Los Angeles, CA. AIDS Walk Los Angeles will observe the halfway mark of its fundraising on August 16. Recognized as one of the world’s first walks to take up the cause against HIV and AIDS, AWLA has raised nearly $90 million for APLA Health’s various programs that focus on care and advocacy for over 18,000 affected individuals in the Los Angeles County. Due to Covid-19, there is no official in-person walking event and most of the AIDS Walk will be held online, with three outdoor challenges that take place during checkpoint dates of the Walk.
To keep supporters motivated and updated on the progress of fundraising, The Walk Show began on July 7 – the same time as the AIDS Walk fundraising began. The show releases new episodes every week, with each week focusing on a particular location in Los Angeles County helped by the work of APLA Health. The Walk Show is hosted by popular drag queen Ongina who walks viewers through fundraising tips and fun challenges. A big highlight of the show is the weekly story of a patient from one of APLA Health’s programs or clinics. Episodes of The Walk Show can be found here: https://aidswalkla.org/the-walk-show/.
The Trans Connections program, featured in Episode 2 of The Walk Show.
“APLA Health was founded in 1983 as AIDS Project Los Angeles with the goal of ending the AIDS epidemic in Los Angeles County. Today, we provide services in four key areas: 1) primary medical care, dental, behavioral health and HIV specialty care, 2) Critical HIV Support Services, 3) HIV Prevention, and 4) Advocacy.” APLA Health & Wellness is a 501(c)(3) charitable organization doing business as APLA Health.
Los Angeles, CA. All Peoples Community Center Executive Director Saundra Bryant talks about the difficulties young children are facing in a virtual academic setting and how the center has adjusted its programs to fit the state’s current public health guidelines. Annually, All Peoples hosts a “Back to School” night for youth. This year, to help with the adjustment to remote learning, staff distributed Back to School “remote learning” supply bags. 300 youth received school supplies for the upcoming school year, as seen above.
Bryant explains, “It’s trying to adjust to a new learning curve.” All Peoples Community Center primarily focuses on helping the local youth’s education and wellbeings with the center’s events and activities like extended child daycare, after-school programs, and summer camp.
Bryant notes that children between grades 1-4 had an especially difficult time with distant learning in comparison to other age groups. The staff has found over time that this age group is more focused and easier to help within scheduled one-on-one virtual tutoring sessions.
The organization had to make significant adjustments this year to provide opportunities to kids without risking the spread of the coronavirus in large groups. The staff started to understand the issues surrounding distance learning from contacting parents and the youth of the center’s after-school programs in the first months of the pandemic.
Bryant listed a number of issues exemplified by the parents that include a lack of access to reliable internet and not having responsive, functional equipment needed for virtual learning.
Additionally, while some households are able to function within a stay-at-home environment, other larger households aren’t able to afford the same luxuries.
There can often be multiple people in one household who all need to use their one or two computers for meetings and work at the same time. This can create difficulty for everyone in the household in maintaining a regular routine for school and work fairly.
There are a number of virtual tutors that reach out to specific areas of the center’s youth like beginner art lessons led by Teens Youth Coordinator Erick “Sen” Moreno who has a Youtube channel where he posts his art lessons online like the one seen below:
Bryant’s staff has come up with a variety of ways to keep kids of all age groups engaged in a virtual setting by adding in fun activities that emphasize the main lessons and have talked about starting a book club as well.
The community center hasn’t completely shut down as the 20,000-square-foot building allows for the staff and a select few children to practice social distancing effectively.
“In some cases, we’re able to actually have students to come in for the tutoring sessions,” Bryant said, “that’s been more effective for some of our youth.”
The other reason the community center has stayed open is due to the active participation in certain campaigns with other nonprofits like the Angeleno Campaign which provided thousands of prepaid cards for struggling families, assistance in the ERAS application process for those unable to apply at home, and a weekly food distribution program.
All Peoples will continue to make important decisions for events and programs as the holiday season approaches.
“Normally we would do a Thanksgiving dinner where we would feed between 800-1,000 people,” Bryant said, “we are going to cancel that and we talked about doing a major food giveaway instead.”
Bryant listed an additional concern for the community in February 2021 where several unemployed LA residents could become homeless as a result of the expiration of LA County’s Temporary Eviction Moratorium for Residential Tenants.
“The other major concern that we are focused on is really about the education of our young people,” Bryant explained, “we know that our schools aren’t able to open safely, so what we’re looking at is our young people will have lost a year to a year-and-a-half of education.
“We’re already in a community where there is a concern about the education that our young people are receiving and the support that they need to be able to compete and now they’re a year-and-a-half behind.”
All Peoples Community Center will continue to keep the center open under strict social distancing for the youth who prefer a classroom learning environment and assisting individuals in the community for certain social services and programs.
The center launched the All Peoples Senior Food Delivery Service in October and are currently delivering to more than 40 seniors a week.
The center is labeled by the city’s mayor as an essential services provider and has subsequently seen a large increase of families needing assistance with food and other living essentials. Their donation page is here if you have the means to assist the center to continue operations during this unprecedented time.
From All Peoples Community Center:
Our mission is to provide social services and programs that empower individuals and promote community respect and self-determination for all.
All Peoples Community Center has become a comprehensive community center, delivering a myriad of social and educational services and activities. Our services and activities are driven by the purpose of:
Helping Children Succeed at Each Stage in their Development
Strengthening and Supporting Individuals and Families and Building Community
Preventing Violence and Crime, in the Community and in the Home
Addressing the Root Causes of Gang Involvement
Providing Job Training and Creating Job Opportunities
Los Angeles, CA. LA Más consists of a small team that made a huge impact with the neighborhood of Northeast LA (NELA) through a food support program (seen above), partnerships with other organizations, and continuous communication with residents.
The non-profit is organized by a group of seven people who prioritize promoting projects that help to elevate working-class communities and people of color since its foundation in 2012.
Program Manager Alexandra Ramirez explained that “before COVID-19, we had two major programs” that the team primarily focused on. The Backyard Homes Project allowed homeowners to construct an Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU) in exchange for providing affordable housing to a Section 8 voucher, and Storefronts, LA which focused on “developing storefronts redesigned for small business owners.”
The ADU project and Storefronts, LA regularly had in-person meetings with multiple people, which could not continue as phase one of quarantine began in mid-March. “We were in the midst of doing about three or four designs,” said Ramirez, “so that had to stop.”
For the next two weeks, Ramirez and her team started checking in and getting advice from local non-profits about how to best serve the community during the shutdown. It was in these conversations that LA Más and its local partners started to note “this informal phone tree that was happening” between residents of NELA checking in with their neighbors about how they could help during the pandemic.
“And that’s when we started realizing that we could do more of those check-ins,” said Ramirez, “we didn’t know how much more we could do so we really needed to rely on our volunteers.” (seen below)
An Excel spreadsheet was created by the LA Más team and was made up of the contact information of about two thousand residents. They began contacting people on their spreadsheet in order to best understand their current needs.
“We knew that we couldn’t be the only ones making these calls and checking in with residents and that’s when we opened it up to our volunteers,” Ramirez said, “and we started training them to make calls and, yeah, we went on from there.”
After about a week of over 150 volunteers talking to residents, LA Más found that the highest needs were primarily with food and information on financial and social issues that arose during the pandemic.
Grocery sponsorship allows struggling families to be able to eat fresh food through deliveries made by LA Más volunteers. Photo credit: LA Más Outreach Lead Liliana Sánchez
In mid-April, the Northeast LA Community Response was announced on LA Más’s social media pages as an initiative to help community members gain immediate relief. Requests could range from deliveries of activity kits and face masks to information on unemployment filings and mortgage payments.
“We kept seeing how food insecurity really was so present in our community, so we have been running offshoots of that program [NE LA Community Response] ever since,” Ramirez explained.
For the rest of the summer, LA Más operated a temporary food support program, where volunteers delivered donated and sponsored grocery bags for families in need on a weekly basis.
When discussing what Ramirez hopes for in the future when the coronavirus may not be as much of a centralized issue, she said, “We really need to address the systemic issues that are impacting working-class communities of color in our neighborhood.” She continues to explain immigrant families in particular “had a really hard time getting the support they needed.”
“Really, our goal is to continue to work in addressing those underlying issues, and figuring out how do we support our community and make these issues more visible,” Ramirez concluded.
LA Más is currently focused on reinventing its mission statement and posted a week ago that:
“For the rest of 2020, we are doing ‘fieldwork’ around the priorities that community members helped us identify: housing stability, economic development and food access, to name a few. We’ll be partnering with neighbors to identify what local solutions already exist and explore where new infrastructure could be helpful.”
If you have the means to donate to LA Más to continue giving to the community or are interested in becoming a volunteer, click here.
Photo credit for the first image: Russell Horning
From LA-Más:
LA-Más designs and builds initiatives that promote neighborhood resilience and elevate the agency of working class communities of color. We envision a Northeast Los Angeles where communities of color have equitable access to the power and resources needed to shape their futures.
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