National Acclaim for New Downtown Women's Center Facility

Why the Downtown Women's Center in Los Angeles?

First and foremost, services for women, exclusively for women, are badly needed. One-third of all homeless individuals are women. Many women suffer from abuse from a young age, and it's really important to have a safe location for them to live and receive services. Often when we think of homelessness, we think of "the man" on the streets, and women tend to get ignored in our own community.

What has the Downtown Women's Center done to meet that need?

The most important thing is providing permanent supportive housing-homelessness is linked not only to poverty and the need for affordable housing but also to mental illness. Offering permanent supportive housing with support services is key to take people off the streets to a home and keep them housed. That's the most important factor. The second is that, for many of our people living in other types of housing, they might need those support services-the mental health services, the medical support services, and job training and assistance-to help them stay housed and out of the cycle of homelessness. We want to permanently remove people from homelessness.

Many believe that the additional facility that the Downtown Women's Center just opened is one of the most significant new projects in more than a decade. What did the Downtown Women's Center just open?

We've owned our buildings for the last 32 years, and development is important to Los Angeles, so we see this as a big part of the city of Los Angeles. We felt it was important to not only provide the housing on the ground floor but to also provide services that are beneficial to the women that we serve and the community as a whole. We approached this to design the building as a beacon in our community, which stands up to the for-profit buildings next door and across the street. We also developed a store on the ground floor for our community that provides employment training and economic development for our women, also providing a shopping experience for new dwellers moving to our community. We worked for two years doing need assessments, studying and looking at all types of businesses; this was something that our community wanted to see.

What were you offering before you opened the new facility?

At the Los Angeles Street site, we were offering permanent housing and we had a drop-in center where we provided meals for about 2,000 women a year and case management to help women claim benefits, reunite with family, and provide showers and a place to receive their mail-all types of services. We also have 47 permanent housing units on site.

The new site expands DWC by an additional 71 units and allows us to serve up to 3,500 women a year with all of our programs. It also allowed us to have the first medical mental health clinic in Downtown. We felt that to end homelessness, we have to work with women from a more systematic approach, on their chronic illnesses, as well as mental health services, which allowed us to develop our workforce development program. We saw an increase in about 40 percent of women becoming newly homeless to the Downtown Women's Center, and a lot of our new women are experiencing recent unemployment, so we really felt like the expansion of the workforce development program was key to the future of the new look of the women that we're seeing becoming homeless.

The new facility that opened in December is a renovated 1926 historic building. Talk about the team you put together for the renovation.

Our new site was a W. Douglas Lee building, and it was built in 1926, like you said, which housed a shoe company at that time. The contractor that developed the building was a woman. It was very unique in the 1920s to have a woman contractor lead a site. This was a really fun opportunity for us.

The architecture of our old building, we believe, is key to our success in helping women. The building was designed with the kitchen as the heart of the Day Center. Although there was some similarity to each of the rooms so we could have as many apartments as possible, they were designed to look individual for the women. We really wanted to continue that within the new site, so we hired Pica+Sullivan. Maureen Sullivan worked with Brenda Levin when she was our architect at the old site, and so it was kind of nice for her, 25 years later, to come back and work on the Downtown Women's Center again. We worked with Pica+Sullivan, and we worked with the Gaston Construction Company because we felt that we didn't have all the expertise that we needed to manage a project of this size, and hired W.E. O'Neill as our contractors. We had a lot of great advisory members who we brought back from our old team-Brenda Levin, Wayne Ratkovich-we had our advisors because we hadn't done such huge growth in a long time.

Elaborate a little bit more about the development process and the fabric of the building you protected.

Being Silver LEED was important to us-not only because we wanted to be green-we want to protect and stretch our donor dollars as much as possible. By going Silver LEED, we reduced our electric bills and water bills to help us to be sustainable long-term. The other thing that was really important to us was that, because the building was an historical building, we worked with Christy McAvoy of the Historic Resource Group as our consultant to make sure we stayed within the historic guidelines of the building and to keep the integrity of the time that it was built in 1926. That meant that we kept the window features, the façade, and the columns on the inside. We wanted to be a beacon in our community. By keeping those historic features, it is a much nicer building in the end.

The reaction to the opening, nationally and locally, by the press and reviewers, was amazing, astoundingly positive. What's so amazing about what's been produced here?

It's amazing because the need is so great, and people really got to understand that a nice environment is key to the women's self-esteem and to the success of their endeavors. People also got to see the kind of the full, wrap-around services that the women receive, and they can envision how that could really support and help women to end homelessness.

It is really good urban development. It has outdoor garden space, it has a store that integrates the whole community, and it has apartments that stand up to for-profit apartments. We took what was the best being done in the nation to support homeless women and brought it to Los Angeles.

An incredible community supports the Downtown Women's Center, which was evident at the opening. Talk a little bit about the community of support that you've created and the kinds of fundraising that paid for the cost of the new facility.

We were very fortunate to get the building donated. Councilwoman Jan Perry, the Mayor's Office, and the CRA/LA, worked toward getting this building donated to us for a dollar. They made it a priority project in the city. Though it was donated for a dollar, it cost about $26 million in construction, because it is 67,000 square feet. We realized that we needed to raise a lot of money, but for our community and for our board, sustainability was key to success, so we looked at not only the money for construction but also how much are we going to need for the new growth and for an endowment to make sure that we can be there for another 33 years.

We did a campaign of $35 million, and we were successful in meeting our goals for that campaign. We are about 99 percent there, so we have a couple hundred thousand dollars left to raise, but we're pretty close. We secured a gift with Wallace Annenberg for $5 million. The second gift came from our original board president Bettina Chandler for $1 million. The Downtown Women's Center is very fortunate because we have a founder who recognized the need for community involvement and solving homelessness, which set the groundwork to get the community involved. Based on the work that founder Jill Haverson did, based on her story of donating both her life and her money to support homeless women in Downtown, people were motivated and she activated people to support. Over the years, we've been building on that support. Right now, on average we've been gaining volunteers every year, right now we have about 800 volunteers. Last year we actually used about 1,800 volunteers for the opening of the new site. These volunteers did everything from mini-fundraisers and helping raise money to "moving partners" that worked with the women for over a year to help reduce their share of moving, helping them pack and move, to all the interior design and all the new furniture. Volunteers donated everything. Volunteers donated all the signage and the artwork.

The corporate community of Los Angeles has been very generous to the Downtown Women's Center, having been actively involved over the years, cooking meals for the women and with dollars toward the new site.

You did this fundraising in the period of a recession bordering on a depression in California and the United States. How miraculous is that?

It actually is miraculous. Wallace Annenberg, of course, is wonderful and great, but our average donor gives about $600 a year, so it is really made up of individuals giving small donations. Because of the recession and the increased need, and because we truly had grown out of our old site, people recognize the huge need for services. Because women are the fastest-growing segment, people could relate, and they wanted to give.

You came to the Downtown Women's Center a little more than a decade ago, and it's been there for 30-some years. Talk a little bit about the changing nature of the people on Skid Row in Los Angeles today.

When our organization was founded, only about five percent of the homeless people were women. That was the first time that mental hospitals got closed down throughout the state and throughout the country. That was the first time you were really seeing homelessness in Los Angeles, especially homeless women. The issue then was alcoholism. When I started, even a decade ago, the community was much smaller but it was also much more hidden and very ignored. There were a lot more people on the streets but not getting the services that were being offered.

We've come a long way. The average age of our residents is 55 years old, and most of our women have chronic health issues. Even ten years ago, a lot of our women may have been married before but found themselves having to rely-maybe their husband left or passed away-on a very low Social Security check or Social Security disability income. The average income of our resident is about $775 a month. It's very hard in Los Angeles to find affordable housing when that's your only income. It was still a lot of older women, and people with mental illness.

Over the last ten years, we're definitely seeing a lot of younger people. Our average age in our Day Center is about 36 at this time, with a lot more, and different, barriers. Not only do we now have mental illness, there's more long-term homelessness, and you see generations of families that have been on welfare-nobody in their family has ever worked before. About 80 percent of our women suffer from chronic health issues. About 60-80 percent suffer from mental illness, and there is a growing number of women with HIV and AIDS. We see a lot more women with children. They may not have their children with them, but their children are in the system, so they may be working to get their children back, or their children are living with family members. There's a lot of compounding issues that you have to break through instead of just providing a home.

You have a strong board, traditionally and today. They've done fundraising to support the center without much government aid. Talk a little bit about the funding-where you get your funding and what reliance you do or do not have on government. Give our readers a sense of the financial underpinnings of the Downtown Women's Center.

In 2010, until this project was built, we were always 100 percent privately funded. That was based on the belief that it takes a community to solve homelessness. Although the government should be able to solve it, we're finding that we need a whole community to solve the issue. We didn't want to take away time from the women that we serve-we wanted to be there, instead of dealing with the paperwork that comes along with the federal and state dollars that we could receive.

However, when our services kept growing and we needed more to build to this scale, the project's capital campaign was $35 million, with $19 million private and $16 million public. It was really a public-private build-out. That money was for the construction of the housing. Now we do have some federal funding. We have a new federal grant with the Office of Minority Health, working in our community to fight diabetes and obesity. The Department of Mental Health is funding us for psychiatric services for the mental health of our women.

We continue to believe that the majority of our money has to come from individuals and communities, because that's what has made us so successful over the years, but we are looking to expand to different support.