Bob Erlenbusch announces leaving LACEH&H
After 25 years of protests, marches, and advocacy work on homeless issues, 18 of which as the Executive Director of the LA Coalition to End Hunger & Homelessness, I am leaving Los Angeles to start my new life in Sacramento. I am getting married in October, so I plan to have my last day at LACEH&H be August 29, 2008.
I am very proud of what my staff and Board of Directors have accomplished in the last two decades. When I began at LACEHH we had two thousand in the bank and my board at that time said we couldn't take out a loan. Thanks to the vision of Dr. Michael Cousineau, the Executive Director of Homeless Health Care LA, LACEH&H became a project of HHCLA until we were able to fundraise and obtain our nonprofit status. Over time with the support of hundreds of individual supporters who believed in the mission of LACEHH, foundations like Liberty Hill, the California Community Foundation, Public Welfare Foundation, the Butler Family Fund, the California Endowment, and more recently, WAMU, Kaiser and United Way, we grew to be the largest local homeless advocacy organization in the nation.
We have been at the cutting edge of public policy work that entire time- civil rights, civic participation, redevelopment and gentrification issues, welfare reform, anti-hunger issues, general relief, discharge planning, creating a 10 year plan to end and prevent homelessness and now foreclosures. None of this would have been possible without a great staff, interns and board of directors over the years. I am very proud of the fact that many of my former staff have gone on to become Executive Directors of organizations working on social justice issues. I am equally proud that over the years, LACEH&H, both board and staff, never wavered from our principles and values, principally that housing is a basic human right and that ending and preventing is possible and it is the role of advocates to hold policymakers accountable to that end. Based on those values, LACEH&H took, and I hope will continue to do so in the future, a principled "inside-outside" strategy, working with policymakers to craft policy and marching in the streets to protest when some of those policies turned ugly and criminalized homeless people.
My great sadness in leaving Los Angeles is the haunting thought that I leave 80,000 homeless people on the streets on any given night. I leave a community where disproportionately, policymakers lack the vision to create and fund policies that would end and prevent homelessness. Rather, policymakers continue to criminalize homeless people, and "divide and conquer" service providers with limited and often uncoordinated funding. Nevertheless I am comforted in knowing that LACEH&H is a strong and vital organization and that the new leadership will continue the fight for social justice, with and for, homeless people. Over the next three months I will be working closely with my very dedicated Board of Directors to help determine the future course of LACEH&H. Finally, I remain eternally hopeful that together we can bring Los Angeles home.
My Best to all,
Bob Erlenbusch
