Va Lecia Adams Kellum, photographed in the Los Angeles Times in El Segundo on September 8.
When the cleanup of homeless camps in Venice three years ago gave a megaphone to a flamboyant sheriff and created battle lines of opposing community activists, a measured voice emerged from the cacophony.
Va Lecia Adams Kellum, then president and CEO of the Venice-based St. Joseph Center, secured beds at nearby motels and flooded the beach with social workers. As the city's sanitation trucks lumbered down the boardwalk behind her, Adams Kellum faced the media and promised that everyone would be moved, but not before each received an offer of a better place to sleep. .
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The month-long campaign became the model for Inside Safe, Mayor Karen Bass's program that has cleared about 50 of the city's toughest encampments.
After helping shape that program as a member of Bass's transition team, Adams Kellum, 58, took on the most daunting job in Los Angeles' fractured homeless services system.
Adams Kellum, elected in March of last year as executive director of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, brings a strong personality and street experience to an agency that had been run by bureaucrats for nearly a decade under increasing lawsuits. increasingly intense for it to be restructured or even dissolved.
'We should lead, which means lead. “We should propose a strategic direction.”
—Va Lecia Adams Kellum
The joint powers authority conducts the annual homeless count, distributes federal homeless funds, employs outreach teams, and maintains the homeless database.
And yet, despite growing several times over with increasing funding from cities and counties, the agency has not been deeply involved in coming up with viable plans to get people off the streets and into housing.
Adams Kellum said he intends to change that.
“This mission is pretty clear,” he said. “We should lead, which means lead. “We should propose a strategic direction.”
His first year has tested that resolve as he faced bureaucratic slowness.
Frustrated by numerous contract amendments delaying reimbursements to service providers, she fired the authority's finance and data directors.
“I asked the finance team, 'Can you imagine a time when we have fewer amendments?'” Adams Kellum told the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors during a hearing on the payment issues. “Unfortunately, some of those people are no longer with me. “I didn’t get an answer that I thought was what I should hear.”
She said that's just the beginning.
“I've been in this position for a year and I didn't build this system,” he told supervisors. “But I know that it must be rebuilt because the suffering in the streets demands it.”
