Sam Slovick is an award-winning documentary filmmaker who recently chronicled the heartbreaking true scope of the homelessness problem in Los Angeles for both LA Weekly and GOOD Magazine. Over the next month, clips from his "Skid Row" video series will appear on the AWEARNESS Blog. Below, he offers a brutally honest assessment of what needs to be done to solve the homelessness problem in America.

AWEARNESS: You've mentioned the term "informed philanthropy" to describe the types of charitable organizations that are really making a difference on Skid Row. What should individuals look for before they make charitable contributions to an organization?

Sam: People on Skid Row don't need food and clothes. The missions serve thousands of meals a day. They do a lot of fund raising and provide a lot of services. Informed philanthropy is investing in a consciousness that deals with underlying causes of a disenfranchised community that is at the bottom rung of our society. Two of my favorites are School on Wheels that tutors kids in their store front on San Pedro and 5th Street and United Coalition East Prevention that does a lot of outreach and address problems in the community directly. They also have an after-school program for kids. Both seems to have an understanding of the deeper systemic issues that need to be addressed.

AWEARNESS: As you point out in the video series, there is no easy solution to Skid Row. Throwing money at the problem is not the solution. What are some alternative steps that can be taken to revitalize the Skid Row area?

Sam: Part of the problem with Skid Row is that we live in a country that subscribes to a capitalist indoctrination that says, if you work hard you will prosper. Even people living on sidewalk believe it. It's not true for everybody. Some people need help. Some need a lot of help. Some people are damaged in a way that they are not going to recover from and need to be taken care of. Others can get reconnected but it'll take time and money. We need to embrace them. Collectively, we need to include them. The measure of any society is how they treat their weakest members. We have people who are deeply wounded in need of help wandering the streets in filth in the shadows of the financial district. It's outrageous and unacceptable. When it becomes impossible for our leaders to remain in office and ignore the suffering it will change, not before. The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, The Mayor... The City Council... All of them. It's unbelievable to me that we allow it to continue. You and me allow this. We accept this. We sign off on it by not storming City Hall in a massive revolt.

I recommend everything and anything. Initially that you become as outraged as I did when I moved to Skid Row. Go down there and sit with a 4 year-old at the Union Rescue Mission and you'll get the picture quick. Speak out. Write a letter, call the mayor, the county board of supervisors, tell everyone who will listen to demand that it has to stop in any way you can. Call the police chief's weekly 'call in radio show'. Write about it, pray about it, chant, email, go there, tell your friends... Anything you can think of so we can begin to develop a collective consciousness that says this is unacceptable. Demand in any and every way that you can that it has to stop.

AWEARNESS: Despite there being more than 3.5 million homeless Americans, why is the issue of urban homelessness largely "invisible" to so many people?

Sam: It's hard to take. It's not that people don't want to help, it's that it's overwhelming and they don't know how so they refuse to see it. The politicians are performing a sleight of hand. It's a shell game. It's a numbers game. The statistics are misleading and it depends on who's doing the counting and what their agenda is. The politicians make plans and talk about them at press conferences, but they're onto the next photo opp and nothing ever really gets done. City government is fragment and ineffective. The big pieces that need to get moved in the budget to really effect a change are not even being discussed. Affordable housing for all is not an conversation that has ever been on the table by an electable politician in Los Angeles. Ever.

AWEARNESS: In the introduction to the film, you describe Los Angeles as "the first Third World city in America." In what way is the City of Angels a microcosm of what is happening in other cities across America?

Sam: I was referring to the homeless encampments. People living in the street. Sleeping on the street in filth with rats running across their ankles. With urine and feces all over the place. With prostitution and drug dealing in plain view. The LAPD police chief William Bratton told me it's the worst social disaster in America. There's nothing else like it in the States. It's like something you see in Peru or Brazil. My point that was the blind eye to the suffering, the resounding silence from the entertainment industry and other businesses that thrive in such close proximity to the pain. It's a picture of an incredibly self-involved, uncompassionate society... The kind that's responsible for the bloodletting in the Persian Gulf. The kind that is strung out on pharmaceuticals. Whose dinner party activism has produced 3rd world scenarios like Skid Row in the richest country on the planet.

AWEARNESS: What can the average person do to ensure that people like young filmmaker Franklin Arburtha truly have a future when they become adults?

Sam: Franklin needs a filmmaking mentor. He needs to go to film school and he needs to continue to be showcased while it's happening. Schools like Inner-City Filmmakers which train marginalized kids to make movies would be a great asset to Skid Row kids. It would be a big undertaking. I pitched the idea to Fred Heinrich who operates the nonprofit Inner-City Filmmakers. Funding from a corporate entity would clearly do the trick.

I have wondered why no one has done it. I also wonder why all the black mega-churches are absent on Skid Row. I wonder why high-profile black leaders and churches like Agape are not there in full force. Some of them do outreach, giving out sandwiches and preaching. It's misinformed philanthropy.

Franklin has a show on World of Wonder. It's called Kids Row. It's awesome. He's an amazingly gifted filmmaker. The average person can call World of Wonder and tell them to give him back the camera and give him another show.

AWEARNESS: Which of your peers do you most admire for their attention and dedication to social causes?

Sam: Joe Donnelly is the deputy editor of the LA Weekly. He is the one who championed all the Skid Row stories I have written for them. He encouraged me to write them and patiently shepherded them onto the cover of the LA Weekly. That's dedication. LA Yoga Magazine is an amazing place for this kind of work. They are fearless. The original editor, Julie Deify, and the editor who has recently taken over and reshaped the publication, Felicia Tomasko, are crusaders who will put this stuff in print. It's the biggest Yoga Magazine in the biggest market, so its relevant. Everyone at Good Magazine, including Zach Frechette and Siobhan O'Connor, are relentless dedicated to social causes. The producer / editor for the Skid Row documentary, Lindsay Utz and her partner at Good Video, Morgan Currie, are completely committed to social causes. It's what they are doing with their lives.

AWEARNESS: What are some resources - either online or offline - for learning more about the homelessness problem in America?

Sam: It's a numbers game with these statistics and it depends on who's doing the counting and what their agenda is. Cartifact is a real time map of the homeless body count on the streets of skid row in Los Angeles and other cities, but what does it really show? It shows that there's less people because it's cold and so people have temporarily gone into shelters. It shows that the police are implementing the city's policy, which amounts to homeless cleansing. They arrested and forced out thousands of people. They implemented a Constitution-free zone. It smacks of what the Bush Administration has done in the Persian Gulf.

A lot of the people living on the streets of Skid Row in L.A. went to jail and will be back with whatever damage they left with intact. Addiction, mental illness... Whatever. When the mostly one-time money that the city spends on the additional cops runs out, the dance will continue. Just like it has for decades. The politicians and city government is unwilling to move the large budgetary pieces to scale to make changes that will resolve the problem. There's no pressure or urgency to effect that change. It's the old "If you don't have to see it on your way home to Brentwood, who cares?" scenario. It's the same thing with the mass incarceration, paramilitary policing strategy in Los Angeles. The right people are dying in the right neighborhoods. Horrifyingly true. Black people and brown people who are at the bottom of the food chain, monetarily speaking. It seems like a stretch, but it's the same issue. We spend money on things like elephant habitats at the zoo and the subsidization of golf courses, but there's next to nothing for Skid Row, for battered women's shelters, for children in Los Angeles' 'hot zones' who are risk of getting caught in crossfire every time they put in their little backpacks and head for public schools. In a city where there are 14,000 homeless children registered in LAUSD. A city with over 40,000 homeless people, a number that has remained fairly consistent for many years. Those numbers are from School on Wheels and LA Coalition to End Homelessness - both excellent resources.

AWEARNESS: Of the various Democrats and Republicans still in the Presidential race, which of them do you think has the type of "political will" to help solve the homelessness problem in America?

Sam: I don't think any of them have the political will to do anything of consequence. It's not that they're uncaring, personally. It's that they are part of a larger consciousness that has decided to accept that people at the bottom rung of society don't matter. That agent orange veterans, severely mentally disabled people, addicts, victims of spousal abuse, children and others who have no resources should be allowed to suffer senselessly and needlessly in the richest country in the world, at the most abundant time in history, on the streets of Los Angeles.

I take my cues from the Vedas. I don't vote. I don't engage in that process and I am not prone to believe that electing one official or another is going to have a profound effect on the kind of relentless meaningless suffering. If it would, why hasn't it already? I think I'm more effective praying, chanting and writing about consciousness. That's what I'm writing about. I recently did a story for LA Yoga Ayurveda and Health Magazine call "The Gida on Skid Row," where I hung out with these Hare Krishna devotees on Skid Row. In all honesty, I think the cure for Skid Row is Krishna Consciousness. That's what I truly believe in my heart. Oddly, that idea is an easy sell to the people who are suffering there. The healing that God can perform as the ultimate solution. So, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton? C'mon. I voted for God. For Krishna. He's Blue but I don't know that he's running on the democratic ticket.

The problem isn't America. The challenge at hand is the development of a consciousness that embraces compassion for the widows, the orphans and strangers in the land... Iraq, Skid Row. Same thing only different. We have a lot of healing to effect. Here are a few paces you can begin if you want to help on Skid Row in Los Angeles -- these are places and people that I personally know to be ethically sound and operating in an enlightened awareness that could use your informed philanthropic attention: United Coalition East Prevention, School on Wheels, LAMP Community, Central City Community Outreach, and the LA Coalition to End Homelessness.

[image: skid row by mattlogelin on Flickr]