A Research and Development Test bed – The ADRO Initiative

As an initial demonstration and on-going learning experience of the Legacy XXI Institute methodology, Legacy partnered with Volunteers of America Los Angeles (VOALA), a faith-based organization covering much of Southern California with an annual budget of over $40 million, 400 employees and 500 volunteers.

The focus of the model program became the over 20,000 men, women and children in the central downtown district of Los Angeles [known at the beginning of the model program as Skid Row].  This is a community of 55-sq blocks in downtown LA that “hosts” those referred to as “homeless.” It is a community filled with hopelessness and despair. The manifestation of this community dynamic includes:

• the largest concentration of programs and participants in recovery;
• the largest concentration of obvious street drugging and abuse;
• the full representation of religious, faith-based, and other care providers;
• the highest concentration of single-room occupancy (SRO) housing;
• multigenerational stuckness and young kids “freely” roaming the streets;
• ever-increasing crime;
• ever increasing federal and city resources, including a well-funded new (the old ones failed) multi-agency program to end homelessness in ten years;
• a place nobody wants to be…

To summarize the 100 year VOALA experience, they report, and we concur, that:

• Current programs do not reduce the intransigence of homelessness;
• Amongst the acknowledged reasons that the intransigence of homelessness is not being reduced:
• there is a fundamental breakdown in the social service delivery process that is currently measured by process effectiveness and not by condition improvement or elimination;
• professional social service providers regard themselves as “fixers” and constituents as those in need to being “fixed”;
• funding programs (federal, state, city, foundation) continue to foster on-going process and not systemic change;
• the demographics of the recipients of current social services keep changing;
• there is little sense that social service agency and community service recipients work effectively together, respect and trust each other, trust that systemic results can be produced, experience a joint sense of accomplishment in the arena of mutually beneficial results, or have any experience of significant cooperative success or cooperative breakthroughs;
• It had been determined by VOA that an effective process, outside the domain of the existing programs, needs to be designed, implemented and tested; and,

• It had been determined that the maximum leverage point is the flip-side of the most serious deterrent to systemic change – the culture within which the current social service processes themselves are taking place.

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