Lavern Bond:

Her Journey from Homelessness on Skid Row
To Urban Studies Student at Columbia University

By Stephen A. Jacobs

Access Dignity Respect & Opportunity –the ADRO initiative – launched in 2004 by Legacy XXI Institute in partnership with the residents of the Skid Row and Volunteers of America Los Angeles, intended to alter the cultural influences of the Skid Row community and to create re-newed possibilities and choices for men and women to shift their lives as well as their community culture.  In some ways the partnership of the ADRO participants succeeded; Lavern Bond’s journey is one such example.

The ADRO initiative explored the access points to altering the culture of communities. One of those levers of change was the media, and the ADRO team decided to publish a culture-shifting, transformational newspaper for the community. One homeless woman living in the community volunteered to be the Editor-in-Chief; this is the report of her journey from Skid Row in 2004, to Editor of the ADRO SHIFT newspaper in 2005, to Columbia University in 2008, and our recent meeting again on Manhattan’s Upper West Side as she enters her third Ivy League year.

Perhaps no moment of the volunteer ADRO initiative felt more profoundly successful as when I received an e-mail from the former ADRO editor.  My wife, and ADRO partner, Eleanor Michael and I later spoke with Lavern and set a lunch date to meet at the trendy Bistro Citron in New York City on a lazy, muggy summer afternoon.

When we first met Lavern in Los Angeles in 2003, she was homeless and was in the process of planning a new life for herself.  When she first arrived in Los Angeles, she didn't know anyone and lived on the street for about a short time before finding a homeless shelter in the Los Angeles Skid Row district.

As we all sat in New York eating lunch, Lavern shared with us what motivated her to participate in the ADRO initiative.  Lavern told us that while she was seeking her own permanent housing, the experiences of homelessness had a profound effect upon her.  She said her experiences on the street made her more sensitive to the issues of the homeless and the working poor, many of whom were poverty-stricken, mentally ill, or drug addicted.   She performed community work as a result of her Skid Row experiences.  She thought in some small way she could make a difference in the community.

In 2004, while she was still on Skid Row, she enrolled in community organization courses at Los Angeles Trade Tech to better understand how community organizations could help.  She also enrolled at East Los Angeles Occupational Center to improve her office and desktop publishing skills.  Later, she used these skills to produce the ADRO newsletter, The ADRO Shift.

After her stint as ADRO editor, Lavern attended Los Angeles City College.  At Los Angeles City College, many mentors encouraged her; their gentle but determined encouragement planted the seeds for Lavern to transfer to Columbia University and envision a new direction for her life.

Now, in her third academic year, Lavern plans to graduate in 2012 with a major in Urban Studies and an academic concentration in American Studies. While in Los Angeles, she advocated for low-income housing.  She hopes to put to good use what she is learning as an undergraduate at Columbia to help others to gentrify neighborhoods without the challenges and negative consequences often experienced by most residents, building developers, and politicians.

Lavern hopes to learn how to develop an urban core mixed-use housing development model that serves not only the very low-income resident but the real estate developer as well.  She believes there is a way to develop a win-win solution where everyone can be fairly served in America's major cities.

At 47, the Columbia University School of General Studies student says: “There needs to be a way to both revitalize a neighborhood while concurrently empowering the disadvantaged who live in that community. In general, I don’t oppose gentrification; instead, I see it as an opportunity to innovate and revitalize communities by including the disadvantaged, rather than excluding them. To me it is a challenge to create a win-win environment for an entire community – past, present and future. We need to work together: community residents, politicians, and developers to create a replicable model to solve this urban dilemma.  This was my primary interest in Urban Studies…I have learned that it is not what you get out of the system, but what you can give back to society that ultimately sets the tone for our communities.” 

Today, far from the crowded and busy streets of Skid Row Los Angeles, Lavern is planning what's next after graduation, perhaps law school or a stint on Capitol Hill as a legislative assistant to a Congressman committed to urban transformation.

Early on, we realized Lavern’s potential when she wrote in Vol. I, Issue II of The ADRO Shift, an editorial about Black History Month:

As a young girl, I used to read stories about famous “Black” leaders. Their stories seemed so much bigger than life itself. But, when I look[ed] deeper… [into]…  their personal struggles I realized that these people were just like you and me….I do not believe it was the intention of these heroes to endure such hardships only to see us strung out on crack, broke, depressed, and homeless. I do not believe their harsh afflictions were for us to live indefinitely on public assistance without a flame igniting within us to do and to become something bigger, greater. ….Many of our historic leaders died giving their last breath in hope that we, their children, would enter this world with more access, more dignity, more respect, and more opportunities… They left us a legacy…now let us access it and receive it.

A lot has happened in the past five years, but given the momentum of the shift in Lavern's life, we fully expect that she will indeed continue to make the ADRO team very proud of her, and more importantly, she will indeed make the leaders celebrated in her Black History Month editorial proud of her.

Editor's Note: The Legacy XXI Initiative was made possible through the partnership of Volunteers of America Los Angeles, the Max and Anna Levinson Foundation, Legacy XXI Initiative volunteers Jim Selman and Ron Schultz, and particularly Eleanor Michael, without whom there would have been no ADRO initiative.