Mobile phones give researchers a deeper look into living homeless in L.A. That’s thanks to a program at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Communications.
“We wanted to bring technology to the people who are experiencing the worst of homelessness,” said Mark M. Johnson, a professor at USC’s Annenberg School of Communication who works with the social action institute. “If we’re going to solve the homelessness problem, we’re going to have to work on the issues of poverty, and we have to understand where poverty comes from… We know, for instance, that poverty is caused by housing insecurity.”
Johnson got the idea in 2006 when he moved from Manhattan to the South Bay to teach a class in homeless studies. On his first day of class, he was on a panel with homeless people he had never met before.
Johnson said he made a point at the panel to talk about his own life, describing his struggle to get to the U.S. from Mexico as a teenager and how he had left behind a family of eight to find himself in Los Angeles.
He described how he had been homeless for decades, and how he found his way to a safe haven: a group of people who gave him shelter and care while he sorted through his own issues.
“I thought to myself, ‘You are a human being,’ ‘You are a human being who can look at what is good and positive in this world and what needs to change,'” Johnson said, describing his first day of learning of the need for a homeless shelter at UCLA.
Now, Johnson works with the University of Southern California’s social action institute, which launched the Homeless Technology Project in 2009. His goal is to get the technology to people who need help, including those who have fallen on hard times and have nowhere else to turn. The program is funded by a $1.5 million grant from the Knight Foundation.
The first person to receive the technology was a woman, who had gone to a homeless shelter in the South Bay. She said that the technology was life-changing for her.
“In six months we could have found them a place to live,” said the woman, who asked not to be identified. “I realized