*Doing together what we cannot do alone | | |
Dear Friend,
As we move into the final months of the year, this newsletter highlights just a few examples of the incredible impact of our Street Outreach and Housing team in 2024. They demonstrate deep compassion, unwavering dedication, and a tireless commitment to the people the team serves. From crisis intervention to guiding individuals through recovery, their work requires a unique blend of empathy, patience, and resilience. It takes a special kind of person to walk alongside those who are struggling, and we are fortunate to have such remarkable individuals leading this vital work.
Approaching the holiday season ahead, let’s carry forward the spirit of generosity and thoughtfulness that underpins all we do here at Friends In Deed. Whether through time, resources, or a simple act of kindness, each of us has the opportunity to make a meaningful difference in our community. The stories below show that every person who comes through our doors is deserving of care, dignity, and the chance to thrive, and they are a testament to the life-changing power of support and connection.
Bret Schaefer
Board President, Friends In Deed
| | It is through your generosity that we are able to provide these programs and services | | Stories from Our Programs | | | | A Crisis Intervention Story - Finding Ways to Communicate | |
An urgent call came through to the Street Outreach and Housing team from the Food Pantry. A deaf young man had come in, clearly needing help, but unable to communicate his needs.
As it happened, two team members were out on the road and swung by the pantry. They began communicating with the young man by writing notes, establishing he was experiencing homelessness and was in desperate need of help.
The team called PORT (Pasadena Outreach Response Team) for help. Read more...
| | Lee's Story - Continuing Recovery | |
Lee had been in sober living for a year, but he timed out of the program without having found a place to live, and he ended up back on the streets, mostly living in his car in safe parking facilities. The Friends In Deed Street Outreach and Housing team became involved, and worked with Lee to get his documents ready for reentry into housing. He was awarded a Section 8 voucher, placed in an apartment in Pasadena, and found work as a pet groomer.
Unfortunately, that’s when it all started to go wrong again. Read more...
| | | | | Barriers to Housing - Dan's Story | |
Dan has a PhD - and ADHD. He’s extremely intelligent, but many of the executive function tasks other people take for granted - paying bills, taking out the trash, cleaning the house - are often beyond him. In the second of our series of fictionalized accounts of the barriers people experience to getting housing, we’ll look at "Dan’s" journey.
Somehow Dan muddled through college. He had a reputation as an “absent-minded professor” and people forgave his erratic timekeeping. Read more...
| | Stories from Our Community | | Lily's Story - A Bigger Toolkit | |
Lily is one of our Master of Social Work (MSW) interns at Friends In Deed. The internship program is proving to be a very positive experience for everyone involved - Friends In Deed and our clients benefit greatly from the extra skilled help in our programs, and our interns get valuable experience in the field. In fact, the only drawback is we get fond of our interns and it is hard to say goodbye!
It will be hard to see Lily go, when she finishes her internship in a few weeks’ time. Read more...
| | | | | Don's Story - Asking the Difficult Questions | Don Meaders may be our newest board member - having served only since July - but his involvement with Friends In Deed goes back several years to his and his wife’s generous support of our Jazz on the Green events. He also knows our Board President Emeritus, Pam Marx, through First United Methodist Church, Pasadena - and when Pam began looking for someone to replace her to provide input from FUMC to the FID board, Don’s name was suggested. Read more... | | Our Staff - Stories from Then and Now | | William's Story - A Habit of Community Service | |
William’s story with Friends In Deed began back in 1999 when he was working at Grandview Foundation as a drug and alcohol counselor. One of his coworkers was an overnight staffer at Friends In Deed’s Bad Weather Shelter. He invited William to join the BWS staff - and so William, already working full time at Grandview, studying, and with four small children at home, took on several nights a week at the Bad Weather Shelter as well!
As a kid himself (picture attached) William and his mom took part in the opening ceremonies of the Paralympic Games. Read more...
| | | Stories from Our Archives | | Executive Director Rabbi Joshua, with Street Outreach and Housing team member Najwa, in the early days of the Street Outreach Program | | The Street Outreach Story - Ambitious Dreams | Back in 2018, Friends In Deed’s Street Outreach and Housing team was a fledgling program with only two employees. Friends In Deed House on Washington Boulevard was already bursting at the seams, so we rented a new office space on Lake Avenue. The tiny team painted the new open-plan office themselves, in FID green, and then generously shared it with our administrative and eviction prevention staff. The Street Outreach team’s job was to reach out to people experiencing homelessness where they were, on the streets, and start connecting them to services. Small but mighty, in the first few months they housed eight clients! Read more... | | |
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Our Staff
(in alphabetical order)
Helen Angove
Director of Operations
Jane Armbruster
TWR Program Manager and Case Counselor
Isaac Arreola
Harm Reduction Specialist
Marty Campolo
Deputy Director and Grants Officer
Coty Dietel
Food Pantry Aide
Rosie Espino
TWR Program Attendant
Olivia Esteb
Housing Navigation Program Manager and Substance Abuse Specialist
Ryan Greer
Senior Director of Programs
Al Hackett
Outreach Specialist
Tish Inong
Director of Street Outreach and Housing
Jenny Juarez
TWR Program Associate
Joshua Levine Grater
Executive Director
Kristina Martin
Food Pantry Program Associate
Marlene Martinez
Assistant Director of EPRA
Stacey McCarroll
Director of EPRA
Tim Nistler
Director of the Food Pantry
Najwa Payton Jones
Housing Navigator and Outreach Liaison
Elyse Reed
Development Associate
Lindsey Reed
Director of The Women's Room
Eva Rivera
Food Pantry Manager
William Shelby
Senior Intensive Case Management Specialist
Yesenia Suarez
TWR Program Associate
Virginia Valencia
Outreach Program Manager and Mental Health Specialist
Laura Van Alstine
Director of BWS
Merria Velasco
Senior Director of Development
Dani Vinokurov Rivera
Development Associate
Kenyetta Wilson
Controller
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Our Board
Bret Schaefer
President
Leslie White
Vice President
Christopher Pelch
Treasurer
Debby Singer
Secretary
Richard Cheung
Immediate Past President
Kevin Bourland
Ervin Galvan
Tim Howett
Nishanthi Kurukulasuriya
Don Meaders
Jeff Salcido
Stacy Santeramo
Lana Slavitt
and;
Pam Marx
Board President Emeritus
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Friends In Deed is committed to fostering, cultivating, and preserving a culture of diversity, equity and inclusion. We embrace and celebrate the spectrum of our employees’, volunteers’, and clients’ ages, color, ability or disability, ethnicity, family or marital status, gender identity or expression, language, national origin, physical and mental ability, political affiliation, race, religion, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, veteran status, neurodiversity, and other characteristics that make our employees, volunteers, and clients unique.
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