Lifting Up Families and Individuals in Crisis

Welcome to Episode 4 of The California Table: Lifting Up Families and Individuals in Crisis.

We welcome Louis Gill, Executive Director of the Bakersfield Homeless Center, and a few of his team members to shed light on how to effectively support families in crisis to attain permanent housing and self-sufficiency.

Homeless — a societal label that when ascribed to any adult or child who is unsheltered or facing housing instability, has the great potential of immediately stripping one’s dignity. The growing inequality in California, now exacerbated by the COVID public health crisis, has most of us knowing a neighbor, family member, or perhaps it is we ourselves at the edge or having plunged into housing insecurity.  Still often associated with large urban areas, homelessness in California spares no region.

The Bakersfield Homeless Center, provides a continuum of services to assist families. These services include basic shelter, food, education for the children, permanent housing assistance, job development, and other transitional services.  Most importantly, the work of the Center rests on the foundation that every individual has value — and that condemnation and judgment do not change lives, but love and care do.