When Community Holds the Mirror

Last night I attended a Cease Fire meeting in South Los Angeles. It was a room filled with community leaders, service providers, outreach workers, and people who live with the consequences of the systems we build. Many of them work directly with people experiencing homelessness. Some of them discharge to Soul Housing. Some of them have referred to our Recuperative Care program for years. A few of them have been harmed by failures in the past.

It was a necessary room to sit in.

Work like ours often happens behind gates, inside programs, inside policies, inside well-intentioned frameworks. Over time it becomes easy to measure success by internal metrics and operational improvements. What is harder, and more important, is staying close to the lived experience of the people who are impacted when things go wrong.

I met a former participant who was discharged during a difficult transition period. At the time, communication failed and transitions were not handled with the care they should have been. He ended up back on the street. He survived through his own resilience, but with unnecessary hardship layered on top of an already fragile situation. That hardship did not need to happen.

There were also hard questions about broken promises made long before our current leadership and structure existed. Promises that were remembered clearly by the people they were made to. Promises that shaped trust, and when broken, shaped anger. That anger was justified.

This is the part of the work that does not show up in reports or dashboards. It shows up in rooms like that one. It shows up years later. It shows up in the faces of people who remember what it felt like to be dismissed, rushed, or treated as an operational problem instead of a human being.

What mattered just as much, though, was what came alongside the accountability.

There was recognition that we have changed. That we have slowed down in the right places. That we are more structured, more transparent, and more intentional about how people move through care. Community partners who recently walked our facilities spoke about professionalism, compassion, and improvement. That feedback matters, not as validation, but as confirmation that change is visible beyond our own walls.

Progress in this space is rarely clean or linear. It requires correcting course while still moving forward. It requires acknowledging harm without letting past failures define the future. It requires listening more than explaining, and showing up even when it is uncomfortable.

The takeaway from that meeting was not that the work is failing. It was that the work demands constant engagement with the community it serves. Not only when things are going well, and not only through intermediaries, but face to face, consistently, and with humility.

If we want to do this work well, we cannot operate in isolation. We have to look beyond our own programs and metrics and remember that trust is built in moments, and lost the same way. Being better is not about being perfect. It is about being accountable, responsive, and willing to learn in public.

That is the standard worth holding ourselves to.