By Alivia Pacino
I have been a Girl Scout for twelve years, and throughout my time being a Girl Scout, I have gained a deep passion for homeless advocacy. With this in mind, I decided to use my passion to help others and try to make a change through my Gold Award project.
The Gold award is an 80-hour project that helps to create a long-lasting and influential change in the community. A Girl Scout that chooses to pursue this project works with a non-profit organization to help guide her on her way to success.
For my project, I chose to work with a non-profit organization named Share Hope USA.
This organization strives to help advocate and feed the homeless in the streets of Los Angeles and beyond. I collaborated with this organization to help me create a short educational film named “Shine a Light on the Homeless”. This film consists of interviews from people of all walks of life—high schoolers, actresses, non-profit organization leaders and the homeless themselves—as well as information on how the socio-economic status of the country as a whole has affected the lives of many innocents, causing many who have the traditional tools to take care of themselves to be homeless.
The goal of the film is to help further educate the current generation and future generations on how people can become homeless and try to influence their perception of homelessness in Los Angeles. I created this film to try to inspire future leaders in our community to make a change.
Homelessness has been growing rapidly in the city of Los Angeles, and it’s becoming a huge problem. The city has been kicking out homeless people faster than ever, and with
homeless shelters being full/closed or there being no way to transport the homeless to these shelters, they have nowhere else to go. According to the LA Times, “the number of those living in the streets and shelters of the city of L.A. and most of the county surged 75%—to roughly 55,000 from about 32,000—in the last six years.” These numbers are only going to continue to rise as inflation continues to worsen and housing prices skyrocket. I believe the only way to fix this problem is to educate as many people as possible on the issue and to help inspire future generations to begin to make a change in the way society views homelessness. Homelessness isn’t a personal issue; it’s a societal one, and without anyone trying to seriously make a change, more and more people will end up on the streets. The only way to prevent this from happening is if we work together, and I believe we can.