Above: California faces one of the largest homelessness crises in the country. Frontline workers are often underpaid and overburdened. With decades of experience on the front lines herself, Celina Alvarez is tackling this problem head-on.
For two decades, the motto of Housing Works of California was, “Do whatever it takes for as long as it takes.”
What it took for Celina Alvarez when she joined this Los Angeles nonprofit in 2008 was shoveling out a hoarder’s apartment as roaches fell from the ceiling or bringing bed bugs home on twelve-hour days with no additional pay.
Alvarez is part of a team that was entirely devoted to Mollie Lowery, the activist who founded Housing Works and coined its phrase. When Lowery died in 2015, Alvarez inherited the reins, moving directly from frontline worker to executive director without ever having held a supervisorial role.
Her first step: revisit the organization’s motto.
“Because we were growing at that point, I couldn’t ask the staff to do the same things that Mollie would ask us to do and that we’d say yes to,” said Alvarez. “Just because I said yes to cleaning an apartment where I needed a shovel and had roaches fall in my hair doesn’t mean that was okay. I will not jeopardize my staff’s own safety and make them sacrifice their health at the cost of what someone else needs.”
With this worker-centered model, Alvarez has grown Housing Works across 11 sites in LA serving more than 1,400 people annually — with a 97% housing retention rate for a population that includes people with severe mental illness, physical disabilities and decades on the street.
Last year there were 72,308 unhoused people in LA County, including 43,699 in the city of LA — 4% less in the county and 3.4% less in the city than the prior year.
For her work, Alvarez is one of six recipients of this year’s James Irvine Foundation Leadership Award, which involves a $350,000 grant.
Alvarez, 50, grew up in far west Texas — “No Country for Old Men territory,” she said — and moved to LA in 1993, right after high school. She landed at an HIV/AIDS clinic near Skid Row during the peak of the epidemic, drawn somewhat by necessity: There was “easy access to employment for someone coming from Texas with only a lifeguarding background.”
By 1999, she was working on Skid Row under Lowery’s mentorship at LAMP Community, the nonprofit housing center the activist co-founded, now called The People Concern.
“Before trauma-informed work even became a thing, it was really about unconditional, positive regard,” Alvarez said. “It’s considered radical in this sector that’s very heavy on bureaucratic processes and systems, when you do things outside of the box, but when I think about human engagement in its truest form, it really isn’t radical.”
Lowery’s team of eight workers, hand-picked and most without college degrees, became nicknamed across the sector as “Mollie’s Maids” for doing the work no one else would touch.
“Five of us took bedbugs home once, because we were helping people prep their units for bedbug treatment, and we were doing it without much protective gear or guidance around guardrails. It was like, well, this person’s going to lose their housing, and someone’s got to help them, and they don’t have anyone to help them, and so I guess that’s us,” said Alvarez.
In 2008, Lowery recruited Alvarez to Housing Works, where the same ethos reigned. When Lowery died, other organizations that had long relied on Housing Works’ unconditional “Yes” started calling Alvarez’s board to complain when she said “No.” Her response was direct: “I’m not going to have my staff work 10- and 12-hour days, for something that’s a biohazard to their health, and you’re not even paying us for this service.”
This staff-centric shift has collided with the funding structures usual in her sector.
Most of Housing Works’ provisions run through case management contracts paid per person monthly, which Alvarez described as loaded with paperwork and performance indicators that crowd out the messier, daily human-relational work driving her model.
“In our dream world, we would be given a bulk of funds to do the work that we know how to do, without being constricted and restricted by all the funding channels and contract deliverables that keep us suffocated under the paperwork,” she explained. “We haven’t gotten there yet.”
The model’s 97% retention rate suggests it’s working anyway.
Alvarez, who still carries a small caseload herself while leading the organization, attributes this success to a holistic approach that Lowery pioneered.
“If someone is going to lose their housing, it’s not a linear problem. It’s a whole all-hands-on-deck approach,” she explained. “When someone is on the verge of being evicted, we look at it holistically with the property management, with the developer, so that we can understand: Are we at a juncture where this person actually needs to go, or are they at a point where we could use this crisis that’s jeopardizing their housing as an opportunity to have a conversation with the person about the behavior that’s jeopardizing their housing?”
Alvarez was in criminal court recently, advocating for a 60-year-old woman — one of Pasadena’s longest-unhoused residents, now housed for two years — facing two years of federal prison over 70 counts of stealing Tide Pods and alcohol from Target.
“Because she’s been so entrenched in alcoholism, it’s hard to get her to understand that her housing could be in jeopardy,” she explained. “I’m advocating for her to do a diversion program, including a six-to-nine-month dual diagnosis inpatient program. But we’re still looking at how we can help her relinquish the unit on good standing with the housing authority, for when she’s ready to go back into housing.”
Meanwhile, Alvarez has also helped build a more structural solution to the workforce gap: California’s first accredited certificate program in homeless services, launched at Santa Monica College in August 2024.
The nine-month curriculum owes to years of conversation between Alvarez and Vanessa Rios, then the senior workforce advisor at the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, about the generational knowledge gap of a new workforce coming into the field without the mentorship that helped workers like Alvarez.
Alvarez, who teaches during the spring semester “about the art of human engagement and what it takes to do the work on the ground,” works with two other instructors, each of whom worked under Lowery and have at least three decades in the field.
Three more LA community colleges are now exploring launching this curriculum.
Alvarez said the Irvine grant, which kicks in this July, will fund professional development, the Housing Works’ new five-year strategic plan and a “wellness effort” she launched last March: through June, all 77 of her staff have access to acupuncture, massage, chair yoga, music therapy, tapping, emotional release work and sound baths.
“Most frontline workers have never experienced anything like this, and they are blown away,” she said. “They’re learning how to regulate their nervous systems and learn how to keep well in this work.”
The grant has already done something Alvarez didn’t expect: “All the things we were stressed about before — no one’s talking about workforce development, no one cares — all of a sudden, it’s front and center across the state … So many philanthropy folks have reached out, seeking time to meet with me.”
“If our workers are not well,” she added, “the communities they serve will not be well.”
More information about the James Irvine Awards is available here.
This year’s other five grantees are Chris Chatmon of Kingmakers of Oakland; Lian Cheun of Khmer Girls in Action; Darla M. Cooper of the Research and Planning Group for California Community Colleges; Adrianne Hillman and Erin Garner-Ford of Salt + Light; and Virgil Moorehead and Amy Mathieson of Two Feathers Native American Family Services.
