Campaign for L.A.'s homeless reaches out to younger activists

Campaign for L.A.'s homeless reaches out to younger activists

We see a video on the Internet and it makes us melt or fume or cry. Sometimes, we respond en masse and change lives overnight.

Thanks to one video campaign, a 9-year-old boy who made a cardboard arcade in East L.A. has received more than enough money to one day go to college.

Thanks to another, a 68-year-old school bus monitor verbally bullied by a pack of middle schoolers probably now can afford to get off the bus for good.

We see things on the screen and we act, in part because it's so easy. At our keyboards, on our cellphones, we can with a handful of clicks beam out help.

What's right in front of us is different. Sometimes we don't see. Sometimes we choose not to see. Sometimes we see but have no idea what to do.

Take the homeless people many of us pass daily on city sidewalks and freeway ramps.

Make eye contact or not? Give money or not? Is passing cash out the car window enabling?

A lot of us mull these questions and, failing to resolve them, do nothing.

The nonprofit Weingart Center on skid row wants that to change. It needs private donations to help pay for its programs to move the homeless toward self-sufficiency by tra ining them for work, providing them counseling and finding them jobs and housing. Public money often requires private matching funds, and it doesn't cover some of the center's efforts.

But private donations outside of foundations are hard to come by, said Kevin Murray, the center's chief executive.

"It's hard to sell homelessness. It's not sexy," Murray said. "It's not the big dinner where the big star shows up."

Generally, individual private donors are older and wealthy and write big checks.

"Clearly, we're not getting money from young folks," Murray said.

So his organization has decided to reach out to a younger audience on its own terms, with a campaign designed to be linked to and tweeted and clicked on and Facebook-liked â€" and to educate them on the breadth of homelessness in Los Angeles.

The campaign is centered on the pro bono work of David Goliath, an El Segundo-based creative agency, which does commercial campaigns for Ki a Motors, Universal Studios and the California Lottery. It asks people to donate $10 by text message.

Last November, DG, with the help of Grandesign Media Services, filmed two different projects in downtown Los Angeles.

Both featured volunteers who once were homeless. Both used street art that made passersby stop in their tracks. Both spoke of the more than 50,000 people living on the L.A. County streets.

One had a grim message, one a more hopeful one.

In front of City Hall and Walt Disney Concert Hall and other spots around downtown, open cardboard coffins were lined up. Some were placed vertically, with volunteers standing inside them. Some were placed horizontally, with volunteers lying down. Next to the coffins, a cardboard sign read: "Every day in L.A., one person who sleeps on the street dies there," and directed people to the Weingart Center's website.