Here are the morning’s top stories on Thursday, April 24…
- As the state grapples with the homeless population of over 187,000 people, a new program at Santa Monica Community College is training students for jobs to help people get off the streets and into housing. But it also faces an uncertain future.
- Farmworkers in the U.S. have historically been excluded from overtime pay. That’s no longer the case in California. But on Wednesday, state lawmakers tabled a proposal to help ag employers afford that overtime.
A New Program Training Students to Help Homeless Californians Faces Funding Struggles
With more than 187,000 people sleeping on California’s streets and in its shelters, the state’s homeless services industry is struggling to hire enough qualified workers to help them. Last year, Santa Monica College set out to fix that. It heralded the state’s first-ever community college program aimed at training the next generation of homeless service workers.
But the program has fallen victim to many of the same challenges that have long stymied progress on homelessness in California, including unreliable funding, high attrition rates and political turmoil. In fact, it’s not clear if the much-needed program will persist.
“We know the value added when somebody is adequately trained before they’re deployed,” said Vanessa Rios, a senior advisor for workforce development with the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, which funds the community college program. “It would be a disservice to our system should we not fund and support this effort. Where the dollars (will) come from, I don’t know.”
Most nonprofits that provide homeless services in California can’t help everyone who asks, in part because they struggle to recruit and retain staff, according to a 2024 study by the UC Berkeley Terner Center for Housing Innovation.