Tag archives: homeless outreach

New Beginnings Counseling Center Opens New Location
By Joanne A Calitri   |   June 20, 2023

Santa Barbara’s New Beginnings Counseling Center (SBNBCC) held its grand opening with a ribbon cutting reception on Friday, June 9, at its new location, 530 East Montecito Street, Suite 101. The event was well attended, with noted state and local politicians – Congressman Salud Carbajal (CA24), Senator Monique Limón, First District Supervisor Das Williams, District […]

New Beginnings
By Steven Libowitz   |   June 13, 2023

When New Beginnings began serving Santa Barbara as a nonprofit half a century ago, providing confidential, therapeutic psychological testing, assessment, and counseling to low-income individuals and families in the greater Santa Barbara area was its core mission. Experienced masters-and-doctoral-level counselors support clients exploring life transitions, relationship issues, and any number of other concerns – including […]

Hands Across Montecito: Union Pacific Railroad Police Visit Montecito
By Sharon Byrne   |   May 30, 2023

I got a bit of a surprise call last Thursday from Agent Potter, with Union Pacific [UP] Railroad Police. We’d been notified by the County’s encampment response team that UP was coming to do a South County cleanout sometime in April – outreach teams should work to clear inhabitants of camps so that Union Pacific […]

PATH: People Assisting the Homeless
By Steven Libowitz   |   May 9, 2023

Homelessness has been growing in Santa Barbara, where last year nearly 2,000 people were living without shelter, a situation that has been very visible as evidenced by the number of encampments encroaching along railroad paths, roadsides, and waterfronts throughout the county. The same story exists in virtually every corner of California in what increasingly seems […]

Hands Across Montecito: With Railway Cleanout Headed Our Way, Hands Team Hits the Tracks
By Sharon Byrne   |   April 18, 2023

Two weeks ago, the Hands team was on a countywide conference call regarding the upcoming camp clearing by Union Pacific. Outreach teams should attempt to get everyone camping along the railroad tracks into shelter before the clearing. Shelter beds, of course, are scarce. PATH, the Rescue Mission, and the Salvation Army are the only providers, […]

The Hands Team Takes on the Point
By Sharon Byrne   |   February 28, 2023

We’ve written in these pages before about how the Hands Across Montecito project is a solid outreach team that helps people leave homelessness in our area. In January, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) required every jurisdiction to perform a point-in-time count of the people living unsheltered to allocate funding for homeless […]

Montecito Asks City, County to Collaborate on Homelessness
By Eileen Read   |   May 24, 2022

It’s noon, about five hours later than Hands Across Montecito’s (HAM) usual monthly hike to locate and aid our village’s hidden population of unhoused individuals. We generally arrive just after dawn to find folks barely awake in their bivouacs around freeway entrances, in gullies near the railroad tracks and cemetery, along creek beds, and on […]

A Year Later: Hands Across Montecito The Model That Makes the Difference in Homelessness
By Sharon Byrne   |   March 8, 2022

In the spring of 2020, as the pandemic unfolded, Montecito neighbors started noticing a significant uptick in homeless individuals on Coast Village Road, traveling along the tracks, and encampments began mushrooming along the freeway. I contacted Luis Alvarado from Santa Barbara County’s Behavioral Wellness Homeless Outreach Team, and we started walking the tracks and outreaching. […]

A Success Story: First Person Helped by Hands Across Montecito Leads Cleanup
By Heal the Ocean   |   September 14, 2021

The “Holy Grail” of abandoned homeless sites was tackled on August 30 in a cleanup being done by a team of homeless workers who have been enlisted by Earthcomb, the brainchild, and business of Andrew Velikanje. The site, located at the end of South Kellogg Avenue in Goleta, is the second in Heal the Ocean’s […]

Santa Barbara Finally Getting Some Traction with Its Homeless Population
By Zach Rosen and Nick Masuda   |   August 5, 2021

Amid a 120-day cleanup of homeless encampments, the question becomes: What happens on Day 121? You might not have noticed Joe — or maybe you did but kept your eyes on the road in front of you. Joe, a senior citizen, would panhandle at numerous off-ramps around Santa Barbara, spending 16 years sleeping on the […]

Well-Meaning Handouts Not Aiding Homelessness Efforts
By Montecito Journal   |   August 5, 2021

The following is an open letter to the Coast Village Association and the property owners of the Country Mart and Starbucks strip:  We need you to step up now and help your businesses and customers stop enabling homelessness. Help us solve it instead.   We are writing to you as Montecito residents and founding members of […]

Tackling Homelessness is Hard, Emotionally Exhausting Work
By Sharon Byrne   |   May 27, 2021

When we started the Hands Across Montecito project late last year, we counted 31 individuals living unsheltered along our railroad tracks and on beaches. We took an approach now touted by Bakersfield: work cases individually, on a by-name basis. Each person’s needs are different, so you have to find the solution that works for them. […]

A Compassionate Partnership: Hands Across Montecito, Sheriff’s Office are Quite the Tandem
By Sharon Byrne   |   April 1, 2021

Last Friday, Jane Olson, one of the founding members of our Hands Across Montecito homeless outreach project, happened to be out walking near Hammond’s Meadow and encountered a very thin woman screaming at the top of her lungs and disrobing.  We had met this woman before, during the homeless point-in-time count at East Beach in […]

A Story of Helping Hands and Hope
By Sharon Byrne   |   March 18, 2021

In 2020, the Montecito community witnessed a growing population of unsheltered individuals in the area. Encampments mushroomed and became quite visible. Bicycle thefts were up as were incidents of trespassing on private property. I started visiting the encampments in Montecito with Luis Alvarado, a case manager from Homeless Outreach Services at Santa Barbara County’s Behavioral […]

Homelessness Update: Montecito Leading the Way
By Sharon Byrne   |   December 3, 2020

The Hands Across Montecito initiative got off to a great start this September. We did a census count with a terrific team of Montecito volunteers, our fire chiefs, sheriffs, and members of Behavioral Wellness, organized by City Net. We hiked all over Montecito, interviewing, and finding out more about who is living unsheltered here, and […]

Joining Hands Across Montecito
By Eileen Read   |   October 21, 2020

In the middle of another heat wave, it’s 95 degrees near the beach in Montecito and everybody has moved indoors. Everybody except our small group trailing behind Luis Alvarado, a determined homeless outreach specialist with the Santa Barbara County Behavioral Wellness Department who has come to Montecito to make contact with as many homeless people […]

New Beginnings Counseling Center
By Zach Rosen   |   November 21, 2019

All too often the amount of people living on the street in the area is referred to as the “homeless problem.” While there is a negative connotation to the word problem, problems also have solutions and New Beginnings Counseling Center (NBCC) is one of the nonprofits in town working to provide solutions. Their range of […]

Righteous Path
By Richard Mineards   |   June 21, 2018

PATH – People Assisting the Homeless – hit a definite home run with its second Making It Home tour, a sell-out event with 260 supporters taking a tour in eight trolleys – two more than last year – of four of our rarefied enclave’s toniest properties and raising around $75,000 for the nonprofit formed three […]

SBRM: “We Can Do It”
By Lynda Millner   |   June 14, 2018

Rosie the Riveter a la World War II has nothing on the Santa Barbara Rescue Mission (SBRM). They recently sent out invitations titled “We Can Do It”, hoping women would band together to fund the women’s homeless shelter at the SBRM. They have learned that the average age of homeless women is 59, and they […]