Featuring Amy Turk, LCSW, Chief Executive Officer of the Downtown Women’s Center (DWC), the only organization in Los Angeles focused exclusively on serving and empowering women experiencing homelessness.
What are the root causes of homelessness among women? What role does gender-based violence play? What policies would reduce the risk of women becoming homeless? Amy Turk, a social worker and chief executive officer of the Downtown Women’s Center, and host Brenda Gazzar discuss the factors that drive women and their children out of their homes and into the streets.
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Amy Turk, Downtown Women’s Center (courtesy of Amy Turk)
Domestic Violence, Homelessness & Health Care
—– TRANSCRIPT —–
Opening MUSIC – “Talk Back” 10 seconds, fade down
Welcome to Code WACK!, your podcast on America’s broken healthcare system and how Medicare for All could help. I’m your host Brenda Gazzar. Today, we’ll talk about the driving factors of women in homelessness as part of a series on how domestic violence, homelessness and health care intersect.
Amy Turk is the chief executive officer of the Downtown Women’s Center (DWC), the only organization in Los Angeles focused exclusively on serving and empowering women experiencing homelessness. She has held leadership positions in the field of social work and homeless services since 2001.
Welcome to Code WACK!, Amy
Turk: Thank you, Brenda.
Q: So nice of you to join us, I wanted to start out by asking you how did you first get involved in the issue of women and homelessness and why are you so passionate about this issue?
Turk: As a student of women’s studies in my undergrad work. I volunteered in a shelter that supported women and on that night I had hardly cooked dinner for myself, and somehow managed to cook dinner for 15 women that were residing there and had the privilege of sitting down and just getting to know people and just was so impressed with people’s comfort level in sharing parts of their stories and the resilience I could hear in their stories that I just kept going back and ultimately started working there and that thus started a career of about 20 years now in social work.
Q: Wow, where was this, by the way, the shelter?
Turk: It’s in Santa Monica, California, and it’s run by an organization that’s now called The People Concern.
Q: And I’m just curious, what did you make them for dinner?
Turk: (Laughter.) Oh, I wish I could remem….super simple, probably like grilled cheese sandwich or something.
Q: That’s so nice of you though. That’s really sweet. Great, thank you so much. What are the main reasons that women experience homelessness today?
Turk: You know, the main reason that we find homelessness, in general, is obviously a lack of enough funding to afford housing and then systems that unfortunately disproportionately impact, mostly people of color in negative ways. But for women, it’s usually an experience of gender-based violence that could lead to homelessness, or the impacts of typically making less money in general than men and of course that’s, that’s more true for women of color and just the compounding impacts of not being able to add to your wealth over time has left many older women in particular, either vulnerable to homelessness or homeless themselves.
Q: When you say gender-based violence, can you give me an example or a story that kind of illustrates that?
Turk: I work with many women who have unfortunately experienced domestic violence or sexual assaults or even child abuse and in reports that we’ve produced at the Downtown Women’s Center, most recently our 2019 LA City Women’s Needs Assessment, over 50% of the women said that they had experienced domestic violence over the course of their lifetime.
When I think of one woman, in particular, she grew up in a household where her father was abusive and she excelled in school and kind of moved out of that environment on her own and moved into a relationship that replicated some of the patterns that she grew up with and she had to flee her home that she was living in with her husband and with their children. But the dynamics of domestic violence are the financial isolation and, without any finances, it’s really difficult for people to leave and then go pay for housing somewhere else.
So she found herself homeless with her children literally in a park and as luck would have it, to some degree, her name came up on a Section 8 waiting list into public housing just about right at that time. What was not lucky was that she had been waiting 10 years prior for that moment to happen but the timing worked out in that scenario.
Q: Wow. where is she living now?
Turk: She lives in Los Angeles and we get to work together, mostly in advocacy-related work to help prevent this from happening to anyone else.
Q: Oh wow, that’s amazing. Thank you so much, Amy, for that. Um, so, what do you think are the most effective strategies to combat these reasons for homelessness among women?
Turk: I mean foremost additional affordable housing. There’s a lack of housing in Los Angeles County and in many places across the nation, that’s affordable for anyone and that creates pressures in our supply of housing which ultimately impacts folks’ ability to literally obtain housing or not. So number one, homes end homelessness. Right? So any advocacy, anything that protects existing affordable housing and anything that helps produce more wealth for individuals to, you know, close the pay gap, to have jobs that pay a living wage, that also include of course health insurance and things that we know can be protective factors to never experience homelessness.
Q: Thank you, Amy.
Find more Code WACK! episodes at ProgressiveVoices.com and on the PV app. You can also listen to Code WACK! at heal-ca.org. This podcast is powered by HEAL California, uplifting the voices of those fighting for healthcare reform around the country. I’m Brenda Gazzar.
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