Created with the Los Angeles Community Action Network (LA CAN), this series is a handwritten campaign paired with portraits that bring attention to unhoused residents’ policy priorities. The work coincided with the pandemic's shift to remote hearings. Phone lines and Zoom replaced in-person testimony. Voices that are often excluded had an opportunity to participate in the city’s public process.

Skid Row is a roughly 50-block, historically underserved neighborhood east of downtown. The estimated unhoused population of Skid Row is 3,791 people (about 2,112 unsheltered). In a place where access to services and schooling is frequently disrupted and safety is uneven, low-barrier paths to information and participation are essential public infrastructure.

Residents’ messages address the mechanics of crisis response: do not remove tents until housing exists; expand mental-health care; prioritize relief access; redirect funding from punishment to services; treat veterans and neighbors with dignity. Their demands track with public-health guidance that warned against encampment clearances without individual housing and with emergency programs that placed tens of thousands of Californians in hotel rooms during COVID. Portraits pair faces with handwritten appeals — plain-spoken, specific and civic in intent — so that the people most affected by policy are seen as the authors of it.