Meet Step Up | Mental Health and Homeless Service Provider

We had the good fortune of connecting with Step Up and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Step, what principle do you value most?
Step Up is driven by a set of core values: Hope, Respect, Collaborative Relationships, Wellness, and Voice & Choice. The foundational principle that guides all of these is the understanding that change is possible in anyone, if given the opportunity. Every one of our values puts our clients front and center, with their needs driving every action, and their progress is the only measure of our success. We often hear terms like “human-centered” services thrown around, but people can sometimes lose track of what that really means. With this foundational principle in mind, Step Up has never lost track of what it means to focus on the individual while also addressing the actual problem at hand. Without keeping the individual’s needs and goals at the forefront, and without allowing each person to identify their own needs and goals, how can anyone hope to address them seriously? Here at Step Up, that’s what matters most to us: giving each person we serve the voice to express their needs and goals and then providing them with all the resources and support they need to progress toward them.

What should our readers know about your business?
Step Up began back in the mid-1980s as a drop-in center for mental health support. Our founder, Susan Dempsey, was inspired to found Step Up because she struggled to find the help her son, who was struggling with a serious mental health issue, needed. She wanted to make a difference, so she set up a safe space where people dealing with serious mental health issues could find support, resources, and refuge in a city that often felt unwelcoming. Over the next ten years, the center grew, and one of the biggest lessons we learned was just how closely mental health struggles are connected to homelessness.
It didn’t take long for Susan and the staff to realize that giving meaningful mental health support became nearly impossible when someone was also dealing with homelessness. That insight led to a big change for Step Up: identifying the need to develop more permanent supportive housing. Our first project was Step Up on Second Street, which remains Step Up’s headquarters to this day. Back in 1994, we opened 36 units right in the heart of Santa Monica, and that move really set us on the path to becoming one of the top providers of permanent supportive housing in the state.
Since then, we’ve added 14 more housing communities with over 600 units. Plus, there are thousands of individuals living in single apartments, often called “scattered site” units, across cities in the greater LA area, the Inland Empire, Sacramento, Monterey County, and even in states like Georgia and Tennessee. It hasn’t always been easy, but at Step Up, we stay focused on our core mission: providing compassionate support to those facing serious mental health conditions and chronic homelessness.
With this focus in mind, we have helped some of the hardest-to-reach individuals find a place to call home, achieve stability, and work toward their personal goals. That’s what we’re most proud of. We’ve shown that tackling homelessness in the U.S. can be accomplished, and the key ingredients are compassion, understanding, flexibility, and adaptability. With these tools and comprehensive mental health treatment, we’re genuinely making a difference in the lives of some of our community’s most vulnerable neighbors.

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
This is a really tough question for us because LA is such a complex and multifaceted place, full of contradictions! We’d probably start with the 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica, but we couldn’t be honest without also mentioning the daily struggles of folks experiencing homelessness on the beach. You’ve got luxury shopping on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, right next to the hustle and grind of West Hollywood and Mid-City. We love the views from the high rises on Bunker Hill, just a few blocks from Skid Row and some of the rawest examples of hardship in the country. The food in LA? It’s legendary, almost every cuisine you can think of! But at the same time, we know many people rely on our pantry services just to get by. And the view from Griffith Observatory is absolutely stunning, but it’s a reminder that beneath the city lights, thousands are just trying to find a safe place to sleep.
We love LA and our communities. It’s because of that love that we have to be honest. LA’s got plenty of fun, interesting, and engaging stuff to check out, and no one should hold back from experiencing it. At the same time, there’s a lot of work to do here, and that’s what we’re really focusing on.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
We want to give a shout-out to our clients! They are the reason we do this work, and our only measure of success is their success. We often repeat this message through member stories, quotes, and various statistics and data, but the core idea stays the same. When we help someone find a permanent home and provide ongoing support to help them stay there, that success belongs to them and them alone.

Website: https://www.stepup.org

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