interview Archives - L.A. Parent

How Artists Are Fighting to End Homelessness in L.A.

Published June 2, 2023

Tracy Martin

There are currently 580,466 people experiencing homelessness in the United States today, and more than 174,000 of them are people with families and children. College students are also massively impacted by this crisis. According to an L.A. Times article, one in 20 students in the University of California system alone are unhoused. Since the pandemic, these numbers continue to rise, along with the stigma and misconceptions surrounding homelessness.

While these numbers may be disheartening, organizations and activists continue to find ways to curb the homelessness crisis in Los Angeles. One of these people is Tyrone Stokes, founder of Dope Spot Studios in Pomona and has helped Lee Ballinger (co-founder of A.U.E.H) in invaluable ways, who spoke to us about Artists United to End Homelessness (A.U.E.H.). A.U.E.H. uses the voices and support of artists to increase awareness around homelessness and push toward ending it. Organizers put on shows and events to gain support and educate the broader community about this crisis.

Why artists? It’s no revelation that creating and performing art helps to build social-emotional skills, which creates a strong sense of empathy and compassion in artists. In children specifically, socio-dramatic play (pretend play) strengthens social competence and the ability to understand others. Artists have a special ability to feel empathy — and often want to help. By using their talent, they have helped A.U.E.H. in invaluable ways.

I recently spoke to Stokes about the organization’s work.

How did you become involved with Artists United to End Homelessness?

I attended an open mic that was held in Pomona. It’s called “A Mic and Dim Lights.” They don’t host this event in Pomona anymore; they host it in L.A. now. They hosted this open mic in Pomona at the dA Center of the Arts. It’s an art gallery in downtown Pomona. There, I saw Lee Ballinger go up and do a poem. Then, he also spoke about Artists United to End Homelessness. It was something that he was in the beginning stages of starting. It seemed pretty interesting to me as far as artists playing a part, playing a role and doing something for a greater cause. I talked to him to see how I could get involved, and I’ve been pretty much involved ever since.

What are some common misconceptions that you believe Artists United to End Homelessness is helping to change?

There are a few. There’s a good number, I think, of misconceptions just about the actual causes of homelessness. We’re able to show people what those actual causes are by actually speaking to the unhoused via our art and the different things we do to give the unhoused a voice. I think some other misconceptions regarding the unhoused is [that they are not] willing to work or not taking the steps necessary [to work]. And then…how a lot of people may see shelters as housing. We try to help people see that that is a misconception. Shelters should not be considered housing. I think one of the big ones that we always go back to is how to actually end homelessness rather than manage it. I think that’s a big thing because a lot of what we hear from people involved in this issue is they don’t have actual solutions to ending it. They open more soup kitchens, they open stuff like that, and it’s usually seen as more charity work rather than solutions to end homelessness, and I think that’s another misconception that we try to tackle as well with our work.

Artists United to End Homelessness is using its platform to create pressure in politics to do more to end homelessness. Have there been any accomplishments in this area that you are especially proud of?

I think one of the biggest things we have done was to participate in an event called “100,000 Poets for Change,” and during that time, we hosted several different events in different areas where the focus was on our mission to end homelessness. I think by doing that, we spread our message pretty quickly. We were able to recruit a lot of artists to our cause and get the attention of some of the individuals in the arts sectors of various communities. So, I would say, I think we’re most proud of that particular event because it was a success. We weren’t sure how it was going to work. We didn’t come together as a team to do one big event — we just kind of all spread out from different various places: L.A., Pomona, Ontario, the O.C. We hosted community events at all these different places, and we were able to gather as many people as possible to have discussions on homelessness and ways to end it. I think it was a really great turnout and a really good vision for what we were trying to do.

You held a symposium at Cal State Fullerton. Why is this message important to spread in the setting of young college students?

I think it’s important because there’s a high percentage of the unhoused community that are college students, and a lot of people don’t know that. I personally have a friend who I went to college with…her entire senior year she was homeless, and I didn’t know it. And we were friends, too. So, I was heartbroken at that and questioned why she didn’t say anything.

I think it’s very important, because you can be on campus walking around and not know that some people are actually unhoused and don’t have the support that they may need. And they’re going through that personal situation while also trying to graduate and get a degree at university or wherever they’re at. [It’s also important] to get people to start thinking about what’s going on in their community at that age in general because the unhoused are also a part of the community; they’re our neighbors. They’re not second-class citizens.

There are organizations and people who are trying to make an impact and create change. I think [college] is a perfect time [for students] to start getting involved within their community, so I think that’s why it’s important that we do let them in on what we’re doing.

How can people support Artists United to End Homelessness? Are there ways to donate or spread the word?

One of the best ways is to go to our website. Once they go there, we have a statement that specifically reads, “Take the people without homes and put them in homes without people,” and we want to get signatures on there and artists advocating for that statement.

On our website, there is also a tab that details the 14 steps that we’ve created to be taken to end homelessness. I would encourage them to look through those steps and ask themselves what it is that could do to make an impact or at least get involved. Other than that, I would say to reach out to us and let us know what you do and what you are inspired by, what your passion is, artist or not (and any kind or art as well). We’re very vigilante as far as people reaching out to us and bringing artists in and other individuals who want to be involved. There are a lot of different things that they can do, so reach out to us on our contact page.

To learn more, visit aueh.org.

Owner of Wagmor Pet Rescue, Melissa Bacelar, Talks All About Pet Adoption

Published May 5, 2023

Tracy Martin

If your kids have been begging you for a pet, the summertime is a great time to add a new furry member to the family. Explore t his roundup for a look at some great pet adoption spots.

Before you commit, though, check out what Melissa Bacelar, owner of Wagmor Pet Rescue, has spoke to us about her rescue agency, and offers helpful insight to families looking to adopt a pet.

As the owner of Wagmor Pet Rescue, what is your favorite part about your job?

My absolute favorite part of the job is when I go in and I take a group of dogs that are completely shut down, completely scared, don’t trust people, and I watch them go from a completely shut-down being to a wagging-tail-happy being, trusting with their forever family, knowing the rest of their lives they’re not going to have one bad minute.

Can you speak about the number of rescues you saw during the pandemic? There were a lot of people adopting — and then surrendering once they had to get back to work and school. Did this affect your rescue at all?

Absolutely. During the pandemic, when we would post the group of dogs that we took in, the next morning we would have a line of people waiting outside the door to adopt them. We would put up sign-up sheets. Our overnight person would call and say, “Oh my gosh, there’s people around the corner just lined up.” That was the pandemic. We rescued and adopted out thousands and thousands of dogs without even really trying. It was unbelievable.

Now that the pandemic’s over and people are back to work and school and sports and travel, we’re not seeing a huge return of animals adopted from us, but we are getting calls every minute of every day from shelters, from owners, from neighbors that are watching their neighbors not treat their dogs properly. It’s really quite depressing and unbelievable the amount of dogs that are coming in and not having any place to go. In Los Angeles and California in general, the shelters are just so beyond capacity. Some of them aren’t even able to take in dogs. They are telling me this is the worst it’s been in 10 years.

Wagmor does something called “Social Club Cuddle” time. How do you see this benefiting the pets looking for their forever homes and the people thinking about adopting?

Cuddle time is a huge stress reliever, and it’s a great way to get people in because I feel like a lot of people might not be ready to adopt a dog, or they might not be in a situation where they can adopt a dog or it’s fair to adopt a dog, but they still want the interaction. And our dogs being from situations where maybe they didn’t get enough human contact, or they weren’t able to trust humans, really benefit from other people coming in and sitting with them and allowing them to warm up to them.

So, it helps the humans because it’s stress relief, and I’m telling you, no one leaves without having a smile on their face after being cuddled by 50 dogs. For the dogs, it’s so awesome to know that every single person that enters our facility is going to be nice to them. No one is going to yell at them, no one is going to lock them in a cage, no one is going to be mean to them, and whatever happened previously is not going to happen again, so it helps them trust all types of people. And obviously, we can’t afford to have 10 staff members sitting with dogs all the time, so having these volunteers with them really helps.

What is something a family should know or prepare for before going to adopt?

Myself being a parent, I understand the importance of having a dog that is not only going to be good with your child, but be good with children coming into your home. I always feel that’s the biggest thing. We can always make the dog trust their immediate family because they’re used to them. They see them every day, they feed them and walk them and all those things, but a big concern, especially for me with two sons that are school age, is having friends come in, and friends with different personalities and different energy levels. So, when a parent is thinking about getting a dog, they have to think about how active their house is, how many people are in and out of the house and what kind of dog do they think they have time for…

As a parent, you have to think, “How many hours am I truly home every day?” “How much time am I going to be able to dedicate to this dog, and if we do sports and activities after school, are they sports and activities we can bring the dog to?” Really thinking about being honest with ourselves about how much time we dedicate to this animal and how much we can take them with us, and taking into consideration the amount of exercise and mental stimulation they need.

I also think that a young dog or puppy is always a good way to go because there’s no baggage, no one [has] hurt them. But again, [we have to be] honest with ourselves about time. If you get a puppy, are you going to have time to train that puppy? Are you going to have time to be home with that puppy during the months he can’t interact with other people, go on walks and train the puppy so the puppy is used to kids and people?

Can you discuss the price of adopting at Wagmor Pet Rescue? How does that money help your rescue?

At Wagmor, we work a little bit differently. Most people tell me they can’t believe how quickly we get back to potential adopters and how available we are, and that is because we have a full-time staff that is available 24 hours a day that are all paid. We don’t work on a volunteer basis at all. We are a fully paid staff rescue, and we also have a facility. And the facility isn’t like a kennel or a shelter; it is a luxury pet hotel, so the dogs are loose and free. And it’s a nice place to go with your family. No one feels sad when they go there. No one feels upset for the dogs. It’s a nice, beautiful place where people can come in and relax and enjoy themselves. Because of that, our adoption fees are a bit higher. Our adult dogs are $650, and our puppies are $850. That money not only goes to their medical care and their food, but also goes to a 24-hour staff that’s watching the dogs. It’s also going to the facility that we obviously have to pay rent for every month to make sure we can house these dogs. And it also allows people to get a sense of what the dogs are like with other dogs and different staff members, because there are always new people in there working with them. We’re these dogs’ forever home. If anything happens in six months, in two years, in five years, we are going to be there and we are going to take care of that dog.

Do you have any favorite adoption stories?

[A dog named] John Wayne. We get a call from a shelter, and they’ve got a pitbull…and someone was like, “We have to put the dog down right now; the dog is dying.” One of our sponsors, donors and friends has a plane, and I called him, and he said, “I’m going to get that dog.” He flew his private plane, put the dog in his plane, flew the dog back to our vet, off the euthanasia table. The dog went to our vet, we sealed him up… and he went to medical foster. When he walked into the medical foster (she has three kids under seven, and she never puts her foster dogs with her kids at first, especially a dog who had been so badly abused), he saw her kids and jumped out of his pen to be with them and kiss them, and he was just so happy to be there. He was there for about a month and a half healing, and when he was healed, he had quite large scars, but he was fine. He came to Wagmor to get adopted. We do a lot of events at Wagmor, and we had a healer who was coming in to do a healing event with the dogs and the people, and he was just going to be there healing. This man [who] was not looking for a dog — he traveled, he didn’t want a dog, he didn’t think he could have a dog — fell in love with John Wayne, he adopted John Wayne. And now John Wayne goes with him on retreats and healing journeys. So this dog went from literally such an abusive situation [to getting] flown on a private plane and healed, and now he’s traveling the world with a healer.

Interview with Author Kwame Alexander: His ‘Acoustic Rooster’ Goes to the Stage

Published April 14, 2023

By Tracy Martin

Kwame Alexander, an esteemed children’s book author, took the time to speak with L.A. Parent about his children’s book “Acoustic Rooster and His Barnyard Band,” which will be transformed on stage April 22 and 23 at the Wallis Annenberg Center For The Performing Arts. Some of Alexander’s awards include the 2018 and 2020 Coretta Scott King Book Award.

Throughout the interview, his liveliness and passion for his work shone through.

You have an extensive list of publications, including children’s books, novels and poems. Your children’s book “Acoustic Rooster and His Barnyard Band” is now a stage production. This book was published around 10 years ago. What has it been like to revisit this story?

“You know, I started writing it 15 years ago, and it was published in 2014, so I was done with the story. I had exhausted all of my creativity. It took me five years to write it, and I felt really good about it. Adapting it allowed me to expand and extend the story and create new characters and help breathe life into it, so it really shined for the screen. It was almost like telling a different story or telling an extended story of a story that I wrote that I had grown up with, and now I was able to have a rebirth as it were in the storytelling process, so that was exciting.”

“Acoustic Rooster” puts an emphasis on jazz, introducing different musical terms as well as having some correlations to some real-life musicians. Can you talk about why introducing children to music, jazz specifically, is important to you?

Author Kwame Alexander. PHOTO COURTESY KWAME ALEXANDER

“I’m a huge fan of jazz music, and when I started writing “Acoustic Rooster,” my daughter was 1 year old, and I had been laid off from my job, so I was at home with her, and in an effort to get her to stop crying, which she did a lot of, I would play music on the record player. The music would range from hip-hop…there was even some country…but none of that seemed to work, none of that seemed to soothe her. When I played Ella Fitzgerald singing “I Got You Under My Skin” and “With a Song In My Heart,” she stopped crying and her eyes got big. So I played some Billie Holiday some Miles Davis, and it was apparent that the jazz music really soothed her, it really did the trick. And it was sort of interesting to have the parallel not only with my writing but with my life. Whenever I am working with a book, I am listening to jazz. Music is that thing that keeps me inspired on a soul level, and I guess it worked with her.

“Jazz is America’s first music — it’s a bonafide American creation. I like to think it’s a metaphor that we can all learn from, and that is there are all these musicians that are all on stage at the same time and they work together to create this beautiful [sound], but in given time everyone has their opportunity to solo, to shine, and everyone else takes a step back and lets that person do their thing and support them. How great would it be if that is how we lived our lives, giving everyone their opportunity to shine? We all get the opportunity, and we realize that we are better united than we are not. Of course, kids don’t get all that, but, on a soul level, I think they do get it. We all get it. Not to mention how gorgeous and delicious the music is itself. It’s the closest thing in music that allows us to appreciate our unanimity.”

How did you narrow down what songs and artists to showcase in your book?

“I was in Tuscany, Italy, when I was writing that story, and I just happened to be in a villa. Of course, if you’re in Tuscany, you’re going to be near a vineyard, and I happened to be near a vineyard and also a farm. I remember walking by the farm one day on my way to a cafe and seeing these roosters and these hens. They were running around the coup, and it was almost as if they were partying. And so I remember saying, ‘Man, that’s kinda cool, they’re partying. Perhaps they’re listening to some really cool jazz music.’ And I don’t know how it came to me, but the idea of “Acoustic Rooster” just sort of hit me. Once I had that, I went ‘Oh, we got a rooster and he plays guitar and he’s got a name that rhymes, so maybe I can do something similar with the other characters, ‘cause, again, when you’re playing jazz it’s a team sport, it’s a band, so who are some of the other characters that are gonna be in the band?

“Then it was a matter of me brainstorming. What are some of the other animals whose names are going to lend themselves to names that either rhyme or have puns attached to them that the kids will like because of the way that it sounds, but the parents will get? The parents will be the ones who understand, and from there it was Mules Davidson and Duck Ellington…I think those were the first ones. And then, I just had fun with it and started looking at all kinds of musical genres. Charlie Pride, a.k.a. Collie Pride. Dolly Parton, a.k.a. Dairy Parton. That was a lot of fun to brainstorm.”

Have you had a favorite moment watching your original story come to life on stage?

“Oh my goodness, in musical theater you got these different sorts of templates for songs. You got the ‘Who am I?’ song, the ‘What is the problem? song. There are all these templates for these songs. And the song that’s the finale, that’s that grand song, and when we wrote the first couple drafts of the musical — Randy Preston, Mary Hess and I — we didn’t have that big song at the end that sort of tied all together that makes us cry or laugh, you know, feel ebullient. And we realized that maybe a week or so before we went into rehearsal, and I remember Randy and I talked about the song, and he went off and wrote it. When I watch that show and I get to that last number, the grand finale, that is going to take us home, I just feel like I can do anything. And, of course, that’s the message in the play. It’s how do you remember to be a star in your mind and to always let it shine? And when I hear that number, I am blown away. I’ve heard it 30 or 40 times, and it still feels like the first time. It still feels as empowering as it felt the first time. And the way Kanysha [Williams] blows with that song – she’s incredible.

You will be participating in a talkback for the final performance. What are you looking forward to discussing with the younger viewers?

“I love Q&A’s. I speak a lot, and my favorite part of speaking is the Q&A. I love answering questions. I love the wild questions kids ask. And I love being able to come back with answers that are going to engage them and inspire them. So, I’m not looking forward to one thing in particular; I’m just looking forward to engaging with the young people and the audience and answering any and every question they have — from the silliest question to what size shoe does rooster wear to the questions that ultimate are going to be educational… So, I’m looking forward to the questions more than the answers.”

“Acoustic Rooster and His Barnyard Band” will show 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. Sat., April 22, and 11 a.m. April 23 with a talkback with Alexander. Watch the trailer.