Hospitality and Hope: A Case Study on Alexandria House
- Drake Africa
- Jun 5
- 7 min read
As I’ve traversed more and more of Los Angeles, it’s become clear to me that even the most vulnerable residents of the city can still strive to turn their dreams into reality. In the Mid-Wilshire area, I’ve had the fortune of working at one of the most steadfast champions of this notion: Alexandria House. A shelter that’s been providing safe and supportive housing for women and children experiencing homelessness and trauma since 1996, Alexandria House offers a continuum of support as people move from crisis situations to financial and emotional stability, and ultimately to permanent housing.
The shelter’s staff also serve the broader community by providing wellness, educational and enrichment opportunities and resources to not only meet basic needs, but also foster ambition for the future. It’s this space where I joined Alexandria House in enabling people to look towards the future with hope and excitement.
Reaching Dear Neighbors: Our Audience
As a community-oriented transitional residence and neighborhood center, Alexandria House faces unique obstacles to reaching community members and prospective helpers seeking to make a difference.
Outside of the shelter's core service of transitioning folks into housed lives, Alexandria House also aims to provide a circle of care that brings hospitality and stability from multiple sources. These include financial and social-emotional enrichment opportunities, childcare providers, and food services that ease the burden on participants of our programs. But where does this all come from? To answer that, the shelter needs to capture the attention of folks who can not only provide but also share the benefits of this aid. So how do you turn strangers into neighbors?
Having served the neighborhood for over thirty years, the staff of the shelter have had to establish several methods to keep these services available to everyone stepping through our doors. These include in-person and digital touch points such as newsletters, books, events, and social media pages that would generate engagement with excitement and resolve to develop lasting partnerships. But what populates these channels? And what does this work look like offline? That's where the work of interns and apprentices like myself come into play.
Opening Doors: How We Established a Welcoming Atmosphere
Through the Public Allies program, I joined Alexandria House in 2024 with the goal of promoting economic opportunities to participants in the shelter's Entrepreneurship Program, as well as those seeking job opportunities that would provide a livable wage. Simultaneously, I would support the shelter's neighborhood services by helping to revise infrastructure needed for food and hygiene product distribution while providing resources and referrals to neighbors in need. I'd then go on to work towards moving the shelter's agenda of boosting volunteer and donor engagement in the following year.
These efforts would involve improving a targeted social media presence by supporting the shelter's official channels with informative content, while also opening new touch points for folks to get a look at what the shelter has to offer.
Supporting Students with Startup Sisterhood LA
The first project I contributed to on this front was the podcast of Start Up Sisterhood LA (SUSLA), our Entrepreneurship Program which provides quality training, counseling and access to resources for community members to pursue, develop and succeed in a career or small business. Since the start of the COVID pandemic, SUSLA has launched over 100 businesses led by participants of our housing program, as well as non-residing entrepreneurs. Alongside the Director of Job Development and Entrepreneurship, I produced four podcast episodes during my first year as an apprentice.
One key challenge I had to contend with for this was the necessity of respecting the privacy of the shelter’s most significant spokespeople: its past residents. My goal was to uplift their stories while also showcasing them as examples of the impact that people can make on their own lives with Alexandria House. Luckily, by developing friendly relationships with them and enabling them to define the boundaries of our recordings, I was able to share their stories in a manner that highlighted their accomplishments without diving too much into personal matters.
With these episodes, prospective students and curious members of the public could now get a better idea of what graduates can achieve with SUSLA. Whether that's starting a boutique candle business or creating marketing materials for a musical career, I gathered an impressive cast of graduates who would serve as examples of the professional success that SUSLA enables.
As I worked to produce these episodes, I provided continuous assistance for students in the program by connecting them to vending opportunities, researching business supplies to purchase, and providing free photoshoots that they’d incorporate into their branding materials. In the time I worked on this program, 41 students graduated and went on to launch their own startups, a 32.6% increase in graduations from the previous year.
With each new cohort, my confidence grew not only in the program’s effectiveness, but also in my own ability to shine a light on what really matters to the community. Going into my second year as an Ally, I aimed to find even more ways to enable people to grow familiar with the org and connect with our program participants on a more personal level.
Creating Connections with Volunteers and Donors
As the Volunteering and Community-Building Specialist, I joined the Development Team at Alexandria House to increase volunteer and donor engagement for the benefit of the women and families we serve. Though I had already spent a year at the shelter at this point, it was really in this department where I realized just how much our enrichment activities, in-kind donations, and routine operations are affected by outside assistance.
This boost in engagement would necessitate a mixture of personalized email campaigns, in-person outreach, and the refinement of our social media presence. Managing our volunteering and general org email inboxes with our Volunteer and Resource Coordinator, I arranged activities and drives by reaching out to existing and incoming service providers on a constant basis.
Through these partnerships, I’d put together an impactful lineup of events benefiting program participants in a variety of ways. My favorite of these was our Valentine’s Glow-Up Day, in which mothers and their children could get their hair and makeup done by professional stylists for headshots and family photoshoots done by a professional photographer. These collaborations enabled the women to prepare photos for employers and their families. As it turned out, one of them was able to take a first-time family photo.
Experiences like these became my favorite part of the job. Whether I was coordinating free haircut sessions, art projects, yoga lessons, or even setting up a free shopping pop-up store with Jessica Frances Dukes (Ozark, The Gilded Age), I had the privilege of working with incredible volunteers dedicated to making life a little sweeter for the community.
Networking with individuals and organizations online and in-person became a key element in our strategy to make Alexandria House feel like a place where you don’t just survive, but thrive. These opportunities included our own onsite tours and offsite events like the book launch for Immigrant Roots, where I was actually able to bring several SUSLA graduates to meet successful Latin-American entrepreneurs.
Folks from events like these would go on to arrange several donations with me to benefit hundreds of community members through school drives, corporate initiatives, and serendipitous in-kind gifts. Guests at our own events would also support us with purchases of our merchandise and goods from our SUSLA entrepreneurs.
One drive I remember fondly was our Mother’s Day Self-Care drive, in which I worked with representatives from JoMalone London, Sinai Temple, and the Universal College of Beauty to bring some extra holiday cheer to the women and children in the neighborhood.
With this outreach, we gathered hundreds of gift bags and baskets worth of lotions, stress balls, face masks, and other materials to complement our Mother’s Day programming at the shelter. As a point of contact for donations and holiday activities at this time, I’d grown worried that these gifts and services wouldn’t make the season feel special enough.
After seeing the faces of our participants that week, however, my holiday anxieties had totally melted away. I was even lucky enough to get some students from local high schools to gather photo frames for the Valentine’s Day photos! It was moments like these that demonstrated how strategic engagement can translate into dignity, confidence, and connection for our community.
As I continued to engage with supporters, I’d develop further collateral to establish key touch points for them to learn more about our story and how they can make an impact. This would involve several video shoots to provide materials for our Instagram page and website. The biggest of these projects was the Volunteer Orientation, which I produced to inform the public of our volunteering opportunities and the proper procedures to get involved in them.
Getting the chance to launch our new YouTube channel with this video brought me high hopes for the future of volunteering at Alexandria House. Since I joined the Development Team, we’ve registered over 200 new volunteers in our system. As our following continues to grow, I look forward to seeing more people join our mission!
Coming Home: Conclusion
Until I started working at Alexandria House, I struggled to envision what it means to be an Angeleno. Coming from the Bay Area, I’d already come to know what homelessness and hopelessness looks like in the big city. I initially moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in the entertainment industry to express myself and share things I care about in an artistic manner. But working at Alexandria House gave me a new sense of purpose – a new way to strengthen a sense of kinship and sisterhood between myself and the city around me.
Getting to make people feel welcome and empowered to move closer towards stability and success has renewed how I see Los Angeles and its people. Inspiring hope and healing in others is what this house does best, and if there’s anything I can say about the work I’ve done here, it’s that there’s nothing more inspiring than making a house feel like home.
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