'This Is Called Interdependence': Images of Homeless Outreach in an Outbreak

“How are you going to shelter in place when you don’t got a place?”

It's a question that Lisa Gray-Garcia, a Bay Area homeless advocate who goes by Tiny, wants Bay Area residents to consider as the coronavirus continues its relentless assault on the region — and the world.

“It’s an absolute emergency,” says Tiny, the co-founder of POOR Magazine, who herself spent years living on the streets. The homeless community was already living in crisis mode, she says. This just adds another terrifying layer.

There are more than 34,000 unhoused people in the Bay Area, the majority of whom live in crowded, unsheltered conditions, often without basic sanitation resources. That makes them among the most susceptible to contracting and spreading the virus.

“People on the street don't have access to resources — to the things you’re supposed to have to stay safe from this virus,” she says. “When you have no running water, washing your hands, keeping your stuff clean is a struggle. These are things we deal with every day.”

As cities throughout the region scramble to secure shelter and emergency services for some of their unhoused residents, Tiny and her team of collaborators have taken matters into their own hands.

This week, Tiny's group, along with volunteers from United Front Against Displacement and Self-Help Hunger Program, distributed mostly donated cleaning and sanitation supplies to homeless residents living in encampments in West and East Oakland and in San Francisco's Tenderloin District.

Tiny says her group had been handing out food and other critical supplies long before anyone even heard of the coronavirus. But now they're now doubling down on those efforts, scrambling to get hold of as many cleaning and healing materials as they can in an effort to fill the large gap left by the many homeless service providers that have had to scale back their services.

“This is called interdependence, and we do it with or without a virus, because we're struggling with a virus called poverty,” she says, noting the underlying current of mutual aid that circulates within the homeless community. Homeless people may be vulnerable, she adds, but many are also impressively resourceful. “People outside have a lot of skills and are doing their darndest to stay alive and clean and organized.”

As people swarm supermarkets and hoard materials, Tiny says, supplies have been increasingly hard to come by, and she is appealing to community members to “redistribute” anything they might not need.

To that end, her group is now accepting donations of food, cleaning products and clean clothing, tents and sleeping bags, which can be dropped off at their site at 8032 MacArthur Street in East Oakland. Money for supplies can also be contributed online here.

“Were out of everything today. We gave everything away,” she says.

Earlier this week, KQED photojournalist Beth LaBerge visited one of the group's community relief efforts, at an encampment on 24th and Wood Streets in West Oakland, where more than 100 people showed up to collect cleaning supplies, gloves, masks and other critical supplies.