About LA CAN

The Los Angeles Community Action Network (LA CAN) engages in community organizing, public education, leadership development, public policy development and advocacy, and community-legal partnerships to improve the conditions for low-income residents living in Skid Row and parts of South Los Angeles.  LA CAN believes the relationship between building communities and winning measurable improvements must be inextricable, but the potential for winning cannot solely drive our decisions.  We select the problems we choose to address through community input, member input and analysis, current organizational capacity, and evaluation of potential community impact.

 

Residents of extremely low-income communities have long been excluded from public decision making – resulting in decisions that benefit a few and are a detriment to most.  The sole objective of traditional decision-makers is to maximize resources and to attract new consumers, forgetting or ignoring the impacts on current low-income and homeless residents.  Therefore, the main problem that LA CAN is addressing is the lack of voice and power for very low-income residents living in Downtown and South Los Angeles.  Additionally, through the collective voice and power, we address the issues of poverty, homelessness, safe and stable housing, civil rights, gentrification, sexism, and racism.

 

The organizing principle of LA CAN is to build indigenous leadership within our communities to address the multitude of problems faced by homeless and very low-income residents.  Our communities have long been disenfranchised and ignored or have had “leaders” that were not representative of the community speak on its behalf. This reality is what led to the formation of LA CAN and continues to drive the need to build indigenous leadership equipped to build power and make systemic change.

 

Our core funders include:

Liberty Hill Foundation: http://www.libertyhill.org

Diane Middleton Foundation: http://www.dmfgrants.com

Marguerite Casey Foundation: http://www.caseygrants.org

The California Endowment: http://www.calendow.org

Drug Policy Alliance: http://www.drugpolicy.org

21st Century Foundation: http://www.21cf.org