Personal Data Rights and Systemic Change: Building Coordinated Care for Our Unhoused Neighbors - Letters to the Housed by Paul Asplund of Second Grace LA
Illustration depicting personal data by delux multimedia
What a week!
There's so much going on right now that deserves attention, but I want to step back a minute and talk about the stories we're working on for the last few months of 2025.
Personal Data Rights: The Foundation of Systemic Change
Beyond Radical Hope and Radical Love—the topics I will always center my message around—I also want to discuss some systemic challenges and the conversations I've been having with my peers.
One of the biggest challenges we're trying to address is the poor job most of us do in tracking the interactions and progress with people we serve. On a local level, we have several silos, all of which were created by funding, that prevent us from sharing information between agencies. This has been the fact of it as long as I've been around, and what's required to get it fixed has to include thousands of city/county/state and quasi-governmental agencies, all the way up to the federal agencies who created this problem in the first place.
This can be fixed, and we're making progress in fits and starts, but the path to a whole care/whole life system for coordinating services is fraught.
Who Should Own Your Data?
The people I've been talking with all agree that the core of making this work is to change the ownership of personal data. Instead of Facebook, X, Cambridge Analytica, and thousands of data brokers owning our personal data, we need to own it ourselves. This is where we'll see the most advancement, the quickest. It's also the one area where we'll meet the most resistance. Your data has been made a commodity, and taking it back presents a challenge that includes changing the business practices of some of the biggest companies in the world.
Breaking Down the Homelessness Industrial Complex
And then there are all of the systems, loosely framed as the "Homelessness Industrial Complex," that have made an art of standing in front of the funnel of federal dollars and scooping up as much as they can. While they don't own the data, they rely on it to justify their funding and programs. For them to transition their systems will take time and money, and can only happen in response to changes in the federal funding structure. Significant systemic changes like this are slow, but not impossible.
The Impact of Upcoming Mega Events on LA's Unhoused Community
Los Angeles is hosting two global "Mega Events," the 2026 World Cup and the 2028 Olympics, and we need to make plans now to ensure that our unhoused neighbors retain their rights as we prepare for hundreds of thousands of visitors to LA County.
A French non-profit created an in-depth report on the effect those Olympics had on their unhoused and underserved communities in 2024. We'll take you through the report as well as the recommendations we'd like to see enacted before the events in LA. We can provide safety and dignity for all our neighbors in LA if we start to enact some simple safeguards and plan well for the inevitable mass relocation of the unhoused and underserved.
Building Coordinated Response Systems
This includes retaining personal data for each resident and ensuring follow-through after each step of relocation. This requires coordinating hundreds of homeless agencies and thousands of faith organizations to bring enough people actually to do the work. This involves the data systems mentioned above, designed to work today and continue to function going forward.
I'll be bringing these topics up in planning sessions with the new Department of Homeless Services & Housing starting this week.
How Federal Policy Changes Continue to Affect Our Unhoused Neighbors
September 20 marked the most consequential nine months of federal policy change in my lifetime. So far this year, we've been tracking changes in policies affecting immigration, Queer rights, and homelessness. These intersecting issues (along with many others) affect the day-to-day lives of our unhoused neighbors and are increasing the instability that leads to more people losing their housing. We're still seeing 60,000 people lose their housing every year in LA, and hundreds of thousands are barely hanging on.
Responding with Innovation and Love
Deportations tear families apart, requiring us to respond quickly and with love and respect for those left behind. And the effort to erase Trans people from our culture can be seen as one more of many such moves to exclude and disempower minorities. We need to be innovative and effective in how we move forward at the street level.
Living in Radical Hope
It's a lot, I know, but Radical Hope asks us to live in the world we imagine. I live in a world where we are brilliant, loving, caring, and effective. I invite you to live here too. Nothing can stop us when we work together.
We'll cover these stories over the next few months, and we invite you to add any other topics you'd like to see discussed here in the comment section below.
Stay Radical,
Paul
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Focus Keywords: personal data rights homelessness, coordinated care systems LA, Olympics 2028 homeless impact, systemic change homelessness services, federal policy homeless community