Our Community La

Win community college outreach- in the fall of 2023, ocla launched an outreach campaign directly on the campuses of 4 local community colleges in an effort to improve support for homeless and resource insecure students. Ocla's community college coordinator has lived experience of homelessness and offers genuine understanding and voice to the student experience. The goal of the college outreach is to raise awareness among students about the availability to local supportive resources and support their understanding of how to use both the win app and the hud survey tool to find needed help. The campus outreach program now only offers workshops, presentations, and trains college staff in how win can support struggling students, it also employs local students to serve as win ambassadors to provide peer-to-peer education about win.

Team win: team win is a paid part-time social media training and mentoring program for a small cohort of homeless or nearly homeless youth. Youth are trained in social media skills, (such as how to make videos, use twitter, facebook and instagram), in support of promoting awareness about the win app in the community. Pre-covid youth engaged in in-person outreach at local homeless coalition meetings to raise awareness about win. During 2020, team win shot and produced 2 how to use win videos, (in english and spanish). In 2021 team win shot and began releasing several "how-to survive" with win video series including how to obtain hygiene products, cooking with food from a food pantry, and more. They have since added voices of team win, a blog hosted on ocla's website, showcasing their experiences and those of others who are attending college while struggling with homelessness and resource insecurity. They also are creating and releasing a series of cooking videos entitled cooking with pearl which are hosted on ocla's youtube channel.