About Lamp

Lamp Community is a Los Angeles-based nonprofit organization that permanently ends homelessness, improves health, and builds self-sufficiency among men and women living with severe mental illness.

What We Do

We help people living with severe mental illness move from streets to homes. Lamp offers immediate access to affordable, safe and permanent housing without requiring sobriety or participation in treatment. Once settled in their home, new tenants are surrounded with customized services such as mental health treatment, drug recovery, healthcare, budgeting, visual and performing arts, job opportunities, and other supports to help them achieve their goals and become a part of their community.

How We Do It

The approach we use, and helped to pioneer, is called Housing First or Permanent Supportive Housing (PSH). Conventional wisdom has long said that homeless people with disabilities had to “straighten up” before they could obtain housing. But people with severe disabilities cannot access treatment, let alone make dramatic changes in their lives, while struggling to survive on the streets.

Lamp treats housing as a prerequisite for coping with the debilitating challenges of mental illness, addiction, physical disability, chronic disease, and the trauma associated with 5, 10, even 20 years of homelessness.

Customer choice is central to all of our services. Historically, people with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and other serious mental illnesses have been denied a voice in decisions that affect their lives. But Lamp knows that personal choice is paramount to success in treatment and in all aspects of one’s life.

It Works

Permanent Supportive Housing is the proven solution to ending street-dwelling homeless.

It transforms lives, helps revitalize neighborhoods, and it’s actually cheaper than leaving people on the streets, cycling through shelters, hospitals, and jail.