A Santa Monica College student in action
As kids play soccer on a makeshift field constructed of traffic signs and cones at MacArthur Park, old women in tattered clothes walk by with shopping carts containing their possessions. In the corner, at a rat-infested section of the park, people sit idly next to bags of recyclables asking for food, change or foil to smoke out of.
In 2024, according to the Information Technology Agency of Los Angeles, there were 4,902 complaints made to the city’s MyLA311 service about homeless encampments in Westlake between Jan. 1 and Aug. 31, amounting to 612.75 monthly calls.
“I’m homeless right now, but it’s not by choice. Being on the streets, and sober, is hard. What you guys are doing is great for the community. It feels good to be understood,” said Jawane Mason, 26.
Justin Michael Ellis-Brooks, a Santa Monica College student, is the founder and Executive Director of Books With Brooks, a grassroots organization and initiative that aims to bring social justice and mutual aid through literary advocacy. Ellis-Brooks held his first community aid event at MacArthur Park on March 8, 2025, designed to emulate the community care efforts of the Black Panther Party (BPP).
The flyer announcing the event displayed an image of a sack reading “People’s Free Food Program.” The People’s Free Food program was an initiative by the Black Panther Party that provided free breakfast to children before school. This BPP social program pressured the federal government to establish the School Breakfast Program in 1975.
The Black Panther Party was a political organization established in 1966 after the assassination of el-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, formerly known as Malcolm X. The Black Panther Party stood for Black empowerment, political, and governmental reforms outlined in the party’s platform, the Ten-Point Program. Aside from political aspirations, the Black Panther Party established a community survival program consisting of 65 different social programs. Directed at uplifting marginalized communities, these programs provided free breakfast for children, legal aid, medical resources, and educational classes, amongst other services.
Under a blue canopy on the north half of the park, Ellis-Brooks partnered with a Books with Brooks sponsor, the Institute for Public Strategies, to distribute 128 slices of Costco pizzas, 125 hotdogs, bags of chips, 100 drawstring bags with hygiene kits, and 100 community information kits with fentanyl testing strips and Narcan, with a budget of just over $1,200.
Although the initiative was targeted at the homeless population in the area, everyone at the park was welcome to grab the resources they needed. Children, homeless people, street vendors, and daytime park gamblers all lined up next to the canopy and patiently waited in line.
“I think if you love the people, then eventually you’re going to be moved to provide action, provide support. I have the resources to support the people, so I’m going to begin doing that,” said Ellis-Brooks.
One hundred hygiene kits were distributed with items like shampoo, conditioner, lotion, socks, and more. “We are providing resources and information about extreme heat awareness, and how to prevent heat stroke. We’re providing fentanyl test strips and Narcan, as well as coloring books that display a tribal connection to the L.A. landscape through the Tongva and Chumash. It highlights the need to take care of our land and preserve it. All different pieces of information to inform the community and protect themselves,” said Ailsa Ortiz, Community Outreach Supervisor for the Institute for Public Strategies, a public health nonprofit that works alongside communities to advance health equity.
“Hygiene kits help, they help a lot. Narcan helps a lot, you see a lot of people overdosing; and, people walk over them. People not helping,” said Frank Sales-Aranda, a 26-year-old homeless individual.
According to a funding recommendation filed by Dr. Clemens Hong, Director of Community Programs at the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services, “Following Skid Row, MacArthur Park has the second highest number of overdose deaths among people experiencing homelessness in LA County.”
The recommendation continues, “According to the Department of Public Health’s Center for Health Impact Evaluation, the 90057 zip code encompassing MacArthur Park experienced 80 unintentional overdose deaths among people experiencing homelessness for years 2021 and 2022 combined, which is more than any other zip code in the County.”
As a means to mitigate the homeless and drug crisis, Dr. Hong requested funding “to establish a MacArthur Park Overdose Response Team based on the Skid Row Overdose Response Team model.”
If passed, the $450,000 funding recommendation would establish an Overdose Response Team that would search for potential overdoses, provide Narcan and oxygen to those in need, monitor individuals for possible second overdoses, and if necessary and agreed to, send patients to a hospital or the David L. Murphy Sobering Center. “This project can not be implemented with partial funding,” Dr. Hong wrote in the funding recommendation.
According to a 2024 report from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, “the estimate for unsheltered homeless in the County of Los Angeles decreased approximately 5.1 percent to 52,365 compared with last year, while the shelter count increased by 12.7 percent to 22,947. The City of Los Angeles saw its unsheltered homelessness estimate decline to 29,275 or 10.4 percent, while the City’s shelter count increased by 15,977.”
Throughout L.A., Mayor Karen Bass has implemented different initiatives to ease the homeless crisis. In 2022, on her first day in office, Bass issued a Declaration of State of Emergency on homelessness. Since then, Bass has established the Inside Safe program, which provides hotel rooms, shelter and resources for homeless individuals.
Bass also signed Executive Directive One (ED1), an order to expedite the development of affordable housing, and as of January 2025, a new initiative has been announced in partnership with the City housing authorities and property associations to help homeless veterans in L.A.
However, in the summer of 2023, modifications were made to ED1, henceforth excluding neighborhoods with single-family zoning designs. According to a study by the University of California, Berkeley, this modification inhibited ED1 benefits on 78% of residential land in Greater L.A.
Although the city has implemented efforts to take homeless individuals off the streets, some locals are still displeased with the government's response.
“The community has to do something. ‘They’re killing themselves,’ that’s what the government says. We have doctors and lawyers and geniuses dying on the street. They need to clean the city. This only happens in our cities, the poor parts. Look at Black and brown communities, then look at Brentwood, Bel-Air, Beverly Hills; it’s another world,” said Mauricio Ayala, a Los Angeles local.
“A lot of people who live at the park need personal items and space. The police take away from those selling things trying to make something,” said Silvia Mejia-Manzanares, another Los Angeles resident.
The community care event was advertised on social media and came to fruition through donations, sponsors and collective effort. “It was an assortment of different avenues,” said Ellis-Brooks.
“One thing that makes a community successful is being able to be self-sufficient. Being self-sufficient and community are two things that can’t exist without the other, meaning in order to be self-sufficient you need community. You need to show up for one another, and you can’t expect a return on that. You have to give more than you receive sometimes,” said Ortiz.
“Books With Brooks and the Free Book Initiative are extensions of this lifelong journey—born from personal experiences of instability, systemic neglect, and the transformative power of knowledge. My commitment to literacy advocacy is rooted in the belief that access to books, education, and critical discourse are essential to breaking cycles of poverty and oppression,” said Ellis-Brooks.
He continued, “Through this initiative, I seek not only to distribute books but to cultivate a culture of engaged learning, resistance, and empowerment within marginalized communities. My activism and community work are informed by both my past and my vision for the future—a future in which education is a tool of liberation, mutual aid is the foundation of community resilience, and justice is not a privilege but a right accessible to all.”
Later, Ellis-Brooks said, “As a seven-year veteran of the armed forces, I gained firsthand experience in understanding the power of structure, discipline, and collective action. However, my time in service also exposed me to the deep inequalities that exist within American institutions, reinforcing my desire to challenge systemic oppression through education, activism, and mutual aid.”
“My transition from military life to academia and community organizing has been marked by a commitment to service beyond the confines of the state—one rooted in empowering communities to build sustainable, self-sufficient models of support,” he said.
In the later afternoon, once resources were depleted and fewer people were arriving at the canopy, it was decided that the organizers and volunteers would roam the park and distribute the rest of the resources to the community directly. As they walked around pulling a red cart holding supplies, volunteers were surrounded by those in need. The resources were distributed and some people even took more than they individually needed.
Those who took more than they needed ran back to their circles of other homeless individuals and they distributed the extra supplies amongst themselves. Some split chips, others divided hotdogs into halves and leftover water was used for quick hygiene.
“People don’t have food. It’s great what they’re doing. They’re helping a lot of people,” said Valentina Gutierrez, a local street vendor.
In 1966, the Black Panther Party was organized by two college students, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, in Oakland, California. By 1968, the Black Panther Party had party chapters across the nation in marginalized areas.
The rapid expansion of the Black Panther Party prompted J. Edgar Hoover, the former Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, to say that “the Black Panther Party, without question, represents the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.”
The BPP was then strategically dismantled by the FBI through a program called COINTELPRO, a covert counterintelligence program that used illegal means to disrupt Black power movements.
As for the reason the BPP was targeted for dismantling, according to NPR, historian Donna Murch finds that “the answer lies in the Panthers’ political agenda: not their brash, gun-toting public image, but in their capacity to organize across racial and class lines. It was a strategy that challenged the very foundations of American society. And it was working.”
A collective effort to inform, feed, protect, and rebuild disparaged communities out of poverty was a goal of the Black Panther Party; Ellis-Brooks shares the same goal. The next community care event is expected to be held in either April or May. Until then, Ellis-Brooks will be providing drive-by food and assistance from his car on weekends, while he looks to grow his organization and initiative through community support and self-funding.