Alastair Boone often gets calls for help from people experiencing homelessness. Some may be leaving abusive relationships or need urgent medical care. Others tell frightening stories of recent encampment sweeps or are despondent after an eviction. Sometimes, the voice on the other end of the line simply says they’re hungry.
More often than not, the underlying question is straightforward—“How can I get a place?” But the answer is maddeningly complex, and Boone is not a social worker.
She fields these calls from her desk at Street Spirit, the East Bay street newspaper sold by housing insecure community members for a suggested donation of $2 or more. Street Spirit’s South Berkeley office also includes a drop-in center, which offers clothing, food, and supplies to unhoused residents regardless of their inclusion in the vendor program.
After nearly 200 people sought help from Street Spirit over the course of a year, Boone had an idea: What if we published a guide to help people navigate available resources?
She soon got to work developing a proposal, and in October, Street Spirit won a $10,000 grant from the Lab for Journalism Funding to develop a pocket-sized resource guide for Alameda County’s unhoused communities. The Street Spirit Resource Guide, which will be updated every six months, aims to provide comprehensive details and contact information for available shelter, food, health care, legal aid, and other services.
Boone is currently fundraising an additional $50,000 for one year of printing costs, and plans to distribute 10,000 copies to local shelters, libraries, hospitals, and local businesses each year. In the future, she hopes to expand the project’s scope to include resources in San Francisco and Contra Costa counties.
Street Spirit’s guide, which will debut later this year, will be distinct from government-funded information services such as 211: It won’t require an internet connection or phone to learn about available services, and will be developed with input from unhoused community members to ensure engagement with the guide is seamless and easily understandable.
“I think that it’s going to uncover a lot of the weak spots,” Boone said. “We’re trying to help people get support and, in doing that, we’re going to uncover where and how it’s difficult to get support.”
The Portland Playbook
The Street Spirit Resource Guide is modeled after the Rose City Resource Guide, which debuted in Portland, Oregon in 2007.
Allie Morgan, a staffer at Portland’s Street Roots, said the community has long voiced frustration with government red tape and service accessibility, pointing out that most providers require paperwork to be filed online. Morgan emphasized that these modern efficiencies fail to recognize that many unhoused people lack easy access to the internet.
For nearly two decades, the Rose City Resource Guide has helped to fill that knowledge gap. It’s now produced twice a year for three counties, and more than 500 partner organizations and social services agencies help distribute 200,000 copies annually.
Morgan said updates to the Rose City Resource Guide have evolved over the years through the development of best practices. For example, the cover of each new guide is published in a different color, visually alerting unhoused people that an updated version has hit the streets.
Morgan’s years of experience eventually led to a full-time position as Street Roots’ resource and systems navigator, a role that often informs when and where the resource guide is updated. She frequently finds herself passing on info received from one community member to another, such as when a shelter’s hours have changed.
“You have that community knowledge and running dialogue,” Morgan said.
To Offer Help, Follow Their Lead
According to 2024 PIT count data, 6,343 people live unsheltered in Alameda County on any given night, a nearly 800-person dip from two years prior. But for every unhoused person who is able to secure housing and services from the county’s pool of resources, many more find themselves lost in a labyrinth of agencies and service programs that often leave them confused and frustrated.
Amber Whitson, who has lived on the streets of Berkeley and Albany for nearly 30 years, says her situation worsened over time without easy access to resource information.
Between 2004 and 2006, while staying around People’s Park, Whitson accumulated seven warrants she refers to as “homeless tickets”—citations for sleeping or living in prohibited areas. Court instructions were often unclear or hard to obtain, Whitson said, and she struggled to understand when and where to appear and address her citations. Bench warrants for missed appearances began to pile up, and it took years for Whitson to resolve them.
Whitson, who now lives in an RV, refers to her current living situation as “bougie” and “snooty homeless,” but aims to use her learned experience to help others in need by contributing to Street Spirit’s development of the guide, specifically a section devoted to navigating Alameda County’s court system. She describes the guide as a much-needed lifeline for people experiencing homelessness, and imagines people finding the guide “crumpled up, blowing in the wind” and accessing shelter that evening.
“Compared to 90 percent of the service providers,” Whitson said, “Street Spirit is far more in touch with the unhoused community.”
Among the first to raise their hand in support for an Alameda County-specific resource guide was Freeway, a Street Spirit contributor and former resident of the Wood Street encampment in West Oakland.
Freeway was unhoused for eight years, knocking around Denver, Portland, and several California cities before being approved for subsidized housing in Oakland. Now working as a substance abuse navigator in Alameda County, they plan to contribute lists of available services they collect at work, as well as street-savvy tips such as areas with heavy police presence or shelters known to serve expired food.
“Who better to put this resource guide together than someone who has slept in an alcove in the middle of a snowstorm?” Freeway said.
Kim Vanderheiden, a community advocate and representative with Braided Bridge Homebridge Connect, agrees with that sentiment. She says that lived experience with homelessness is not always seen as expertise, but should be.
“Those who are housed learn a tremendous amount from those who are or have been unhoused,” Vanderheiden said. “Therefore, we follow their lead as to how best to offer help.”
Only As Good As Available Resources
Street Spirit was far from the first organization to notice that unhoused communities struggle with the often confusing and opaque process of obtaining resources.
According to the 2014–15 Homeless Population Needs Assessment, conducted by Alameda County’s Healthcare for the Homeless program, services often lack continuity with one another, and thousands of unhoused residents seeking medical care are discharged from hospitals directly back out to the streets.
A 2018 report from DC-based Urban Institute urged Alameda County to strengthen coordination between service providers, consolidate programs into a single agency, and incentivize city agencies to adopt shared policies and best practices.
Whitson also mentioned that issues with the county’s 211 system—a helpline designed to connect people with housing, healthcare, and disaster relief—is complicated, and that calls often do not materialize effectively.
She said friends have called 211 only to be referred to shelters no longer in operation, and while using the service to navigate prior court appearances, she received no help before being disconnected from the operator.
“They are the epitome of getting the runaround,” Whitson said.
Lucy Kasdin, deputy director of Health and Homeless Services for Alameda County, said that there aren’t enough resources to support the constant stream of people falling into homelessness. Simply put, 211 can’t refer people to services that don’t exist.
“Everbody loves to s— on 211,” Kasdin said. “In fairness, they are only as good as the available resources.”
David Modersbach, grant manager at Alameda County Health Care for the Homeless, supports the development of the Street Spirit Resource Guide, but considers it a stepping stone in addressing larger systemic issues that impact service availability. To truly support local unhoused communities, Modersbach said, there must be “serious institutional change in our systems of care.”
Until that day comes, advocates like Talya Husbands-Hankins are on the ground every day providing direct material assistance to people experiencing homelessness. Her work with Love and Justice in the Streets, an all-volunteer-run organization in Oakland, provides supplies such as socks, tents, and jackets to unhoused residents, and she looks forward to adding the Street Spirit Resource Guide to her list of offerings.
Husbands-Hankins hopes the guide will empower those experiencing homelessness to push back against what she sees as anti-homeless policies, such as encampment sweeps, which impact service providers’ ability to keep track of their clients.
She also hopes housed residents engage with the guide, both as an educational tool and to mobilize on their own time to distribute copies to their unhoused neighbors.
“I think that this guide is an invitation and an opportunity for all members of our community to get involved,” Husbands-Hankins said.
If you are interested in supporting the guide’s development, donate here.
Zoe Meyer is a student-journalist at Cal’s Graduate School of Journalism.