Episode 04: HOME AND HOMELESSNESS |BUILDING SMARTER
What might resolve the challenges of sheltering the homeless? KISHANI DE SILVA envisions a pilot scheme to test a smarter, faster, cheaper methodology. Bridging government, design, technology, and community resistance, she speaks, with hope, to the urgent need for alignment, partnership and the intangible meaning of community and belonging.
Kishani De Silva is a recent FUSE Executive Advisor working with the executive office of the Los Angeles County Development Authority (LACDA). She has worked in the architecture and design industries for over twenty years in the project and program management arenas, both in the U.S. and the U.K. Prior to her appointment with the LACDA, she worked as a management consultant, which followed her time at Foster + Partners in London. Her work for the LACDA has focused on finding solutions to both the challenges of homelessness and the shortfall in affordable housing as well as special projects related to the COVID19 pandemic. As part of Woodbury University’s adjunct faculty, she has taught a graduate level practice class focusing on a management, leadership and entrepreneurship segment, and her work relating to housing innovation, sustainability and the business of design have been published in Next City (2019), Metropolis (2016), and Design Intelligence (2012). A former president and Board member, she leads a “50:50 x 2020” gender equity initiative for the Association for Women in Architecture + Design, and is also a Board member of Ten Thousand Villages Pasadena, a local retail non-profit serving marginalized artisans around the world. She has a MSc in Major Program Management from the University of Oxford, England, and a Bachelors of Architecture from Woodbury University. She has just been appointed as the interim chair of of the new Sustainable Practices and Construction Management programs at Woodbury University.
To find out more about KISHANI DE SILVA:
https://www.awaplusd.org/5050-iniative
TRANSCRIPT EXCERPT
“Definitely home is not shelter and vice versa. I think a home is community, basically. And even if you are a single person, I think one has to have those networks of community, whether it's your friends, your work colleagues, faith-based organizations, other advocacy groups. You have to build that safety net for when you have a life incident happen, whether it's a health issue or a job loss or, something, right? You have to have communities that have help you through that tough spot. And, if you don't, that's when your resiliency drops, and that's when you have the potential to fall into homelessness. So, what is a home for me? It's about people more than anything else. And, you can say it's about artifact. It's about things that you personalize and you put in your little space to create home. But, if you're really thinking about an intangible, then, it's that feeling of belonging to somebody, to some thing, to some place. And, I find having done all the research, that a lot of people don't have that belonging. For example I heard a story that this man used to be downtown. And they somehow got him housed. But being LA, and LA is so vast, his housing was somewhere really far away. He wouldn't stay there because his buddies were in downtown Los Angeles. So, he gave it up. And that shows how much that belonging means to somebody. The problem is so multifaceted, and so very complex and layered, at so many levels. These are some of those intangible where that sense of belonging to someone, you know…I think is really important. “ FOR FULL TRANSCRIPT READ HERE