The Northeast Neighborhood Outreach organization (NENO) is a 501(c) non-profit volunteer-run organization which focuses on serving the unhoused in the Eagle Rock and Highland Park communities.
President Natalie Warner said NENO organization first began as a community group largely funded through local neighborhood councils. They later became a chapter of the Silver Lake, Echo Park, Los Feliz, Atwater Village and Hollywood Neighborhood Homeless Coalition (SELAH) for the next two years until the chapter program was discontinued. According to Warner, with SELAH’s support, NENO was able to start as their own 501(c) nonprofit organization in August 2022.
“The mission of NENO is to meet our neighbors, our unhoused neighbors,” Warner said. “Sometimes, they want help accessing medical services or housing services or vet services, and our mission is to connect people with what they’re looking for, what they need.”
Secretary Jack Bentele said he was an outreach volunteer at SELAH for four years in NENO’s chapter. According to Bentele, a large part of his job is connecting homeless people to the right service providers.
“We go out on a weekly basis to provide resources, mostly food and other living supplies,” Bentele said. “Also try to touch base with them and act as much as we can as kind of a middle ground or a point for other information to funnel to them either from the city or service providers.”
According to Bentele, some of the work NENO does is help people find interim housing, which are temporary homes that is operated by a service provider with the intent to help individuals in the process of searching for permanent accommodations.
Warner said that in order to get out of interim housing, people must be document ready. According to Warner, the document ready process involved providing ID vouchers, filling out paperwork that pertains to cash aid, acquiring food stamps or even helping people call the Department of Public Social Services (DPSS).
“We are not technically the ones that help people get ‘document ready,’ but we have in the past, supported people in getting some of their documents ready,” Warner said. “We always have to be clear with people. We are not case managers, we’re not social workers, we’re not accountants.”
Queenie Ngo (senior) said she has been on NENO’s board for a year, where she serves as social media manager and is an outreach volunteer. According to Ngo, followers on the NENO Instagram have been very responsive to showing support, such as providing cold water bottles and tarps to the unhoused people of NELA.
“During the rainy season, we asked if anyone had tarps and a lot of people came through for us and that was really nice. When it’s really cold or when it’s really hot, we ask for frozen water bottles,” Ngo said. “We’ll ask for blankets, we’ll do a blanket drive, a clothing drive, a socks drive. And people have been really supportive of that.”
Bentele said city service providers are known to be understaffed, so NENO tries to fill in the gap to make sure more people have more resources and opportunities to gain permanent housing.
“The short term goal is the same as it’s always been, try and stay as consistent as a point of contact as possible for everybody in our area,” Bentele said. “Long term is just trying to start rebuilding a lot of these connections in the area so that everybody has the same information about what services are available, trying to untangle the web of services.”
Bentele says that NENO has worked with many local businesses, such as Rosie Bunny Bean Urban Pet Provisions, Rock Dog and Cat, Dave’s Chillin N Grillin and Highland Park Brewery.
“We’ve received a lot of food over the years from Dave’s Chillin N Grillin and they make Thanksgiving Meals every year for us and some other meals throughout the year,” Bentele said. “Also Highland Park Brewery has been a pretty invaluable partner. They have donated every week. They donate all of our groceries.”
According to Warner, their partnership with the Highland Park Brewery formed when one of the owners and his wife served as outreach volunteers.
“They actually reached out to us,” Warner said. “The owner Bob and his wife Tiffany actually joined us on outreach and were like, ‘We would love to support you in any way.’”
According to Ngo, NENO is still a grassroots organization, making volunteering feel similar to hanging out with friends. Ngo said outreach volunteers mainly help with bagging issues, like the amount of goods needed and the amount of people they meet each week.
“The bags and the supplies are only half of it,” Ngo said. “The other half is making sure that these underserved people, these people who have been abandoned by the lack of social services and infrastructure, know that there are people still out there that care for them, that they don’t feel so alone in this horribly unfair system.”
Bentele said that the need for volunteers is not limited to just outreach. Volunteers can work in logistics, advocacy and social media. He said that NENO works really hard to ensure efficient use of donations and services.
“What we really need to do to remain sustainable is a way to kind of procure and organize those resources,” Bentele said. “We’d love to get to a point where we can have a reliable, sustainable rotation of people going.”
NENO volunteer Cooper Kenword said he has been doing outreach for four years and has found it rewarding.
“I wanted to be more community oriented, take part and get to know our neighbors more,” Kenword said. “It’s been nice and grounding every weekend to just kind of go out and do something simple that also feels like you’re making an impact.”
Treasurer Chris Bertolet has been with NENO since August 2020 and said the best part about volunteering is the fulfillment it brings.
“The best part is that I know many more neighbors than I knew before I started doing this and I continue to meet more of them, and the more neighbors I meet, the more community I engage with, the happier I am,” Bertolet said.
With hopes to get more volunteers and expand NENO’s services to Glassell Park, Ngo said she had one more final request to anyone interested in doing this type of volunteer work.
“Join Outreach, please,” Ngo said. “I’ll get on my knees and beg, I am not above it.”
Contact Karen Palacios Echeverria at palacioseche@oxy.edu
