A Place to Call a Permanent Home

Susan Dempsey’s son Mark was in college when he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. The illness changed his life, causing him to drop out of school and drift away from his friends. Susan desperately looked for help, but it was the 1980s, and services for anyone with a mental illness were hard to find. So, Susan stepped into action and created a place for Mark and others with mental illness who were stigmatized and often left living on the streets. 

Step Up’s first location was a drop-in center that opened in 1984 in Santa Monica that provided individuals with mental health conditions a safe place to gather and created a sense of belonging, connection, and community.

“As a society, we’re really not very good at creating access to mental health care,” says Tod Lipka, the nonprofit’s president and CEO. “It’s often offered within the four walls of the mental health institution. You have to penetrate that institution to get help, and we’re talking about people who are homeless and the least able to manage getting that help.” 

Step Up provides permanent supportive housing to chronically homeless individuals who are suffering from serious mental illness or in need of mental health support. The organization challenges the deep-seated mindset on mental illness that focuses on housing last, only after mental health issues are addressed. That traditional approach isn’t effective, Lipka says. Step Up measures its success on its 97% retention rate, which is a measure of how many residents remain in the free studio supportive housing apartments for longer than a year.  

“We say housing shouldn’t be the culmination of recovery, it should be the foundation for recovery because recovery on the street is virtually impossible,” Lipka says.

The charity has scattered studio apartments and apartment buildings converted from blighted motels throughout Los Angeles, Hollywood, Santa Monica, Pasadena, and in Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, Monterey, and Sacramento counties as well as in the states of Georgia, Florida, and Tennessee. Since its inception, Step Up has provided permanent supportive housing and case management services to thousands of formerly chronically homeless individuals. Today, Step Up is providing life-changing housing, mental health, and case management services to over 1,800 individuals. And it’s already working to increase those numbers with plans to build 20 new sites that will nearly double its current housing capacity. The housing developments are run by trained mental health experts who work with the residents to provide mental health and addiction recovery, life skills, vocational training, and resume building skills.

“We want to empower individuals to cultivate lives of hope and dignity,” Lipka says.

The organization helps everyone from veterans with PTSD to youth with substance abuse issues and offers individuals a home for life. 

“The outcome we’re looking for is not that they ‘graduate and move on.’ It’s that they stay housed,” Lipka says.