On Feb. 23, Amazon Head of Community Engagement (West) David Ambroz spoke to the Rotary Club of Santa Monica about his new book A Place Called Home: A Memoir, during a meeting at the Hilton Santa Monica. Ambroz, who previously served the Los Angeles area as the president of the city’s Planning Commission, became involved in poverty, housing and child welfare advocacy due to his own homelessness experience as a child.
Growing up homeless in New York City, Ambroz’s family lived underneath Grand Central Terminal, where he endured years of neglect and malnourishment before being placed in the foster care system. There, he experienced more torment, being abused physically, emotionally and sexually. He was also sentenced to a young adult prison due to his homosexuality, which was referred to as gender dysphoria during his upbringing.
This situation fueled his emotional stance toward the children and foster youth of today. During the talk to the Rotary Club, he noted that modern foster youth are “more likely to die than go to community college” and that foster care is the “number one source” of sex trafficking recruiting in Los Angeles. He also pointed to the fact that minority children are disproportionately impacted by the system, and that foster youth are more likely to encounter post-traumatic stress disorder than military veterans.
To combat these trends, Ambroz started FosterMore, an organization dedicated to involving the public in improving outcomes for youth and being a resource for other “exceptional organizations in this field.” FosterMore partners with organizations to recruit foster parents through media campaigns, and created the Foster Care Friendly Workplace Certification initiative to “create supportive environments for workers wishing to become foster parents.”
In addition to uplifting foster parents, Ambroz wishes to make lives easier for social workers, recounting how his sister, a social worker for Los Angeles County, couldn’t afford to buy a home within a three-mile radius of her workplace despite being in the field for decades. He also believes that social workers’ time should be used more wisely, as his sister answers “I do paperwork” to people asking what her workload is like.
“Here is this highly qualified person who wants to do this work, and we have her filling out forms on multiple databases,” Ambroz said.
Ambroz pointed out the differences in how society spotlights professions, saying that “we know the statistics” for professional athletes but don’t know nearly as much about frontline workers.
Credit: Thomas Leffler
“Our values are messed up,” he added. “We need to honor and [recognize] the contributions of … social workers.”
A change in values was also brought up within the realm of homelessness and housing, which Ambroz prioritized during his time on the Planning Commission. As president, he helped institute several Los Angeles policies such as the linkage fee for affordable housing, the Permanent Supportive Housing Ordinance, and the Hotel/Motel Conversion Ordinance that established regulations to facilitate the use of existing hotels and motels for supportive or transitional housing.
He bemoaned some of his constituents’ distaste for the city’s homeless during his talk, and offered up several additional ideas that the area could implement for increased housing availability.
“What if we built a dorm on the six acres of flat parking above the [Metro] Red Line station at Santa Monica/Vermont?” he asked. “What if we house veterans in apartments, not shelters?”
He also introduced an idea of mentorship on college campuses, where more elderly residents in need of housing could be housed in college dormitories to pass along their knowledge to new generations.
For more information on “A Place Called Home,” visit davidambroz.com