Standing steps from the J Street entryway to downtown Sacramento, nonprofit leader Kathy Chao Rothberg described her vision for a campus at the former Vagabond Inn that will house and educate homeless residents and put them on the path to self-sufficiency.

As CEO of Lao Family Community Development, she has developed two similar campuses under the nonprofit’s CARE brand — Community Accessing Resources and Education — offering dormitory-style housing in Oakland and in Contra Costa County.

About six years ago, Lao Family also quietly began working with homeless Sacramentans at the nonprofit’s campus in the Arden area, Chao Rothberg said, and the nonprofit’s team has helped more than 3,000 people advance from having no job and no place to live into employment and permanent housing.

“We did it all for each person within six months to 12 months,” Chao Rothberg said.

The downtown Sacramento campus began serving clients this year, Chao Rothberg said, but because she hasn’t negotiated a government or private sponsor for the housing, Lao Family has only been able to offer rooms to clients who can pay a discounted rate or who have a special voucher for families in crisis.

Chao Rothberg, who returned to living in the Sacramento region for the first time since 1993, said she was surprised to see the number of homeless residents on downtown streets. In addition to running re-entry programs in Contra Costa County and Oakland, she said, Lao Family has been able to back up other shelters and nonprofits in Sacramento and the Bay Area with temporary to permanent lodging.

As she worked to redevelop the two Bay Area campuses, she said, she heard the word “no” plenty of times. Property owners weren’t certain she could raise the money to make a purchase, she said, and then government officials questioned whether a nonprofit serving refugees was the right organization to assist homeless people in rebuilding their lives.

Rather than treating “no” as the end of a conversation, Chao Rothberg said, she chose to approach it as an opportunity to negotiate. In Oakland, she ultimately secured $25.3 million in private funding to buy a former Motel Six with 285 rooms.

The San Francisco Business Times named the 3.2-acre project a “Real Estate Deal of the Year” in 2022, one of 30 projects honored for their boldness and creativity.

While coordinating the acquisition and redevelopment of that property, she also worked on persuading officials within the city of Oakland and the Alameda County Probation Department to give her team a chance to prove they could help stabilize residents who had few resources.

“I’m not the typical re-entry program, so they think I don’t know how to do it,” Chao Rothberg said. “I had to fight for a pilot.”

Lao Family has spent about 45 years developing processes and skills to help refugees resettle in the United States, Chao Rothberg said, and she was certain her staff also could steer disenfranchised Californians toward a successful re-entry into mainstream life.

“We’ve taken everything we’ve learned from serving people who have to start over in a new country and they don’t even speak the language, they don’t even know the banking system, they don’t even know the political system, the transportation system, and we take everything we’ve learned and we wrap it around our customers as if they were family,” Chao Rothberg said.

Oakland agreed to give Lao Family a chance, allowing it to assist 50 homeless residents with making a fresh start, Chao Rothberg said, and Alameda County Probation arranged a pilot as well, sending them 136 clients who were trying to find both housing and work after a stint in jail.

Clients praise emotional, financial support from Lao Family

Chao Rothberg rattled off a detailed accounting of her staff’s success: 47 of the 50 homeless Oakland residents gained permanent housing, even 10 people who are permanently disabled. And, 37 secured jobs.

In Alameda County, 125 of 136 justice-involved individuals obtained permanent housing, including 10 on disability, and 115 found work.

Lao Family’s work stood out enough that, when federally funded researchers from Georgia Institute of Technology came to study Alameda County Probation Department’s innovative re-entry initiatives, the Oakland CARE Campus was one of the sites where probation leaders sent the academics to conduct interviews, Chao Rothberg said.

Avon Conaway, one of the clients, said that, before he ever got to Lao Family’s Oakland campus, he had made up his mind to work with the staff to find work and housing. His Lao Family housing navigator, Gladys McDowell, made it easy to maintain that commitment, he said.

She was so solicitous, helpful and encouraging, Conaway said, and when he encountered a delay or setback in his plans, he would go to her, and she would provide the positive self-talk he needed to keep working at putting his life on a new course.

“I told her I was gonna make her proud,” Conaway said. “They had a thing where, once I did start working, if I put $1,000 in my savings through them, then when it came time for me to leave, they would match it.”

At 61, Conaway said he had spent most of his adult life in prison or jail. The last time he completed a sentence, he said, he had been homeless for three months before he found shelter. Because he got a stable roof over his head so soon after leaving Santa Rita Jail, he said, he was able to check in with a friend who had found a job with a San Francisco outfit called Urban Alchemy.

That nonprofit company hires many people who have served lengthy sentences to assist homeless residents. Urban Alchemy was Conaway’s shot at making enough money to sustain himself, he said, and he scored a job as an ambassador. He has been certified in giving first aid, including how to treat heart attacks with CPR and the use of defibrillators.

“We help straighten out the streets where the homeless live and keep the area clean,” Conaway said.

At Lao Family’s Oakland campus, Conaway had a room that included a bed, microwave, refrigerator, television and his own adjoining bathroom. The staff had catered food stocked in a common room in the former motel’s lobby.

“The only requirements that they ask of (you) is that each day, you do something to make it better for yourself, whether you’re going job hunting or you’re going to … school,” Conaway said. “They give you the freedom to make your move, to make it better for yourself. It’s more empowering.”

Parolees get fresh start with jobs, housing

After finding work, Conaway began scouring Zillow for an apartment and found one he liked. He went for a tour, and because of his Christian faith and his time sharing openly with McDowell, he decided to divulge his past to the rental agent and explain that he was looking for a place to live as he found his footing.

The agent had shown him a studio and a one-bedroom, Conaway said, and he would have been delighted to get either. He cried tears of joy, he said, when the agent called later to tell him that he had been approved for a one-bedroom with a view of Lake Merritt.

Lao Family had smoothed the way, Conaway said, providing a reference and a security deposit. When he got the place, he said, the nonprofit also provided furniture and kitchen items for his apartment.

He spent just nine to 10 weeks in 2023 at Lao Family’s Oakland campus, he said, and he’s been in his apartment for about a year now. He said he couldn’t pass up the chance to publicly praise “Miss Gladys” and the nonprofit that uplifted him.

When Chao Rothberg was a girl of 9 years old, her father Chaosarn S. Chao founded Lao Family as an all-volunteer organization with an HQ in their family home. Now, the same help that her dad offered foreign refugees, Chao Rothberg said, she has begun offering to the teeming masses of homeless and formerly incarcerated Californians seeking some kind of relief.

Chao Rothberg’s family came to the U.S. after fleeing their home in Laos with few possessions because they feared political persecution for assisting the U.S. in the Vietnam War. Chao Rothberg, a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, said she has worked in urban planning and affordable housing in the Bay Area. In 2014, she said, she became the first Iu Mien mayor in the United States and the first Asian mayor in the city of San Pablo’s history.

“I went back to the mountain, to the village that I was born in. I didn’t go back for 47 years after coming to America, and after I went back, I realized, ‘Wow, how far have I come, how far have my family and my people come,” Chao Rothberg said.

The work with the Alameda County probation department prevents homelessness, Chao Rothberg said, and 125 graduates from that program have seen growth because of Lao Family’s structured, goal-oriented program. Those who found work are now earning annual income between $39,000 and $150,000, she said, and most of them work two jobs in order to pay for housing in the private marketplace that costs between $750 and $2,000 a month.

At Lao Family’s CARE Campus Oakland, participants have on-site access to case managers, job counselors, a health clinic, cognitive behavioral therapy, a job center, banking, coaching and 24-hour staff who live on the campus.

“Each customer has five staff surrounding them to advance them, and that’s the same way it will be over here,” said Chao Rothberg, referring to the new CARE Campus Sacramento that Lao Family has established at the erstwhile 109-room motel at the corner of J and 3rd streets.

Lao Family clients say they made a choice to engage

All the tools that clients need to succeed are right there in one place, said Oakland campus “graduates” Samuel Sherman and Shantesha Fluker.

Sherman, who used to live in Elk Grove and Sacramento’s Greenhaven neighborhood, said that he had worked as a security guard before serving a short stint in an Alameda County jail, and Lao Family helped him find new employment in the same field. In addition to working two jobs, Sherman said, he also restarted his business making hoodies and other merchandise under his giftedsupplyco label, using an Instagram account to show off his line.

Since June, Sherman said, he has been living in his own apartment. Lao Family paid the security deposit and helped him get renter’s insurance. The 43-year-old father of two lived at the Oakland campus for about 15 months, and Lao Family helped him get a bank account started and rebuild his credit. He never had to worry about going hungry, he said, because there was always free food on campus.

Fluker, a mother of five who lived in a mobile home in south Sacramento for five years, found shelter at CARE Campus Oakland for about 13 months. She said clients have to make a choice about the path they want to take when they come to the campus.

“You can either maximize your time there by being involved in pro-social activities: going to school, signing up for their employment services division that they have at the Lao Family, or … you could lay in your room and you could do nothing. You can make no plan, and you can be gone In a year, basically in the same type of situation you came there in, which could be homeless, still on a substance, or whatever the case may be.”

In her case, she said, her counselor kept reminding her to stay in the present moment and to realize that, sometimes, you hit a standstill and you have to be patient and wait for forward progress to begin again.

Through a class at Lao Family, she discovered a new career possibility: peer support specialist. After getting certification, she discovered, she could help patients who had substance abuse and mental health disorders navigate their journey to recovery. She took the necessary classes and started doing the work.

Lao Family then helped Fluker with the security deposit to get her own apartment in March of this year. She also started a bank account while at Lao Family and earned the $1,000 match.

Chao Rothberg said her dream is to see the downtown CARE Campus Sacramento focus on training people to work in entry-level health care jobs because Sacramento has so many companies operating in that field.

Earlier this year, she said, Lao Family got a taste of what that would be like, partnering with TSQ Nursing Academy to run a training program for certified nursing assistants at the J Street campus. Funding from the city of Sacramento allowed them to graduate one class of about a dozen youth, nine of whom have passed their state exam and seven of whom are working in the field.