‘Our training is our lived experience’: One woman’s journey from homelessness to advocacy

In a city that knows homelessness all too well, 42-year-old Amanda Jenkins is an authority on the subject.

RICHMOND – With clipboard in hand and neon green safety vest on, Amanda Jenkins calls out to a gray-bearded man sweeping the road at the Castro Street homeless encampment under Richmond Parkway.

“Will you fill out this survey?” she asks. “It’s for our meeting in Sacramento next month.”

Surrounded by trailers and old cars covered with blue tarps and billboard posters (“They’re great at keeping the rain out – you’d only know if you’ve lived outside!”), she makes her way to the next person she finds at the quiet encampment.

He is busy loading big black bags of trash onto a truck when she greets him with a fond punch in the shoulder and rattles off the questions on the survey.

“How long were you homeless?” “Where do you live?” “Do you think every citizen should get universal basic income?”

He answers. She jots. Well-versed with the uncertainty of life on the streets, Jenkins is a volunteer leader for the nonprofit Faith in Action East Bay and was collecting responses from current or formerly unhoused individuals ahead of an April meeting with California legislators about housing rights.

She does not ask Castro Street residents their names. Those she already knows. Between 2020-21, Jenkins was herself a resident of the encampment, spending nights in her gray Nissan Maxima with bright red tape for tail lights. The Castro residents are not her clients, she says. They’re her people.

In a city that knows homelessness all too well, 42-year-old Jenkins is an authority on the subject. She serves on Richmond’s Castro Street Advisory Council, which meets once a month to discuss the encampment’s sunset plan. In March, she was invited to a conference organized by the National Alliance to End Homelessness in Oakland. Not long ago, she set up her own nonprofit called Operation Ground Zero– a “stepping stone to better things” for homeless people, Jenkins says. For all this work, her qualifications are six years of lived experience on the streets – in trailers, tents and cars; behind Triangle Court, on Castro Street, and at Rydin Road, the vehicle and trailer encampment Richmond cleared last fall. She hopes officials will rely on her firsthand experience and expertise as they attempt to tackle one of the Bay Area’s most persistent problems.

Her ultimate goal, Jenkins says, is to run a transitional housing set-up for the homeless community – and, one day, to be elected mayor of Richmond. “I want to be remembered as someone who helped my people,” she says.

With temporary city and county support, Jenkins lives in an apartment now, a two-bedroom central Richmond place she shares with her 15-year-old son Clyde and dogs, Bobo and Legacy. It is the first time she has lived indoors, with a private bathroom and kitchen, since 2016.

Back then, she was in a Section 8 apartment in Richmond she shared with an abusive partner, “just hustling to survive,” she says. The Section 8 program enables the payment of rental assistance to private landlords on behalf of low-income people.

She left that apartment, she says, when the landlord paid her to break the lease early because he wanted to redo the complex.

She flitted from a friend’s place to an abandoned house, and then to several tents she made, with whatever scraps of material she could find, and pitched in different parts of north Richmond.

“Being in that tent showed me I could do anything in the world,” she says. “I could move the whole thing in 20 minutes!” She chuckles, and then goes quiet.

“But nobody should have to live like that. In the rain, I see a person in a tent and I start crying. It’s horrible. It’s nothing I would wish on my worst enemy, especially for a woman. That’s why I have dogs, you know.”

Still, Jenkins found joy within the unhoused community, she says; she came to love a man called BoomBoom, who moved into her tent. He was too heavy to walk and suffered a great deal of pain, she says. Although he had been promised housing, it never came through.

“I ended up taking care of him for about a year in the tent,” Jenkins says.  “And he died on me. Before he died, he said, ‘Amanda, you take your White skin and your big mouth and get everyone inside. They’ll never see you coming to defend us Black people because you’re White.’ And I said –” she is fighting back tears — “OK.”

In 2020, spurred by repeated requests from the police to move her home (a trailer at that time) and motivated by BoomBoom’s words, Jenkins moved to an encampment located at the tail-end of North Castro Street known as Camperland.

A year later, Jenkins says, she left Camperland when a misunderstanding resulted in a man “socking” her. So she packed her life into her beat-up Maxima and moved six miles away to Rydin Road, where another encampment emerged during the pandemic.

Rydin Road was a smaller community – 28 residents as compared to Castro’s 74 – and they bonded like one big family, or at least that’s how she remembers it now. They cooked meals together on the back of a car, they borrowed from and loaned each other essentials, they depended on each other.

“It’s just like being neighbors, but a little closer, because we went through things like not having toilets together,” Jenkins says.

But multiple incidents of arson, issues of safety and blight and a return to post-COVID normalcy put the Rydin Road and Castro Street encampments on the Richmond City Council’s radar.

Last year, the council allocated $250,000 to move Rydin Road residents to shelters, motels or other housing alternatives, gave residents’ two months of notice and cleared the encampment.

“It was really planned for the city,” says Jenkins. “They knew exactly what they were doing and were working in unison. But we were scrambling. It was complete chaos for us.”

Jenkins stayed till the very end, she says; she watched it all happen.

She ultimately got a Section 8 voucher through the county and moved into the place she now calls home.

The first-floor apartment costs her $200 per month, supplied by Richmond’s long-term rental assistance program Housing First, which prioritizes former Rydin residents. But, Jenkins says, the transfer of money has been slow, creating a new source of stress for her. She fears being evicted.

The apartment is warm and cozy and filled with mismatched pieces of furniture Jenkins says she found on the streets: a light gray recliner, two black high chairs, a long white sofa. Thanks to Bobo and Legacy, they’re all covered in dog hair.

The living room walls are covered with other quotes she’s put up – “Be Loving.” “Be Humble.” “Be Patient.” “Bloom from Within.”

Tucked away behind a white wooden door is a tiny closet Jenkins has converted into an office. The two top shelves are filled with an impressive Hello Kitty collection; all pink. On the bottom shelf are her notes and papers. You’re looking at the Operation Ground Zero headquarters.

Operation Ground Zero started as a volunteer effort to ensure the Rydin Road and Castro Street encampments were clean, safe and serviced. The group took on duties of security, trash collection and cleaning in their living space.

Now, Operation Ground Zero is a registered nonprofit in California with a 501(c)(3) tax exemption and bigger goals.

“We want people to lean on us when they need it the most,” she says. Inspired by a Drake song, the organization’s slogan is “Started from the bottom, now we’re here.”

She’s using her smartphone and the internet to learn how to apply for grants. She is exploring opportunities to collaborate with other nonprofits and the city of Richmond. She’s also taking online certificate courses in leadership and social work and attending all city council meetings to remain in the loop.

“Let us help,” she says. “Taking care of homeless people is rocket science for the city. But we already know this stuff… Our training is our lived experience. While the city people slept in their beds after work, we were still at Rydin Road every single night.”

The Castro Street clear-out is next on Richmond’s agenda. The encampment is set to shut in June.

It’s a sunny afternoon and Jenkins is busy filling out surveys at Castro Street.

She needs to hurry – she has a doctor’s appointment in 30 minutes. But before she can get going, someone calls out to her. “Amanda, how do we get paid for our RVs if we give them up?”

A woman in a yellow “Security”  t-shirt asks, “Are you here to help with housing? I live in my car.”

Now, Jenkins is really running late. Shouldn’t she get going? She smiles. “I won’t stop till everyone has a house,” she says. “I can’t.”