COMMUNITY AMBASSADOR

Crushow is a long time Skid Row leader, musician, and award-winning muralist, who collaborates with residents and neighbors to design murals to beautify buildings. Crushow has been a member of Sidewalk since the early days, helping host and organize community art events, and is now continuing that work as apart of the new LA County Violence Interruption and Community Care Project.

COMMUNITY AMBASSADOR

Reilly is a long time skidrow resident living off an on for 20 years, most of that time living as an unhoused street based sex worker. She was employed and then housed through our program in 2020 and has gone on to create and invote her own program, Tree of Life, and is part of the new LA County Violence Interruption and Community Care Project.

OUTREACH WORKER

Noel’s work centers around serving participants with harm reduction supplies in MacArthur Park & the BAART Clinic in Boyle Heights, alongside syringe exchange services and wound care. Noel also serves as the COVID compliance officer providing public health education on COVID and safety supplies. Before coming into

CASE MANAGER

Kristina works to get participants shelter and permanent housing support, resource linking, document support, and harm reduction support and linkages. Once a member Skidrow, and now housed and in recovery, Kristina is familiar with hopelessness and loss of autonomy. She came into this work to lend the hand she’d been given by like-minded organizations with compassion and non-judgement.

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR & CO- FOUNDER

Soma Snakeoil is one of the founders of the Sidewalk Project, and provides programmatic and administrative oversight for the organization on top of her boots on the ground style of leadership that includes crisis response, outreach, and advocacy. Her dedication to the houseless community comes from lived experience as a long-term former person who uses drugs, being unhoused, and 20 years on the spectrum of sex work. Outside of the Sidewalk Project she is a writer, artist, and activist whose work is rooted in liberation for marginalized people. In addition to her duties as the ED she serves on the Sidewalk Board.

COO & CO-FOUNDER

Stacey Dee is one of the founders of the Sidewalk Project, and provides financial and administrative oversight for the organization. Stacey is also a founding member of punk rock band Bad Cop Bad Cop, playing 50+ shows a year nationally and worldwide. She speaks openly about difficult times in her life enduring poverty, drug use, trauma, and overcoming cancer and the power of a positive and hopeful attitude. In addition to her other roles within Sidewalk she serves on the Sidewalk Board.

DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS

Sonya Guerra provides programmatic, administrative, and hands-on work for case managers, street outreach, and crisis response, and is devoted to fighting for and implementing culturally sensitive services for monolingual Spanish speaking Latin Americans. Her passion for working with displaced people comes from being born and raised in the Central American Westlake community of Los Angeles to immigrant parents from Guatemala and El Salvador. In her down time, she can be found at a local ceramics studio.

DIRECTOR OF STREET OUTREACH & TRAUMA INFORMED SERVICES

She is a Certified Trauma Recovery Coach specializing in childhood and sexual trauma, with a specific concentration on gender-based violence. Her 20+ years unhoused, doing survival sex work, substance use, and enduring the cycle of incarceration provides her invaluable lived experiences. Much of her current work is focused on BIPOC Trans Sex Workers living with HIV.

MEDICAL DIRECTOR

Mahan Naeim is the medical director for the Sidewalk Project. He completed his bachelors in science and his medical doctorate at UC Irvine. He served on the Board of Directors for the Orange County Needle Exchange Program (OCNEP). He also founded the Harm Reduction Institute (HRI) in Orange County. The only two syringe access programs that have ever served Orange County, California. He is currently a resident physician in Emergency Medicine at Highland Hospital. Outside of harm reduction and medicine, he can be found in his living room DJing very loudly or playing video games.