Nitin Bajaj:

Hey everyone, welcome to The Industry Show. I’m your host Nitin Bajaj and joining me today is Pooja Bhalla. Pooja, welcome on the show.

 

Pooja Bhalla:

Great to be here. Thank you, Nitin.

 

Nitin Bajaj:

Pleasure is all ours. Let’s start with who is Pooja.

 

Pooja Bhalla:

I’m an optimist at heart, I would say. Someone who’s always trying to find the best in every situation, whether it’s personally, professionally, living in this world today, there’s so much that goes on. So I’m always looking for the opportunities that are available for everyone and anyone that we come across in our lives. And more on a personal level, a mother of two UCLA Bruins and a lucky wife to my husband, who’s a professor and a really busy CEO of a healthcare and homeless organization called Illumination Foundation.

 

Nitin Bajaj:

Thanks for that intro. Looking forward to learning more about Illumination. I know you guys are doing some really cool and amazing work here in the community. So with that, tell us a little more about what Illumination is, what’s the size and scale, but more importantly, what’s the impact that you and your team have been able to create in this community?

 

Pooja Bhalla:

Yeah. So Illumination Foundation provides housing and healthcare services for the unhoused population. And last year alone, we served 6,500 individuals, including families and single adults and seniors. And we work in Inland Empire, Los Angeles, and also in Orange County. And our mission is to disrupt the cycle of homelessness. And the way we do that is by providing services all the way from street to home. So let me break that down a little bit. I’m sure all of us in our daily interactions come across individuals that you see out on the streets that are unhoused and maybe living in a tent or living on the streets or living in the cars. So at Illumination Foundation, we help those individuals. And sadly, many of those folks actually are coming from generations and generations of homelessness. These are individuals whose families have been homeless for many years. So our goal is to bring them into services from the streets, into our shelters, into recuperative care, which is a place for homeless individuals that are ending up in the hospital with serious medical and mental health issues, but don’t have a place to go and they need to get medical care. So that’s recuperative care. So they come from streets, from shelters, they come into recuperative care. But what’s unique about Illumination Foundation is we get them into housing. Because a lot of times what we see is folks will come in, they stay with us for a little while, yet there’s no place for them to go. So they end up going back out on the streets. So our model is street to home. And last year alone, as I said, you know, we saw 6,500 individuals, many families came into homelessness. And sadly, we continue to see homelessness on the rise. So our model is comprehensive services from healthcare to shelter to housing.

 

Nitin Bajaj:

And just knowing a little bit of the entire gamut of services and the lives you touch in a positive way, it’s amazing. Because this is a problem and has been for many of our communities, especially in Southern California. And it doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon. So it’s extremely important the work you and the team at Illumination are doing to help these. And this may be a technically wrong term, but people with this chronic state of not having homes, and as I’ve come to learn, this is not by choice. There are many factors that go into bringing them to the place they are in. And so it’s, I would imagine, not easy to work with these individuals, despite all of our efforts, and the work that the team puts in. So if you can highlight a little bit, and what I’m trying to glean at is, this is not easy work. So why do this?

 

Pooja Bhalla:

Yeah, and before I do that, I’m so glad you touched on the word choices. Because I hear it constantly about the population that I work with. These are the choices that they made, right? They decided to be in this situation. And I’ve been doing this work for 25 years now, and I always come back to it was a choices given, not the choices made. What were the opportunities that were made available to these folks? And we have seen kids, we have seen young adults that have been touched by our organization that had never had an adult in their life to support them. So why I do this, and why our team do this is, it’s such a rewarding experience to be in this work. Like I get so much back from doing this in my personal life, just realizing how fortunate we are for what we have. And then when I see my patients, my clients and hear their stories, it reminds me that as all of us as human beings, when you have that one person in your life who believes in you, and you get that chance that lives can be transformed. And that’s why I do it and why our team do it.

 

Nitin Bajaj:

Love that. Thanks for sharing that. And again, congratulations and kudos for all the work, all of the accomplishments. And I know there is a lot more to achieve and bring about here. And as we think about this, as we look at all of these accomplishments, I’m curious to know, among the many different challenges you face with infrastructure, with permits, with regulation, with so many different things, what’s the one big challenge you’d like to call out?

 

Pooja Bhalla:

Yeah, the biggest challenge that we are facing today, and it’s in our organization, it’s actually nationwide is access to affordable housing. And I want to call this out because not everybody understands the causes of homelessness. People believe people become homeless, because they started using substances, they ended up being out on the streets, and they just didn’t do all the right things. There was a recent study that was just published by UCSF, that really made it clear that people experience homelessness because they cannot afford rent. What we are seeing is that we are seeing more and more families, especially coming into homelessness. Simply, they’re working two jobs, three kids, two jobs trying to make ends meet, they cannot afford a home.

 

So I think one thing that I want to call out the challenge is we need to really look at this as a society, as policy issue, we need to make housing more accessible and more affordable on a federal and state level, especially in the state of California, where it’s the most expensive to live in. You can’t imagine trying to be a family of four working two jobs. This is what we’re seeing in our family shelters right now. These are the folks coming in. So one thing to call out is how can we make housing more affordable and accessible?

 

Nitin Bajaj:

Makes sense. Now on the flip side of this challenge, and this is not something that will change overnight, because we’ve been working on it for several years. And there is always forces on each side that are trying to pull for their vested interest. And so as we work on these challenges, I want to take a moment and talk about opportunities. And what’s the most exciting one that you and the team are targeting?

 

Pooja Bhalla:

Yeah, so one of the things that we are very excited about is that we will be bringing on two family shelters online in the next three months. And that’s really important because, as I know, and I don’t think the numbers are accurate, because not everybody reports this, there’s at least 300 families that I know that are homeless in Orange County. The numbers are a lot larger in Los Angeles and Inland Empire. So we’re really excited because we will be bringing two family shelters online in Orange County, which will allow us to bring in 50 to 60 families the streets into shelter. And the reason this is really important is last year, there was a study done in Orange County to look at deaths, people that were dying on the streets in Orange County. And it breaks my heart to say that two of them were babies, infants that died on the streets in Orange County, simply because they didn’t have a place to be. The mom didn’t have any place to go. When you think of the large number of families that are experiencing homelessness, we’ll be able to bring in 50 families through in a year and then get them into permanent housing. But bigger than that is we’re going to be saving lives. And the trajectory of deaths are increasing. Last year, there were 500 deaths. The year before, there were 400 deaths in Orange County. And this year already, we’ve had 100 deaths in the first few months. Actually, more than that, because I’m realizing we’re at the end of the year. So we’ll see what the numbers will bring. And they usually publish a report. So the trajectory of folks dying on the streets is just the numbers are heartbreaking. So we’re very excited about these two family programs coming online. And what’s great about that is it’s not just a family shelter. And this goes back to the program that we were talking about. We’re an integrated model.

We’ll be able to provide education services, tutoring services, a lot of case management. We’ll be able to connect them to our local hospitals for pediatrician visits, follow them all the way through. We’ll have psychiatry and therapy and all of the services that we need for this population in a home. And what’s different about this family shelter is it doesn’t look like a typical shelter. I’m not sure folks have been inside a shelter where in many cases you walk in, it’s like 50 cots on a floor. And that’s what’s possible, given it’s a shelter. But our family shelters are actually homes. These are seven to eight bedroom homes, like our normal homes and each room becomes a unit for the entire family. And there’s a community room, there’s a beautiful backyard as close to this bus station. So it’s going to be very much accessible for our families as soon as they try to move forward in their journey.

 

Nitin Bajaj:

That is really exciting. And I’m really looking forward to these coming online. And when you say 50 out of 300, you’re really going to move the needle and make a dent. So that’s really amazing. And when you have this holistic model that you have come up with, I think that’s what creates that transformative change. Because with a lot of these things, it has to stick, it has to become something that they really believe in. And so things don’t go back to where they came from.

 

Pooja Bhalla:

Yeah, it’s exciting because when you look at the numbers usually, and this was when we were early on, I’d get the question about how many people did we serve? So now we can actually do say, hey, we’re able to bring 50 families in which is reducing homelessness in a large way, you know, in Orange County. And I think what’s exciting is this model we know has worked, we have four family shelters and bringing on more of these are really going to allow for other community members to be more involved as well.

 

Nitin Bajaj:

Amazing. Now, as we look forward, I want to take a moment, pause and look in the rear view mirror and ask you to share two moments. One that did not work out as you had expected was a failure became a lesson. And another one that exceeded your own expectations and became a success beyond maybe even your imagination.

 

Pooja Bhalla:

Yeah, I’ll tie this back to the healthcare side of what my expertise is. A few years ago, we were trying to work on starting a federally qualified health center. It’s a big program that’s funded through the feds. And there’s a lot of rules and regulations. And I was really excited to look at one of our sites and trying to get this clinic going. And for lots of complicated reasons, mainly financial and building related where you have to cut the whole thing and spend hundreds and thousands of dollars to get this clinic up to code to then become an FQHC.So I was disappointed that we couldn’t do that because it just wasn’t going to be fiscally possible given the cost of the project and the regulations. Fast forward two years later, right in the midst of COVID, I met this wonderful physician, and we put our heads together. And now we actually have a clinic. It’s not a federally qualified health center, but it’s actually a primary care practice, just like a primary care practice that you and I would go to for Kaiser or Blue Shield. And his heart was working with this population. He helped me during COVID. He was helping with our COVID patients. And we’re like, when we started seeing these patients, we knew all the needs and he’s what can we do together. So we started a primary care clinic in our Fullerton location. It’s a full blown clinic with dental services, with psychiatry, with therapy, primary care. And it’s amazing that our clients now have access to it. And that really makes Illumination Foundation fully integrated because we can now bring a doctor’s office right to where the clients are living. So I’m really proud of that.

 

Nitin Bajaj:

That is so cool. That is amazing. And again, I think for a lot of this population, just not having access to basic care, just compounds in it. One thing leads to the next, and not knowing where to go, what kind of issues they’re dealing with, is just a compounding issue. So I’m glad they have access to a place where they can get care just like we can. Now, I want to pause before we move on to the next section and ask about what do you do for fun?

 

Pooja Bhalla:

Honestly, it’s a lot of time to myself, it’s recharging, but mostly it’s doing a lot of hiking and fun for us is family outings. All of us will go together for a family hike. And that’s what recharges me. I’m not big into going to a lot of busy places and travel is nice, but the best part is really for all of us to go on a family hike.

 

Nitin Bajaj:

I love that. We like to do a little bit of the same and we live in pretty crowded spaces. So it’s good to find escapes and hike up the mountains a little bit.

 

Pooja Bhalla:

Yeah. 

 

Nitin Bajaj:

All right. Now onto my favorite part of the show, we call it the one line life lessons.

 

Pooja Bhalla:

We would love to hear a few of yours, help others take care of people who can’t take care of themselves and be grateful for what you have in life because you just don’t know what the next chapter is going to be.

 

Nitin Bajaj:

I love that. Short, simple, sweet. That’s what all the life lessons are all about. Pooja, thank you so much for taking time to share your journey, your story, but more importantly, for doing what you do and for creating Illumination Foundation and helping so many hundreds of lives, well, thousands and soon to be millions. We really appreciate it. You’re doing some amazing work for the community and we would love to bring you back on here in some time and see and talk about more of your successes.

 

Pooja Bhalla:

Great. Thank you so much for the opportunity and it’s always fun for me to talk about this topic because this isn’t a topic that everyone wants to talk about. So I appreciate the opportunity and hearing about our work. Thank you.