LOS ANGELES — It took her time to learn the skills necessary to make the perfect cup of coffee — she knows how to steam milk, make lattes and mix a delicious salad.

LaShornda Young works at Made by DWC, a café at the Downtown Women’s Center in LA.

While she’s learned a lot about operating a café, she says the most important skills she’s learned over the past three years have been emotional ones.

“I was angry, very, very angry,” Young said, sitting on the roof deck at the Downtown Women’s Center, where she lives.

Young spent 14 years in prison on drug-related charges. When she was released in 2014, she says she didn’t have a support network or a place to go. She ended up living on the streets of LA in a tent.

“I was hopeless, I felt hopeless,” Young said.

She was able to find work at Homeboy Industries, and eventually was connected with the Downtown Women’s Center.

It is an organization that supports women experiencing homelessness and provides wraparound services, including housing. They immediately connected Young with mental health care. She now works regularly with a therapist.

“I started simmering down a little bit, just to help the inner me. If I don’t help the inner me, then I can’t help anyone else,” she said.

Gina Murdock is the senior director of clinical programs at the DWC. She says women at the center are offered trauma-informed care along with a variety of other services.

“The primary tenet of trauma-focused care is that we are doing no further harm to our clients. We are not forcing anyone to immediately processing their trauma,” Murdock said.

Instead, clinicians, psychiatrists and therapists work with clients who have experienced homelessness and help them feel safe.

“We are working with whatever it is they want to work on with regards to their safety and mental health. It’s important that women use our services in order to get stable,” she said.

According to Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research in 2020, 25% of all homeless adults in LA County had severe mental illness, such as a psychotic disorder and schizophrenia.

And while mental health disorders can often lead to individuals experiencing homelessness, Benjamin Henwood, a professor at the USC Suzanne Dworak School of Social Work and the director of the Center for Homelessness Housing and Health Equity research, says living on the streets can create new issues.

“This is like living in constant stress. We know anytime you have constant pressure and stress that it can’t be good for existing mental health conditions. It leads to anxiety and depression and feelings of worthlessness,” Henwood said.

Henwood noted that one key to providing people with support is consistent care.

“When we try to design efficient systems sometimes, we forget how important that human element is to the whole process … It takes often times longer-term engagement to build trust,” Henwood said.

That long-term, consistent care is what Young at the Downtown Women’s Center said helped her most.

She now supports other women who are just coming out of homelessness and working with clinicians at the DWC.

“This is the new me,” Young said. “I’m not as angry anymore. I’m not as frustrated. When I get frustrated, I just take two steps back,” she said.