We were lucky to catch up with Adrianne Hillman recently and have shared our conversation below.

Adrianne, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Let’s kick things off with talking about how you serve the underserved, because in our view this is one of the most important things the small business community does for society – by serving those who the giant corporations ignore, small business helps create a more inclusive and just world for all of us.

Yes, Salt + Light serves neighbors experiencing homelessness in California’s rural Tulare County. Homelessness is a complex issue impacting our entire nation, with nearly half of the nation’s entire homeless population residing in California (2022 Annual Homelessness Report to Congress). The population that Salt + Light serves is an intersectionally diverse, multi-faceted group that are some of society’s most vulnerable. Over half of the neighbors we serve are people of color, 90% have a disability, 100% have a mental health condition, and 100% live well below the poverty line. The mission of Salt + Light is to cultivate community with our neighbors experiencing homelessness by providing services, programs, education, and job opportunities to help uplift our neighbors off the streets and end the cycle of homelessness.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Salt + Light Works was established in 2019 to address the single most significant crisis affecting our nation: homelessness. Homelessness is an issue impacting our nation, with nearly half of the nation’s entire homeless population residing in California. The Central Valley, aptly named the nation’s Bread Basket, serves as a vital source of the nation’s food supply. Despite this, our community is grappling with food scarcity and a distressing lack of affordable housing. These issues are exacerbated by a glaring absence of substantial state investment in our diverse communities, perpetuating a cycle of poverty and the associated health problems, deepening the societal divide and intensifying the struggles in our community. At the intersection of these systemic problems is the homelessness crisis. Salt + Light was created in response to fill in the gaps in services for neighbors experiencing homelessness.

In just four years, Salt + Light has grown exponentially, bringing cutting-edge services to neighbors experiencing homelessness. Our capacity is continuously growing as well due to increased collaborations and partnerships, highly experienced staff, and a significant following of dedicated volunteers and supporters. We see the devastating impact that unjust policies have on our region that have created systemic and societal barriers to crucial services, stable housing, and upward mobility. Our work sits at the intersection of these injustices, and our organization is steadfastly working to get at the root of these injustices and advance policies and create systemic change that ensures unhoused populations are not only included in discussions about policy regarding housing, land-use, and protocol but are centered and listened to.

Our organization provides hot and cold meals and palliative care items through our food truck program, Everyone Eats Today, and our case management model, which helps connect neighbors to community resources and housing. These two programs were and still are the organization’s entry point into this vulnerable population, who understandably do not trust easily. One of Salt + Light’s pillars is dignity, always putting the human first. We want to build relationships, trust, and community with neighbors. From these relationships, we have been able to not only meet our neighbors where they are to provide basic needs but have also been able to see the gaps in services historically provided to our neighbors. The next step in our work, then, is to uplift and empower our neighbors to break the cycle of homelessness.

To that end, we are launching the Salt + Light Social Enterprise in Fall 2023 and have broken ground on our flagship project, The Neighborhood Village, which is set to open in Spring 2024. The social enterprise will provide job training, transitional jobs, and access to educational programs to complete a General Education Development certificate or High School Equivalency Diploma. The Neighborhood Village is a 53-unit mobile home neighborhood with wrap around services on site. This means that care professionals will meet our neighbors right where they live, which will streamline the coordination of services, leading to better outcomes for our residents. Salt + Light believes we heal in community, and our work is to provide the community our neighbors can heal in.

What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?

When I founded Salt + Light, there was a decent amount of educating that needed to take place for the community at large to understand our out-of-the-box solution to mitigating homelessness. What became apparent early on was the need for us to be super solid on our guiding principles, and to make sure every decision internally and externally were made through the lens of these principles consistently. With that, we have been able to be an organization that donors can trust, because our insides match our outsides at Salt + Light, and that results in integrity that shows up in everything we do. Our social media content, communications and consistently reiterate who we are and what we do, and our reputation has been built because people know that we mean what we say, and we say what we mean. We not only say things and communicate our values, we put them into action, and it had created an incredible following in our region.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Well, I founded and launched Salt + Light in Oct. 2019 without a dollar, a donor, or a single volunteer; just a dream. A week after our launch event, my dad went in for routine cardiac testing and flat-lined on the table, resulting in emergency open heart surgery. He had been caring for his ailing parents–my grandparents– and my grandmother passed away in my arms a week after his cardiac event. I planned her funeral because my dad was incapacitated, of course. Six weeks later, my maternal grandmother and namesake passed away. I had one employee I could barely pay, no donors to cultivate, and no volunteers. I had hardly had a chance to develop relationships with the people I had cast vision to at our launch party. Three months later, in March 2020, the pandemic hit. I was sure this would be the demise of this fledgling organization. I had to lay off the only employee I had in early April because I couldn’t afford to pay him without the ability to host any fundraisers, and on April 19, my grandfather passed away. I felt like a ship in the middle of the ocean somewhere, and the waves just kept crashing while I tried to offload the waters threatening to sink it. I dug deep, and decided not to go down without a fight. I spent the quarantine days of the pandemic building my business infrastructure, creating policies and procedures, employee handbooks, and crystalizing the mission, vision, and values so that I knew exactly what we would stand for as an organization. I spent as much time as possible calling meetings with decision-makers and cultivated as many relationships as possible over virtual meetings. I capitalized on the gaps in people’s schedules due to the pandemic and filled my days with relationship-building and outdoor coffee dates. The result is that we are only four years old as an organization, had a pandemic in the middle of those years, are under construction on California’s first permanent supportive housing village of its kind, have a food truck relief program that served over 44,000 meals last year, and a team that has grown to 15 employees. We wouldn’t be here without resilience. And some late nights :)

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.saltandlightworks.org/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/saltandlight.works/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/saltandlight.works/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/saltandlightworks/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@saltlight4797/

Image Credits
Topograph, https://www.tpgrph.com/