On a Saturday morning in April, Lethal Gee stands beneath a tent near Roeding Park, sorting through garbage bags stuffed with makeup and secondhand clothes – summer dresses, winter coats and a random variety of shoes.
“You see that big mirror that somebody donated?” she says. “I’m going to take that out to the streets.”
Gee, who agreed to talk under her street name because her privacy has been compromised in the past, works at the San Joaquin Valley Free Medical Clinic and Needle Exchange in Fresno, a mobile facility, where every Saturday people line up for health care and resources. They come for screenings, immunizations or just the gear they need to more safely manage their addictions. Most are unhoused, and once Gee’s work at the site is done, she hits the streets looking for women who can use the items donors have dropped off.
“Someone on the streets will be able to feel just that much more beautiful because they had a better mirror to work with putting their makeup on,” she says.
As a street-level outreach worker, Gee specializes in supporting people who are unhoused, including women who experienced domestic violence before they lived on the street.
Domestic violence is a common precursor to homelessness in California. A recent University of California San Francisco study showed that nearly 10% of unhoused survey participants in the state had experienced domestic violence, and among unhoused cisgender women, that number about doubled.
But in the Fresno area, only one shelter exclusively serves women escaping domestic violence. It’s called the Marjaree Mason Center and it can house up to 40 families. In Fresno County, which has one of the highest rates of calls to law enforcement for domestic violence in the state, that’s not a lot.
Around 11 a.m., Gee settles into her car alongside the clothes, bottles of water and sunscreen, donated food, tents and safety vests to prevent people on the street from being hit by cars.
Finding people on the street can be tough. Changes to Fresno’s encampment policies have led to more sweeps in recent years, and kept more unhoused people on the move. To stay safe – from abusers, predators, or even the police – unhoused women sometimes have to switch up where they sleep and keep their things.
“I’ve been hearing from people that the city’s been taking all of their stuff and throwing it away,” Gee says. “So it’s always nice to be able to replenish that when I run into them throughout the week.”
Once Gee locates someone she can help, the work becomes highly individualized. One person might need medical attention. Another could be looking to get back into a shelter. Or someone could need a new government ID because the last one got tossed out during a sweep. And if that means standing in line with a client at the DMV, then that’s the job.
“I think it’s perfectly fine, perfectly fair if a full-grown adult needs their hand held,” she says.
Once Gee is able to find the appropriate resources, she might then have to find the person again, which can also be tough.
“I just do outreach all week,” she says. “Most of my hours outside of the Saturdays is spent on the streets….”
The people she finds there tend to have been through a lot. Some have diagnosed or undiagnosed mental health issues, but others have just experienced painful hardships that resulted in their housing troubles and damaged their overall wellbeing.
“The vast majority of people experiencing homelessness have had some precipitating trauma that has contributed to their homelessness,” says Alex Visotzky, senior California policy fellow at the National Alliance to End Homelessness. “Either it’s exiting the carceral system, it’s fleeing domestic violence, it’s having some major disruption with family.”
Visotzky says any of those experiences can make it hard for someone on the street to trust police, or even social workers trying to help them.
“It’s very possible these folks have been burned before by a public system,” he says.
To counter that dynamic, Gee relies on her own lived experience. She says she grew up in a family that struggled with housing instability, and knows firsthand how to access services from nonprofits and government agencies. She knows which kinds of foods, clothes and survival gear are practical for people living outdoors, and which are unusable. Almost no one on the street, for example, wants a dress. But if someone did, Gee would know who because she tracks the names and stories of the people she meets as she makes her rounds.
“I just keep like a little rolodex in my head and it makes it really easy to navigate people to things and also care for them a little better,” she says. … “I know how to talk to people. I know what it is that they need to hear. Not everything needs to be so clinical, so professional.”
Another common barrier to helping unhoused people is, of course, funding – most of which comes from the state and federal governments and can fluctuate with changing budgets, policies and political will.
“There’s very few sources of stable funding for outreach services, for case management services, and that contributes to a dynamic where these jobs are often very low pay,” Visotzky says. “These are also very hard jobs to do, so you see a lot of turnover in frontline jobs.”
Visotzky says moving locations on the streets has become an even greater necessity for unhoused people since 2024, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, opening the door to laws banning camping and sleeping in public spaces. Fresno officials at the city and county levels followed quickly with anti-camping ordinances. In 2025, Governor Gavin Newsom used state funding to encourage California cities to conduct more sweeps.
“That’s pushing folks experiencing homelessness into more and more places where they’re trying to remain less visible…out of the public eye,” Visotzky says. “So they might not be on that same street corner where you’re used to seeing them on. They might have moved into the woods, into a waterway, onto the side of a [highway] ramp.”
And regardless of how often people on the streets are moving around, he says, survivors of domestic violence can be especially difficult to maintain contact with.
“These dynamics of distrust, of hesitation of sharing your information with a public entity are there for everybody, but they’re just magnified for those folks that are fleeing violence and are trying to keep themselves, and maybe their children, safe.”
‘We were looking for you for like a year’
Gee is not the only person in Fresno working to locate people in homeless encampments.
Kevin Little is an attorney in Fresno who specializes in human rights cases. Several of his clients are unhoused and about once a month he goes looking for them.
On a weekday afternoon in April, he starts at Roeding Park, where people living on the street often congregate.
“They don’t get hassled there,” he says, “but additionally, there’s trees, there’s shade, there’s water fountains.”
He says he finds the people he’s looking for about half the time. It’s harder now than it used to be because of Fresno’s new ordinances.
“But I think this was the goal of the ordinance, right?” he says. “Make folks be invisible. Make them hide and go underground, so to speak, so that we don’t really have to be reminded as much about the awful inequality that we have and how many people are just not able to make it.”
Fresno City Council President Mike Karbassi disagrees with that assessment.
“The goal of this ordinance [is] to end the status quo and do something,” he wrote in an email to The Intersection. “There are some passionate advocates who want us to just turn a blind eye to this issue and allow unhoused persons to keep living in squalor anywhere they please. We also have the added responsibility of ensuring that public spaces like parks, sidewalks and bus stops are accessible to all, not just one person or group, no matter who they are.”
After scanning the park and finding none of his clients, Little moves on to an apartment building that provides transitional housing. He doesn’t go inside, but he does talk to a few people hanging around outside.
Just then, he spots one of his clients, Julie, walking toward him from across the street carrying just a school-sized backpack that appears to have almost nothing in it. She doesn’t have a tent or any food to get her through the day.
Little heard about Julie a few years ago after a car ran into the tent she and her partner were sleeping in. Her partner was killed and Little went looking for her to see if she wanted legal representation. That lawsuit is ongoing, and today, Little and Julie recall the first time they met.
“We were looking for you for like a year,” he says to her.
Safer on the streets
Lethal Gee parks her car under a highway overpass, where just a few people sit eating, surrounded by their things. She greets them by name and one, Dawn, gives her a hug.
Dawn just turned 30, and says they’ve been on the streets for about five years. They had hoped to be housed again before that milestone birthday. Their story includes intimate partner violence.
Dawn stays at shelters occasionally, but usually avoids them because the experience can be emotionally heavy and unsettling. They say they don’t trust that shelter employees are equipped to handle the “hypersensitive mental health issues” that some visitors face. They also feel they haven’t gotten much meaningful help from shelters and that staying the night in one usually means being separated from their partner.
“I think it’s easier when you have someone else doing it with you,” they say.
So, Dawn stays mostly on the street. For them, sleeping outside and losing their belongings during routine sweeps beats staying in a shelter where they don’t feel safe or supported.
Gee comes through this part of the Tower District multiple times each week and sees Dawn frequently. Gee knows what Dawn likes – they’re the rare person who will want the donated dresses.
Before Gee arrived, Dawn just had the clothes they were wearing. Now, they have a couple of new outfits and a faux fur jacket that will make the cold, spring night a little more comfortable.
Dawn also accepts the mirror. Now they can see their face when they do their makeup.
Megan Myscofski is an independent reporter covering health care and state politics. She is based in Sacramento. meganmyscofski@proton.me
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