Las Vegas Sun

March 19, 2024

Linda Lera-Randle El: 1950-2014:

Longtime champion of homeless in Las Vegas dies at 64

linda

Las Vegas Sun File

Forrest Williamson, left, and homeless advocate Linda Lera-Randle El shop for some necessities at a thrift store on Main Street Friday, Jan. 17, 2003. Williamson was homeless in the Las Vegas valley for seven years and just got off the street when a portion of the $34,000 in Social Security disability benefits were restored to him.

Linda Lera-Randle El

Straight from the Streets director Linda Lera-Randle El, gives Stephen Philip D'Costa some hot sauce for a burrito in a parking lot near Sahara Avenue and Maryland Parkway Friday, November 29, 2002. ETHAN MILLER / LAS VEGAS SUN Launch slideshow »

For more than a quarter of a century Linda Lera-Randle El stood as a beacon of light for the homeless in Southern Nevada, advocating for job training, community outreach, Social Security benefits and decent housing for the downtrodden.

So much so that in 2004 Lera-Randle El, the founder and executive director of Straight from the Streets, was honored nationally by the Washington, D.C.-based Points of Light Foundation, an organization founded by former President George H.W. Bush to pay tribute to crusading citizens who made up what he called the thousand points of light who spread like stars throughout the nation.

Lera-Randle El, who died early Friday from a lengthy battle with a liver ailment, has left what local officials call a void in the lives of those who struggle in the grips of poverty and despair, including an estimated 15,000 homeless people locally. She was 64.

Services for Lera-Randle El, a Las Vegas resident of 56 years, will be 1 p.m. Oct. 31 at Palm Mortuary, 7400 W. Cheyenne Ave.

“Linda put a face to the homeless issue,” said Clark County Commissioner Chris Giunchigliani, who began working with Lera-Randle El when Giunchigliani was a Nevada assemblywoman in the 1990s. “She was a true community spirit who knew and understood the political side of things and how to work to bring about improvements for the conditions of many homeless people.”

Giunchigliani said that Lera-Randle El was one of the first advocates locally to address the mental health issues of the homeless.

“When people criticized the homeless as being lazy or unwilling to get jobs, Linda was addressing problems such as PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) in homeless veterans and other mental health problems of the so-called street people,” Giunchigliani said.

“She advocated more job training programs and community outreach. She was instrumental in changing many people’s lives for the better by seeking solutions to long-standing problems.”

Starting in the 1980s, Lera-Randle El, without financial remuneration, cruised some of the city’s worst neighborhoods and the tent city hobo jungles, aiding the homeless and giving them hope for a better future. She and her organization won numerous awards for her work.

“She was not about winning awards — she was about helping people — that was the only reward she ever sought,” said Lera-Randle El’s husband, Thomas “Chicago” Randle-El. “She sought to get people the social services they were entitled to and badly needed.

“When mentally ill homeless people could not do the social service networking to get benefits, we would go around and pick them up. We would take them to the Social Security office, stand in line with them, help them fill out the paperwork and do the advocacy work that helped them get their checks.”

Ina Dorman, president of Straight from the Streets, said the organization Lera-Randle El founded grew from handing out eggs, oranges, bottled water and hygiene products on street corners to being an all-encompassing volunteer social service juggernaut.

“Linda had a passion to help those in need, especially the chronic homeless,” Dorman said. “As Straight from the Streets grew, we took on more and more needs of the people we helped. Linda’s goal was to stabilize as many lives as she could, especially when it came to getting people decent housing.

“Linda turned no one away. She always kept fighting the good fight. And the organization will continue on in the same voluntary spirit that she began.”

Lera-Randle El’s advocacy also included organizing annual vigils to remember local homeless people who had died. She also served as crisis director for the former MASH Village Crisis Intervention Center in the mid-to-late 1990s.

Straight from the Streets incorporated on Oct. 31, 2001. Early on, Straight from the Streets received a $20 million grant from HELP of Southern Nevada to aid in helping the homeless. Since November 2005, the organization has been a part of O.U.T.R.E.A.C.H., a unified effort of a group of social service providers working together to help homeless people.

Lera-Randle El has been credited with bringing volunteer street outreach to the forefront of homeless services. Since then, other charitable groups and agencies, inspired by Lera-Randle’s efforts, have followed her example by reaching out to the homeless instead of waiting for poor people to come to them.

Lera-Randle El often called her method of operation “the street wise, no nonsense” approach to addressing homelessness and poverty.

Born Linda Lera on Oct. 16, 1950, in Galveston, Texas, she moved with her family to Las Vegas at age 8. She graduated from Clark High School.

Lera-Randle El began her work with the homeless in the 1980s, when she and her father, Benjamin, handed out boiled eggs and bottled water to the homeless in local tent cities that sprang up on vacant lots in urban Las Vegas. At age 93, her father survives her.

As the major recession of the early 2000s was taking hold on Las Vegas, Lera-Randle El warned that a new wave of homelessness was on the horizon.

Quoting a USA Today news article on homelessness that examined debt and joblessness in America, Lera-Randle El said many families that previously felt a sense of security now were finding themselves on the brink of homelessness.

“No longer does having a job ensure against winding up on the streets or teetering on the edge,” Lera-Randle El wrote in a Las Vegas Sun “Where I Stand” guest column that was published Aug. 28, 2003.

“Welcome to what I call the front door of homelessness. This is the condition of living from day to day amidst a fragile, shaky economy, where job layoffs, lack of affordable housing, rising gas prices and lack of child care facilities are constant threats to having a roof over your head. These issues are real for thousands of people. They are now affecting the lives of many people who have never before experienced life on the edge.”

In addition to her Point of Light award, Lera-Randle El was the 2007 recipient of the Hope Award for Southern Nevada Adult Mental Health and three years ago won the Social Equity in Action award from the American Society for Public Administration.

Lera-Randle El also served as chairwoman for the Citizens Advisory Committee for Clark County Social Services and chairwoman of the Emergency Food and Shelter Program.

In addition to her husband, Chicago, and father, Benjamin, both of Las Vegas, Lera-Randle El is survived by a daughter Tracy Bates and her husband, Roger, of Carlsbad, Calif.; a daughter Jessica Schultz also of Carlsbad; two grandchildren Brittany and Bella; two brothers Ronnie and Bobby; and a sister Deborah.

The family said donations can be made in Lera-Randle El’s memory to Straight from the Streets.

Ed Koch is a former longtime Las Vegas Sun reporter.

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