Meet Zac Levy!

 1. Tell us why Non-profits like LalaForever matter, specifically in regards to children. 

2. If you could create a program, or service, under the LalaForever name, what would it be? 

3. What would this program mean to you, and how would you run it? 

I unwrap my phylacteries and carefully fold my talet. I quickly do my hair, pack my bag, and make myself a cup of tea. At 6:40, I angle my phone correctly and join the Zoom—“Good morning Rabbi!” I can think of no better way to start my mornings. We explore the works of the greatest Jewish philosophers and exercise our minds to ask questions and search for answers. Back and forth. In and out of the text. Juggling three different languages. Forty-five minutes of heavy questions and cross-referencing events decades or centuries apart to inform our day-to-day decisions and thoughts. I am so fortunate to have such a wonderful spiritual guiding force in my life. I would not give up my learning for the world. 

Rabbi Ricky Cohen teaches a breadth of spiritual and self-help ideas that I was shocked by the rawness of when we first met over three years ago. In time, I’ve learned from his actions and words the importance of self-confidence and self-love. I’ve learned to strike a balance between selfishness and selflessness as a means of psychological well-being and continued emotional growth. I’ve learned that the words that the quote that is identified as the most fundamental idea in the entire Torah—כמוך לרעך ואהבת ,meaning to love your neighbor like you love yourself—requires you to love yourself before you can love others. 

While I have been fortunate enough to receive instruction from incredibly self-aware and mental-health-oriented parents and spiritual leaders, I have unfortunately witnessed many scenarios in which my peers and others I’ve met had not been so blessed. 

A year and a half ago I had an experience that changed my life. It was a hot summer day and my father and I were waiting in line at 7/11. As we went to put our drinks on the counter, a voice rang through the store. We were pushed to the side by a girl, no more than nineteen. “I’m next in line” she hollered and she placed her can of arizona on the counter. She was grasping onto the counter with one hand while her other hand fished through her pockets searching for some change. It was clear she didn’t have any money. I nudged my dad and he ran to the counter and handed his credit card to the cashier and said, “It's on me.” Instantly, she bolted out of the store and the only sign of her existence were the bells ringing as my father swiped his card. When we left, we saw her lying on a bench, surrounded by some meager belongings, chugging her drink. I was filled with compassion and a desire to understand how this teenager, only a few years older than me, ended up in this situation. 

My curiosity kicked in and I immediately started researching how people become homeless. I learned that while statistics were available, there were no personal stories. Most articles pointed to the straw that broke the camel’s back, not the events beforehand that led up to the grand fall. I wanted to understand the individual journeys that led people to this point. With this in mind, I began Project Unhoused to share the stories of the unhoused. 

My idea was simple—talk directly to those experiencing homelessness. I reached out to local shelters, housing assistance organizations, food banks, community restaurants, and soup kitchens to learn from their operations and find safe ways to speak with those experiencing homelessness. Less than a month after that hot summer day, I sat down opposite Larry, a 50-year old African American man who tore my entire world view to shreds in the first minute of our two hour conversation. He was raised by his father and step-mother—both of whom were physically abusive—since his birth-mother broke her neck trying to escape a rapist while hitchhiking a few months after he was born. This was the first sentence he told me and his childhood was only downhill from there. With no one to support him financially or emotionally, it is no wonder that he couldn’t cope with his bipolar disorder—which made it nearly impossible for him to hold a job—and resorted to substances to numb his brain to his traumas. 

My sixteen-year-old mind was so disturbed by this meeting. It shattered my view of our country and our social safety net. I simply didn’t understand how someone like Larry could fall through the cracks. What also disturbed me is that in an article, Larry would simply add +1 to the number of people who fell into homelessness due to substance abuse. How does this accurately sum up Larry’s life experiences? 

Over the next few months, I continued to conduct interviews and every story just opened up more questions. As I learned more, though, I saw common threads emerge—for example, almost every near-death-experience story I heard started with some variation of “it was a really cold winter night.” Immediately, I started a winter clothing drive in which I collected many hundreds of bags of clothing. Five times over that winter I set up a table in low-income areas of my community and gave the winter clothing to those most in need. At every event, I was overwhelmed with the constant influx of people in need. I was troubled by just how many people fall through the cracks, but comforted that with our help, they would at least remain warm through the upcoming winter months. 

But more than these small band-aids, I wanted to make a real difference. I wanted to share my interviews with the world and portray homelessness through real stories. Reading scholarly articles about the causes of homelessness doesn’t give over the full picture. By sharing the life stories of these individuals, I hope to humanize their struggles and instill a feeling of empathy and mutual-responsibility in others. That is why I wrote my book, Project Unhoused. 

One of the largest commonalities that I was able to find between my interviews was a lack of the ability to self-regulate. In a functional social culture, children learn the ability to self-regulate from those around them. Self-regulating is the ability to manage your own behaviors and emotions. This allows people to modulate their reactions (like anger or sadness), focus on a task, control their impulses, and behave normally in social situations. When they have to make complicated decisions, they are able to think logically, weigh all of their options, seek counsel (if necessary), and choose the best option. 

When parents are negligent or do not have the ability to self-regulate, they cannot endow their children with all of the social and emotional skills they need to make it in the world. These children are hardwired to feel anxious and make impulsive decisions. I saw in almost all of my interviews with individuals experiencing homelessness that lack of emotional maturity and clear thinking as a consequence of incomplete parenting and a dysfunctional social culture directly caused many of their challenges in life. Nonprofit organizations like LaLaForever can have a tremendous impact at this point in a child’s life by imbuing children with important emotion skills. Teaching children to love themselves and prioritize their emotional well-being builds a solid foundation for them to grow from. 

One of the men that I interviewed, James, had a father that was very callous and largely absent in his childhood, so instead, his mother primarily raised him. The problem is that she suffered from depression and severe agoraphobia. When in the span of a few months he was mugged and had his jaw shattered, his younger brother / best friend was killed in a tragic car crash running an errand that James was supposed to have done, and his family lost their apartment in Superstorm Sandy, he was unable to self-regulate and fell into a deep depression. While he originally was prescribed morphine to deal with the pain from his jaw, when his brother passed, he used it to numb his mind and avoid having to address his mental turmoil. When Superstorm Sandy caused his family terrible financial trouble, he was advised that heroin did the same thing as morphine for cheaper. I met with James during his first year clean after living on the streets for a decade. He pointed out that only now he can truly think lucidly and that he has realized that he “still has the emotions of a teenager.” 

If I could create a program to address this problem, I would attempt to tackle it from a perspective of building functional social cultures through strong community bonds. By creating community-wide events for children of all ages we can encourage strong interpersonal skills. I would pay trained social workers to run the programming and work one-on-one with the children who seem to struggle socially. Additionally, the social workers would work in groups and one-on-one with children to teach them important principles of self-love, self-confidence, and prioritizing one’s physical and mental health. Children would also be taught the importance of volunteering and treatings others with empathy, compassion, and understanding. 

I’ve noticed that especially within my generation as social media and digital communication become more pervasive, that in-person community events and hangouts have fallen out of style. I have no doubt that this will and already has had massive effects on the happiness and social contentment of children growing up in such a world. Thankfully, my community has the weekly Sabbath to stay grounded in the real world and our local neighbors and friends. I feel that a reversion to in-person communication with trained professionals to ensure that no chick is left behind can change this tide in our country. 

This program is extremely personal to me as after a year and a half of deep research into what the most common problem from youth that leads to homelessness yielded this result. Emotional stability is integral to overcome the constant challenges in our life that are thrown at us. Being able to make community-level changes to give children these skills at the most formative point in their lives can truly make a monumental difference.