DRAFT: Leadership Profile Ted Hayes
Founder, Justiceville / EXODUS II Initiative
Ted Hayes is a longtime civic activist and homelessness public and private policy innovator and causevator whose work spans more than four decades of direct engagement with homelessness in Los Angeles and beyond.
Throughout the country, particularly in LA, the National Capital of Homelessness (NCH), the matter can’t be properly discussed with the mention of Ted Hayes.
Unlike many policy figures who approach the issue primarily through academic or administrative channels, Hayes’ experience is grounded in extensive firsthand exposure to the realities of life on the streets.
In the 1980s, for 8 years (1985-1993), he voluntarily lived among individuals experiencing homelessness on the sidewalks of Los Angeles’ Skid Row in order to better understand the conditions and dynamics that conventional policy approaches often overlook. He was “digging in the roots!”
This experience helped shape Hayes’ long-term, resolution view that homelessness in America is not solely a housing or social services issue, but a complex civic challenge involving governance, economic opportunity, public health, and community structure.
Hayes is best known as the founder of Justiceville, the first politically and socially organized homeless encampment in Los Angeles, which drew national and international attention to the issue in the late twentieth century.
Justiceville served both as a humanitarian response and as a public demonstration designed to bring visibility to the growing homelessness crisis in American cities.
He later helped develop Dome Village, an innovative transitional housing community that combined shelter with supportive services and community governance.
Dome Village became widely recognized as a practical demonstration of how structured environments can help individuals stabilize their lives and transition toward greater independence.
Over the years, Hayes has remained active as a civic voice on homelessness policy, engaging with public officials, community organizations, faith institutions, and private sector leaders.
His work has consistently emphasized the importance of dignity-centered solutions, civic participation, and practical experimentation rather than purely theoretical approaches.
The EXODUS II initiative represents Hayes’s forty-one-year effort to synthesize decades of observation and field experience into a broader national framework to improve coordination among government agencies, civic institutions, and private-sector partners.
Central to this effort is the idea that homelessness resolution requires not only programs, but effective national coordination structures capable of aligning existing resources and expertise toward measurable outcomes.
Supporters of Hayes’ work often note that his perspective combines three elements that are rarely present together in homelessness policy discussions:
• extensive frontline experience with homeless populations
• practical experimentation with community-based models
• long-term civic advocacy focused on structural solutions
This combination has shaped his proposal to strengthen the role of the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness (USICH) while incorporating structured civic advisory participation through the proposed Councils of We the People framework.
Hayes continues to advocate for approaches that seek not merely to manage homelessness, but to develop durable civic structures capable of addressing the underlying challenges that contribute to it.