> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.smdp.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Former Upward Bound House resident Viola White now sits on shelter's board - URL: https://www.smdp.com/communityprofiles-community-profiles-is-a-weekly-series-that-appears-each-monday-and-delves-into-the-people-who-live-work-and-play-in-santa-monica-vio/ - Published: 2005-10-10T15:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-23T07:55:13.000Z - Author: Guest Author - Tags: Community, Santa Monica, #archive-import, Homeless, Homelessness *By JASMIN PERSCH Special to the Daily Press* Formerly homeless and seeking help from a Santa Monica shelter, Viola White now sits on its board and advises her colleagues on how to improve the program. A month after she left Upward Bound House in May 2003, ending her eight-month stay there with her daughter and son, White opened her own flower shop, Viola’s Original Zeal, which is run out of her home in Central Los Angeles. Upward Bound House, operated by the First United Methodist Church of Santa Monica, offers shelter and a program aimed at self-sufficiency to homeless families and seniors. Participants are required to take parenting and life-skills classes, as well as learn to budget and save their money. The program has a 95 percent success rate, White said. A career woman, White became homeless when she couldn’t handle life’s challenges — her mother’s death, raising two children, suffering through two divorces and financial uncertainty. “When I left here, I didn’t have the desire to return to corporate America,” White said. “I went to the flower mart with $50, and the rest is history.” White also is a volunteer at Upward Bound House. She focuses much of her time with children — doing homework or just spending time with them, she said. She gained the reputation of a trusted mother when she was living at Upward Bound House and was often relied on to watch the children. She said young mothers can especially use help from volunteers. White was a devoted mother for about two decades while she pursued her career. She said she worked for several Fortune 500 companies before she became homeless. She has mainly worked in sales and media — K-EARTH 101, United Press International, WJBO, to name a few. She excelled in school, studying sociology at Louisiana State University and Southern University, but dropped out to get started working. Originally from Louisiana, White uprooted to Nashville, Tenn., with her first husband before moving to Santa Monica in 1985 because, as a producer, her husband wanted to live closer to Hollywood. White has gone through two divorces and had a child with each husband since she relocated to California. She went home to Louisiana while living on the West Coast to care for her father and mother before they died. It was at the time of her mother’s death that White became homeless even though she had a sales job at a computer company in Torrance. Overwhelming life pressures and a lack of budgeting led to White’s bout of homelessness. Every paycheck at that point went to living costs. Yet White and her children never went without a roof over their heads because friends took them in. After a friend directed her to Upward Bound House, White took her children there and got her life organized again. White is now an entrepreneur, and a mother of a college-going daughter and a skateboarder son. She volunteers at Upward Bound House to give back to the place where she learned to build herself from the bottom up. White recently sat down with the Daily Press to talk about being homeless in Santa Monica. What do you think about the homeless problem in Santa Monica? “I think this program is a model program and I’d like to see more programs like it. The Katrina and Rita hurricanes have been so devastating, but we have people right here in this city and all of Los Angeles that have their personal Katrinas and Ritas and tsunamis on a regular basis. And the good news about Family Place (the program focused on families at Upward Bound House) is that we are able to give them skills to sustain them other than just giving them a check. And I’d like to see more programs available that will give families and people an opportunity to live on a long-term basis as opposed to a soup line that only sustains them for that moment. “I think the homelessness situation is growing. People are really not aware of how very close being homeless is to their neighbor or to their former college roommate. We actually have family members here from the hurricane. Our numbers here are growing as a result of disasters in another part of the country. I think it’s not just a personal journey. I think that there needs to be more of a concerted effort including funding for Katrina and Rita. I think the only way to end it is to prepare for it. Only a percentage of the population has the chance to excel when another portion of it is going to fail. The economy is large and more expensive, and it’s almost impossible for a one-parent household to support children.” What is your most memorable recollection of helping someone else? “I had a neighbor who lived above me (in Upward Bound House) at the time. She had a child with special needs. There’d just be days where she’d be on overload, and I would always make myself available to play with them (her kids) and we created a little program called the ‘star program.’ And I made a chart and I would give them colorful stars every time he would make an achievement. And she was able to take that and work it into her home so she was able to see some difference in him and not be as impatient. She had him and a baby. If I could, I would help. My children were a little bit older so I didn’t have the challenges she did.” What inspires you to help the homeless? “I’m probably just a product of my parents. You know, my parents reached out. They helped and that’s how I was raised. That’s what you do, you help, you be a neighbor. People need people. My mother was very involved in our church. It was ironic that I was raised a Methodist and as much as we did within our own church that the entity that gave me help in the crisis of my life came from the First Methodist Church. (My mother) was secretary of the church, she was in the choir, she did a lot. And my father was always helping to make improvements around the church. My family was well known in the community, and my mom worked for the school board. They got me involved. I did a lot a good stuff when I was a child.” How did you become homeless? “I was working in sales and I was good at it, but you’re only as good as your last pay check. And those numbers kept coming and kept coming and kept coming. And the pressure grew. But, as I came closer and closer to my 40s, at that stage where women change and the stress became unbearable and the mood swings grew. It was just really hard to manage work, marriage, children, quotas and life. It was a very difficult time for me.” How do you feel about where you are today? “Fantastic. Life is good. I couldn’t be more ecstatic. I work for myself in my own house. I used to sell hundreds of thousands of dollars for clients and for businesses. I can now do it for myself. It’s always been a goal for me. And I can grow my business and hire people and help people in that way. When it was time for me to leave Upward Bound House, I often tell this story, you have to go out and seek affordable housing and the first house that was offered to me was the house where I am. And I applied for numerous places, and I was either next on the list or didn’t make it or didn’t qualify or whatever the reason was I didn’t get it. It came time for me to move, and this house was still available to me. And I prayed, ‘God give me a house as nice as the one I had or nicer.’ And little did I know that my prayer was answered from the very beginning. The house had one extra bedroom. It had been completely refurbished. When I walked in the house it had naked floors, and I thought, ‘They are going to put down a beautiful carpet.’ They put down an indoor-outdoor carpet, and I just hated it. Little did I know I was going to need an indoor-outdoor carpet (for my flower shop).” Do you spend a lot of time in Santa Monica? “I love Santa Monica. This is where I first lived (when I moved to California). My children are beach children. My daughter graduated from a local high school. My son went to school in Venice. He’s a skateboarder. We like to spend time here, real recently — shopping, the movies. We like to go to the restaurants here, and I have a few house accounts in the area so I deliver flowers here. It’s probably still like home. I spent two very important parts of my life here: my first residence and my homeless incident. And they were both awesome.” ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/55/9f/559f9abc-8372-4a2e-8c2d-27386da4e363/content/images/2026/10/101005-02_01.jpg) (Photo: Fabian Lewkowicz/Daily Press) *Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on October 10, 2005.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/101005.pdf?ref=smdp.com)