For anyone keeping track, Rosario Dawson is a busy girl. She’s a single mom, has a new drama series “Briarpatch” debuting on the USA Network, she just produced a documentary on the youth homeless crisis in America and she’s dating former presidential candidate Cory Booker. Talk about multitasking! 

By Heather Newgen

For the last 20 years Rosario Dawson has dazzled audiences with her compelling performances, fierce characters and undeniable beauty. But off-screen the New York born actress has another powerful role she plays–activist. While she’s known for her high-profile film career, Dawson has passionately advocated for a number of causes including LGBTQ rights, HIV and AIDS  and homelessness, which she recently produced a documentary about titled “Lost in America.” The “Sin City” star talked to The Voluntourist about the issue and how others can get involved to help.

The Voluntourist: One of the things I’ve always loved about you is your passion for advocacy. So what’s a cause that you’re really backing right now and that we should turn our attention towards?

Rosario Dawson: Homelessness, especially youth homelessness. Having a daughter that was in foster care for years and was in her fifth placement by the time she came to live with me. Starting to become aware of incredible organizations like Children’s Rights, but they literally work as an arm to fix very broken policies and situations that exist within the foster care system, it’s a governmental program. The fact that we even need an organization that’s been running for over 20 years to correct what our
government is doing is just terrible, but they’re under resourced and there’s just a lot of inherent problems. So for me, when I look at, especially the foster care system and how many of these kids age out, have no community, have no resources and ends up on our streets. How many kids are LGBTQ, who ends up on the streets because their parents suddenly stopped loving them because they love people that they don’t want them to love, is just super scary and alarming. So I produced a documentary called Lost in America that’s going to be coming out over the next couple of months. We just did a thing called A Night for Youth and we broke the Guinness book world record of how many people doing a sleep out. A lot of homeless organizations will do that to fundraise, but they don’t normally do it in conjunction. We had over a hundred organizations that participated nationwide
in doing a sleep out and bringing attention to this issue. So it’s definitely something we’re only finally starting to get the numbers even, which are sadly in the millions. When you watch the documentary, you’ll see people go out. Was it like maybe 50,000, 100,000? I mean, we really haven’t even put any of the resources to even understand the breadth and scope of this problem. So I’m just really excited. Tiffany Haddish, who was homeless. Jewel, who was homeless, she wrote a song for it. That’s an original
song for it. So there’s just a lot of push to bring people to this attention which I think is really important.

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The Voluntourist: And why are there so many youth on the street? 

Rosario Dawson: When you really think about the reality, that we have more animal shelters than we have human shelters. I think there’s a lot of gaps that these kids are falling through and people in general. We’ve got vets, we call ourselves the home of the brave and then people go and they fight for all different kinds of reasons overseas and they come back and they disproportionately end up homeless. In general, I think this documentary is really critical to just start bringing people into the conversation and shifting the narrative so that people can feel like we can do something about it.

USA Network Events — TIFF Briarpatch Red Carpet and Screening in Toronto, Canada — Pictured: Rosario Dawson — (Photo by: Dan Boczarski/USA Network)

The Voluntourist: Why is this issue so important for you?

Rosario Dawson: I grew up in a squat– we moved there when I was 6-year-old, so housing issues are something I’ve always been really sensitive towards. People are really critically important and any space that they occupy, people are valuable, they need to be seen and we’re not doing that. I live on the Westside of LA and we’ve seen it all the way from San Francisco. There’s an influx of homeless people everyone. They’re treating it by incarcerating people with mental health problems and addiction problems. We’re throwing so much money on wars and dropping bombs on poor people. Then we invite our soldiers to come back home and be homeless. I think this is an issue that needs to be looked at from many different sides. People don’t recognize how many people are vulnerable to homelessness, how many people are a paycheck away from being homeless. Women who homeless because they left abusive relationships, kids age out of the foster care system, troops come home and they have PTSD and mental health problems, people get sick and can’t afford their healthcare bills. So many people are vulnerable to becoming homeless and we need to step up before they become invisible to us. Once someone crosses over to being homeless, we don’t want to look at them. We don’t want to deal with them and you can tell by the disproportionate amount of animal shelters than homeless shelters. And we make it difficult on people. There’s youth homeless shelters that don’t allow LGBTQ youth, there’s homeless shelters curfews, there’s homeless shelters that you have to pay to get into. There’s all these weird things. People who do food banks and stuff like that are disallowed from doing it because changed the law. They say they’re giving out fresh food and they could be accountable if someone gets sick. So it shuts down people trying to do good. There’s a lot of backwardness around this situation that isn’t helping for it to be better. I keep sending people to the Lost in America website, even before the film is out. You can go check it out and there’s a list of organizations across the nation that you can support and you can be better aware of what exists within your community that can be of service to people. As my boyfriend says, we should not allow our inability to do everything to stop us from doing something. 

The Voluntourist: What are things people can do to help the homelessness situation?

Rosario Dawson:  I would go to Lost in America  on their website so you can see different organizations [helping the homeless] and you can get a lot of factoids that people are very much unaware of. This way people can contribute food or money or their time. Also this is a census year. A lot of people might very well become homeless because people didn’t fill out the census in their community and then that community has been affected with not getting the resources it needs over the next 10 years. So you’re going to see a huge disparity because guess what everybody in Beverly Hills is filling out their census forms. So their community and district is going to get all the resources it needs. Their roads will be great, their schools will be great, their hospitals will be great. They will have nice decorations over the holidays. Then there’s a bunch of people who have been made to feel scared because they were threatening putting a citizenship question [on the form]. There’s obviously an uptick in deportation, so people have been very afraid and won’t fill out the census forms for fear they might become targets.

Q: What has it been like to be on the campaign trail? Is that a different kind of world for you?

Rosario Dawson: Oh, for sure. I mean I started a voting organization in 2004 for the Latina. So I’ve definitely, I’ve been going to correspondence dinner since Bush was still president. But I’ve never been blowing kisses to candidates at a debate, as many debates as I’ve been to. So it’s definitely quite a revelation. I’m grateful for all of the years in which I’ve spoken to voters and non-voters and all kinds of people. But to have this sort of different perspective into politics has been really eye opening to understand why I have a right to be so frustrated. And so many people have a right to be frustrated because there are a lot of people in positions of power that are not always working with the idea of being cohesive and idea of being progressive and really trying to work together and collaborate. There’s a lot of them fighting and so it was really interesting learning that, but also alarming. Because I’ve never experienced the severity that comes along with politics. I mean the standards that politicians are held to are very, very, very different. And that’s true from the level of the toxicity from the trolls and that people you encounter, to just the danger element. I mean, he’s had a bomb sent to his office. So it definitely was one of those things as I got into the relationship, like I don’t get to just cavalierly just fall in love with someone. I have to really consider. I have a daughter and I’ve got a family and are we all willing to go down this path together? And he’s just the love of my life. So it just is what it is. And we’ve all kind of grown together and figured that out. But yeah, it’s definitely been very eye opening… He’s never given me any flack that I couldn’t be more on the campaign with him. It just been a really remarkable experience to be with someone that I feel more free with and I’m growing with rather than compartmentalized with. And so it’s definitely had a profound impact. And I can say this is one of the most challenging years of my life this past year. And I’ve had so much gratitude and I look back on my younger self who was so much more stressed and anxious and scared and made choices, poor choices from those places and angry and made really poor choices from that. And I took a nonviolent communications course in 2017 and I’ve really tried to transform that and turn it around and I’m really grateful. I wish my grandmother was still here and I could share that with her, that there’s another way of going about things than necessarily she was taught to just survive.

Briarpatch starring Rosario Dawson, Kim Dickens and Alan Cumming, debuts on the USA Network February 6th.

For more information on Lost in America please visit www.lostinamericafilm.com.