LAPD believes in the power of imagination to motivate people and not only artistically, but by acknowledging the hopes, dreams, rational and spiritual power at the core of everyone’s humanity. LAPD’s success has encouraged many Skid Row agencies to integrate arts into their programs and has informed policy. They are a “pipsqueak” organization that has had a major impact on raising the value placed on the arts by social service providers and policy makers.

LAPD’s activities and projects have used theater and other arts to thematically focus on a constellation of interrelated issues of continuing importance to Skid Row, and other low-income communities. A common element is to create acknowledgement for the accomplishments of the neighborhood. In articulating the new reality of the neighborhood, they are creating a narrative that causes re-thinking of a variety of issues, including gentrification and community displacement, drug recovery, the war on drugs and drug policy reform, the status of women and children on Skid Row and mass incarceration and the criminalization of poverty.