The Brief

Maybe the way out of California’s homelessness crisis is to prevent it in the first place, rather than focusing only on people who have already lost their housing.

That’s the thinking behind a program in Santa Clara County — and others like it around the state — that has gained traction and will soon test its strategy beyond California.

These prevention programs have found that with a payment of several thousand dollars, aid organizations can head off someone’s homelessness. That both prevents the trauma that comes with losing a home, and saves the state or local government the potentially tens of thousands of dollars it takes to help someone after they become homeless.

The Santa Clara County program by nonprofit Destination: Home recently inspired the launch of 10 more pilot projects throughout the country, marking the first large-scale, multi-state test of this strategy. If it works in those test counties, advocates will push for a nationwide program.

Meanwhile, a bill introduced this year in California would require the state to come up with a broad homelessness prevention strategy.

“The single most obvious answer to homelessness is to not let it happen in the first place,” said Jennifer Loving, CEO of Destination: Home.

Focusing on prevention marks a significant shift in thinking. Traditionally, cities, counties and the state reserve their resources for helping the people in most dire need — those currently living on the street — get back on their feet. The problem with that strategy is that for every one person they move into housing, multiple other people fall into homelessness. That leaves cities spinning their wheels without meaningfully lessening the problem.

But prevention has its own challenges: The aid is most effective when it goes to people imminently at risk of losing their housing, and determining exactly who that is can be tricky. Several Bay Area communities use a questionnaire to evaluate how likely someone is to wind up homeless unless they get help. A Los Angeles County program uses artificial intelligence.

“The risk is you give out a lot of precious resources to people who otherwise would be able to prevent homelessness on their own, and that takes away from things like emergency shelters or transitional shelters or permanent supportive housing,” said Jim Sullivan, director of the University of Notre Dame’s Lab for Economic Opportunities. His team evaluated Santa Clara County’s prevention program and found that people who received prevention funds were 78% less likely to become homeless than people in similar situations who got no funds.

Even among the people who didn’t get prevention funds, the overall rate of homelessness in these studies tends to be small (in Santa Clara County, 4.1% of people who didn’t get help became homeless, compared to 0.9% who did get help). That’s because, despite the very visible humanitarian crisis on the streets of California, statistically speaking, homelessness is still extremely rare, said Janey Rountree, executive director of the California Policy Lab at UCLA, which helped develop a similar program in Los Angeles County. The vast majority of people are able to keep a roof over their head by getting help from family or friends.

How homelessness prevention works

Destination: Home helped launch Santa Clara County’s first homelessness prevention program in 2017. At the time, there wasn’t much help available for people on the brink of homelessness. Families staring down looming evictions were told to call back once they actually ended up on the street.

With a budget of $1 million secured through donations, the program helped 200 households that first year. Over the following years, the nonprofit got results — and buy-in from county officials. Now, the program has an annual budget of $30 million (most of which is publicly funded) and serves 2,500 households per year.

The program appears to be making a dent. Prior to its existence, for every homeless person who got housing, another three lost their homes. Now, for every one person housed, the math works out to 1.7 people losing their homes, according to Destination: Home.

People who apply to the program hear about it in different ways, including through food banks and other service providers, by word of mouth and through outreach workers in eviction court. Then they fill out a questionnaire designed to assess how likely they are to become homeless. Multiple factors could put them at greater risk: if they have experienced domestic violence, have been homeless before or are disabled, for example. If they check off enough risk factors, they qualify for aid.

Over the past year, people accepted into the program received an average of about $6,500 (including if they returned multiple times for help), most of which went directly to rent, security deposits and other housing expenses. Participants can use the money to address whatever problem is threatening their housing, including fixing their car so they can get to work, paying for a hotel while they are between apartments, covering medical expenses or paying down a credit card debt if the large monthly payment is hurting their ability to pay rent.

Participants can come back for help multiple times if they need, and many do.

“We’re providing temporary assistance to folks that are facing long-term, systemic problems, and we don’t expect that hanging out with us for a few months is all of a sudden going to increase the supply of affordable housing or living-wage jobs,” said Erin Stanton, director of family assistance at Sacred Heart Community Service, which coordinates the aid.

Mayor Sam Liccardo, takes part in the 2022 Point in Time Count for Santa Clara County in San Jose on Feb. 23, 2022.

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Now, Destination: Home is expanding its prevention model to 10 new places across the country, including San Mateo County in California, as well as Miami-Dade County, Florida; Atlanta, Georgia; Austin-Travis County, Texas; communities in Alaska and multiple tribal communities in Minnesota. The idea is to see if the model can be successful outside of Santa Clara County and to see how it might be tweaked depending on the community it is serving. The needs in an economically depressed community, or one saturated by addiction, will be different from those in a rapidly gentrying area, for example.

Destination: Home, which raised nearly $80 million for this effort from private donors, is giving each community $500,000 to plan their own homelessness prevention program modeled after Santa Clara County’s, and then at least $5 million to run the program for three years. The first programs are expected to launch this fall.

The University of Notre Dame will evaluate the programs to see if they work. If they do, Destination: Home plans to push for a nationwide prevention strategy.

San Mateo County signed on to be a test community because it’s an “exciting opportunity,” said Amy Davidson, director of the county’s Center on Homelessness. The county already runs an emergency financial assistance program, but it doesn’t screen participants to determine who is most likely to end up on the street. With Destination: Home’s help, the county will launch a second program that more specifically targets people at risk of homelessness.

“It seemed like a really great learning experience for us to try to learn what works really well, and what haven’t we done that we could consider doing,” Davidson said.

Lower rates of homelessness

Five other Bay Area communities, including San Francisco and Oakland, already have similar prevention programs, which together have served more than 30,000 people. They’re supported by the organizations All Home and Bay Area Community Services, which helped fund the programs and developed a standardized online form that evaluates each applicant’s risk of homelessness. A sixth program in Marin County is set to launch later this year.

In San Francisco, participants were 40% less likely to end up homeless than those in similar circumstances who didn’t get help. Between March 2023 and February 2025, less than 5% of program participants became homeless within a year of receiving prevention funds, compared with 8% of similarly situated people who didn’t receive funds.

In Los Angeles County, people helped by the Homelessness Prevention Unit were 71% less likely to later end up in a homeless shelter or use street outreach services. As in Santa Clara County, the overall rates of homelessness are still small: Less than 2% of people enrolled in the program became homeless and used street or shelter services within 18 months, compared to a little more than 6% of people in similar circumstances but not enrolled in the program.

Los Angeles County’s tool is unique because it uses AI to predict who is most likely to become homeless. Participants don’t apply to the program. If the AI model picks them out, program staff cold-call them and invite them to participate.

The county is still testing the program, and a detailed analysis is expected next year. In the meantime, local leaders have thrown their support behind it. The county recently poured additional Measure A funding into the program, and is launching a new prevention program focused on young people.

Feeding off the momentum generated by these efforts, a bill introduced this year would require the state to establish a statewide homelessness prevention strategy by July 2027. The state is expecting a budget deficit this year, and Assembly Bill 1924 doesn’t come with funding. But supporters say it’s still a step forward.

“Now that we have proven models from the Bay Area and LA, we believe that it’s time for the state to be doing more to articulate goals and strategies for having a prevention program, with the hope that in the future if there’s more budget surplus those strategies could get better funding,” said Irene Farnsworth, director of regional homelessness prevention for All Home, which is co-sponsoring the bill by Assemblymember Jesse Gabriel, a Democrat from Encino.

‘They won’t just leave you hanging’

Desiré Campusano knows how to hustle. She’s crashed with relatives when she couldn’t afford rent and worked multiple jobs at once. But in 2021, something unexpected happened: She became an emergency foster parent to two of her young relatives. She felt herself foundering.

That’s when she found Santa Clara County’s homelessness prevention program. It helped her stay afloat as she navigated moving into her own apartment in Milpitas, changing jobs and suddenly becoming a single guardian to two children.

She asked for help twice that year, once receiving her full rent payment of $1,575, and once receiving $1,000 to help her get by. The next year, her rent increased and she asked for help each time she couldn’t quite make the payment — for example when the kids got COVID and couldn’t go to day care, so she had to miss work and not get paid. She got help four times that year.

“I’d be fine for a month or two, and then I’d need it again,” Campusano said.

In 2023, her rent went up again and she had to move out. She went to stay with her godfather in Hollister, but that meant a grueling commute to San Jose for work every day. Then, at the start of 2025, Campusano moved into a subsidized apartment in San Jose. The county’s homelessness prevention program helped her secure the apartment by paying her first and last month’s rent.

That ongoing support was a gamechanger for Campusano, who finally feels like she’s back on her feet. She’s now teaching sociology and Mexican-American history at San Jose City College.

“They won’t just leave you hanging,” she said. “They’ll make sure you feel stable.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

Held by the Los Angeles Review of Books since 2019, LITLIT, or The Little Literary Fair, started out as a way to introduce students from workshops to the publishing industry.

It has since grown into a gathering of independent West Coast publishers from Seattle to Santa Monica. This year’s iteration on June 6 and 7 is the biggest yet, with more than 50 publishers participating in the event at Sci-Arc in Downtown L.A.

People look through a small library of used books from "A Good Used Book," a Los Angeles based book pop-up, during LITLIT 2024.

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It’s ‘small’ lit

The fair aims to get the public in front of books that don’t originate from the so-called “Big Five” publishers — behemoths like Penguin Random House and HarperCollins.

“They really get to control what people get to see, and so we hope LITLIT lets people see more of what is out there and what they can support directly,” said Emily VanKoughnett, public programs and engagement director for LARB.

One of VanKoughnett’s favorite independent publishers will be there. Two Lines Press, the publishing arm of San Francisco’s Center for the Art of Translation, deals specifically in translated works.

Two Lines Press, which specializes in translated works, show off their books to attendees of LITLIT.

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They’ve published authors from across the world, translating books from more than 100 different languages into English.

“ We do our work in quiet rooms, so it's really nice to be able to meet readers and talk to them about what's interesting them. These festivals are really valuable to us in that way,” said CJ Evans, publisher and editor-in-chief of Two Lines.

Pressed locally

Local favorite Angel City Press, which operates under the auspices of L.A. Public Library, will also be there with one of their newly published titles, Los Angeles Central Library POPS, that celebrates 100 years of the Central Library.

People at LITLIT 2024 look through different small presses.

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You’ll also find LA-based Errant Press, which specializes in books that break the traditional form — like a poem printed on measuring tape or a matchbox sized poetry collection.

“It’s really cool to see the kinds of risks that people are able to take, the kinds of communities they’re able to serve and really highlight here on the West Coast,” said Irene Yoon, executive director of LARB.

Panels, printing presses, and workshops

The two-day fair also hosts various panels and workshops, including one on the art of comedic writing and another on how to tell the stories of Los Angeles through archival materials.

“This is, I think, the most panels we've ever done,” VanKoughnett said.

People sit down for a panel discussion at LITLIT 2024.

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Workshops on how to navigate the literary world with a completed manuscript and making your own comics and zines are also on the itinerary.

And Carson’s International Printing Museum will demonstrate how to screen print your own bookmark.

“It's not until we're all in the same room with all our best books literally out on the table that you get to see kind of what a phenomenal publishing culture Los Angeles truly has,” said Terri Accomazzo, editorial director of Angel City Press.

Running a small business is tough under normal circumstances. Running one in a wildfire burn scar can feel nearly impossible.

That's the reality many Altadena business owners are still navigating nearly a year and a half after the Eaton Fire destroyed the community and the local economy. Businesses are grappling with how do you stay open when so many of your customers are gone?

At Wet Paws, a pet grooming business along Lake Avenue, that question recently came to a head.

The shop reopened in January but business remained slow. Wet Paws co-owner Stephanie Trujillo estimates the fire had displaced up to 90% of their customers.

Marley, a Cane Corso from Pasadena, went for her first grooming session at Wet Paws in more than a year.

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Then came a conversation with their landlord several months ago that forced a decision.

"He reached out and said, 'Are you going to re-sign your lease?'" Trujillo recalled.

The answer wasn't obvious.

"I said, unfortunately, we're not even making it. We're paying out of our own pocket," she said. "So he said, 'I'll give you until June 1.'"

The deadline meant Trujillo and her mother, Linda Alashti, who have owned the business together since 2023, had only a few months to figure out whether Wet Paws had a future in Altadena.

Wet Paws is hardly alone. As businesses struggle, Los Angeles County recently launched a program offering free marketing assistance and storefront improvements to fire-affected businesses. The deadline to apply is June 8.

A flag banner and sandwich board on the sidewalk outside Wet Paws advertises its services.

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The county also operates a gift card program to encourage residents to spend money at fire-impacted businesses.

But relief has not arrived quickly enough for many businesses.

One particularly slow April Sunday at Wet Paws drove home how dire the situation had become, when they had only one customer.

As she drove home to Fontana, Trujillo began composing a social media post.

"So this isn't easy for us to share," the post began, "but I wanted to reach out with an open heart and hope."

In the message, Trujillo asked the community to book appointments and spread the word to help their business survive.

Before posting it, Trujillo showed it to her mother.

Wet Paws groomer Elizabeth Ranes takes care of a basset hound client.

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"We're very prideful, and it's very hard to ask people for help," she said. "I felt embarrassed that we had to ask the community for help."

Her mother's advice was simple. "Just post it," she told her. "The worst that's going to happen is nobody sees it or nobody cares."

Instead, the opposite happened. By the next day, the post had been viewed and shared hundreds of times across Instagram and Facebook.

The phone started ringing, said Wet Paws groomer Elizabeth Ranes.

"I got well over 50 calls," Ranes said. "We booked out for the last three weeks of the month when we made that post.”

Customers told Alashti that they “didn't know you were back, because they don't come this way anymore.”

Decor inside Wet Paws embraces a playful canine motif.

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Among those who returned was Penny Dahlstrom, a Pasadena resident whose 113-pound Cane Corso Marley had been a Wet Paws regular before the fire.

Dahlstrom had tried taking Marley to a large pet store chain while Wet Paws was closed.

"My husband went in to pick her up, and he hears crying, and it was her," Dahlstrom said. "That's not just her nature."

The social media appeal didn't just bring back former customers. It also introduced the business to new ones, Trujillo said.

But recovery remains uneven.

Some days are still slow. And the shop continues to deal with lingering fire-related electrical damage in the back of the building.

Wet Paws is operating on a temporary electrical system, limiting how much power it can use at any given time.

"If we run our AC, and the neighbors run their AC, we lose power," Trujillo said.

As the June 1 lease deadline approached, Trujillo and her mother weighed their options. They could walk away and cut their losses. Or they could commit to rebuilding alongside a community they had come to love.

Ultimately, they thought about the response to their post and the customers who had shown up when the business needed them most. And they had faith that Altadena would rebuild to its full strength.

They chose to renew the lease for another three years.

"I can't imagine what the community is going through, losing their homes and losing everything that they had," Trujillo said. "Yet they're still coming back."

And as long as they do, she said Wet Paws will be there for them and their fur babies.

On a recent Monday, students at Breed Street Elementary in Boyle Heights started their day like no other — with a tour of the murals hand-painted over the weekend across the playground.

It’s the latest of seven elementary schools in and around L.A. to get the treatment. Over 70 murals in the last 13 years, brought by a collective of artists to students in under-resourced neighborhoods with little access to art education.

“The kids were so excited,” said Stefanie Barbee, a math teacher at Breed. “Just pure joy.”

The students snaked through the paintings on handball courts and school walls: cartoon animals, bright orange flowers, a circle of meticulously painted lines. The works span genres and sensibilities.

Mural by artist hi-dutch.

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“It's grassroots. We're not getting money from anyone,” said Erik Caruso, the fifth-grade teacher in Paramount who's the group glue. To them, they are just an assembly of like-minded friends — and friends of friends — who spend one weekend out of the year hanging out and painting murals for school kids.

But the collective is anything but typical. It includes artists like the late Rich Jacobs, who died from leukemia this year; Tim Kerr; pro skater Ray Barbee; and Japanese artists Yusuke Hanai and hi-dutch. The vibe's always low-key, and somehow they've managed to stay under the radar.

Mural by artist Yusuke Hanai.

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Mural by artist Yusuke Hanai.

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“The kids have no idea that they show in huge galleries or have pieces hanging in museums,” said writer Martin Wong, co-founder of the pioneering Asian pop culture magazine Giant Robot. "Or they're famous in the skateboarding scene or surf or music."

Their reward is the Monday morning after, seeing the happiness on the kids’ faces.

“The artists are waiting all weekend — it’s that moment,” Caruso said.

Mural by artists Sandy Yang and James Hamblin.

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James Hamblin was at Breed for the meet-and-greet earlier this month. He painted a mural designed by his partner Sandy Yang on one of the handball walls.

“Sandy's design is pretty abstract, so it was interesting because the kids were [asking], you know, ‘ What is it?’” Hamblin said. “It was great because I could tell them I had no idea and like, ‘What do you guys think it is?’"

Bring the art museum to the school

Erik Caruso.

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The idea came to Caruso in 2011, after he took about two dozen students from his Paramount school to MOCA and discovered that only four had ever been to an art museum.

“I wonder if there's a way we can bring the art museum to the school,” he said.

Caruso, a 24-year veteran, was no stranger to bringing art — and artists — directly to his students. In 2009, he launched a monthly art project for fifth-graders that culminated in a year-end show where they met and shared work with living contemporary artists.

Caruso's 5th grade art project, featuring works by artist Tim Kerr.

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The murals were next.

They painted their first ones at his school in 2012. Soon, the project expanded to the rest of Los Angeles.

Crew at work

Mural by artist Chris Johanson.

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Mural by artist Chris Johanson.

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The painting takes place between Friday and Sunday, but planning takes months.

At Breed, the connection was made through math teacher Barbee — wife of Ray — who is on a two-year stint at the Boyle Heights school to help students catch up on the subject.

“I had sort of planted that seed that at some point I would love for a school I was working at to be the recipient of the beautiful work,” she said.

Breed Street Elementary in Boyle Heights.

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She brought Caruso out for a site visit last September.

“He has a really amazing kind of vision about where to place the artists … based on just their artwork and where it is in relation to the street view,” Barbee said.

Next came an introduction to the principal and the approval process.

“One of the biggest challenges with what we are doing is, you know, they want flipping dolphins and stuff like that,” Caruso said. “But we want to cross over into fine art pieces.”

Mural by artists Lookout & Wonderland

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Mural by artists Lookout & Wonderland

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Paying it forward

Caruso estimated that as many as 40 artists and musicians have joined the effort.

The core group now, he said, is about 11 people, and friends and families often tag along to help out, given they have just 16 hours over three days to finish the job.

Mural by artist Oitama.

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Mural by artist Lori Damiano.

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Among the regulars: Wong and his wife, Wendy Lau, who once organized DIY punk shows to fund music education at their daughter's Chinatown school. In Caruso, they saw a kindred spirit.

Caruso later brought the collective to paint at that school and eventually invited their daughter, Linda Lindas bassist Eloise Wong, to join his fifth-grade art and music project.

“All of these kids on the blacktop were all just screaming their hearts out,” Eloise said. “It's cool how Erik — Mr. Caruso to them — shows them, like, raw ways to express themselves through cool art.”

Reggae star Ziggy Marley has spent decades carrying one of music’s most celebrated legacies. But until now, he had never written a song directly about his father, Bob Marley.

That’s changed with “Many Mourn for Bob,” a track on Marley’s ninth solo album Brightside, his first release recorded in his new studio in North Hollywood.

Marley was just 12 when his father died of cancer in 1981. Now 57, Marley says the song instinctually emerged after years of life experience and producing the biopic One Love, which revisited his father’s struggles like an assassination attempt amid political violence in Jamaica.

“He went through some things that was really tough on a human being – and just understanding him in that light is to have a little bit more emotional, deeper connection to his experience,” Marley said in an interview at his studio.

Searching for the bright side

The deeply personal track is part of a splashy return for Marley, who's touring behind Brightside and will perform at the Hollywood Bowl on June 21.

The new album blends political themes, optimism and musical experimentation.

Its lead single, “Racism Is a Killa,” featuring Big Boi, pairs the heavy topic with an upbeat groove that he hopes will make the song more accessible to young people.

“We just wanna come out straightforward, like I never want to come out tiptoeing,” Marley said. “I want to say something that can catch your ears or catch your thoughts.”

That tension between darkness and hope runs throughout Brightside. Marley described the album as a reflection on enduring difficult periods – from the pandemic to the Los Angeles wildfires – without losing sight of optimism.

“Sometimes we get lost in that so much that we don't realize that there is always a bright side,” Marley said.

The 432 Hz experiment

The album also experiments sonically: Marley recorded Brightside using 432 hertz tuning instead of the standard 440 hertz in most mainstream music. Advocates of 432 hertz believe it produces a warmer, more meditative sound better synced to the natural world. (You can hear the difference for yourself here.)

“It's a lower musical frequency, but it's a higher frequency in a next sense of your spirituality and emotion,” he said. “So even though the numbers go down, the frequency actually go up.”

Marley sees the move as part of a larger search for new creative approaches.

“I'm very open-minded and always trying to evolve and just experiment with life and music,” Marley said.

The Grammy winner, who joins James Blake and Ed O’Brien of Radiohead as the most high-profile artists to record at the lower frequency, floated the idea of a larger movement among artists.

“Let's just have a revolution in the music industry,” he said. “Let's change the frequency.”

Building a dream

Marley works out of his Rebel Lion Studio in North Hollywood, its name a nod to his 2018 album Rebellion Rises while also a play on the word “rebellion.”

He described the studio as an extension of the independent spirit his father built with Tuff Gong Studio in Jamaica.

Musicians set up for rehearsal ahead of the next leg of Ziggy Marley's tour.

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“My father had a dream, and I had a dream too,” Marley said.

Like with Tuff Gong, Marley also plans to expand the studio operation to include vinyl pressing as records continue their resurgence in the streaming era.

“There’s always gonna be a vinyl present going on,” Marley said. “A thousand years from now, people that we're still gonna need vinyl records to listen to music.”

Ziggy Marley in the hallway of his new studio in North Hollywood.

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For years, Marley said, he worked out of smaller home setups and rented facilities before deciding to build a larger permanent space in L.A.

Marley said the city has become central to his own creative evolution over the last two decades of living and working here.

Drawn initially by music, friends and the city's small but tight-knit Jamaican community, he says being surrounded by creatives from different backgrounds helped push his artistry in new directions.

“I left my safety and my community, my tribe, and come out by myself to L.A.,” he said. “But it's a great experience. It really helped my growth as a human being being here.”

What’s next

Fresh off the release of Brightside, Marley says he’s already working on another album – a notably quicker turnaround since his last album, the family-music release More Family Time in 2020,

“We're doing back to back,” he said.

Ziggy Marley will be performing at the Hollywood Bowl on June 21 as part of a tour supporting his new album Brightside.

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He’s also busy writing a children’s book based on his feel-good hit anthem “True to Myself” and eyeing opportunities in front – or behind the camera – inspired by his time working on One Love and making the video for “Racism Is A Killa.”

“Same philosophy, same message, but within visuals, you know?” Marley said excitedly. “I want to create some stories and try out. I feel it coming. I can feel it.”