THE ACTIVIST
JOELLE MOLLOY Joelle Molloy has taken a different route to most of the Irish who move here. Joelle, an artist in her own right, whose paintings hang Downtown, is, to paraphrase JFK, “asking not what LA can do for you, but what you can do for LA”. Currently sitting the California bar, she has her sights set on tackling the city’s biggest human rights problem: homelessness. There are more than 50,000 homeless people – a figure that rose 23 per cent last year. Downtown, where she lives, is the epicentre of the problem. “They bus homeless people from wealthier suburbs like Beverly Hills here and the problem just grows and grows,” says Joelle, who works with a number of organisations providing showers for some of the homeless and operating a system whereby restaurants can pass their leftovers on to homeless people in their vicinity. Her plan is to hone her skills and then take what she has learned back to Dublin. Joelle is impatient: “The world could end at any time,” she says. But she’s also a polymath: she creates, she fights legal battles and works tirelessly on behalf of the homeless. She probably has a good book in her too.
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