In March 2020, when Congress enacted the country’s first-ever federal paid sick time and child care leave policy, it carved millions of people out of the law’s guarantees, including one group that the nation was simultaneously hailing as heroes: health care workers.

The law, which was in place from April to December 2020, provided eligible workers up to 80 hours of paid sick leave to address COVID, and 10 additional weeks of child care leave for COVID-related interruptions. The law excluded large companies and their employees, and had rules that allowed very small companies to deny child care leave to their workers. An additional carveout for health care workers and first responders meant that an employer could claim hardship and deny a request for sick leave or child care leave, without any proof required.

This exemption sent the message that health care workers were so “essential” that they could be forced to care for others even when they and their families had needs of their own.

Even before COVID-19, turnover in the health care workforce was a concern. During the pandemic, the stress on health care workers, especially women, was profound. After COVID, substantial shares of workers reported burnout and said they were considering leaving the health care profession—and women were more likely than men to say they might find other work.

Now, the United States is in the midst of a health care workforce crisis, caused in part by the inability of nurses, physicians, and other caregivers to care for themselves and their families. The stability and quality of the health care sector, which is overwhelmingly comprised of women workers, and the country, depends on addressing this challenge.

There is no silver bullet that can create better quality jobs across the entire health care industry, but public investments in child care, higher wages for the lowest paid workers, and paid leave for all would go a long way—and would even contribute to economic growth in the process.

Child care for health care workers is a major issue—more than in other sectors because of the disproportionate shareof family caregiving that women do. A 2022 study of nurses and teachers found that 11 percent of workers reported that child care issues affected their ability to work compared to 6 percent of workers in other industries. Women nurses and teachers were 54 percent more likely than men to report that child care affected their ability to work.

On-site child care—with hours that reflect the long, irregular shifts that nurses and other health care workers must work—is one solution. But on-site child care arrangements can be tenuous. Earlier this year, a major health care center in Nebraska announced it would close its child care center, causing concerns that the shutdown would further exacerbate worker shortages.

And not all health care workers work in a facility that can support a child care center, or work in a facility at all. Which is why creating universal access to high-quality, affordable child care, and improving the quality of child care jobs is so critical.

Fair, family-supporting wages are also important, and workers in direct care jobs, like personal care and home health aides, face particular precarity. Those who work full-time receive average wages of just over $600 per week, or just over $15 per hour for 40 hours per week of work. Immigrant, Black, Latine, and Asian workers comprise substantial shares of this workforce, and often face circumstances at home and on the job that are more difficult than those of white workers. Workers who cannot afford to support themselves and their families—much less pay others to care for their families while they, in turn, care for others—are more likely to leave the field entirely, causing care challenges for family members who need to work and care gaps for patients.

Direct care workers, like millions of other U.S. workers, also often have both children and older adults or loved ones with disabilities to care for. Yet they are extremely unlikely to have paid sick time or paid family and medical leaveunless they live in one of the minority of states that guarantees one or both of these policies. And even if they are in the right state, they may not get paid sick time or paid leave because of eligibility rules.

Creating national paid sick time,  as well as paid family and medical leave programs for all working people, could provide the scaffolding on which the medical profession could build.

Paid leave policies are also essential for patients and their families, covering time they need away from work to deal with their health (an argument the American Academy of Pediatrics has made to federal lawmakers). Physicians would also benefit from these programs. While they have more access to paid and unpaid leave, they face often unreasonable expectations about training, hours, and shifts that make work and family incompatible. Women now represent more than half of medical school students but they make up just 37 percent of active physicians in the United States.

A recent American Board of Medical Specialties policy offering parental leave to medical residents is a good start. But these leaves are relatively short, may be unpaid, and do not extend to other family caregiving needs. Access to and utilization of leave by female and male physicians are uneven nationwide due to both policy gaps and cultural professional norms.

Family-friendly job schedules, flexible work, job-sharing arrangements, and access to child and elder care—on a gender-equal basis—are also important in order to mitigate bias and encourage the use of these arrangements.

A vibrant, healthy, and well-supported health care workforce is in everyone’s interest. At some point, we all need emergency care, preventive care, or assistance with ongoing or serious acute conditions, and health professionals are our first call. Communities, businesses, and the economy also benefit when we are all healthy.

Those who care for us deserve to be able to manage their personal and professional lives with dignity because essential health care workers are human. Practices and policies must reflect and honor their humanity.

The post Who Cares for Caregivers’ Families While They’re Caring for Us? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

California’s San Joaquin Valley is a place of contradictions: It is the most agriculturally productive region in the world, growing over 250 crops and grossing approximately $35 billion in annual sales of everything from fruit and nuts to livestock, wine, milk, and grains. Its 27,000 square miles reside in a geographical sweet spot, with a Mediterranean climate and land watered by once mighty rivers flowing from the Sierra Nevada mountains. The valley possesses incredible cultural diversity, too: People of more than 70 different ethnicities, speaking over 100 languages, call the region home. It is the place that gave rise, among many important cultural moments, to the powerful farmworker movement that built solidarity across race, class, and other divides.

Despite this abundance, it is also a region of deep and concentrated poverty and food insecurity. The San Joaquin Valley is the United States’ most polluted air basin for fine particles (which, when inhaled, increase the risk of a host of health problems, including early death). It is one of the surfaces on Earth most altered by humankind due to a century of mining groundwater, which has caused land to sink by as much as 28 feet in some places and counting.

These contradictions hold obvious perils, but also promise—that the science and resources government and industry have poured into extraction can be redistributed and focused instead on eliminating environmental racism and building just, livable communities.

I was born and raised in the heart of the valley, in Madera County. I was diagnosed with asthma as a kid, although my race and class in many ways buffered me from the worst impacts of our air pollution problems.

For five years I worked as an organizer for the Central Valley Air Quality Coalition (CVAQ), raising awareness of air pollution’s health impacts. Over and over again, decision makers, air regulators, and industry lobbyists constantly told me, and the community leaders and youth advocates I worked with, that we had to accept our fate, that where we live makes pollution unavoidable.

The unhealthy air to which all 4.3 million valley breathers are supposed to resign ourselves is partly rooted in the region’s role in feeding the nation and world. Industrialized agribusiness in the valley utilizes hundreds of millions of tons of pesticides, fertilizers, and other chemical inputs and uses polluting equipment such as tractors and nut harvesters. The region is also a major source of oil and natural gas production, which emits a slew of toxic air pollutants and contributes to smog and particle pollution. Trucks and trains traveling up, down, and across the state via freeways that run through our communities play a role as well. Catastrophic, climate change-fueled wildfires and extreme heat compound an already dire situation.

Research from California State University, Fullerton has shown that unhealthy air costs our region at least $6 billion dollars per year—paid in premature deaths, asthma attacks and other serious medical conditions, and missed school and work days. Compared to the national average, children in the San Joaquin Valley are twice as likely to be diagnosed with asthma before age 18.

The valley is a designated “sacrifice zone,” where industrial extraction and disposal takes precedence over human health—and where low-income, Black, brown, and Indigenous residents are asked to sacrifice the most. That is certainly true of south Stockton, which has some of the highest asthma rates in the state. Barred from living in other parts of the city, Filipinos immigrated there in the early 20th century, and the neighborhood became home to the largest diaspora in the nation. But in the 1970s, the state demolished large swaths of the neighborhood to construct Highway 4, an artery for the flow of goods in and out of the Port of Stockton. The port concentrates cancer-causing diesel pollution from ships, trains, trucks, and other equipment, which commingles with other pollution sources nearby, such as an industrial biomass plant that burns woody waste.

As I keep hearing, the people of south Stockton, like people across the San Joaquin Valley, have a “choice”: accept pollution-causing industries or suffer lost jobs and revenue. But I know it does not have to be this way. I have seen community-innovated solutions firsthand, in both my academic research and advocacy work in the region.

In extensive interviews with advocates, staff, and decision-makers at the San Joaquin Valley Air District, I learned that they agree on one thing: that the region needs transformation away from extractive industries in order to achieve clean air. As one decision-maker told me, “The only way you’re going to change the Air [District Governing] Board is change the boards of supervisors because they control the Air Board, and until you get a majority of the supervisors who don’t have that farmer mentality, you’re not going to be able to change the valley.” They added, “The economy has to be diversified.”

Change, however, can also come from the ground up, which I’ve witnessed in my time at CVAQ, where I returned as executive director after receiving my PhD in geography. I’ve seen how communities across the valley continue to take matters into their own hands when it comes to air pollution, to protect and improve neighborhoods. Local campaigns in Kern and Los Angeles Counties, combined with years of cross-regional organizing, have built the political will to help institute a 3,200-foot health and safety setback rule to protect people from oil drilling. The setback will help keep homes, hospitals, schools, and other sensitive receptors farther from oil wells, which increase the risks of respiratory illnesses, cancer, and other health issues for people living and working nearby.

In south Stockton, community groups like Little Manila Rising are providing asthma management services to the most impacted households, distributing resources such as indoor air filters, planting trees, and employing unhoused and formerly incarcerated community members. Little Manila Rising, CVAQ, and the enforcement division of the California Air Resources Board are collaborating on a multi-year research project that is engaging the community in studying and implementing solutions to address diesel truck traffic.

There are many more opportunities to create jobs and build a more equitable and healthy San Joaquin Valley. We have a history of building solidarity to achieve change. California has abundant science, people power, and economic resources to make good on its claims as an environmental trendsetter that prioritizes equity.

The post Where Bad Air Carries Peril and Promise appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

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In the spring of 2019, residents of eastern California’s Owens Valley were on the fight. As is usual in that part of the world—where a century of aggressive water extraction by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has left the valley dry—they were angry about a water project dreamed up by some Southern Californians.

But this was a new kind of fight. Premium Energy Holdings LLC, a small, Walnut-based energy company, had filed for a preliminary federal permit to explore the development of an enormous pumped energy storage facility to be built in the mountainous terrain near Bishop for the benefit of Southern California utilities. The facility’s complex of dams, pipelines, and hydroelectric generation would have flooded sizeable sections of the John Muir Wilderness, destroying critical habitat of several endangered species and beloved recreational landscapes in the process.

After locals submitted scathing feedback during a mandated public comment period, Premium withdrew the federal application associated with the project. But in the three years since, the company has filed for preliminary federal permits for three similar, billion-dollar energy storage facilities in other remote sections of California. Additional pumped storage projects are moving forward near Joshua Tree National Park and in northern San Diego County. Meanwhile, other types of energy storage installations are also being developed across the state, such as compressed air storage facilities near Morro Bay and Rosamond and lithium-ion battery arrays in multiple desert locations. Beyond the state’s borders, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power is flirting with the concept of a pumped hydro facility at the Hoover Dam, and Daybreak Power, a private energy developer, is pursuing federal permits to build the 3.6 billion dollar Navajo Energy Storage Station near Lake Powell, a pumped hydro installation that they envision providing electricity to markets in California, Arizona, and Nevada. And these are only a few of the projects currently underway. Electricity storage infrastructure is quietly transforming the rural U.S. West.

Pumped storage facilities consist of two (or more) reservoirs that are sited next to one another, but at substantially different elevations and connected by pumps and a hydroelectric generation facility. They depend on landscape, requiring steep grades, safe sites for reservoir development, and abundant water. When electricity is plentiful and inexpensive (such as around midday, when solar production is peaking), they pump water uphill, only to release it downhill through the hydroelectric generating station to produce power when the sun isn’t out.

The technology isn’t actually anything new. While companies such as Premium tend to frame their projects as cutting edge, several large-scale, utility-owned facilities have operated within and beyond California for decades. Because of their scale, however, the facilities are extremely expensive to develop and cumbersome to permit. These obstacles have meant that no new utility-scale facilities have come online in California since Pacific Gas & Electric’s Helms Power Plant, located east of Fresno in the Sierra Nevada, in 1984.

Why are they back on the table now? The new need for storage infrastructure is a side effect of California’s aggressive embrace of wind and solar electricity generation. Since 2002, the state’s Renewables Portfolio Standard (RPS), a policy geared at expanding clean electricity generating capacity via binding targets, has set continuously escalating renewable energy procurement requirements for its load-serving entities (the industry term for a utility). This transition accelerated in 2018, when the California legislature passed SB100, a bill requiring that 100% of the state’s electricity be produced by “zero emission energy sources” by 2045.

But renewable sources have a reliability problem: unlike fossil fuel sources, which can provide a constant stream of electricity, windmills and solar panels can’t produce when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine. This means that the state needs on-demand, zero-emission electricity generating capacity—typically referred to as energy storage—to use during those times. It also means that this storage will only become more important for the state’s grid as renewable energy development increases.

To achieve this, the California Public Utility Commission (CPUC) has included electricity storage targets in the energy procurement orders it has issued in support of meeting the RPS, including dramatic increases in 2013 and 2021. So far, this has mainly resulted in a rapid expansion of lithium-ion battery storage facilities, usually connected to renewable energy generation sites. Many of these installations are concentrated amid the desert scrub of eastern Kern County and look like unexceptional clusters of smallish beige outhouses to the untrained eye.

But a detail of the 2021 procurement order has ensured that other technologies will be part of the new storage rush. The new target of 1000 MW of long-term electricity storage creates a need for facilities capable of holding the energy in reserve past the typical four-hour maximum of lithium-ion batteries—like pumped storage. So, with political will on their side, energy companies are rushing to permit possible pumped storage projects. (And though the RPS is specific to California, the storage rush isn’t: Arizona, Colorado, and Nevada also all have their own tax incentives in place designed to encourage the development of energy storage infrastructures.)

Cheerleaders tout these storage projects as essential to the transition from fossil fuel dependence to renewable energy. But—as the resistance from the residents of the Owens Valley shows—the installations can also bring serious negative impacts to local environments. In eastern Riverside County, for instance, locals have been fighting the Eagle Mountain Pumped Storage Project for thirty years, arguing that pumping desert groundwater to power the system will disrupt the fragile desert ecosystem, threatening its flora and fauna.

Given the urgent need for climate mitigation, it’s easy to cast local resistance to such projects as selfish NIMBYism. But many rural residents have already lived through the negative effects of extractive infrastructure on their home landscapes, and don’t want a repeat of those destructive experiences. While these pumped storage projects won’t spew much carbon, they would use enormous volumes of scarce water in ways that will desiccate some habitats and inundate others. Some of the projects also threaten homelands and sacred sites of Native communities, making them only the latest in long histories of violent dispossession. For rural communities, storage projects, despite their sustainable branding, are just more of an old pattern: abusing hinterland terrain to preserve urban consumption.

More difficult, but more equitable, would be to work to develop a grid that doesn’t treat rural areas as sacrifice zones. Incorporating more robust local consultation requirements into the permitting processes for utility-scale storage would help to halt or amend destructive projects. Prioritizing the development of smaller, more distributed renewable energy generation and storage infrastructures that can be sited within metropolitan areas will also help to redraw the lopsided geography of the state’s energy networks—and help city dwellers better understand the impact of their energy consumption. Such a fundamental reconsideration of the grid and its uses is intimidating, but necessary if we want the state’s pursuit of climate justice to be anything more than a branding exercise.

The post The Rural Price Tag of California’s Clean Energy Transition appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

What, then, could be a more fitting setting—and metaphor—for our Zócalo/ California Wellness Foundation event co-presented with the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, “How Can Our Communities Escape Polarizing Conflict?”

Fortunately, unlike the prehistoric beasts felled by the intractable tar pits, our panel of experts doesn’t believe that hope is lost for humans who wander into sticky situations. Instead, they agreed, it’s possible to de-escalate the cycle of perpetual conflict by practicing active listening, embracing curiosity, and welcoming complexity back into the conversation.

Amanda Ripley, author of High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out, the book that inspired the conversation, began the evening by explaining that not all conflict is created equally. Sometimes, we need it to challenge one another. She defines this as “good conflict,” in homage to late U.S. Rep. John Lewis’ “good trouble.” But once there’s no sense of movement—no “flickers of curiosity” left—that’s when you have high conflict. The term comes from high-conflict divorce, characterized by hostile, aggressive and destructive behavior between the ex-partners.

Gesturing to the tar pits bubbling behind the audience, Ripley said that once you’ve ended up in high conflict, you’re stuck. To avoid getting into the tar pits, she advises, look out for the “trip wires,” such as corruption (or perceived corruption), humiliation (“the most under-appreciated force driving high conflict”) or people who exploit conflict for their own ends, whether for power or for profit or even because of psychological issues (what Ripley calls “conflict entrepreneurs”).

UCLA sociocultural anthropologist Kyeyoung Park brought historical perspective to the conversation, demonstrating how conflict entrepreneurs have fanned the flames of conflict throughout history. In her research on the 1992 Los Angeles civil unrest, she showed how such actors played on existing tensions between Black Americans and Korean Americans in South L.A.

Now, 30 years later, she said, it’s clear why a white judge giving a Korean immigrant store owner no prison time for killing 15-year-old Latasha Harlins, a Black teenager the owner believed had been shoplifting, became a flashpoint. The incident occurred less than two weeks after the beating of Rodney King by four white LAPD officers, and as Park explained, “people saw it as an honorary white sentence, not a Black sentence.” The media, the criminal justice system, and government officials, Park added, exploited and escalated this situation “beyond the control of ordinary people.”

“Do you see echoes of this conflict in current struggles?” asked the evening’s moderator, L.A. Times columnist Erika D. Smith. “Absolutely,” said Park, noting that the Black Lives Matter protests were incited by police violence killing African Americans, yet media outlets still ran articles that turned the unrest into a “Black-Asian or Black-Korean conflict,” because many local business owners whose stores were damaged by looting were Korean American and Chinese American.

“I’m losing my respect for NPR,” Park said frankly. “Things are a lot more complex, but the media is so quickly reaffirming here is Korean American/Black American tensions.” They’re always looking for conflict, she continued, rather than reporting on coalition-building, like Asians for Black Lives Matter.

Image by Soobin Kim.

Turning to the final panelist, former California Superior Court judge B. Scott Silverman, who is now a mediator, Smith asked, how can we get out of this cycle of conflict? What are great tactics of mediation? For individuals or massive societal problems?

“In my field the biggest problem is high conflict cuts off constructive communication,” he said. In his current work as a mediator, he tries to figure out ways for people to communicate more effectively. “People get distracted by issues that are real and meaningful but don’t get to the heart of what the dispute is,” he said, adding that one of his roles is to give people a chance to vent. His ultimate goal: steering disputants off the peripheral topic and toward a more constructive one.

People don’t know how to listen anymore, Ripley agreed. As an investigative journalist, she wants her profession to start asking different questions, and really listen to people and let them feel understood. “We always flit around the surface like a moth to the flame,” said Ripley. “There were deeper underlying reasons why African Americans were upset that Korean Americans couldn’t solve, but could understand better.”

There’s space to do more nuanced work through storytelling, Ripley said. She cites the Solutions Journalism Network as a new model of coverage that can go deeper and find “the understory” that helps people better understand themselves and their opponents, so they can “start to have the right fight with the right people.”

“What would your perfect L.A. look like without high conflict?” Smith asked the panelists, wrapping up the conversation.

“I don’t think that’s possible but what I do think is possible is institutions and practices can proliferate and develop that can reduce the amount of high conflict and intervene early,” said Silverman. He cites, for instance, how the Los Angeles County Bar Association is offering a variety of pro-bono family mediation programs that help people resolve divorce cases without going to court. “We’ll never completely wipe out high conflict but we can institutionalize to a greater degree processes and organizations to help people get past it,” he said.

Park agreed that it’s unrealistic to think about L.A. without high conflict. “But,” she said, “we have to understand what’s leading to conflict and what we’re trying to do.” The good news is, people want to hear about constructive approaches. During her research, she spoke with Korean immigrant merchants who were eager to know what other merchants were doing to help alleviate shoplifting in positive and non-punitive ways. Many were inspired by a story she shared of a local merchant who used a reward system to give kids candy for free if they did well in school. “Kids don’t have money, but kids want sweet things,” said Park. By understanding the root of why young people might be tempted to shoplift, we can address the problem better.

Closing out the night, Ripley doubled down on the need for more complex storytelling to communicate the root issues of our time.

“Every great story needs conflict—we’ve been told that over and over again,” she said. But the problem is that we’ve been defining conflict too narrowly: “The complexity in streaming TV right now is 1000 times greater than complexity of people we write about. That’s weird. In a better world, good conflict journalism would look like streaming TV.”

The post Why Conflict Should Look Like Streaming TV appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The event—titled “What Would the End of Mass Incarceration Mean for Prison Towns?”, which also was accompanied by a collection of essays on the subject—was held at Veterans Memorial Building, on Main Street in Susanville, California. Susanville has a population of 16,000, nearly 7,000 of whom live in its two prisons. The state of California has announced its intention to deactivate the older of the prisons, California Correctional Center, by June 30, 2022; the city has brought a lawsuit to stop CCC’s closure.

The panel—which brought together a leading scholar of prison towns, a former correctional officer and current mayor of another small California town, and the president of Susanville’s local community college—linked Susanville’s current predicament with national debates about criminal justice. In different ways, the panelists made the case that the challenges of ending mass incarceration are linked to America’s failure to invest in and develop its rural communities.

“There are opportunities in rural America,” said University of Wisconsin sociologist John M. Eason, author of Big House on the Prairie: Rise of the Rural Ghetto and Prison Proliferation. “And we haven’t focused enough on giving rural communities enough attention to wean themselves off of caging people.”

The event was moderated by Marshall Project staff writer Keri Blakinger, who noted that she herself had served time in prison. She pressed the panelists on why towns become dependent on prisons, and how they might take a different economic or civic path in the future.

Eason, who also directs his university’s Justice Lab, said that while there is considerable attention on the inequality prisons create, we often overlook that prisons were built on inequality. Rural communities with high poverty rates are more likely to have prisons. At several points, he noted that the late-20th-century boom in prison construction has often been the country’s only public works program for rural places.

Eason detailed how he has mapped and created data sets on all state-owned prisons built in the United States—more than 1,600—and analyzed the towns where they are located. When you compare towns with prisons to similar towns without prisons, the prison towns see a rise in median home value and median income, and decreases in unemployment.

But that isn’t the whole story: “Rural communities are sending more people to prison than ever,” he added.

Eason called Susanville an “outlier” among prison towns for various reasons, including being whiter and more Republican than many such communities, and having unusual infrastructure strengths. But he also noted that Susanville was representative of communities that became dependent on prisons after losing major industries.

Historically, Susanville attracted a young male labor force to work in timber, mills, and farming, another panelist, Lassen Community College President Trevor Albertson, explained. But when the first prison, CCC, came in the 1960s, he said, the prison paid more than in the mills, which began to close. With the arrival of the second prison 20 years ago, prisons became dominant economically, at some cost to the town’s commercial vibrancy.

Albertson said that the state’s announcement of its intent to close CCC, and the litigation to stop the closure, had created uncertainty for the town and for prisoners. His community college, whose student body includes inmates, could lose about 200 full-time enrollments. They’ve been working to make sure that their students continue to receive education, whether they stay or are moved to other facilities.

Image by Soobin Kim.

“Where it has been troubling and really problematic with the closure … is the not knowing. I know it wears on folks in town, I know it wears on folks working inside the prison,” said Albertson. The inmates are not immune, either. “No one asks about the folks in that prison.” Those students’ concerns are particularly troubling, he added, because “when you can’t control your own life, how can you control your education?”

Another panelist, retired correctional officer Alma Beltran, is the mayor of Parlier, a city of more than 14,000 people in Fresno County. She spoke extensively about Avenal State Prison, where she said she took a job because of the good pay, job security, and opportunity for advancement.

She also detailed how the town of Avenal depended economically on the prison. Prison employees and sub-contractors drove home buying, apartment rentals, and retail sales. And the spike in Avenal’s population numbers, as a result of the growing numbers of inmates, made the city eligible for more federal and state funds based on population.

In response to questions offered in the YouTube chat room or by text, panelists addressed Susanville residents and their current predicament directly.

“You are very important because you are the first rural institution to close,” Beltran said of the CCC prison. But she added, it won’t be the last—she anticipated seeing Avenal on an upcoming list of closures. “Other cities need to look at what’s happening here, because they might be next.”

Albertson, the community college president, said that “there’s something next” for Susanville. There is economic development money to “reskill” people who need new jobs as well as the possibility of creating a new “center of gravity” that would draw people to the region.

He offered an idea for one such entity: Susanville’s beauty and location make it a strong candidate to be the home of a new national cemetery, which could draw visitors and help the local economy.

“There has to be something beautiful after there has been something ugly,” he said.

Eason, in addressing Susanville, said that many urban people don’t care about rural places, so Susanville has to do the work itself.

“My question is: what’s the local infrastructure that is compatible with growth industries?” Eason asked. “How much investment would it take? This isn’t something you snap your fingers or change overnight.”

Susanville needs a plan, and he offered personally to assist the town in putting one together—because its future is crucial for rural communities everywhere. “If you want to close prisons,” he said, “you have to give rural communities some options.”

The post After the Prisons Close, Where Does That Leave Rural Communities? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

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Why is that? And what are individuals, organizations, and government doing to improve Los Angeles communities? These were a few of the questions tackled at the downtown Los Angeles panel titled “How Do You Fix a ‘Bad’ Neighborhood?”

Zócalo editorial director Sara Catania, the event’s moderator, opened by asking Los Angeles City Councilmember Marqueece Harris-Dawson, who represents South Los Angeles and grew up there, to explain why his family left the neighborhood.

Harris-Dawson explained that their move coincided with larger American trends—urban deindustrialization and the crack cocaine epidemic. “A place that was safe and was nurturing became completely unsafe, unstable, and downright destructive,” he recalled.

UC Irvine criminologist Charis E. Kubrin said her research has shown that large-scale structural changes in cities such as the ones Harris-Dawson mentioned shape local neighborhoods. “I’m interested in why crime clusters where it does, why it occurs where it does,” she said. “To understand that you have to know how neighborhoods are shaped by larger social forces.”

That holds true for St. John’s Well Child and Family Center/Harbor-UCLA Medical Center pediatrician Chris Mink. “You think one child, one doctor in one office,” she said. “I am one-on-one with the child, but everyone in the community is there with me.” An obese child may be living in poverty, for example, with food insecurity Mink explained. To combat that, she added, you need a grocery store where the family can buy good food, a parent with a job to buy that food, and a park that’s safe for the child to go out and play.

As president and chief operating officer of the Gang Reduction & Youth Development Foundation (the GRYD Foundation), Adrienne Newsom is trying to combat some of these issues through programs like the Summer Night Lights series. Summer Night Lights keeps the lights on at parks in neighborhoods dealing with gang-related violence and also creates events and programs (from sports and food to gardening) for the entire family after hours. The program, said Newsom, is about taking people who live in areas where it’s hot during the summer and who feel cooped up inside, and giving them the chance to come out with their families and enjoy themselves.

“How do you take an example like that where you see success with a program,” Catania asked Harris-Dawson, “And translate that into action on your end?

Harris-Dawson, who was involved in the beginnings of Summer Night Lights as a community organizer, said that it’s two-fold: People and organizations talking to neighborhood residents first, then doing things with the community. Summer Night Lights “created a platform for connection,” he said. “No one knows more than the people living in a block, or a neighborhood, what it takes to bring that place to the next level.” It’s not just poverty but disconnectedness, from both your neighbors and the police, he added, that causes crime.

Kubrin said that communities with less crime have a very close relationship with their police force. “There’s communication, there’s trust,” she said. It goes both ways, too, she explained. People feel they can go to the police if they have a problem. And “the police rely on the community members to help do their job.”

Harris-Dawson pointed to the LAPD’s Community Safety Partnership Program, which places officers in a specific neighborhood for a five-year period and evaluates them not on arrests, but on participating in community activities as a successful way of building such relationships. “Residents know police, and police know residents,” he said.

Resilience and grit have become buzzwords for talking about individuals who rise out of difficult circumstances, said Catania. “Can a community have resilience? Can a community have grit?”

Yes, said the panelists, but they can’t do it without having support from beyond their communities in fixing structural disadvantages and providing necessary resources. “You can have all the grit you want” in a struggling neighborhood, said Kubrin, but “you are from behind at the start.”

Harris-Dawson said that it has to start with creating “a situation where people’s basic needs can be met,” like having the time and money to cook healthy meals. Too often, we marvel at the rose that grows through the concrete. “I’m like, break up the concrete, there are a bunch of flowers under there,” he said.

So what can be done to transform a “bad” neighborhood?

“I think one thing would be to have some type of town forum, so to speak, where we can actually hear from residents what their perceptions are of their neighborhood and what they think are some of the solutions,” said Newsom. It’s more than that, however. “There needs to be a mindset change, too,” she said.

For Harris-Dawson, it comes down to kids. “Every child has to have their basic needs met. A caring adult in their life. Something meaningful to do. And someone to love,” he said. “I think if you do those things, almost every problem’s solved.”

Mink said that we know what a good neighborhood looks like: “It’s safe, loving, and nurtures growth for everybody,” she said. “There are so many things we need to do and we know how to do” to make those neighborhoods happen. “We just have to get people invested.”

That takes resources. “Where does that money come from?” asked Catania.

The money is there, the panelists agreed. Unfortunately, most of it is going into what Kubrin called “back-end criminal justice solutions” rather than “front-end prevention.” The state, she said, spends $60,000 per year to house a prisoner.

What, asked Harris-Dawson, would happen if you spent that money paying people decent salaries instead?

In the question-and-answer session, audience members asked for advice on dealing with problems in their communities, how the panelists tackle various challenges, and their takes on a few different programs.

“If an inner-city residential neighborhood had a pocket park within a quarter mile of every resident, how valuable would this investment be?” To put a pocket park in every six to eight blocks, he said, would take just 1.2 percent of L.A.’s annual budget.

“It would help with health and wellness and stress relief,” said Newsom.

However, Harris-Dawson cautioned against parks without programming. “The park is identified as one of the most dangerous places” in many neighborhoods in South Los Angeles. A football league in the street, run by adults, is more beneficial to the community than a park without the type of programs GRYD runs, he said.

Another audience member asked what she can do to educate her neighbors about resources available to them, and get the community connected, even as she feels unsafe on her neighborhood’s streets. “What’s the first step?”

“It’s one slice at a time,” said Mink. She works with many foster children who face a number of different obstacles. Her hospital has tried to deal with these obstacles individually: A fundraiser for buying pajamas first, then one to provide lunch in the summer, and finally to buy backpacks for the school year. “Just one slice of the pie at a time,” she said.

The post To Fix a “Bad” Neighborhood, Connect the Neighbors appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Four panelists, each involved in different Inland Empire communities, shared their diverse perspectives on this topic at the Zócalo Public Square/The California Wellness Foundation event “Will the Inland Empire’s Sprawl Create the Community of the Future?” in front of a full house at the Riverside Art Museum.

The evening was framed by findings from The California Wellness Foundation’s Advancing Wellness Poll, which found that residents of Riverside and San Bernardino counties endure some of the nation’s dirtiest air and longest commutes. These communities also deal with low wages, which means they often work more, making it difficult to spend time with friends, family, and neighbors. Nevertheless, the evening’s spirit was one of hope from the beginning, when moderator and New York Times reporter Jennifer Medina asked the panelists how optimistic they are about the region’s future and why.

“I’m very excited about our region’s job prospects,” John Husing, a research economist, answered. He said the Inland Empire has added approximately 235,000 jobs recently, bringing the region to a total of nearly 100,000 more than before the recession.

Luz Gallegos, who works with the region’s immigrant population as community programs director at TODEC Legal Center, was also optimistic. She said she’s seen the immigrant community “wake up” and become politically engaged. “We’re very hopeful because at the end of the day that’s how you see change,” Gallegos said.

Medina pressed the panelists to consider one of the Inland Empire’s greatest challenges: How do you engage the community when it’s so widespread and disjointed?

“It’s one community at a time … If change is going to happen, you must start with the indigenous people,” Rev. Samuel J. Casey, executive director of Congregations Organized for Prophetic Engagement and a pastor at New Life Christian Church in Fontana, said. The other panelists agreed, emphasizing the importance of building relationships between individuals as well as across different organizations.

Greer Sullivan, a professor of psychiatry and the Founding Director of UC Riverside’s Center for Healthy Communities, pointed out that it’s not uncommon for people to feel like they don’t know their neighbors or like there is no “community” to begin with. But she had an idea for change: “I think the solution is to start small and build from there.”

Gallegos agreed, saying she’s seen the firsthand benefits of grassroots organizing. It helps to “get in the trenches” in order to know each community’s individual needs. Coachella, for instance, is very different from Riverside, she said.

“There are 4.4 million people in the Inland Empire spread across two counties,” added Husing. “There’s no center to it.” This disjointedness can make it challenging to deal with big problems. “In San Bernardino, 27 percent of children and 18 percent of all people are living in poverty,” he said. “These are catastrophic numbers.”

Sullivan said that there’s a link between poverty and health, and she has been encouraged that this is becoming more widely known and researched. However, the Inland Empire needs to address both at the same time. “Research shows that having close friendships, having close family or friends, is really critical,” she said. “Exercise is really critical. If you don’t have a safe neighborhood, you may not feel safe exercising.”

Gallegos agreed that paying attention to wellness is a necessity for positive community growth. “We live such fast and crazy lives; we are running from taking kids to school to trying to get to work. There’s really no time for wellness,” she said. “How can we work together as a team that will continue empowering the community—not only for our generation, but for future generations?”

The audience question-and-answer period also looked ahead in order to deepen the discussion. One audience member asked: How can people in the Inland Empire get better access to education?

Casey said there are two issues that need to be addressed. First, high poverty areas sometimes lack teachers with the training needed to address students who come to school hungry, or are suffering from PTSD. “The reality is that teachers are walking into classrooms trying to engage students that they are not prepared to engage,” he said. Second, he said, more attention needs to be given toward not just education but jobs in order to put an end to “the school to prison pipeline.”

Still, several of the panelists said they have seen improvement at schools where parents become involved at school board meetings. Ultimately, that’s the kind of action that all four panelists agreed can improve the region’s communities—a perspective best summed up by Gallegos’ closing remark. “By working together,” she said, “I think all of us can really make an impact in the Inland Empire.”

The post More Sprawl Can’t Keep the Inland Empire Down appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Joe Mathews, the evening’s moderator and Zócalo’s California editor, asked Robyn Thomas, executive director of the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, to assess the current climate of gun regulation. Is there broad consensus for action?

Thomas said that in the past year, since the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, she’s seen a sea change on the issue. A number of different organizations have formed and stepped up their games—including Newtown Action Alliance, Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, Americans for Responsible Solutions (launched by former U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords), and Mayors Against Illegal Guns (started by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg). Eight states have passed sweeping gun reform packages, and 13 states have passed more minor legislation. Plus, 90 percent of Americans support background checks—something she said even gun rights advocates will admit “are OK.” Said Thomas, “There is common ground there.”

Yet many Americans continue to cling to their guns, said Mathews, the moderator, and many state that it’s for self-defense, despite the fact that the homicide rate has gone down precipitously over the past 15 years. Why do we feel this need in spite of evidence to the contrary?

Jody David Armour, a legal scholar at the University of Southern California, pointed to the death of Trayvon Martin and acquittal of George Zimmerman as evidence of a fear that persists, particularly “of young, strapping black males who look like they might be from a truly disadvantaged background.” This fear isn’t justified statistically, said Armour, “but that doesn’t make the perception any less compelling or palpable to those who feel it.” Combining the right to self-defense, guns, and social stereotypes about black males in particular makes for a “combustible” situation.

Our perceptions about gun violence are also distorted, said Armour; Sandy Hook Elementary School has become the embodiment of the problem, yet in the inner city, every two weeks, gun violence takes the same number of lives as the Newtown shooting. “Gun violence has a race and has a class dimension to it,” he said. To get at the problem, we have to feel as much empathy for the kids killed by inner-city gun violence as we do for the Sandy Hook kids.

Turning to Jim McDonnell, chief of the Long Beach Police, Mathews asked what view the law enforcement community takes of gun regulation.

There is no consensus, said McDonnell; rather, divides persist. Sheriffs, for instance, who are elected every four years and are generally in more rural areas, tend to object to gun control legislation; police chiefs, who are typically appointed to their offices in more urban areas, tend to be in favor of it. McDonnell added that the debate often neglects the complexity of the situation—with a focus on weapons rather than mental health, for instance. In all of the massacres that have made the news, the perpetrators have showed warning signs of violence and illness.

Could we, asked Mathews, see a federal redefinition of the mentally ill when it comes to guns?

Thomas (of the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence) said that there is hope at the federal level of improving background checks for mental health and improving services for mentally ill people who present a threat of violence. She said that the 56 votes in the Senate for the background check bill are proof of the possibility of change.

So what else could break a deadlock?

Armour (of USC) looked back half a century, to a time when activists concerned about government oppression picked up firearms to protect themselves. “If you want to really achieve a lot of gun control legislation in California, bring back the Black Panthers,” he joked. With a number of other constitutional rights up for debate at the moment, he said, maybe this isn’t completely far-fetched.

Since 1996, federal funding for research on gun control has been frozen. Asked Mathews, what don’t we know about guns that we should?

Thomas said that there are 250 people shot every day in America; 82 of those people die. There are homicides, suicides, and accidental gun deaths. We need research on these different types of gun violence, she said. We also need to know how background checks, bans of particular weapons, and changes to licensing and registration work. But there is little money, public or private, going into that research right now.

One person who is putting money into fighting gun violence is Michael Bloomberg, said Mathews. How strong a force is he?

His position as mayor of the biggest city of America plus his money give him a bully pulpit few others have, said McDonnell (of the Long Beach police). We don’t know if his contribution is sustainable or if it can combat the money being spent by other factions. But for now, he is creating a dialogue we might not have otherwise.

Bloomberg, added Thomas, is providing a counter-balance to the NRA’s money in Washington. And he’s combating the apathy of American voters when it comes to guns; it’s an issue gun rights advocates will speak up about and vote on, but many people who are pro-gun control are less likely to vote with the issue in mind.

Is gun violence tarnishing America around the rest of the world, and could concern for our global image make a difference?

Maybe we can get shamed into change, said Armour: “If our brand is superior, how can we have all this carnage in the street?”

The post A Heat-Packing Discussion appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.