If so, then you should go jump in a lake.

Either Tahoe or Elsinore will do.

South Lake Tahoe and Lake Elsinore—separated by 460 miles, 5,000 feet in elevation, and 25 degrees in average temperature—have built such supportive housing infrastructures that within two years both could achieve “functional zero.” That’s the term for communities that have solved homelessness for a particular population, with systems comprehensive enough to assure that homelessness is rare, brief, and non-recurring.

In the process, both lakeside communities are challenging the cynical conventional wisdom that homelessness is too difficult a problem for the state’s dysfunctional governments and divided citizens to solve, and showing other California places how—with jet-ski speed—they might support all their homeless neighbors.

There are two layers to this story. The first is about how this deadly pandemic, while killing more than 50,000 Californians, has opened up government spending and new possibilities for the people and communities that survive it.

Last year South Lake Tahoe and Lake Elsinore were among California’s first cities to secure funding under the state’s $600 million Homekey program, which allows cities to purchase hotels, motels, and other properties and convert them into long-term housing for homeless people. While the state’s overall approach to homelessness remains disjointed—a new state audit notes that homeless services are divided up between nine state agencies and 41 different programs—Homekey, which was enacted with dollars from the federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, has already shown itself to be exceptional in its flexibility, funding, and fast impact.

But these lakeside successes are about more than numbers, or the benefits of emergency-era programs. The second layer of this story is that the biggest obstacles to reducing homelessness lie not with the people living on the streets, but in the conflicts within communities about how to respond to the problem.

South Lake Tahoe, among California’s colder places, and Lake Elsinore, among its hottest, both could take advantage of pandemic opportunities on homelessness because they had already managed to find a comfortable middle temperature on the issue.

In Tahoe, the cold was the inspiration for addressing homelessness. Those who wanted progressive assistance for homeless people and those who wanted tougher law enforcement both agreed that the area’s winters could kill people living outdoors. So, community leaders, including local doctor Marissa Muscat, opened the Warm Room, a seasonal winter shelter, in 2015. As the shelter grew, so did the non-profit Tahoe Coalition for the Homeless, which ran the shelter and brought people together to work on homeless issues.

At the time, there was no year-round shelter or permanent supportive housing in South Lake Tahoe, population 22,000—or anywhere else in El Dorado County. To find supportive services, from mental health care to veterans’ benefits, people experiencing homelessness in South Lake Tahoe sometimes had to travel an hour over Echo Summit to get to Placerville, the county seat.

In the year before COVID hit, the Tahoe Coalition was building momentum for locally based, long-term supports. In January 2020, the coalition hired an executive director with extensive experience in Bay Area homelessness work, Cheyenne Purrington.

COVID accelerated these efforts. The coalition built a data-sharing network to identify those most in need. The coalition, whose staff has grown from 2 to 15, first used Project Roomkey, a temporary state program enacted during the pandemic, to house 30 people in the Econo Lodge. When Homekey funds became available in the fall, the coalition then purchased three motels that are now being turned into permanent supportive housing for 70 people.

Purrington says this investment in housing supports is paying off in fewer police calls and emergency room visits. It also demonstrates the power of supporting people at risk of homelessness in smaller places. “With a community like South Lake Tahoe, we can end homelessness with these three properties,” she says. “If small communities don’t have resources to do this, people start bouncing around and end up in larger cities where there are services.”

Lake Elsinore, a southwest Riverside County city of 70,000, is learning a similar lesson.

Located between but apart from the L.A. basin, San Diego, and the Inland Empire desert, Lake Elsinore can feel like the edge of the urban cliff (perhaps that’s why sci-fi novelist John Varley has civilization re-establish there at the end of Slow Apocalypse). In 2015 and 2016, the city was consumed with conflict over growing homelessness; breaking up encampments didn’t seem to work.

But Lake Elsinore is full of risk-takers (it’s such a mecca for extreme sports that I’m always being invited to jump out of airplanes there), and in 2017, the city decided to brave the political winds and form a homelessness task force with local officials, law enforcement, and concerned citizens. Those meetings created a safe space to think seriously about the problem. “Homelessness was such a divisive topic here,” says city official Nicole Dailey, a task force participant. “The task force allowed us to work.”

The task force soon focused on housing 150 local people identified as chronically homeless, many of them living along the lake’s 14 miles of shoreline. Lake Elsinore at the time offered little in terms of shelters and other supports; people who needed help could be sent to the city of Riverside or the Coachella Valley. But the task force changed that. The county sheriff’s department assigned a community resources officer for Lake Elsinore. A nonprofit called Social Work Action Group, or SWAG, stepped in to lead homeless services. The city used pre-pandemic grants to secure one motel for emergency housing, and to turn a former convent in nearby Perris into longer-term housing.

When the pandemic and Homekey arrived with a $3.1 million grant, the city quickly purchased a motel in Lake Elsinore’s historic downtown. It opened on December 30 with a nautical name, the Anchor.

When SWAG’s on-site manager Robel Kevorkian gave me a tour recently, the Anchor was immaculate, with people occupying all but two of the 16 rooms, each of which are equipped with their own kitchen and bath. The staff include social workers, a nurse practitioner, an occupational therapist, and a substance-abuse counselor. There’s a music room, a shaded outdoor dining space, a classroom for clients, a community garden, a swimming pool, and a hot tub. The Anchor provides only breakfast and lunch, but one client currently living there is such a skilled chef that he often cooks dinner for everyone.

“I worked outreach, and it’s harder when people are on the streets or by the lake,” says Kevorkian. “It’s much easier and better to provide support to people here.”

Homelessness is not over. Indeed, from one room at the Anchor, I could see a homeless person camped on the city’s Riverwalk. When I later spoke to that man, and four other homeless people living on the lakeshore, each said SWAG was in close touch, and was working to find them housing.

But functional zero for chronic homelessness is not so far away. City officials say their point-in-time homeless count has declined more than one third since 2018. And the city is eyeing both expansion and further development of the Anchor. While the facility now provides 90-day interim housing (before people graduate to the Perris convent), Lake Elsinore plans to turn it into permanent supportive housing by 2025.

The post How Two California Lakeside Communities Are Ending Chronic Homelessness—at Jet-Ski Speed appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

By “this stuff,” he meant mutual aid, in which members of a community work together to meet each other’s urgent needs. Normally, the day laborers and domestic workers who are members of his organization, New Immigrant Community Empowerment (NICE), work together on direct-action campaigns to fight exploitation and advocate for their rights. But the pandemic has pushed them into organizing mutual aid around food.

They are not alone. In recent months, members of progressive direct-action organizations have developed new systems for checking on their neighbors, dropping off food and medicine, providing protective personal equipment to incarcerated family members, and giving cash to those suddenly unemployed to meet immediate rent, food, and medical needs. At the same time, they’re continuing to press for workers’ rights and proper health care during the pandemic, as well as ensure access to federal stimulus money for individuals and small minority-owned businesses.

In so doing, these organizations are harkening back to their roots: people creating social ties by helping each other out, and those ties fueling collective fights for new systems and policies.

Combining mutual aid and direct action might seem like common sense, but in today’s corporatized and professionalized nonprofit world, this model had disappeared almost completely. Community-based nonprofits in the United States today are split into distinct silos, with service provision firmly compartmentalized in one box and direct-action organizing in another.

The roots of this split lie in the increasing professionalization of the sector over half a century, driven by no small amount of sexism, classism and racism.

Throughout American history, mutual aid societies existed wherever poor, disenfranchised people could be found, particularly Black, Indigenous, and immigrant communities. Chinese immigrants of the 19th century formed networks to defend against xenophobic violence and to fund their businesses when banks refused. Native Americans formed urban community centers in the 1950s and 1960s after the government terminated the rights of more than 100 tribes, forcing people off traditional lands across the Great Plains as well as California, Texas, New York, Florida, Oregon, Wisconsin, and Montana. These urban centers provided employment support, housing assistance, and health care, creating both the material and political conditions for self-determination.

During and immediately after slavery, free Black people formed mutual aid societies to provide resources denied them by the white community. The first was the Free African Society of Philadelphia, founded in the 1770s to provide a place to worship and financial resources to members. Similar organizations soon sprung up in Philadelphia, New York, New Orleans and Newport, Rhode Island, providing non-denominational spiritual guidance and resources such as banks, schools, burial societies, newspapers, food, support for widows and orphans, and more. W.E.B. DuBois called these “the first wavering step of a people toward organized social life.”

These organizations were a threat to the racial status quo. Charleston shut down the Free Dark Men of Color in the 1820s for fear of slave insurrections and Maryland made it a felony to join a mutual aid society in 1842. Despite the crackdowns, thousands more societies formed after the Civil War, making enormous gains for Black communities. Decades later, these self-organized groups would become the infrastructure of the Civil Rights Movement and the inspiration for the Black Panthers, who famously served up free breakfasts and health programs alongside their fight against police brutality and exploitation of Black communities.

European immigrant communities of the 19th and 20th centuries, too, relied on cooperative efforts that helped their members learn English, find decent housing, and resist labor abuse. Incorporating a mix of mutual aid, community organizing, and legislative campaigning, the social reformer Jane Addams founded Chicago’s Hull House in 1889, sparking a movement that counted more than 400 “settlement houses” within 20 years. Addams had been inspired by visiting an English settlement house where she saw boundaries of language, class status, and religious affiliation stretching and blurring. In the United States, settlement houses were community arts centers, social service providers, and civic action committees all rolled into one.

Formalizing social work for white people began with the settlement houses. In the late 1890s, Addams’ training of settlement house volunteers became the basis of early social work college programs. Settlement house workers increasingly felt the need for credentials because the medical doctors and lawyers who intervened in the lives of poor families routinely ignored the insights of the volunteers, mostly well-off white women, whom they perceived as amateurs. Early training programs were practical, such as the 1904 partnership between Columbia University and the New York School of Philanthropy. In 1915, medical educator Dr. Abraham Flexner critiqued social work as lacking professionalism of the sort that’s found in medicine, law, and preaching, and labeled social workers as “narrow minded technicians.” Colleges then began to push curricula that would elevate the “theory” of social work rather than the practice.

The settlement houses, meanwhile, continued their social reform projects, including sanitation reform, women’s suffrage, temperance, legislation against child labor, and labor law. Movement leaders such as labor advocate Frances Perkins wrote many of these ideas into the New Deal. In the throes of the Great Depression, the Social Security Act of 1935 created pensions for the elderly, care for the disabled, a state-run medical insurance program for the poor, and unemployment insurance. But the legislation also reflected the prevailing racism of the time, excluding domestic and farm workers in a compromise that ensured that Southern Democrats and the agricultural industry would continue to have access to cheap labor. Left to fend for themselves, those communities, largely comprised of people of color, continued to rely on mutual aid even as they tried to organize for change.

In this April 16, 1969 photograph, Bill Whitfield, member of the Black Panther chapter in Kansas City, serves free breakfast to children before they go to school. Courtesy of William P. Straeter/Associated Press.

At the same time, Black social work traditions grew out of mutual aid organizations, added journalism to the practice, and for decades had a testy relationship with the white social work establishment. Leaders like Mary Church Terrell, Anna Julia Cooper and Mary Jane Patterson founded the Colored Women’s League in 1892 to generate racial uplift through self-help. Thyra J. Edwards, virtually unknown in mainstream social work history, was also a trained journalist. These women made lynching their top priority.

Despite political action among social workers of all races, Saul Alinsky is the white man credited with codifying the social action elements. Starting in Chicago’s Back of the Yards neighborhood in the 1930s, Alinsky eventually became the nation’s most famous “community organizer” with his approach of starting with local issues in order to rally people to fight for broader political change. He described this approach in his 1971 book Rules for Radicals: “They organize to get rid of four-legged rats and stop there; we organize to get rid of four-legged rats so we can get on to removing two-legged rats.” Alinsky built the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), one of the largest and most powerful organizing networks of the 20th century, uniting churches, ethnic associations, and neighborhood groups in direct-action campaigns. It was an IAF affiliate in Baltimore, for example, that won the first local Living Wage law in 1994, the precursor to today’s “Fight for $15.”

The Alinsky model came to dominate the way activists were trained and organized. It featured highly professionalized, well-paid organizers who kept any radical politics to themselves in the name of people power. The IAF also had a distinctly male culture. Alinsky expected organizers to work around the clock; women, he thought, were too delicate, even if he didn’t publicly discourage them from the work.

Alinsky’s influential “rules” saw services—mostly organized by and provided by women—only as a means to direct action campaigning. The goal was to deliver “winnable” material improvements as well as change the relations of power between everyday people and the institutions that shaped their lives. Described as “non-ideological,” this model characterized membership-based community organizations for many years. But over time, organizers who were women and people of color have disrupted and changed that norm, arguing that racism, sexism and capitalism would never be challenged under these conditions.

In any case, the split between providing services and advocating for systemic change had long been established in the U.S. When the National Association of Social Workers was formed in 1955, providing services via casework and organizing for systemic change had become distinct streams of social work. By 1960, they had their own tracks at various universities. Funding patterns followed. Philanthropists, too, viewed these functions as separate, driving far more resources to apoliticized service provision than they did to community organizing. When I was learning to organize in the late 1980s, I was consistently told that self-help schemes, lending circles, and cooperative businesses had little to do with “real” organizing.

Today, though, a new generation of activists is erasing that distinction.

The pandemic, in particular, has clarified that organizing cannot be divorced from actually helping people. In March, on a webinar about race and COVID-19, the moderator asked us panelists, “What inspires you?” I applauded all the self-organized mutual aid schemes and noted that prominent organizing networks have jumped in, including the Center for Popular Democracy, People’s Action, the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Black Lives Matter, United We Dream, Faith in Action, and Make the Road, among many others. All are responding to the immediate needs of their constituencies—food, masks, money, help navigating government assistance—and diverging from their pre-coronavirus activities. Another panelist countered: “But mutual aid can’t solve this crisis at scale. Only government can do that.” Some activists fear that politicians will try to replace government care with community care, or that mutual aid will absorb all of our energy, leaving nothing for political fights.

But especially in times when the state dramatically fails to deliver what people need, mutual aid is a powerful way, sometimes even the only way, to help people manage daily life while sustaining their spirits in the struggle for systemic change. Organizing requires courage; courage comes from community. Mutual aid fuels the audacity to demand more because it reinforces that we are not alone in our suffering.

Chai Moua, the Civic Engagement Director at Freedom, Inc, a 17-year-old coalition of Black and Southeast Asian groups in Wisconsin, told me that her organization has been ready for this moment. “We have always believed in combining service and organizing to get to a bigger future,” she said. “Our food pantry is actually part of our civic engagement work. We’re not just giving you food but showing systematically ‘this is why our folks don’t have access to healthy food,’ and then changing those systems.”

The United States, and perhaps the world, is at the beginning of a string of fundamental shifts in culture, politics, economy and daily life. The combined disruption of an ongoing deadly pandemic, record unemployment, and multiracial uprisings to defend Black lives will soon make many of our existing models irrelevant. Photos of sophisticated mutual aid operations at recent Black Lives Matter protests powerfully symbolize the future of organizing, protest, and direct action. Everyone is discovering what some of us have always understood: The social ties cultivated by mutual aid are the same ties needed to fuel a historic boycott, a union organizing drive, or a campaign to close down prisons. Our ancestors knew this well, and now we do too.

The post Why Today’s Social Revolutions Include Kale, Medical Care, and Help With Rent appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

What I did not do, but really wish that I had, was enter a description of my experience into the U.S. Geological Survey’s crowdsourcing initiative, “Did You Feel It?” The system collects data from people who have felt tremors to determine the extent and intensity of earthquakes in near-real time. The submitted data are used in the USGS ShakeMaps, which help organizations like the Federal Emergency Management Agency prepare for and respond to earthquakes.

USGS’s “Did You Feel It?” initiative is a great example of one kind of citizen science—everyday people using their experiences or interests to participate in scientific projects. These research projects come from a startling variety of scientific disciplines. Bird lovers can participate in the Audobon Society’s annual Christmas bird count. History enthusiasts can scrutinize 19th-century whaling logbooks to better understand climate change. You could also use a virtual microscope to hunt for particles of interstellar dust retrieved by the Stardust spacecraft in 2006. If neuroscience is more your thing, you can help to map the brain by playing EyeWire, an online game designed by a lab at Princeton University.

Citizen contributions to projects like these go back at least as far as Thomas Jefferson’s plan to collect weather data from as many people as possible in order to produce “a reliable theory of weather and climate.” It’s the kind of citizen science that most everyone agrees is worthwhile—helpful to researchers and edifying for the public. In fact, a bipartisan bill making its way through Congress at the moment, the Crowdsourcing and Citizen Science Act of 2015, encourages collaboration between scientists and the public. The bill appeals to a range of political sensibilities because it encourages public engagement in science and broadens the scope of federally funded research without increasing budgets. (Citizen volunteers cost even less than postdocs, it turns out.)

But citizens can do more for science than just collect data (as important as data collection is). By educating themselves in the research and infusing urgency into the process, citizen scientists can get involved in decisions about what gets researched, how research is conducted, and how results should be used. This pushes the bounds of citizen science in new and contentious ways.

Citizen participation in science-related decision-making can mean advocating for testing, as residents in Flint, Michigan, did when they realized that, despite their state Department of Environmental Quality’s claims, their water was contaminated with lead. It can mean loudly encouraging new research priorities, like AIDS activists did in the 1980s and some cancer patient advocates do today. Or it can mean funding the development of better air-quality samplers for use by communities near petrochemical facilities. Non-experts can also contribute to decisions about consequential (and potentially controversial) technologies, such as gene-editing techniques and artificial intelligence, by voicing their politics, values, and concerns in emerging forms of structured deliberation.

As Darlene Cavalier, a citizen science pioneer who founded the SciStarter database, and researcher Eric Kennedy astutely point out in their new book on citizen science, the public’s involvement in these scientific issues is not intended to replace or refute expertise. (Disclosure: I work for Arizona State University’s Consortium for Science, Policy, & Outcomes, and we published Cavalier and Kennedy’s book.) Citizens complement traditional science policymaking by contributing perspectives that researchers and decision makers would not otherwise have access to.

The educational aspect runs both ways. Participation in citizen science in its many forms improves adult scientific literacy, an important task as scientific issues permeate public policy debates on everything from Zika research funding to genetically modified organisms. (This might also educate people on the limits of science and help diminish our habit of appealing to it to arbitrate disagreements over the nonscientific realms of policy, politics, and values.) Greater awareness of issues like lead contamination in municipal water supplies can benefit the research process, too. Under federal rules, for instance, city utilities must get volunteers to collect water samples for testing. In 2014, the Philadelphia water utility sent letters to more than 8,000 of its customers but managed to find only 134 volunteers. Demanding that our water supplies aren’t poisoning us means taking some responsibility for ensuring that it’s tested properly.

It’s also worth remembering that a lot of research in the United States is publicly funded, as Cavalier has emphasized: “American adults fund 50 percent of the basic science [through tax dollars], and we entrust people with issues that impact our lives, but we’re cut out of the conversation.” The federal government will spend nearly $150 billion on research and development this year. Some measure of accountability to the people supplying that funding is necessary and appropriate.

Citizen scientists have different incentives than career scientists, which can affect the kind of research undertaken and how the results are used. Of course, scientists would presumably have chosen different career paths if they did not care a great deal about, for example, environmental quality and how it affects people. But the sample of murky water sitting on a lab bench looks a lot different than the murky water with which you’re making pasta for your kids. Because they’re human, the pressures of publishing, of finding funding, of making tenure, of discovering a marketable drug, or of keeping one’s boss in the environmental agency happy can all exert influence on scientists—and don’t always help align their research with the interests of everyday citizens.

This gets to an important final point about public involvement in science policy. Citizen participation improves the science. Ominous clouds have been building above many parts of the scientific establishment, aided by a steady updraft of retractions, fraudulent practices, reproducibility problems, conflicts of interest, conflicting results, and simple irrelevance. One of the reasons for this is that scientists are rarely accountable to anything outside their community. A citizenry that demands tangible results—such as effective cancer therapies and safe drinking water—can help to discipline research efforts toward finding solutions to pressing, real-world problems.

When dealing with the quality of our air, water, and food; searching for treatments for diseases we suffer from; or even understanding the enormous social implications of innovations stemming from cutting-edge science and technology, citizens’ voices need to be heard. This will require citizens like me to participate—rather than wandering off for a post-earthquake beer—and for scientists and policymakers to be more accepting of the public’s involvement in using the power of science to improve the world.

The post Crowdsourcing in the Name of Science appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In long-maligned South Los Angeles, that time is now, said a panel that included a scholar, a community organizer, a youth mentor, and a former city official during “Is South L.A. an Urban Success Story?,” a Zócalo/California Wellness Foundation event.

The lively discussion was moderated by Jennifer Ferro, president of KCRW, before an overflow crowd at Mercado La Paloma, a former garment sweatshop turned community hub. The conversation covered the evolution of South L.A. into a place that is both far more hopeful and far more complex than stereotypes would suggest.

It’s not that the work in South Los Angeles is done, said Manuel Pastor, a USC sociology professor and director of its Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration. Far from it. But, he said, a newly released study on Latino engagement in the historically African-American area, which he co-authored, demonstrates both the tremendous progress of the entire community and that, “there’s no single story of South L.A.”

In 1980, South L.A. was 80 percent African-American. Today it’s nearly two-thirds Latino. Over time the relationship between black and Latino residents—especially among younger, second-generation Latinos—has evolved into a nuanced understanding of their community that bridges race. Today, Pastor said, “there’s a very different South L.A. Latino. They’re deeply invested, and they believe they have a future in South L.A.”

Benjamin Torres, head of the grassroots organization Community Development Technologies Center, known as CDTech, agreed that the momentum is behind a collaborative effort to invest from within, in a historically and socially equitable way, rather than relying upon outside development and its consequent gentrification.

“We don’t try to wipe away the knowledge and the history of people who have come before,” Torres said. “Residents are actively saying, we want to actively create a vision, rather than letting outside development drive the change.”

To be effective, you need to be heard, said Valerie Shaw, the former president of the Los Angeles Board of Public Works and longtime resident of Leimert Park. To be heard, you need to know, first and foremost, how to organize. And, also, how to complain.

“When I say complain, I mean anything you can imagine, any service you want, that’s how things happen,” Shaw said. “If you want something from your elected official, or city government, if you complain in an orchestrated way and you never give up, you will get it.”

Ferro jokingly suggested Jorge Nuño, who recently announced his candidacy for Los Angeles City Council’s District 9, pay attention to Shaw’s humorous and forthright advice for dealing with constituents and vice versa. Apart from his own political involvement, Nuño mentors young South L.A. residents through his non-profit Nuevo South, teaching them skills they’ll need to become effective community leaders themselves.

“A lot of our young people who have spent time with Nuevo South are going on to college and coming back and asking, ‘What can I do? What can I do to help my community?’,” Nuño said.

In the end, panelists observed, the ongoing progress in South Los Angeles owes much to the resilience of a multicultural community previously crippled by crime and a lack of equal opportunity.

During the question and answer period, the audience contributed to deepening the understanding of “multicultural”—with one questioner reminding the panel of the importance of the Asian community to the history of South Los Angeles and to an inclusive future.

Another audience member asked how political and business leaders can work with the community rather than being perceived as a threat. “Let them be guests at our table,” Nuño said. “We want the investment, we just don’t want the displacement.”

Pastor summed up the sentiment of the evening by riffing on a line from rapper Kendrik Lamar, a Compton native, to observe, “The thing that’s going right in South L.A. is that South L.A. loves itself.”

The post The Secret to South L.A.’s Success Is That It Loves Itself appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The untapped potential in South L.A., where I live and work, is huge. There are an estimated 690,000 people in Los Angeles County alone that are eligible for expungement or felony reduction. By getting rid of their convictions, people will have more opportunities to get jobs, start businesses, earn housing benefits, go back to school, or even win back custody of their children.

There are two big challenges. The first is that not enough people know about the possibilities under Prop. 47. The second is that the process of changing your record is not as easy as it could be. But it’s still well worth doing. I know because I’ve recently been through the process of reducing a felony myself.

Indeed, Prop. 47 helped change my life even before it was passed. After I got out of jail in 2009, I began volunteering at the Community Coalition, an innovative nonprofit in South L.A. Eventually, my responsibilities grew, and I became a member of the staff, working on civic engagement and neighborhood improvement.

Through that, I got deeply involved in the campaign for Prop. 47 back in 2014. We held town hall meetings and weekly rallies and made over 40,000 calls to residents throughout City Council District 8. We also knocked on thousands of doors, educating our communities about Prop. 47 and building a larger movement regarding criminal justice reform.

To me, a major point of Prop. 47 was to redirect criminal justice funding away from our racist and broken prison system and invest those dollars into community-based prevention, re-entry, and treatment programs. Non-violent offenders are also coming home early from prison or jail through the Prop. 47 resentencing process.

In its details—which need to be better understood—Prop. 47 allows people who have certain non-violent felony offenses on their record to get those reclassified to a misdemeanor, no matter how old the charge. These include simple drug possession, petty theft under $950, shoplifting under $950, forgery under $950, receipt of stolen property under $950, and writing a bad check under $950. The money saved from having fewer people in the prison system is supposed to go towards programs for crime victims, to help people re-enter into society, and to reduce recidivism and deter people from getting into trouble in the first place.

During the campaign, I was upset by a troubling narrative being pushed by our opponents—that Prop. 47 was going to let out a bunch of violent rapists and murderers. So, in advocating for Prop. 47, I used myself as an example: I had reducible low-level felonies under Prop. 47, and I had been out of jail for five years, was married, was a father, and was doing work that benefited my community.

The slightly longer version of my story is that I grew up in the Hyde Park neighborhood of South L.A., and went to Crenshaw High School. But I grew up around a gang element, a criminal element, and gravitated toward street activity. I was in and out of jail between the ages of 18 and 27 and ended up with a couple of felonies.

The last time I was incarcerated was seven years ago. When I got out, I looked for a job, and my felony drug conviction was held against me, even by companies that are supposed to be “felon-friendly.” So I worked dead-end jobs for a few years. I drove a truck without receiving benefits. I was a cook and a dishwasher. I worked for a contractor.

I was very fortunate to find Community Coalition—CoCo as it’s called—which gave me opportunities to do amazing work and to grow professionally despite my criminal record. I discovered that I had a talent for organizing people, and in 2012 worked on the Proposition 30 campaign to raise income and sales taxes temporarily statewide.

Before Prop. 47, I had tried to get my simple drug possession and commercial burglary charges expunged, but it was very hard—and I was ineligible to do anything about my record while I remained on probation. When I got the job at CoCo, it seemed less urgent. But after Prop. 47 passed in 2014, I wanted to use the new process myself, both for my own benefit and so I could help others who might be navigating the process.

It can be cumbersome and confusing. You start by getting a copy of your “rap sheet” or criminal record, and that means going to the different counties and the various superior courts where you might have had cases. For me, that would have meant going to Riverside, San Luis Obispo County, and various L.A. County courts.

But another option is to request a copy of your record from the state Department of Justice—which is how I decided to do it. That requires getting fingerprinted. The Live Scan usually costs money—$25 is the state fee, and there can be other charges that bring the total above $50. There are fee waivers, but that requires you to submit more forms and proof that your income is under a certain level. CoCo and other organizations, thankfully, have implemented huge resource fairs that allow people to get their record for free. I got my rap sheet in three weeks.

Once you have your record, you fill out forms. The process can vary depending on your county, but for me, it required three different forms—a petition to reduce the felony, a petition to expunge the charge, and then a petition for a fee waiver.

You put those together into a “reclassification packet” one conviction at a time—a package for each charge.

You can mail in the documents, but I was advised to head to the courthouse as a way of avoiding mistakes. Any errors in your application can send you back to the beginning of the process.

The process at the court took an entire day. You get directed to the clerk, who directs you to the public defender and the D.A. for different signatures and to submit your forms. It was hard to navigate, but being there allowed me to ask questions. I also found that at L.A. Superior Court, at least, many of the people who worked for the courts didn’t seem to understand the process themselves, and I got some instructions that proved to be wrong.

Once you’ve submitted your packet—as I did last summer—you wait, for weeks or even months, while the D.A.’s office confirms your eligibility and then notifies the Superior Court, which then must document the reclassification of your record. Usually, you just get the notice in the mail, but you can get called to court for a hearing.

There are many programs and legal professionals working pro bono to help people navigate the process. Several community organizations in South L.A. and around California are running clinics or Prop. 47 fairs to help people out. I went to CoCo’s own Prop. 47 clinic at Southwest College and found the advice I got there useful in my own case. I also found the instructions on the MyProp47 website very helpful.

In my case, my felony was reduced to a misdemeanor by mail. If I wanted the charge totally expunged, I’d have to go to court, which I haven’t yet done. When I have time, I also think I am going to use the process again to reduce or expunge another charge.

In the meantime, I’m hoping to build on Prop. 47. The initiative should be expanded to include any type of nonviolent crime. And we need to take this opportunity to build a much stronger re-entry system to serve people coming out of jails and prisons, especially in Los Angeles County. This need is related to the homelessness we’re seeing; people who are getting out of prison and jail are saying they don’t have many options of where to live.

I’m hopeful that the new federal Promise Zone designation for South L.A., which is supposed to bring new resources to the area, will help. And the state needs to do more too. I’m already involved with Gov. Jerry Brown’s Public Safety Rehabilitation Act, a ballot initiative that gives judges more discretion in sentencing people and releasing them early.

We have such a moment of opportunity to transform people’s lives and our communities; our elected officials can’t afford to be cheap. Recently, Gov. Brown’s January budget allocated a mere $29 million in Prop. 47 savings (later revised up to $57 million) for prevention and anti-recidivism programs, as well as victim services, but that was $100 million less than what the nonpartisan legislative analyst office had identified as savings. This is a longer-term fight that I believe the people can win.

For those of us with records, taking advantage of Prop. 47 means we need to understand what’s available and what rights we do have as citizens. Too many people think, mistakenly, that if they have a felony or a misdemeanor, they can’t vote in California, and that keeps us powerless as a constituency. The sooner we can correct misimpressions, and help people throw off the burden of a criminal record, the better South L.A. will be.

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My family lives in a rural, geographically isolated area of Northern California. Del Norte County has just a handful of preschools, and back in 2009, the only two that had space for our son Henry were private religious schools that charged fees. We visited both.

One seemed like a pipeline to factory work: a windowless room where the emphasis was on following directions and “instilling discipline.” My husband and I observed a coloring lesson where kids had to choose a red crayon to color a picture of a Bible bookmark. We watched as one boy was chastised for choosing green. Another boy, no more than three years old, couldn’t sit still and was punished by having to be last in the line to visit the bathroom. “We give them bathroom breaks twice a morning,” the teacher told us while the kids were queueing up. “They learn to go on a schedule.”

We went with the second preschool. It had colorful rooms decorated with art, a nice play yard, and a kindly head teacher who, among other things, let kids go to the bathroom when they needed to.

Henry attended that school for nearly a year, but it wasn’t a good fit for the long run. The kids went to chapel every day and we noticed that Henry was becoming especially worshipful of the pastor. He described how the teacher and the children would open up a special wooden display box somewhere in the sanctuary, look at his picture, and say a prayer. On reflection, it was probably a picture of Jesus, but my son thought it was the pastor, and no one seemed to disabuse him of this notion. Meanwhile, I became a bit suspicious of the good reverend. He met regularly with the children, but his lessons seemed to be especially political. Henry would report his views back to us. For example, it was wrong for men to marry other men, and Buddhists misguidedly “worshipped Buddha.”

We weren’t the only family with concerns. My friend Geneva was worried about her daughter, Temaia. “She gets confused by the doctrine,” Geneva complained. “She told me that Jesus doesn’t like it when you vacuum in the afternoon.”

I never said, “We need to start a movement for a better preschool in our community.” I just kept running into parents with the same problem. One set of parents was Jewish. They didn’t want their four- year-old to attend a religious school, but they couldn’t afford a nanny. Two physician friends could afford a nanny, but they wanted their son to get more socialization. Another friend was a single parent who needed a school that accepted childcare subsidies, but she didn’t think that the one she qualified for offered a very creative, student-centered curriculum.

It soon became clear that we could keep complaining, or we could work together to make something happen.

We started having meetings—sometimes at the local Family Resource Center; sometimes in each other’s homes. We wrote down ideas on flipcharts, and debated options: A co-op day care? A home day care? An elaborate nanny share? But when the dozen or so of us agreed on a vision for a full-scale, all-day preschool, we knew we had to look for a partner organization. The Del Norte Child Care Council, which at the time focused on afterschool care and in-home child care licensing, had a director who was interested in expanding their services—and the council co-owned a building with an available classroom. After a dramatic meeting with a reluctant DNCCC Board—which had never seen members of the community turn out in such numbers—the partnership was born.

The next step was funding. The parents group worked hard on a proposal for a grant from the California Endowment. Our idea for a small school soon became a vision for changing the community’s norms, empowering parents, and reforming education. The idea for a “Preschool Without Walls” was born: Our preschool would be more than a classroom. It would be a center for home-schooling parents, networked families, playgroups, and student teachers to exchange practical ideas for early childhood education. Our preschool would move the needle towards better education at all levels.

That was the dream, and that dream was still alive when the Little School of the Redwoods—a name our kids chose in a vote—opened in 2011. It was our area’s first Montessori and Reggio Emilia-inspired preschool, combining two innovative teaching methods: self-directed independent learning activities in the morning and child-led group projects in the afternoon. Little School was also the first private pay, non-religious preschool in our county. The parents’ organization—now named the Parents’ Advisory Group (PAG)—helped interview new teachers, select and gather books and materials, and dig a garden.

But since the opening, the road has been very, very rough. Most of the original PAG parents involved in the effort moved away for better jobs or to be closer to family. Some of them never got to send their kids to the school. They aged out before it opened. Others carried on for a while. The PAG continued to meet, but most original members—including me—felt we had earned a rest. And I was pregnant with my second kid and didn’t have time to stay involved.

Now, in 2015, I’m the only founding PAG parent left with a child in the school. Our son Theo has been attending for over two years now.

The quality of the education is still pretty good. But the “Preschool Without Walls” dream—a preschool that offered training experiences and knowledge sharing to the larger community—never really materialized. There was no one to pick up the work at the DNCCC. The funder didn’t follow up with that part of the proposal, and new parents on board didn’t want to devote the energy or time to fight battles they saw as someone else’s.

The PAG has dwindled in power and influence. What was once an organization that provided vision and direction for the school has become a fundraising group that does raffles and jewelry sales. Its members don’t know that the PAG once participated in hiring staff and amending the handbook. Now the PAG is so disempowered, it can’t even get the billing office to accept credit cards to pay monthly tuition.

To be fair, the DNCCC, our partner organization, has good reasons for being disappointed with us. The school’s finances have been in the red. Parents, the council complained, just don’t get involved.

But as I reflect on the effort to create and sustain the Little School of the Redwoods, I have to catch myself from slipping into negative thinking. This is a lesson about the success of a social movement, not its failure. It is hard to organize parents, but we did it. Our principle goal was achieved: the school is here.

Meanwhile, those original parents who remained in the community have gone on to organize other movements—bigger ones. One mom now leads our local community food council and has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to improve our food systems. Another parent from our group created a recycling movement across the school district, saving what now amounts to over a million dollars—and preventing millions of tons of waste from going to the landfill. One founding school parent now serves on the Library Board, orchestrating slow but meaningful reform in a once defunct system where the board chairman did not even have a library card. One couple who moved away is moving back—the husband will help local tribes better invest their money, and the wife will be doing broad-based community development work with a local foundation. They have a new baby, too, who will eventually go to Little School of the Redwoods. The circle of change continues.

As for myself, I’ve stayed interested in education reform, particularly how we might improve after- school programs in our area, despite cutbacks from the school district. Right now, I’m just casually talking to parents when they have a minute, and attending a few meetings. I have a better sense now of how things get done. Which is probably why I hesitate. I know it’s going to be another long road. I also know that it’s not likely to happen unless enough people with a shared interest get together with a flipchart.

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