The post Community Coalition President and CEO Alberto Retana appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Four of the poorest, most maligned places in America have become beacons of hope—and burgeoning centers of trust, in people and local government—since going broke in the Great Recession. How did they pull themselves up from an especially low point, and what can the rest of the country learn from them?

This was the subject of 2023 Zócalo Book Prize winner Michelle Wilde Anderson’s The Fight to Save the Town: Reimagining Discarded America, which we honored last night as the year’s best nonfiction book exploring community and social connection at the Zócalo Book and Poetry Prize event.

Held at the ASU California Center in downtown Los Angeles, the program, which also streamed live online, began with a virtual reading by this year’s Zócalo Poetry Prize winner, Paige Buffington, of “From 20 Miles Outside of Gallup, Holbrook, Winslow, Farmington, or Albuquerque.” Then, philanthropist Tim Disney—the sponsor of the program and both prizes—took the stage, where he lauded The Fight to Save the Town as “a moving and important document, and a timely one.”

Anderson received $10,000 in prize money and a pre-solved Rubik’s Cube, emblazoned with the Zócalo logo, for winning this year’s book prize. She announced she would be keeping the Rubik’s Cube, but donating all of her winnings to four organizations she wrote about in her book, and to South L.A.’s Community Coalition. “Because if this book moved anybody, that is because, above all, these people moved me,” she said.

During the 13th annual Zócalo Book Prize lecture, Anderson shared stories from the four places she wrote about: Stockton, California, Josephine County, Oregon, Detroit, Michigan, and Lawrence, Massachusetts. Since the 1980s, these towns and cities and others like them—often older, industrial cities with decaying housing and infrastructure, and high levels of environmental contamination—have grown poorer because of disinvestment from state and federal government and poorer tax bases.

“These cities are broke in part because they’re poor, and their people stay poor in part because their governments are broke,” said Anderson. “This is actually the start of a larger, vicious cycle of decline in which the conditions of poverty undermine the basic trust that is needed for human cooperation.”

But in each place, she found examples of how people and institutions are facing this vicious cycle and finding ways to work together to break out of it. In Stockton, that meant addressing the trauma and mental health effects of violence, segregation, and intergenerational poverty. In Josephine County—one of the most anti-government places in America—that meant saving public services by convincing angry, skeptical voters that it’s possible to build cooperation and trust in government. In Detroit, that meant fighting foreclosures and speculators, and putting property back into local hands. And in Lawrence, that meant forming strong, pan-Latino networks to help residents in the 21st-century economy make a living wage.

“All of these efforts add up to social repair,” said Anderson.

Following the lecture, Alberto Retana, president and CEO of South L.A.’s Community Coalition—which, like many of the organizations in Anderson’s book, engages in ground-up, locally focused work—joined her on stage to talk about The Fight to Save the Town’s inspirations, and how to apply some of its lessons to other communities around the country.

Retana noted that Anderson’s book celebrates what democracy is all about: “people fighting to make something beautiful from something broken.” How, he asked Anderson, did she come to this subject and perspective?

She said she chose to write a “people-centered” book because she’s “really concerned that the way we tell stories about poverty is part of the problem.” Our narratives of poor places feature “crooks in the government and bullets flying everywhere and hell holes … Those narratives reinforce faithlessness that things can be better. So they give outsiders an excuse to stop working alongside people on the ground.”

You can see this dynamic in Los Angeles, a city of 40,000 unhoused people, particularly among the white middle class, Retana agreed. But what, he asked Anderson, is the “heart of the heart of the central solution” to tackling poverty and disinvestment?

“Turning government back toward its people,” said Anderson. “We have to invest in people where they live.” But she cautioned that one community cannot write the playbook for other communities. To the extent that, say, Lawrence has a method to teach the rest of America, it would be “showing up and listening,” and forming tight and supportive networks among people and organizations.

Why center the book on these local networks? Federal and state policy cause many of the problems they are tackling, said Retana.

It’s true that the problems are systemic, and we need federal and state policy changes, said Anderson. But upper tiers of government don’t work without this grassroots level—which creates places for outside funding, policies, and philanthropy to land.

Anderson turned the question back on Retana—whose work is local, after all.

The greatest changes in American history, he said, come from localities up—“whether it’s Ferguson in 2013 or Birmingham, Alabama, in the ’60s, or Los Angeles solving the homelessness crisis in the next few years.” He added, “I really love this book because it recenters the conversation where it really needs to happen: in our backyards, on our blocks, in our living rooms.”

After concluding their discussion, Anderson and Retana turned to audience questions, which largely centered around their advice for people and organizations hoping to effect change locally.

In response to one person who wondered what opportunities community-based organizations might be overlooking, Anderson shared a lesson from Stockton. There, a youth development program gathered all the local youth programs staff together one morning a week for orange juice and doughnuts. “It was an incredible moment for the city’s network-building,” she said—not because spectacularly important plans got made in these meetings, but because they helped people and programs get to know one another and coordinate in an environment of scarcity. “I do think there’s a form of casual coordination that we don’t give enough credit to as a component of social change,” she said.

Last night also kicked off Zócalo’s 20th birthday celebration, and before the program wrapped, Zócalo executive director Moira Shourie took the stage to thank Zócalo’s past and present staff, funders, and audiences for their support over the past two decades, through more than 700 public programs and 3,000 published essays. And then, in true Zócalo fashion, everyone came together for cake and more conversation.

The post Where Local People Build Local Change appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The open-air event, which also streamed live online, was produced in partnership with Esperanza Community Housing’s South Central Innervisions: An AfroLatinxFuturism, a free multidisciplinary arts festival being held at the mercado, a marketplace and community center in the Figueroa Corridor, this Saturday.

The question of the evening—“Is South L.A. Forging a New American Identity?”—offered a dynamic look at how place-based identity can build bonds of solidarity across racial and ethnic lines.

Before jumping into the conversation, moderator Angel Jennings, the Los Angeles Times’ assistant managing editor for culture and talent, explained why the panelists would be using the terms “South Central” and “South Los Angeles” interchangeably.

“You can’t talk about this region, this community, and this area without first giving it a name, and identifying and describing it,” said Jennings. Located on the ancestral and unceded territory of the Tongva people, said Jennings, this land has become “the epicenter of the California dreams for so many.” That includes African Americans, many of whose descendants came to South L.A. from the South during the Great Migration, and immigrants from Central and South America and their children and grandchildren, who’ve increasingly made it their home over the last four decades.

When it comes to South Los Angeles or South L.A., Jennings said, both names have legitimate claims to the space.

Panelists Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo and Manuel Pastor, USC sociologists and co-authors of a new book, South Central Dreams: Finding Home and Building Community in South L.A., which inspired the discussion, agreed, noting that even their title straddles both names. They interviewed some people, young and old, who Hondagneu-Sotelo said, consider South Central “a special term of endearment,” while for others, South L.A. feels more encompassing, especially among those who hadn’t felt included before. “In Watts, they felt very firm,” she added. “This is not South Central. This is Watts. There’s a particular pride in the uniqueness of the place.”

Visual notes by Amanda Oesef

Panelist Corey Matthews, chief operating officer of Community Coalition or CoCo, is a local himself, born and raised on 108 and Western. (He noted, and the audience agreed, that part of being from South Central is naming your streets.) Matthews recalled leaving home and returning to a place with a new name and new demographics. “In a lot of ways,” Matthews reflected, “I’m relearning and learning newly what South Los Angeles is.”

To tell this story of demographic change, Pastor looked to the numbers. In 1970, South Central was 80 percent African American, and around half of Los Angeles County’s Black population lived in the area. Today, South L.A. is two-thirds Latino, and only one-quarter of the county’s Black population lives there. This data offers “a sense of loss on the part of the Black population of this central place of meaning for the community—not just for people who lived there, but for all of Black Los Angeles,” said Pastor.

Amid this demographic transformation, academics and the media focused on the tensions between Black and Latino residents, but few scholars have revisited that narrative since. In their book, Pastor and Hondagneu-Sotelo explore how South L.A. today tells a different story: of how Latino and Black residents have come together and built community in this historically Black space.

What, asked Jennings, were the most surprising things that came out of their research, which included interviews with nearly 200 residents?

For one thing, they said, how central place can be to identity. “Latinos in South L.A. are different than Latinos in the rest of Los Angeles,” said Pastor. Beyond, say, a preference for hip hop over Ranchera music, second generation Latinos, they found, are steeped in the history of American apartheid and Jim Crow. “They’re very easily able to center the struggle of anti-Black racism even as they’re lifting up Latino empowerment,” said Pastor.

Another key finding centered around community organizing. The impact of South L.A. community organizing groups, including institutions like CoCo and Community Asset Development Re-defining Education (CADRE), has been widespread in forging coalition-building among Black and brown residents. “We often think people make movements,” said Pastor, “but movements also make people.”

Matthews agreed. “I’m really fascinated by this generation,” he said, noting that young people of color are coming together around issues that matter to them, whether it’s parks and green space, art, wellness, or entrepreneurship. CoCo’s South Central Youth Empowered through Action (SCYEA) group, for instance, held a teach-in in response to the rise of anti-Asian American hate crimes. “They felt it important to elevate [their] concerns and draw similarities between their experiences and their comrades that were of a different background,” he said. It was a marked contrast to his own experience as a young person. “That was something that we were not doing, at least not explicitly, and certainly not with language at the time,” he recalled.

Visual notes by Soobin Kim

The young people doing this work today with this capacious understanding of identity, said Hondagneu-Sotelo, are “South L.A.’s biggest asset.” They possess “love of place formed by these communities, formed by daily experiences, interactions with schools, sports teams,” all of which creates “a strong sense of not only affiliation and solidarity, but consciousness.”

This has larger implications for the nation as a whole, Pastor said. “Historically, South Central has been looked at from the outside as a place of deficits. As a place of economic challenges. I don’t want to minimize all those,” but he said, “South L.A. is a model of what could be done with good community organizing, power building, and coalition building.”

The panelists also answered questions from audience members participating in the virtual chatroom, including one around what such coalition-building demands.

Pastor cited “frank and honest conversations around differences,” recalling a Q&A from a panel he was on several years back with CoCo founder and U.S. Representative Karen Bass.

Pastor recalled a “young Black man who said, ‘You know, I used to like Mexicans, I just don’t like these new Mexicans’—by which he meant Central Americans.” Another, older Black man in the audience offered his own generalization: “‘Latinos like to work.’” These “impolite, impolitic” statements would never come up in an academic setting, noted Pastor, yet they started a difficult, meaningful conversation. “And out of that real and honest conversation grew a Black-brown alliance to support the retrofitting of city buildings, pipelines for jobs for Black and brown people,” he said.

Before the conversation wrapped, Jennings asked the panelists: What should we be thinking about as we reimagine the future around South L.A.?

“Are we building a South L.A. that will allow our young people to buy here, live here, and stay here?” Matthews asked.

Hondagneu-Sotelo and Pastor agreed, addressing displacement concerns. “Home,” said Hondagneu-Sotelo, “is a key aspect of the book, and the looming danger is, can South Central continue to be a home for those who are currently here—who’ve been here for several generations?”

The post How South (Central) L.A. Is Forging Its Future 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.

The post Prop. 47 Has the Power to Transform South L.A., If More People Used It appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

During my sophomore year at Poly, I found out I was pregnant. When I told my family, they were so disappointed. My family was just barely holding it together. My dad was out of work then, and my mom is disabled by a brain tumor. They had moved to Long Beach as refugees in 1979. They had only escaped from Cambodia because my grandpa, who still bore the scars of an explosion that blew up his friend, had a hunch one night that the Khmer Rouge would be coming. He urged my family to leave and we later found out he was right because the Khmer Rouge did show up in their hometown the next day. Living in Long Beach is not easy—half the Khmer families here live below the poverty line. But it’s hard to say that we have it that bad because of what our families had to go through just to stay alive.

My family had big plans for me—they wanted me to graduate from high school, get accepted to college, and pursue a career. Because of the high percentage of teen pregnancy and high number of teen mothers in my city, they feared that I would become another statistic who wouldn’t finish high school. They always envisioned me reaching higher than they did. My parents insisted that I get an abortion but I decided to keep my baby. Because I went against their decision, I was kicked out of my house and lived with my aunt for a while.

Even though I felt so tired due to my pregnancy, I woke up everyday with the mindset that going to school was still my goal. I believed in this before I got pregnant and quitting was never an option. I had a lot of self-discipline—at one point I was planning to join the military—but I had trouble going to school and being pregnant at the same time. At first, I started missing school once a month for prenatal appointments, and during my last trimester, I was missing school once a week to make my appointments. I had to catch up on so many assignments. I was frustrated and stressed out about how much time I wasted waiting in line at city offices to submit all kinds of paperwork, including my application for Medicaid. I never regretted being pregnant, but I never expected it to be such a hassle to get the health care I needed when I needed it most.

In Long Beach, teen pregnancy is actually really common. The rates are much higher here than the average across the state. In California, the pregnancy rate for girls ages 15 to 19 is 37 babies per 1,000 young women. In 2007, Long Beach teens gave birth to 53 babies per 1,000 young women. In some neighborhoods, the rate was 69. And once you’re someone who needs help in Long Beach, resources can be hard to get: You can’t always count on family savings since a lot of people are low-income; the houses are often already crowded. Teen mothers struggle going to school because they don’t have a babysitter or can’t afford childcare.

About 2 months before I got pregnant, I had joined Khmer Girls in Action (KGA), the 18-year-old Long Beach non-profit that highlights the voices of Khmer youth and organizes for social change in the community. I first saw KGA at the Khmer New Year’s Day parade in Long Beach. The girls were chanting and wearing matching T-shirts with the lotus logo and they looked so cool.

The reason I joined was that I was looking for something life-changing for me, people in my community, and future generations. I heard KGA helped others find themselves and become leaders. Joining KGA felt like home, only more comfortable. At the meetings, which took place in KGA’s office, near Cambodiatown, there were snacks, chairs, music, and people who were supportive of each other. With 20 other girls, I took part in the Young Womyn’s Empowerment Program. We talked about what society assumes about us and what our parents put on us. My family expected me to cook and clean and stay at home in the traditional way, and through KGA I started understanding that other young women had the same kinds of struggles going on in their families. I saw the things that were wrong in the community that we needed to make right. I came to see myself in many of the other Cambodian-Americans we were working to help—people who are young moms, low-income, or dealing with something that you wouldn’t know on the surface.

I was the only KGA member at the time who was pregnant so not a lot of the other young women knew exactly what I was going though. But they showed support for my decision in keeping my baby. KGA was my family then because they were loving and showed affection in a way that my own family at the time could not. I grew up in a household where you couldn’t talk about your problems. And by talking with other women at KGA, I understood why my family and I could not relate—I realized that it was really hard for my parents to show affection and love because of the way they grew up. Sometimes it was easier for them to express anger than other emotions.

With help from KGA, I did finish my sophomore year. They listened to me cry and pour out my stories; they checked that I completed the courses that would be needed to qualify for admission to the University of California and Cal State system. They still gave me opportunities to be a leader—like emceeing lunch rallies—when I felt many people had stopped believing in me.

A few months before the baby was born, my father accepted the fact that I was going to give birth. My parents got along really well with Danny, my boyfriend, and he moved in. In 2014, I gave birth to my son. Over that year, I had really matured as a strong mother and a strong woman. My son’s arrival changed my dad’s perspective and he became supportive. Finally, things seemed to be falling into place. At a KGA event in May 2014, I shared a poem that I dedicated to Danny.

I had no idea that a year later I would be up on the same stage at another KGA event sharing another poem dedicated to Danny, but this time he wouldn’t be in the audience. Just three weeks after the birth of our son, my boyfriend was killed in a car accident and my life changed again.

KGA was supportive throughout the loss. They reached out to me and asked me what I needed. They were understanding of my schedule and continued to believe in my leadership. I emceed another lunch rally and even got elected secretary for Youth Organizing Long Beach, a club run by the Children’s Defense Fund that works to empower young people.

As I grieved—without access to a professional mental health counselor—I came realize how many other teens were struggling as much as I was. I helped plan a “wellness week” when we collected over 1,500 student surveys on health needs. We found that three out of four of my classmates were dealing with stress and anxiety. Forty-two percent suffered from depression and half the students wanted mental health services. Nearly 70 percent needed physical health care, including information on subjects like safe sex, acne, and weight loss. We asked them if they’d go to a clinic with “teen-only” hours and about half the students said they might. I don’t think students’ health issues should be a barrier to our success in school.

Now I’m starting my senior year and my son is 16 months old. I stayed in school and now I want to go to a four-year college and become an occupational therapist. My motivation is my son, and the desire to be someone who gives back to other people, helping people without expecting anything in return. Long Beach is not an easy place to live, but we can make it better for students by giving them the resources to help themselves and each other, and to stay in school.

The post Stress, Pregnancy, and Grief Shouldn’t Limit Success in School appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

My roommates were not Catholic sisters, but other recent college graduates, who sometimes acted a little too much as if we were still living in a college dorm. But most of our time was dedicated to service of our community—teaching, leading afterschool programs, counseling pregnant teens and gang members, working with the elderly—just as the sisters who preceded us in the convent had once done.

The news that pop star Katy Perry wants to buy a former convent in Los Feliz has me thinking about my days at Amate House, a full-time Catholic volunteer program in Chicago. The Los Angeles Times broke the story that two nuns are blocking the archdiocese from selling the estate to Perry, who wants to live there. Early coverage of the story centered on the sister’s disapproval of the “I Kissed A Girl” singer.

My fond memories of convent living, though, make me wonder if the question of whether Perry is a suitable successor to the sisters misses the point. As our society become less connected to religious institutions, it may be more important than ever for communities to think creatively and sensitively about how to make use of formerly religious spaces.

I had never imagined that I would live in a convent. Amate House operates three houses, two of which were convents, with both male and female volunteers, and it is part of the Chicago archdiocese. But I approached it more like Peace Corps or Teach for America: an opportunity to do something special, learn about life in the inner city and give back—not to live out my faith. I identified myself as a “practicing-but-not-believing Catholic.” I had volunteered with my high school youth group through college, but I was more interested in Buddhism than Christianity.

Though I defied typical categories—neither fully Catholic nor a religious “none”— my experience reflects the trend of young Americans disaffiliating from institutional religion and forming their own religious identities and understandings.

My grandmother, in contrast, grew up wanting to be a Catholic sister. Unfortunately for her (but thankfully for me), she lacked the education to join a religious congregation. Instead, she got married and raised my father and his four brothers.

Seeking to understand my recently deceased grandmother’s devotion—why would a woman voluntarily commit her life to a patriarchal church?—I wrote about Catholic sisters for a class in college. The nun in her nineties that I profiled couldn’t explain her vocation other than as a call from God.

Her order had once occupied a huge motherhouse in my hometown and sent teachers to schools throughout the Midwest. In northwest Iowa, she had taught art to a budding cartoonist who would go on to work for Disney and draw the genie in Aladdin. But by the time I visited, they had moved to a smaller house, essentially a nursing home for sisters.

Their grand old motherhouse became Loyola University Chicago’s education school. The sisters were happy that a Catholic institution was continuing their legacy, but then Loyola moved to sell the property to a developer that planned to raze the convent and put in single-family homes.

The city intervened, and the building still stands as senior housing. But the sale of convents and churches to developers is not unusual. Around the same time, my parents moved into a development in a neighboring suburb that had been built on the grounds of a former convent. And when I lived in a convent, my window looked out on a Protestant church that had been converted to condos.

Such examples will become more common as people move away from institutional religion. Places that once brought together a community become individual units, our architecture seeming to reflect our spiritual trends.

Yet, many still long for a sense of togetherness, even if in untraditional ways. My convent roommates and I were not all regular churchgoers, despite living above a chapel where daily mass was held. Our “church” came in the form of meals, reflection nights, and service to the broader community.

But buildings can’t be preserved just for community. In exchange for our service, our work sites paid Amate House small fees to cover our living expenses, including our convent housing. Another solution is to make churches into community arts centers, renting space out to nonprofits during the week. Both situations provide a win-win for religious institutions and nonprofit organizations.

A year or so ago, I met with two sisters in Chicago who were in the process of opening a migrant shelter in an old convent, supported by an interfaith organization. They told me what Pope Francis had recently said at Centro Astalli, a refugee center in Rome: “Empty convents are not for the church to transform into hotels and make money from them. Empty convents are not ours, they are for the flesh of Christ: refugees.”

Intrigued by this tension between money and mission, I applied to and received an International Reporting Project fellowship to find out if Pope Francis had affected Italy’s welcome of migrants. Visiting Centro Astalli and other refugee centers around Rome, I met many migrants living on the street or in abandoned buildings, unable to find work or housing in their new country. Two men showed me how they survived while homeless in Rome, sleeping at Termini train station, passing their days in a park behind the Colosseum and seeking services at churches and convents.

For my last few days in Rome, I checked into a convent hotel along their daily path, a few blocks from Termini. Once again, I found myself in a spartan single.

My convent hotel was clean and comfortable, European beds being what they are. And for not much more than the price of a hostel, I had a private, quiet space.

Four sisters lived on the top floor, and one of them told me that they make themselves available to travelers for either logistical or spiritual concerns. Many orders consider hospitality to pilgrims as part of their mission. In addition to tourists, they host student groups and families of patients from a nearby hospital. And the hotel helps fund their work in the missions.

Yet, when I saw the generous breakfast spread for what seemed like a handful of guests, I couldn’t help but think of the homeless migrants I had met on the streets of Rome. If the government, churches, or nonprofits paid for even a few migrants’ room at this convent, I wondered, how would the tourists staying there react?

Some argue that the pope’s statement against convent hotels reflects the male hierarchy’s desire to control the hard-earned assets of women in religious orders. In Los Angeles, the Katy Perry story is more about who manages the proceeds of the sale—the nuns or the archbishop—than whether Perry or someone else is the next owner of the convent.

I, for one, would trust a group of sisters more than the archdiocese to put the millions earned from the sale to good use. Yet the sisters’ buyer, a driver of gentrification who is also currently refurbishing the former Pilgrim Church into a hotel and restaurant, is no more likely than Perry to transform the convent into a homeless shelter.

As religious institutions decline, not all religious buildings will survive. But as someone who enjoyed living in a convent—temporarily—I would hope that some could be transformed into shelters, art centers, homes for nonprofit or volunteer organizations or other projects that benefit the whole community.

With a little creativity, Catholic sisters’ spirit can live on in a very concrete way.

The post Katy Perry’s Not the Only One Who Wants to Live in a Convent appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Maybe you think of Santa Monica as a place of sea breezes and ocean beaches, of suntans and surf. But for me the core of Santa Monica is the apartment. Over 60 percent of the residents are renters, and many are combatants in a miniature class war that never stops. They are haunted by one question: Will someone try and take my apartment away? If you understand that simple fact, you’ll appreciate a lot of what makes the town tick.

When I first moved to Santa Monica, the year was 1973, and Santa Monica was not yet a bedroom community for the rich. It was still “Oshkosh by the Sea,” a town without traffic jams or movie stars. Third Street had no fancy Promenade, and the old downtown had a single department store, Henshey’s, which was owned by a local family that was as civic-minded as could be. Main Street was shopworn and tired.

The Chamber of Commerce and local newspaper, The Evening Outlook, ran the place. The seven-member at-large city council was an unabashed bastion of conservatism. They had grand ideas and visions for the city—most of which were terrible, and all of which set off firestorms of protest. One plan was to tear down the Santa Monica Pier and build an Island in the Bay with a freeway out across the Pacific leading to Malibu. (Don’t ask why this was supposed to be a good idea.) It failed. But other plans succeeded. One brought the shopping center now known as Santa Monica Place to the southern end of the Third Street Promenade. Another brought high rises to Ocean Park.

People who lived in Santa Monica loved their neighborhoods, loved their Pier, and generally picked up that the city council was trying to benefit special interests instead of ordinary voters. But the majority, the renters, didn’t exercise their power. Only 15 percent voted in local elections, and most didn’t even know who their mayor was. (Many thought the mayor of L.A. was their mayor.) My mission, as a full-time organizer in Ocean Park, was to help change all of that.

My first apartment in Santa Monica was a one-bedroom maid’s quarters facing a front yard on Third Street in Ocean Park. Rent was $90 a month. Jim Conn, the minister of the Church in Ocean Park, had found it for me. I was coming off several years as an organizer with the farmworkers movement, most recently with a stint on the East Coast. I returned to California in early 1973, and Jim hired me as a community organizer to assist in the fight against the Ocean Park Redevelopment Project. Meanwhile, he put together a congregation at the Church in Ocean Park, a traditional Methodist church building at Second Street and Hill Street.

Ocean Park is a neighborhood located right along the beach in the southern part of Santa Monica. It was and is an area known for its creative types. It was also, for many years, one of the poorest parts of town. The City Fathers hoped to evict the low-income people there and, with help from Washington’s newly created Department of Housing and Urban Development, replace the homes with luxury high-rise apartments. This was to happen on a 25-acre section right along the beach in the southernmost section of town, a community of low-income seniors and Latino families. It was called the Ocean Park Redevelopment Project.

By the time I arrived, half of this plan had already been achieved. Two giant apartment complexes had gone up by the water. (They remain today.) A second phase that was moving forward called for two more high-rises, 14 stories each, and not an inch of parkland nor a single unit for any of the low-income families and seniors moved out of their homes against their will. As an organizer at the Church in Ocean Park, my job was helping people to mobilize against Phase Two.

Bad as things looked, we felt a sense of momentum. Activists had already banded together in 1971 to save the Santa Monica Pier, a grassroots campaign that was so powerful it led to the removal of three council members and the city manager. After a long fight, one that finally involved the brand new California Coastal Commission, we came to a deal that lowered the density of the project, created 100 units of senior housing, and forced the construction of a six-acre public park and of two access-ways through the project to the beach. It was a major victory for the neighborhood, and it heralded a shifting of power in Santa Monica.

One hotspot for reformists in those days was Al’s Kitchen on the Pier. Al’s was a hole-in-the-wall hamburger and fish place owned by a woman named Joan Crown and managed by Jack Sikking, who would hold court at a corner table on a patio behind the restaurant. Jack, a reserved, good-hearted man in his 40s, was a straight-up political genius. Without any formal training in politics, he’d figured out where the real centers of political power in the city were, what their vulnerabilities were, and how to tap the best instincts and energy of citizen activists. Activists gathered there for breakfast, lunch, and dinner to discuss how to take power away from developers, The Evening Outlook, and the banking and real-estate interests.

The other primary locus for us reformers was the Church in Ocean Park. Two years after Jim Conn’s arrival, the place was buzzing with a childcare center, a community center, a women’s center, a low-income legal center, and a community organizer (me). The church had its own improv group (known as Public Works), which would do shows every Friday and Saturday night. Artists brought their work to the church. Poets read to audiences large and small. It was a place of innovation.

I remained an organizer at Jim’s church for a little over three years. Then I began to work on other issues in the city and went on to a career as an organizer and an advocate. Those years in the mid-1970s gave me not only the tools to do this work but also the inspiration to know that social change and social justice are possible and real. And the power shift we set in motion led to the most dramatic change of all in Santa Monica: rent control, enacted amid runaway inflation in 1979.

Santa Monica in the old days—the days I knew from 1973 through the ’90s—was, to be frank, a hell of a lot more fun than it seems to be today. We activists lived in Ocean Park and never went north of Montana because that was “north of the people.” Tuesday evenings meant city council meetings and then talk, talk, talking at Zucky’s Deli (now long gone) on Wilshire and Fifth Street. Mornings meant a long breakfast, often at the Omelet Parlor on Main Street. There were telephones in each booth, because so many unemployed actors and political organizers came in for breakfast. Unlike most places, it looked down on smokers: you had to get up and fetch an ashtray.

There is a great temptation to simplify and make cute what Santa Monica was in those days. But the fights were serious, and passing rent control ultimately brought stability and peace to thousands of renters. All of this emerged from a citizen’s movement that had a vision of cities as more than simply eminent domain for well-connected developers with bulldozers. Cities are places where people live, and those people deserve some security in their homes.

So if you drop by for an overpriced latte along the Promenade, you can rest assured that somewhere nearby is an apartment with a senior citizen who is living without fear of removal. And if you enjoy a walk to the end of the Pier or along the coastline, you can credit the successful fights to enhance coastal access for everyone. Santa Monica is a complex little city where the experiment of democracy led to wonderful results. It isn’t perfect, but it is much better than others would have made it.

The post When Santa Monica Was Still Oshkosh By the Sea appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.