The post Professor Emeritus at Cal State San Bernardino School of Criminal Justice Brian Levin appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The other students had straight white teeth, more than one week’s worth of clothing, and “pocket money.” All I had was a load of imposter syndrome (though the term had yet to be popularized in the early ’70s), a suitcase of clothes, a box of books, a guitar, and stories; stories about the people I grew up with, and my large extended family in California and Mexico.

My stories about where I lived, or the race riots that marked my time in high school, police storming the students in the quad with batons and tear gas, were met with skepticism by my fellow students. Then, one day, a friend stopped me to say his class had just read Joan Didion’s essay “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” which describes a notorious murder trial that had taken place a few years earlier in San Bernardino County. It described the people of San Bernardino the way I did, he said, “but I never believed you.”

What is it about the printed word that makes a story credible? Why did Didion’s account change me from an unreliable source to a credible narrator?

Since her death, I have been thinking about her impact on me as a writer. Before Didion, no one talked about the part of the world I grew up in. I thought journalism and storytelling took place in big cities, or Europe, or that Americans who got their books published were white men from the East Coast. But that day on campus, there it was: my childhood landscape as described by a woman, between the covers of a real book.

“This is a story about love and death in the golden land, and it begins with the country.”

From that first, declarative sentence in “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream” to its long, lingering description of a bride, the essay held me in its spell. Not necessarily the content, but the incantatory sentences that make the reader complicit in the web of truths and lies she is telling us. At the time, I was just learning about journalism as a cub reporter for the Stanford Daily. I remember taking a journalism class offered by the brilliant Bill Rivers, who took us through a series of exercises that emphasized the use of a few words that count.

It would be another four or five years until a friend at work brought me a well-worn copy of Didion’s essay collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem, which included “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream.”

This was long before we had online access to information about people. Now I know that although from California, Didion was from an entirely different background than mine, the descendant of white settlers who declined to take the Donner Pass cutoff. Yet she was able to see the place much as I saw it, one where people, even white people, were striving to make good without much to start with, people seeking a way out, a shortcut to prosperity.

For my parents, immigrants from Mexico who had worked hard for their tenuous, lower middle-class position, this shortcut was to conform as much as possible to the prevailing post-World War II American culture, always somewhat foreign to them, even as its institutions were crumbling around them. My parents’ notion of a good life for me was one where I lived under their roof while attending the community college, and then worked as a teacher or nurse until I married a local boy, maybe one of my father’s former students at Franklin Junior High. I would have two children, at least one of them a boy to make up for the fact that I was the third daughter in our family.

This future had filled me with dread, and it pushed me to earn good grades, keep my scholarships, and keep hustling for jobs that would fill the gap between what I had and what I needed. The alternative meant to go home in defeat.

My parents did not understand my restlessness, my need for intellectual and physical stimulation. We drove two-and-a-half days to Mexico each summer to visit with my mother’s sister in Chihuahua, Mexico. Wasn’t that adventure enough?

But with Didion, I found a fellow traveler with a slightly jaundiced eye. For her, the strategy was to point out as many of the pitfalls of the American Dream as possible. Her work walks a fine line between compassion and scorn, and perhaps this is what drew me to her writing—the ability to be critical, yet care enough about detail to make readers understand this dual vision. Teatro Campesino, street theatre, and irony were beginning to seep into the wider culture, and my penchant for sarcasm and irony could find space in my work as a writer. While Didion could describe individuals with devastating accuracy, she maintained a certain distance to which I aspired.

It wasn’t our commonalities as women writers that interested me the most about her; rather it was her descriptions of the land. “Don’t you think people are formed by the landscape they grew up in?” Didion once asked. That first summer after my freshman year at college, my parents demanded that I return to San Bernardino for the summer. Upon arriving, I found that many of my former friends would not speak to me, afraid of being compared to the people in my new life. I applied for job after job in town, which resulted in work as a sales clerk for $1.20 an hour at the locally owned department store, The Harris Company, and a short-lived job with the Sun Telegram trying to pull ticker tape for regional and national stories quickly enough to suit the editors. Everyone in the newsroom except the ticker tape operator was male, including a classmate, the nephew of the editor-in-chief. There was no respite in town for someone who seemed not to belong in the first place. My friend who went off to Harvard came home and worked as a garbage collector that summer, which at least paid well.

But I still found solace there, in the mountains and wild places. For a few years, my parents owned a cabin in the San Bernardino Mountains located just above the smog line. I fantasized about owning it someday, but as with my sister’s ’68 Mustang, I was never offered the chance.

Looking at Didion’s work, and knowing now what I did not know then, that she was a world traveler more accustomed to airports than mountains, I am surprised at how well she understood the power of landscape. She treated it as a character, something I have tried to emulate in my own writing. By tying us to the land, stories give us substance and definition. Her stories brought the western landscape into focus, and while it was often treated as isolating and ominous, those images were a balm to a writer who grew up with that “hot dry Santa Ana wind that comes down through the passes at 100 miles an hour and whines through the Eucalyptus windbreaks and works on the nerves.” This was language I understood. And I understood that I could use it to make my way in the world. No matter what I write, the first draft often begins with a portrait of that land as a way of grounding myself before I set off into unfamiliar literary territory.

I met Didion once, before her life took a tragic turn, while she was in Seattle on book tour. She was as she described herself, slight verging on invisible. We had to strain to hear her speak from the stage. Like Didion, I am somewhat shy, so I’m sure I mumbled something about how much I admired her work, and she mumbled something back while we both avoided eye contact. It did not matter much exactly what we said. Whoever she was, Joan Didion gave me the courage to speak up, to bear witness, and to tell the story.

The post Joan Didion Helped Me Tell My Own Story appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Non-profits in this area are stretched thin. In 2009 the James Irvine Foundation did a study that showed that non-profits in the Inland Empire had a total budget of about $3 per capita, while those in Los Angeles had about $16 per capita to work with. The gap may have narrowed a bit since then, but we still have a long way to go to bring the resources in line with the need. And the needs are significant.

At Youth Action Project we realized that simply getting kids through high school and into college wasn’t enough. So we work to get them all the way through college and out into employment on the other side. The future health of the Inland Empire is contingent upon well-trained workforce and a robust entrepreneurial spirit.

We have a two-part program, with the first part focusing on high school students and the other on college kids. In the 2015-2016 school year, our Young Scholars program served nearly 700 students from the San Bernardino area, providing after-school homework support, mentoring and job training. Our goal is to give each student a total of 45 hours of individualized attention each school year.

After participants are enrolled in our program we do everything we can to help them succeed. Our volunteers do home visits, knocking on doors. There it’s about talking with the parents, scanning the home, saying “this would be a good study space for Johnny,” suggesting that maybe from 6 to 7 p.m. they keep the TV volume low, that they set up the house so its conducive to learning.

We encounter single parents, many of whom speak English as a second language. Some are suffering from drug addiction, or are in abusive relationships. Sometimes our mentors will buy groceries, or help make sure our kids have clean clothes. You don’t want a kid not showing up for school or for a job because he’s self-conscious that he doesn’t have a clean shirt. These little things can make a big difference.

All of our college participants come to us through a partnership with AmeriCorps. They help us by mentoring our high school scholars, and we help them by providing structure and support to stay on track. We hire 50 AmeriCorps members a year—and I’m happy to say some of them are the same kids who went through our high school program, so they are reaping the full benefit of what the Youth Action Project offers.

Many college students don’t have practical work experience. They don’t know how to do anything outside of school. We teach work readiness—how to show up on time, how to talk to your employer, how to be productive in the workplace. How to not just get a job, but keep it and advance in your work. In 2015, 80 percent of our AmeriCorps grads got a job not subsidized by the government. We have not yet seen our kids starting their own successful businesses, but we’re working our way toward that goal now.

Since our founding in 2007, YAP has hired and trained 300 local college students, provided more than 100,000 paid-work experience and community service hours; and provided tutoring and mentoring to 2,000 high school students. Over the years we’ve increased our community partnerships—we now have 14 community partners in the region that we work with to extend our reach. We now serve Rialto and Highland, as well as San Bernardino. Our funding is a mix of government grants and foundation support—we just received a $20,000 grant from Kaiser Permanente, which is great both for the financial boost and the affirmation that our programs are helping improve the overall health of our community.

YAP isn’t a sustainable business yet. We’re a service provider. We fill a social need within the system; it’s a fee-for-service model at this point. In the next two to three years my goal is to be able to hire someone to be COO, to keep things running in the day-to-day, and to focus on developing the next iteration—a Girl Scouts model, but instead of selling cookies, we’d put together laptops, or offer coding services.

At the end of the day, the success of our youth depends on our ability to reach them, support them, and raise them up. That doesn’t work unless you can get the kids to work with you, and that means you have to be honest and authentic: “Nothing about me without me.” It’s not a quick solution, but it’s the right solution.

Here in San Bernardino County, there are people who inspire me, who have a vision for change and for a better world. Many of these people are kids, and I have the great fortune to be able to serve them every day.

The post Staying in School Isn’t Enough appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In the early 1990s, my mom, my two older brothers and I moved from South Los Angeles to Rialto in San Bernardino County. During that decade the black population in the Inland Empire increased significantly and many were like us—families in search of jobs and housing away from crime and overcrowding in Los Angeles.

My mom was a nurse and she worked long hours on the swing shift to provide for my brothers and me. I was in the “gifted and talented” program, and I was the queen of softball. But emotionally, I was a mess. When I was 14, I got caught shoplifting and spent three months in juvenile hall, after which I was put on house arrest. Here I was in ninth grade going to school with an ankle bracelet. I was ostracized, bullied, and teased daily. I ditched school to escape, violating my parole.

So it was back to juvenile hall for another six months, after which they wouldn’t let me come home—I was made a ward of the court. Shoplifting was my only crime but I paid dearly for it. My probation officer wanted to send me to the California Youth Authority. To me, that meant I’d get beat up and tortured and possibly killed.

But the judge didn’t look at me as “shoplifter and troublemaker” and, thankfully for me he was compassionate and sent me to a boarding school in Colorado. At boarding school there were mentors who told me that I could change my situation. “You don’t have to be this,” they said. They poured that message and that support into me and they stuck with me. I did well in my classes, excelled in sports, and I even got my first job. I promised myself that one day I would do that for someone else: I would be one of those mentors.

I returned to San Bernardino and spent a number of years climbing the corporate ladder, ultimately securing a well-paying career at a Fortune 500 media company. My salary covered a good home for my two kids and me, a nice car, vacations, and everything we needed to live comfortably.

But I wasn’t comfortable. Inside, I was struggling with the culture—everything from office politics to perceptions about my hair, which I could not wear “naturally” because the clients would not accept it. I felt like it was just me, on an island, by myself.

In 2014, I quit. I re-connected with some childhood friends and we decided we needed to do something for our community. Around this time Trayvon Martin was in the daily news and so was the violence in San Bernardino. With the support of my friends, we officially launched United Nations of Consciousness, a nonprofit dedicated to unifying and empowering people of African descent. Our first official event was a community town hall forum called “S.O.S: State of San Bernardino, Stop the Violence.”

 
Our motto at UNC is “resources, reach, and results.” A big part of our mission is to bring together all of the many resources in the African American community—including individuals and businesses as well as political and religious organizations. Our core values are rooted in self-sufficiency, economic growth, and development.

After the town hall we began leading weekly clean-ups in our parks and neighborhoods. We held resource fairs with a health clinic on-site, GED sign-ups, and workshops on how to expunge your criminal record. Now, we are doing a lot of work with youth.

We decided to do something about the problem of summer. For some families summer vacation means months of fun in the sun. But for working families that are just getting by it’s a nightmare. How are they going to pay for childcare? Sometimes they’re forced just to leave the kids home alone all day. This summer we held our first summer session for kids, an all-day program for six weeks with workshops and enrichment.

For the summer session we had a partnership with the San Bernardino School District that was supplemented with private donations to ensure our programs were accessible to everyone, regardless of their ability to pay. The session was a six-week, all-day program, including breakfast and lunch. The total cost to San Bernardino families was a $25 registration fee.

We’re also trying to expand our kids’ horizons. Last summer I learned of a program at Cal State San Bernardino called Kids that Code. It was a week-long, immersive boot camp. It was a huge success and incredibly popular. I enrolled my son and he loved it. The fee was $450 per child for the week. This summer UNC replicated that program. We raised the funds and found the instructors to donate their time. The fee per child was just $35, and we were at capacity, with 75 kids enrolled.

Even while we keep the costs down we keep the quality up. Our staff, our instructors, our visiting speakers are all the cream of the crop. We have regular West African drum and dance classes, open to the entire community, led by Makeda Kumasi, who teaches at UC Riverside.

We teach a Rites of Passage program for boys age 10 to 14, and a parallel Discovering the New Me program for girls, covering everything from life skills, bullying, and character-building to college readiness and finance to grooming and sexuality. Dr. Lawson Nana Kweku Bush V, chair of Pan-African Studies at Cal State LA works with our youth on how to contribute to the community while remaining safe. I have a 12-year-old son and like many in my community I’ve had “the conversation” with him, about how to talk to police—how to interact—to avoid becoming a target. For the girls, we talk about self-esteem. We bring in Tamara Ellison, a youth director at her church, a life coach, and a motivational speaker who grew up in San Bernardino.

In our summer program we had youth who were struggling with some serious issues and had very little, if any support. We tried our best to help them, but it became very clear to us that we need to develop a strategy and resources to provide mental health services and emotional support to really help our youth become successful. Just during the summer program, I had to call Child Protective Services twice in the first two weeks. It was heartbreaking, but at the same time motivating for us to do more. We realized that a lot of the challenges youth are facing are the result of trauma. It is necessary for them to have emotional healing, just like I needed, to even begin to address their academic needs.

 
Here in San Bernardino there is an extreme need and the children and community are crying out for change. I believe we do have the resources to help our children, we just need to make the commitment, to come together and focus on helping our community.

You know those kids who give you the most trouble? That was me—I was one of them. Don’t put them in jail. Punishment does not rehabilitate youth. Give them leadership roles and opportunities to pursue their passions. That’s what we need as a society. If they are able to realize their potential in a positive way, they will become the leaders who can change the world. We need people who don’t march to the status quo, we need game changers and we need to put in the work—and take the risks—to help them.

The post I Escaped San Bernardino’s School to Prison Pipeline appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Our clinic is on the outskirts of the city of San Bernardino, in a largely Latino area called Muscoy. Nearly a third of all residents live below the poverty line and many of them do not have cars or access to other transportation. Without a clinic like ours close by, checkups would not happen and chronic conditions like diabetes, obesity, and heart disease would be left untreated.

Al-Shifa has been here since the year 2000. We have an extensive website, alshifafreeclinic.org, where we explain that “shifa” is the Arabic word for cure, and that the clinic is based on the teachings of Islam, with compassion for the sick and service to those in need. The model of a Muslim-run clinic bridging the health care gap for primarily non-Muslim patients is not as rare as you might think—one survey found that there are at least 10 such community health care providers throughout the country.

The clinic has an open-door policy to provide care regardless of race, religion, or socio-economic status. We are open Tuesday through Saturday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and we serve primarily low-income and uninsured patients.

About 60 percent of Al-Shifa clients are Spanish-speaking only, so most of the medical staff is bilingual and can serve as translators for doctors who don’t speak Spanish. The staff, as well as the clinic’s volunteer doctors, board members, and donors believe everyone has a right to health care and the right to live a healthy life. It’s very important that there is no communication gap between the physician and the patient.

On a recent morning a reporter visiting from Zócalo Public Square interviewed a Spanish-speaking gentleman who works as a carpenter and had come in for his regular check-up. He told the reporter that he’s been coming here for a couple of years for help managing his diabetes, that he likes the Al-Shifa doctors, and that he can walk to the clinic from home.

From left to right: Al-Shifa manager Muhammad Safwatullah, Job Corps interns Keviana Mims and Alex Acuna, and Dr. Duc Nguyen at Al-Shifa Free Health Clinic.

 
I am the clinic manager as well as an aspiring primary care physician. I got my medical degree in Pakistan and I’m now in the process of obtaining a residency program. I’ve lived in Riverside for eight years, and several years ago I started at the clinic as a volunteer. I was looking for a place where I could get a feel for how medical care works here. I heard about this clinic from my family doctor. I like the way everyone helps one another—to me the spirit of service here goes to the heart of what good medicine is about.

The medical care Al-Shifa provides relies on volunteers. For example, Dr. Duc Nguyen, who was the scheduled doctor on the day Zócalo came to visit, is an internist by specialty. He sees patients at Al-Shifa for four hours every Friday. He is currently employed at Kaiser and has been there for many years. He donates his time, he’s been a real supporter of the clinic, and the clinic relies on people like him to provide the high level of care that Al-Shifa provides. The rest of our staff is also made up primarily of volunteers, as well as interns from Job Corps, the career technical training program administered by the U.S. Department of Labor.

Al-Shifa hosts free health classes in both English and Spanish.

The clinic has between 30 to 45 doctors volunteering each month, providing both primary and specialty care, including cardiology, pulmonology, neurology, physical medicine, nephrology, orthopedic surgery, and rheumatology. On Tuesdays we have a phlebotomist to do blood work. The clinic also offers gynecology services, free mammograms, and pediatric care.

We offer EKGs, echocardiograms, and cardiac stress testing—free of charge. The health clinic sees about 200 patients a month on the medical side. We also offer a low-cost dental clinic, which treats about 30 patients a day, up to three days a week. The clinic tries to offer everything under one roof.

At the beginning of every month, we ask our doctors about their availability and make a schedule. As we get inquiries from patients, we let them know the days and times they can come in to see the specialist they need. We’re proud to be able to provide specialized medicine that can really make a difference in the quality of care, and that would otherwise be difficult for our patients to get access to.

In addition, the clinic provides preventive care and wellness education, including support to help quit smoking and to help deal with diabetes/weight management. We also offer a program on how to maintain a healthy diet and keep up a regular exercise regimen. Since many of our clients have not had regular access to health care in the past, by the time they come to us their health has deteriorated and they have developed other complications. We do all we can to help but we are also working to prevent that from happening.

Staff and volunteers outside the Al-Shifa Clinic.

 
Our annual budget is tiny—just $240,000. Most of our funding comes through private donors, with additional support from Kaiser Permanente and the city of San Bernardino. Everything here was donated: the parking lot, the building, the staff, and medical equipment. Our 5,000-square-foot clinic houses 19 exam rooms, but despite its size it is a modular building that manages to accommodate what we need to provide care for our patients. Al-Shifa Clinic would certainly benefit from a permanent facility, but funding is limited and our goal for now is to make the most of what we have.

Working at Al-Shifa has taught me a lot of things, including how to connect with people and how to handle challenging tasks, patients and the staff. It has taught me a lot of valuable lessons. Most importantly, it has deepened my commitment to providing medical care for everyone, regardless of ability to pay. No one should be denied this precious service. Though my personal goal is to eventually be placed in a residency program, until then I am very honored to serve this community.

The post An All-Volunteer Clinic With Muslim Roots Brings the Community Together to Save Lives appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That sounds like a trivial thing, but it’s not. We’re bringing people together to walk at night, to pray together, to talk about life—not death—and really to change the narrative of our city. It’s a message that is not about incarceration. We say, “We want people alive and free.”

I grew up in Iowa, in a white working-class family. My dad was a social worker, and I was introduced to charity work through him. I was in college in the 1970s at Notre Dame. There I met priests who had been exiled during the military dictatorship in Peru. I spent time in Peru and in Chile, living in extreme poverty, working to help try to alleviate some of the injustice. In 1998 friends invited me to work with them in San Bernardino. I’d never been to California, but I looked at the city of San Bernardino, at both the need and the hope, and I recognized a lot of what I’d seen in Latin America, and I knew there was an opportunity here to do something that could make a difference.

I joined Inland Congregations United for Change in 2005, right when it was founded. In that year there were 52 murders, 15 of them children under the age of 18. Every month a kid under 18 was getting killed.

Fast-forward to 2016. With more than two months left in the year we’ve already seen 52 slayings. This is a steep increase from last year’s 44 homicides, which included the 14 people killed by terrorists at the Inland Regional Center. The youngest victim through early October of this year was Travon Williams, a child of just 9, shot in the head on a July night while he was with his father, who was also shot to death. More than a thousand people came to their funeral. A few months earlier, 12-year-old Jason Spears was shot dead walking home from the market near his house.

We know that the people in San Bernardino who are shooting and killing people account for one half of one percent of the population. That’s 100 people. There must be a way to turn that around.

Two years ago, Inland Congregations United for Change started advocating to the city that they adopt the Ceasefire model. This is a program that started in Boston 20 years ago that has been adopted in cities across the country. In Oakland it seems to be making a difference and in Stockton it decreased homicides by 43 percent. It involves local officials and community leaders “calling in” suspected gang members and offering them counseling and support services and employment—if they agree to put down their guns.

To start the process we walk into neighborhoods and invite people into an accountability session. All of the community partners are there—police, mental health, housing, job training and employment. We invite the people who are involved in the violence and we tell that person we know they’re involved in this. Then we say: “Look at what we’re offering you. We want to work with you. We don’t want you incarcerated. We want you free and alive.”

This is a big change. It’s about changing the mentality about how we address violence. The challenge now is to get the city to try it. And so we walk, twice a month, sometimes three times a month. In the evenings, after work. The turnout is very strong. We have 25 clergy representing a diverse array of faiths, Catholic, Baptist, Muslim, Jewish. We have 200 or 300 people walking. We pick three places of worship in a very heavily impacted area, in an area that has seen a lot of hardship and violence, and we walk from one to the next.

We start at one house of worship and we pray together. We talk about how Ceasefire works. Members of the community speak the names of friends, family, and neighbors who have perished. We have a display made up consisting of what look like painted popsicle sticks—one for each person who has been killed. Then the clergy call out the names of every city council member, and we say, “Councilmember XYZ, we see you.”

And then we march together through the streets, chanting, “Alive and free, that’s what we want to be.” The point is to walk through the neighborhoods and make contact with neighbors and families, parents and grandparents, children and grandchildren. People are out in their yards, walking down the street. We talk with them and some of them join us.

We aim for what we call a prophetic tone. We have a vision of a different community. We have a clear message to the community about living alive and living free, and a clear message to our political leaders that there are solutions to the gun violence that are working, that other communities are embracing and we are calling on them, very boldly, to be supportive.

To get our city leaders on board, we know we need to change the way they think about the community. The common narrative of San Bernardino is that this used to be an “All-American City.” There’s a big sign downtown to that effect. The story goes that San Bernardino was a kind of nirvana until the economy started to go down. Norton Air Force Base closed; Kaiser Steel in Fontana shut down; and BNSF Railroad moved to Kansas City. The narrative is these businesses left and then the city started to go downhill, the working people went to Kansas City, and the people with good jobs moved elsewhere.

That story continues like this: Then all the poor people came in and brought crime. That’s a dog whistle meaning that black people and undocumented Latinos were gang bangers and criminals who created all this violence.

But if you look deeper, what you discover is that the narrative about the fall of San Bernardino is full of holes. Violence in this city has been here for a long, long time. An important part of the San Bernardino story is about groups who have been denied access to opportunity while other groups of people have held on to their opportunity.

When African Americans came to the Inland Empire, after slavery and Jim Crow, cities like San Bernardino were totally segregated, a separation that held until not that long ago. For decades, if you were Latino or black you could not go to the white schools.

Even the name “Inland Empire” makes some people uncomfortable. It may conjure the seemingly endless citrus groves that used to cover the region, but for some people it sounds too much like the “Invisible Empire” of the Ku Klux Klan, which maintained a large presence in the area in the mid-20th century. This was the so-called “All American” idyll.

So where are we now? The dominant narrative is that people who live in poor, dangerous neighborhoods are valueless—not worthy of being helped and supported, with nothing to contribute. That is just not true. In every neighborhood there are incredible, good-hearted people who want to improve their lives and live in safety.

There’s a lot going on in our community: There are neighbors, family, and friends taking care of each other, overcoming poverty and exclusion, and finding ways to thrive. One example: air pollution in some neighborhoods regularly exceeds health safety standards—there are many days of the year when outdoor physical activity is not recommended. So we have groups of high school and college kids who have gone into the churches and schools and community centers to create youth-friendly activities, places to create art, and programs to explore forms of personal expression in a safe setting.

The young people here are a gold mine, but we are shortchanging them at every turn. The poorest neighborhoods have no parks. Of the children who graduate from high school in San Bernardino, a full 85 percent do not have the credits required for admission to college.

Over the past 10 years ICUC has mounted some very successful campaigns and some that have not been as successful. We’ve advocated for a range of programs for youth, and we’ve focused a lot of effort on the schools.

That’s great, but it’s not stopping the violence. It’s not enough to change the narrative.

In July, on the day of one of our marches, I read in the newspaper that the mayor and two councilmembers had gone to Oakland to study the Ceasefire program. That night at the march, I was standing with about 200 people. I looked up, and there was the mayor, standing next to me. I don’t think he knew who I was. I said, “Hey, I understand you went to Oakland, to look at their Ceasefire program. How did it go?” He said, “It went really well.” I asked him if he thought San Bernardino might give it a try. He said, “Yes, maybe. Thanks for asking.”

That’s how change happens. One hair at a time.

The post Why I Walk at Night in San Bernardino appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“He has something wrong with each tooth,” the dental student said in amazement. “He has to be in constant pain.” I nodded my agreement, not really surprised by the news.

I’m the principal of Victoria Elementary School in San Bernardino, where the dental student was assessing Eric’s oral wellness as part of the annual fall screening we bring to all 500 children in our student body. In partnership with Loma Linda University’s dental school, which triages the worst cases and then follows up weekly with their mobile clinic, this program treats our students throughout the school year. For many kids, it’s the only dental care they receive.

Eric had a bright, cheerful demeanor and near perfect attendance, making it all the more incredible to learn that he’d been living in pain. Thankfully, the dental school put Eric and his sister at the top of their patient list—after two years of treatment, their dental health is finally approaching normal.

Eric and Madeline’s circumstances are not unique at our school. In our zip code, half of the children live in poverty, according to the U.S. Census. Almost monthly we have students undergoing extractions of abscessed teeth caused by bacterial infections, which, left untreated, can spread to the jaw, neck, and brain causing even more serious medical conditions.

Victoria Elementary School students receive dental check-ups.

To me, Eric’s teeth represent a problem in the way we measure whether we are providing economically disadvantaged students with educational opportunities on par with their wealthier peers. In addition to academic support, we must factor in the many needs of our children beyond the classroom. Are they hungry? Did they sleep? Basic necessities cannot be assumed when dealing with poverty because we know that hungry and tired children do not perform well in class.

In 2013, Gov. Jerry Brown shifted state educational funds to allocate more per-pupil to students from low-income families, and to increase local control. This shift will enable Victoria to expand the range of services to support our students. Starting this school year, we now have a person dedicated to following up with students in everything from school work, basic needs, and most importantly, emotional support for the psychological effects of poverty.

I was introduced to Victoria Elementary seven years ago, when a colleague called it a “hidden gem.” Through a fluke of geography, Victoria is located in San Bernardino, but it’s part of the neighboring Redlands school district. The differences are stark. Redlands, a city in the top 100 best places to live in California, is a “destination district.” It’s where teachers want to teach, students want to learn, and parents want their children to go to school. Transfer requests are many and successful transfers are highly coveted. San Bernardino, on the other hand, is third from the bottom on that same list of 240 cities. Poverty is high. Security is uncertain, both in terms of personal safety and food security.

Given the unmet needs in this community—needs as fundamental as food, clothing, and shelter—I consider myself lucky that when I took the principal position at Victoria, I inherited a Family Resource Center (FRC) on my campus. The FRC is our hub for community outreach. Originally funded through California’s Healthy Start Initiative, Redlands Unified has retained four FRCs across the district. Staffing duties are shared by a case manager from a local charity and a school worker.

Working in a community where many lack the basics, I’ve come to learn that poverty doesn’t mean impoverishment. The families that make up the Victoria community are generous with what they have. Neighbors often walk each other’s children to school. It’s also common for them to open their homes to one another so that parents have a place where they can leave their children before starting their early morning commutes to work. Even with this esprit de corps, more is needed.

Addressing hunger is one of the most vital issues we deal with. The school, formerly surrounded by orange groves and strawberry fields, now lies in the middle of a food desert. Many of our families don’t have cars, and public transit is both slow and sporadic, especially on weekends. There’s a liquor store nearby, but the nearest market is a five-mile round-trip walk.

More than 90 percent of Victoria’s students participate in the National School Lunch Program and receive free or reduced meals. Every Wednesday, a local church brings in bread donations from the Panera restaurant chain, which the children are free to take home. On Fridays the kids start the weekend with bags of groceries provided through the United Way’s Backpack Program. Sometimes it isn’t enough, so we run our own food pantry to help families who run into emergencies.

Several years ago we transformed an unused space outside a kindergarten classroom into a vegetable garden. Through local grants and the tireless efforts of several teachers and our after-school coordinator, children helped plant and sow lettuce, chard, and cauliflower. We use the fruits of their labor in our school cafeteria and we send some home with the families who help keep the garden maintained.

 
Some of our families cannot afford to buy their children shoes. Seeing first graders shuffle around in adult-sized shoes is not uncommon. At the start of this school year, Kim, the assistant principal, stopped at a local Payless to buy a fifth- grader and her brother new shoes. The last time they got new shoes was when she and I took them to an Assistance League-sponsored shopping trip last March. I think these are the only times these children have had new shoes.

The emotional effects of poverty are more hidden, but no less insidious. Simply put, poverty hurts—physically and emotionally. With a school full of young children, we see a lot of separation anxiety, which our staff is well equipped to handle. But for deeper emotional trauma we seek outside help. When Nathan’s mother was battling cancer, I would fish him from her car and Kim or I would sit him in the office. Some days we could get him to class; other days we couldn’t. It was only after our case manager from the Building a Generation charity arranged counseling that his anxiety got better.

Families do what they need to survive. Often, this means doubling or even tripling up in a house. This creates a host of scenarios I never encountered as a solidly middle-class kid growing up. At the milder end, it means their children are left in the care of older siblings or roommates with whom families have banded together to pay rent. At the more extreme end, arguing or abuse in the home in one form or another can result. We work with students and parents who themselves are working through their varying levels of anxiety or depression or worse. Some families handle it well and others struggle. Some self-medicate.

I tell our teachers that we can’t control what happens at home, but we can control how we react to it. The first thing we remind each other is: “Don’t confuse issues of poverty with issues of morality.” Simple things like homework completion need to be viewed through that lens. Does the student have someone who can help her with her homework? Does she even have a place where she can work? More than a few teachers let students stay after school to do their homework. Every child needs a champion.

The daily encounters with our parents and students are as important as any academic, medical, or social service at our school. I am often outside at arrival and dismissal times. Not only is this a great way to welcome or say goodbye to students, it gives our parents easy access to the “person in charge.” For every sit-down meeting I’ve had with a parent I’ve had two curbside conferences. The level of familiarity is important. Not only does it relieve parents to know that I watch over their children, but it helps create a sense of community that everyone belongs here.

It’s easy to get lost in the enormity of the conditions in which we operate. Many of the problems, such as affordable housing and jobs with livable wages, are beyond our power to solve. However a sense of belonging is what gives us the tenacity to not only carry on but to help our students be resilient. Poverty makes it harder to succeed, but it is by no means an insurmountable barrier. Parents understand that we are on their side and their gratitude is evident every Teacher Appreciation Day when there is no shortage of flan, pan dulce, or tres leches cake for the staff.

The post A Hungry Child Cannot Learn appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

She is telling me this because I am her primary care doctor. As part of a routine check-up, I want to know if her arthritis is affecting her daily life. When patients become socially withdrawn, their health deteriorates further. She wants a reality check. Her arthritis never limited her but, she asks, should she avoid these places, be this afraid of terrorism, even if it’s affecting her health and happiness?

Anna is an example of the ‘‘terrorism burden”: the adverse health effects—ranging from loss of well-being or security to injury, illness, or death—caused by terrorism and national terrorism policies.

Terrorism causes public fear by definition and by intent. Our response to terrorism can harm our health, too. Watching the unrelenting replays of the September 11 attacks on television worsened psychological distress and even increased the risk of post-traumatic stress disorder. After every terrorist attack, pediatricians warn parents to limit their child’s exposure to television news on the topic.

But beyond what’s clinically diagnosed, our counterterrorism policies can also create other unintended psychological harm. And it is the most vulnerable people among us who feel these effects most deeply.

After September 11, 2001, the Department of Homeland Security ran its well-intentioned, color-coded system alerting the public to the risk of terrorist attack. For 10 years, the terror alert level remained at yellow, an elevated risk of attack. It’s not surprising that, a year after the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, more than 10 percent of Americans were still changing their behaviors from fear of terrorism—limiting their outside activities, use of public transportation, and attendance at public events. The constant reminder about the threat of terrorism impaired our sense of security, a critical part of one’s overall health.

Unremitting warnings of terrorism harmed people from some walks of life more than others. Surveys found that persons with disabilities were more anxious about their personal risk from terrorism than were persons without disabilities. One survey that my research team worked on in 2004, three years after September 11, found that having a physical disability increased the likelihood among Los Angeles residents of frequently avoiding activities from fear of terrorism. The study also found that, compared to non-Latino whites, African-Americans were eight times more likely to frequently avoid activities from fear of terrorism; Latinos were seven times more likely.

We looked for reasons to explain this disparity. Could differences in the prevalence of psychological anxiety lead to different reactions? Or might lower educational attainment make it harder to understand the real risk, thereby leading some people to overreact? Nope. Our results did not change after statistically accounting for differences in education, income, anxiety level, immigration status, and other factors. Other researchers have found similar results across America.

Psychological theories such as R.W. Rogers’ protection motivation theory and Kim Witte’s extended parallel process model may explain our results. According to these theories, people will change their behaviors to protect themselves and reduce their fears based on their appraisals of both the threat and their abilities to cope with the threat. The threat appraisal includes perceptions of the probability of harm. The coping appraisal assesses their perceived self-efficacy to cope with an attack.

These theories help me understand my patient Anna’s avoidance behavior. Anna is less able to protect herself in a terrorist attack, like the attack in San Bernardino, because she can’t run away or hide as easily as someone without a mobility impairment. No matter how well prepared she is for any disaster, she faces greater risk of harm for this reason. Terror alerts may be nationwide, but people assess their vulnerability to terrorism and disasters—and their ability to recover—on a very personal level. Then they adapt their behaviors to protect themselves from harm and to reduce their fears. One possible reason minority groups take measures to avoid terrorism is they may not trust they will be treated equally after a disaster, as in Hurricane Katrina.

Of course, trying to protect yourself from harm is a good thing. But avoiding going to a restaurant with your friends is not the best way to do this. When people feel at risk, they may make bad choices or make good choices. It’s a bad choice to stay at home all the time, but a good choice to learn how to protect yourself in the event of a disaster or mass shooting. In my research, the same vulnerable groups who are avoiding public places after a terrorist attack are also buying emergency supplies and making disaster plans immediately after disasters and terrorist events. People who believe they are particularly vulnerable to a risk are motivated to reduce it. We should be guiding people to the right choices.

I am tempted to reassure Anna that her risk of meeting a terrorist is vanishingly small, but I know this won’t really help her. It could make her feel unheard. What I can do is recommend actions, in detail, that will actually reduce her risk in a risky world. This is one of the first lessons of what is called risk communications—the study of how we should communicate about risk in ways that promote healthy responses.

She should talk with a close colleague at work to enlist her help should she need to evacuate quickly. She should watch the online videos giving detailed instructions about “Run, Hide, Fight” with a particular focus on the details in the Hide and Run parts. (This is the approach recommended by the Department of Homeland Security and other federal agencies, based on a small body of research showing that immediate evacuation can save lives. It is also controversial. But having a plan and training may be better than inaction.) Anna can view the video and decide if it will work for her. I recommend the Ready Houston video on YouTube, despite the terror of watching it.

She should ask her boss to make a company-wide drill out of these recommendations, or at least practice it herself in her head—to “train your brain” as Amanda Ripley suggests in her excellent book, The Unthinkable. And she should keep at least a week’s worth of water, food, and her prescription medicines for the inevitable earthquake. As her doctor, I can give her detailed directions about how to get an extra week’s worth of medicine, which is only allowed by her health insurance plan if she makes the requests in the right way.

The recent terrorist attacks are an opportunity to improve our preparedness for emergencies and disasters. Let’s not miss this opportunity. For all the media attention to the San Bernardino attacks, I have not seen anything on how to promote our safety and well-being in the practical ways I describe.

All businesses should actively drill “Run, Hide, Fight.” I like Ripley’s idea of encouraging participation in drills by having the official meeting spot be a coffee shop on the next block where the boss buys everyone a coffee. Other doctors and pharmacists can proactively advise patients on getting and storing a week’s worth of medicine for disasters. Rather than using these attacks as moments to remind ourselves what we should be scared of, we can make these events teachable moments that build a greater culture of preparedness across the nation.

The post Obsessing About Terrorism Is Bad for Your Mental Health appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I have been asked to mentor Ahtziri, a 17-year-old high school senior, through the process of writing a novel for her A.P. English class. I am not a novelist, but I am a poet, and I direct a nonprofit—the Inlandia Institute—whose mission is to support literary activity, in all of its forms, throughout inland Southern California, aka the Inland Empire or I.E. The Inland Empire has been in the news a lot lately, with the most recent mass shooting and largest terror attack on U.S. soil since September 11 taking place here. But we are far more than a news headline.

Until the recent shootings in San Bernardino, the Inland Empire was largely unknown, and until the Inlandia Institute was formed, it lacked a cohesive literary identity, unlike Los Angeles or other major metropolitan areas, despite its long history of literary excellence. I was drawn to Inlandia because its mission so closely meshes with my own priorities: as a writer who calls this place home, as a mother who wants to see more opportunities for young people to engage their creativity, and as a locavore reader who wants to read and support local writers. I want more people to know and understand this region that I love, and the best way I know to do that is by seeing it through the eyes of the people who live here.

Which is why I’ve agreed to mentor Ahtziri. And why the Inlandia Institute wants to build community by supporting creative literacy—fostering creative thinking and problem solving through narrative and storytelling—throughout inland Southern California.

Like any other group, a community of readers and writers doesn’t spring up overnight; it grows gradually over the decades as people with a similar mindset find one another and begin to lay a foundation. But sometimes a catalyst comes along, and suddenly there is momentum. In the case of Inlandia, that catalyst was the publication of an anthology that recognized the depth and breadth of the literary writing by and about this region: Inlandia: A Literary Journey through California’s Empire, which Heyday published in 2006.

Inlandia stacks greats such as Joan Didion and John Steinbeck and Norman Mailer alongside local jewels like novelist Susan Straight, who sets many of her stories in the fictional Rio Seco, a doppelgänger of Riverside; American Book Award winner Juan Delgado, whose poems evoke and celebrate the lives of the Mexican-American residents of San Bernardino; and Gordon Johnson, a Native American newspaper columnist for Riverside’s Press-Enterprise who writes with frank humor and grace about life on the reservation. The anthology elevated the lives of the people here, and put the Inland Empire, quite literally, on the “map”—now anyone around the country can pick up this book and gain an understanding of what it’s like to live here, and what the region is like.

The nonprofit Inlandia began as a collaboration of the Riverside Public Library and Heyday to create cultural and literary events that celebrate the region’s writers and offer creative literary enrichment opportunities for people of all ages. Early projects included an ongoing series of writing workshops, programs in the schools, workshops for seniors on writing their life story, seminars on the “Business of Being a Writer,” and book readings and signings. By 2009, the program was so successful that it became an independent organization. A mission statement was drawn up to clearly define its footprint as the entire inland region (including both Riverside and San Bernardino counties and parts of neighboring Imperial and Inyo counties), and to focus on five core programs: adult creative literacy, publications, public literary events, children’s creative literacy, and a literary laureate program.

That was the year I got involved with Inlandia. I was invited to present my work for an Inlandia author series at the library downtown, where I met Marion Mitchell-Wilson, the nonprofit’s first executive director. Marion thought my writing, publishing, and literary event experience would be a good fit for Inlandia. Soon she created a part-time coordinator position for me, which expanded over time, from founding a literary journal and running events to facilitating book publication, grant writing, and managing daily operations. When Marion was diagnosed with breast cancer, she asked if I would keep everything running until she got better. I couldn’t say no.

Marion underwent treatment, came back, found the cancer had returned, and left again; she came back one last time before learning that the breast cancer was back yet again and had metastasized to her bones, liver, and brain. Within a matter of months, she had succumbed. But before she died, she called some of the people involved with Inlandia into her home and made a dramatic request: She wanted us to found an endowment in her name to ensure the continuity of the organization for decades to come. We raised $100,000 in six weeks.

Building a literary community is not just about reading and writing; like any community, it is only as good as its people. People tend to unite in celebration of a cause they feel passionate about. That’s what I believe happened with the endowment.

The people are also the reason I keep working with Inlandia. Over the past few years, I have had the privilege of collaborating with UC Riverside professor and current U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera (who coined the term “Inlandia” in the first place) on a variety of projects, including a guerrilla-style poetry reading on the downtown Riverside pedestrian mall during the lunch hour, and an event at the Smiley Library in Redlands to collect poems for his unity poem.

Juan Felipe Herrera, now U.S. poet laureate, conducts a choir during the Unity Fiesta at UC Riverside.

A few lines of poetry contributed to Juan Felipe Herrera’s collaborative project, “The Most Incredible and Biggest and Most Amazing Poem on Unity in the World.”

Inlandia serves a vast swath of inland cities, from the Salton Sea to Temecula, from Wrightwood to Mecca. I am very attached to this region, where I’ve spent the better part of my adult life, even after living in places where the arts have deeper roots. But what the region lacks in deep roots it makes up for in diversity—both ethnic and socioeconomic—and its residents have a great appreciation for that. We are not San Francisco or Los Angeles, but we, too, have world-class museums and cultural events and spacious, beautiful libraries. And we have pride.

As I write this, I am surrounded by poems submitted to our “Poetry Box” during Riverside’s Long Night of Arts and Innovation, an event held downtown and sponsored by the city of Riverside every two years. The event brings together innovators in technology alongside arts and cultural organizations to showcase what Riverside has to offer. (Riverside’s tagline is the “City of Arts and Innovation.”) The Poetry Box was a space for people to play with words—to cut up and rearrange them into poetry on a large felt board, to add to a collaborative poem in a single notebook, or just to write with pens on blank paper. It was surprising to see how many people stopped, sat down, put pen to paper, and wrote a poem, some for the first time. The Poetry Box got to the core of what Inlandia is all about—building community, one word at a time.

I love who we are, we Inlandians—and I revel in all of the places we’ve come from or have yet to go. I think of Ahtziri—wonder whether or not she will finish her novel. But you know what? The finishing doesn’t matter. It’s the starting that counts, and I don’t just want to see how the story ends. I want to see where it takes her.

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