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$1.4 Million Grant to Bolster ‘Powerful Collective’ Advocating for BIPOC Transgender Sex Workers

UCLA’s Hub for Health Intervention, Policy and Practice (HHIPP) has been awarded a $1.4 million grant to strengthen and support its efforts to unite sex workers and their advocates with academic investigators, health care providers and social services agencies. Over a four-year period, the grant will benefit research and community-based programming for Sex Work LEARN (Lived Experience Affirming Research Network), a multisector alliance that does not presume sex work is a problem to be solved. The project will focus on transgender women with sex work experience who identify as Black, indigenous or other persons of color. Principal investigator Ayako Miyashita Ochoa, an adjunct professor and co-director of HHIPP, said collaborators will include Social Welfare doctoral students Kimberly Fuentes and Vanessa Warri, and the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law. Miyashita Ochoa said she is “thrilled to be working with” co-principal investigators Sophia Zamudio-Haas of UC San Francisco and Bamby Salcedo, a leader in the transgender rights movement and president of TransLatin@ Coalition. Other community partners are the Unique Woman’s Coalition and Sex Workers Outreach Project Los Angeles (SWOP LA). “I couldn’t be more proud of our research group and am so appreciative that UCLA Luskin will now serve as a home for this powerful collective,” Miyashita Ochoa said. Funding is from the California HIV/AIDS Research Program, which is awarding similar grants this year to four other research projects in California that center the voices of people affected by HIV.


 

Recalling Social Welfare’s ‘Finest Moment’ After Los Angeles erupted in racially charged violence 30 years ago, UCLA faculty and students gave people in a city under siege the chance to talk

illustration of diamond with text

By Les Dunseith and Stan Paul

In 1992, four police officers were acquitted in the beating of a Black man, Rodney King, whose brutal arrest had been caught on camera. Pent-up fury from years of racial and economic inequality in Los Angeles spilled onto the streets in waves of burning, looting and violence that lasted three days and left 45 people dead.

woman rests her head on her hand while sitting outside on a bench

Distinguished Professor Emerita Rosina Becerra was dean of the School of Social Work at UCLA in 1992. Photo by Les Dunseith

Rosina Becerra was dean of UCLA Social Welfare at the time. Joe Nunn and Alfreda Iglehart were on the faculty. Laura Alongi was in her early 20s and a second-year master’s student studying to be a social worker.

What they and others did next was “perhaps our finest moment,” said Nunn, who like Becerra and Iglehart is now a professor emeritus at the Luskin School of Public Affairs.

“There were people who were afraid to leave their houses,” Becerra remembered. “A lot of people were unable to figure out where to get services. They didn’t know who to call.”

Within days of the uprising, officials at Los Angeles’ public television station, KCET, reached out seeking advice through Mitch Maki, a field faculty member at the time whose wife was a station employee. Becerra recalls sitting at a conference table with Maki and station employees eager to assist but unsure how to respond to people’s emotional turmoil. What did people need?

“Mostly, they need a chance to talk,” Becerra told them.

Three days later, UCLA Social Welfare and KCET-TV launched a crisis line during which faculty, students and other volunteers recruited by UCLA answered calls from distressed citizens via the telephones normally used during the station’s pledge drives. They called it, “A Chance to Talk: Emotional Support in Times of Crisis.”

woman sits in chair in her office

Field faculty member Laura Alongi was a student in 1992. UCLA Luskin file photo

Alongi was one of the student volunteers, helping to fill weekday shifts that ran for four hours each morning and four more in the evenings, plus 8 a.m. to 11 p.m. on weekends. While the crisis line was in operation, KCET viewers were encouraged by news anchor Val Zavala to call a number shown on their screens if they needed to talk to one of the people working the phones behind her.

Because of the urgency of the situation, volunteers like Alongi only had time for a brief orientation. She had never worked a crisis hotline. Moving about the city to get to the TV studio still felt dangerous. And racial tensions remained high, especially between Black residents and the Korean shop owners whose properties had been a frequent target of rioters.

Alongi remembers being filled with anxiety.

“Is this something I should be doing?” she worried. “Do I even have the right to do this, given that I’m, you know, a young white woman and not impacted in the same way?”

Her anxiety was replaced by a sense of fulfillment once she began taking calls.

“It was fantastic,” said Alongi, now a member of UCLA Social Welfare’s field faculty herself. “The people I spoke to were all just afraid and hurt and sad. They wanted to be able to talk about that with another human being.”

Alongi recalled speaking with an older woman who lived in South Los Angeles near where the unrest began.

“She was crying. And she said, ‘How did it get to this? How did we end up being these people that fight each other in this way?’”

Some calls involved directing people to services. One caller said her market had burned down and she didn’t know where to go now for food. But mostly, Alongi said, she was there just to listen.

woman smiles as she faces the camera

Professor Emerita Alfreda Iglehart helped organize the crisis hotline after the civil unrest.

“We didn’t know what to expect,” said Iglehart, who helped organize the effort and later contributed to an academic paper about it. “And you did have some angry callers.”

Volunteers were instructed to remain calm, Becerra said. “No matter what anyone ever said to you, you’re not to get mad.”

Later analysis showed the initial reason for most calls were feelings of anger and frustration (22%), followed by fear or anxiety (19%) and a desire to discuss the current situation (11%).

About 4% of the calls were racist and hateful in nature. Although relatively small in number, these calls were powerful and ended up occupying a disproportionate amount of debriefing time afterward, researchers noted.

The academic report details an incident in which a Black female volunteer received a call from an angry white male who made racist and disparaging remarks regarding African Americans.

“Both caller and listener were aware of each other’s ethnicity, and the call proceeded to last about half an hour,” according to the report, which was written by Iglehart, Nunn and Maki, with contributions from Cayleen Nakamura at KCET. “The listener validated the caller’s underlying personal feelings and carefully challenged him to reframe his thinking. The caller ended the call by stating that he realized that he had said some hurtful things, acknowledged that the listener had stuck with him, and thanked her.”

The report also mentions other callers:

  • a man who was despondent over the destruction of his business said he contemplated suicide;
  • a 10-year-old boy found it unfair that he could not go out and play because of the unrest;
  • an elderly woman spoke of her fear of waiting at bus stops;
  • a 7-year-old girl called to say that she was having problems sleeping because of thoughts that “the riots will happen again.”

“We validated people feelings if they were fearful. If they felt alone, we validated that,” Iglehart said. “We wanted people to feel that what you are going through and what you’re experiencing is not unique to you. Other people around you are feeling this way.”

Given the cultural diversity of Los Angeles and the randomness of calls, listeners fluent in Spanish, Korean
and several other languages were  always present.

man in center listens as younger people talk in a classroom setting

Professor Emeritus Joe Nunn participated in the crisis hotline and says it exemplified the ideals of social work education at UCLA.

“When people would call in, if they spoke Spanish or they spoke Tagalog or whatever language, you’d hold up a sign that said you needed someone with that language skill to come over,” Nunn said.

The crisis line started with UCLA faculty and students, but it soon expanded.

“There is a great deal of credibility that goes with the UCLA name,” Iglehart said. “With that kind of credibility and legitimacy, people say, ‘Oh, this must be a good idea. I want to be involved.’”

Soon, organizers had mobilized their contacts and recruited local professionals in the helping professions and additional student volunteers from other L.A.-area universities. In all, more than 300 volunteers took calls from about 2,000 individuals. By the 10th day of the project, the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health had established its own telephone hotline, and the UCLA-KCET project was terminated.

For those involved, the effort remains a treasured memory that exemplifies UCLA Social Welfare’s long history and tradition of providing service to Southern California.

“We’re in a university where we talk about teaching, our research and service,” said Iglehart, noting that in academia that tends to mean service to the profession, such as reviewing articles for an academic journal. “This was direct hands-on service to the community of Southern California, and I think that’s really important.”

“People from my student cohort went out onto the streets and were doing cleanup after the fires and the looting,” Alongi said. “Just literally sweeping up broken glass.”

They had listened and they had acted, doing whatever they could to help a fractured city begin to piece itself  back together.

Social Welfare at 75 Field Training Is the Heart of the Program

By Stan Paul

Since 1947, Social Welfare at UCLA has been a leader in enhancing human well-being and promoting social and economic justice for disadvantaged populations.

Social Welfare has much to celebrate after 75 years. Under the direction of Professor Laura Abrams, the current department chair, the department will be hosting celebratory events throughout the academic year, culminating with an on-campus gala May 6. Fittingly, the theme of the 75th anniversary celebration focuses on community engagement.

“That’s why I became a social worker, that’s why I came to UCLA, that’s why I stayed at UCLA, that’s what’s shaped me is the community engagement,” said Gerry Laviña, longtime director of the field faculty at UCLA Luskin.

Laviña, who plans to retire in 2023, reflected on his experience as a student, instructor, leader, mentor and social worker over 30 years.

“One of the things that I learned as an MSW student from the first year throughout my career and is what I told my first- and second-year students, you cannot do this work alone,” Laviña said. “That’s what field education is.”

Laviña said the department has survived and thrived because it has long emphasized field education through deep ties to community service agencies and an emphasis on community engagement.

“I was here for the 50th anniversary, which was really significant, and now I’m going to end at the 75th anniversary,” he said. “There’s been a lot of positive changes in our program, which is due to the hard work of a lot of us who’ve been committed to making it a better place.”

Professor Fernando Torres-Gil concurs.

“In just over 75 years, this program really moved up in terms of respect, recognition and visibility,” said Torres-Gil, who has filled a number of leadership roles over his three decades at UCLA.

Social Welfare is the oldest and largest of UCLA Luskin’s graduate degree programs in terms of student enrollment and number of faculty. Thousands of students have received their educations and training over the years.

“Our Social Welfare program is embedded in the multidisciplinary Luskin School that’s part of a university that truly believes in cross-disciplinary collaboration,” said Torres-Gil, referring to the decision in the 1990s to join Social Welfare, Urban Planning and Public Policy in a School of Public Affairs. “It’s stronger, more influential, more impactful precisely because it collaborates with its sister/brother departments.”

He said it’s been gratifying to see the department and School’s academic and professional reputation grow in recent years. “It has finally come of age, recognized nationally, even internationally, however you measure it.”

Abrams and Boston University Dean Call for Social Workers to Use Knowledge for Change Scholars must wrestle with the root causes of social inequality and strive toward bettering people's lives, they write

Professor Laura Abrams, chair of UCLA Luskin Social Welfare, and Dean Jorge Delva of Boston University’s School of Social Work (BUSSW) are co-authors of a newly published journal article looking at the opportunities and obligations of social work research.

Published by the Journal of the Society for Social Work & Research, “Social Work Researchers: From Scientific Technicians to Changemakers” is a call to action for social work scholars to direct their efforts toward high-impact research that produces findings that can be applied in a timely manner to influence programs, policies or movements that improve the lives of the most marginalized and oppressed populations.

Abrams and Delva note that amid recent social tumult, global challenges and increased attention to racism and anti-Blackness, there has been an increase in demand for research that is both scientific and attentive to social, racial, economic and environmental justice.

They say, however, that an empirical push in social work research has resulted in “a focus on quantity over impact; undue emphasis on publishing in journals, often in non-social-work journals that have high impact factors but are separated from our practice community; engagement in ‘traditional’ modes of scholarship that do not necessarily challenge the status quo; and pursuit of NIH funding as an end in itself.”

The authors acknowledge the value of National Institutes of Health funding but write that the “narrow focus on NIH as an arbiter of a successful scholar … has also reinforced the top-down, parachuting type of research whereby researchers drop into a community, conduct their research and depart with little to no involvement by and impact on the community.”

Pushing toward evidence without a solid anchor to communities is a phenomenon that the authors attribute to pressures within academia to attain ever-greater funding, power and prestige — pressures fed by incomplete measures of success such as the U.S. News & World Report rankings.

Delva and Abrams point to a paradigm shift, saying the next generation of social work scholars is ready for change. New momentum exists for the belief that current research practices function as tools of white supremacy, patriarchy and oppression, which is an idea advanced as early as 1968, when the National Association of Black Social Workers urged the National Conference on Social Welfare to publicly repudiate the welfare system.

Delva and Abrams say that social work must reach beyond the goal of implementing health research into practice and also wrestle with the root causes of social inequalities. In the same way that science alone could not have improved women’s lives without women’s rights movements, social science can only make an impact with communal support and momentum, the co-authors write.

Abrams, whose research centers on improving the well-being of youth and adults with histories of incarceration, joins Delva, the Paul Farmer professor and director of the Center for Innovation in Social Work & Health at BUSSW, in imploring academic leaders to make a more concerted effort to elevate and reward work based on public impact, community participatory research and social movements.

A New Hub at the Intersection of ‘Multiple Vulnerabilities’  

UCLA Luskin’s newest research initiative is deeply rooted in the community, with the aim of improving the well-being of its most vulnerable members. 

Launched in late 2019, the Hub for Health Intervention, Policy and Practice (HHIPP) connects scholars, policymakers and advocates for those battling poverty, racism, homophobia and discrimination of all kinds.

“We really see HHIPP as in service to Los Angeles’ diverse communities, especially those at the intersection of multiple vulnerabilities,” said Social Welfare Professor Ian Holloway, director of the initiative.

In his long career in research, Holloway has focused on health policy through a social justice lens, working closely with Social Welfare faculty colleague Ayako Miyashita Ochoa.

“When we looked across all of our projects, one of the unifying themes was that we always started with our community partnerships,” Holloway said. “We centered the needs and priorities of the communities that we’re engaged with: lots of diverse LGBTQ+ communities, BIPOC communities, communities of people who use different substances or who are street-connected.”

This has led to innovative and collaborative projects including one using machine learning algorithms to provide personalized information about HIV prevention to gay and bisexual young men. A team led by Miyashita Ochoa is working with people involved in L.A. County’s sex trade to measure the impact of a new state law that prohibits law enforcement from using condoms as evidence of sex work.

HHIPP is also tracking the trajectory of cannabis use among LGBTQ young people in the state. This includes efforts to understand high rates of tobacco use among gender-non-conforming youth, including the role of targeted marketing campaigns.

“And so the idea for HHIPP was really to unify all of these streams of research under one hub,” Holloway said.

HHIPP is committed to making its research widely accessible to the public. To share early findings from the hub’s tobacco-related research, Holloway hosted a webinar tied to LGBTQ Health Week and Transgender Day of Visibility.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, when the School’s signature Luskin Summit went virtual, HHIPP used the platform to share information on the coronavirus’ impact on the opioid crisis and the role of telemedicine in protecting sexual health.

Even though the pandemic lockdown struck HHIPP just as it was getting off the ground, Holloway noted that the COVID era also brought new opportunities, including development of a proposal to create community-based tools for vaccine promotion and delivery.

“We certainly have seized the moment in terms of trying to understand the impact of COVID on the communities that we’re serving,” he said.

HHIPP’s work has been funded by a variety of organizations, including the National Institutes of Health, the California HIV/AIDS Research Program and the California Bureau of Cannabis Control. The initiative established a cross-cutting advisory board and continues to launch partnerships with community groups across Southern California.

Looking down the road, Holloway envisions a brick-and-mortar field site where HHIPP can truly serve the community. Local residents could come to the site for social services or health and mental health support. Scholars could co-create research alongside community members, and Social Welfare, Urban Planning and Public Policy students could develop their skills in real time and alongside policymakers.

“Bridging worlds together and locating power in community would be very aligned with our ethos at HHIPP,” Holloway said. “I think that that is one strategy that moves us closer to achieving our vision.”

Current Solutions to Crime Are Not Working, Leap Says

Adjunct Professor of Social Welfare Jorja Leap spoke to the San Francisco Chronicle about Urban Alchemy, a nonprofit that hires formerly incarcerated individuals to address street-level issues rooted in addiction, mental illness and homelessness. The nonprofit employs 1,100 people in five cities across the United States, many of them people of color and individuals who have previously experienced homelessness. The organization has faced challenges, including two workers shot on the job and criticism that its employees do not have the appropriate licenses to police public spaces. However, Leap said she is confident that Urban Alchemy will overcome these obstacles. “Crime has gone up in America, the same old solutions are not working, so we’re going to see more growth in these areas … and there are going to be growing pains,” Leap said. “Whether you are an abolitionist or a police cheerleader, we all agree what’s been done in the past is not working.”


In Memoriam: Karen Lee, Former Field Faculty Member A co-founder of a national consortium focusing on geriatric social work, she educated and mentored hundreds of students during 12 years at UCLA

Former UCLA faculty member Karen Lee died of cancer Jan. 25 at her home in Eugene, Oregon. 

Lee’s tenure at UCLA Luskin Social Welfare began in 2002 as a member of the field education faculty, and she later served as associate director of the Master of Social Welfare program. She retired in 2014.

Known for fostering student interest in geriatric social work, Lee represented UCLA as a founding member of the Geriatric Social Work Education Consortium, or GSWEC. Twenty years later, the consortium continues to flourish, and the partnership of universities and centers of excellence has expanded. 

Lee is fondly remembered for her passion and guidance by many, including her former colleagues in Social Welfare.     

“I truly considered her a role model in the way she interacted with students and taught in the classroom,” Laura Alongi Brinderson said. “Her sweet smile and infectious laughter will not be forgotten.”

Michelle Talley recalled being assigned to work with Lee when she first arrived at UCLA, shadowing her and learning how to teach and manage a classroom. “It really helped me to understand the role,” Talley said.    

“Karen Lee will be missed by our Social Welfare community at UCLA and beyond,” said former colleague Gerry Laviña, director of field faculty at UCLA Luskin.

Laviña recalled that the “Advanced Practice in Aging” course taught by Lee was highly evaluated, and she was known to be a readily accessible field liaison who touched the lives of many students.

As news of Lee’s death spread on social media, several alumni and friends posted remembrances on the Social Welfare alumni page on Facebook saying they viewed her as a pivotal mentor during their time as MSW students and as someone who continued to make an impact in their personal and professional lives well after graduation.   

“She was more than a teacher — she was friend, mentor, cheerleader, and all around mensch,” wrote Charlie Padow MSW ’07. “I am not alone. She touched countless lives as an educator and a friend.”

Jean Dorsky wrote: “As a gerontology specialist, Karen was pivotal in my career choice. I will always remember her as being honest, fair, and funny and insightful.”

“This is such a surprise. … Karen was a mentor in more ways than one,” wrote Brittany Leigh, who continued to say that Lee cared not only “about what we did at school, but really cared about me as an individual.”

She is survived by her husband, Joseph “Joe” Lee, and sister, Eileen. The family has requested that donations in her name be made to Food for Lane County, a nonprofit food bank near their home. 

New Paper Analyzes Impact of School Closures on Families

Social Welfare Professor Ron Avi Astor and doctoral student Kate Watson collaborated on a new paper highlighting the needs of children and families during school closures caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper, published in Social Work, analyzed responses to a nationwide survey of 1,275 school social workers who reported on their clients, including schools, children and families, during the COVID-19 school closures in spring 2020. While other reports have focused on academic challenges facing students during the pandemic as well as the effects of online learning on academic success, the authors identified a knowledge gap in understanding the needs and difficulties of K-12 students and their families from a social work perspective. In their responses to the survey, school social workers indicated that the children and families they served had significant unmet basic needs, including for food, health care and housing. “Poverty and mental health compounded pandemic difficulties, which were associated with the sociodemographic makeup of schools,” wrote Watson, the paper’s lead author, with co-authors Astor and colleagues from Hebrew University, Cal State Fullerton and Loyola University Chicago. Based on the survey results, the authors identified several policy and practice implications for the future. They highlighted the need for “additional services for students and families, a plan to address structural inequities in our schools and communities, coordinated outreach to reengage missing students, and recognition of the strong work being done by school staff coupled with a need for additional supports and resources to combat persistent inequality.” — Zoe Day


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