UCLA Grants Deepen Ties to the L.A. Community Projects by Luskin faculty will build collaboration among scholars, students and local partners

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The first goal of UCLA’s Strategic Plan is deepening collaborations and connections with Los Angeles. This academic year, several UCLA Luskin faculty are helping the university meet that mark.

As recipients of grants from the UCLA Center for Community Engagement, these faculty will explore ways to strengthen ties between community partners and UCLA students and scholars, with the goal of finding solutions to L.A.’s most pressing issues.

This year, the UCLA Community-Engaged Research Grants will fund exploratory projects including:

Achieving and Implementing Abolition in Los Angeles

Co-Principal Investigators: David C. Turner III, assistant professor of social welfare, and Kelly Lytle Hernandez, professor of history, African American studies and urban planning

Community Partners: Justice LA; Check the Sheriff’s Coalition; Police-Free LAUSD Coalition; People’s Budget LA Coalition; PUSH LA Coalition; LA Youth Uprising Coalition

Million Dollar Hoods is a UCLA research project that advances the labors of activists and advocates working to change how public dollars are spent in Los Angeles. In particular, it advances the work of those seeking to reduce criminal justice budgets while expanding health services, housing options, welfare benefits and employment opportunities. This grant will fund a deep strategic planning and research process focused on implementing community-led policy initiatives that reallocate public resources to supporting human-centered services.

Aligning Housing Policy With Popular Demand for More Housing

Co-Principal Investigators: Zachary Steinert-Threlkeld, associate professor of public policy, and Paavo Monkkonen, professor of urban planning and public policy

Community Partner: Abundant Housing Los Angeles

Angelenos understand the scarcity of housing and want to see more constructed. According to a November 2020 survey by the Los Angeles Department of City Planning, 64% of Angelenos call increasing housing supply a top or high priority. Support for more housing is one of the few bipartisan policy issues in the country, yet new housing construction in Los Angeles remains at multi-decade lows and rents and housing prices continue to rise. Untangling this puzzle is the focus of this community research.

Building Urban Soil Networks in Los Angeles for Research and Action

Co-Principal Investigators: Kirsten Schwarz, associate professor of urban planning and environmental health sciences, and Jennifer Jay, professor of civil and environmental engineering

Community Partners: TreePeople; Physicians for Social Responsibility – LA; Communities for a Better Environment; Watts Labor Community Action Committee – Better Watts Initiative

Urban soils are an important regional and national equity concern that shape the health and well-being of urban dwellers. They also represent a paradox of sorts, as contaminated soils are a hazard and clean soils are beneficial to the ecosystem. This project brings together community groups active in urban soils work in the L.A. region to build relationships, identify potential collaborations, and begin the process of coalescing around a common set of research priorities and actions.

Building Worker Power: Support for Low-Wage Worker Leadership With the Los Angeles Worker Center Network

Co-Principal Investigators: Chris Zepeda-Millan, associate professor of public policy, Chicano/a and Central American studies and political science, and chair of UCLA’s Labor Studies program; and Tobias Higbie, professor of history and director of the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment

Community Partners: Los Angeles Worker Center Network, including: CLEAN CarWash Worker Center; Garment Worker Center; Koreatown Immigrant Workers Alliance; Los Angeles Black Worker Center; Pilipino Workers Center; Restaurant Opportunities Center Los Angeles; Warehouse Workers Resource Center

The UCLA Labor Center, a founding member of the Los Angeles Worker Center Network, seeks to document best practices around multi-racial, multi-industry, multi-language organizing in support of labor standards, immigrant rights and anti-discrimination enforcement. In this project, researchers and worker centers will determine the best methods — such as popular education, storytelling, academic journals and social media — to document successful and replicable L.A. worker campaigns since 2009. They will also implement legal clinics and provide technical assistance to local agencies enforcing fair labor laws.

Healing Within While Incarcerated: The Role of Credible Messengers in Transformative Justice in L.A. County

Co-Principal Investigators: Lauren Ng, assistant professor of psychology, and Laura Abrams, professor of social welfare

Community Partner: Healing Dialogue and Action

Incarcerated youth experience a multitude of poor social, emotional and physical health outcomes after detention. To address these concerns, Los Angeles County has adopted a “rehabilitative, care-first model” of juvenile justice that is being implemented by Credible Messengers — leaders with the lived experience of incarceration. There has been limited academic collaboration investigating Credible Messenger programs. This partnership with an organization working in county juvenile justice facilities will advance the science behind the Credible Messenger approach with the aim of promoting healing of justice-involved youth.

Housing and Homelessness Justice Research Collaborative

Co-Principal Investigators: Chris Herring, assistant professor of sociology, and Ananya Roy, professor of urban planning, social welfare and geography

Community Partners: LA Tenants Union; Union de Vecinos

This grant supports a recently established collaborative partnership between UCLA faculty and the Downtown local of the LA Tenants Union. The funds will allow the partners to broaden a study of Los Angeles’ Permanent Supportive Housing initiative to address homelessness. Despite billions of dollars recently committed to this initiative, no research to date has examined its success or weaknesses. The UCLA grant will allow additional community partners to participate and aid the collaborative in envisioning a multi-year tenant justice research agenda.

Interdisciplinary Center on Housing and Homelessness

Co-Principal Investigators: Till von Wachter, professor of economics; Michael Lens, professor of urban planning and public policy; and Elizabeth Bromley, professor in residence of psychiatry and anthropology

Community Partners: Individual community members; Los Angeles Homelessness Services Authority; L.A. County Department of Health Services; L.A. County Department of Mental Health; L.A. County Department of Social Services

L.A.’s housing and homelessness crises are caused by a complex web of factors ranging from lack of housing production and zoning policies to structural racism in labor markets and justice systems. This project focuses on developing an interdisciplinary center that brings research communities together with people with lived experience of homelessness and policymakers from Los Angeles government and nonprofit agencies. The project emphasizes structural reforms needed to reduce homelessness and aims to inform the public debate by replacing misconceptions with data and research.

Previous awards from the UCLA Center for Community Engagement supported the development of two courses designed to immerse undergraduates in community-engaged research. The grants went to Associate Professor of Public Policy Meredith Phillips, who developed a course on data analysis for educational research, and Associate Professor of Social Welfare Lené Levy-Storms, who developed a course on human aging through an interdisciplinary lens.

Read about all of the 2024-25 Community-Engaged Research Exploratory Grants.

Zepeda-Millán on New Administration’s Ramp-Up of Deportations

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Chris Zepeda-Millán, associate professor of public policy at UCLA Luskin, commented in a Newsweek article on the Trump administration’s ramping up of its immigration policy in the first week back in the White House. According to polls cited in the story, deporting migrants who are in the U.S. illegally and convicted of a crime has broad support, but that support is limited. Zepeda-Millán, also professor of Chicana/o studies and chair of UCLA’s Labor Studies program, said immigration has received heightened attention because of the Republican Party’s emphasis on it, but also because of the continuing burden of inflation. “If economic inequality in the United States wasn’t still growing, this would be less of a concern for most Americans.” Zepeda-Millán said that issues such as family separation, “widely unpopular” during President Donald Trump’s first term, are still unpopular.

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Zepeda-Millán on the U.S.-Mexico Border Wall

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Chris Zepeda-Millán, associate professor of public policy at UCLA Luskin, commented in an Independent story on the current status of the U.S.-Mexico border wall eight years after President-elect Donald Trump made it a central part of his 2016 campaign. According to the story, illegal immigration increased during Trump’s major border wall construction push and hit record levels in 2023 during the Biden administration, with the wall “neither preventing nor deterring the things it was designed to stop.” Zepeda-Millán, who has conducted public opinion polling about why people support the wall, said, “Most Americans, even those who support the wall, know that it’s not going to produce the claimed effect, which then leads to the question: Why support it? Why build it?” Zepeda said he sees a parallel with Trump’s promises to deport millions of undocumented people: “The economy would collapse if he actually deported 11 million undocumented people. … Inflation would skyrocket.”

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Zepeda-Millán on Anti-Immigration Campaign Rhetoric

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Chris Zepeda-Millán, associate professor of public policy at UCLA Luskin, commented in a U.S. News & World Report story on anti-immigration rhetoric used by presidential candidate Donald Trump on the 2024 campaign trail. The story suggests that while the former president’s messaging could repel Latino voters the final weeks before the general election, he could possibly sway a small group that could make the difference, notably in swing states. “His courting of the Latino vote is definitely a legitimate concern for the Harris campaign and for Democrats in general,” said Zepeda-Millán, who also holds appointments in Chicana/o Studies and Political Science. While the goal of Trump and Republicans may not be to win a majority of Latino voters, he added, “they just want to confuse enough Latino voters to either not go out and vote or to shave enough off from the Democrats in order to weaken Latinos as a voting bloc.”

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A Closer Inspection of Trump’s Comments on Immigration

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A Los Angeles Times article about Donald Trump’s statements about actions he would take if reelected asked UCLA Luskin’s Chris Zepeda-Millán to weigh in on the former president’s comments on immigration. Trump has said he will “seal the border” with a physical wall, “carry out the largest deportation operation in American history,” order the military to attack foreign drug cartels and do away with birthright citizenship. While there is debate about whether to take the candidate at his word or chalk up his comments to populist rhetoric, Trump’s recent comments are his way of “doubling down on getting the most racist white Americans out to vote,” said Zepeda-Millán, associate professor of public policy and co-author of “Walls, Cages, and Family Separation: Race and Immigration Policy in the Trump Era.” Zepeda-Millán’s research shows that most Americans did not support Trump’s first-term immigration policies, and those who did held the “most racist views,” including general discomfort with growing Latino populations.

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UCLA Strategic Labor Research Conference Unites Diverse Coalition of Researchers, Activists

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In a keynote address at this month’s UCLA Strategic Labor Research Conference, Kim Kelly, journalist, organizer and author of “Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor,” spoke about the unifying potential of the labor movement in our polarized society. “Every struggle is connected,” she said. “At every protest you can think of, for every cause or issue you can imagine, almost every person you see there is going to have to clock into work the next day. Labor is one of the few truly universal experiences in our divided society.” Now in its second year, the conference held Aug 2-4 at the Luskin School provided a valuable educational and networking opportunity for individuals and organizations that leverage research and data to improve work standards and advance social justice. In workshops, talks and panels, participants learned how intricate policy details, geographic data about constituents and detailed corporate earnings reports could be used to maximize the efficacy of labor and economic justice campaigns. “The conference provides an exciting opportunity for cross-fertilization, with researchers realizing that they have a lot in common and are organizing against the same targets. There’s a coalition building that happens, not only within movements but between them as well,” said Chris Zepeda-Míllan, UCLA Labor Studies chair and associate professor of public policy and Chicana/o and Central American studies, who initiated the annual conference. This year’s gathering drew 200 attendees from across North America, including labor researchers and those working in adjacent social movements such as climate change, food justice and housing. — Willa Needham

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UCLA Strategic Labor Research Conference

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Hosted by the UCLA Labor Studies Program, the annual UCLA Strategic Labor Research Conference will include discussions about strategic campaigns designed for new and experienced union and labor movement researchers, as well as workshops on applied skills. The conference will take place at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs.
Applications for this free conference were due May 17. Sign up here to receive updates about future strategic labor research opportunities.
Conference highlights:
  • Keynote speaker is Kim Kelly, author of “Fight Like Hell:The Untold History of American Labor.”
  • Keynote panel will focus on “Strategic Campaigning and the Green Economy.”
  • More than 20 workshops will feature topics such as “FOIA & Public Records Requests,” “California Labor Policy Strategies,” “Moving From Research to Campaign” and “Researching With Workers.”
SEE FULL CONFERENCE DETAILS

Uncovering Climate Hazards in California’s Prisons

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A San Francisco Chronicle article highlighted research by UCLA Luskin master of public policy students who found that California’s prison system is not prepared to respond to climate emergencies that threaten the well-being of the state’s incarcerated population. Their report, produced on behalf of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, used a mixed methods approach that included interviews with experts, a spatial analysis and a survey of nearly 600 currently incarcerated people in all 34 of California’s prison facilities. The study found evidence of power outages and generator failures, a lack of shade in outdoor spaces, and a lack of access to air-conditioned spaces or heated facilities during extreme weather events. Sixty-one percent of survey respondents said they experienced heat exhaustion while incarcerated. The researchers, MPP ’23 graduates Aishah Abdala, Abhilasha Bhola, Guadalupe Gutierrez, Eric Henderson and Maura O’Neill, offered a series of policy recommendations aimed at keeping incarcerated people safe, protecting taxpayer interests and ensuring that government institutions are held accountable.

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Zepeda-Millán on Effects of the LAUSD Strike

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Chris Zepeda-Millán, associate professor of public policy and chair of UCLA’s labor studies program, was cited in an article by The Progressive about how school staff won key victories after a major strike in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). In March, members of Service Employees Union Local 99 were able to negotiate with the LAUSD and approve a new contract that will increase the average annual salary from $25,000 to $33,000, increase the minimum wage to $22.52 and provide other benefits. Zepeda-Millán said that the labor action provided an advantage to the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) in their own negotiations with the district, which have led to a tentative agreement. UTLA is larger than Local 99 and helped elect many school board members.

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