Advocate for Ending Poverty Named UCLA Luskin Commencement Speaker Former Stockton Mayor Michael Tubbs, first elected at age 26, now champions reforms to battle income inequality

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Michael D. Tubbs, who made history in 2016 when he was elected the first Black mayor of Stockton, California, at age 26, then used the platform to plant the seeds of a nationwide campaign to end poverty, has been named 2023 Commencement speaker for the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs.

Tubbs is a champion of social and economic reforms that have earned him a reputation as a rising star in progressive politics. On Friday, June 16, he will deliver two Commencement addresses: At 9 a.m., he will speak to students graduating with master’s and doctoral degrees in public policy, social welfare and urban planning at UCLA’s Royce Hall. At 3 p.m., he will address students earning the bachelor’s in public affairs on the Kerckhoff Hall patio.

“Michael Tubbs has shown us all that a clear vision and strong resolve can uplift the lives of people across our state and nation,” said UCLA Luskin Interim Dean Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris. “His leadership, innovative spirit and ability to turn bold concepts into real action are exceptional, and as a School committed to improving the human condition at all levels, we look forward to hearing his inspiring message.” 

Tubbs is widely known for his work advocating for a guaranteed basic income to provide stability to American households. As mayor, he created a pilot program providing direct, recurring cash payments to Stockton residents and founded the nonprofit Mayors for a Guaranteed Income to support similar efforts across the country. He also raised more than $20 million to launch the Stockton Scholars, a universal scholarship and mentorship program for the city’s students.

Under Tubbs’ leadership, Stockton was recognized as one of California’s most fiscally healthy cities; saw a 40% drop in homicides in 2018 and 2019; and led the state in the decline of officer-involved shootings in 2019. The National Civic League named Stockton an “All-America City” in 2017 and 2018.

After he left office in 2021, Tubbs joined the administration of Gov. Gavin Newsom as special advisor for economic mobility and opportunity. Last year, he founded End Poverty in California, a nonprofit devoted to breaking the cycle of income inequality.

Tubbs’ 2021 autobiography, “The Deeper The Roots: A Memoir of Hope and Home,” relates how hardship in his early years shaped his vision for leadership and policies that are responsive to those who are struggling. Tubbs writes about his father’s incarceration, the strong women who raised him, his scholarship to attend Stanford University, the opportunity to intern in the Obama White House, and his calling to return to his hometown to improve the quality of life. 

Tubbs served as a high school educator and city council member before running for mayor. His experiences advocating for reform in the city’s top job are chronicled in the 2020 HBO documentary “Stockton on My Mind.”

Tubbs is a fellow at the Harvard Institute of Politics and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab. He was named to Fortune magazine’s 40 under 40 list and Forbes’ 30 Under 30 All-Star Alumni, as well as The Nation’s Progressive Honor Roll, which recognized him as the “Most Valuable Mayor” of 2018. He earned the 2019 New Frontier Award from the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and the 2021 Civic Leadership Award from The King Center.

Learn more about UCLA Luskin’s 2023 Commencement.

L.A. County Residents Express Second-Lowest Satisfaction Ever With Quality of Life Despite overall uptick in eighth annual index, dissatisfaction remains high due to inflation, homelessness and the COVID-19 pandemic

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By Les Dunseith

Los Angeles County residents are feeling more upbeat today than a year ago — but not by much.

Inflation remains a primary concern as people worry about losing their homes or feeding their families. Many residents said their quality of life had been affected by a homeless encampment. And they believe the pandemic’s impacts on L.A. life will be long-lasting.

Those are just a few of the key takeaways from the latest Quality of Life Index, or QLI, a project of the Los Angeles Initiative at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs that measures county residents’ satisfaction levels in nine categories. The overall rating rose two points to 55, but it was still the second-lowest rating in the eight years of the project. The highest rating of 59 was recorded in 2016 and 2017.

“Last year’s record negativity appears to have bottomed out and made a slight upward turn,” said Zev Yaroslavsky, director of the Los Angeles Initiative, who oversees the index. “But inflation has taken a toll, especially among lower- and middle-income residents.”

In fact, 94% of respondents said they were affected by inflation and the increase in costs of basic needs. And 71% said it had a major impact. Rising housing costs were an issue for 82% of respondents, and 58% said it’s a major concern.

More than a quarter, or 28%, of respondents worried about losing their home and becoming homeless, while 25% were afraid their families will go hungry because they can’t afford the cost of food. Nearly half of people in households earning less than $60,000 were concerned about becoming homeless.

Almost three-quarters of residents, 73%, said their quality of life had been impacted in the last year by a homeless encampment. A major impact was reported by 43% of respondents, with San Fernando Valley and Westside residents at 50% and San Gabriel Valley residents at 28%.

Most respondents, 75%, said life has been fundamentally changed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Only 23% expect life to return to the way it was before.

Of survey respondents who are employed, 49% said they always work away from home, 36% divide their work between home and a workplace, and 14% always work from home. Lower-income residents were far more likely to always work away from home, 61%, than higher-income households, 39%. Hybrid schedules were more common for higher-income workers, 41%, compared to 29% for lower-income households.

Many respondents said their income changed during the pandemic, with 27% saying it went down and 30% saying it went up. More than a third, or 35%, of those with a household income below $60,000 said it declined. Nearly half, or 45%, of respondents with a household income over $120,000, said it rose.

“The income disparities that have defined the Southern California economy for several decades have been exacerbated by COVID, as the rich seem to be getting richer while the poor are getting poorer,” Yaroslavsky said. “County residents whose incomes have not rebounded have less money than they used to, and what they have doesn’t buy what it did before. They’re getting hurt coming and going.”

This year’s QLI was based on interviews conducted with 1,429 county residents over 30 days beginning on Feb. 24. The survey has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.6%.

Ratings were up slightly in all nine categories except health care, which remained the same as 2022 at 66.

Among the other results:

  • Cost of living, which is always the lowest rated, increased to 41 from 39. White respondents gave it a 37, among the lowest in any category in the survey’s history.
  • Also scoring below the survey’s midpoint of 55 were education, 48, and transportation and traffic, 53.
  • Public safety, jobs and the economy, and the environment came in at 58.
  • Race and ethnic relations, 67, and their neighborhood, 68, were the top-rated categories.

The survey also examined approval ratings for local elected officials. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass had the highest favorability, with 46% of all respondents viewing her favorably and 23% unfavorably. City of L.A. respondents were even more positive, with 51% favorable and 17% unfavorable.

Sheriff Robert Luna was rated 37% favorable and 21% unfavorable. Los Angeles Police Chief Michel Moore received a 31% favorable and 22% unfavorable rating.

County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer was viewed favorably by 34% and unfavorably by 20%, with respondents ages 65 and older giving her a 47% favorable rating. Meanwhile, ratings for District Attorney George Gascón improved somewhat from last year but were still negative — 27% of county residents view him favorably, compared to 40% who view him unfavorably. Last year, the result was 22% favorable, 44% unfavorable.

The Quality of Life Index is funded by the Los Angeles Initiative and Meyer and Renee Luskin. The full report will be released on April 19 as part of UCLA’s Luskin Summit, which is being held in the Faculty Center at UCLA. In addition to a presentation by Yaroslavsky, L.A. City Council President Paul Krekorian will deliver a keynote address. A series of breakout discussions on issues of public concern will precede a closing session on the local homelessness emergency featuring state, county and city officials. The full agenda for Luskin Summit 2023 is available online.

The QLI was prepared in partnership with the public opinion research firm FM3 Research.

View the report and other information about this year’s study, plus previous Quality of Life Indexes, on the website of the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies.

report cover with text

 

Joe Nunn, at the Heart of Social Work Education UCLA Luskin professor emeritus reflects on what has changed during his six decades in the profession and its teaching — and what’s still in progress

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By Stan Paul

Social work education is going through a transition based around social justice, said Joe Nunn, emeritus professor of social welfare, but change is nothing new for the profession or for UCLA.

Nunn has a long affiliation with the university, first coming to the Westwood campus as a 17-year-old freshman in winter of 1961, then continuing through pursuit of his MSW and doctorate degrees, and later to the faculty. He retired in 2006.

Recalling his time as an MSW student from 1968 to 1970, he said, “One of the major transitions — and it’s still always going to be an issue — I think was diversity.”

During a time of anti-war and anti-discrimination marches and protests, UCLA Social Welfare had just two instructors who were African American. He and other students demanded that a tenured Black professor be added.

Douglas Glasgow, an assistant professor, was the only tenure track instructor at the time. Subsequently, Glasgow was promoted to associate professor and also served as director of the Center for Afro-American Studies (now the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies). Glasgow went on to become dean of Howard University’s School of Social Work.

“We’ve since had more African American faculty members than we had early on,” said Nunn, pointing out that the field faculty has been, in general, more diverse than the faculty as a whole across programs locally and nationally. But “there’s still more to be done.”

Before becoming director of field education from 1991 to 2006, Nunn’s first job after earning his undergraduate degree was working with juvenile offenders in the probation department for Los Angeles County in the mid-1960s. His work schedule spanned early mornings, afternoons and late nights, sometimes into the wee hours.

“When you’re with kids, you’re there all day. I mean, you’re 100% time with the unit,” he recalled.

It was during this time that he became aware of the work being done by social workers with youth and their families, he said.  “I got to work with some of them. That’s what really connected me to social welfare and the profession.”

‘Social work, as a community, should be community-connected because it is a service, that link between town and gown, so to speak, between the university and the community.”

He continued as a probation officer in Los Angeles after earning his MSW, totaling 15 years in all. He began working with interns from UCLA who were associated with the county’s probation camp.

“That was the first time I think they had social welfare interns. I was studying for the LSAT when my field liaison, Trudy Saxton, encouraged me to consider a doctorate in social work,” he said. “So, that’s what got me out of probation and into the PhD program.”

As a doctoral student, Nunn focused on juvenile justice.

“I looked at the attitudes of social work professionals and lay people from the Black community toward youth in trouble … how they viewed these kids in terms of what they thought should be the outcomes of providing service to them.”

His next career move was becoming assistant dean for field education at USC.

“That was hard to go across town, being such a Bruin, but I thought it was an opportunity. So, I went there for four years. And I learned a lot because I’d never worked for a private entity before.”

After returning to UCLA to direct its field education program, Nunn taught courses on cross-cultural awareness and social work. He played an integral role in developing the first course on juvenile justice for UCLA Social Welfare.

“Had to really fight for that,” Nunn said, because juvenile justice wasn’t a significant focus at the time. That has changed in recent years, as exemplified by current Social Welfare chair Laura Abrams, a professor whose focus is on juvenile justice.

The field training aspect has been a constant for Nunn, who has served in leadership positions for the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE), which sets national standards for social work education. He recalled being at an annual meeting with thousands of social work educators representing hundreds of social work programs. Nunn and a few colleagues noticed something was missing in the conference’s attendees and recognition programs.

“The people missing were the field instructors, the people who actually work with our students in the community,” Nunn said. So, he worked with peers at Cal State Long Beach to start the Heart of Social Work Award, an award that is now given at the organization’s annual conference to outstanding field instructors across the country. The award prompted more universities to sponsor field instructors to come to the conference and receive the award.

Over his career, Nunn has been awarded regional and national honors such as the National Association of Social Work, California Chapter Social Worker of the Year. Since 2007, he’s been the namesake for UCLA Luskin’s Joseph A. Nunn Social Welfare Alumni of the Year.

One honoree was Aurea Montes-Rodriguez MSW ’99, now executive vice president of the Community Coalition in Los Angeles, who spoke about Nunn at the award celebration in 2017.  “I am surprised and very humbled to be nominated and selected, especially for an award named after Dr. Nunn,” she said. “When I was a student, I looked up to him and admired the work he had done around juvenile criminal justice — thinking about ways we could do a better job eliminating the cradle-to-prison pipeline so we can develop a healthier generation.”

For decades, Joe Nunn has been an observer, an instigator of change and a teacher in a profession that, at its heart, continues to advance one overriding mission — public service.

“Social work, as a community, should be community-connected because it is a service,” Nunn said, “that link between town and gown, so to speak, between the university and the community.”

After a Long Road to UCLA, He’s Now on the UC Board of Regents Drawing lessons from his own journey, Social Welfare PhD student Merhawi Tesfai aims to break down barriers to higher education

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By Mary Braswell

Merhawi Tesfai joined the University of California Board of Regents at an interesting time, to say the least.

Tesfai, a UCLA doctoral student in social welfare, has participated in discussions about UCLA’s move to the Big Ten Conference and its purchase of a Rancho Palos Verdes campus to expand enrollment, and he was at meetings during the largest higher-education strike in U.S. history, involving graduate students across the UC system.

And that was just the fall of 2022.

“The strike and the Big Ten took up a lot of the time and conversations, but there were all these other very important issues that didn’t get as much attention,” said Tesfai, who joined the board last summer as student regent-designate.

For the 2023–24 academic year, he will serve as the board’s sole student regent, with full voting rights, giving voice to the statewide system’s 285,000 students.

At listening sessions with students, chancellors and administrators from every UC campus, Tesfai has heard concerns about sustainability, housing, scholarship support and more. His role is to faithfully convey those issues to his fellow regents, a board that comprises 18 appointees, the UC president and other officers, along with elected leaders including the speaker of the Assembly and governor of California.

Tesfai’s journey to the UC’s governing body has been anything but conventional. He brings to the position the unique perspectives of transfer students, first-generation students, older students and parenting students — and a record of using his own experiences to light the way for others.

Tesfai was born in Eritrea, but his family fled conflict there, moving to neighboring Sudan before eventually relocating to Los Angeles’ Koreatown neighborhood when he was 5. His mother prized education, sending him to charter schools on the Westside and insisting that he apply to college. But more than a decade would pass before Tesfai would find his way to UCLA.

After high school, he enrolled at Cal State Long Beach but left after three semesters.

“I was just not ready at that time,” he said. “It took a few years before it became something that I wanted to do and not something that I felt pressured to do.”

So Tesfai entered the workforce while taking community college classes. He eventually found his calling in the field of counseling and therapy.

“I really felt that this was not just a job; that I could actually help people in some way,” he said.

Tesfai at a UC Regents meeting in July 2022. Photo courtesy of the University of California Board of Regents

He began taking courses toward a certificate in substance abuse counseling at Los Angeles City College, but professors there encouraged him to connect with UCLA’s Center for Community College Partnerships, which offers resources for prospective transfer students. Soon, Tesfai was in touch with a UCLA peer mentor — “someone who looked like me and who had come to school a little bit later as well.”

Then 32, Tesfai weighed whether returning to life as a full-time student was the right move; the summer before he would enroll was a whirlwind highlighted by the birth of his son. But he moved forward, earning a bachelor’s degree in African American studies in 2019, followed by master’s degrees in public policy and social welfare at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs three years later.

“When you come in and you’re trying to get your bachelor’s and you’re trying to do a minor and you’re trying to set yourself up for applying for a grad program right after — it’s a lot that you have to cram in there in short periods,” he said. “But luckily, a lot of resources and a lot of encouragement came along with it.”

As an undergraduate, Tesfai was accepted to the prestigious McNair Research Scholars program, which provides guidance for students aspiring to earn advanced degrees. At the Bunche Center for African American Studies, he engaged in research on race and inequality. And through the Center for Community College Partnerships, Luskin Black Caucus and other campus groups, he reached out to students from underserved communities, letting them know that a UCLA education was within their reach.

Now, Tesfai is on track to become a quadruple Bruin: He expects to complete his doctorate in social welfare within four years.

Undergraduate and graduate students from any UC campus can apply to serve as student regent; candidates ultimately must be confirmed by the full Board of Regents after a rigorous selection process. Tesfai initially became interested in the post to help fund his doctoral studies — the position comes with a stipend and waiver of tuition and fees during the two-year commitment. But he has come to value how the responsibilities dovetail with the topic of his dissertation, which focuses on barriers to navigating higher education.

He hopes to use his position to advocate for increasing the ranks of underrepresented students throughout the UC.

“This is something that was informed by the long road it took for me to get here,” he said. “I have seen the different ways that high schools, community colleges and universities can really excel at preparing students to just get to a four-year university and potentially to grad school or into whatever career they want. Or how they can fail.”

And Tesfai hopes to honor the guidance he received from the other students, professors, counselors and administrators who helped him along his own academic journey. “I want to do that for others, wherever I can.”

How Weather Woes Led Jack Rothman to UCLA Emeritus professor, now 96, tells why he relocated his pioneering academic research on community organizing to sunny California in the 1980s

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By Stan Paul

Jack Rothman was in a rut — literally.

It was winter in the early 1980s and he found himself walking down “automobile tire tracks, you know, trudging along” amid thick snow as he made his way from his job at the University of Michigan to his home about a mile away.

“Why am I doing this as a grown intelligent man living in the winter all the time? I’ve been in New York, Pittsburgh, now Michigan,” the UCLA Luskin emeritus professor recalled thinking. “First chance I get, I’m moving to warm weather, particularly California.”

“It was January. I was writing a paper — my constant preoccupation,” Rothman said. “I hear a voice, ‘This is Dean Leonard Schneiderman, you know, school of social work at UCLA. Would you be willing to come out for an interview visit?’”

Outside his window, it was snowing. “‘You’re darn right. I’ll be out as soon as I can make it,'” he said. It was 80 degrees in Los Angeles during his interview with Schneiderman, former dean of Social Welfare at UCLA. “I had improved my temperature by 70 degrees,” Rothman said. “And that was it.”

He spent the next decade teaching, researching and writing at the Westwood campus. He has been officially retired for three decades, but Rothman’s work, influence and longstanding reputation in the field remain current, according to colleagues and former students.

“He was the first to conceptualize and describe community practice in an academic way as fundamental to the profession,” said JoAnn Damron-Rodriguez, an adjunct professor emerita of social welfare and longtime former faculty member at the Luskin School. She cited his seminal theoretical piece, “Three Models of Community Organization Practice.”

“His textbook on models of community organization became a classic with seven editions and generations of students using these practice approaches to shape their careers,” Damron-Rodriguez said.

More books followed on related areas of practice: case management, intervention research, action-directed agency and community change, community intervention and more.

“All are on a path to structural change related to the same knotty problems social workers confront today,” Damron-Rodriguez said.

Rothman is a prolific writer — with more than 25 scholarly book titles. His “Planning and Organizing for Social Change: Action Principles from Social Science Research” is one of the earliest efforts to formulate systematic, empirically based practice.

About his interest in community organizing, “I was inherently attracted from my early years to values reflecting equality, social justice and anti-racism,” Rothman said. “These ideals were embedded in my family,” who were immigrants who fled the Ukraine in 1920 during the civil war surrounding the Russian Revolution after centuries-long antisemitism.

Following military service in World War II, Rothman entered academia, completing a bachelor’s degree from City College of New York and a master’s degree from the Ohio State University.

“I started my master’s studies in 1949, almost the same time that the UCLA [Social Welfare] school started. And would you believe there were only two schools in the whole United States that had a concentration or major in community organization,” Rothman said.

“I was really on the ground floor. I decided then I would enter the field with the aspiration of  expanding on the ‘Jane Addams’ social change dimension of the profession,” said Rothman, who completed his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1960 with an emphasis on social psychology.

At the time, there were not many graduate programs in social work in the U.S., Rothman said. Today, it’s over 200. “Instead of taking [classes in] community organizing in only two schools, you could probably take it now in the majority of schools … so that’s a really big change,” he said.

‘My hope is that Social Welfare at UCLA continues along the same path and remains one of the major programs in the country.’

In 1984 — the same year Rothman came to UCLA — Marshall Wong MSW ’86 entered UCLA’s social welfare program and was among the first class to take Rothman’s course on community organizing.

Out of 70-plus MSW students in his class, 11 ended up working in the community area, said Wong, who is now a senior intergroup relations specialist for the Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations.

“[Rothman] is an extremely modest, amiable person. At the time, I don’t think any of us had any idea of his towering reputation in the field. It took a little while for us to realize,” Wong said.

Rothman’s teaching was foundational for Wong, his classmates and colleagues.

“He really encouraged his students to draw upon their own life experiences as kind of the base for what community organizing techniques and strategies would be effective, and so there was a real, a dynamic relationship between the theoretical and practical,” Wong said.

In 2015, Rothman was honored by the Council on Social Work Education with the Significant Lifetime Achievement in Social Work Education Award and he is the namesake of an annual award for Structural Change Practice by the Special Commission to Advance Macro Practice in Social Work.

Rothman took part in Social Welfare’s 50th anniversary celebration, and he plans to be back on campus for the 75th gala celebration to help mark the program and its achievements.

The Past, Present and Future of Transportation Access Author and scholar Robert Cervero says long-ago research by his late mentor, Martin Wachs, still has relevance for today’s planners and policymakers

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By Les Dunseith

When UC Berkeley Professor Emeritus Robert Cervero was asked to deliver the 15th annual Martin Wachs Distinguished Lecture, he was initially hesitant. 

“But it dawned on me that a really important foundational piece of work that was published one-half century ago, 50 years ago, was Marty Wach’s paper on accessibility,” said Cervero during a Feb. 28 presentation in honor of his former urban planning mentor and colleague. “And why don’t I wrap my talk … around the theme of that paper and try to show how it really shaped my own research in this field and, I would suggest, generations of other people as well.”

Titled “Physical Accessibility as a Social Indicator,” the article by Wachs and T. Gordon Kumagai continues to influence planning policy, said Cervero, who earned his doctorate in urban planning at UCLA in 1980 and joined UC Berkeley’s city and regional planning faculty, where he remained until 2016.

“The article really highlights a number of different contexts of which accessibility should really be an overarching principle that guides what we do in this field of urban planning and transportation,” Cervero said.

During introductory remarks, UCLA Luskin Professor Brian Taylor mentioned that the lecture was the first in the series to be presented without Wachs himself in attendance. The longtime urban planning scholar taught at both UCLA and UC Berkeley before his death in 2021. Members of the Wachs family, including his wife, Helen, were in attendance. 

Presented in conjunction with the Luskin Lecture Series, Cervero’s talk was titled, “Accessibility, Social Equity, and Contemporary Policy Debates,” and he spoke about how the concepts put forth 50 years before still have relevance today, especially in regard to how access to transportation contributes to the well-being of people living in cities. 

“Marty made the point with his co-author that this sensibility happens at multiple scales. It’s regional access to jobs or medical facilities, but it’s also at the micro-scale of ‘Do you have access to, say, a bus?’” said Cervero, who said he built on this notion in his own research about socioeconomic matching in terms of the realities of transportation access. A person might live in a transit-rich area, for example, “but if you’re in a wheelchair, and the buses don’t have wheelchair ramps, then you don’t have great transit access.”

In the 1970s, few scholars prior to Wachs had written about these types of human components to transportation access. “To me, it was truly revolutionary,” Cervero said. 

For example, Cervero found that people living in central city neighborhoods often bear disproportionately higher costs for transportation services. Because they make frequent off-peak trips for necessities like groceries, they end up paying a lot more than affluent suburbanites taking fewer trips over longer distances.  

The disparity also was apparent when he and other researchers looked at why people who seemed to have public transit options readily available to them choose to rely primarily on their vehicles instead. 

“A lot of these individuals were people like working moms who had very complex travel patterns,” Cervero said. “They have a child to drop off at the child care center and then go to their job. They were taking vocational courses at night and had to get there at a time when public transit service was bad. They had split-shift weekend jobs when transit services are notoriously lousy. So, they need a car.”

man wearing glasses speaks at podiumProfessor Brian Taylor invited Robert Cervero to speak about his long association with the late Martin Wachs at both UCLA and UC Berkeley.
man wearing glasses speaks at podium
man wearing glasses speaks at podium
two men talk while seated in front of a projection screen
two men talk while seated in front of a projection screen
woman with gray hair gestures
woman with gray hair gestures

In looking at the concepts articulated by Wachs so many years before, Cervero also found lessons that can be applied to some of today’s planning and policy debates. One example is the idea of a “15-minute city,” a place designed by planners to ensure that most people have ready access not just to work but to the other necessities of daily life within 15 minutes of their homes.

The idea is laudable, but it has its critics. 

“If you really insist on this, you potentially stifle economic competition. Companies don’t want to thinly distribute activities everywhere,” said Cervero, as some in the audience of UCLA faculty, staff, students and alumni nodded their heads in agreement. “So, this idea of a 15-minute city really runs in the face of what economists have long argued are important economic drivers towards the economic growth and performance of a city.”

In his career, Cervero has consulted on transportation and urban planning projects worldwide, including recently in Singapore. “They’ve come up with this idea of the 20-minute town and the 45-minute city. You can reach a lot of things within 20 minutes. But when it comes to employment, when it comes to going to see a sporting event or buying a car or going to a regional hospital with specialized medical care, that’s a 45-minute city. So, I think we’re getting a lot better articulation and sensible policy.”

During a Q&A session after his formal presentation, Cervero spoke with UCLA Professor Adam Millard-Ball and took questions from the audience. When asked to talk more about his global experience, he explained that much of the scholarly work to date has focused on urban life in the United States and Europe. 

Some of today’s researchers focus on climate change impacts and how to find “a little more efficiency out of electric mobility or ridesharing or whatever. But in the grand scheme of things, over the next 20 or 30 years, 80% to 90% of urbanization is not going to happen in the Global North. It’s going to be in south Asia and Africa, and whatever happens there is going to swamp any and everything we do here, particularly in the rates of carbon emissions and so forth.”

In the developed world, the focus is often on how to get people from the central cores to jobs in suburbia. That’s less true in places like Mexico, South America, Indonesia and other parts of Asia. 

“It’s a totally different landscape. Most of the poor are not in cities but in far-flung suburbs or towns. When you’re talking about lack of access, it’s a two- to three-hour, one-way daily commute,” Cervero said. “The amount of time and resources you have to invest is enormous just getting to and from where you need to be in order to have the earnings to cover basic needs.”

He was also asked about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting rise in remote work.

“Historically, we think of physical proximity,” said Cervero, noting that when workers have highly specialized skill sets they depend on interactions in teams of people with other specialized skills to thrive. 

“The whole idea of access being tied to location is being somewhat thrown around by all these rapidly evolving, powerful kinds of technological advances,” he said. “Technology is transforming. The notion of physical proximity as we all know it has long driven the idea of cooperation. But maybe it happens less.”

Established by students, the Wachs Lecture Series features prominent and innovative scholars and policymakers in the field of transportation. The UCLA Luskin Lecture series brings together scholars with local and national leaders to discuss solutions to society’s most pressing problems. This event was organized by UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs and Institute of Transportation Studies, for which Taylor has served as the director and Millard-Ball the interim director. Cervero was the director of UC Berkeley’s counterpart to ITS for many years.

View additional photos on Flickr

UCLA Lecture by Robert Cervero

Watch a recording of the lecture on YouTube

UCLA Luskin Social Welfare Alumnae Elevated to Public Office

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Caroline Menjivar and Nikki Perez, two members of UCLA Luskin’s Master of Social Welfare Class of 2018, have turned their background in social work into successful bids for public office. Menjivar has been elected to the California State Senate, and Perez will join the Burbank City Council, results from the Nov. 8 election confirmed. The two alumnae will bring a broad range of perspectives into the halls of government. Menjivar, a Marine Corps veteran and the daughter of Salvadoran immigrants, will be the first out LGBTQ legislator to represent the San Fernando Valley. She told CalMatters that she plans to use her personal experiences and background as a social worker to advocate for mental health services and housing solutions. While at UCLA Luskin, Menjivar worked in the office of Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti as a David Bohnett Fellow. Perez was the top vote-getter in the Burbank council race. She told the Burbank Leader, “As the first Indigenous and openly LGBTQ woman elected to council, it’s a tremendous honor to bring a unique perspective and representation to our city government.” A lifelong Burbank resident and graduate of its public schools, Perez said she will be a voice for the city’s underrepresented populations, including renters, working-class families, union members and the Latino community. Since graduating from UCLA Luskin, Perez has worked as a nonprofit program manager and staff member with the California Legislature.

 

Weekend Event Harnesses the Power of Service Public Policy hosts aspiring public servants from across America for workshops focusing on policy issues and solutions

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Twenty-nine undergraduates from across the nation came to UCLA in mid-August for three days of study and discussion as UCLA Luskin Public Policy returned to in-person programming for its third Public Service Weekend.

“Harness the Power of Action-Oriented Public Service” provided aspiring public servants an in-depth look at a diverse array of career opportunities, policy developments, and social issues such as environmental justice, inequality, homelessness and immigration reform.

The program, which was produced in cooperation with the not-for-profit Public Policy and International Affairs (PPIA) organization, included a tour of a Los Angeles clean technology site and workshops conducted by UCLA faculty, alumni and staff.

“Additionally, we aimed to inspire students by sharing the life stories and successes of UCLA graduate students, alumni, policymakers and faculty doing the work on the front lines of advocating for policy reform and social change,” said Kenya Covington, a senior lecturer at UCLA Luskin who coordinated the program.

Speakers included Dean Gary Segura, as well as alumni William “Rusty” Bailey, the former mayor of Riverside, and Dan Coffee, a project manager for the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation. Second-year MPP student Elliot Woods, chair of the School’s Black Student Caucus, shared educational and personal insights. He said experiences with the foster care system early in life have sharpened his determination to improve society through a career in public service.

man in industrial workplacePilot projects at the La Kretz Innovation Campus focus on green tech efforts to mitigate climate change.
man in industrial workplace
man in industrial workplace
man gestures in front of screen showing photos
man gestures in front of screen showing photos
man speaks at front of classroom with presentation slide behind him
man speaks at front of classroom with presentation slide behind him
man at podium speaks to group
man at podium speaks to group
four people sit at a table in the front of a classroom at UCLA
four people sit at a table in the front of a classroom at UCLA

A site tour of the La Kretz Innovation Campus exposed participants to creative clean technology ideas seeking to decrease the emissions that cause climate change. Participants learned about pilot projects involving lithium battery recycling, for example, and they witnessed how welding workspaces, 3D printing technology and chemistry labs can all play a role in developing green technology solutions.

The student participants were challenged by Covington to identify pressing societal problems, and faculty and staff facilitated learning exercises that helped them to define values that have been violated and the scale of problems to be addressed. The students wrapped up the Public Service Weekend with mock professional presentations that focused on potential solutions.

“The presentations were impressive,” Covington said. “Future social change depends largely on the development of leaders capable of taking on the most pressing social problems that we face in the world. With partners like PPIA, the Luskin School is doing just that.”

View photos on Flickr:

Public Service Weekend 2022

‘Social Workers Who Drive Social Change’ Students from around the world gather at UCLA to reimagine their chosen field through a justice-first lens

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By Mary Braswell

The aspiring social workers from around the world gathered on a shaded lawn at UCLA to process what they had seen that morning.

Their visit to an agency on Skid Row, epicenter of Los Angeles’ homelessness crisis, came after several days immersed in conversation about how to engage communities on society’s margins, and the group’s reflections pointed to one overriding question:

How can individual social workers move away from managing misery and toward a transformation of their entire field, upending systems that perpetuate inequity in order to truly change lives?

That aspiration guided this year’s International Summer University in Social Work, hosted by UCLA Luskin Social Welfare over two weeks in July.

More than 20 scholars and graduate students from universities in Australia, Canada, China, India, Israel and Switzerland joined a large UCLA contingent during the collective multinational inquiry.

“We are seeking common practices that promote justice, and we learn from one another,” said Amy Ritterbusch, the assistant professor of social welfare who developed the curriculum with Professor Emerita Rosina Becerra.

‘We are seeking common practices that promote justice, and we learn from one another.’ — Amy Ritterbusch, assistant professor of social welfare

The summer university has convened around the world for more than a decade, governed by a consortium of universities to bring a global lens to core social work theories and practices.

This is the first year that UCLA has hosted, and finding a place on a full agenda were topics such as racism, the wealth gap, gender bias, housing and health inequities, children’s rights and elder abuse.

Faculty members from each participating university shared their scholarship on community engagement, as did the keynote speaker, University of Washington Professor Karina Walters, a triple Bruin who earned her doctorate in social welfare in 1995. Walters drew from her Choctaw heritage and research, using the elements of water, land, air, wind and fire to frame the dialogue.

Off-campus elements of the program revealed the extremes of L.A. society: the structural poverty and exclusion seen on Skid Row and at the Los Angeles LGBT Center, and the spaces of privilege glimpsed during cultural outings to the Hollywood Bowl and Pantages Theater.

Also built into each day’s schedule was space for group dialogue to share the unique cultural perspectives and social work practices each participant brought to the summer university.

Vanessa Warri, a UCLA doctoral student studying social welfare and a leader in the summer university, said the program challenged students to broaden their thinking about their chosen profession.

“There’s a history of social workers showing up as ‘saviors’ — at best providing resources to an underserved community and at worst managing the suffering of a population, but not necessarily helping to alleviate it,” she said. “So how can we engage and advocate in the spaces we are in and build more sustainable communities?”

Before and after the trip to the Society of St. Vincent de Paul’s Cardinal Manning Center on Skid Row, the group grappled with the enormity of the homelessness crisis, the limits of social work, and the concern that taking a tour of life on the streets would be more voyeuristic than educational. The shelter staff invited them to take note of the sights, smells and sounds, then ponder how policies are addressing or not addressing what they observed.

Bobby Benny, a student from the Rajagiri College of Social Science in India, was struck by the dozens of shelters and service providers within a few blocks but wondered how they could possibly meet the needs of the 6,500 unhoused people in downtown Los Angeles, much less the tens of thousands countywide.

“How is that building with 100 beds a solution? How is any of it a solution?” Benny asked as the students gathered back at UCLA. “I’ve seen this in India, but something is different here.”

On the institute’s final day, Benny shared a poem juxtaposing the Los Angeles he had dreamed of and the one he woke up in, where “those skyscrapers were acting as a source of shade for the people who were forgotten in the City of Angels.”

Group presentations allowed all the students to synthesize their experiences and reflect on how they could apply what they learned in their home cultures. And they expressed a desire to stay connected even over long distances.

Said Ritterbusch, “We hope to leave here with a collective commitment to become social workers who drive social change.”

View lectures and photos from this year’s International Summer University in Social Work.

International Summer University in Social Work

Urban Planning Marks Half a Century of Action-Oriented Scholarship Alumni, faculty, students and friends gather to honor the program's activist ethos and focus on equity since its launch in 1969

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It was a celebration 50 years in the making, plus a few for good measure.

UCLA Urban Planning, launched in 1969, marked its golden anniversary this spring with a series of events aimed at showcasing the program’s activist ethos and focus on equity.

As a finale, alumni from across the decades joined students, faculty, staff and friends at a May 14 commemoration, “50 Years of Scholarship to Solutions.”

Dolores Hayden, professor emerita at Yale University and noted scholar of the history of the American urban landscape, delivered a keynote address to the Urban Planning community. Panels of faculty, doctoral students and alumni, moderated by Cecilia Estolano MA UP ’91, explored UCLA Luskin’s latest research.

The crowd then moved to UCLA’s Franklin D. Murphy Sculpture Garden to enjoy music, food and drink, and reminisce about the last half-century of making a difference in Los Angeles and cities around the world.

During the gathering, Jacqueline Waggoner MA UP ’96, a member of the UCLA Luskin Board of Advisors, gave an update on the new Urban Planning Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Fund, established to support student fellowships and assistantships.
Celebrants including Associate Professor Michael Manville, left, capture the moment at a selfie station. Photo by Todd Cheney
woman at microphone pauses during event
woman at microphone pauses during event
man smiles while talking with woman
man smiles while talking with woman
people seated in foreground listen to speaker at podium while a screen shows an image of Martin Wachs
people seated in foreground listen to speaker at podium while a screen shows an image of Martin Wachs

Since March, the 50th anniversary celebration has hosted thought leaders on planning, policy and environmental justice.

They included L.A. City Council member Nithya Raman, an urban planner by training, who came to UCLA to speak about the need for creative solutions of all types to make headway against the crisis of homelessness.

Environmental advocate Elizabeth Yeampierre shared stories about the power of front-line communities working for climate justice.

And Robert Bullard, known as the father of environmental justice, spoke of the undercurrent of racial discrimination beneath the growing climate crisis.

Several other speakers appeared as part of the Harvey S. Perloff Environmental Thinkers Series.

The weekslong commemoration also included an afternoon marking the legacy of Martin Wachs, scholar, mentor and key influencer of transportation policy and planning. Wachs, who died in 2021, held top research and leadership posts at UCLA and UC Berkeley for over five decades.

On May 13, students, colleagues and friends gathered to remember his impact and watch as Wachs’ wife, Helen, accepted two prestigious honors on his behalf: the Planning Pioneer award and the Planner Emeritus Network Honor award from the California chapter of the American Planning Association.

From its beginnings as part of UCLA’s School of Architecture and Urban Planning, the program has evolved and expanded. In the 1990s, it joined what is now the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs and continued to build a reputation of interdisciplinary, action-oriented scholarship.

Ranking among the top planning programs in the nation, UCLA Luskin Urban Planning offers master’s and doctoral degrees in urban and regional planning, as well as several dual-degree programs, including a new partnership with European research university Sciences Po in Paris.

Read more about 50 years of urban planning at UCLA.

View photos from the Urban Planning at 50 celebration.

View photos from the gathering recognizing the legacy of Martin Wachs.