Opening Doors of Opportunity for Undocumented Students Spearheaded by two UCLA Luskin master's students, a campaign to establish the right to work puts public policy coursework into action

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By Mary Braswell

Two UCLA Luskin master’s students are putting their public policy education into action to advocate for equal opportunities for undocumented students — and their work is already paying off.

Last fall, Carlos Alarcon and Karely Amaya spearheaded a campaign known as Opportunity for All, which called on the University of California to remove hiring restrictions for all students, regardless of immigration status.

Backed by labor, legal and education experts across the nation, the campaign laid out a strategy that upended prevailing interpretations of a 1986 federal law that had blocked employment opportunities for undocumented immigrants.

In May, hundreds of students from up and down California carpooled to UCLA to show their support at a rally during a meeting of the UC Regents. During a public comment period the following day, speakers donned Opportunity for All T-shirts to stand in solidarity.

“Just to see the sea of blue — it was beautiful,” said Amaya, who delivered an impassioned statement to the regents that day, along with Alarcon and other advocates.

At the close of the session, the board voted unanimously to find a pathway to enact the groundbreaking policy. It established a working group that set out to tackle the legal and political ramifications within six months.

“Absolutely, it is our intention to find a way to allow employment opportunities for all our students, regardless of their immigration status,” Regent John A. Pérez said after the meeting. “This is too important to get wrong.”

‘This could set a huge precedent for what happens next.’ — Student leader Karely Amaya

Alarcon and Amaya credited the vast array of forces that came together to create a campaign that ended in “yes.” The UCLA Labor Center and UCLA Law were key allies that provided expertise and resources, and endorsed the strategy of letting undocumented students’ voices lead the way.

“The beauty of our campaign was that we weren’t looking at this just through the lens of student organizing. We weren’t looking at it just through a lens of the law and immigration and labor law,” Alarcon said. “We were also looking at it through the lens of politics,” aware that the window of opportunity to act on immigrant rights would be impacted by the 2024 U.S. presidential contest.

Lessons learned in their public policy coursework helped shape the campaign, the students said.

“This showcases the incredible policy work our students are engaging in outside of the classroom,” said Kevin Franco, director of student affairs for UCLA Luskin Public Policy. “The work that Carlos and Karely are doing is crucial.”

The student leaders, each of whom came to the United States as young children, had been speaking out on behalf of the undocumented population for years. Their paths first crossed when they were undergraduates, Alarcon at UC Riverside and Amaya at UCLA.

Both were part of the 2021 Dream Summer fellowship program, hosted by the UCLA Labor Center’s Dream Resource Center to empower immigrant youth to address the needs of their community. And both were accepted into the Master of Public Policy program at UCLA Luskin, Amaya in her first year and Alarcon preparing to graduate this week.

At UCLA, they launched the Undocumented Student-Led Network, uniting peers from across the UC campuses, and settled on their top priority: allowing students to work so that they could sustain themselves, pay tuition and continue their education.

“Our message was, ‘Hey, we’re your students. You accepted us into this prestigious university. You put us on your brochures. But I don’t have the same opportunities as my classmates,’” Amaya said.

As a participant in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, Alarcon is eligible for a work permit. But Amaya is one of tens of thousands of California students who were shut out of DACA after it was halted during the Trump administration and remains tied up in the courts. As a result, she said, she was unable to accept an offer to work as a graduate student researcher, which would have fully covered her tuition.

The Undocumented Student-Led Network set out to address that inequity, and quickly learned that UCLA Law was already on the case. Its Center for Immigration Law and Policy had developed a novel legal theory arguing that individual states are not bound by the decades-old federal law barring the hiring of undocumented residents.

Twenty-nine respected immigration and constitutional law professors from universities around the country signed a letter endorsing the legal analysis, a pivotal part of the campaign’s multi-pronged approach.

“We realized that it’s going to take a whole strategy, an implementation plan,” Amaya said. “We’re going to organize undocumented students. We’re going to build power. We’re going to continue reaching out to the media to report on this, and we’re going to meet with state legislators, nonprofits, different actors. We need all of our allies to show up for this.”

Their efforts paid off. The October launch of the campaign was accompanied by a New York Times piece laying out the issues. A nonprofit donated $30,000, allowing the team to purchase shirts, banners and other campaign materials aimed at underscoring their message and building community. Momentum grew, leading to the UC Regents’ action on May 18, which made headlines across the country.

The vote means the students’ work will continue. Representatives from the Undocumented Student-Led Network and other student organizations plan to meet regularly with the regents’ working group. And Alarcon and Amaya have high hopes that California will be a model for action that eventually opens the door of opportunity for students beyond its borders.

“This could set a huge precedent for what happens next,” said Amaya.

Capstone Projects Tackle Complex Social Issues Clients explore tough policy decisions with help from graduating UCLA Luskin students, including those in Urban Planning 

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By Les Dunseith  

Antonia Izuogu, a second-year urban planning student, came to UCLA with an interest in affordable housing, and as a Bohnett Foundation fellow, she has had an opportunity to participate in initiatives relating to homelessness for the Los Angeles mayor’s office. 

“I was homeless at one point, actually twice, within my childhood,” Izuogu said. 

But when the time came to choose a topic for her required capstone research project, Izuogu chose to pursue an emerging interest in the community development side of urban planning, particularly work cooperatives. She ended up doing a feasibility study for a partner group of the Downtown Crenshaw Rising community organization. 

“My capstone and my mayor’s work didn’t really touch each other — they’re just two passions of mine that I was able to work on this past year,” Izuogu said.

Read about Graham Rossmore’s capstone on al fresco dining and its influence on policy in L.A.

Throughout the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, soon-to-graduate students pursue monthslong deep dives into pressing policy issues with social relevance. In the Master of Urban and Regional Planning (MURP) program, the capstone experience may involve individual students like Izuogu working with community groups, government officials or public agencies to investigate real-world policy issues.

Other MURP candidates work in small teams or participate in one of two longstanding group-learning opportunities — the Community Collaborative and the Comprehensive Project classes.

The Community Collaborative is a unique pairing of students with community-based organizations in need of the expertise that academic researchers can provide. In turn, the students benefit from the insights of activists and others with lived experiences, fostering a mutual learning experience. 

This year’s Spatial Justice Community Collaborative course was taught by Professor Ananya Roy, and it focused on issues relating to life in homeless encampments. Class participants included individuals who had been among the unhoused populations at encampments forcibly cleared by law enforcement.  

The second group option is the Comprehensive Project class, which is a more traditional group project experience led by a faculty member who directs student researchers through an examination of a complex policy issue. Interested students had to apply nearly a year in advance to be admitted to the class, which this year focused on heat equity under the direction of Gregory Pierce BA ’07, MURP ’11, PhD ’15, an adjunct associate professor of urban planning and co-director at the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation.

The client for the class of 13 MURP students was Marta Segura, chief heat officer and director of the city of Los Angeles’ Climate Emergency Mobilization Office, which is known informally as CEMO. Segura and her staff are developing strategies for Los Angeles’ efforts to deal with rising heat from climate change in an equitable manner. 

“The work that CEMO is doing is really important, and they have a huge mandate, particularly on heat,” Pierce said. “But they have very little actual staff capacity to do a lot of the research they need to do.”

The office’s agenda is driven by nonprofit and community-based organizations, which “aligns with the social justice orientation of the Luskin School, for sure,” Pierce said. 

The students, whose research has also been guided by Ruth Engel, project manager for environmental data science at the Luskin Center for Innovation, have divided the task into three subtopics — cooling centers, emergency response and bus shelters. Their final report was due to CEMO on June 9, just one week before UCLA Luskin’s commencement. 

Pierce said the report commends Los Angeles for being at the forefront of government efforts on extreme heat, but it notes room for improvement in terms of action and having systems in place to ensure public safety and equitable distribution of resources. 

“This is a pretty new space for a lot of cities, so it’s in its early days,” Pierce said of the strategic planning. “But there’s a lot of work to do to really follow through on what needs to be done as it gets hotter all the time.”

Among the students’ recommendations: 

  • increasing cooling center density in underserved areas of the San Fernando Valley and Harbor Gateway;
  • developing heat responses in cooperation with unhoused residents and their advocates to better meet their needs; 
  • utilizing more expansive definitions of heat emergencies and heat warnings, with lower heat thresholds than existing city policy;
  • shifting the priority for bus shelter development — often guided in the past by political considerations or the revenue potential of shelter advertisements —  toward geographic equity, thus prioritizing the placement of shelters in hotter neighborhoods with high numbers of bus riders.

Among the bus shelter group was Miguel Miguel, a second-year urban planning student who grew up in an area of the San Fernando Valley that often sees dangerously high temperatures. 

“I grew up seeing people suffer from what happens without adequate heat protection. It was really important for me to be involved, and to bring lived experience and emotional compassion into this project,” Miguel said. He said the capstone experience helped position him to play a role in shaping the nature of environmental justice in Los Angeles moving forward.

young woman in blue jacket gestures while talking about research shown on poster to her right

Pearl Liu’s capstone research looked into safety issues on public transit in San Francisco. Photo by Les Dunseith

Equity was a foundational element of many urban planning capstone projects completed this year, including one by Pearl Liu. Her capstone project focused on public transit safety issues among women and gender minorities.

An international student, Liu was accustomed to getting around her home city of Taipai, Taiwan, via ready access to a clean, safe public transit system. She didn’t find the same conditions in Los Angeles or San Francisco, where she did an internship with the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, or SFMTA. 

“As a woman, and living without a car at all for two years in L.A. and also in S.F., I totally understand how women feel when they travel,” Liu said. “I have all these struggles. I have all this … built-up anger and complaints. I hope to change all these things as a transportation planner.”

At SFMTA, she had an opportunity to become familiar with a grant-funded gender equity initiative. During the internship, she started building a transit safety survey that eventually led to her capstone project.

The survey was launched through the Transit app for riders of San Francisco’s public transportation system, known as the Muni. Within a month of launching, a total of 1,613 people had filled out the survey. 

“Sexual harassment is a very common experience for many transit passengers, but especially to women and gender minorities  —  transgender people and those with non-binary gender identities,” Liu said. 

Another MURP, Greer Cowan, worked with Liu on the survey about Muni usage and travel patterns among women and gender minorities in San Francisco, with special attention paid to riders’ experiences. Gender-based violence can include inappropriate swearing or leering, as well as physical assaults. Were the survey respondents victims? If not, had they witnessed it? If so, where? When? Was it on a train, a streetcar or a bus? While riding or while waiting for a ride? Night or day? And so on.

Cowen focused on the reporting of incidents, noting that many people only tell their friends or family, so authorities have insufficient data to take action. Liu’s capstone focuses more heavily on how respondents feel about their safety, and where incidents occurred.

Among gender minorities, more than half of respondents felt the least safe at a bus stop, for example. But for male and female transit users, harassment and the fear of it happening was more intense during transit rides, particularly on buses. 

She did a spatial analysis of the data, overlaying the incident maps with the transit lines and transit stops, and produced a “heat map” to determine places with higher concentrations of incidents of gender-based violence. The bus system showed the most problems.

“It is mostly happening in the downtown area,” she found. “A lot of it was on Market Street,” in the financial core of San Francisco.  

Therefore, her capstone recommends that safety and equity initiatives by the SFMTA focus heavily on bus routes near Market Street. She also advocates for a safety toolkit for women and gender minorities. A transit ambassador program to monitor stops, stations and vehicles could focus more attention on buses. And the No. 1 suggestion to benefit women and gender-minority riders? Install more lighting.

“That always — always — is something that we’re pushing for,” Liu said. “Most people … feel at least somewhat safe during the daytime or when a station is well-lit.”

Liu said the capstone project helped refine her career aspiration. 

“This project … it really sparked an interest in me in how safety is so important in public transit,” Liu said, “and I feel like that has given me a passion to want to work in this area in the future.”

In some cases, the capstone projects serve as a reality check for the client organizations. Such was the case for Izuogu’s research for Downtown Crenshaw Rising. 

Her capstone project focuses on cooperative ownership, or co-ops, as a means to foster economic development in lower-income areas. The project was built on work that had been done by the previous year’s Community Collaborative class  — a project that ended up being recognized by the American Planning Association’s Economic Development Division for its Student Project Award. 

That project had recommended several possible ways to improve economic conditions in the Crenshaw area of Los Angeles, and her client was interested in the possibility of creating a cooperatively owned manufacturing facility in the area. 

Izuogu is a native of North Carolina who had gotten her undergraduate degree at Spelman College, a historically Black college in Atlanta, Georgia. She was excited for an opportunity to familiarize herself with a neighborhood like Crenshaw with a sizable Black population and do work that might benefit its residents.

“I was like, ‘That sounds really interesting, and I want to work with Black communities, too,’” Izuogu remembered thinking. 

two Black women pose in front of a poster about a research project

Antonia Izuogu, right, had an opportunity to discuss her research with Eve Fouché, who represented the project’s client during the poster event at UCLA. Photo by Les Dunseith

Her feasibility study reflects the Crenshaw group’s interest in launching an eco-friendly manufacturing site for electric vehicle charging stations to take advantage of incentives created by the federal Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that President Biden initiated in 2021.

“I didn’t know much about clean energy before coming [to UCLA] or about working with co-ops. At the same time, I’ve been taking economic development classes,” she said, “so everything was … fleshing out well together.”

Once she delved into the data, however, it became apparent to Izuogu that manufacturing electric vehicle charging stations was not the best option for the group. They lacked startup financing. No one in the group had experience building charging stations, nor connections within the industry. That led to the reality check. 

“As a consultant, I’m saying that maybe we should take a pause on that,” Izuogu said. Her capstone report suggests that the group instead create a co-op to install such stations and maintain them as part of a long-term strategic plan that would start small — a bakery/restaurant co-op is already in the works — and build over time into a hub for economic activity. 

Izuogu said her client expressed gratitude for her insights. 

“They like the idea that I didn’t stop and just say, ‘OK, this is not a good idea. Goodbye,’” said Izuogu, who has urged the group to think beyond Year 1. “Let’s go further than that. And they’ve been very appreciative of the information.”

The capstone project also helped inform Izuogu’s future plans. She will be pursuing a law degree, envisioning a career focusing on “solidarity economy lawyering,” helping small businesses and worker co-ops organize, drafting contracts and successfully navigating government regulations. 

Izuogu is a big fan of the UCLA capstone requirement.

“I love how they’re community-based, and this is not just a theory, but we’re actually applying what we’re learning in the classroom,” she said. “I love that I had the opportunity — even though I’m not from L.A. — to benefit the residents here. And getting to know their names and, basically, that we’re continuing this connection between academic institutions and the residents around them.”

View photos of other individual capstone projects in Urban Planning in this Flickr album:

Careers, Capstones and Conversations 2023

Click the links below to view photos from the numerous other capstone project presentations at UCLA Luskin this year:

Comprehensive Project class

Community Collaborative class

Public Policy’s Applied Policy Presentations

Master of Social Welfare capstones

Undergraduate Public Affairs capstones

Click here and enter “capstone projects” to find stories from previous years and other information about student research at UCLA Luskin.

L.A. County Supervisor Advocates ‘Poverty Disruption’ at Luskin Lecture Holly Mitchell wants to reweave the social safety net with an equity focus in the wake of COVID-19 and the stark inequalities it exposed 

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By Les Dunseith

Poverty has been a cornerstone of the professional life of Los Angeles County Supervisor Holly Mitchell as an elected official and in her prior work within child and family welfare organizations. Today, she is at the forefront of next-generation approaches that she thinks could fundamentally dismantle poverty in our society.

Speaking on the UCLA campus during a May 3 Luskin Lecture organized by the Luskin School of Public Affairs, Mitchell urged a crowd of faculty, staff, alumni and students to rally behind a current movement that goes beyond simply strengthening the social safety net.

“I think we have to reweave it, reimagine it and remake it to serve with equality, inclusion and humanity,” Mitchell said. “We have got to be as intentional about equity as previous generations have been intentional about exclusion.”

Organized in conjunction with a yearlong 75th-anniversary celebration of social work education at UCLA,  Mitchell was invited to speak because her focus on poverty coincides with the Luskin School’s mission.   

Social work was born as a profession to respond to poverty and inequality in society, said Laura Abrams, professor of social welfare and department chair, in her introductory remarks. Yet, social services programs like welfare and food stamps “have too often been coercive and judgmental, [with] caste stigma and population stereotypes racialized and inflicting harm on communities.”

Since being elected as a supervisor in 2020, Mitchell has pushed help for disadvantaged communities as a countywide priority, and her office’s effort to ensure that equity is a centerpiece of the local COVID-19 recovery plan has been held up as a national model.

In the wake of the pandemic, public officials have access to what Mitchell described as a “once-in-a-generation onslaught of public funds called COVID-19 recovery dollars.” Past tradition in L.A. County would have meant simply splitting those dollars equally among the five supervisorial districts. That made no sense to Mitchell. 

“From my perspective, it’s really pretty simple math: Those who have been disenfranchised and hit the hardest deserve the disproportionate investment in their recovery,” she said. 

This led to the creation of the first-ever countywide equity formula and public dashboard to ensure that federal dollars reach those most impacted by the pandemic. The L.A. County formula incorporates economic, social and environmental factors to identify the communities with the highest need, so far allocating $1.9 billion to 120 projects from the Antelope Valley to East L.A. to South L.A. and beyond. 

“For many of these neighborhoods, it’s the first time that government puts them at the front of the line for investments,” said Mitchell, who led one of the largest private, nonprofit child care and development corportations in California, Crystal Stairs, before entering politics and going on to serve in the California Assembly and Senate.

‘The era of invasive and patronizing social welfare in L.A. County is over,’ says Holly Mitchell.

A centerpiece of her policy history has been fighting against so-called benefit cliffs — eligibility restrictions on social services benefits that can trap people into cycles of poverty just to remain eligible for public assistance.

During her time at Crystal Stairs, Mitchell said, “my most painful days” related to working mothers faced with the prospect of losing public assistance because a work promotion would put them “pennies, literally, over the eligibility limit. And they were having to decide whether to walk away. ‘Do I keep this $3,000-a-month childcare voucher? Or do I take this promotion at work?’” 

Eliminating such dilemmas requires radically new approaches, Mitchell said.

“The era of invasive and patronizing social welfare in L.A. County is over. I’ll put the final nail in that coffin right now,” she said, prompting supportive applause from the UCLA audience.

“Research has shown us that things like work requirements and impossible barriers to eligibility do nothing to truly address poverty. It just continues to criminalize poverty,” Mitchell said. “We’ve got to go beyond, in my humble opinion, poverty alleviation and focus on poverty disruption.”

Central to her poverty disruption agenda for L.A. County is a pilot program called Breathe L.A., which is one of the largest guaranteed income programs in the nation. Since March 2022, it has been providing 1,000 Angelenos with $1,000 a month. The payment will continue for three years, no strings attached, for randomly selected participants who are 18 years or older and have been negatively affected by the pandemic.

Assistant Professor Judith Perrigo is among the researchers at UCLA Luskin helping to evaluate Breathe L.A., joining scholars currently evaluating similar guaranteed income efforts across the nation and around the world. 

Mitchell said that early results of that research belie the misguided perception put forth by opponents attempting to cast doubt on whether recipients will spend the money wisely.

“What’s the No. 1 thing participants in Breathe L.A. have spent the money on?” Mitchell asked the crowd, pausing a moment to let her listeners think about an answer. “It’s food. Food and basic necessities to feed their families. And making sure one less child is going to bed hungry, I believe that’s a good thing.”

people seated at tables in a conference room watch a speaker at the front of the room speak at a podiumHolly Mitchell spoke about her career to a packed room in the Luskin Conference Center at UCLA.
people seated at tables in a conference room watch a speaker at the front of the room speak at a podium
people seated at tables in a conference room watch a speaker at the front of the room speak at a podium
woman in purple dress gestures at podium
woman in purple dress gestures at podium
Black woman leans forward as a woman holding a child speaks with her
Black woman leans forward as a woman holding a child speaks with her
woman in dark jacket and yellow top sits in chair
woman in dark jacket and yellow top sits in chair

After her prepared remarks, Mitchell was joined on stage by Perrigo for a Q&A session. “You have fire inside of you,” Perrigo told Mitchell, then invited her to describe where she finds the courage to advocate for poverty approaches like guaranteed income that have a history as political lightning rods.

Mitchell stressed the public servant aspect of her role, saying she thinks about the new mothers among her constituency who dream of creating a better life for their children. 

“Everyone has the right to have that dream. And the role of our society is to not create barriers to lift those possibilities,” Mitchell said. “When I think about things like that, it gives me the courage to go against the grain and fight.”

She recalled her effort in Sacramento to do away with a state provision that penalized low-income families receiving cash aid for having another child. After three frustrating defeats, she found success on the fourth try.

It will take similar perseverance to make guaranteed income a cornerstone of social services policy. 

“It’s a righteous fight,” said Mitchell, urging supporters in the audience to look at the gradual rollout of guaranteed income efforts as “an opportunity to expand your warrior base of people who will fight.”

She noted that the basic idea of guaranteed income is not new — Martin Luther King Jr. was a proponent, in fact. Decades later, it’s only now taking hold.

“It’s a movement,” said Mitchell, comparing Breathe L.A. to today’s bedrock public aid programs like Medicare and Social Security. 

“Those were, in their time, cutting-edge, innovative concepts around income security,” she said. “When I think about those game-changing, life-saving policy initiatives that I’m sure had a very rough start also, I believe we can get there.” 

The name, Breathe L.A., implies providing the means to weather a crisis — a little time to breathe — directly to people facing financial hardship.

Perrigo noted the popularity of the idea among lower-income, underserved communities and their advocates. But how will policymakers like Mitchell persuade skeptical taxpayers? 

 “If we are able to create healthier communities, safer communities, everybody benefits,” Mitchell said. 

Public education is also necessary. 

“It’s trying to acknowledge and help [skeptics] understand they started out 10 steps ahead, and this other community is trying to catch up. I think it’s important to have those kinds of conversations,” she said, “because that’s the honest truth.”

Mitchell is also a board member of LA Metro, and in response to a question from the audience, she said her priority for public transportation in the county is bus service “because that’s what a lot of our poor rely on.”

Eventually, she said, her goal is an entirely fareless bus system. For now, she takes heart in the success of Metro’s GoPass pilot program, which has provided more than 241,000 youths a free transit pass since it launched as a pandemic recovery measure in October 2021.

“The data … on school attendance is mind-blowing,” Mitchell said. “For some of us, it may be hard to imagine that $1.75 can stop a lot of people from going to school, but it can. Our K-12 ridership is double the pre-pandemic numbers.” 

Much of Mitchell’s presentation focused on touting accomplishments, but she acknowledged that L.A. County has no shortage of problems yet to be solved. Homelessness is a primary ongoing concern, “and we are 500,000 housing units short in L.A. County,” she said. “So, we have to build.”

Mitchell acknowledged that reality leads to difficult conversations. Want to stir up a political hornet’s nest? There’s no surer way in Los Angeles than going to a community homeowners association and talking about building more densely in neighborhoods zoned for single-family homes, she said.   

“People will roll up on me, and it’s, ‘What do you do about the homeless?’ And I say, ‘Well, as soon as you tell me how you are willing to have the composition of your own block change, I’ll tell you what I’ll do about the homeless,’” Mitchell said. 

“It is our moral dilemma,” she said. “And only when we have decided that we are sick and tired of being sick and tired — and that we’re not going to allow people to live like this anymore — can [developers, public agencies and governments] expand and build the diversity of housing that people need.”

View additional photos on Flickr:

UCLA Luskin Lecture With Holly Mitchell

‘We’re Beginning the Work of Rewriting the Next Chapter of Los Angeles History’ Top officials join scholars and advocates to tackle the region's most pressing problems at the fifth annual UCLA Luskin Summit

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By Mary Braswell

A search for solutions to Southern California’s most urgent problems brought top researchers together with government and civic leaders at the fifth annual UCLA Luskin Summit.

Los Angeles City Council President Paul Krekorian gave the keynote address at the April 19 gathering, attended by more than 200 scholars, students and community members seeking to learn more about how the region is responding to homelessness, climate change, racial disparities, voting rights violations and more.

Krekorian spoke about the state of governance at L.A. City Hall, acknowledging that citizens’ faith has been shaken by corruption cases, politicized redistricting and the release of a racist recording that led to high-profile resignations. But he added that the upheaval has opened the door to a period of change.

“The kind of city hall that the people of Los Angeles deserve [is] a city hall that’s more ethical, more transparent, more trustworthy, more urgent, more collaborative and hopefully much more effective,” Krekorian said.

He laid out a roadmap that includes a top-to-bottom charter review that could add more seats on the City Council, change who decides land-use issues to reduce incentives for corruption, and take the power of setting district boundaries away from elected officials.

“Together, we’re turning the page on a very dark time and we’re beginning the work of rewriting the next chapter of Los Angeles history,” Krekorian said.

Zev Yaroslavsky, who oversees the annual UCLA Quality of Life Index, reports on this year’s findings. Photo by Les Dunseith

The Luskin Summit, held in person at the UCLA Faculty Club after three years of remote and hybrid convenings, continued its tradition of spotlighting the UCLA Quality of Life Index (QLI), a wide-ranging survey of Los Angeles County residents.

This year’s QLI revealed deep dissatisfaction with many aspects of life in L.A., a sign of the region’s slow emergence from the dual shocks of the COVID-19 pandemic and soaring inflation, said Zev Yaroslavsky, who oversees the survey as director of the Los Angeles Initiative at UCLA Luskin.

In conversation with ABC7 News reporter Josh Haskell, the emcee of this year’s Luskin Summit, Yaroslavsky said the high cost of housing continues to sow anxiety, with 28% of respondents saying they worry about losing their home and becoming homeless as a result.

“Now, let me put this in more stark terms than just percentages,” Yaroslavsky said. “The county’s population is a little over 10 million people, so 28% means that there are 2.8 million people in this county who are going to bed every night worried about whether they’re going to lose their home. Think about it that way. That’s a lot of people. That’s a lot of stress.”

The region’s housing emergency also took center stage at a plenary session that illustrated a hallmark of the Luskin Summit: the participation of key elected and appointed officials in a position to turn social science research into policies for change.

Lourdes Castro Ramírez, secretary of California’s Business, Consumer Services and Housing Agency, moderated the dialogue with L.A. County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, L.A. City Council member Marqueece Harris-Dawson and the city’s chief of housing and homelessness solutions, Mercedes Márquez.

The conversation emphasized a new push to coordinate efforts by a multitude of agencies to relieve California’s housing emergency.

“A challenge of this magnitude requires all levels of government to work together, and that’s exactly what we have been doing over the last two years, working very closely with our federal partners, working very closely across the state agency and department, and working in a unified and coordinated manner with local cities, counties, continuums of care and folks on the ground that are doing this work every single day,” said Castro Ramírez, a UCLA Luskin Urban Planning alumna who oversees 11 state departments and boards.

The Luskin Summit’s plenary session on the region’s housing emergency featured, from left, Lourdes Castro Ramírez, secretary of California’s Business, Consumer Services and Housing Agency; Mercedes Márquez, Los Angeles’ chief of housing and homelessness solutions; L.A. City Council member Marqueece Harris-Dawson; and L.A. County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath. Photo by Les Dunseith

With the end of pandemic-era eviction moratoriums, Horvath said her office is working with cities to implement new protections for both renters and mom-and-pop landlords, with the aim of keeping residents in their homes.

“We have no time to waste,” she said. “We’re not going to wait until every detail is perfect. People are dying on our streets and we have to do something.”

The panelists credited newly elected Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass for jumpstarting efforts to shelter the homeless, including the appointment of Márquez to cut the red tape that has delayed the construction and acquisition of desperately needed housing.

“We have identified 360 projects that are 100% affordable. That’s over 8,000 units that are now on a fast track,” Márquez said, adding that her team is also reviewing government-owned land including Metropolitan Transit Authority car lots that could be converted to residential development.

Harris-Dawson, whose district includes South Los Angeles, said housing strategies must be guided by a sense of equity to prevent poverty from becoming concentrated in pockets of the city.

“The commitment has to be both to build and build fast, but also to build where it’s difficult to build,” he said. That includes parts of the city where the prevailing attitude is “ ‘send all the poor people over there, build housing over there and build it as dense as you need to, but keep them over there’ — as if poverty is a communicable disease and living near it damages your quality of life somehow.”

The Summit also featured a series of breakout sessions where scholars, officials and advocates zeroed in on critical issues. They included representatives from UCLA Luskin research centers, including the Luskin Center for Innovation and its Human Rights to Water Solutions Lab, the Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies  and the UCLA Voting Rights Project. The sessions explored:

  • vehicular homelessness, the unique circumstances of those who must shelter in their cars;
  • persistent disparities based on race and ethnicity in the mortgage industry;
  • how to build popular support and political momentum for investments in climate infrastructure;
  • whether California’s plan to transition to zero-emission vehicles is sufficient to meet climate goals;
  • the uncertain future of voting rights pending decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court;
  • and the activation of far-reaching programs to bolster the region’s water supply.

Following the Summit, several participants gathered for a lunch presentation on equity and clean energy that included UCLA experts and representatives from the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the lead sponsor of this year’s Luskin Summit. Other sponsors include Bank of America, the Weingart Foundation, David Bohnett Foundation, California Community Foundation and California Wellness Foundation. The media partner is ABC7.

View photos from the 2023 UCLA Luskin Summit on Flickr.

Luskin Summit 2023

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.”

Steep Decline in Day-to-Day School Violence UCLA study of more than 6 million students during an 18-year period finds welcome school safety news amid outburst of mass shootings

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Mass shootings at schools in the United States continue to make headlines, terrifying students, parents, educators and communities. Yet groundbreaking new research shows that, during the two decades prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a steep and steady reduction in serious forms of violence, including bullying and weapon-related behaviors, across California’s middle and high school campuses.

The overall improvement in campus climate is welcome news for families concerned about sending their children to a safe environment, and it suggests that eruptions of gun violence should be treated as a separate social and psychological phenomenon, said UCLA scholar Ron Avi Astor, co-author of the study published this week in the World Journal of Pediatrics.

“Each school shooting is a devastating act that terrorizes the nation, and there is a growing sense in the public that little has changed in two decades to make schools safe,” Astor said. “But mass shootings are just one part of this story. Overall, on a day-to-day basis for most students, American schools are safer than they’ve been for many decades.”

Astor is a professor of social welfare and education at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs and the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies. Using data from the confidential California Healthy Kids Survey, he and co-authors Rami Benbenishty of Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Ilan Roziner of the Sackler School of Medicine at Tel Aviv University analyzed responses from more than 6 million middle and high school students from 2001 to 2019.

“During the 18-year period examined, California secondary schools had massive reductions in all forms of victimization,” including physical threats with or without weapons, verbal and psychological abuse, and property offenses, the authors wrote. Noteworthy findings include:

  • a 56% reduction in physical fights
  • a 70% reduction in reports of carrying a gun onto school grounds, and a 68% reduction in bringing other weapons, such as a knife, to school
  • a 59% reduction in being threatened by a weapon on school grounds
  • and larger declines in victimization reported by Black and Latino students compared to white students

“These findings were evident in more than 95% of California schools, in every county, and not in wealthy suburban schools only,” Astor said.

Over time, students’ sense of safety and belonging at schools rose steadily, the study found. Astor attributed the improvement in campus climate to new policies, stepped-up resources and community efforts prioritizing the development of emotional maturity in youth.

The authors noted that the study covered the period before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down schools across the country, which may have triggered some mental health issues and outbursts of violence.

“It is important to learn from the policies and interventions that have helped reduce school violence in the last two decades to face these new challenges,” the authors wrote.

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 Trials — and Triumphs — of Rosina Becerra For almost 50 years as a professor and academic leader, she has taken on whatever challenges UCLA has asked of her

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By Les Dunseith

Dedicated. Self-sacrificing. Hard-working. Underappreciated.

These are words often used to describe America’s social workers — individuals who sacrifice of themselves to provide the safety net for people in need in places like schools, hospitals, mental health facilities and family services agencies.

People like Rosina Becerra.

For 48 of UCLA Social Welfare’s 75 years, she’s been conducting research, teaching and taking on a daunting series of sometimes-thankless administrative challenges in a relentless pursuit of making things better.

Becerra has overseen the field faculty. She’s been a department chair (for more than one department) and a dean. She was a vice provost and a vice chancellor. She has run academic centers and served as a chief financial officer. She’s been a personal mentor to hundreds.

Even after joining the ranks of emeriti professors in 2016, Becerra hasn’t stopped helping out at UCLA. She is a member of the Board of Governors with the Faculty Club. She is president of the executive board for the UCLA Emeriti Association. She served on the campuswide COVID-19 Task Force. She is a special assistant to the vice chancellor for academic personnel.  She’s also helping to plan Social Welfare’s 75th anniversary celebration.

If there’s a need, Becerra steps up.

Take 1998, for example. When then-Chancellor Albert Carnesale identified diversity as one of the areas demanding immediate attention in his “Strategy for a Great University,” an associate vice chancellor for faculty diversity was sought. Becerra, who came to UCLA in 1975 and was the first Latina at UCLA to be tenured in 1981, was selected.

For five years in that role and another three as vice provost of faculty diversity and development, she was responsible for promoting ethnic and gender equality in a place where many white male professors tended to stay on the job for decades.

“It’s not like running a company —  you can’t just fire people and hire new ones,” said Becerra, stressing that the key to success as an academic leader requires gaining the respect of faculty. “They have to feel like someone’s in charge, you know, and listening, and making sure that things are going to get done.”

Fostering diversity is not quite as difficult in a field like social work that tends to attract workers of color, and UCLA’s Social Welfare program has long been more diverse than UCLA as a whole. An emphasis on diversity was accelerated in recent years at the Luskin School, which today has a full-time and ladder faculty that is 50/50 women and men, and 50% faculty of color. The student body is the most diverse in the University of California system.

Still, change often comes slowly in academia, including within social work education.

“In the past, we were, in many ways, a very cloistered profession,” she said. “We had very strict rules about what the curriculum looked like.”

Society has changed, however, and the profession has been evolving. Social work education is changing, too.

Becerra said, “We still have an accrediting body that’s very strict, but it has loosened up in the sense of broadening what is needed in the profession: How do we begin to look at other types of services and what kinds of skills are needed?”

Today’s students do more research and take a more rigorous analytical approach, she said, and that means “more statistical analysis than we used to have.”

“Whether you’re in health or you’re working with children or you’re working with the elderly or you’re looking at race and ethnicity —  these are all areas of social welfare.”

What has not changed is UCLA’s emphasis not just on social work but on social welfare, which encompasses more of the human condition.

“Whether you’re in health or you’re working with children or you’re working with the elderly or you’re looking at race and ethnicity —  these are all areas of social welfare. We have a broader perspective, and that allows UCLA Social Welfare to attract faculty members with broader, interdisciplinary perspectives.”

Identifying and promoting new approaches served Becerra well in finding solutions to problems during her time as associate dean and then dean from 1986 to 1994 in what was then known as the UCLA School of Social Welfare.

She led the field training program through a time of conflict, she recalled, developing a point system that reassured ladder faculty that the field instructors were carrying a fair load of classroom instruction and other duties.

During her tenure as dean, Los Angeles was beset by racial tensions that erupted in violence. (Read more about Social Welfare’s role in helping the city cope during these difficult times.)

This was also a time of intense economic pressure in higher education.

“UCLA was, I think, $33 million in debt,” she recalled. To survive, it became clear that smaller schools like UCLA Social Welfare would be merged with other degree programs into new entities — a forced combination that few faculty members welcomed.

“I could see the writing on the wall. There was no way we were going to avoid this,” she said.

For social welfare education to continue at UCLA meant merging with urban planning and adding public policy to become the UCLA School of Public Policy and Social Research. But how does that work?

“The argument we laid out was that UCLA is the only department that taught social policy regularly. We taught social policy in child welfare, in mental health and in gerontology. And social policy knowledge was needed in our social service agencies,” she said.

Another thing the three degrees have in common, she thought, was their goal of improving the human condition through policy change.

“The people in public policy are the ones that develop policy. In urban planning, they begin to put some meat on the bones of the policy and figure out how it should be implemented,” Becerra said. “And in social welfare, we implement the policy, and we make it work within the communities and in the institutions.”

She helped the School take its difficult first steps on the path toward what UCLA Luskin is today, but Rosina Becerra knows from firsthand experience that being a university leader is never easy. It takes dedication, sacrifice, hard work, toughness — and perseverance.

How Laws and Policies Can Close — or Widen — Gender Gaps New book by UCLA researchers shows that progress toward gender equality has stalled, particularly for caregivers in the U.S.

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By Les Dunseith

A comprehensive review of economic gender equality in 193 countries by the UCLA WORLD Policy Analysis Center identifies global trends and exposes policy gaps that include shortcomings when it comes to caregiving.

When the authors of a new open-access book first began tracking maternity leave policies around the world in 2000, they were alarmed to find that 18 countries had no national paid leave in place for working mothers. Today, seven remaining countries still lack such protection — five small island nations, Papua New Guinea, and the United States of America.

The book, “Equality within Our Lifetimes,” pulls together information from more than a decade of research that has also been collected into a robust, freely downloadable database. Co-author Jody Heymann, a professor at UCLA and founding director of WORLD, said that through the 1980s gender equality was rapidly advancing.

“There were more women entering the workforce. There were increased economic opportunities for women, increased educational opportunities,” she said. “That progress has completely stalled.”

The country’s gender wage gap has barely budged for 15 years. What’s more, it’s even broader among parents. In 2021, the average mother working full-time in the U.S. still earned just 73 cents for each dollar earned by a father working full-time.

Because U.S. women remain predominantly responsible for all types of caregiving, it’s not just new mothers who are impacted by the continued lack of federal paid family leave and other legal protections for caregivers in the workplace. The authors cite studies that show women are three times as likely as men in the U.S. to lose their jobs or to leave the workforce because they’re caring for an ill adult.

The economy has felt the impacts. From 2000 to 2019, the U.S. dropped from 7th to 23rd in a ranking of 36 high-income countries on women’s participation in the labor market, Heymann noted. Amid COVID-19, women’s labor force participation fell to its lowest rate since 1987 and has yet to fully recover — with Black and Latina women experiencing the greatest losses.

Heymann and her research team analyzed national laws and policies in all 193 countries of the United Nations. Among their findings:

  • Although nearly all countries (93%) now prohibit at least some form of gender discrimination in the workplace, only half prohibit discrimination based on family responsibilities.
  • In 1 in 5 countries, employers can legally discriminate against women of color because laws fail to prohibit employment discrimination based on both gender and race.
  • Over five years since #MeToo went global, 1 in 4 countries still fail to explicitly prohibit sexual harassment at work. In about one-third of countries, the law is silent on employer retaliation, meaning women can be fired if they report harassment.
  • Two- thirds of countries fail to provide paid leave to care for a child during routine illnesses or to take them to the doctor.
  • A majority of countries (58%) provide no paid leave to care for an ill spouse, and 61% offer no paid leave to care for an aging parent.

color coded map

Fathers of infants have far less paid leave available to them than do mothers.

More encouraging for the authors is a worldwide trend toward paid leave for new fathers. Between 1995 and 2022, 71 countries enacted paid leave for dads, increasing the share of countries globally with leave from 24% to 63%. The U.S is not among them.

In the United States, some private employers and 11 states, including California, now offer paid parental leave, although inconsistently. Co-author Aleta Sprague, an attorney and senior legal analyst at WORLD, said the negative impact of not providing paid family leave at the national level is far-reaching.

“It’s no longer in question that our lack of support for new parents and other caregivers is driving women to leave the labor force,” Sprague said. “And that in turn is a barrier to economic growth.”

UC Press is releasing the book — authored by Heymann, Sprague, and co-author Amy Raub, principal research analyst at WORLD — at roughly the halfway point of the Sustainable Development Goals, a 2015 United Nations commitment to ensure equal rights across the globe by 2030. It is being distributed online, accompanied by briefing papers and downloadable assets in multiple languages, as part of a commitment to making top university research readily available to everybody, Heymann said.

The book presents new research on the extent and pace of policy change in 193 countries as well as new longitudinal studies of policy impact, bolstered by case studies that show how change can occur. The lesson from around the world is that solutions exist from every political perspective.

“The way you get to 187 countries providing paid maternity leave, the way you get to every other major economy providing paid sick leave except for the United States, is that there are conservative solutions, there are progressive solutions, there are middle-of-the-road solutions,” Heymann said.

There’s little disagreement among the general public about the need for paid family leave. The Family Medical Leave Act, a 1993 law that guarantees unpaid, job-protected leave for specified family and medical reasons only for some employees, has proven to be inadequate. Heymann said polls have shown that across party lines and across states, paid family leave is popular.

“People want parents to be able to take time to care for a newborn child. They want adults to be able to take time to care for a dying parent,” Heymann said. “And they don’t want American parents to drop into poverty because of it.”

So, is it possible to achieve gender equality in our lifetimes?

“It is completely within our reach,” Heymann said. “There are solutions that can be achieved in real time, that are feasible.”

Sprague’s answer is similar. “I think we know how to get there. One thing that this book illustrates is how feasible it is and how much of a difference a few key policy changes can make.”

Moreover, Heymann emphasized, the standard arguments against some of those key policies in the U.S. overlook critical evidence about their potential for impact. “Too often, policymakers highlight the costs of paid leave without acknowledging its overwhelming payoffs,” she said. “The evidence is clear that when women in particular have access to paid leave for family caregiving needs, they are far more likely to stay in the workforce — and even slightly narrowing the gender gap in labor force participation would boost our GDP by hundreds of billions. It’s a powerful investment.”

Heymann pointed to studies from McKinsey, the World Bank, and others demonstrating how advancing gender equality pays huge dividends.

“At core, gender equality is a basic human right,” she continued. “But it also yields tremendous economic value—and the U.S.’s continued inaction comes at a high cost to us all.”

 

To conduct the studies referenced in this book, a multilingual, multidisciplinary research team systematically analyzed the laws and policies of all 193 U.N. member states. They also rigorously analyzed the impacts of legal changes around the world. The book is being distributed through UC Press, and downloadable resources are being made available on the website of the UCLA WORLD Policy Analysis Center.

The WORLD Policy Analysis Center (WORLD) at UCLA is the largest independent global policy data center, capturing over 2,500 social, economic, health, and environmental quantitative legal indicators for all 193 U.N. countries. With an international, multilingual, and multidisciplinary team, WORLD collects and analyzes information on every country’s rights, laws, and policies in areas including education, health, adult labor and working conditions, child labor, poverty, constitutional rights, discrimination, childhood, gender, marriage, families, aging, and disability. Heymann, the center’s founding director, is a distinguished professor of public policy, medicine, and health policy and management at UCLA with appointments in the Fielding School of Public Health, Luskin School of Public Affairs and David Geffen School of Medicine. She is also dean emeritus of the Fielding School.