Archive for category: For Students

Increasing Urbanization Contributes to Racial and Gender Pay Inequality, Study Shows Newly published research finds that an 'urban wage premium' in large cities primarily benefits white and male workers

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By Les Dunseith

Researchers who study cities have long documented an “urban wage premium,” whereby workers in denser, larger cities tend to have higher wage and salary incomes. But a new study by a UCLA scholar is providing fresh insight into how growing population density in urban areas contributes to pay inequalities by race and gender.

In research published this month in the Journal of Urban Affairs, Max Buchholz, a postdoctoral researcher working with Professor Michael Storper of the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, shows that this wage premium primarily benefits white and male workers, with significantly less positive impacts for Black workers, and possibly none for Latino and female workers.

Furthermore, gender-based wage inequality related to urbanization tends to be significant between men and women who have children but relatively insubstantial between men and women without children.

“My findings suggest there is something about cities that makes it particularly difficult for women to manage the dual responsibilities of child care and having a career,” Buchholz said.

He also looked at the constraints and tradeoffs that arise when urban workers balance employment opportunities with choices about housing quality and affordability, commuting and other activities. These “congestion costs” have been shown to have negative impacts disproportionately borne by women and people of color.

In particular, Buchholz found that the relationship between density and pay inequality became stronger when commute times to and from work also increased. Moreover, as urban areas get denser, commute times for Black workers and Asian American and Pacific Islander workers increase relative to white workers. But female–male commuting inequality decreases.

“This suggests that rising density doubly disadvantages Black workers with relatively lower wages and longer commutes, prompts AAPI workers to commute longer for pay that is equal to white workers, and constrains women’s access to jobs that suit their skills and qualifications,” Buchholz said.

The research was supported by a postdoctoral research fellowship from the National Science Foundation.

L.A. Asks How to Equitably Achieve 100% Clean Energy by 2035 — and UCLA Answers Luskin School research centers join cross-campus effort to guide LADWP strategies centered on equity and justice

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By Mara Elana Burstein

In 2021, after the LA100 analysis laid out pathways for the city of Los Angeles to produce 100% renewable electricity, the City Council and Los Angeles Department of Water and Power committed to pursuing the most ambitious — and expensive — scenario: achieving the goal by 2035 at a cost of nearly $40 billion.

But cost is far from the only challenge. Facing a legacy of inequity within the city’s energy system, the LADWP turned to UCLA researchers to develop strategies for pursuing clean energy without perpetuating social, racial and economic injustices.

Five teams convened by the Sustainable LA Grand Challenge answered the call, bringing together more than 20 UCLA faculty and researchers with expertise in engineering, environmental science, law, labor studies, public health and urban policy. Working with researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which offered computing power and technical capacity, these scholars provided a deep local context, as well as behavioral, social and political expertise, to help Los Angeles ensure a more just transition.

The release of their two-year study, the LA100 Equity Strategies report, was announced today at a press conference at LADWP headquarters downtown, where Mayor Karen Bass’ “Powered by Equity” initiative, based on the report’s findings, was also unveiled.

“We have an opportunity to be innovative and bold,” Bass said in a press release. “We have an opportunity to shape our clean energy future in a manner that delivers benefits to community residents and our LADWP customers in the neighborhoods where they live. We’re making a conscious decision to take intentional clean energy actions that are ‘Powered by Equity,’ as recommended by the newly released LA100 Equity Strategies research study.”

Stephanie Pincetl, a co-author of the report and director of the UCLA California Center for Sustainable Communities, welcomed the initiative, which will kick off with a LADWP project to build, operate and maintain a network of electric vehicle charging stations in underserved communities.

“No other utility in the United States has made a commitment to not only 100% renewable but making sure it’s implemented equitably,” said Pincetl, who earned a PhD in urban planning from UCLA in 1985. “This is the power of a municipal utility, a utility owned by and for its customers.”

The UCLA authors of LA100 Equity Strategies found that significant changes will be necessary to prevent the energy system’s injustices from increasing both during and after the transition, particularly for underserved communities of color, which currently bear the brunt of bad air quality, extreme heat and electrical outages. Without mitigation, these communities are projected to pay more for energy and experience fewer benefits over time.

To that end, UCLA’s approach has been justice-centered, providing community-informed, evidence-driven strategies and recommendations on affordability and policy solutions, air quality and public health, green jobs and workforce development, and housing and buildings.

The cost of electricity will rise with the transition to clean energy, with average electricity bills predicted to increase by nearly 80% for households overall and by more than 130% for low-income households by 2035. Addressing those rate hikes has been a key goal for UCLA researchers.

The work of the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation, supported by the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, provides specific recommendations for robust, long-term structural solutions to improve LADWP customers’ ability to pay their energy bills. These include addressing regulations that constrain rate affordability and continuing to explore and scale up innovative approaches to support affordability for ratepayers.

“Affordability is a key equity concern for all LADWP stakeholders, and protections for lower-income customers must be expanded,” said Gregory Pierce, a report co-author and research director of the Luskin Center for Innovation. “And as exposure to extreme heat increases, universal access to residential cooling is essential.”

The UCLA Center for Neighborhood Knowledge and the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Institute analyzed aspects of energy affordability for small ethnic-owned businesses. They recommended that the LADWP partner with community-based organizations to better engage with these businesses.

Other projects, led by teams from the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment and UCLA California Center for Sustainable Cities, focused on improving air quality, promoting green jobs abd equitable workforce development, and proving energy upgrades to housing and other buildings, many of them in disadvantaged neighborhoods.

Achieving the city’s carbon-neutral goal equitably requires intentional, community-informed, bold decisions adapted over time, and UCLA will continue to work with the LADWP and local communities on these efforts.

Importantly, the researchers say, UCLA’s methods, tools, insights and strategies not only support the LADWP’s efforts but can be used other cities seeking a just energy transition.

In addition to Pincetl and Pierce, the UCLA teams were led by Paul Ong, director of the UCLA Center for Neighborhood Knowledge; Yifang Zhu, professor of environmental health sciences at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health; Raúl Hinojosa-Ojeda, director of North America Integration and Development Center at UCLA; and Abel Valenzuela Jr., interim dean of social sciences and professor at the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment.

Read the full story.

Learn more about the Luskin Center for Innovation’s recommendations for how to expand protections for low-income customers.

Tapping Into the Inner Strength of Black Girls Empowering children instead of focusing on their struggles will lead to healthier choices, says Luskin Lecturer Ijeoma Opara

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By Mary Braswell

“People out there expect you to fail. Prove the haters wrong. You know I’m here for you always.”

These words from a father to his young daughter — consistently encouraging her to finish school, stay away from drugs and make a good name for herself — helped her rise above the damaging stereotypes she faced as a Black girl growing up in America.

The New Jersey teen’s story was one of many shared by Yale University scholar Ijeoma Opara, who came to UCLA on Oct. 19 to deliver her message that harnessing the inner strengths of children of color is not just possible but imperative.

Opara, the first UCLA Luskin Lecturer of the 2023-24 academic year, conducts research focused on the well-being of Black girls, who may face multiple layers of stress because of their race, gender, class and age.

The conversation between father and daughter emerged in a survey Opara led of 200 girls from around the country, most in their mid-teens. With surprising frankness, they spoke of how they view themselves in the world, and how they struggle to protect their health and mental health in the face of harmful stereotypes.

“They were very aware that they were not loved by society,” said Opara, who directs the Substance Abuse and Sexual Health Lab at Yale.

“They understood, too, that society always assumed they were doing something bad. … They’re internalizing all the things that adults are saying about them, all the images they’re seeing.”

Some of the girls wondered how they could possibly thrive in a world that assumed they were angry, aggressive, into drugs and alcohol, or sexually permissive.

‘It’s not about us saving these children, right? They don’t necessarily need to be saved. They need to be empowered.’  — Ijeoma Opara of Yale University

“We cannot keep looking at Black children as if they are criminals instead of harnessing their strengths,” Opara said.

“It’s not about us saving these children, right? They don’t necessarily need to be saved. They need to be empowered.”

Opara was moved to study the unique experience of Black girls in high-risk surroundings because, she says, “I was one of them.”

Growing up in a part of New Jersey where violence and drug use were common, she saw many friends choose unhealthy paths. Later, as a social worker in New York City helping youths caught up in the criminal justice system, she came face to face with Black girls who had simply given up hope.

But she wondered, “What about girls like me and the other girls that I run into who are thriving in these environments? Why aren’t we talking about them, learning from them?”

On her academic journey, as she earned a PhD as well as master’s degrees in social welfare and public health, Opara set out to connect with these girls. She wanted to hear what factors led to their strong self-esteem and how their experiences could help others.

The common denominators, her research has found, include a strong sense of ethnic pride, a community that has their back and the belief that they have some control over their destinies.

Among girls who demonstrate a high level of resilience and self-assurance, the public health ramifications are striking, she said, with many far better equipped to avoid substance abuse and sexually transmitted infections.

For those who’ve already fallen into dangerous behaviors, these strategies can still provide a lifeline. Opara shared the story of Sheila, who by age 15 had been involved with robberies, attempted murder and kidnapping. Sheila had spent time on Rikers Island.

“She had no hope in the future. She thought she would be dead by 19 years old,” said Opara, who was assigned to Sheila’s case when she was a social worker.

With Opara’s help, Sheila came to “feel heard, feel like a teenager, feel like a human” and eventually turned her life around. She is now attending graduate school and volunteering as a youth advocate for a substance use prevention program.

“Sheila is the reason that I do the work that I do,” Opara said.

In her current research, Opara’s top priority is elevating the voices of young people of color. She has opened up opportunities for Black girls by offering internships in her lab and hosting tours of Yale to show that higher education is within their reach.

Her signature Dreamer Girls Project is a “safe space for Black girls that infuses elements of ethnic identity, of empowerment, of pride, of sisterhood,” Opara said, and its youth advisory board, a small working group of budding researchers, helps shape and administer her studies.

During her visit to UCLA, Opara met one-on-one with UCLA Luskin doctoral students and appeared at a virtual meeting of the Los Angeles County Commission on HIV’s Black Caucus. The commission was a co-sponsor of the visit, along with the UCLA California HIV/AIDS Policy Research Center and the Center for HIV Identification, Prevention and Treatment Services at UCLA.

Following Opara’s Luskin Lecture at UCLA’s California NanoSystems Institute, Ayako Miyashita Ochoa of the UCLA Luskin Social Welfare faculty moderated a conversation that delved into the most effective ways to strengthen connections among social workers in the field, the research community and those in position to make real policy reforms.

Opara said the guiding principle is keeping the focus on the strengths of children instead of their deficits.

“It’s up to us as adult allies to support them, to show them that they that if they fail, if they make a mistake, we’ll be right there, judgment-free, to support them and lift them up.”

Luskin Lecture by Ijeoma Opara

‘Retirement Is Not Retreating; It’s Changing Gears’ Now a professor emeritus, Social Welfare's Mark Kaplan continues to teach and serve the UCLA community

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By Stan Paul 

Mark S. Kaplan, professor emeritus of social welfare, officially retired earlier this year, but, for now, he is busier than ever.  

“Retirement is not retreating; it’s changing gears,” explained Kaplan, an avid cyclist. “It’s more leaving one set of activities and moving toward new adventures.”

He is still teaching, conducting research, applying for grants, including from the National Institutes of Health, mentoring students, and continuing to mentor and collaborate with former students who have become successful scholars and colleagues over the years. He’ll also take on a campuswide faculty committee post or two, including chairing UCLA’s Academic Senate Grievance Advisory Committee for 2023-24. 

Kaplan, a faculty member at UCLA Luskin for the past decade, has devoted his career to public health issues, most notably suicide and gun violence in the United States and globally. 

“Throughout his career, Mark tirelessly devoted himself to unraveling the complex dynamics surrounding suicide, substance use, and gender and firearm violence,” said Social Welfare chair Laura Abrams at a retirement celebration/roast held for Kaplan over the summer. “His unwavering dedication to these critical areas of public health and social work has significantly contributed to our collective knowledge, prevention strategies and policy advancements in addressing these pressing concerns.”  

Man in white shirt and dark jacket standing at festive table

Kaplan thanks his colleagues from UCLA Luskin Social Welfare at a retirement dinner/roast. Photo by Ananya Roy

Kaplan, also a dedicated ukulele player, says his retirement also comes with a few strings attached. 

“I’m actually working with more undergraduate public affairs students than ever before, including honors thesis projects,” he said. 

In addition, he will be teaching his popular course on preventing firearm violence, now approved for distance (online) learning. Kaplan said the format has allowed him to bring in a wider array of guest speakers on timely topics who are unable to travel to campus.  

Of one of his frequent guests, he said, “We don’t see eye-to-eye on anything. But it is a very civil conversation, and most students very much appreciate the diversity of points of view and hearing different voices in this highly polarized area.” 

Since going online in winter 2021, the course has received positive feedback from students, who voted to keep the course fully online in winter 2022, even after UCLA had returned to in-person instruction. 

“There’s no other place in the country that I know of that has a permanent course on gun violence,” Kaplan said. Launched in the wake of a 2016 shooting on the UCLA campus, the course has been consistently filled, and student interest has only grown. “What is important is that it has evolved over time. It keeps getting better, so I am committed to that course,” he said. 

Kaplan has received a number of awards throughout his career, including the Distinguished Investigator Award from the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. He has contributed to state and federal suicide prevention initiatives and has testified before the Senate Special Committee on Aging at a hearing on veterans’ health. He has also served as an advisor to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. Kaplan also has advocated for including of gun violence prevention as one of the Grand Challenges in Social Work, which he said was recently approved. 

At UCLA, Kaplan has been a faculty affiliate with the university’s California Center for Population Research. Academic posts before coming to UCLA have included Portland State University, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Oregon.  

The four-time Fulbright awardee recently received an award from the Fulbright Specialist Program to help faculty at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid maximize the global impact of their research. He also has his eye on new research opportunities in Canada, where he has been affiliated with the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research at the University of Victoria in British Columbia.

Kaplan, whose research has been widely published, is a frequent contributor to media seeking his expertise, including through op-ed pieces. He plans to expand on that effort to help the next generation of scholars improve their citation record of scholarship and their overall visibility and impact. 

“I’ve been intrigued by that. How do you engage the readers more? It doesn’t happen in an organic way.”  

And although Kaplan has made some time for cycling in the Pacific Northwest and a trip to Guatemala, where he grew up, he also plans to continue collaborating with Luskin School faculty, staff and students.

So, for now, Kaplan is staying local. 

“It’s not one transition. It is a series of transitions for me,” he said. “And there will be unexpected twists and turns along the way.” 

In Memoriam: Douglas G. Glasgow, Author of ‘The Black Underclass’ First Black UCLA Social Welfare tenured faculty member was director of UCLA’s Center for Afro-American Studies, and later dean of Howard University’s School of Social Work

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By Stan Paul

A celebration of life for former UCLA Social Welfare Associate Professor Douglas G. Glasgow, a widely recognized scholar on welfare and underclass formation in urban cities, will be held Oct. 7 at Howard University in Washington, D.C. He died Aug. 9 at age 94.

Glasgow was the first Black tenured faculty member in the UCLA School of Social Welfare — now part of the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. He was a member of the faculty from 1969 to 1971. In 1970, Glasgow served as director of the UCLA Center for Afro-American Studies, which later became the UCLA Ralph J. Bunch Center for African American Studies.

“Doug was a good friend and colleague when I was a lecturer and he an associate professor in the School of Social Welfare,” said emeritus professor Alex Norman. “He was the first African American to receive tenure at the School — I was the second.”

Glasgow was one of the founders of the National Association of Black Social Workers and was former vice president of operations of the National Urban League during his time in the nation’s capital.

“He was beloved as a teacher and respected as a scholar,” Norman said.

Norman also noted that Glasgow, who was published in numerous professional journals, coined the phrase “the Black underclass,” the title of his powerful and insightful book based on research he conducted in Watts in the 1960s following the Watts riots. Updated in 1975, his research drew attention to young Black males labeled as “problem” youths who constituted a perpetual underclass that, he said in his book, “represent the fastest-growing portion.”

“This book was born in flames, in an inferno that raged for four August days in 1965. The place was Watts, Los Angeles,” Glasgow begins. Amid this tumultuous historical turning point in Los Angeles, Glasgow writes that he sought to “examine the lives of inner-city young men through their perceptions of their life experiences.”

In his preface, Glasgow wrote that “this book is not intended as a definitive study of the Black underclass. Rather, by concentrating on a group of representative young men and their individual (and collective) confrontations with mainstream institutions, it attempts to convey the human experience of those who are denied upward mobility and are processed into underclass status.”

Glasgow also wrote that his hope was that “everyone concerned with the human, social and economic waste represented by America’s inner cities will benefit from reading this book.”

Joseph A. Nunn, who earned his undergraduate, MSW and Ph.D. degrees at UCLA, also recalled Glasgow fondly from his graduate student days in the 1960s.

“Dr. Glasgow was the only tenure-track faculty, an assistant professor, when I arrived,” a time of anti-war and anti-discrimination marches and protests, he said. During that time, Nunn and other students demanded that a tenured Black professor be added.

“He was promoted to associate professor following the activities of the Black Caucus,” said Nunn, who would later become a longtime director of field education at UCLA Luskin.

Glasgow left UCLA for Howard University’s School of Social Work, where he was dean from 1972 to 1975. While there, he led faculty and students in creating the first comprehensive, accredited, graduate-level curriculum modeled from a Black perspective.

He is included on the National Association of Social Workers Foundation Pioneer roster, which notes his many accomplishments and affiliations. Among these are visiting professor at the University of Ghana at Legon and Makerere University in Uganda. During his time in Africa, Glasgow served as a policy analyst and consultant on social development to the Ministers of Social Welfare in Ghana and with the Ministry of Rehabilitation in Ethiopia.

In the United States, he was a visiting professor at the University of Maryland and taught at Norfolk State University, where he helped start its social work department.

Glasgow also helped found community-based and national organizations that include the Black Men’s Development Center and the United Black Fund/United Way. In Washington, he served on a number of boards and commissions, including the District of Columbia’s Mental Health Reorganization Commission, the Advisory Board on Mental Health and the Teen Pregnancy Commission.

He was a resident scholar for the 21st Century Commission on African-American Males and was a scholar in residence at the E. Franklin Frazier Center for Social Research at Howard University, where he remained actively engaged in research and policy studies into his later years.

Glasgow was born in New York City, the youngest of 13 children of Matthew and Angelin Glasgow. He grew up in Brooklyn and received his undergraduate degree from Brooklyn College in 1959 and MSW from Columbia University in 1961, followed by his DSW from the University of Southern California in 1968. He later worked as a youth therapist at Kaiser Permanente Los Angeles.

His activist work as a student led to friendships with civil rights advocates including Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, Jesse Jackson, John Lewis, Andrew Young, Ronald Brown, Whitney Young and “so many other greats while publishing articles, consulting, working and always selflessly trying to make a positive difference,” said his daughter Karen Glasgow.

“He was a gifted lobbyist, orator, writer, cook, singer, storyteller, visionary, father, partner, friend, bridge builder and a very humble man,” she said. “He only wanted his legacy to be remembered as a catalyst to make others pick up where he left off. When asked what he was passionate about, his reply was ‘the eradication of injustice.’”

Glasgow is predeceased by his wife, Frieda Glasgow, and a daughter, Rickie Glasgow. He is survived by his daughter Karen Glasgow; his grandson Douglas R. Glasgow; his partner Cheryl McQueen; and great grandchildren, nieces, nephews, grandnieces and grandnephews.

In his memory, the family suggests that donations be made to the National Association of Black Social Workers in his name.

More information is available via the family obituary and tribute wall online.

A Festive Welcome to UCLA Luskin The entire School community comes together to make connections and celebrate the launch of a new academic year

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Students, alumni, faculty, staff and friends of UCLA Luskin connected at a series of events kicking off the 2023-2024 academic year.

An orientation for graduate students brought public policy, social welfare and urban planning students together to learn about resources provided by the university and the Luskin School.

The undergraduate program hosted a luncheon for majors, pre-majors and students interested in learning more about the bachelor of arts in public affairs.

And the Block Party tradition continued for the 12th year, with the entire UCLA Luskin community gathering to make connections, learn about opportunities and organizations, enjoy the flavors of Los Angeles, and greet the School’s benefactors, Meyer and Renee Luskin.

View photos from:

Graduate Student Orientation

Graduate Student Orientation 2023

Undergraduate Open House 

Undergraduate Open House 2023

12th Annual UCLA Luskin Block Party

Block Party 2023

 

For access to the Block Party 360 Videos and Roamer Booth images, contact events@luskin.edu. 

UC Grant Will Fund EV Research by UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation Team led by a Fielding School professor gets nearly $2 million to pursue an equitable model for electrical vehicle charger placement

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The UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation will be a key contributor to research recently funded through a partnership between the University of California and the state intended to spur real-world solutions relating to climate change in California.

A team from the Center for Innovation, or LCI, will focus on community engagement relating to a project led by Yifang Zhu, professor of environmental health sciences at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, that will look at how efforts to reduce greenhouse gases can better enable residents of disadvantaged communities to adopt electric vehicles more readily. 

A $1.99 million grant under Zhu’s direction will fund the study of EV usage in communities that have historically lacked access to charging stations. The LCI researchers will work with local residents and community-based organizations to identify barriers, improve knowledge and awareness of EVs, and design plans for deploying and installing charging stations in underserved areas. 

To date, the siting of EV chargers has been a top-down process driven by business priorities rather than community needs and preferences. Gregory Pierce, adjunct associate professor of urban planning and co-executive director of LCI, said researchers will partner with three community-based organizations in the Los Angeles area to co-design the first-ever procedurally equitable process for placement of EV chargers. 

“We hope that this project leads to a new community co-designed model for placing electric vehicle charging stations throughout California that can accelerate our transition to a zero-emissions transportation future,” Pierce said. 

The UCLA Luskin-affiliated team will be co-led by Rachel Connolly, project director for air quality and environmental equity research at LCI. The effort will include surveys and a three-part workshop process relating to the siting of EV chargers and future investments in coordination with the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and other partners. Connolly, who earned doctorate and master’s degrees in environmental health sciences from UCLA, has been working at LCI since 2017. 

In all, $83.1 million in California Climate Action grants were awarded to a total of 38 projects involving researchers from across the UC system, as well as California State University campuses, private universities and community, industry, tribal and public agencies. The two-year grants are part of $185 million allocated by the state for UC climate initiatives that advance progress toward California’s climate goals.

Read about other UCLA research funded by California Climate Action grants

A Push to Protect Angelenos From Mpox Infection UCLA's Hub for Health Intervention, Policy and Practice leads community effort to bring vaccinations to vulnerable populations

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The Hub for Health Intervention, Policy and Practice (HHIPP) at UCLA Luskin is leading an effort to ensure that vulnerable populations in Los Angeles are protected from the mpox virus.

HHIPP has teamed up with nonprofits, grassroots groups, health care providers and government agencies to provide mpox information and free vaccinations at a summerlong series of events serving the LGBTQ+ community. Nearly 1,000 Angelenos have received the vaccine since the campaign launched in June, LGBTQ+ Pride Month.

Now, HHIPP will take the campaign to the rest of California, thanks to a $100,000 grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Foundation, an independent nonprofit that helps to marshal resources to support the CDC’s public health priorities.

“We particularly want to focus on Black and Latinx folks, as we were seeing lower rates of vaccination in those groups, and on people living with HIV who are out of care, who are particularly vulnerable to complications related to mpox,” said HHIPP Director Ian Holloway, professor of social welfare at UCLA Luskin.

Holloway was named a scientific advisor to the California Department of Public Health in 2022, after the first case of mpox was reported in the United States. In spring of 2023, the CDC and local and state health agencies called for renewed efforts to protect people from the virus, which is typically spread through sexual activity or skin-to-skin contact.

In June, HHIPP and its partners launched a social media campaign called stickitin.la to share information about mpox, invite the community to pop-up vaccination clinics and offer other health services, including testing for HIV and sexually transmitted infections.

“In true HHIPP fashion, this was a co-creation led by and for our community and facilitated by us,” Holloway said. “Very quickly, we were able to get a lot of large and small community-based organizations working on sexual health to come on board and to help cross-promote and co-sponsor events and provide financial support.”

To date, around 20 community partners have joined the campaign. “They’re all working multiple angles to continue to get the word out about the importance of mpox vaccination and then actually bring it to communities where it may not have been as readily available,” Holloway said.

The campaign also invited the community to an End of Summer Celebration on Aug. 31 at the APLA Health in Baldwin Hills to share information about the vaccination effort and promote diversity, inclusion and sexual health awareness.

The Heat Is Rising, and UCLA Luskin Research Is Helping L.A. Respond Environmental justice has been the cornerstone of Luskin School efforts related to the city’s hot weather policies

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By Les Dunseith

As Southern California braces for more heat waves this summer, the city of Los Angeles has launched its most comprehensive and equitable response ever, thanks in part to partnerships with student, faculty and staff researchers from UCLA Luskin.

Interactive mapping tools co-developed by Luskin School-affiliated scholars and the Public Health Alliance of Southern California, for instance, are helping government officials and social services providers better visualize the neighborhoods most in danger from extreme heat. And research has helped ensure that city resources like cooling centers are being deployed in areas with high numbers of low-income residents and communities of color — groups that tend to be disproportionately affected by hot weather but whom previous heat-mitigation efforts often failed to reach.

While California has not historically viewed hot weather in the context of social equity, heat’s disparate impact on the state’s various populations has been a central focus of Luskin School and other UCLA research.

“Heat is an equity issue. Neighborhood by neighborhood, we’re going to be experiencing heat differently,” said Colleen Callahan, co-executive director of the Luskin Center for Innovation and co-author of the center’s three-part series on California’s Extreme Heat Action Plan. “That’s why it’s important to identify where protections are most needed and where they’ll have the biggest impact.”

Among those equitable protections is providing shade from the heat, said V. Kelly Turner, an associate professor of urban planning and point person for the Luskin Center for Innovation’s climate adaptation and resilience research. In a July 2023 commentary in the journal Nature, Turner detailed how a lack of shade affects urban residents — particularly those from low-income and marginalized communities, who tend to live in heat-prone areas that lack air-conditioning and tree cover — and stressed the need for cities to remove regulatory restrictions that make it difficult to build shade infrastructure.

“It’s going to take a setting-by-setting approach, whole of government approach, where we look at all the regulations that make it really hard to do the right thing,” she recently told LAist.

A related recent capstone effort at the Luskin School involved graduate students in public policy. Their research (PDF) explored historical inequities in Los Angeles and included a survey to assess how the city can create an equitable heat policy with long-term resilience for vulnerable communities.

It’s the hope of Callahan, Turner and many other UCLA scholars that their research will spur the city of Los Angeles and its Climate Emergency Mobilization Office to continue to implement equitable and forward-thinking responses to extreme heat.

Finding CEMO

Twitter:
CEMO_EJ4LA

Facebook:
facebook.com/EJ4LA

Instagram:
CEMO_EJ4LA

Email:
CEMO-Office@lacity.org 
www.climate4la.org

These and other UCLA contributions are informing the city’s equity-based approach to the threat posed by climate change and rising temperatures, said Marta Segura, Los Angeles’ first chief heat officer and director of the city’s Climate Emergency Mobilization Office. Launched in 2021, CEMO is responsible for coordinating across agencies to create a cohesive response to extreme heat.

“It’s my belief that in focusing on equitable climate solutions and investing first and foremost in the historically disinvested communities, we will accelerate climate solutions for everybody,” Segura, a UCLA Public Health alumna, said during a May panel discussion at UCLA organized by the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation.

Using data gathered in partnership with UCLA scholars, CEMO was able to identify which cooling centers received a lot of use in previous years, which didn’t and where the need was greatest. This summer, the number of city-coordinated facilities offering heat relief — including air-conditioned recreation centers and public libraries that stay open beyond regular hours — has expanded significantly.

Among those helping the city evolve its hot weather response were 13 students who earned their master’s degrees in urban and regional planning this past June. As participants in the UCLA Luskin Urban Planning 2022-23 Comprehensive Project class, they prepared a report on heat equity for CEMO under the direction of Gregory Pierce, adjunct associate professor of urban planning and co-executive director of the Luskin Center for Innovation.
woman in striped top speaks at podium while map is projected on a screen behind her

Corinne Odom discusses the importance of cooling centers at the Comprehensive Project’s June 2023 presentation. Photo by Les Dunseith

The students focused on three areas — cooling centers, emergency response and bus shelters. Their final report (PDF), released in June, commended Los Angeles for being at the forefront of government efforts on extreme heat but noted room for improvement to ensure public safety and equitable distribution of resources.

Corinne Odom was among the students who looked at cooling centers. She and her classmates spoke with staff members at libraries who were eager to help but frustrated that people in danger didn’t seem to know these facilities were available.

“Visitor counts at cooling center locations last summer were low,” Odom said. “So, really informing people that they’re available is important, and that’s something that CEMO is prioritizing.”

Odom and her classmates were supportive of the city’s efforts to create “resiliency centers” by offering a broader range of social services programs and heat-related amenities at locations like recreation centers and public libraries that traditionally serve as cooling centers. They also noted that CEMO’s communication efforts also recommend informal locations where residents can duck in quickly to escape extreme heat.

“A mall could be a cooling center,” Odom said, “or a movie theater.”

A particularly difficult challenge for city officials is reaching the people in the most danger — the unhoused population.

Michelle Gallarza, a Comprehensive Project participant who contributed to Luskin Center for Innovation research on heat and housing insecurity, noted that the unhoused population’s lack of shelter makes them particularly vulnerable during heat waves.

woman in dark shirt without sleeves speaks at a podium

Michelle Gallarza, shown here talking about the Comprehensive Project’s findings, remembers the lights being left off during heat waves in her Los Angeles grade school that lacked air conditioning. “The same thing would happen when I would go home,” she said. “We’d just have fans blowing and no lights on.” Photo by Les Dunseith

“These people are more likely to suffer from the extreme aspects of heat and a really increased likelihood for illness and, unfortunately, death,” she said.

In Los Angeles County, unhoused people accounted for 42% of heat-related deaths in 2022, even though they make up less than 1% of the population. Beyond having less access to indoor cooling than the general population and facing challenges getting information about emergency resources, they may not always feel comfortable in city-provided facilities, said Gallarza, who spoke with an unhoused person who said cooling centers have not felt very welcoming.

“In our sensitivity and vulnerability analysis,” Odom said, “we thought that there should be more specific solutions catered to that community, especially in collaboration with organizations that are trusted and knowingly support unhoused communities.”

Generally speaking, Segura said, a person in danger doesn’t need to be out of the heat for long to benefit, and this is where resilience centers, particularly smaller ones, can help. She and other city officials hope to persuade, for example, local fast-food restaurants to serve as centers for unhoused people and others on hot days.

“With just three or four hours of refuge and recovery, you can make it to the next day,” she said. “People don’t need to stay there 24 hours.”

Waiting for the bus: The need for transit shelters

Other Comprehensive Project students focused on Los Angeles’ Sidewalk and Transit Amenities Program, recently established to support the expansion of transit shelters in a city where only 26% of Metro bus stops currently offer shade.

Project participant Miguel Miguel said he was surprised to discover that the city’s shelter placement decisions were often related more to political and commercial considerations, like advertising potential, than protecting people from heat. “We never suspected that would be such a driving factor,” he said. “We finally realized that the contract explicitly said that [shelter providers] needed to maintain advertising revenue to support the operations of the program.”

man in blue shirt and glasses gestures at a podium while a woman listens int he background

Miguel Miguel delivers findings from the Comprehensive Project’s final report. Miguel, a San Fernando Valley resident who has seen the impact of dangerously high temperatures on communities without adequate heat protection, said, “It was really important for me to be involved and to bring lived experience and emotional compassion into this [research].”  Photo by Les Dunseith

In the end, the students recommended prioritizing bus shelter development on geographic equity, with a focus on the Harbor Gateway area near San Pedro and parts of the San Fernando Valley area that have high ridership and where historically underserved populations frequently experience extreme temperatures. The final report of the Comprehensive Project class recommended revising criteria for heat emergencies and heat warnings, setting lower thresholds than previous city policy. And their emergency response analysis found a statistically significant correlation between 911 call volumes and heat across the city but no similar spike in calls to the 311 system, which connects residents to city services, including heat mitigation. More outreach is thus needed to ensure that people seek help before it’s too late.

Segura said in May at UCLA that the city had developed an equity index to guide policy decisions, but it didn’t yet have a strong climate equity focus. Now, Los Angeles has begun ts climate vulnerability assessment and fully developing its heat action plan.

“This information that the UCLA researchers are bringing to us is going to be part of the consideration and the development of those plans,” she said. “So, the timing couldn’t have been more perfect.”

Read more about UCLA’s efforts to combat the effects of extreme heat