Student Report Reflects on Japanese Disaster Preparation

/0 Comments/in , , , /by

Three years after a massive earthquake and tsunami struck Tohoku, Japan, students from all three departments have produced an anthology of personal reflection and academic analysis of the disaster’s impact on the community.

“Telling our Story: UCLA Luskin Japan Trip 2013” collects writing from 22 students in Public Policy, Social Welfare and Urban Planning that traveled to the region last year. In a weeklong trip over Spring Break, the students toured disaster sites, examined official and community responses to the tragedy, and documented the country’s progress toward recovery.

“We, the authors, made promises to our sponsors and hosts to never forget Tohoku, and sharing our academic observations and personal experiences here not only immortalizes them but makes them accessible to those who cannot travel to the region themselves,” write the editors — Urban Planning student Vicente Romero, Social Welfare student Elizabeth Schaper and Public Policy student Keitaro Tsuji. “It is our hope that this body of work will help us achieve our promise to increase this region’s global visibility.”

The students also documented their trip in a video piece produced by Public Policy student Dustin Foster.

Students Get Up Close With Green Tech on City Hall Day

/0 Comments/in , , , /by

On Friday, Feb. 28, 24 students from all of UCLA Luskin’s academic departments traveled to City Hall for a day of briefings and interviews on the topic of “Can green technology help drive L.A.’s economy?”. The students gained experience in what it takes to make government work, and the city leaders benefited from the students’ new ideas and inspiration.

Follow the action through the Storify thread below.

 

Flexible Response to Calif. Budget Crisis Preserved HIV Testing

/0 Comments/in , /by

New research from a team led by Public Policy research professor Arleen Leibowitz shows that local health jurisdictions were able to maintain HIV testing near to pre-recession levels despite a substantial reduction in funding during California’s budget 2009 crisis.

As a direct result of state budget cuts that eliminated state funding for HIV prevention and testing, the number of HIV tests administered by California’s public health agencies declined dramatically between 2009 and 2011, the researchers write in the journal Heath Affairs. The state targeted remaining federal funds for HIV prevention to the 15 counties (other than Los Angeles and San Francisco) with the greatest prevalence of HIV/AIDS. Counties with lower HIV/AIDS prevalence lost all their state support — and the number of publicly funded tests in those counties plummeted by 90 percent as a result.

Although testing dropped precipitously, HIV diagnoses fell by a much smaller amount. The 90 percent drop in testing in low-burden areas from 2009 to 2011 resulted in a decline in new diagnoses of only 15.7 percent in those counties. New cases of HIV/AIDS “declined by 6.7 percent in high-burden jurisdictions, despite the fact that their HIV prevention funding was halved and the numbers of HIV tests supported by public funds fell by 19 percent,” the researchers write.

The level of new diagnoses remained high because public health officials responded nimbly to the elimination of state funding, the researchers report. “By targeting the remaining federal resources to the most affected areas and allowing local jurisdictions the flexibility to allocate support to the most effective strategies and the populations at highest risk,” the state reduced the impact of the cuts, Leibowitz said.

“Across-the-board cuts would have resulted in delivering many fewer tests and identifying smaller numbers of new HIV/AIDS cases,” she added.

Although the agencies were able to mitigate the impact of the cuts, prevention activities were still reduced. Agencies were forced to scale back or eliminate risk-reduction and education programs, restructure program staffing, and seek external funding for testing and operations. In the sea of red ink, public health officials clung to a raft of testing regimens above other prevention methods.

“HIV testing is a crucial first step in identifying people living with HIV, who can then begin treatment to maintain their health,” Leibowitz said. “Treatment is also a key prevention strategy because it dramatically reduces transmission of the virus to others.” Even with the increased emphasis on testing, however, the reduced funding pool meant that “fewer than 520 Californians a year were not informed that they had been infected with HIV,” the researchers write.

Now that California’s budget outlook is improving, HIV testing should be strengthened and expanded, Leibowitz said. “California’s improved fiscal situation could allow for restoring resources for free, publicly-funded HIV testing, so necessary to the ‘HIV treatment as prevention’ strategy,” she said.

The article, “HIV Tests And New Diagnoses Declined After California Budget Cuts, But Reallocating Funds Helped Reduce Impact,” appears in the March 2014 issue of Health Affairs. Leibowitz’s coauthors are Karen Byrnes, Adriane Wynn and Kevin Farrell of UCLA’s California HIV/AIDS Policy Research Center. Support came from the UCLA Center for HIV Identification, Prevention, and Treatment Services, which is funded by a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health. The California HIV/AIDS Research Program and the UCLA AIDS Institute also supported this research.

Bluestone Kicks Off FEC Lecture Series

/0 Comments/in , , , /by

By Stan Paul

From President Obama and the Pope to venture capitalists and billionaires, “everyone is talking about inequality,” said Northeastern University professor Barry Bluestone in his Feb. 25 talk at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs.

“This is new,” he added.

Bluestone’s presentation, “The Great U-Turn: Inequality in America 25 Years Later,” launched the Luskin School’s 2014 FEC Public Lecture Series. The events, which follow the theme of “Economic Inequality Through Multiple Lenses,” are sponsored by UCLA Luskin’s Faculty Executive Council, the Center for the Study of Inequality at UCLA Luskin, the Ralph and Goldy Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, and the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, among others.

While inequality in the United States is certainly not a new subject, focus on disparities among Americans and their relative freedom to pursue the American Dream has sharpened recently. In addition to a historical view of inequality in the U.S., Bluestone, director of the Kitty and Michael Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy at Northeastern, provided new data that showed the situation has changed since he first reported his findings in the 1980s.

Among the headings of his presentation were insights such as: “Where inequality is greatest, so is the cost of living,” (Los Angeles was recently ranked ninth most unequal on a list American cities), and “Income Gains at the Top Dwarf Those of Low- and Middle-Income Households.” He presented data showing the percent change in real after-tax income since 1979 that resembled a craggy, but ever-growing mountain range of prosperity, culminating in a 201 percent increase for the top 1 percent. But, the categories of the next 19 percent, the middle 60 percent and the bottom 20 percent appear as relatively flat foothills in comparison.

As an explanation for the causes behind the divergent fortunes of the haves and the have-nots, Bluestone referenced an Agatha Christie novel to show that no one cause is to blame. Under the heading “Murder on the Inequality Express,” he ran through a top-ten list of suspects from technology to globalization to decreased union representation to trade deficits.

One chart, named “Income Growth and the Changing Distribution of Family Income,” came with a dour subtitle, “From Growth with Greater Equity…to Stagnation and Inequality.” Following World War II and decades of growth in income generally among most Americans, the “Great U-Turn” began in the 1970s, according to Bluestone, who used that term with his co-author Bennett Harrison as the title of their 1988 book. In the preface of the paperback version of that book, the authors wrote, “When we first wrote The Great U-Turn, we began with a simple and fundamental premise: what is essential to the American Dream is the promise of an ever-improving standard of living. Americans expect to find and hold higher-paying jobs as they get older, and they expect their children to fare even better…”

Prof. Bluestone put the “current concern about growing economic inequality into some historical perspective. He and Bennett were pioneers in this field,” commented Urban Planning professor Paul Ong, who directs the Center for the Study of Inequality at UCLA Luskin.

Counter to society’s expectations of ever-increasing prosperity, Bluestone showed evidence that family income mobility has stagnated in the decades since the 1970s. While expressing pessimism about any significant changes for “current generation income equality,” Professor Bluestone said that intergenerational improvement — or the prospects for children born into low-income families to advance to a higher level of wealth – might have more luck if major changes are made.

Bluestone suggested that universal quality prenatal care for all children and more spending on early childhood education would be the best investment to address the inequality gap. By better matching educational spending to the time when a child’s brain undergoes its period of most dramatic growth, the U-turn could be reversed, Bluestone said.

How much would this cost? “A fortune, but it would be worth it,” he said.

Bluestone’s presentation is available here.

The next FEC Public Lecture, scheduled for April 29, will feature William “Sandy” Darity of Duke University who will discuss “Race, Ethnicity and Economic Inequality.” 

Global Public Affairs Opens New Student-Faculty Discussion Series

/0 Comments/in , , , , /by

By Adeney Zo
UCLA Luskin Student Writer

Learning can come in many forms, including class lectures, discussions and research, but the first Global Public Affairs salon aimed to combine these forms into one engaging multi-departmental, student-faculty discussion.

Put together by Urban Planning professors Michael Storper and Steve Commins, this salon created a space for students and faculty from widely varied backgrounds in Public Policy to discuss major global public affairs topics outside of the traditional lecture setting.

The main topic of the night centered around the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s 2014 annual letter, titled “3 Myths That Block Progress for the Poor.” The letter aims to debunk the following three global affairs myths (through research and media examples):

  1. Poor countries are doomed to stay poor.
  2. Foreign aid is a big waste.
  3. Saving lives leads to overpopulation.

Once the debate commenced, students brought up points to defend or deconstruct each myth while faculty expanded on those ideas with information based on their own research and experience. Comments ranged from analysis of developmental markers to benefits of quantitative vs. qualitative data to dealing with corruption and misuse of foreign aid.

Professor Michael Storper led the discussion, emphasizing at the beginning that the goal of the salon was to take information learned in the classroom and apply it to engaging, intellectual debates. Other Luskin faculty members that participated included Steve Commins, Manisha Shah, Robert Schilling, Paavo Monkkonen and Susanna Hecht.

Hecht co-edits “The Social Lives of Forests”

/0 Comments/in , /by

Urban Planning professor Susanna Hecht has published a new book. “The Social Lives of Forests,” co-edited by Hecht, Kathleen D. Morrison of the University of Chicago and Christine Padoch of the Center for International Forestry Research in Indonesia, will be released in early March.

With 28 chapters in five parts, the book takes a comprehensive look at humanity’s multidimensional relationships with forests and woodlands. From the publisher:

“Forests are in decline, and the threats these outposts of nature face—including deforestation, degradation, and fragmentation—are the result of human culture. Or are they? This volume calls these assumptions into question, revealing forests’ past, present, and future conditions to be the joint products of a host of natural and cultural forces. Moreover, in many cases the coalescence of these forces—from local ecologies to competing knowledge systems—has masked a significant contemporary trend of woodland resurgence, even in the forests of the tropics.

“Focusing on the history and current use of woodlands from India to the Amazon, ‘The Social Lives of Forests’ attempts to build a coherent view of forests sited at the nexus of nature, culture, and development. With chapters covering the effects of human activities on succession patterns in now-protected Costa Rican forests; the intersection of gender and knowledge in African shea nut tree markets; and even the unexpectedly rich urban woodlands of Chicago, this book explores forests as places of significant human action, with complex institutions, ecologies, and economies that have transformed these landscapes in the past and continue to shape them today. From rain forests to timber farms, the face of forests—how we define, understand, and maintain them—is changing.”

The book is published by the University of Chicago Press.

Holloway Earns Two Grants for HIV Prevention Studies

/0 Comments/in , /by

Social Welfare professor Ian Holloway has been awarded two grants to study sexual risk behavior among populations of gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men (MSM) in Los Angeles County and the Dominican Republic.

In a $25,000 award from the National Institute of Mental Health and administered through UCLA’s Center for HIV Identification, Prevention and Treatment Services, Holloway will lead a team of researchers looking at how mobile apps and social media can be used to deliver HIV prevention and treatment messaging tailored for Black MSM.

Although apps such as Grindr, Jack’d and Scruff have become common ways for young men to meet each other and connect to gay communities, little is known about how these apps may facilitate HIV risk behavior among young Black MSM, or how the networks formed through these apps could help connect Black MSM with HIV prevention services and resources. Holloway’s grant seeks to inform the development of technology-based interventions to reduce the spread of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases in this population.

“Current HIV-prevention strategies focus on increasing outreach, testing, treatment and retention in HIV care in order to reduce community viral load. It is imperative that we understand the ways in which young men are using technology in order to tailor interventions for delivery online and through mobile technologies,” Holloway says. “Our research will help inform network-based interventions that can keep HIV-positive men healthy and hopefully reduce new infections among HIV-negative men.”

The second grant from the UCLA Center for AIDS Research/AIDS Institute, totaling $50,000 over two years, focuses on the social and sexual networks of male sex workers in the Dominican Republic. Holloway and his co-researchers hope to learn more about how tourism economies in the Dominican Republic contribute to substance use and HIV risk through changes in the structure and composition of the social and sexual networks of Dominican male sex workers. For this project, Holloway will collaborate with Vincent Guilamo-Ramos, who co-directs the Center for Latino Adolescent and Family Health at NYU’s Silver School of Social Work and has studied the role of alcohol and drug abuse in HIV risk behavior among Dominican youth. In-country collaborators include Rafael García-Alvarez and Antonio de Moya of the Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo.

Holloway has previously studied the impact of social networks on HIV risk behavior, especially among young sexual minority men.

The Art of Leadership: Madeleine Albright

/0 Comments/in , /by

Prior to delivering her Luskin Lecture and receiving the UCLA Medal in January, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright spoke about the qualities that make good leaders — both today and in the future.

Watch the video below to see what Albright had to say about “The Art of Leadership.” More interviews from other noted leaders can be seen on UCLA Luskin’s YouTube channel.

 

Janine Berridge: Worldwide Roots, Worldwide Interests

/0 Comments/in , /by

By Adeney Zo
UCLA Luskin Student Writer

Public Policy student Janine Berridge’s journey has taken her around the world, but along the way she’s achieved an impressive list of accomplishments — both in the workforce and as a master of public policy candidate at UCLA Luskin.

Beginning her story in Wales, where she spent her childhood, Berridge first received her undergraduate degree in journalism from Cardiff University. “I always wanted to become a broadcast journalist. However, I realized I had to eat, breathe and sleep ‘news’ in order to work in the journalism field . . . and I realized this might not be the thing for me,” Berridge explains. “So after I graduated, I took some time off traveling. I went all over the world and, along the way, discovered that I really enjoyed and thrived off meeting communities. When I returned I thought about how I could put my skills to work with these communities to solve certain issues.”

With these experiences in mind, Berridge took a leap of faith and started her career in a junior position at Plan UK, a children’s charity with which she had ties as a sponsor and passionate supporter. “At first, the job was hard because it was very repetitive. I had to phone 50 schools a day, saying the same lines with as much enthusiasm and energy as I could,” she recalls. Despite the high turnover rate of her position, Berridge continued with Plan UK, rising from assistant to senior executive within five years. “Ultimately, this came about from me thinking, ‘What are my skills? Where do I want to be?’, and then getting my head down and working hard.”

Working with Plan UK allowed Berridge to continue her passion for travel and meeting communities around the world. From working with a girl’s boarding school in Malawi to teaching young people about sexual and reproductive health in Zambia, Berridge devoted her efforts to creating change through her work.

Though her travels were mainly work-related, one specific trip was made for the sole purpose of self-discovery. “My grandfather was born in the Gambia and came to the UK as a stowaway on a ship,” she explains. Intrigued by her family’s origins, Berridge went on a solo journey to the West African country to discover her story — armed with a single photograph and an unfaltering sense of determination. She went from door to door in communities across the country, hopeful that someone would recognize her grandfather from the photograph, or from the story of his adventures as a stowaway. At the least expected moment, one woman grew excited at the sight of a familiar face in the picture, and took Berridge to another compound to meet the now elderly lady in the photograph. “All of a sudden, she just burst out in tears, and I ended up bursting out in tears as well. She was my grandfather’s cousin, and they were raised together by their grandmother after their parents died when they were young,” Berridge describes. She found the rest of her relatives in the Gambia through this point of connection and spent time there reconnecting with her family’s roots.

While working at Plan UK, Berridge met her husband, a filmmaker who traveled between London and Los Angeles for work. The couple decided to permanently relocate to L.A., and Berridge made the decision to apply to graduate school. “I always wanted to get my master’s but the money and the time were an issue,” Berridge explains. “Going through the GRE was absolutely petrifying, but I eventually got offered a position to study here.”

From the start, Berridge was determined to apply an equal amount of dedication and involvement at UCLA Luskin as she did in her previous jobs. “I wanted to be really involved and be a part of the experience in a way that I didn’t really get to do as an undergraduate,” she explains. During her time at UCLA, Berridge has taken on several leadership positions through campus organizations. Her roles include: vice president for professional development with the Association of Master of Public Policy Students; lead member of Policy Professionals for Diversity; Graduate Student Representative (GSA) for the LGBTQ UCLA-wide committee; leader in the development of foreign language options for graduate students; and member of the Luskin Senior Fellows Program, which Berridge describes as a program that “has really made my time at Luskin very special.” Berridge is also the recipient of a fellowship from the Wasserman Foundation, which provides funding for exceptional UCLA Luskin students.

On top of her active involvement within the school, Berridge was also offered the unique opportunity to intern with the Clinton Foundation last summer. “The internship was a good, holistic program that offered a great deal of knowledge on topics I’m interested in,” Berridge relates. “I really enjoyed the ‘brown bag’ events where highly accomplished individuals who worked in administration and the White House shared their insight on our work.”

As an intern, Berridge worked with the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) team and CGI partners to formulate market-based approaches to global social issues. “The goal is to promote more practical, market-based, shared-value strategies to all levels of the income pyramid,” she says. “Companies will invest in a program that benefits both the company and the individual, unlike philanthropies that may dry up when the economy is in recession.”

Berridge’s work as a Clinton Foundation intern and work outside of UCLA continue to fulfill one of her first goals — to help communities around the world. Her Applied Policy Project, a team report that all Public Policy students submit at the conclusion of their studies, is focused on offering policy recommendations to a client working in Malawi who is facing “the challenges of employee absenteeism and petty theft in  their community development projects.” Berridge also serves as a consultant at InVenture, a social enterprise aimed to offer resources for entrepreneurs in India to reach out to unbanked individuals, and Wells Bring Hope, a nonprofit that funds boreholes in Niger.

Berridge has come a long way from her initial dream of becoming a broadcast journalist, but each step of her journey has been one of personal growth and discovery. “It takes hard work — and failure, sometimes — to figure out where you need to focus your strategy,” she concludes. “Like someone once said, if you’re not failing you’re not trying hard enough. Always push yourself until you’ve reached your maximum and then take a step back and see how you can improve from there.”

Students Join Movers & Shakers at TRB Conference

/0 Comments/in , /by

By Adeney Zo
UCLA Luskin student writer

A group of Urban Planning students looking to expand their knowledge and professional connections in the transportation world made the trip to the 93rd annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board in Washington D.C., earlier this month.

The TRB annual meeting is a massive event, with around 12,000 participants and 800 different sessions spanning the width and breadth of transportation studies each year. Attending this event offered the UCLA Luskin students an opportunity to meet a mix of professionals and academics working on issues and projects similar to their own.

One student presenter, Jaimee Lederman, recalled, “This conference really gave me the chance to talk to people I normally couldn’t gain access to. For example, I had problems getting data from people in the insurance industry because they are not easy to contact, but there was a woman there who happened to be the head of an insurance company.”

Fellow student Kelcie Ralph agreed that the networking opportunities at the program are invaluable: “My first year, I tried to go to as many sessions as possible and drilled myself into the ground just to see everything. This year, I scaled back and focused on networking. I had the opportunity to attend a women’s reception that became an amazing networking opportunity for me to meet other women in transportation.”

Four Urban Planning students — master’s student Timothy Black and doctoral students Trevor Thomas, Ralph and Lederman — each were invited to present and discuss their research in various panels and forums at the conference.

Thomas’ paper covered the topic of post-welfare reform. “There are many travel surveys done for low-income people, single parents and children under welfare reform, but none of these data has been analyzed on the national level,” Thomas explained. “After looking at travel surveys from 1995 and 2009, we found a big change in vehicle access for poor single parents — more so than for any other demographic — that reflected in distance and their speed of income.”

Black conducted his research on the effectiveness and application of methods of measurement in urban planning. “With each metric, we were looking at different ways it could be applied, along with its background and development,” he explained. “By applying different metrics to streets of Santa Monica, we can find the best ways of measuring each street for bicycles and pedestrians.”

Ralph presented both a lecture and a poster. Her paper analyzed the relationship between women’s household labor and their use of automobiles. “Men & women divide household labor, but even women who work more than their husbands do significantly more housework than their partners,” she said. “That means that they need an automobile to make these trips, so I am looking at how these two topics are connected to each other.”

For her poster, Ralph examined how participation in after-school activities can be influenced by teens’ access to an automobile. “I think the goal of transportation, at the end of the day, is to connect people to opportunities and further social equality,” said Ralph.

Lederman also focused her research on two different topics within the legal realms of transportation and technology. The first covered transportation and ecology, specifically “streamlining transportation delivery of endangered species through large-scale collaborative planning,” she said.

Her second research topic concerned liability for emerging transportation systems and technologies. “With the new integration of automated driving technology in cars, there is an uncertain legal landscape,” she said. “People are so focused on the ultimate endgame, the automatic car, but we first have to slow down and look at how legal liabilities will affect technological development in this area.”

Though the conference is promoted throughout the Urban Planning department as one of the biggest transportation events of the year, the high cost of attending often prevents students from presenting their research in person and receiving feedback from some of the top professionals in the industry. These four students were able to attend thanks to a generous scholarship from alumnus Larry Sauve MA UP ’78  in order to cover their travel costs to the conference.

Sauve first experienced the conference as a working professional at Parsons Brinckerhoff. Once he realized the range of opportunities this conference could provide to students, Sauve offered to cover the travel expenses of four UCLA Luskin Urban Planning students who were invited to present their research each year.

“I felt that money should not hold you back” from this professional opportunity, Sauve said. “I didn’t get a chance to go to TRB until I was actually working, but if I had the chance as a student it would have made me even more enthusiastic about going into my career in transportation.”

“The scholarship was very helpful because people [at the conference] asked specific questions about the research,” Black explained. “It provided me the chance to be there to answer questions in detail about my own research.”

The four students will present their research again at a conference at UCLA Luskin on February 12, 2014.