Archive for category: Uncategorized

By Zoe Day

Social Welfare faculty, students and alumni joined forces over the summer to craft an Action Plan to Address Anti-Blackness and Racism in response to political turmoil across the country following the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and countless other Black Americans.

“This summer has been extremely challenging given the global pandemic, continual murders of Black folks and the looming economic crisis. Through these circumstances, Black students at Luskin pushed to ensure that our department would begin to transform and enact sustainable and lasting changes to its curriculum, culture and more,” said Victoria Copeland MSW ’19, who is now pursuing her Ph.D.

Copeland was part of the team that worked with Social Welfare Chair Laura Abrams and faculty members Latoya Small and Gerry Laviña to draft a set of action items addressing racial disparities within the department and across social welfare education. The faculty voted unanimously to endorse the effort in June, and the plan was finalized in July. In October, the action plan was the focus of a virtual event drawing about 120 students, alumni, faculty and friends of UCLA Luskin Social Welfare.

 

“For many years, Black faculty and students have impressed upon us as a community to confront racism and anti-Blackness in our program and in the social work profession. Despite these calls, we have not risen to the challenge,” Abrams said.

“We have a ways to go to meet our goals, but we are most certainly at a threshold of change,” she said. “Our plan is concrete and attainable, and the involvement of students, faculty, alumni and staff will be critical to achieving our short- and long-term goals in all areas of the plan.”

Those goals include increasing the visibility, recruitment and funding of Black students and ensuring that the curriculum embraces Black scholars and thought.

Small credited Social Welfare’s students with sparking the call for change. “This is only the beginning of the journey that involves people throughout our department,” she said.

The team, including members of the Luskin Black Student Caucus, highlighted the need to educate students in anti-racist social work practices to reaffirm the department’s commitment to addressing racial disparities and anti-Blackness.

“I am appreciative of the department’s willingness to listen and actively implement the Social Welfare Action Plan,” MSW student Jameelah Howard said. “It has truly been a meaningful and powerful experience working with the administration on addressing anti-Blackness and racism.”

Doctoral student Dominique Mikell called the team’s efforts over the summer “a challenging but essential process to ensure our department can move toward dismantling racist and anti-Black practice within our own school and ultimately within social work.”

“The plan is really the start of a much longer process to ensure that our department adequately prepares its students to confront white supremacy and anti-Blackness in all institutions they interact with, including Luskin,” Mikell explained. “Despite this work being emotionally and mentally taxing, I greatly appreciate the opportunity to participate in it to make our department and the field of social work more just.”

The working group that collaborated on the plan also included MSW student Nana Sarkodee-Adoo, Ph.D. student Jason Plummer and alumni Nicole Vazquez MSW/MPP ’09 and Evin Capel MSW ’17.

Copeland said she is grateful to her peers and colleagues who spent hours over the summer, often meeting numerous times a week, to hammer out the action plan and “demand and ensure that we would be heard.”

With the plan now in place, “I imagine a program that not only accepts and retains more Black students and faculty but uplifts and empowers them as well,” Copeland said. “A Public Affairs school that centers Black thought and Black scholarship is needed, and Luskin can work toward it.” …

“I know that this is only the beginning of a departmental and school-wide transformation that was desperately needed.”

By Les Dunseith

By mid-March, the World Health Organization had declared COVID-19 a pandemic, UCLA classes had moved online and university employees in non-essential roles were working remotely. Soon after, on April 1, the UCLA Center for Neighborhood Knowledge, or CNK, based at UCLA Luskin issued its first research report about the health crisis.

By late September, researchers affiliated with CNK had released more than a dozen COVID-related studies on their own or in partnership with other centers at UCLA and elsewhere in academia. Roughly, that works out to an astounding pace of one new study every two weeks.

The first report, “Implications of COVID-19 on At-Risk Workers by Neighborhood in Los Angeles,” was released in conjunction with the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Initiative. It delved into census information to identify the neighborhoods most vulnerable to economic hardship from the pandemic. Poorer ethnic areas would fare worst, the study predicted.

Two weeks later, a CNK study identified Latino neighborhoods as being less likely to receive federal economic stimulus funds. By mid-May, a CNK report had determined that the census tracts that were lagging behind in the 2020 enumeration were the same areas of L.A. hit hardest by COVID-19. Additional studies soon focused on renter displacement, a shortfall in unemployment coverage for workers in disadvantaged communities and other topics related to equity and social justice amid the pandemic.

Such a prolific output of timely research is impressive, but it’s even more so when you consider that much of the project, known internally as the COVID-19 Equity Research Initiative, was completed without prior funding.

“The way we work is that we tap into people’s passions and commitment to doing good,” said Paul Ong, CNK director.

“I call on my friends, my colleagues and my family, offering them an opportunity to make a contribution and make a difference by producing these analyses and informing the public.”

Ong said he had a sense when he first heard about the novel coronavirus that it might have a huge impact, and as early as February he began hearing from people in the Chinese American community that they were being adversely impacted, including being blamed for the outbreak.

“We heard anecdotal evidence that indicated that, indeed, this might be a very profound crisis emerging,” Ong recalled.

But when he asked for empirical evidence, most people didn’t have any.

“It’s partly that I’m just inquisitive,” Ong said of his nature, but soon he was devoting time and effort to finding ways to investigate what people were saying, looking for data to help document the unfolding crisis.

Delving into the impacts of the pandemic on marginalized populations aligned perfectly with Ong’s reasons for starting CNK in the first place. The research center builds on his background in social welfare and urban planning with the idea of “trying to understand the nature of inequality in our society from a very empirical, quantitative approach,” he said.

“We believe that the way we move forward to a more just society is by fully understanding the challenges before us,” Ong said. “It is good to think about utopia, but the problem with just thinking about utopia is it doesn’t anchor you into the reality of what needs to be addressed.”

The team at CNK is small, numbering between two and two dozen, depending on funding and how many student workers are available. Ong, who retired in 2017 but has continued as a research professor, said the research center has long sought to understand the nature of inequality, how it’s produced and reproduced over generations, and how it takes form in different sectors — housing, employment, education, health.

“Indeed, if [the pandemic] was going to have a profound impact on society and a profound impact on disadvantaged neighborhoods and populations, then we believed that we could make a difference in terms of working to generate additional insights,” Ong said.

Soon, Ong was enlisting help from friends and colleagues, including his wife, Elena, a public health expert, and his son, Jonathan. Both worked pro bono on some reports despite not being directly affiliated with the University of California.

They asked questions: How can we identify the population most at risk? How can we identify those not likely to receive the type of support that’s necessary? Next, without stopping to seek funding, they sought answers.

Ong noted that the grant funding process can take months or years. “But we’re not working in normal times,” he said. “The crisis is unfolding in real time. We’re working during a time where decisionmakers and community leaders and other stakeholders need the data today.”

So, Ong found help wherever he could. In some cases, he was able to obtain funding and research assistance from colleagues at UCLA, including people like Professor Ananya Roy, who leads the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy.

“Amidst difficult times, the scholarship pioneered by Professor Paul Ong and the Center for Neighborhood Knowledge has been a guiding light, demonstrating how and why rigorous research has an important role to play in shining a light on structures of inequality and making the case for the policies that must address such oppression,” Roy wrote about her team’s involvement in several of the pandemic-related reports.

As the pandemic continues, so will the research by CNK.

Ong is hopeful, knowing that a vaccine will be widely available soon and that society will regain some sense of normalcy thereafter. But the work will not be done.

“What I’m concerned about is that the legacy of the damages from the pandemic is not going to disappear,” Ong said. “We’re going to have to live with those inequalities. It has had profound impacts on people and households.”

Some impacts are obvious and visible. Others, such as the likely census undercount in low-income communities, will have repercussions that may not materialize until years later.

If there’s an upside of the pandemic for Ong, it’s taking gratification in the collective effort.

“In these dark days, it’s great seeing people being willing to volunteer and do the hard work and not receive compensation for it,” Ong said. “I am very grateful to our partners at other centers who were willing to step forward to help us.”

With a wry smile, Ong summed up his formula for success: “We depend on the kindness of strangers.”