Maciek Kolodziejczak: A Legacy of Giving Former graduate advisor founds Fellowship Fund in Public Policy to benefit future students

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After 20 years of service to Public Policy students, former Graduate Advisor Maciek Kolodziejczak wasn’t ready to walk away without leaving a legacy at UCLA Luskin.

In June, Kolodziejczak retired from his post after mentoring every Public Policy student to ever step foot on the UCLA campus; he had held the position since the creation of the Master of Public Policy in 1996. In his time, he advised and fostered the education of about 700 policy students who have gone on to directly influence the world.

As a final act of service to those he cared about so deeply, he founded the Maciek Kolodziejczak Fellowship Fund in Public Policy. A month-long campaign leading up to his retirement celebration on June 12 raised over $34,500 for fellowships for students who will demonstrate excellence in leadership and service in the department, the Luskin School, UCLA and the community at large. Donors included students, alumni and friends from throughout UCLA Luskin Public Policy’s history.

Because Maciek himself provided a generous lead gift and the Dean of the Luskin School provided a $25,000 matching gift, nearly $55,000 was raised in all. Public Policy students will thus have another source of funding to advance their desire to become Luskin agents of change.

The legacy of Maciek Kolodziejczak will continue well into the future.

Latest Updates Regarding Support for UCLA Luskin The School's education and research efforts are bolstered by support from alumni and other advisors

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Each issue of the Luskin Forum magazine includes information regarding recent gifts to UCLA Luskin and the various development activities that help us maintain and strengthen our education and research. Here are highlights from the most recent issue:

Students Say Thank You to the Luskins

Last spring, recipients of a Luskin Graduate Fellowship from the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs met for lunch with Meyer and Renee Luskin. The students wanted to thank the Luskins for their generous support of academic endeavors. Meyer and Renee Luskin are among the school’s most generous supporters and have supported UCLA Luskin students from the school’s beginning. Students from each of the three departments are selected each year for this prestigious award.

 

A Salute from the UCLA Luskin Board

The Board of Advisors for UCLA Luskin met Oct. 3, 2017, to discuss the school’s future with Dean Gary Segura, and to salute and say thank you to the outgoing board chair, Susan Rice. The board, made up of civic leaders, business executives and social entrepreneurs, helps shape the vision and strategic plan for the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. In her final meeting as board chair, Rice was recognized for her five years of service as leader of the board. Taking over as the new board chair is Michael Fleming.

Members of the board include, back row, from left, Chuck Gatchell MPP ’05, Miguel Santana, Keenan Behrle, Michael Mahdesian, Fleming and Len Unger. Middle row, from left, Vicki Reynolds, Laura Shell, Fran Inman, Karen Hill Scott, Annette Shapiro and Jill Black Zalben. Front row, from left, Dean Segura, Rice and Marcia Choo.

Board members not pictured are Michael Dukakis, David Fisher, Gadi Kaufmann, Joanne Kozberg, Randall Lewis, Meyer Luskin, Dan Maldonado, George Pla, Jeff Seymour and Steve Soboroff.

From left, Sherrie Schlom, Dick Lewis, the 2016-17 Kathleen Lewis Family fellow Ummra Hang, and Ricardo Quintero, UCLA Luskin’s director of development.

Lewis Family Fellowship Honors Outstanding MSW Student

The Kathleen Lewis Family Fellowship was established in 2013 to support Master of Social Welfare (MSW) students in memory of Kathleen “Kathy” Lewis MSW ’60. Dick Lewis, Kathy’s husband of 54 years, and their two daughters, Carol Gullstad Lewis and Susan Lewis, created the fellowship to honor Kathy Lewis’s memory and her legacy as a social worker who was dedicated to community and political issues.

As the first in her family to graduate from college, Kathy Lewis overcame significant family challenges, which helped lead her to a career in social work. Her family believes there is no better way to ensure her memory is carried on by future generations of social workers who are passionate about helping others.

The 2016-17 Kathleen Lewis Family fellow was Ummra Hang, who received her MSW degree last June.

Hang chose UCLA Luskin because of her desire to be an impactful change agent. She is dedicated to working with the juvenile justice population and those who have been impacted by the commercial sexual exploitation of children (CSEC).

A survivor of sexual exploitation herself, Hang became more involved with CSEC research and empowering youth through shared knowledge of trauma and healing that is possible through higher education. Her research involved working on the CSEC research team and hosting a conference that highlighted survivors and services to assist the population and their healing.

Hang was a part of the Justice Workgroup, as well as the Formerly Incarcerated Externship, where she researched policies and pathways and advocated for the formerly and currently incarcerated so they too could heal and combat the cradle-to-prison pipeline.

Hang had extensive internship experience while at UCLA Luskin. She was an Education and Workforce Development Intern for the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce, where she researched and wrote grants for program development. She also researched and wrote a report on the school-to-prison pipeline and compiled research to help the Chamber become more equitable.

She also collected data and created a collaborative model, assisted in organizing youth educational events, and worked with the Smart Justice team to expand program development for formerly incarcerated youth.

Match Program Boosts Endowed Scholarship Gifts to UCLA Luskin

UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs is pleased to announce an exceptional opportunity for friends and alumni of the school to expand the impact of their gifts.

UCLA Chancellor Gene Block has created the Chancellor’s Centennial Scholars Match program. Through June 30, 2018 — or until matching funds are exhausted — the UCLA Chancellor’s Centennial Scholars Match program will add 50 percent to the value of all qualifying gifts for endowed scholarships. With the Chancellor’s Match, a $250,000 gift automatically becomes $375,000 to support high-achieving Luskin students. A $1 million scholarship gift automatically becomes $1.5 million.

“Endowed scholarships are vital for our students and the school,” said Ricardo Quintero, director of development at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. “They attract diverse and talented applicants who want to take advantage of the rich education we offer in the fields of social work, urban planning, and policymaking. They also help the School to provide the access and excellence that are our hallmarks as one of the top public affairs schools in the country. In addition, endowed gifts remain intact in perpetuity, giving donors a permanent legacy at the School.”

HOW THE CHANCELLOR’S CENTENNIAL SCHOLARSHIP MATCH WORKS:

Qualifying gifts of $250,000 to $1 million will be matched at 50 percent. Gifts eligible for matching funds must support new or existing endowments that are specifically designated to support scholarships at UCLA Luskin. Cash gifts and pledges will be matched. Corporate matching gifts and planned gifts are not eligible. Pledges are payable over a maximum of five years. The Chancellor’s Centennial Scholarship Match is part of the Centennial Campaign for UCLA — a seven-year, $4.2 billion effort to prepare UCLA for a second century of leadership as one of the greatest public universities in the world — and it will help strengthen UCLA Luskin for decades to come. 

For more information, contact Ricardo Quintero at (310) 206-7949, or by email at rquintero@luskin.ucla.edu

 

Catalysts For Change

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On Nov. 1, 2017, Global Public Affairs @UCLA Luskin hosted a lunchtime talk with Duncan Green, an educator, writer and head of research at Oxfam GB, about power and how power systems shape global policy and change. As detailed in his latest work, “How Change Happens,” Green shared his expertise and knowledge gained through years of working with different institutions of power ranging from governments to grassroots social and political activists.

A Flickr album of photos from the presentation can be accessed below.

Author Duncan Green

Professor Donald Shoup Speaks to Urban Planners from China

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On Sept. 19, 2017, Professor Donald Shoup of UCLA Luskin Urban Planning spoke to a group of 25 urban planners from China who were touring the United States. He talked about his research on urban congestion and the negative consequences of offering free parking on municipal streets in American cities. A gallery of photos by George Foulsham of Luskin Communications is available on Flickr:

Professor Donald Shoup's Presentation to Urban Planners from China

Tackling the Resource Curse UCLA researchers launch the Project on Resources, Development, and Governance to design policies in countries where corruption, conflict undercut natural abundance

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By George Foulsham

From left, Michael Ross, professor of political science; Graeme Blair, assistant professor of political science; and Darin Christensen, assistant professor of public policy at UCLA Luskin, are the co-founders of PRDG. Photo by George Foulsham

For three UCLA scholars, it just didn’t add up. Why do so many people who live in developing countries with an abundance of natural resources struggle in poverty every day?

“You would think that it’s a simple thing to take wealth that’s underneath the ground and turn it into wealth on top of the ground for everybody to share,” said Michael Ross, a professor of political science at UCLA. “But we know from studying countries around the world that that very rarely happens.”

Social scientists call it the resource curse, and it’s one of the reasons why Ross and two UCLA colleagues, UCLA Luskin’s Darin Christensen and political science faculty member Graeme Blair, have created the Project on Resources, Development, and Governance (PRDG), a network of social scientists, policymakers, nongovernmental organizations and industry representatives dedicated to finding policies that promote welfare, peace and accountability in resource-rich countries.

“For the past 15 years or so, I have been living in two worlds,” Ross said. “One is an academic world where I do research and I speak to some of the smartest young social scientists in the world who are studying the problems of developing countries. In the other world, I’m sitting around the table with policymakers who are worried about how to fix a problem called the resource curse.”

About three dozen countries in the low- and middle-income world are economically dependent on oil, gas and mining, but they all seem to struggle despite the riches provided by the resources. Those countries include Angola, Kenya, Uganda, Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela, Bolivia, Indonesia, East Timor and Kazakhstan.

“They tend to be conflict-ridden,” Ross said. “There are protests, there’s pollution, there are civil wars around these projects.” There’s also plenty of corruption, with many of the countries in economic turmoil because of bribery and other issues in regions of exceptional resource wealth, such as mining areas.

“There are so many opportunities for corruption, and politicians are a whole lot less responsive to the people and a whole lot more concerned with siphoning off money for their own bank accounts overseas,” Ross said.

Finding solutions to these challenging issues won’t be easy.

“We have a generation of super-smart young political scientists and economists who are interested in this problem,” Ross said. “Our project is designed to bring together the smartest sort of leading-edge people in political science and economics with the policymakers who are dealing with these problems on a day-to-day level.”

That mission officially begins Sept. 21-22, 2017, with the first PRDG summit at the Luskin Conference Center on the UCLA campus. Researchers and policymakers from UCLA, the World Bank, Barnard College, the University of Pittsburgh, the Natural Resource Governance Institute and many other organizations and universities will make presentations and discuss issues that range from creating successful research-policy partnerships to the research priorities of funders.

The September conference at UCLA was generously funded by the Luskin Center for Innovation, Natural Resource Governance Institute, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Burkle Center and UCLA’s Political Science Department. The initiative also recently received a one-year, $600,000 grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to support additional workshops in Washington, D.C., and Accra, Ghana, and the research partnerships that emerge from these meetings.

“One of the important parts of PRDG is the effort to bring in local researchers,” said Blair, assistant professor of political science at UCLA. “We want to provide training in modern social science research methods, and to provide learning-while-doing at matchmaking workshops where we bring together academics, policymakers and practitioners.”

Providing guidance on policy issues is Christensen, assistant professor of public policy at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. “I think policy plays an essential role in this PRDG initiative,” Christensen said. “What PRDG is trying to do is bring policymakers and academics around the same table and allow policymakers to propose solutions and team up with researchers who can go to the field and determine whether these new initiatives are actually helping root out the corruption or address the grievances that often accompany these big mining, oil and gas projects.”

PRDG’s short-term goals include generating a series of new research projects on solutions to problems faced in resource-rich countries, bringing together researchers, policymakers and practitioners. “Another goal is to start joint learning exercises where we go out into the field and try to help build research into their existing program,” Blair said.

In the long term, the UCLA researchers are hoping that the conversation about these issues becomes circular — the research feeds back into the policymaking conversation, which generates new questions the researchers can tackle.

“We want to figure out ways to make a difference, and find ways to fix this problem,” Ross said.

Putting Activism Into Context UCLA’s first two Activists in Residence use the past to help frame the future of activism

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By George Foulsham

Soon after the November 2016 presidential election, UCLA welcomed two Activist Fellows for the winter quarter. Funmilola Fagbamila and Lisa Hasegawa were the first of what the Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA Luskin hopes will be a continuing series of fellows.

Fagbamila, a founding member of Black Lives Matter L.A. and an adjunct professor at Cal State Los Angeles, served as the fellow for the Institute. Hasegawa, who worked in the Bill Clinton administration before serving as executive director of the National Coalition for Asian Pacific American Development, was the UCLA Asian American Studies Center’s fellow. Hasegawa is also a Luskin Senior Fellow.

How did the November election and the reaction to it influence your approach to the activist-in-residence fellowships?

Fagbamila: I came into the fellowship with a desire to have conversations about how to contextualize the current political moment. When we think about the election and how people were attempting to understand how Trump could have won, it’s important for us to look at the numbers, to look at the history and the patterns of how electoral politics functions at a federal level in the country.

A lot of talk is about how the country is just inherently racist, and that’s why somebody who has this kind of sentiment around race, policing and immigration could win. But when we look at the numbers closely, we understand that around 40 percent of the population did not vote at all — because they are so disillusioned with the system as it exists, feeling as though they didn’t have any option in terms of a candidate who could truly represent where they are ideologically.

Then you have about 20-25 percent of the people who did vote for Donald Trump, not actually liking him, but feeling that they didn’t have another option. So what does that say about the current political moment and what has been the history and trajectory of federal electoral politics in this country?

The reason it was so important for me to be here at this moment, and Lisa as well, is to have conversations and contextualize what’s happening, why it’s happening, how we can resist it, what our resistance has looked like in the past, and figuring out what it is that actually sparks urgency with folks.

Hasegawa: With all the talk during and after the presidential election about executive orders, and the Muslim ban, I just felt that I needed to think critically about where I positioned myself after having been in Washington, D.C., for the past 20 years.

I was encouraged to apply by some colleagues because I was very vocal about my frustration, even thinking about a new Democratic administration. Returning to the Asian American Studies Center seemed to be the ideal place for me to reflect upon the strategies we employed to move the policy agenda for underserved, low-income Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.

I feel like core democratic institutions are being questioned and strategies to influence policy are being considered in completely new ways that have not been examined in the public dialogue, in the public mind.

You have managed to connect a lot of dots when it comes to dissent, arts and scholarship. What has been your inspiration?

Fagbamila: It’s a desire to make it known that we can absolutely engage in activism and advocate for those who are most vulnerable within a society while also maintaining health and stable lives for ourselves. There’s a sentiment that exists in the popular imagination, about being a person who advocates for justice meaning that you live an unhappy life, void of joy and fun. Always serious. The idea being that in order to do this type of advocacy work, that one must sacrifice their well-being. This is a false narrative; one that scares many people away from engaging in resistance work that could be potentially transformative.

I am inspired to have conversations, through my art and through my scholarship, about the various forms that activism takes, about what it means to both advocate for and work toward a more just society while also taking care of yourself and making your mental, emotional, physical wellness a priority. Specifically within activist communities, we need to emphasize that self-care is not selfish. Self-care done collectively and strategically is what will be the force that enables us to make our resistance efforts sustainable, as opposed to fleeting. Creating movements, as opposed to moments.

Hasegawa: There is this desire to reconnect with the languages of politics and policy and with theory and academia. We’re just trying to figure out what this means for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in this moment. There has been this fight to gain basic visibility in a lot of spaces, places, reports — just to kind of penetrate into the mainstream psyche and understanding that Asians and Pacific Islanders are American, belong in this country and have helped build this country.

I’m so tired of inaccurate stereotypes and data about our communities being used to criticize and punish other communities of color. AAPI artists, cultural workers and organizers are disrupting the narrative and this framing that the Right uses, claiming, ‘Look at Asian Americans, they have overcome barriers despite their race and despite all of these very difficult histories as refugees and immigrants.’ We need to fight against the anti-blackness in our communities, lift up our shared histories of struggle and resistance.

What have you been hearing from students?

Fagbamila: What I’ve been hearing are questions about how to be a scholar activist, questions about how one can actually consistently engage in what is perceived as time-consuming resistance work while also remaining serious about their scholarship and doing their research. The question has been how to do both and have both of the endeavors allocated the proper amount of time and energy, and I think that’s a conversation around balancing time and also knowing that, for many scholars and academics, their research is part of their resistance.

Hasegawa: I have really felt some of the disconnects between the students and the institutions that had been laboring to represent Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and policy issues. For the most part many students have not even heard of community-based and national advocacy organizations, or they have heard of them but don’t really know the histories of them or don’t really feel connected to the work or the people who are in them. They are hungry for these stories and connections. Also, I have heard their interest in my perspective on what it was like to be at UCLA when the Rodney King verdict came down, and what was it like to be a young person at that time. Figuring out how to encapsulate that experience and share these stories with this generation of students has been a joy — actually, a gift — to me, because it has helped me to realize how influential those times were for me and my understanding of race, advocacy and coalition building.

What advice do you have for students in a very uncertain time for Americans?

Fagbamila: There are number of ways that people can be of service, but I think oftentimes activism gets conflated into this one thing, this one specific process of choosing an organization, becoming a member, and helping in that particular capacity. But if we think historically about the various ways that people have advocated for societal change, we consider the scholar activists — people who, as I mentioned earlier, engage in transformative work within their scholarship — writing about necessary issues within your area of study, specifically issues that have not been written about or have been silenced within the academy. We need those tools; we need this research in order to push forward. You have many students who also might engage in some amount of activism with their art. Part of my work as a member of Black Lives Matter, an original member, has been to develop the arts and culture component of the organization. Along the same train of thought, my work as an artist and playwright is something that has been absolutely fundamental to what I believe has been my mission. Through the lens of art, through the stage, through theater, through this type of writing to cast light on stories, about blackness, about the black experience, about the complexity of the black political identity — these narratives are most often not captured in mainstream dialogues and images of black people. So my work, in this moment, is to tell stories, as honestly as possible, about black people — about our glory and our pain, our thoughts and our experiences.

‘Desistance’ and the Transition to Adulthood Book by UCLA Luskin Professor Laura Abrams and social welfare alumna Diane J. Terry examines challenges faced by formerly incarcerated youth as they become adults

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By Stan Paul

What are the prospects for young men and women who grow up in and then age out of the juvenile justice system?

Research and the media paint a bleak picture for those whose formative adolescent years have been intertwined with incarceration, and may continue to traverse the revolving door of probation, detention and corrections into their adult lives.

Using in-depth, in-person interviews, UCLA social welfare professor Laura S. Abrams and Diane J. Terry SW Ph.D. ’12, who also earned her MSW degree at Luskin, have presented a more nuanced portrait of life after juvie in their new book, “Everyday Desistance: The Transition to Adulthood Among Formerly Incarcerated Youth” (Rutgers University Press).

Desistance is often defined as “the movement toward the complete termination of offending,” yet in their study the authors are able to hone in on the nuances of this process for young adults.

Abrams and Terry collected firsthand stories and insights to answer the following questions: What does everyday life look like for young people who age out of the juvenile justice system? And how do young people navigate the transition to adulthood while attempting to stay out of the hands of the law?

Terry, now a senior research associate at Loyola Marymount College’s Psychology Applied Research Center, and Abrams interviewed 25 men and women ages 18-25 in Los Angeles who aged out of the juvenile justice system. Some interviews spanned numerous years to understand the transition as “emerging adults” and the participants’ “everyday” experiences of constructing lives after growing up in the juvenile justice system.

The researchers said that they looked at those whose lives lie between the extreme narratives that predict failure or success against all odds. They focused on the challenges and opportunities of desistance from crime and alongside becoming an adult — those neither giving up on their goals nor experiencing a simple and straightforward pathway to success.

“Criminal desistance is not an end goal; it is a process. And it is certainly not linear,” Abrams said. The book is the culmination of a decade of Abrams’ work on juvenile re-entry and desistance — research she started upon arriving at UCLA in 2006.

Among the chapters in the books are “The Road to Juvie,” “Locked Up and Back Again” and “Now I’m an Adult.” The book also covers the very different points of view and experiences of men and women in the juvenile justice system.

“The young women have a unique story, and much of their post-incarceration lives revolve around finding and experiencing a sense of ‘home’ that they didn’t have in their youth,” Abrams said.

Another chapter, “You Can Run but You Can’t Hide,” points out the dangers that persist when youth transitioning to adulthood return to their old neighborhoods. Those youths said that they feel marked by their histories.

“We’re all marked. Forever. All of us. No matter how much the transformation,” said a young man named Oscar, whose story features prominently in the book.

Abrams and Terry said that they count this discovery as one of the most important lessons they learned from the interviews. “From the young men’s world view, being marked was partially related to the stigma from appearance, age and race, but was also tied to navigating the urban environments of Los Angeles as former gang members, drug dealers and those who law enforcement viewed as criminals,” Abrams said.

Abrams and Terry previously published a paper from these interviews, “You Can Run But You Can’t Hide”: How Formerly Incarcerated Young Men Navigate Neighborhood Risks.” In that paper, published in the journal Children and Youth Services Review, the researchers wrote about how young men contend with everyday risks — including old gang ties — and complex survival strategies in high-adversity environments.

Abrams and Terry said that research from criminology to biology informed their newest study. But it was the insights gathered from more than 70 interviews that helped them understand the factors that may affect criminal desistance — age, maturity, social bonds, internal motivation, external hooks for change, and neighborhood conditions, among others.

“Although we fully acknowledge that the juvenile justice system continues to create a group of youth who are disadvantaged as they enter adulthood, we contend that these young men and women are a great deal more than their bleak odds,” the authors wrote. They also note that as juveniles age out of the system and are suddenly deemed adults left to their own devices, they are thrust into adulthood and responsibility earlier than their peers who may have access to more social and economic resources.

“Transitioning to adulthood with little support and an incarcerated past is hard,” Abrams said. “There is a lot of trauma to contend with. Most of the youth were struggling with just daily needs. Their lives changed rapidly and unpredictably.”

In the final chapter, the authors recognize the limitations of social safety nets in providing youth with everything needed to overcome barriers to criminal desistance. They call for specific policies for this group similar to those that exist for former foster youth.

“As we listened to the narratives of our participants and watched their adult lives unfold, we were amazed at the ingenuity and resilience of these young men and women to navigate immense obstacles they faced,” Abrams said. “In the end, their stories taught us that all young people have the capacity to reach beyond the labels assigned to them.”

Black Caucus Gathering Focuses on Empowerment Sanctuary Event continues a 10-year tradition of recognizing black culture and celebrating its importance at UCLA

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By Aaron Julian

“Shadowed beneath thy hand, may we forever stand, True to our God, true to our native land.”

This closing couplet of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” often referred to as the Black American National Anthem,” rang out at the Luskin School of Public Affairs on May 16, 2017, marking the start of the 10th annual Sanctuary Event hosted by the Department of Social Welfare’s Black Caucus.

Inspired by the writing of Assata Shakur and themed “Nothing to Lose but Our Chains,” the Sanctuary Event is held each year at the time of Malcolm X’s birthday on May 17. It focuses on issues of importance to people of color, particularly the black community. Topics of discussion this year included the role of intersectional identities and communication among and between different communities, as well as empowering and informing UCLA Luskin students about how to proceed in the current social and political climate.

Larthia Dunham of the social welfare field education faculty described how the event’s inauguration was driven by a need to recognize black culture and its place at UCLA and in the greater Westwood area.

The Department of Social Welfare’s Black Caucus hosted the 10th annual Sanctuary Event. Photo by Aaron Julian

“We have to understand that being black is very important in identifying who we are, why we’re this way, and what our culture is all about,” Dunham said.

A traditional libation was then poured out as a way of honoring and remembering important past and present figures, as well as friends and family. Harambee, meaning, “let’s pull together,” was said in response following each of Dunham’s processions.

Continuing with the themes of traditions and culture, the Black Caucus members provided and served food described as fundamental for classic celebrations.

Dunham then detailed the historic role that food and sharing meals has had going back generations in the black community and in building relationships. “We bring food because food brings peace. If there is someone you don’t like, go have coffee, break bread and enjoy each other because you never really know what you have in common.”

Funmilola Fagbamila, activist-in-residence for the Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA Luskin and the arts and culture director for Black Lives Matter Los Angeles, later joined the conversation as part of a panel to provide insights about her work as an author, activist and intellectual. Fagbamila encouraged a proactive engagement in social movements, but she cautioned that striking a balance between that work and other passions is crucial in maintaining effective long-term activism.

“People think if they engage thoroughly and if they try to become what they perceive as an activist or organizer or protestor that they would have to sacrifice their joy. You don’t need to sacrifice your joy, your wellness and your happiness to be effective,” Fagbamila said.
Fagbamila further explored the topic of identity by imparting her own experiences as a woman of Nigerian descent. “My family life is very much informed by being a Nigerian person, but when I walk around in the world you can’t tell I’m a Nigerian … you can just tell that I’m a black woman.”

A Grassroots Mission in Watts UCLA Luskin’s Watts Leadership Institute launches a 10-year program to build a legacy of leaders and empowerment

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By George Foulsham

WATTS — If you’re searching for the heartbeat of the UCLA Watts Leadership Institute, look no further than 10360 Wilmington Ave. in Los Angeles. What was once a liquor store is now the home of the multi-faceted Watts Century Latino Organization.

On a recent Saturday, more than 70 volunteers gathered here to help with a grassroots task: assemble and plant a community garden. The event was part of the citywide Sharefest Community Workday, but it represented much more for Jorja Leap, an adjunct professor of social welfare in the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, and for the Watts Leadership Institute’s first cohort — community members who hold the key to deepening the indigenous leadership of Watts.

“This is the beginning,” Leap said as the volunteers spread mulch around four large planter boxes. “We’re going to be bringing in youth from the various middle and high schools throughout the area. They’re going to be learning about gardening, they’re going to be learning about healthy eating, and they’re going to be developing strategies for contributing to their community.”

It’s just one example of what the Watts Leadership Institute hopes to bring to a part of L.A. that Leap has been engaged in since she was a social welfare graduate student at UCLA in the 1970s. Leap and project partner Karrah Lompa MSW ’13 have launched an institute that’s making a 10-year commitment to Watts.

The Watts Leadership Institute received its key initial funding through a two-year, $200,000 grant from the California Wellness Foundation. In turn, the WLI GRoW Community Garden is supported by a two-year, $100,000 grant from GRoW @ Annenberg, a philanthropic initiative led by Gregory Annenberg Weingarten, dedicated to supporting humanitarian efforts across the globe as well as innovative projects in health, education, the arts and civic & cultural life. The Sharefest Community Workday provided additional support for the community garden from Sharefest, the Mars Corporation and Our Foods.

“This kind of a public-private partnership, along with the research attached to it — and the building of the Watts community — really represent the best of how all of these different factors can come together,” Leap said. “It represents part of UCLA’s continuing and growing commitment to communities like Watts that need our involvement, our engagement, our organizing, our research. We’re also learning from them and being taught by them.”

Jorja Leap, right, director of the Watts Leadership Institute, with Betty Day, president of the Watts Gang Task Force. Photo by George Foulsham

The garden project marked the first time that the institute’s cohort was able to engage Watts residents — and many other volunteers — in the community garden, according to Lompa. “The community was able to get their hands dirty, to help make the garden a reality and to take ownership,” she said. “The volunteers included cohort members, institute fellows, UCLA students and alumni, community members, corporate volunteers and representatives from the Annenberg Foundation. It was everybody coming together to launch the community garden.”

Among the community members in the institute’s first cohort are Pahola Ybarra and her father, Arturo Ybarra. Pahola is program manager and Arturo is the founder and executive director of the Watts Century Latino Organization, which has galvanized the growing Latino population in Watts. The center’s programs are credited with helping to build significant bridges between Latinos and African-Americans. To accomplish this, Pahola and Arturo are among the community leaders recruited by Leap as part of the initial leadership cohort in the institute.

When she approached the Ybarras about becoming part of the institute, Leap asked for guidance about the best way to bring Latinos in the community aboard. Pahola suggested teaching Latino leaders how to start a 501(c)3 nonprofit as a way to “teach them how to do bigger things in the community,” Ybarra said.

It’s only 2.1 square miles, but Watts has more than 190 nonprofits. The problem, according to Ybarra, is that there has always been overlap in the services offered by the various nonprofits.

“What Watts Leadership did was to help us come together, to put our resources together, and be an example for the rest of the nonprofit and leadership community in Watts,” Ybarra said. “It’s been an amazing effort to help us grow, and to help us get out of our own way. It encourages us to reach for as much as we can and do as much as we can in the community.”

Leap often draws upon social welfare professor Zeke Hasenfeld’s Luskin research, which initially characterized Watts as a “nonprofit desert,” but she’s hoping the institute can change that perception by training the first cohort of leaders who will then share their knowledge with a second and a third generation. One of the institute’s goals is to build a comprehensive infrastructure of nonprofits in Watts and use it as a model to build indigenous leadership. That was part of the strategy of the WLI GRoW Community Garden and it was kicked off on this volunteer day.

“This probably doesn’t look like an economic development project now,” said John Jones III, field deputy for Los Angeles City Councilman Joe Buscaino, who represents Watts. “But in the future, when things are growing from here, different businesses might come and buy the fruits and vegetables from here that will help this nonprofit thrive.”

Jones credits Leap and Lompa with teaching community members how to build a better community. “When the Watts Institute grows, this organization will be stronger, it will be better, and the Watts community will be better because of the lessons they learned,” Jones said.

That legacy approach is key to the success of the institute, Leap said.

“We will serve those within the community who will lead and will teach,” she said. “This way, we not only build capacity, we build a continuum of leadership that is cross-generational. Luskin is not going to leave, but we ultimately want Watts in the lead.”

Cohort member Kathryn Wooten, the founder and executive director of Loving Hands Community Care, is a lifelong resident of Watts whose organization was struggling until she was recruited by Leap to be a part of the institute. As part of the cohort training, Wooten and others were provided with computers and trained in how to use them.

“It’s almost too good to be true,” Wooten said. “Since I’ve been a part of it, my organization is more professional. I have all the things I need to run a business because of the cohort and their guidance. I now know how to use a computer.”

Leap’s approach to this project is motivated by a powerful sense of duty.

“This is my way of paying back,” she said. “I did come here in 1978 as a very callow MSW student, and the Watts community took me under its wing and taught me. UCLA afforded me the opportunity to learn here. This community has given a great deal to me, and it is my responsibility and my honor to pay that back, to listen and to really serve in the most meaningful way that I can.”

Examining the Unspoken Truth of Sexually Exploited Youth Author and researcher Alexandra Lutnick keynotes UCLA Luskin School conference on the hidden problem of youth caught up in the sex trade in the U.S

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“The stories I tell no way describe the torture I felt
Years of destruction I knew nothing else
Trusted my mind, body, and soul
In the hands of another human being to control”

from the poem “Mind, Body and Soul,” by Ummra Hang, a second-year master of social welfare student at UCLA Luskin

By Stan Paul

Ummra Hang’s reading of her powerful poem was one of many highlights of a UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs conference examining sexually exploited children. The event, held May 6, 2017, brought together students, faculty, policy experts, law enforcement and service agency personnel — as well as survivors of abuse and commercial sexual exploitation — to focus on a complicated and emotionally charged problem.

The conference, which included appearances by several alumni from the Luskin School, highlighted how commercial sexual exploitation is not just happening in other countries. It is believed to involve more than 100,000 young people throughout the United States — especially in densely populated California cities such as San Francisco, San Diego and Los Angeles. The conference also served as the final project for — and was conducted by — Luskin master of social welfare research students in the University Consortium for Child and Families (UCCF) program, the culmination of their year-long research projects and part of a three-quarter course led by professor of social welfare Rosina Becerra. UCCF is a federally funded program and partnership between the County of Los Angeles Department of Children and Families and six masters of social work programs in Los Angeles, including UCLA.

Assisting the students in putting on the conference were Consuelo Bingham Mira, a lecturer in social welfare and coordinator of evaluation and research for the Public Child Welfare (PCW) California Social Welfare Education Counsel (CalSWEC) program and social welfare field faculty Michelle Talley.

Although the problem is difficult to measure, research shows that sexual abuse and exploitation is not limited to young girls. It affects males, females and across the spectrum of genders and sexualities for a variety of reasons, said keynote speaker Alexandra Lutnick, a researcher and expert on human trafficking, the sex industry, substance abuse and criminalization.

“Our lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex — all face high rates of incarceration, family rejection, homelessness and child welfare involvement,” said Lutnick, author of the book “Domestic Minor Sex Trafficking: Beyond Victims and Villains.” “Any one of those on their own puts someone at an increased risk of trading sex. And, when we look at the intersectionality of those, we realize the ways in which gender discrimination, discrimination based on sexual orientation, housing insecurity, institutionalized homophobia and transphobia all conspire to make this group of young people more vulnerable to being involved in selling sex.”

Lutnick explained that a complicated issue such as this refutes prevailing narratives.

“We don’t know how many are involved — it’s a hidden population,” she said. “There’s no registry,” and therefore no ability to gather data about the ages of youth entering the sex trade.

Lutnick discussed the role that physical or emotional neglect plays in bringing youth into the sex trade. With emotional neglect, a young person may not find support from the adults in the immediate family, so he or she may seek that support elsewhere.

“That could be coupling with somebody in an intimate partnership,” Lutnick said. “And then that person is asking, coercing or forcing them to sell sex. It could be looking for validation from people who are paying them for sex.”

Adding to this complex story is the role of child abuse, said Lutnick. “Inevitably that’s going to come up in any conversation about young people being involved in the sex trade. For some this means they’re being abused at home and to get away from the abuse they run away and then we’re back into the narrative of the role of homelessness.”

For others, she said, “their involvement in the sex trade is a continuation of the way in which their parents and guardians have been abusing them for many, many years. And it’s just one of the ways that’s now happening,” she said.

Panelist Gabriella Lewis, a supervising case manager with CAST, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit anti-trafficking organization, said that the problem is more common than most people realize. “Anyone can be a victim and anyone can be a trafficker,” Calderon said. “Safety is constantly an issue with this population.”

Solutions are challenging, Lutnick said, and they remain obstructed by nebulous dichotomies such as victim and villain.

The idea of, “Oh, we just need to rescue the good kids and punish the bad people,” flies in the face of the reality on the streets, Lutnick said. “We can’t arrest our way out of this. We can’t legislate our way out of it and we need to direct attention to the root factors that contribute to young people either deciding to that the sex trade is their best or their worst option or finding themselves in situations where someone is specifically taking advantage of the vulnerabilities that they have.”

There is some positive news in California, Lutnick said. The state Senate passed a bill in the past year that decriminalizes youth involvement in the sex trade — progress that was many years in the making.

“Even though you’ve got a federal definition, they’re regulated at the state level,” Lutnick said. “So unless states change their penal codes, young people are still being arrested.”

Lutnick also had some advice for lawmakers and policymakers.

“When we have these proposed outcomes — lawsuits or legislation — what are the questions we need to ask ourselves?” she asked. “Is it going to result in the hoped-for outcome? What are the potential negative impacts? Does it address key vulnerabilities such as poverty, racism homophobia, transphobia? And, if not, maybe we need to work a little harder to do that deeper level work — that macro level work — to come up with solutions that aren’t going to create harm for anybody.”

Two Luskin graduates — Emily Williams MPP ’98, assistant senior deputy for Human Services, Child Welfare, and Education for Los Angeles County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas; and Sarah Godoy MSW ’15, a policy associate for the National Center for the Youth Law’s Child Trafficking Team — were among the expert panelists. Both were part of the juvenile justice/law enforcement panel that included LAPD detective Dana Harris, who specializes in the investigation of human trafficking, and Maria Griglio, a deputy county counsel representing the Department of Children and Family Services.

Recognizing that young people over the age of 18 involved in prostitution may have been a victim of exploitation long before that, Williams talked about the L.A. County Supervisors’ ongoing efforts to end commercial exploitation of children as well as the expansion and implementation of support services to those who are 18-24 years of age.

“We understand they need to be served just as much as children do,” said Williams, who serves as a policy liaison to a number of service agencies including the Department of Children and Family Services, the Department of Public Social Services, Child Support Services and the Los Angeles County Office of Education.

Panelist Monique Calderon, who was part of the “healing to action” panel, shared her own story of getting into “the life” in the sex industry after graduating from college, and how difficult it was to get out.

Conference organizers were pleased with the results of the daylong discussions.

“The conference exceeded my expectations,” UCLA Luskin social welfare field faculty member Michelle Talley MSW ’98 said after the event. “Every panelist enhanced the conference as each one imparted their knowledge and expertise about human trafficking and engaged the audience.”

Every student who participated went above and beyond to ensure the success of the conference, she said. “The conference was a start of an invigorating discussion of sex trafficking of youth in hopes to end trafficking as we know it today,” Talley said.

“This successful conference is just one of the examples of the many activities that the students are able to do in our MSW program,” added Becerra, who also acknowledged generous support for the conference by members of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors Mark Ridley-Thomas, Sheila Kuehl and Hilda Solis, as well as by private donors.