Astor on Protecting Children as They Return to Classroom

Social Welfare Professor Ron Avi Astor spoke to K-12 Dive about concerns surrounding the safety and well-being of students as they return to the classroom following a year of living through COVID-19. In addition to pandemic-related stressors, students have witnessed enormous racial and political upheaval, creating “a swirl of different variables that make me really worried,” Astor said. “Kids are coming in with suitcases of really horrible experiences.” Bracing for an increase in threats of violence and self-harm, many school administrators have prioritized physical and mental health rather than nosediving into academic recovery. Astor called on principals to create a welcoming place for students and a supportive environment for teachers. “At least for this year, the next year and the year after, our school is not only about academic achievement,” he said. “We are going to go out of our way to [build] social-emotional friendships, so that our school becomes the ideal of what we hope society to be.” 

Yaroslavsky Urges Action to Uplift the Most Vulnerable

Zev Yaroslavsky, director of the Los Angeles Initiative at UCLA Luskin, spoke to KPCC’s AirTalk about findings from the 2021 UCLA Quality of Life Index. The annual survey of Los Angeles County residents showed that 40% suffered a drop in income over the last year as the region was rocked by the COVID-19 pandemic. “Those are the people who are pessimistic, those are the people who are threatened with losing their apartments because they can’t make their rent payment at the end of the month,” said Yaroslavsky, who called on policymakers to prioritize the needs of the most vulnerable. As one example, he noted that office space vacated as businesses downsize after the pandemic is “going to have huge implications for land use.” He asked, “What do you do with that empty office space? Can you repurpose it for housing, for example?” Several media outlets covered the Quality of Life Index, including the Los Angeles Times, KABC7 News and RealClear Politics.

Shoup on Reclaiming Land for People, Not Cars

Urban Planning Professor Donald Shoup and California Assemblywoman Laura Friedman co-authored a CityLab article calling for an end to minimum parking requirements, arguing that the outdated mandates drive up poverty, homelessness and carbon emissions. “We’ve essentially built many of our cities for cars and made housing for humans incidental to that use,” the authors wrote. Across the United States, they noted, there is an average of 1,000 square feet of parking per car but only 800 square feet of housing per person. Shoup and Friedman urged passage of Assembly Bill 1401, which would end California parking mandates for new buildings near public transit and in walkable neighborhoods, while still giving developers the option to add parking if needed. If the bill becomes law, it would reduce the cost of housing and serve as a model of sustainability, they argued. “In this era of climate change and a crisis of affordability, we have to reclaim urban land for people,” they wrote.

Jack Rothman’s ‘Delayed Harvest’: Poetry That Grasps People Emeritus professor of social welfare publishes a collection of poems to link readers to his nine decades

By Stan Paul

Jack Rothman, professor emeritus of social welfare at UCLA Luskin, has written numerous books — more than 25 — during his long academic career, most of them on community organizing and multiculturalism.

Among those titles is a book on the film industry and a recent chronicle of his search for his ancestral home, a Jewish village, or shtetl, in Ukraine — a place that didn’t appear on any map at the time.

His most recent literary effort is a book of poetry published during the worldwide pandemic titled, “The Voice of Consciousness: Poems Composed After Ninety.” (Tebot Bach)

“My poems dig into the past, embrace the present, look to the future,” Rothman wrote in the book’s introduction. The book is organized into three sections: Musings, Family and Humor. Some of the poems deal with his long-term interests in social issues, such as peace, social justice, and inequality. Rothman describes his straightforward verse style as accessible, “like low-hanging fruit you can easily reach and digest.”

“Too much poetry nowadays,” he says, “is abstract and hard to fathom.”

The collection is the product of a poetry workshop that Rothman, now 94, started attending in his early 90s. A few poems in the collection were written before then, like “The 1%,” which was previously published in The Huffington Post. The rest, about 95%, he says, were written in the last few years.

Rothman, who garnered numerous awards and honors for his academic research, describes himself as “a proponent of social activism and a supporter of progressive causes.” He has written political opinion pieces over the years that appeared in publications including The Nation, Social Policy, The Humanist and the Los Angeles Times. But, he explained, “With time, I found that poetry became a tighter, more cogent way to express my thinking and feelings about what is important to me.”

The section Musings includes titles such as “Precious Consciousness,” “A Struggle for Language” and “Renewal,” where “Hundreds of students/Chant/Carrying posters/Demanding climate change action/Speaking hope amidst the waste.”

In Humor, Rothman takes a poke at the political with “Voting,” “America Ain’t Got No Social Classes” and even the former occupant of the White House in “The Donald.”

Rothman says as teacher he always liked telling stories and discusses the origins of his poetry in his latest book.

My poetry springs from the comic
I was born with a funny bone
Or was it many funny bones
I’ve merged humor and poetry

In fact, in his 70s, Rothman took up stand-up comedy, which resulted in gigs at local venues including The Comedy Store, The Improv and Pasadena’s Ice House.

His work wanders from mundane and daily observances to memories of his childhood in Depression-era America to hope for his grandson in the next generation. For example, Rothman, who grew up in New York, the son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, paints a portrait of an August day in 1935, remembering his father.

Pop, an immigrant,
Owns a candy store

Somewhat shabby and worn
On a Street corner in Queens…

Always a hard worker
The Great Wall Street Crash
Battered Pop’s life
In a double disaster
He lost his wife the same year
And I a toddler of two
Lost my mother…

In “Ode to My Miata,” Rothman uses the image of his prized silver sports car, which “remained streamlined and sporty/Ever youthful,” as he “sprouted signs of aging.” The well-cared-for car is passed on to his grandson, “who now navigates the Miata/with the care and love/That I had bestowed upon it.”

Leaning on my cane
I see a glint on the horizon
An auto and a young man
Flowing along the Southern California Sunset

And lastly, a simple object gives voice to consciousness for Rothman. In “The Yellow Pencil,” he concludes:

“My Yellow pencil may be worn out
The eraser a stump
Just give us a little more time
And we’ll compose
A lasting anniversary rhyme
For my wife”

The book is dedicated to his wife, Judy, “Companion and Helpmate Extraordinary.”

As for the future, Rothman says, along with his other interests, he’ll keep writing poetry.

Torres-Gil on Collective Responsibility to Support Elderly

Professor of Social Welfare and Public Policy Fernando Torres-Gil was featured in a Covering Health article about developing policies to support aging populations. While advances in public health and medicine have increased the average life expectancy for humans, age- and health-related inequalities persist. Communities of color are especially vulnerable to social determinants of health and often have significantly lower life expectancies than other Americans. “If any good has come out of the pandemic, it may be that we are at a rare moment of opportunity for a paradigm shift moving away from individual to more collective responsibility,” Torres-Gil said. “One of the benefits of this great new era is that if we do all the right things, we have the real possibility to live a good long life, well into our 80s, 90s, and to be centenarians.”


Umemoto on Coalitions Emerging From Firestorm of Racism

Urban Planning Professor Karen Umemoto spoke to the Los Angeles Times and the podcast Then & Now about the dramatic rise in attacks on Asian Americans. Umemoto called the violence a “shadow epidemic,” stoked by former President Donald Trump’s rhetoric surrounding the COVID-19 outbreak. “Trump’s role in exacerbating and igniting this firestorm can’t be denied,” she told the L.A. Times. But she also pointed to a new era of coalition-building among communities of color long targeted by a culture steeped in white supremacy. “One of Trump’s legacies is sparking more activism and more acts of solidarity across many groups who became victim of many of his policies and rhetoric,” she told the podcast, produced by the UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy. To tackle structural racism at its roots, Umemoto called for educating schoolchildren about the history and contributions of Asian Americans so that they are no longer considered the “perpetual foreigner.”

Shah Promotes Healthy Behavior Among Adolescents

Public Policy Professor Manisha Shah authored an article in the Conversation about her work to improve adolescent sexual and reproductive health in Tanzania. Adolescent girls in sub-Saharan Africa experience high rates of HIV infection, unintended teenage pregnancy and intimate partner violence. While many reproductive health programs and services focus exclusively on females, Shah and her team developed a program to encourage adolescent boys and young men to make better choices around their sexual and reproductive health through sports programming. They also focused on empowering adolescent girls and young women to make healthy, informed decisions by using goal-setting exercises. The study found that both the men’s soccer league and the goal-setting activity for women reduced intimate partner violence and increased adolescents’ sense of personal agency to make better choices around sexual relationships. Shah concluded that “offering contraception alone, without focusing on behavior change for females and males, won’t necessarily improve sexual and reproductive health for adolescents.”


Loukaitou-Sideris on Future of Biking in Los Angeles

Urban Planning Professor Anastasia Loukatiou-Sideris was featured in a Los Angeles Downtown News article about her involvement in Civic Bicycle Commuting (CiBiC), a new initiative promoting the health and environmental benefits of commuting by bike. While Los Angeles has been dominated by automobiles for decades, a group of UCLA scholars has teamed up to create a digital media archive that will map safe routes, promote biking as an alternative to driving and foster community among bike commuters. Loukaitou-Sideris spoke to the Daily Bruin about CiBiC’s focus on reaching vulnerable groups, including women, people without housing and those from ethnic neighborhoods. In the long term, she hopes CiBiC will build a bicycle infrastructure in low-income neighborhoods through employer partnerships to improve the process of commuting. She added that creating a community of bikers will build safety and protection for vulnerable populations through social capital – the ties that hold together a community when individuals interact and help one another.


Domínguez-Villegas on Latino Voter Trends

Rodrigo Domínguez-Villegas, research director of the Latino Policy and Politics Initiative, spoke to the Atlantic about Latino voter trends in the United States. In the 2020 election, incumbent President Donald Trump won a higher share of Latino votes than he did four years earlier. Domínguez-Villegas said he thinks Trump’s 2020 performance with Latinos was mostly a reversion to the mean after a low ebb in 2016. “It was going back to the historic numbers for the Republican Party,” he said. However, experts disagree about what to expect in the next election. “Latino voters still prefer the Democratic candidates by pretty large margins,” Domínguez-Villegas said. “In some places, [there were] smaller margins than 2016, but nothing out of the ordinary.” The 2020 election also challenged the common misconception that Latino voters are a monolith. “We slice white voters to tiny little slivers, and we don’t do the same with Latino voters,” he said.


Pierce Recommends Investing in Clean Water Now

Greg Pierce, associate director of the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation, was cited in a Radio Free article discussing a report he co-authored about access to clean drinking water in California. The Center for Innovation collaborated with the California State Water Resources Control Board and others on the report, which found that 620 public water systems and 80,000 domestic wells are at risk of failing to provide affordable and uncontaminated water — an issue that will cost billions to fix. The report was “the most comprehensive assessment that’s been done on the state level anywhere in the U.S.,” Pierce said. “Drought and access and water quality are all related.” He argued that temporary solutions, like providing bottled water to people whose water systems fail, are more expensive in the long run than fixing systems before they fail.