At UCLA, the coronavirus crisis washed away all sense of normalcy by March 11, the day the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. Soon, people worldwide were either stuck at home or doing their best to stay safe as an essential worker.
The crisis affected everyone, everywhere, and it’s impossible to document all of the ways that someone associated with the Luskin School rose to the moment amid the pandemic and the groundswell for racial justice that also surfaced this spring. In the summaries that follow, however, we highlight a few examples.
IN-PERSON CLASSES WERE RECONFIGURED AS ONLINE-ONLY SESSIONS within days. Among those impacted was Zev Yaroslavky, director of the Los Angeles Initiative at UCLA Luskin, who turned his public policy graduate course into a forum for elected officials on the front lines of leadership during the crisis.
Appearing via Zoom were county supervisors and Los Angeles’ superintendent of schools. Then Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti found time between press briefings to drop in for a virtual chat.
“Being in Zev’s class this spring gave us incredible access and insights into the unimaginable challenges that our city and county leaders are facing through this pandemic,” said then-student and now MPP graduate Dulce Vasquez.
THE FIRST POST ABOUT COVID-19 ON THE UCLA LUSKIN WEBSITE went live March 17, two days before California’s shutdown order. Three months later, more than 100 posts about coronavirus or COVID-19 were live on the site.
The tally includes faculty interviews with news outlets, but readers can also find at least a dozen stories about research conducted in response to the pandemic. Those studies include the impact of the coronavirus on disadvantaged communities and health policy, an analysis of a shortfall in responses to the U.S. Census, and a warning about a looming crisis amid newly unemployed renters who would soon face eviction.
The response by UCLA-affiliated research entities was widespread and timely. For example, the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies announced funding for new projects related to COVID-19 just two weeks after the statewide shutdown order.
PRACTICE-ORIENTED FIELD PLACEMENTS WITH AGENCIES form an essential part of the educational experience for the future social work professionals at UCLA Luskin. But the quarantine meant that students had to be pulled from their placements, said Gerry Laviña, director of field education.
Thankfully, the vast majority of partners were able to accommodate MSW students’ ability to continue agency activities remotely, Laviña said. “Our agencies pivoted incredibly to offer telehealth and other remote services to clients and communities.”
MANY SOCIAL WORKERS CONTINUE TO BE IN THE FIELD during the lockdown, offering services to those who need them despite challenging circumstances.
“On a personal level, these social workers are making sacrifices of their own health, and potentially the health of their families, in order to continue to serve,” said Laura Abrams, professor and chair of social welfare.
Abrams reached out to several UCLA Luskin alumni via Zoom, and one of her first interviewees was Lavit Maas MSW ’10, who works for a team at the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health that provides care on L.A.’s Skid Row for homeless people with severe mental illness.
“There’s a lot of elderly on Skid Row,” Maas told Abrams. “There’s a lot of people with medical conditions. It’s terrifying because we don’t know what to do [for them]. It makes me sad.”
Abrams learned a lot from the alumni interviews. For example, she was initially surprised to discover that some facilities and social services were being underutilized. The reason? Calls to crisis hotlines and referrals from mandatory reporters at public schools declined sharply because of the quarantine.
“We know that things like abuse and other family problems are probably increasing, but calls … are decreasing so dramatically,” Abrams said. “Child protection is basically falling apart because there’s no window to the outside world.”
LUSKIN VOICES JOINED THE CONVERSATION ABOUT SYSTEMIC RACISM in the United States after the death of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis, shedding light on its roots and leading calls to move toward true justice.
Students, faculty, staff and alumni joined protest marches. The UCLA Luskin community flooded social media, and they talked with news outlets that shared their insights near and far.
Professor Ananya Roy, director of the Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, raised questions about police tactics in Los Angeles and even at UCLA. She organized a faculty response, urging people to stand in solidarity with communities of color and “continue the unfinished work of liberation.”
EVENTS WERE TRANSFORMED INTO ONLINE CONVENINGS with sizable audiences. One prominent example was the Luskin Summit, an annual conference that leverages UCLA Luskin’s research power to tackle the region’s most pressing problems. As a virtual event, it drew more than 9,000 views to 14 sessions over eight weeks.
Coping with COVID-19’s health, economic and social justice ramifications became the Summit’s unifying theme. In the opening session, Dean Gary Segura and Fielding School of Public Health Dean Ron Brookmeyer shared their expertise about the pandemic’s policy implications.
Segura was also on hand for the Summit’s closing session, in which leading California philanthropists spoke with conviction about the steps needed to tear down inequities and build a region that safeguards all its people.
During the series, UCLA Luskin faculty and research centers led cross-sector conversations about the pandemic’s sweeping impact on housing, transit and health care; educating children and protecting them from abuse; immigration and voting rights; and rebuilding the economy through a sustainability lens.
THE ANNUAL SUPER QUIZ BOWL WAS RECHRISTENED as a virtual trivia night in late May, and nearly 250 competitors participated via home computers and cellphones.
“From this mighty group, we had 19 faculty and staff, 110 students and 119 alumni,” said organizer Tammy Borrero, the School’s director of events. “This was our highest participation since its inception eight years ago.”
A COMMENCEMENT CELEBRATION UNLIKE ANY OTHER wrapped up the academic year with a virtual keynote address by UC Regent John A. Pérez to honor 281 graduates scattered around the world.
“Clearly, these are not ordinary times,” Pérez said in his remarks, which were seen by more than 1,200 new graduates and their loved ones within a few days of the ceremony.
The virtual platform incorporated several new features. Each graduate got a few moments of dedicated screen time, with their name and photo often accompanied by a personal message of thanks or inspiration or a video clip — or both.
Urban Planning student speaker Amy Zhou took advantage of the virtual platform with a video in which she and classmates pledge solidarity to practice planning in a manner that will uplift communities. “When one falls, we all fall,” they conclude in unison. “When one rises, we all rise.”
This central idea underlies everything at the Luskin School. In recent months, holding tight to that core philosophy has been of vital importance. This crucial election year began with countless opportunities for political engagement to help redirect our society in a new, more equitable direction. Then came the coronavirus pandemic, threatening our ability to deliver a high-quality education unless we could adapt quickly — and smartly — to the sudden shift to remote learning.
Through it all, UCLA Luskin has persevered. What is the most essential element of our continued success? Our people — including our amazing students.
The graduate and undergraduate students of the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs are both dreamers and doers, people who see a need, then fill that need.
In the profiles that follow, we introduce you to some of the many UCLA Luskin students who are already making a difference in the world. They are dedicated. They are driven. To them, it’s not just about pursuing an education. It’s a calling — a call to action!
Sam Haddad
MAKING HIGHER EDUCATION AN ACHIEVABLE GOAL FOR ALL
Sam Haddad wants to make sure California students of all backgrounds know they have a path to college — and the younger the better.
“I think it really starts with getting to them as early as possible and encouraging them to orient themselves in a way where they would want this,” said Haddad, who has worked with many students who had never considered higher education as a realistic goal.
“The world is very small when you’re in middle school, it gets a little bit bigger in high school, and it gets a lot bigger as an undergrad,” the UCLA Luskin public affairs major said. “So you just have to show them that there’s a lot of opportunities beyond what they’ve been accustomed to.”
Haddad is a coordinator for UCLA’s Bruin Ambassadors, a team of undergraduates who connect with prospective students at high schools, college fairs and on-campus events.
“We get kids excited about what it means to be at an institution like UCLA — that it’s possible, and how to afford it. We are their resource throughout the admission process,” he said.
He is also a founding member of the Luskin Undergraduate Students Association (LUSA), which focuses on networking and mobilizing in the community. Last fall, several LUSA members traveled to Kid City, a nonprofit providing leadership development for youth in South Los Angeles, to assist students with their college applications. Working one-on-one, the undergrads helped the students shape their personal essays for the greatest impact.
“These students have really, really rich stories that they may not know how to verbalize yet. It’s hard to structure your narrative when you’re in the middle of making your narrative,” Haddad said. “LUSA helped them put it all into perspective and edit their essays to a level that would make them more competitive.”
Haddad said his eagerness to encourage students to work toward a college education comes from his own experience finding a path to UCLA. He feels a connection with first-generation students, even though his parents were largely educated in Amman, Jordan, before moving to Southern California before he was born.
“It’s a very, very different landscape to be educated in the Middle East than to be educated in the United States,” he
said, noting that his family was not familiar with UCLA or the rest of the California university system.
“The person who really helped me understand that there were opportunities beyond what was around me was my brother,” who shared advice and resources from his excellent high school counselors, he said.
With an interest in politics and policy, Haddad has interned in his congressman’s office and plans to complete an internship through the University of California’s Washington Center. After graduation, he hopes to jointly pursue advanced degrees in law and public policy.
For now, Haddad plans to continue spreading the word, particularly in disadvantaged communities, that hard work during the high school years can put top-rated universities within reach.
“The more students we have coming from these backgrounds, the more they can reach back into their own communities to allow more students to prosper,” he said.
—Mary Braswell
Olivia Miller, second from left, joins a team distributing condoms and coffee in a sex work zone in Bogotá.
In 2016, Olivia Miller was living and working in Ecuador when a massive earthquake killed 668 people on the country’s coast. Miller took it as a call to action and headed to the decimated region in hopes of providing support. That decision set her on a path that eventually led to UCLA Luskin and research grounded squarely in community empowerment.
“I started working with this wonderful project called Comparte Ecuador, which means “share Ecuador.” It was this really beautiful sort of grassroots community organization model that worked in what they called community reactivation.”
The idea of Comparte Ecuador is to do more than just provide emergency housing or supplies.
There are lots of Non-Governmental Organizations, or NGOs, on site after a natural disaster. “There’s this flood of NGOs that show up to the scene and donate a bunch of items, like mattresses and food and whatever. And then all of a sudden, they disappear,” Miller explained. “But my organization was really focused on asking, ‘Well, what do people want in this community to be self-sustainable so that they are not forever depending on outside organizations to give them things?’”
Miller’s drive to help others without reinforcing a dependency model led her to seek out like-minded peers and professors at UCLA like Amy Ritterbusch, an assistant professor who shares Miller’s interest in working internationally with communities facing violence. Ritterbusch connected Miller to a group of trans activists in Bogotá, Colombia, who were fighting against state violence. Last summer, Miller conducted field work in Colombia that formed the basis of her capstone project at UCLA Luskin.
Miller acknowledges that she is accountable to her professors and to the realities of academic research, but during her capstone she sought to stay true to her belief in community empowerment.
“How do you solve homelessness when you’re not asking the people who are experiencing homelessness? Who are the experts on homelessness?” she said, then continued with the analogy. “It’s the people who are living in homelessness every day.”
Miller’s goal is to pursue work built around that concept. “It’s about smashing those walls that divide us and that put people in boxes and tell them where they belong and what they can or can’t have as an opinion,” she said.
In her capstone, Miller hoped to “reimagine the relationship between street-based social work support and people facing structural violence in a real way, especially people whose livelihoods are connected to the street. It’s about how we can reimagine that, utilizing best practices of the people who have been figuring this out for themselves for a long time.” The way to solve social problems, Miller thinks, is to listen.
“It’s not about me, coming in from UCLA. I love having these conversations with [the people she met in Latin America] because it is so powerful to listen to them reflect on their movement. At the end of the day, the activists I work with are the ones who are changing their situation.”
—Les Dunseith
Romen Lopez encourages the formerly incarcerated to pursue higher education.
SERVING AS A ROLE MODEL FOR THE FORMERLY INCARCERATED
Empower the powerless. Give a voice to the voiceless. Change a life.
For Romen Lopez, such phrases are more than platitudes. They describe his life.
Today, Lopez is a 2020 UCLA Master of Social Welfare recipient, a deeply engaged single father raising three children, and a leader of multiple efforts to direct youths from disadvantaged circumstances toward potentially life-altering educational opportunities.
But a dozen years ago? Romen Lopez was a convicted gang member cycling in and out of prison, seemingly on a path to self-destruction.
“I never in a million years thought I would be doing a master’s at UCLA,” Lopez said of his younger self. “That would have made no sense to me.”
Having followed a path to redemption via higher education, Lopez has seized the opportunity to turn his personal journey into a call to action for others in similar circumstances.
Lopez was part of a team of Social Welfare students who researched the Reintegration Academy at Mt. San Antonio College in Walnut, which points formerly incarcerated youth toward community college educations. Lopez’s similar path began at East L.A. College, then UCLA as an undergraduate
and on to graduate study at UCLA Luskin.
He also founded a UCLA organization called Reforming Education to Diminish Incarceration (REDI), which encourages formerly incarcerated students applying for admission to highlight their experiences in the justice system as “a form of empowerment and not a disability.”
Growing up in East Los Angeles, Lopez said, the best he could imagine was a menial job to pay the bills. His mother urged him to stay in school, but by his freshman year, he had joined a street gang.
When police caught him with a gun, he wound up in the parole-to-prison pipeline, which continued after he aged out of the juvenile system. “I went to prison five times from the age of 19 to my mid-20s,” he recalled.
The turning point for Lopez was Homeboy Industries, founded in 1988 by Father Gregory Boyle to improve the lives of former gang members in East Los Angeles. But it wasn’t a quick fix. Lopez started working at Homeboy in 2009, sweeping sidewalks and cleaning windows, but was arrested on a vandalism charge that sent him back to prison for two more years.
In prison, he earned his high school equivalency degree, and when he was released in 2011, Lopez began remaking his life. A lawyer at Homeboy Industries helped him clear up debts. He completed mandated substance abuse classes. He resolved a DUI to restore his driver’s license. And he began the legal process to obtain visitation rights — and eventually full custody — of his children.
The next step was East L.A. College, where he wound up working for the campus’ student government and, eventually, became student body president.
“I got to experience things I had never experienced before in my life,” said Lopez, including flying on a plane for the first time to attend conferences in places like Texas and New York.
Lopez’s decision to attend UCLA after finishing community college centered around his children, now aged 16, 14 and 8. The university had offered family housing, and “that’s an automatic no-brainer,” Lopez said with a laugh.
“My kids get to live out here in West L.A. now, and they get to see the campus. They know how to navigate higher education,” he said. “That’s something that I never knew.”
As his UCLA Luskin graduation neared, Lopez was both excited and apprehensive. “I’m kind of scared about it because I’ve been in school for the last seven-and-a-half years,” Lopez said. “Now I am going to need to find another spot for me and my kids to live.”
The next step in the remarkable journey of Romen Lopez is not yet certain. But he’s educated now and is eyeing a career in mental health. Plus, he has trusted advisers at Homeboy Industries and UCLA faculty like Jorja Leap in his corner. He’ll figure it out.
After all, the Romen Lopez of today has power, he has a voice, and his life has forever changed.
—Les Dunseith
Noreen Ahmed says policymaking, technology and the arts are intertwined in Los Angeles.
HARMONIZING TO FOSTER EMPATHY
Building a healthy community requires strong public policies as well as buy-in from the people on the ground. And a little music couldn’t hurt.
That’s the approach Noreen Ahmed is adopting in her post on the North Westwood Neighborhood Council, where she has taken on homelessness, gentrification and other issues important to UCLA and its neighbors.
“Everybody’s paying attention to homelessness right now, but there are these frustrations about the speed of how things are going. I just think there are opportunities to get more creative,” said Ahmed, a freshly minted MPP who was interviewed before the COVID-19 lockdown.
She envisions a musical celebration at Westwood Park, south of campus, where homeless encampments have created a divide among neighbors. By sharing their artistic talents in a common space, she believes students, residents and the unhoused would see one another in a new light.
“A lot of events that happen are a one-way thing — we serve you and we give you these resources. But I think there can be ways to elevate the conversation,” Ahmed said. “I think that the timing is just right to pull all these people together.”
Los Angeles is perfectly situated to bridge policymaking, technology and the arts, she said, adding that the students of UCLA are primed to accelerate change.
“My big goal is figuring out how to harness the UCLA voice. … It’s amazing to see the advocacy that’s happening, especially in the undergraduate community,” said Ahmed, who served on the board of directors of the Associated Students of UCLA, the largest student organization in the country.
On her way to Westwood, Ahmed took a winding path, both geographically and philosophically. Growing up in Maryland, she attended Catholic schools but supported her family’s Muslim faith, especially after 9/11. Her love of music led her to Boston University, where she studied to become an executive in the record industry. But she eventually realized that she was called to a different life.
“I just became a much more grateful person. And I wanted to give back in a way that I personally did not know how to do through the record industry,” she said.
So Ahmed joined the Peace Corps. After a tour in the West African nation of Mali, she spent years working in Baltimore and Denver with nonprofits devoted to community development and educating young adults who had dropped out of high school.
“I was in that social work role, though I didn’t have training and I was kind of learning as I went. That was one of the things that really drove me to get into public policy — just trying to get resources for students and seeing the challenges, hearing their stories and knowing how much was on their shoulders,” she said.
“I realized that I wanted to get myself into a place of power to be able to change some of these things,” Ahmed said. And she was pulled further west to complete that mission.
“UCLA is the only school that I wanted to go to, anywhere. It just felt like it was like the people’s school,” she said. “Diversity was really one of the key things for me. I wanted to go to a school that encourages new voices and different voices, and so that’s what attracted me to this program specifically. And it just intuitively felt right.”
After a life moving from place to place, Ahmed is now an established Angeleno. “This is the first place I’ve ever lived where I know I’m going to be for a long time.”
She has made the most of her time in the city, with internships in the offices of Mayor Eric Garcetti and Councilman Marqueece Harris-Dawson, as well as with the governmental public relations firm Cerrell Associates. She
also spent several months campaigning for an L.A. City Council candidate.
Ahmed plans to serve out her three-year term on the North Westwood Neighborhood Council, working diligently for the community — with tunes, whenever possible.
“I literally have harmonicas in my pocket,” said the lifelong music-lover, who approaches guitarists on campus and on the streets and offers to play accompaniment. “I look at it as part of this vision where there’s something more powerful happening than just playing music. It’s about harmonizing, but in a bigger way.”
—Mary Braswell
Joseph Burton is the founder of Hearts for Sight Foundation, a nonprofit organization that seeks to break down barriers to health and fitness among the blind and visually impaired.
HELPING THE VISUALLY IMPAIRED GET HEALTHIER
First, Joseph Burton decided that his degenerative visual condition would not prevent him from improving his health. He began exercising more and eating better, and Burton lost weight and his fitness markedly improved. So he took that success as a call to action and began helping others in similar circumstances do the same.
Burton is the founder of Hearts for Sight Foundation, a nonprofit organization that seeks to break down barriers to health and fitness among the blind and visually impaired.
The organization had been ramping up its activities prior to the coronavirus pandemic by offering bike rides, a yoga series and group hikes in cooperation with the Sierra Club. During one of those hikes at Ernest E. Debs Regional Park in late January, the group recorded a promotional video about the experience that can be viewed on YouTube. It shows sighted guides helping blind participants navigate trails as they make their way through scenic locations in the hills northeast of downtown Los Angeles.
“My focus and passion right now is working with people with visual impairments,” Burton said. “I find that they are some of the most vulnerable populations, and people who often get overlooked.”
Burton, who is entering his second year as a master’s student in social welfare at UCLA Luskin, has retinitis pigmentosa, a genetic disorder that impacts vision in low light and reduces his peripheral eyesight. Eventually, he may lose his vision altogether.
Since founding Hearts for Sight in 2016, Burton has been gathering support from others in similar situations — the members of the Advisory Board of Hearts for Sight are all people facing vision challenges. They work together to “eliminate barriers that prevent the blind and other people who are visually impaired from participating in physical activity,” he said. “What we want to do is promote … the full health, wellness, and mental, physical and emotional well-being for our population.”
An eventual goal of Hearts for Sight is the creation of a wellness center with a gym where people with visual impairments can work out without fear of hazards.
“That’s just a huge challenge,” Burton explained. “I have a high degree of vision still. But when I go to a gym, I’m constantly having to navigate slowly, just to make sure that I’m not tripping over somebody’s leftover weights.”
Nutrition counseling is another need.
“A lot of our population, they resort to fast food or canned foods,” said Burton, pointing out that many people with visual impairments find navigating a kitchen particularly difficult. Some don’t use their kitchens at all. “It’s been a goal this year, actually, to find partners who can help us provide workshops so that we can really teach folks how to navigate their kitchen spaces and develop wholesome meals.”
Burton’s interest in social work is connected to his experiences as a foster child while growing up in San Diego. He started Hearts for Sight while an undergraduate student at Cal State Dominguez Hills. Because his career interests relate to nonprofit development to benefit underprivileged populations, he had long dreamed of attending UCLA, an elite university with a strong focus on social justice.
“I am an African American. I’m young. I was a foster youth. Credibility has always been something that I’ve really wanted,” Burton said. “I knew coming here would really be advantageous for me in terms of bridging relationships with the right people who can help me further my organizations’ mission and vision.”
While a full-time student at UCLA, Burton has worked as a case manager for homeless men at Society of St. Vincent DePaul. And he has started laying the foundation for a capstone research project about the barriers to physical activity faced by the visually impaired that he will complete during his second year at UCLA Luskin Social Welfare.
What’s next after the master’s degree?
“I would love to become Dr. Burton,” he said with a broad smile. Earning his Ph.D. would be personally gratifying, of course, but Joseph Burton is someone who believes that accomplishments become more meaningful when they are shared.
“As a former foster youth who’s been a part of social programs my whole entire life, to be on the other side of it and being able to give back to others, that’s something I feel strongly about,” he said.
—Les Dunseith
Kimberly Fabian, center, connects with high school students at a college readiness event.
LIFTING UP HER NEIGHBORS
Neighborhood is important to Kimberly Fabian. So wherever she goes, she makes connections with people who remind her of home.
“I’m from Koreatown, and that place is beautiful,” she said. “I grew up with a lot of immigrants and a lot of low-income people, and it was just the most amazing experience.”
Fabian learned the meaning of community in that richly diverse pocket of Los Angeles, but she also witnessed a deep communications divide.
“The people themselves, they got along really well. … But the community was sort of disconnected from the institutions that were in place there,” she said. Dealing with landlords or school officials did not come easy for many, she said, and “I’ve never known a lot of people who voted.”
Now a fourth-year public affairs major, Fabian has found a multitude of ways to bridge that divide, both on campus and all across the city she loves.
Earlier this year, Fabian spent time in Boyle Heights and South Los Angeles to get out the Latino vote. Joining other UCLA students staffing tables on behalf of the nonprofit Voto Latino, she shared information about strengthening communities through the ballot box.
“Someone told us something really heartfelt. They were saying that Latinx families trust Latinx women the most,” she said. “I like knowing that they’re hearing this information from us, instead of some random city official that they might have no reason to trust.”
Fabian also underwent months of training to become IRS-certified to assist people struggling to fill out their tax returns. She recalled a session at Central Library in downtown Los Angeles, where she helped an older woman who spoke no English and had a disabled husband at home. Other tax services had given the woman bad information or asked for substantial fees, but Fabian was able to guide her through the filing process at no charge.
“She was so happy, she wanted to tip me, and I said, ‘No, no.’ Then she came back that afternoon with a bag of avocados, and I said, ‘OK, I’ll take some avocados,’ ” Fabian said. “There were a lot of things going on with her story and with her life, and I was really happy that I was the one who got to help her.”
At UCLA, Fabian has benefited from the Academic Advancement Program, which provides resources to low-income or underrepresented students. Now, she is one of the program’s paid peer tutors, providing help in microeconomics while building relationships and trust.
The program is “very intentional about wanting to relate to students by using people who come from the students’ same backgrounds,” she said. “Some peers talk about imposter syndrome with me, and it’s like we’re at the No. 1 public institution in the country and it’s super great, but then you’re struggling because microecon can be hard.”
In the coming year, Fabian will complete a senior capstone project for her public affairs B.A. She aims to immerse herself in an inner-city college access program for kids to study which factors lead to success. She has also worked with data that guide policies for education reform as an intern with the Los Angeles Education Research Institute, co-founded by Associate Professor Meredith Phillips of UCLA Luskin Public Policy. And she hopes to one day pursue a graduate degree in sociology so she can continue to lift up communities like the one where she was raised.
“Every time I’m helping these people, even if I don’t know them, it feels like I’m helping my neighbor, it feels like I’m helping someone I grew up with,” Fabian said.
—Mary Braswell
Michael Rios uses quantitative analysis to advocate for voting rights.
CRUNCHING NUMBERS TO BENEFIT MARGINALIZED COMMUNITIES
When Michael Rios first arrived at UCLA to pursue his Master of Public Policy, he was intrigued by a course that had just launched in the fall of 2018.
“Voting Rights Policy and Law” promised to take graduate students on a yearlong journey, from theory and methodology to a real-world court challenge at a place where the right to vote was under threat.
“The most attractive thing about it was the fact that it was so hands-on,” Rios said of the course, taught by Matt Barreto, professor of political science and Chicano/a studies, and civil rights lawyer Chad Dunn.
“They had made it known that, at the end of the year, they wanted to open up several lawsuits against certain jurisdictions — and that it would all be from our work,” Rios said.
“You come to Luskin, in general, to help people and give back to marginalized communities, and this was a major way to do it.”
By year’s end, Rios had studied case law, learned to crunch population data, helped shine a light on balloting irregularities in Washington state — then realized he was not ready to give up the voting rights fight.
Fortunately, that first innovative public policy course was blossoming into a new advocacy group, the UCLA Voting Rights Project housed at the Latino Policy and Politics Initiative based at UCLA Luskin, and Barreto and Dunn brought Rios aboard as a policy fellow.
“The objective is to figure out where voters are being marginalized. And if people aren’t allowed the right to have their voices heard, then how do we hold the official mechanisms of government accountable?” said Rios, who also researched and co-authored a memo, at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, on the health protections afforded by vote-by-mail balloting.
Rios has a particular affinity for mapping tools and quantitative analysis. “Through the Voting Rights Project, I’ve really been inspired to work with data,” particularly to benefit people, he said.
He has spent hours poring over heat maps and complex columns of data in an attempt to identify places where elected officials look markedly different from their constituents. That’s a sign that voting rights may be diluted or denied.
The research tools Rios has mastered have also been put to use in his Applied Policy Project, the capstone of the UCLA Luskin MPP program. Rios’ team is working for the city and county of Honolulu, which is considering a vacancy tax or some other policy to reduce the number of housing units that stand empty.
“I’ve been collecting 10 years’ worth of American Community Survey data on everything from why units are vacant to people’s education rates to who lives where, and parsing through all that to figure out the best policy option for them,” he said.
With accessibility to information and education one of his top priorities, Rios also initiated a partnership between UCLA Luskin and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute, a nonprofit aimed at cultivating young Latino leaders. Because of Rios’ efforts, beginning this fall, the institute will provide a stipend to graduates of its fellowship program if they choose to pursue a master’s degree at the Luskin School.
For his own educational path, Rios is considering a doctoral program that melds policy and quantitative methodology, with the aim of making data-driven research accessible to a wider public.
“It’s a certain type of skill for someone to be able to look at these huge data sets and figure out what’s the most strategic approach, then interpret the results and put them in layman’s terms so anyone could understand it,” he said.
“So that’s the attractive side of it: How do we ask important questions, and how do we use the data that’s available to us to figure those things out, and how do we tell it to ordinary people?”
—Mary Braswell
Atreyi Mitra shares information about supporting survivors of sexual violence.
ADVOCATING FOR SURVIVORS OF SEXUAL ABUSE
In the fall of 2017, the #MeToo movement was gaining steam, with more women opening up about experiencing harassment and assault.
At the same time, Atreyi Mitra arrived at UCLA, and her ongoing support for gender equity took an urgent and personal turn. Hearing story after painful story about classmates who had survived sexual abuse, she felt she had to act.
“That’s when I first joined Bruin Consent Coalition,” a student-led group formed to support survivors and educate the community, said Mitra, a double-major in public affairs and human biology and society. “And in joining that space, I
saw so many people that I had formed such close connections with who were so very impacted by these issues.”
As she began to grasp the scope of the problem, she also learned a hard truth: While all University of California schools had created Campus Assault Resources & Education (CARE) offices to provide support, healing and advocacy, “they are understaffed, under-resourced and underfunded,” Mitra said.
So she began to dig for data to make the case that survivors and survivor advocates deserve more support.
Mitra collected data from CARE offices across the system, as well as documents from the UC Office of the President. She interviewed CARE staffers and activists against sexual violence, and conducted student surveys to gauge the campus climate. With this foundation, she began to build a case for additional resources.
One example: In 2017-2018, UCLA’s CARE office handled 770 cases with just two advocates. The Chancellor’s office has since funded two additional advocates, and the UC Office of the President has launched a systemwide assessment of CARE resources.
Spending time in different arenas of activism — front-line survivor support and behind-the-scenes data-mining — Mitra also discovered insights about her own strengths and limitations as an advocate.
“As I got more involved, I could feel myself becoming emotionally exhausted. I found that I no longer had an off switch,” she said. With grassroots organizing taking a toll on schoolwork, as well as her own well-being, she decided to step back from the Bruin Consent Coalition and funnel her energy into research.
“I have to say that that entire shift was not something that came easily,” she said. “It came out of a lot of pain, but I think it was better for me.”
Mitra is now pursuing an independent project through UC Speaks Up, a network of public health researchers from UCLA, UC San Diego and UC Santa Barbara, all working to combat sexual violence on campuses.
Her goal is to identify barriers to accessing the UC’s CARE resources. Her research has shown they include straightforward factors such as office hours and location, but also more nuanced concerns such as fears that confidentiality will be breached or seeing few people of color on staff.
Mitra also serves as a student representative on the UC Committee on Research Policy, which advises the UC president on research matters and coordinates policies and procedures across all campuses. And she makes her voice heard as part of UCLA’s Student Fee Advisory Committee, which guides decisions about the allocation of funds on campus.
“I think none of us like to admit this, but money is power. If you truly want to support change, a lot of that support at the end of the day comes fiscally,” she said.
After graduation, Mitra aspires to work at the intersection of research, policy and advocacy, possibly in law, education or nonprofit work.
“I now know that I’ve always preferred to work through academia and bureaucratic structures to create the kinds of changes I want to see,” she said.
—Mary Braswell
Bradley Bounds II got an introduction to UCLA Luskin at the 2018 Block Party.
PLANNING FOR SOMETHING BIGGER THAN HIMSELF
As a newly admitted graduate student in 2018, Bradley Bounds II said he wanted to make a local impact.
“I want to work on building up my community,” said the Compton resident, who was already working as a planning intern for Long Beach when he came to UCLA Luskin.
Two years later, he’s doing just that. Juggling a demanding school and work schedule, Bounds completed his Master of Urban and Regional Planning degree in cooperation with classmates who developed aspects of a new General Plan for Culver City — one that will impact the city’s built environment and the lives of its residents for decades to come.
Bounds’ participation in the project was part of a comprehensive capstone course led by Paavo Monkkonen, associate professor of urban planning and public policy.
“It’s rare that the General Plan would be updated all at the same time,” Monkkonen explained. “What happens usually in planning is certain parts of it are updated periodically and, in Culver City’s case, some parts have not been updated since 1962.”
The city was originally incorporated in 1917, only a year after the enactment of the nation’s first zoning ordinance.
“There’s a lot of parts that haven’t been modified, so it’s been a big deal,” Monkkonen said. Unlike past councils, the governing body in Culver City today is much more progressive.
Monkkonen said the idea to engage with UCLA Luskin on the client project came from alumnus and Culver City council member Daniel Lee MSW ’15, who was elected in 2018 and is the first African American ever to serve there.
Bounds was part of a 15-student class that worked in six subgroups. They connected with city leaders and staff, developers and other stakeholders on such topics as transportation, housing, urban design, environmental impacts and community development.
A city and its consultants must work within certain constraints, but students, who are exploring various concentrations within urban planning, can be bolder and support things that city officials find interesting but don’t have time to study in detail themselves.
“I’m amazed they are attempting to do it,” said Bounds about Culver City officials. “If they succeed, it’s going to be amazing. Whether anyone likes it or not, I’m proud of Culver City for even attempting it and making headway on it.”
Bounds and his subgroup tackled public participation and engagement, a tough task already that became even more challenging amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Interviews over the phone are OK, but it’s way better to interview in person,” Bounds said during an interview that took place while the county was under stay-at-home restrictions. “Now we’re trying to figure out how we can get people to actually respond to us and participate in interviews.”
Just before the lockdown, Bounds and his classmates had taken their proposals to the Culver City Council for a public presentation. They asked questions that focused on barriers to greater participation by various constituencies within the city. They also wanted to know how the city planned to become more inclusive.
“We’ve met with different planning departments, and we’ve interviewed stakeholders and some developers,” Bounds said. “Projects that do well are those that get a lot of stakeholder feedback. We have to make magic happen.”
Bounds emphasized that figuring out how to engage different constituencies now is more important than ever, “because now you don’t have the benefit of being able to go by complete word-of-mouth.”
As graduation neared, Bounds was hoping to find a full-time planning job close to home.
“I’ve always wanted to work in government because I’ve always felt myself called to participate in something bigger than myself,” he said. “I’ve always wanted to do something where I was a public servant.”
Perhaps he can even become a planning commissioner for Compton, his hometown.
Bounds hopes to extend progressive planning ideas beyond Los Angeles and toward Long Beach, Compton and other underserved areas. “That’s my dream,” he said. “Maybe I can come back and push for that.”
As the former governor of Massachusetts and a onetime Democratic nominee for president, UCLA Luskin faculty member Michael Dukakis knows a lot about leading during a crisis.
“The only thing that I had that, from a state standpoint, came even close to [the coronavirus crisis] was the famous blizzard of ’78,” said Dukakis, recalling a catastrophic storm that struck New England states and shut down air, rail and highways. Some commuters were trapped in their cars, and the storm destroyed homes and forced people to evacuate, and find food and shelter.
Thankfully, Dukakis’ secretary of public safety, Charles Barry, “just was obsessive on emergency planning,” he said. “We had a detailed plan for dealing with emergencies and I said, ‘You run it, and you tell me what to say every afternoon at 3 o’clock,’ because I had shut down all traffic and all these other things and, fortunately, came out of it in great shape.”
Dukakis teaches a policy course on institutional leadership at UCLA Luskin each winter quarter, and it focuses on case studies that include his own experiences in government and public service. He stressed the importance of preparing public managers well, noting that graduate students should be serious about learning how to run an agency and deliver the goods during a crisis.
“If you are not organized for this, and you don’t have really superb people, look out,” Dukakis said. “Whoever is in charge should be someone who knows what he’s doing.”
The interview with Dukakis took place shortly after the stunning reversal of fortune of presidential candidate Joe Biden.
“This is an extraordinary year. What’s happened over the last 10 days is beyond extraordinary,” Dukakis said a few days after Biden swept to victory in 10 of 15 Democratic primary contests on Super Tuesday, March 3. “Nobody would have predicted it, including yours truly, and somebody smarter than me is going to have to try to figure out how it happened.”
Normally, at the end of the winter quarter, Dukakis meets with faculty and staff at the Luskin School to share advice and make political observations. This year, that meeting had to be canceled because of the novel coronavirus pandemic, which also temporarily delayed the return of Dukakis and his wife, Kitty, to their home in Massachusetts.
“What I would say to the faculty is that what Joe needs now — and you’ve heard this rant of mine before — is a first-class, 50-state, 200,000-precinct organization … and no more reds, blues and purples, firewalls and all that nonsense,” Dukakis said about what Biden would have to do to defeat Republican incumbent Donald Trump.
A presidential candidate has to be competitive in every single state, “if only to keep the opposition busy in those states,” reiterated Dukakis, who has guided a number of UCLA Luskin alumni to careers in public office and public service over the years.
“It’s all grass roots,” he continued. “They can raise enough money to run a campaign like this, but it’s a precinct captain in every precinct, six block captains” that win an election. “It’s so dependent on the quality and caliber of the people you have working for you. I can’t emphasize that enough. I don’t think people understand just how important that is.”
El Monte Mayor Andre Quintero MA UP ’01, JD ’01 and City Manager Alma Martinez BA ’01, MA UP ’13.
MAYOR AND CITY MANAGER OF EL MONTE ARE BOTH UCLA LUSKIN PLANNING ALUMNI
El Monte Mayor Andre Quintero MA UP ’01, JD ’01 and City Manager Alma Martinez BA ’01, MA UP ’13 reflected on how their UCLA Luskin education helped shape their respective paths and prepared them for careers in government office.
The two alumni apply the skills they developed as graduate students in urban planning to make collaborative decisions to solve problems and maximize the well-being of the residents of their San Gabriel Valley city.
After earning degrees in sociology and political science from UCLA as an undergraduate, Martinez returned to earn her master’s in urban planning at UCLA Luskin.
“I knew I wanted to work with the faculty in the department,” Martinez said. As an undergraduate, then-faculty member Leo Estrada, who died in 2018, had encouraged her to pursue a graduate degree in urban planning, and he became an important mentor during her time in the program.
Looking back, Martinez’s Luskin School education “taught [her] to look at planning and development from a holistic point of view — not only how they affect the city itself but the surrounding communities as well.”
She keeps that holistic perspective in mind as she makes decisions as city manager that she knows will affect thousands of people.
Martinez said the interdisciplinary nature of the UCLA Luskin program gave her “the ability to shift priorities and understand the immediate needs of the community and approach it from a point of view of proactiveness and compassion.”
Quintero received his undergraduate degree in political science from UC Riverside, where he served as student body president
and president of the statewide University of California Student Association.
“I knew I wanted to have a life of public service,” Quintero recalled.
Being able to earn a dual degree from UCLA Luskin and the UCLA School of Law made for an appealing combination when he sought out graduate education.
“While the joint degree was a challenging academic experience to balance, the faculty were amazing and helped me get through as a first-generation student,” he said.
Looking back, Quintero said the joint-degree program made him a more well-rounded student.
“The experience and training that I received at UCLA were essential to what I believe to be good decision-making,” he said.
Quintero was elected in December 2009 as mayor of El Monte. He and Martinez have been working closely together since Martinez was elected city manager two years ago.
“I’ve always aspired to have a strong, collaborative relationship with the city manager, and I finally have that,” Quintero said. “I have a city manager that I can collaborate with at a very high level, and I enjoy our intellectual conversation.”
Having a city manager with a similar academic background creates “a wonderful environment for collaboration.”
Any advice for current UCLA Luskin graduate students?
“Be bold, develop relationships and pursue their passion,” Quintero recommended.
Because planners populate many different departments of city organizations, he recommends that students “go out and find what niche they would like to be involved in. Cities need good and experienced planners who can shape policy at a much higher level.” — Zoe Day
DUARDO LEADS L.A. COUNTY OFFICE OF EDUCATION THROUGH CRISIS
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, UCLA Luskin alumni across the world stepped up to lead their communities through an unprecedented crisis. It’s just that Debra Duardo’s community happens to be bigger than most.
Duardo is a triple Bruin. She received her undergraduate degree in women’s studies in 1994, then got an MSW at UCLA Luskin in 1996 before going on to a Ph.D. in education in 2013.
As superintendent since 2016 of the Los Angeles County Office of Education (LACOE), Duardo has oversight of 80 school districts and more than 2 million preschool and school-age children. LACOE is the country’s largest regional educational agency. Her 30-year career in the Los Angeles Unified School District included positions in health and human services and academic counseling.
During the health crisis, Duardo’s proactive communication was credited with preparing Los Angeles schools to respond quickly in the face of a rapidly shifting landscape. She had the foresight in February to lay contingency plans for school districts to transition to online learning and continue essential services, doing so at a time when fewer than five cases had been confirmed in Los Angeles County.
ALUMNA HAS BROUGHT LUSKIN EDUCATION BACK TO HER CINCINNATI HOME
The charge for every graduate of the Luskin School is the same: Be a change agent and bring solutions to your community’s most pressing issues. For Sara Sheets MA UP ’97 that has meant supporting urban community development in her home state of Ohio for over 20 years.
First making her way to Los Angeles via Teach for America, she taught elementary school for two years. The experience of educating students who lived in underserved neighborhoods beset by a lack of quality housing, rampant crime and unequitable access to food and transportation inspired Sheets to change course. UCLA Luskin’s focus on social justice and community development drew her to enroll as a Master of Urban Planning student.
Upon graduation, Sheets took her UCLA Luskin training and hands-on experience back home to Ohio.
Initially, she worked in community development, seeking to revitalize once-neglected areas of Cincinnati. Currently, she is a loan officer at the Cincinnati Development Fund, supporting real estate lending in low- to moderate-income neighborhoods in attempts to bring affordable housing and new businesses to those parts of town that have been struggling.
She said she is especially proud of Cincinnati’s tremendous growth in the decade after the 2008 Great Recession.
More recently, in the face of COVID-19, that growth was threatened, and Queen City tenants have been counting on Sheets’ leadership and creative thinking more than ever. She is working extensively with small business owners and other borrowers in Cincinnati to help them pay rent, pay their workers, and keep their businesses afloat during the pandemic.
Her initiative quickly turned into a statewide effort to support other businesses and borrowers across Ohio, including with groups like the Cincinnati Development Fund.
“Even though it has been 23 years since graduation, I feel incredibly grateful to have had the opportunity to attend UCLA,” Sheets said. “I remember feeling consistently inspired by my professors — Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, Jackie Leavitt, Allan Heskin — as well as my fellow classmates who came to UCLA with rich personal and professional backgrounds and a deep commitment to equity.”
Although Sheets said she often misses Los Angeles, “I also love the benefits of living in a smaller city and being able to contribute in large and small ways to my community.”
PRITZKER FAMILY FOUNDATION SUPPORTS FELLOWSHIP IN OFFICE OF CHILD PROTECTION
For the past four years, UCLA Luskin has awarded a full-year fellowship to a hardworking student seeking to measurably improve child safety in Los Angeles County. Thanks to the generous support of the Anthony & Jeanne Pritzker Family Foundation, the Luskin School will offer this prestigious award again for the upcoming 2020-21 academic year.
“I leveraged the knowledge and skills gained at [the Office of Child Protection] to apply for doctoral programs in social welfare and have received three offers of admission — from UCLA, UC Berkeley and the University of Washington — to continue my studies and conduct research in child welfare,” said Anthony Gomez MSW ’20, who received the fellowship in the most recent year. “I would like to thank the Pritzker Foster Care Initiative for providing a fellowship that has served as the launching pad for the next chapter of my career.”Each year’s fellowship recipient is chosen through a competitive process. A staff and faculty committee evaluates applicants and coordinates interviews with staff from the Office of Child Protection to select the student who is best-qualified for the needs of the position.
BANK OF AMERICA SUPPORTS LATINO ECONOMIC MOBILITY
The Luskin School has received a $125,000 gift from Bank of America to support a social mobility and economic opportunity agenda for Latinos in California.
At nearly 18.5% of the national population, Latinos are a central engine in the growth of the American economy. Despite high rates of employment and entrepreneurial activity, Latinos own fewer homes and have smaller savings and significantly fewer investments than other ethnic groups in the United States.
The gift will be used by the Latino Policy & Politics Initiative (LPPI) to evaluate and identify scalable interventions and best practices across California. It will help expand mobility and opportunity through applied research under the direction of
LPPI faculty experts.
Award recipient Amy Zhou, left, with Astrid Beigel.
SUSTAINING DONOR HONORS FRIEND’S MEMORY
Astrid Beigel MA ’67, Ph.D. ’69 is a sustaining donor of the Julie Roque Award for Environmental Justice, a memorial fund that honors her longtime friend and former professor of urban planning, Julie Roque.
For over two decades, Beigel, who is an established leader in mental health services in Los Angeles, has been supporting the fund annually to keep Roque’s memory alive. The award provides funds to students whose research and community activities demonstrate an awareness of and commitment to environmental justice and pollution prevention, with an emphasis on social issues pertaining to communities of color, particularly Filipinos and Asian Americans.
This year’s recipient, urban planning student Amy Zhou, met with Beigel over lunch on campus prior to the “Safer at Home” order in Los Angeles and personally thanked her for giving back.
Jim and Judy Bergman are UCLA alumni who fund a mental health fellowship at UCLA Luskin.
GIFT FROM BERGMAN FAMILY CLOSES OUT CENTENNIAL CAMPAIGN
Jim and Judy Bergman, UCLA alumni and longtime supporters of the Luskin School, have made a generous gift to augment their existing Bergman Family Mental Health Fellowship in Social Welfare by utilizing the UCLA Chancellor’s Centennial Scholars Match Initiative.
Their endowed gift, which was matched at 50%, supports graduate students whose field of study is directed toward the improvement and advancement of programs and services for the mentally ill.
Approximately one in five adults in the United States suffers with mental health issues in any given year, with some of the Bergmans’ loved ones among them. In Los Angeles, concerns are growing around issues of homelessness, incarceration and use of emergency services among people with severe mental illnesses.
The Bergmans’ meaningful gift to UCLA Luskin closed out the Centennial Campaign for UCLA, one of the most ambitious fundraising campaigns ever by a public university. When it ended on Dec. 31, the university had raised a total of $5.49 billion and the Luskin School had exceeded its goal, raising over $74 million in gifts during the course of the campaign.
Barbara Yaroslavsky
BARBARA YAROSLAVSKY MEMORIAL FUND: AN UPDATE
When the BarbaraYaroslavsky Memorial Fund was established by Zev Yaroslavsky, it was an unprecedented campaign for the Luskin School. It has also turned out to be one of the most successful.
The campaign included additional support from friends and family to honor the legacy of advocacy and commitment to health care for all by Yaroslavsky’s late wife. The fund will support fellowships and internships for graduate students focusing on health and public health policy at UCLA Luskin.
“Barbara dedicated her life to the core belief that health care should be a right, not a privilege. She served on multiple state,
city and nonprofit boards in that quest,” Yaroslavsky said. “We believe that the most appropriate way to honor her memory is to support a new generation of students who will tirelessly pursue the goals and policies to which Barbara committed herself until
the very end of her life.”
So far, the Barbara Yaroslavsky campaign has raised more than $811,000 from individual donors and received an additional match of more than $400,000 from the university through the UCLA Chancellor’s Centennial Scholars Match Initiative.
At Golden Age Park in Los Angeles’ Westlake neighborhood, visitors can stroll along circular walkways, build strength and balance on low-impact exercise machines, practice their gardening skills, or rest in areas designed for socializing or solitude.
Spearheaded by Urban Planning Professor Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, pictured, a team from UCLA Luskin launched a study of senior-friendly open spaces based on a model from Taiwan where older adults enjoy the benefits of outdoor recreation.
Many parks in the United States are constructed with children in mind, leaving the over-65 population feeling unwelcome. The Westlake park incorporated aspects of urban planning, design and gerontology to turn a vacant lot into a small oasis with age-appropriate features.
If you aren’t mad, you should be. If you aren’t furious, you’re not paying attention.
The Luskin School relies on three first principles in our teaching and research.
First, policy should rest on evidence and evaluation of efficacy. We are best served by social decisions in which science and analysis are brought to bear on human problems.
Second, a central tenet in the shaping of those policies must be human and community well-being. Think of this as a Hippocratic oath for public affairs. Do no harm, and try to do good. Historically, our disciplines have not always lived up to that prescription, but I think this is a fair characterization of the guiding beliefs at work in the School and in our respective fields today.
Finally, in times of crisis, government can and must be at the center of shaping our path out of harm’s way. Yes, government will rely on the support and cooperation of philanthropy and civil society. And, yes, a robust social fabric of interconnected communities and rich deposits of social capital will serve any society in its defense, recovery and restoration. But in the last analysis, the allocation of values and the ability to command resources, cooperation and coordinated response to societal peril, where large numbers of lives are at stake, rests with government.
We are witnessing a moment where, to some degree or another, the events in American society and the actions of our leadership fail to reflect any of those three guiding principles. While some levels of government and specific agencies are engaged in heroic efforts to tamp down the coronavirus and ameliorate its consequences, others are asleep at the wheel, absent from the effort, or are — and it is difficult to fathom this —making matters worse.
Considerations of politics and profit are far too often displacing considerations of human suffering and mortality. Personal responsibility for collective well-being appears to be failing. The near-term prognosis is poor. And the success of other nations in addressing the pandemic and its effects make it plain that our misfortune in the United States simply does not have to be so.
In the midst of this incredible pandemic, the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery reminded us that before the first case of COVID-19, this society already had tremendous challenges in living up to the promise of our rhetoric, and the emotional outpouring of anger and demands for action that were unleashed, at long last, hold the potential for meaningful change, if only we can seize the moment.
◊
We have just completed a school year like no other, and, as I write this, we are busily preparing for yet another, largely displaced from Westwood and our bucolic campus, reliant on electronics and medical masks to interact, and working overtime to continue the delivery of our six degree programs and our important research. But even in this unusual time, the School and its faculty, staff and students continue our important work.
As I write, Luskin faculty are working on reducing harm among Los Angeles’ most vulnerable, helping renters struggling to stay housed, providing mental health support to frontline L.A. County workers, examining the challenges of transportation in times of transmissible illness, thinking through the financial impacts on survival for small municipal utilities, examining the despair of citizens of some of Los Angeles’ poorest communities, and working overtime to reform policing practices that lead so often to injustice and violence against minority communities. Our work and our adherence to the first principles of evidence-based social policy, ethical practices to enhance human dignity, and of an efficient and effective government remain in place.
It is in the most difficult times that we come to know what people are made of. I am proud of this School, and you should be too.
UCLA Luskin and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute have entered a partnership to support underrepresented students in the School’s graduate programs.
Beginning this fall, alumni of the institute’s programs — aimed at developing the next generation of Latino leaders — will receive a $7,500 scholarship if they go on to pursue a master’s degree at UCLA Luskin. The scholarship is renewable in the second year of study.
“We are thrilled to start building our partnership with CHCI” to further the School’s goal of diversifying its student body, said Kevin Franco, recruitment and advising officer for UCLA Luskin Public Policy.
Franco credited MPP student Michael Rios with bringing the alliance from idea to reality.
“I kept hearing about some of the initiatives we were discussing for recruiting students of color, but I felt that there was a huge missing link, that there was a solution that we weren’t really pursuing,” Rios said. That solution, he concluded, was funding.
MPP student Michael Rios initiated the partnership between the Luskin School and CHCI.
“The pool of students of color who go into a graduate program is small, and the pool who go into a policy program is even smaller,” he said. Top candidates may be weighing handsome offers of financial assistance from private universities. Students considering UCLA must also consider the cost of living on L.A.’s Westside.
“As a student of color, you often have financial hardships, so you’re going to do what makes the most sense financially,” Rios said.
To tip the balance in UCLA’s favor, Rios researched potential partners who might work with the Luskin School to attract and support a diverse student body. Late one night in the spring of 2019, he decided to act.
Impressed by the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute, which creates opportunities for leadership and civic engagement for young Latinos, Rios sent an inquiry via the Contact Us tab on the group’s website. It was the first modest step of a yearlong rollercoaster ride.
Along the way, Rios worked to keep both sides engaged in what often seemed like a long shot. But his patience paid off in February when CHCI and the Luskin School finalized the agreement.
In the end, Rios said, “it was a match made in heaven,” one that would benefit students of color, advance the Luskin School’s recruitment goals and support the institute’s efforts to expand its reach.
The scholarships, awarded by UCLA Luskin to students who complete CHCI’s leadership program, are renewable for a second year for those with top grades, making them worth a total of $15,000. Rios’ efforts will benefit students entering all of the School’s master’s programs: public policy, social welfare, and urban and regional planning.
With the CHCI scholarship as a model, Franco said he is interested in pursuing similar partnerships with student leadership institutes representing the black and Asian communities.
Rios anticipated that future agreements would be easier to complete.
“We have the foundation, we’ve gone through the formalities, we know what the agreements look like, and we now know that we have the backing of the faculty and staff,” he said.
Rios hopes his efforts, spurred by his own sense of isolation when he first arrived at UCLA, will resonate with ethnically diverse students considering a graduate education at the Luskin School.
“For prospective students, I think it would be cool to see that there are students in the program who are doing things to benefit other students of color,” he said.
The American Educational Research Association has honored Social Welfare Professor Ron Avi Astor with a Distinguished Research Award for his co-written article on the role of school-level factors in suicidal ideation in California schools, published in the Journal of Pediatrics. The article was co-written with Astor’s colleagues, Rami Benbenishty, professor emeritus at the School of Social Work at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Ilan Roziner, professor at the Coller School of Management at Tel Aviv University. Astor holds the Marjorie Crump Chair in Social Welfare and has a joint appointment at UCLA’s Graduate School of Education & Information Studies. He spoke about his research into suicide ideation among California students with the GSEIS publication Ampersand:
Social Welfare Chair Laura Abrams’ book on the complex lives of youth who transition out of Los Angeles’ juvenile justice system and into adulthood has received the 2020 Society for Social Work and Research Book Award.
Abrams and her co-author, triple Bruin Diane Terry BA ’02 MSW ’04 PhD ’12, received the prestigious award Jan. 18 during the annual conference of the Society for Social Work and Research in Washington, D.C.
This year’s conference highlighted several achievements by UCLA Luskin Social Welfare:
MSW students and faculty conducted a roundtable on their experiences providing legal assistance to migrants detained at the U.S.-Mexico border. After a week interviewing women and children held at a detention center in Dilley, Texas, the team created a set of tools for other advocates who are trying to help migrants who have faced trauma.
Abrams was formally inducted into the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare, a national honor society recognizing excellence in the field. Social Welfare Professor Ron Avi Astor, a member of the academy since 2017, delivered the induction address.
Maggie Thomas, who will join the Social Welfare faculty as an assistant professor in the fall, received the 2020 Doctoral Fellows Award for her dissertation, “Material Hardship, Public Assistance and Child Wellbeing: A Panel Data Study.”
Research by eight faculty, 12 Ph.D. students and four MSW students or recent graduates was presented during the five-day conference’s symposia, workshops, roundtables, and paper and poster presentations.
