LA Philanthropy Watch

This is my final post on the 18^th annual summit of the Empowerment Congress (a program of the California Community Empowerment Foundation), which was held last Saturday at California State University at Dominguez Hills.

The program included a welcome and introductions, a year-end review of activities in the Second District by Mark Ridley-Thomas, and a keynote address by Marian Wright Edelman for everyone assembled.  The second half of the conference featured nine break-out sessions.  I attended the workshop titled ‘Accessing County Services to Enhance and Empower Communities,’ which featured a panel discussion moderated by Steven Vasquez (CEO of GoodLife with Gabby).

Panelists included:

• Val LiHang Jacobo (CEO of the Jasmar Group and managing partner of Vajon LLC), who said, in speaking about organizing within the Pacific Islander community, “Empowerment is an art form… But the word itself is disingenuous.  It presupposes that you don’t have it.”
• Mary Jones-Darks (founding member of Baldwin Village Community in Action), who related her experiences attending community meetings, sitting in the back, and finally becoming an active volunteer.  She offered an insight that will resonate with many volunteers: even if you have 20 or 25 people in your group, “it’s going to be 4 or 5 of you doing all the work ….”  Later she spoke about the diversity of ethnic and cultural groups represented in her neighborhood.  “We live in the community together and we have to learn how to do that…. It’s a work in-progress.”
• Maria Verduzco-Smith (retired from Xerox, she has served in many leadership roles in the Lennox Coordinating Council), who offered a number of insights into activism including, “Once you’re an activist, they always ask you to do something else.” and
• Grace Cainoy Weltman (founding executive director of the Child Care Alliance of Los Angeles) , who became active in the Empowerment Congress as a USC student 16 years ago.

Ms. Weltman presented an overview of strategic approach taken by Empowerment Congress to create active, engaged citizens prepared to take charge of their communities:

Educate – holding annual summits and town hall meetings; finding opportunities to train communities and constituents; disseminating information; and developing leadership within the community.
Engage – convening around specific issues; finding opportunities to get people involved; staging dialogues and community discussions; responding to issues and events in a timely way; and sustaining activities and events.
Empower: mobilizing communities and groups around specific issues to act and make changes that improve their lives – arranging meetings with decision-makers and elected officials; conducting public campaigns (phone banks, post cards, media engagement); speaking and testifying; proposing solutions; and hosting events.

This is a model that works.  Two of the panelists related their embarrassment, before becoming activists, about their neighborhoods – because of the social problems associated with them.  Mary Jones-Darks, who lives in Baldwin Village (near Crenshaw), which had transitioned from an affluent community to one with many needs, told people she lived “south of the 10 freeway.”  Mary Verduzco-Smith, born and raised in Santa Monica, moved to Lennox and told people that she lived “east of the airport.”

But once they became active – taking responsibility for their communities, organizing their neighbors, and bringing about positive changes – they experienced a pride in their neighborhoods.

(The photograph features Grace Weltman.)

This is the second post in a brief series about the 18^th annual summit of the Empowerment Congress, which was held last Saturday at CSU Dominguez Hills.  (The first post is here.)

Mark Ridley-Thomas spoke at the gathering, offering a year-end review of activities in the Second District during 2009, before introducing keynote speaker Marian Wright Edelman.    The range of activities highlighted included this handful:

• a Florencia 13 gang injunction in partnership with Sheriff Lee Baca;
• beginning a series of motions before the Board of Supervisors to end child deaths – “I am on a mission and I encourage you to join me!”;
• a congestion pricing plan for the 110 and 10 freeways;
• an environmental battle in Baldwin Hills over oil derricks; and, of course,
• the decision of the Board of Supervisors to reopen Martin Luther King, Jr. Hospital (which LA Philanthropy Watch covered in a previous post).

The brief video shown just before Mr. Ridley-Thomas’ remarks illustrated the significance of the Empowerment Congress – and the citizens who are inspired to action on behalf of their communities.  There were clips of the Supervisor imploring residents of his district to demonstrate their support for MLK hospital by attending the Board of Supervisors’ meeting when the reopening of the facility was under consideration.  And turn out, they did.  There was standing room only at the Tuesday morning meeting.

The Empowerment Congress and the citizen-activists who comprise the organization create the conditions to bring about change.  Their presence at a Board meeting bore witness to the importance of the hospital to their community in a more powerful way than Mark Ridley-Thomas could have mustered on his own.  This gets to the heart of what community organizing is all about.

As I mentioned in my previous post, the Empowerment Congress is a program of the California Community Empowerment Foundation (which is one of scores of projects of Community Partners).

My next post on the annual summit will feature Marian Wright Edelman’s keynote address.

(Photo of Mark Ridley-Thomas holding up his iPhone as he urged the audience, at the beginning of his remarks, to text donations in support of aid efforts in  Haiti.)

Sixteen hundred people attended the 18th annual summit of the Empowerment Congress on Saturday at CSU Dominguez Hills.  The theme was “We Are the Second District: Educated, Engaged, and Empowered for Action.”

The Second District, of course, is the area represented by Mark Ridley-Thomas, who was elected to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors in November 2008.  More than 2.3 million people reside in this huge, sprawling district – one of five in the nation’s most populous county – which includes “Carson, Compton, Culver City, Gardena, Hawthorne, Inglewood and Lynwood, portions or all of ten out of fifteen Los Angeles City Council Districts and the unincorporated communities, of Alondra Park, Athens, Del Aire, Dominguez, East Compton, El Camino Village, Florence, Ladera Heights, Lennox, View Park, West Athens, West Carson, West Compton and Willowbrook.”

Supervisor Ridley-Thomas launched the Empowerment Congress in the early ’90s after his election to the Los Angeles City Council and continued to nurture the organization during his tenure in the California State Senate and, now, as County Supervisor.  Initially, the Empowerment Congress was one of many citizen-activist groups without a formal tax designation, but four years ago it became a program of the California Community Empowerment Foundation, which is a project of Community Partners, the LA 501(c)(3) that serves as an incubator – offering support and infrastructure – for fledgling organizations.

What’s the role of the Empowerment Congress?  As near as I can tell: to train the constituents of Mark Ridley-Thomas to become community organizers – to learn, first-hand, how to organize their neighbors and enlist local government in their efforts to solve neighborhood problems.

What a great idea!  This is hands-on democracy that’s straight out of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and an ideal role for the nonprofit and voluntary sector.  And, obviously, based on the enthusiastic crowd that turned out on a Saturday morning and the stories that local activists told, the Empowerment Congress has been highly successful.

In the next few days, I will offer a series of posts on this summit.