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.)

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.)

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.

Pool’s obituary reports that, in addition to the efforts of government officials – at the city, county, and state level – and the Integrated Recovery Network (a project of Community Partners), hundreds of readers made donations to assist the family, and a benefit was staged on their behalf at the Laugh Factory.

LA Philanthropy Watch posted on the LA Times‘ stories in October and on the Laugh Factory benefit in November.

This initiative grows out of the conviction that civic participation is critically important for democracy and that voting is central to civic participation.  There are huge disparities in participation levels – which vary by neighborhood, spoken language, ethnicity, income, and age, for instance – and considerable evidence that outreach and education can boost participation.  The mission of the Nonprofit Voter Engagement Network is to expand the role of American nonprofits in promoting civic participation and democracy.

Why focus on nonprofits?  Because nonprofits are uniquely positioned to play a major role in closing participation gaps and invigorating democracy.  And because boosting the level of civic engagement is in the interest of the people and neighborhoods that nonprofits serve.  Nonprofit organizations have:

• Day to day contact with communities that are often marginalized;
• Unique and trusting relationships with the communities they serve;
• A nonpartisan approach that new and infrequent voters may appreciate;
• An interest in the positive role of government; and
• An ability to integrate voter outreach into ongoing activities.

Sarah Pillsbury and Marcy Koukhab (pictured) of California Participation Project hosted a session for nonprofit organizations this morning at the headquarters of the California Endowment.  Other speakers included Frances Talbott-White of the League of Women Voters of Los Angeles, Eugene Lee of the Asian Pacific American Legal Center (APALC), and Norma Vega, who directs the Office of Census 2010, established by Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

Ms. Talbott-White reviewed election resources, many of which are available at the website of the League of Women Voters, which encourages informed and active participation, and at Project Vote Smart.  Mr. Lee reviewed a recent report of APALC, documenting the effectiveness of the group’s get out the vote efforts in 2006 and 2008; the report is available on both APALC’s website and the home page of the Nonprofit Voter Engagement Network.

Ms. Vega is seeking partners to make certain that every one of the city’s 1.4 million households is represented in the census count.  With the help of nonprofit organizations – to offer information, reassurance, and help with the forms – the city hopes to avoid an undercount that would greatly disadvantage Los Angeles.

Information on this community-wide effort – which is organized into three regions: Valley, Central/East, and West/South/Harbor – is available at LA Counts 2010.   The website includes these key dates:

• March 8-10 – Announcement letter
• March 15-17 – Initial mailing of Census form
• March 29-31 – Census Homeless Enumeration Program
• April 1 – Census Day
• April 22-24 – Reminder postcard mailed
• May 1-July 10 – In-home follow up to non-responders

Community Partners provides incubator services – support and infrastructure – for fledgling organizations, such as the California Participation Project (which does not yet have a web presence of its own or at Community Partners’ webpage).

The group, Integrated Recovery Network, launched a year ago under the auspices of Community Partners, finds housing for people who would otherwise be homeless – while providing comprehensive services, as needed.  Essentially, if I understand correctly, the group has created a network of providers (of housing, medical care, mental health treatment, and addiction management) to assure that people in need receive seamless, comprehensive support.