A Year Of Change

As the year ends, it’s clear this has been a year of change, and an opportunity for all of us to be the change.

Liberty Hill’s change-making helped make great gains for the environment.  L.A. is now at the forefront of building the green economy and addressing global warming. With Liberty Hill’s support in the last 12 months--

• L.A. launched a “green business” certification program to create incentives for local businesses to go green. For instance, local hotels now have a clear incentive when they replace incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescents. Not only do they save 65% on overall lighting costs. They are able to tout their green accommodations which enviro-savvy travelers increasingly look for.  See below for a blog post about the program.

• At the Ports, one of the country’s biggest sources of pollution, truck pollution will be reduced by 50% over the next five years.

• L.A. also adopted a green building policy, agreed to increase green purchases and services by 25% in the coming year, and developed an ambitious plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 35%.

• The single largest pool of state funds in the history of the United States was created for urban parks. This money is earmarked for low-income park-poor communities.

What’s Liberty Hill’s piece of these changes? We helped set many of them in motion. We funded key leaders. We brought pivotal players together. We brokered our relationships and trained leaders to advance change.

These environmental victories will continue in 2009. And we’ll be intensifying our work in some additional areas. This year’s greatest challenge was the passage of Prop 8. In the last six weeks we’ve blogged extensively on Prop 8 and been involved in many high-level discussions about next steps. That’s why we’ve committed to doubling our investment in LGBTQ justice in the next year. We need to bring straight and LGBTQ communities into common purpose across our diverse backgrounds. We need to advance equality for all and we need to do it now.

Our track record building alliances across communities paid off on Election Day in the Asian/API communities. They firmly rejected Prop 8. Our contribution to this successful outreach and education can be read in a previous blog post and in our annual report.

In the New Year, we’ll be working aggressively to take advantage of the hard won opportunities before us.  For ongoing updates about our plans, please email us and we’ll add you to our growing list of Change Agents.