Liberty Hill Blog: News from the Frontlines

May 11 Upton Sinclair Dinner Presenters Announced

Byline: Barbara Osborn

I just got the okay to let people know who will present the awards at this year's Upton Sinclair gala May 11. The ChangeMaker Award to Margarita Ramirez will be presented by Sylvia Castillo, Congresswoman Karen Bass's District Director. The Founder's Award to Gary Stewart will be presented by Michele Prichard, veteran Liberty Hill staff person, Director of Common Agenda. The Upton Sinclair Award to Tim Gill will be presented by Brickson Diamond, President/CEO of Music Foundry, LLC, a newly formed multi-platform music exhibition enterprise and Chairman of the board of The Blackhouse Foundation. Find more information about the dinner and the honorees.

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Organizing for Health

 

Jan Robinson Flint

Byline: Kafi Blumenfield

Many L.A.-area schools are on spring break but Liberty Hill’s training program, the Wally Marks Leadership Institute, has been in full session—in the conference room at our office.  So I’ve been chatting in the hallway this past week with participants, including leaders of Black Women for Wellness.  

BWW leaders Yaw K. Davis, Jan Robinson Flint and Dawn Sanders are training in grassroots fundraising and other capacity-building skills. That's Jan pictured above giving a nod to Liberty Hill supporters with the sign reading "Asante Sana" (Swahili for "thank you").  

Black Women for Wellness has touched the lives of more than 15,000 women and their families with health information and education since its founding 1997. It was started by a group of sisterfriends concerned with maternal and infant health disparities suffered by African American women. It is now a vibrant education and advocacy organization committed to enhancing the health and well-being of Black women.

BWW has expanded the dialogue about HIV prevention among Black women, increased communication among the Pan African communities of Los Angeles, trained breast-health motivators and safe-sex educators, created a mentoring program for new mothers, conducted research into connections between certain beauty products and health issues, and been a vital presence offering a racial and gender perspective at many influential conferences and government hearings. It has been present, for example, as a significant voice advocating for women’s reproductive health services in deliberations about the re-opening of Martin Luther King Jr. Hospital in South L.A.

At its monthly breakfast gathering called Sisters at Eight (that’s a.m.!), BWW brings activists, policymakers, health care professionals and other Black women together for discussion, networking and programs like last week’s “The Impact of the Media on Women and Girls.”

Liberty Hill's support of grassroots community organizations in L.A. includes not only grantmaking but also leadership training, alliance building and other strategic initiatives. The Wally Marks Leadership Institute is part of that multi-faceted support.

BWW leaders also attended last year's Leadership Institute and Dawn was one of the speakers at our January celebration of achievements by first-year participants. You can read some of her comments about what she learned here. 

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Overview: Cumulative Environmental Impacts in L.A.

Byline: Elva Yanez, special contributor

SPECIAL UPDATE: The powerpoint presentations from the Cumulative Environmental Impact Policy Briefing April 6, 2011 are available online.

After years of fighting hazardous and polluting projects on a smokestack-to-smokestack basis, environmental justice advocates and residents are turning to pro-active policy solutions as the lever to ‘undo’ inequitable neighborhood conditions and improve residents’ health, safety and quality of life.  Like their early counterparts working on tobacco, alcohol and gun violence issues—environmental justice (EJ) advocates are exploring innovative strategies to ensure that these residents are not permanently relegated to “shorter, sicker lives.” 

EJ advocates recognize that influencing policy allows them to get ahead of the environmental hazards curve.  It offers the best opportunity for the biggest improvements in health outcomes.  They understand that necessary and significant changes in neighborhood conditions will not take place without changes in policy.

As a serious public health problem that disproportionately affects some groups more than others, the issue of cumulative impacts has much in common with tobacco, alcohol and gun violence issues.  As such, there is much that the EJ community can learn from the advocates who raised the visibility of ‘booze, butts and bullets’ issues and brought powerful and innovative solutions to the forefront. 

LESSON #1: Experimentation = Innovation

One of the key lessons from these movements is that policy advocacy success has come about through a process of experimenting with a number of promising approaches, learning through trial and error, and ultimately focusing on specific evidence-based policy strategies.  Local restrictions on handguns—that got their start in West Hollywood—have reduced gun fatalities.  Regulating the placement and distribution of liquor stores in South LA, Oakland and other urban centers has reduced rates of crime and nuisance.  In tobacco, it took a good deal of time, experimentation, research and evaluation to determine that excise taxes and smokefree laws are the two most effective strategies to reduce consumption.

LESSON #2: Significant Power Lies at the Local Level

Another key lesson from the nonsmokers’ rights movement is that there is power and strategic advantage in working at the local level.  Its magic.  In the 1980’s Walter Merryman gave a speech to his tobacco industry colleagues.  Here’s how he described the growing tide of city and county smokefree ordinances: 

“At the local level, it’s kind of like getting pecked to death by a gaggle of geese.  There are at least 80 cities and counties which regulate smoking in restaurants, most of them in California, that bastion of libertarian laid-back demeanor.”

Merryman’s dis to California aside, today there are over 3,000 cities and counties in the US that have local laws in effect restricting smoking in public places.  Over 30% of the U.S. population lives in a town or state with a comprehensive clean indoor air law.  A movement that got its start in Lodi, California has gone international and there are now 17 countries with comprehensive smokefree laws.

Policy innovation comes from the bottom up—starting locally.  The most effective way to engage people on any issue is at the community level.   Local advocates have more power and authority in their own communities than in statehouses or inside the Beltway.  Local policy makers are more accessible and more accountable to advocates who might be a friend, neighbor or relative.  The many victories related to guns, tobacco, alcohol and, more recently, healthy food environments confirm that local prevention policies are more effective and easier to enact, implement and enforce than policies at the state or national level.   A companion lesson concerns preemption and the need to watch for state or federal legislation that attempts to put a stop to strong, effective local policies.

Toxic Hotspot Briefing This Week - An Overview

If you missed the Toxic Hotspot policy briefing on Wednesday, there's a terrific article in today's L.A. Progressive that provides an overview of the three-hour session. Powerpoints of the presentations will be up on the Liberty Hill website early next week. 

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Read previous posts about environmental justice.

 

Civil Rights: Back on the Bus

 

 

Byline: Susan LaTempa

It happens over and over again, says the Bus Riders Union.  

The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (also known as MTA or Metro) responds to an abundance of demands for transportation projects and a chronic shortage of funds by implementing its budget in a way that discriminates against low income people of color.

Like some sort of wicked fairytale parent, Metro was instructed back in 1994 by a powerful wizard (the federal court) to distribute its treasures fairly to all its hungry children—buses, light rail, and subway. For 10 years, the powerful wizard made sure—via a federal consent decree—that Metro stopped depriving its weakest, hardest working child (the bus system) of its fair share. The consent decree was issued to make sure that Metro stopped violating the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and required Metro to rectify the harm it caused to L.A.'s poor working families by violating the Act.

As a result, the spunky hard-working bus system grew in stature and popularity and strength. With money to reduce fares, buy new clean-fuel vehicles, and start "Rapid" service on major streets, the bus system saw a spike in ridership and dramatic improvement in quality. L.A.'s was the largest clean-fuel fleet in the country.

But when the decree expired and the powerful wizard went away five years ago, the wicked MTA once again started favoring its subway and light-rail children and once again began to give them more than their share.

Fortunately for the working families of L.A., the Bus Riders Union, a Liberty Hill grantee, doesn't believe in leaving wicked deeds unchallenged. When the Bus Riders Union looks at the numbers, it sees that since the federal consent decree expired, Metro has been eliminating lines, cutting hours of service and raising fares. It sees that if the current round of cuts proposed by Metro are implemented, 100% of the court-ordered expansion of the bus service (in hours of service) will have been eliminated in just the last three years.

When promises are broken, the noisy members of the Bus Riders Union speak up in all sort of ways.

The latest way the Bus Riders Union spoke up was to submit an admnistrative complaint last fall to the Federal Transportation Administration Office of Civil Rights. With the help of Public Advocates, Inc., of San Francisco, BRU filed this detailed document complaining that in making service cuts in the past three years, Metro was in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

In response, the FTA announced two weeks ago that it would conduct "an on-site compliance review of los Angeles MTA [Metro] this year." 

An on-site compliance review is not a magic wand. "We see this as a small tactical victory in a broader civil rights struggle," says Esperanza Martinez, Lead Organizer for BRU. "These cuts are harmful, they impact real-life people. We're not just talking facts and figures." Or fairytales.

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Can't get to toxic hotspot briefing? We'll be live tweeting!

If you were hoping to attend our Cumulative Environmental Impact briefing this coming Wednesday 9-12 at the Japanese American National Museum, we're sorry, but there's no more room.

The good news is we will be livetweeting and recording a webstream which we will post to the blog after the event. So no need to miss the presentations of:

Dr. Jonathan Fielding, Director of the County Department of Public Health

Dr. Tony Iton of The California Endowment

Dr. Richard Jackson, UCLA School of Public Health

Dr. Rachel Morello-Frosch, UC Berkeley School of Public Health

Bill Gallegos, Communities for a Better Environment

Andrea Hricko, Southern California Environmental Health Sciences Center

Elva Yanez, LA Collaborative for Environmental Health and Justice