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VOL. 24. NO.2 SEPTEMBER 23, 2003

Photo by James MacCurdy

Urban planning graduate student Eric Schwimmer will help community activists stabilize their neighborhood.

Center for community partnerships awards inaugural grants

Collaborators for a better Los Angeles

BY cynthia lee and karen mack
UCLA Today Staff

The Center for Community Partnerships (CCP), the operational arm of the UCLA in LA initiative, has announced the inaugural recipients of its Community Partnership Grants for faculty, staff and graduate students. The competitively awarded grants support research and other collaborations involving a UCLA partner and a nonprofit organization in the Los Angeles region.

For this year, the center received 80 proposals for campus-based projects and funded 18 in amounts ranging from $13,000 to $50,000. An additional competition for community-based projects is under way. No public funds are being used in the grants program.

Established by Chancellor Albert Carnesale in September 2002 and directed by Associate Vice Chancellor Franklin D. Gilliam Jr., CCP develops and supports mutually beneficial partnerships that link UCLA expertise with community knowledge in three key areas: children, youth and families; economic development; and arts and culture.

Here are three of the projects selected to receive 2003-04 campus-based Community Partnership Grants:

Stabilizing a low-income community
Buffeted by rising rents and home prices, pressured by downtown redevelopment and demand for student housing, the low-income residents of one neighborhood in South Los Angeles bordered by Maple, Adams and Hoover streets are struggling to stay in their rented homes. And the Esperanza Community Housing Corporation, which is at the forefront of the movement to stabilize the neighborhood, is about to get help from a graduate student in urban planning. With his CCP grant, Eric Schwimmer plans to build a “distressed neighborhoods database,” which could include such statistics as changes in demographics, code violations and tax delinquencies, that will give community organizers a systematic way to isolate worrisome trends, pinpoint problem areas and strategize. “This would provide statistically accurate information that Esperanza could take to the city council to influence policy,” said Schwimmer. “It would tell organizers where displacement is happening most rapidly. And it could identify economic

Courtesy of the Digital Mural Lab at the Social and Public Art Resource Center

Tiles showing children in their chosen poses formed the border of a mural they created to celebrate diversity.

development or affordable housing opportunities — for example, an old warehouse that could be converted into a small business center.” Residents, said the student, will determine what kind of data to collect and how to collect it, based on the goals they set.

The art of teaching
Two years ago, 5- and 6-year-olds at the Corinne A. Seeds University Elementary School created an unusual mural that celebrates their diversity while saluting their similarities. Education doctoral student Rachel Estrella, who led the project, applied Professor Judith Baca’s techniques of participatory design to the process. In looking for images to serve as metaphors, the children captured on canvas a spider as the maker of the world sitting on a web that links them together. Bordering the mural are ceramic tiles depicting the figures of students in different poses of their choice. “It ended up being an amazing success,” said Estrella, who wove in lesson plans that integrated art, physics, math, dance and drama. “We couldn’t let it just go up into the atmosphere.” With her grant, Estrella, working with the Digital Mural Lab at the Social and Public Art Resource Center in Venice, will produce a DVD-ROM and manual, outlining the development of a mural arts program so that teachers, many in art-deprived schools, can follow her path.

A community garden of healing
When Robert Krochmal was doing his residency in family medicine at White Memorial Medical Center in East Los Angeles, the hospital staff and neighbors decided to plant a community garden of organic plants and herbs on vacant land owned by the hospital. Now Krochmal and David Heber, the director of the center where Krochmal does scientific, evidence-based evaluation of herbal medicine, are teaming up to learn more about organic medicinal plants that have been part of the healing tradition of Latino communities. Assisting from UCLA will be botanists, medical students, researchers and World Arts and Cultures folklore experts who have assembled a large database on medicinal herbs used in folk healing. The team hopes to plant a

Photo by Robert Krochmal

In East L.A., residents harvest tomatoes from a community garden that will be expanded to include medicinal plants.

garden of medicinal herbs with Proyecto Jardín, a community group in Boyle Heights, and offer workshops on how to grow, harvest, prepare and safely use these herbs. From the community, the UCLA team will learn about the aesthetic and mystical qualities of herbs and will study attitudes toward traditional herbal medicine and Western medicine. “We’re creating a place for educational exchange and for dialogue,” Krochmal said.

OTHER WINNING COMMUNITY PARTNERSHIPS

In addition to the three highlighted projects, 15 other grants were awarded to faculty, staff and graduate students:

Eva Baker, professor and director of UCLA’s Center for the Study of Evaluation/National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing in the Graduate School of Education & Information Studies, working with the Los Angeles Educational Partnership (LAEP). They will design a system that LAEP can use to monitor and improve its program to help Pacoima-area families become informed consumers of community health and social services.

Jennifer Blankenship, assistant director of development, School of the Arts and Architecture, partnering with the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) to continue UCLArts ArtsBridge for 2003-04. Under ArtsBridge, undergraduate and graduate students provide hands-on arts workshops in K-12 public schools that lack arts education.

Melany Dela Cruz, research analyst at the Asian American Studies Center, partnering with the United American Indian Involvement and the Coalition of Asian Pacific American Community Development. They will examine the nexus among human capital, labor-market status and home ownership for American Indians and Asians in Los Angeles County. The data will help the organizations to formulate sound public policy and improve services.

Christoph Heinicke, adjunct professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences, partnering with the Westside Family Health Clinic, Venice Family Clinic and the Infant Support Program of the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District to improve the UCLA Family Development Project. It offers intervention services for families at risk for abusing and/or neglecting their infants.

Douglas Houston, researcher with the Ralph and Goldy Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, partnering with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to analyze neighborhood-level usage patterns in order to identify underserved neighborhoods and focus on successful outreach strategies.

Jack Katz, professor of sociology, partnering with Father Greg Boyle, Homeboy Industries, to offer educational and mentoring intervention to gang-impacted youths from East Los Angeles. Trainees will learn how to write ethnographic field notes about their everyday lives. With improved writing and computing skills, trainees could work as office clerks at Homeboy Industries or elsewhere.

Deborah Lintz, law student, partnering with the Unusual Suspects Youth Theatre Program. She will organize a team of UCLA students to work with Los Angeles teenagers and this nonprofit gang-prevention organization to create a film. The film will help the public gain a better understanding of gang life and help participants become aware of the opportunities available to them in education and film.

Raquel Monroe, graduate student in World Arts and Cultures, partnering with the Minority AIDS Project (MAP), a performance-based HIV intervention program developed by and for African-American women at sexual risk in the Crenshaw Baldwin Village. Women participants from MAP, after taking workshops in writing, movement and choreography and songwriting, will give two audience participa-tory performances. Monroe will train agency staff and participants in performance-based interventions.

Chon Noriega, director of the Chicano Studies Research Center, partnering with Self-Help Graphics and Art to rescue and preserve its renowned art collection and institutional papers. A computerized collection management system will be developed to catalogue its print collection, providing increased community access to the center’s resources.

Kathy O’Byrne, executive director of the Center for Experiential Education and Service Learning, partnering with community health councils to train undergraduates and staff from nonprofit agencies serving children, youth and families in program evaluation. Pairs of students and agency staff will then undertake a program evaluation study at the staff member’s agency.
Luis Pena, graduate student in the Graduate School of Education & Information Studies, partnering with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF). They will help schools and communities support parents’ participation in their children’s academic lives, help educators improve teacher-parent cooperation and communication and make MALDEF’s Parent School Partnership program more effective. The project culminates with a final research report, a community meeting and a conference.

Sarah Tolbert, assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry, partnering with LAUSD to design experiments for high school students that combine fundamental aspects of science with nanotechnology. The program is a joint effort of the California NanoSystems Institute, the NSF-sponsored Materials Creation Integrated Graduate Education and Research Training program, Center X and LAUSD.

Dora Valentin, resident director in the Office of Residential Life, partnering with the Residents’ Council of the Ujima Village Housing Authority. They will involve students living in the DeNeve Plaza Evergreen and Fir buildings in projects that range from after-school mentoring to literacy at the Ujima Village public housing site.

John Vallier, assistant librarian in the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive, partnering with Kayamanan Ng Lahi Philippine Folk Arts to expand the archive’s local Filipino-American collections and preserve and increase access to recordings held by UCLA and the community, among other goals.

Roger Waldinger, chair of the sociology department, partnering with the Salvadoran American National Association (SANA) to help it develop an interactive Web site with information about the organization as well as a self-portrait of the experience of Salvadoran migration and settlement in Los Angeles. Waldinger also plans to produce a brochure about the organization and its activities and to document its history.