:: UCLA TODAY Home

©2004
The Regents of the University of California
 

yesterday, today & tomorrow

CULTURAL CONNECTIONS

Using theater to build a bridge between young people from South Africa and the United States, organizers of the Soze Project II will send 12 Los Angeles-area children and six mentors who are UCLA students and alumni to South Africa this month. For three weeks, they and their counterparts from the Kalaneng Art Tracks Theater Company will exchange stories from their lives and share cultural similarities and differences. In 2001, the Soze Project, a monthlong cultural exchange between South African and Los Angeles young people, took place at UCLA. UCLA’s Community Programs Office and Equal Opportunity Productions, a local nonprofit arts outreach program, created the project with South Africa’s internationally acclaimed Market Theatre and the University of Witwatersrand.

FIGHTING CANCER TOGETHER

Leading-edge experimental cancer treatments will be provided to an underserved patient population in South Los Angeles under a new partnership between UCLA’s Jonsson Cancer Center and Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science. The partnership, funded in part by a two-year $500,000 grant from the National Cancer Institute, will bring Jonsson Cancer Center clinical trials to Drew University patients. The initiative also seeks to strengthen Drew University’s own cancer research and training programs through collaborative research projects and partnerships with UCLA scientists. Additionally, the partnership program will recruit and train individuals who, in turn, will stay and work with residents of South Los Angeles’ underserved communities.

SPREAD OF POVERTY

The poor population in the Los Angeles region has become more geographically concentrated over the past three decades, according to a study recently released by UCLA’s Ralph and Goldy Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies and done in conjunction with the Brookings Institution’s Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy. The proportion of the region’s poor who live in impoverished neighborhoods — with poverty rates of at least 20% — almost doubled in 30 years, from 29% in 1970 to 57% in 2000. According to the report, co-written by Lewis Center director Paul Ong, the percentage of poor neighborhoods in suburban Los Angeles County quadrupled between 1970 and 2000. The percentage tripled in surrounding counties and remained relatively constant in inner-city Los Angeles.