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Teamwork with mutual benefits

Partnerships tackle L.A. issues

Did you know that UCLA is involved in a hip-hop-themed community center near Koreatown? A program for refugees and torture survivors in Venice? A storefront literacy program in Pico-Union? An affordable-housing project in south Los Angeles?

Through the UCLA in LA program, faculty, students and staff collaborate with community-based nonprofit organizations to identify and find ways to address issues facing Los Angeles. Since its launch in 2002, UCLA in LA has forged 79 partnerships that are mutually beneficial to the community partner and the campus partner.

The process involves providing funding and support for the joint development and implementation of projects that meld community knowledge with campus knowledge. The by-product of the collaborations are rich exchanges of expert advice, technical assistance, research, education and training for all involved.

“This work is about engaging Los Angeles in real time on substantive issues,” explained Franklin D. Gilliam Jr., associate vice chancellor for Community Partnerships.
UCLA Today turns the spotlight on four model UCLA in LA programs. For more information on these and other partnerships, visit: http://la.ucla.edu.

Jews protesting in Los Angeles (Herald-Examiner Collection/Los Angeles Public Library).

The Jewish Experience at the 'End of the West'
A very logical partnership occurred when history professors David Myers and Stephen Aron sat down to talk about a joint Autry Center-UCLA research project that would explore the complex history of Jews in Los Angeles.

The Autry National Center had recently completed a major museum exhibition called “Jewish Life in the American West,” and Aron, executive director of the Autry’s Institute for the Study of the American West, had been looking for an opportunity to do a sequel to that show. At the same time Myers, director of UCLA’s Center for Jewish Studies, found his interest in the American-Jewish experience piqued by a conversation he’d had with a local businessman.

With the help of doctoral student Karen Wilson, Myers and Aron have developed a long-term research project, “ ‘At the End of the West’: Jews in the Cultural Mosaic of Los Angeles,” which compares the expectations and experiences of Los Angeles Jews to those of Jews in other American cities and to those of diverse newcomers to Los Angeles in the 19th and 20th centuries.

“Typically, American history has been written with a sort of Eastern-centric bias,” Aron said. “And here was an opportunity to see what Jewish history looked like, viewed from the West, in particular, from Los Angeles.”

The team has been busy arranging a November conference to be held at the Autry National Center, working to produce K-12 curricular materials, creating a Web site (lajh.org) and laying the foundation for a major exhibition to debut sometime between 2008 and 2010.

“With the wide-ranging resources of UCLA and the Autry, there are many aspects of the community that we think we can bring scholarly attention to that individual scholars in the past have not been able to do,” Myers said. “The collaborative nature of our research project will allow us to comprehend, in the broadest possible sense, this rich and diverse historical experience.”

— Wendy Soderburg

ESL students at Centro Latino de Educación Popular

It's Never too Late to Learn to Read
In a bright and airy classroom in a storefront school near Los Angeles’ MacArthur Park, Lastenia Ciru, a restaurant cook and mother of two, is finally learning how to read and write. Not in English. but her native Spanish.

El car-ro de Car-men es ca-ro. Ciru, 36, writes the words in pencil on lined tablet paper. Here at the Centro Latino de Educación Popular, Ciru is a student for the first time in her life. She was only 7 when her parents put her to work selling pan dulce on the streets of Honduras. Before coming to the Centro, she could neither read nor write.

Two months ago, Ciru walked into the Centro, which is located in a Pico-Union neighborhood crowded with small shops and eateries catering to Spanish speakers. Since opening nearly 15 years ago, the Centro has become known as a warm and welcoming place where anyone can take classes in Spanish language literacy, ESL or basic computer skills, all at no charge.

The Centro-UCLA partnership involves Concepcion Valadez, associate professor in the Graduate School of Education & Information Studies, UCLA student interns and Centro staff.

The Centro’s time-tested teaching philosophy is that Spanish speakers must learn to read and write in their native language before learning to do so in English. At the Centro, each Spanish literacy student sits at a flat-screened Mac. With the help of a self-paced software program called ¡Leamos! (Let’s Read!), developed in collaboration with Valadez, completely illiterate Latino adults can read and write at a second grade level in 16 weeks. Afterward, students take ESL classes.

Spanish speakers come to the Centro for all sorts of reasons. Arturo Sanchez, 21, a busboy from Mexico City, wants to get a better job. Ana Melgar, 33, in the United States for 18 years, has obtained guardianship over a 2-year-old girl and needs to read the court papers. Laura Perdomo, 34, wants to help her school-age children with their homework.

It’s never too late in life to learn, said Dorit Dowler-Guerrero, the Centro’s director of adult education. “I can’t tell you how many women come here and say they want to read the Bible before they die.”

— Anne Burke

Mexican film star Cantinflas (center)

Eliminating the Stigma of Mental Illness
Steven Lopez has a few tricks up his sleeve when it comes to educating Latinos about mental illness, a somber topic that carries a heavy stigma in any community. Using upbeat pop music and video from a popular kids’ TV show and an old Cantinflas movie, the UCLA clinical psychology professor and his community partner created a Spanish-language multimedia presentation that demystifies psychosis.

Working with the Latino Behavioral Health Institute, a private, nonprofit organization that promotes mental health services for Latinos, Lopez is hoping to seek out people with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depression as well as mentally ill substance abusers in the city of San Fernando. To do that, the partners need residents’ help. But first, they need to explain in a non-threatening way what constitutes mental illness and the symptoms of hallucinations, delusions and disorganized thinking.

“The main barrier keeping people from getting services is that family members don’t recognize psychosis,” Lopez said. “They see that something is wrong, but they don’t consider it mental illness.”

By taking their presentation to churches, community groups, and social service and health agencies, the partners hope to enlist residents’ help in finding the mentally ill and determining how Latino families are affected by the disorders. If the partners find a gap in services and can document it, their database may help in applying for funding to develop family-focused services for Latinos.

Mental illness is prevalent in all communities, Lopez emphasized. “But we have found that the burden is greater for people of minority backgrounds who tend not to get mental health care right away. And when they do, it’s usually of limited quality.”

— Cynthia Lee

Robert Nakamura at Manzanar

Using Manzanar to Teach Tolerance
The internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans following the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack is one of the darkest periods of American history. Befittingly, it is the starting point of “Pilgrimage of Tolerance: An Educational Odyssey From December 7, 1941 to September 11, 2001,” a one-year collaborative project launched in June 2004 by the Asian American Studies Center, the Manzanar 9/11 Committee and the LA Downtown Media Center.

Using digital video technology, printed text and community programming, the project aims to distribute educational packages in schools, libraries and organizations “to educate people about racial discrimination and the need for tolerance,” said Robert Nakamura, a professor in the Department of Asian American Studies who heads the project and was himself held from the age of 6 to 9 in Manzanar.

The first erected and the best preserved of 10 camps from California to Arkansas, Manzanar is located in eastern California’s Owens Valley at the foot of the Sierra Nevada. It is now a National Historic Site.

“We feel there is a direct parallel between the aftermath of Pearl Harbor and the aftermath of 9/11, when the general racism of society reared its ugly head against Arab Americans,” said Nakamura.

A key feature of his project is a 30-minute digital documentary film revolving around the first pilgrimage by a group of people to the Manzanar camp in 1969, which started the nation’s Asian-American movement amid hopes that people’s civil rights would never be trampled again.

At a time when 9/11-related crimes of bias and hate against Muslims are still continuing amid heightened homeland security and the detainment and deportment of immigrants, Nakamura hopes his project will help “deflect some of the suspicion not just against Arab Americans, but also the Latino community, which is a victim of racism.”

— Ajay Singh