While bad news is never difficult to find, I can tell you exactly where to go tonight for a dose of good news: For those of you within the reach of LA’s Fox 11 news station, fire up your TiVos and set them to record a half hour news special called A League of Our Own at 10:30 p.m.
The show profiles an innovative program designed by the Los Angeles Urban league that aims to fundamentally transform the 70-block neighborhood surrounding Crenshaw High School.
The idea behind the Urban League’s “place-based initiative” is that you can’t solve the gang problem in a neighborhood without coming up against the school problem. And when you take on the school problem, pretty soon you see that school attendance and performance is deeply intertwined with the public safety problem. And once you start with public safety, you see it’s part and parcel of the public health problem—physical and emotional. And you certainly can’t solve public health without looking at housing and employment, and….
You get the picture. Neighborhoods are interwoven ecologies. Yank on one dangling thread and others immediately start to unravel.
With this in mind, the LA Urban League has budgeted $25 million over five years to take on the whole thing, and they’ve drafted everyone they can find in the city into partnership with them.
A few months back, I blogged briefly about the initiative, which is called Neighborhoods@Work. The LA Times ran an editorial, and our own Alan Mittelstaedt did an excellent interview with Urban League Prez, Blair Taylor, about the project for CityBeat (back in the days when CityBeat was still smart enough to employ, you know….journalists).
This afternoon, I had a long conversation with the Urban League’s Vice President, Chris Studwick-Turner, who told me that, from day one, the League has made sure to measure outcomes in five separate focus areas: education, health, safety, employment and housing. That way they can see what’s working and what isn’t, and correct their collective aims accordingly.
There has already been progress. Crime has dropped in the area and Crenshaw High, while not yet skyrocketing in terms of achievement, is starting to do quantitatively better after circling the drain a few years ago, with more progress anticipated These and other indicators are promising beginnings. Obviously, if this holistic strategy can be shown to create real change, the League will have pioneered a replicable model to be duplicated in other neighborhoods—neighborhood after neighborhood.
Anyway, grab your TV remotes and record that 10:30 Fox 11 broadcast. (And for those of you elsewhere in the country, it is my understanding that Fox News will run a shortened version at 10 p.m. Sunday night.)
A whole neighborhood, all-hands-on-deck approach is exactly what has been needed in LA’s violence-haunted communities for a long time. It ain’t easy, and it’s labor intensive.
But it also just might rescue the futures of 70 blocks worth of LA’s kids. And that, my dears, is very good news, indeed.
UPDATE: In an admiring rip-off of the the Will-i-am “Yes We Can Song” video, the urban league has a YouTube video out there called “We" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen> Can Do This.” and it’s quite terrific.
I have no idea how effective these folks can be in terms of resources, but their concept is dead-on. It’s a variation on the approach pioneered by Geoffrey Canada in developing the Harlem Children’s Zone, where charter school efforts are matched with more far-reaching family services – with parent-involvement a major focus.
It’s an extremely ambitious, long-term proposal but without a range of plausible interventions along the chain of failure in marginalized communities, attempting to single out one institution for a “fix” – like the schools – is likely doomed to further failure.
C: …an innovative program designed by the Los Angeles Urban league that aims to fundamentally transform the 70-block neighborhood….
What about those people on the 71st block…the 72nd block? Don’t they care about them or are they admitting that there it’s impossible to eliminate crime and poverty everywhere, even though they expect taxpayers to do that?
C: The idea behind the Urban League’s “place-based initiative†is that you can’t solve the gang problem in a neighborhood without coming up against the school problem.
I think they have this backwards. Deal with the gangs, then the schools will fall in place and get better.
C: …the League has made sure to measure outcomes in five separate focus areas: education, health, safety, employment and housing. That way they can see what’s working and what isn’t, and correct their collective aims accordingly.
I would like to know what standards they use to measure and evaluate results and if they consider other factors that affect changes. It’s so common of liberals to pick out aa positive change and take credit for it, whether they produced the critical factor or not. Whatever their standards, I’m confident that the results summary will serve no more primary use than to extend funding.
Hey, why don’t you take money from schools, buy a fleet of buses, and re-start cross-town school bussing that you guys favored so much in the past with such great results? Can’t we get kids up at 5:30 in the dark of morning to send them across town and let them get home late so that the good influences will filter into bad areas…not that it ever worked the other way around.
This Urban League program may feel good, but don’t count on it to make any more difference than all the liberal feel-good programs that preceded it.
“I’m sitting on my ass thousands of miles away wondering why the hell anyone would take any initiative to do something for these kids, because nothing ever works and liberals are idiots. My prejudices are the last word on absolutely everything and they can’t be repeated often enough.”
Shorter Woody:
“Don’t just do something – Stand There!”
Yeah, reg, like you I immediately thought of Harlem Children’s Zone, and I had a conversation with the UL folks about Geoffrey Canada. They said they really deconstructed his program and learned a lot from it—both in terms of what he did, and what he didn’t do, and they felt they needed and wanted to do.
Both really interesting programs.
Hey, PW, don’t confuse honest logical conclusions based upon constant historical failures by liberals as being “prejudice.” It’s called experience. Those who don’t gain experience from failures get to take the course again. The second time, do it on your own dollars.
I just had the same feelings that reg and Celeste expressed. I go further in that I’m not giving program leaders the benefit of the doubt to believe that failed programs might eventually work…maybe if the right people are in charge.
It’s time for change all right, and that’s not in the direction that we’ve taken before on social programs. Check back in a couple of years after this latest attempt to make a difference and tell me how great it is to live in those seventy blocks. You won’t admit it, but you know that it will not be good.
You’ll have more success with Promise Keepers than you will the Urban League. Try that for faith-based initiatives.
I think the key to success in…in anything really… is tuning to Joel Osteen on your big screen every Sunday morning. No one in human history has ever been quite as effective in turning lives around.
Don’t assume that I’m a fan of Joel Osteen, who chooses to display a globe behind him rather than a cross. He seems to be more of a motivational speaker than a Christian leader. However, I suspect that Osteen has helped more lives than has the Urban League and most liberal programs that suck up involutary tax money.
Here’s someone more to your liking, PW: Rev. Ike. You have big problems in life and it’s going to take more than Osteen to help you.
Now, take your pansy, squealing comments and go back to Cooper’s, since you offered nothing here.
Before anyone starts shouting about tax-payer funding of the Urban League’s neighborhoods@work program, it might help to know that it’s funded primarily by foundations–folks like B of A, Boeing, Met Life, Toyota and Union Bank.
And, Woody, the area’s churches are also prominently involved.
Funny how righties extoll private iniative – except when its something they don’t approve of. Then its “Liberal” nonsense. Righties love to extoll the right of the rich to spend their money as they like. Until Bill Gates gives real money for minority scholships – then hear the howls! Guess the Urban League’s “Faith Based” iniatives are with the wrong churches – now if they were promoting “abstinence Only . . . “
If Democrats have their way, all supposed tax breaks would end, including tax-deductible contributions to foundations. Indirectly, taxpayers do fund programs through them. Just think how much Bill Gates saves through his foundations, and that money has to be made up somewhere else. At least he has his choice on how the money is spent rather than the government wasting it.
I have no problem with sincere efforts to solve social problems. However, I’m smart enough to know the ones that will simply look good but make little difference.
I hope that the Urban League is successful in this quest and that I’m wrong. Let’s meet back here in a couple of years to see.
I went to the LA Urban League site. Just look at their highfalutin statement about this program’s measurement methods:
Monitoring outputs in the form of programmatic success will serve as an important internal indicator in ensuring that LAUL’s programs, and those of its partners, are achieving the desired impact within the community. Over time, these activities will lead to measurable outcomes in the community in the form of real changes in the lives of those involved in the neighborhood pilot. Finally, LAUL will track impact metrics which represent the “bottom line†for its programs. Impact metrics are the ultimate set of measures for which LAUL will hold itself accountable.
I wish people would quit trying to sound impressive and quit talking in educationese and begin communicating like normal people and those in business.
Plus, I don’t trust their financial acumen and their accounting methods. I’ve audited places like this before.
The ones that these programs help are the ones who run them. Heaven forbid that they actually solve something and lose their importance.
But, count on liberals to give them break after break because their motives sound so noble.
Monitoring outputs in the form of programmatic success will serve as an important internal indicator in ensuring that LAUL’s programs, and those of its partners, are achieving the desired impact within the community. Finally, LAUL will track impact metrics which represent the “bottom line†for its programs. Impact metrics are the ultimate set of measures for which LAUL will hold itself accountable.
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When I monitor “analog outputs” I put a volt-meter on the output signal and measure a current or voltage. What type of meter, measures “programmatic success outputs”, what ever the that is?
And I really glad “impact metrics” are being tracked, because we all know it’s the “utimate set of measures”, when trying to improve lives in the ghetto.
Woody, where do you get your nonsense? Please show me in any Democratic Party Literature where they want to do what you say.
Gee, rlc…give me a minute…it might be really hard to find where Democrats want to raise taxes…and limit chartible deductions (which is already done). You’ve really challenged me this time.