A FORUM FOR COMMUNITY ISSUES : Today’s Agenda

Understanding and dealing with change early in the process cuts down on stress. That’s why big corporations hire pricey consultants to ease the transition when they move or change product lines. But it doesn’t take expensive outside help to deal with change, as Gardena’s public librarians proved.

When librarian Julie Fu drove down Western Avenue in Gardena in the spring of 1989, she noticed that there were a lot more signs in Korean than there used to be. Her observation, coupled with plenty of hard work, led to the library’s model program for serving a changing population--everything from translation services to best-seller lists in Korean. It’s the subject of today’s Making a Difference. The library’s experience later guided the Gardena Chamber of Commerce, which had complained about the “aloofness” of Korean business owners, in establishing smooth relations with the newcomers. The librarians’ advice should be required reading for any diversifying community or civic organization.

Grappling with change on a shoestring is also the theme of In Dispute, which outlines ways to preserve inner-city recreation programs in tight budgetary times. It’s not a matter of gutting health care to pay for baseball programs, write recreation specialists Jack Foley and Veda Ward, but of leveling the metaphoric playing field. The authors note that suburban parks take in a lot more money than they need in user fees. Some form of sister-parks program could go a long way toward equalizing things. A terrific, idealistic thought, but how many of these suburban programs are going to voluntarily give up money? Perhaps park districts would have to give a good, hard, coercive push to get a program started.

Money is also at issue in Platform. What are panhandlers thinking about us? The responses from four panhandlers run the gamut from a monologue on remaining cheerful to a total detachment from reality. Also, two business people talk about their conflict on being approached--the desire to help without making the situation worse. Homelessness and panhandling afflict every urban community, turning too many of our streets into gantlets of fear, guilt and sadness. Surely a region with the underlying vitality of Southern California can do better than throwing up its hands. In future issues of Voices, you’ll hear from your neighbors about affordable housing, social support and other parts of possible solutions. Please let us know your ideas.

Today’s Getting Answers also touches on the homeless issue, as Jerry Baxter, district director of the California Department of Transportation, answers a reader’s query about trash on the freeway and encampments at freeway underpasses. He doesn’t come right out and say it, but Caltrans doesn’t have any magic formula. Workers can “direct” the homeless to shelters, but that’s a pretty impermanent solution, just as fences and shrubbery are pretty porous barriers.

And in a new feature, Getting Involved, three Voices readers offer a practical helping hand to the child-care program of Las Familias del Pueblo, profiled Sept. 28.