Course in Caring

The building on L.A.’s Hoover Avenue does not look like it houses a war room. A lavender and blue Victorian, it sits amid the smog-silvered urban rush, looking a trifle alarmed but game--an Edith Wharton character somehow transported to pre-millennial Los Angeles. Within, it is a thing of beauty: rooms resplendent with tiled fireplaces, period wallpaper, mile-high ceilings.

And yet, in the last room on the left, at a table long and dark, boundaries are being redrawn, strategies debated, battle plans laid. Yes, there are china cups and dainty cookies on the sideboard; but around one end of the table a group of five is huddled, and they are all business.

Especially the woman in the blue suit. Examining the two maps in front of her, the lenses of her wire-framed glasses flash now and again.

“I am just wondering,” she says quietly, “if these are the best boundaries. Why this jutting piece into El Sereno? Or into City Terrace? Is this really our territory?”

She looks up into silence, and then the others begin to speak, one at a time, and a conversation emerges about the value of consolidation of resources versus that of cooperation.

If the four women and one man were discussing a corporate marketing shift, or a high-profile political campaign, they could not be more thorough. As with many such strategic efforts, there is much money involved. But, more importantly, there are services. Community services. For this Easter egg of a Victorian houses the Community Services Department of USC, and this meeting is about the redirection of community programs on the Health Sciences campus in East Los Angeles.

“This campus has been very frustrating for a lot of reasons,” said the woman in blue before the meeting. “There are some very good programs in place already, mostly in conjunction with local schools. But they need to be refocused, rethought. We need to be large enough to be meaningful, small enough to be reasonable.”

She is Jane Pisano, 55, senior vice president of External Relations, czarina of the school’s more than 300 community outreach programs. And these words are both her personal mission statement and her mandate. Created in 1994 by USC President Steven Sample, External Relations is the keystone of his campaign to change the elitist image of USC. Long considered an island of wealth in a sea of urban problems, the school, according to Sample, needed to share its considerable resources with its neighbors in a consistent, committed and very public way.

In Sample’s vision, the vice president of External Relations would enlist the help of community leaders, motivate faculty and staff to donate their money and their time, coordinate programs with the city, the state, the police and, with any luck, the media. This new VP would overhaul the school’s United Way campaign, handle a budget well into the millions and find more money when more money was needed.

All of which required an acute understanding of the school, the community, the city, the world of philanthropic finance and the human soul.

A Dean of Do-Gooders.

Jane Pisano, then dean of the school of public administration, with more than 15 years of experience in various civic groups, including L.A. 200 bicentennial project, was, according to Sample, the obvious choice.

“She is just extraordinary,” Sample said. “Articulate in person and on paper and so well educated. She also came with great academic credentials, which is unusual for such a post but a real help, because she could motivate the faculty, and that is how you get things done around here.”

Five years later, USC’s reputation is as good as it gets: This summer, Time magazine, in conjunction with the Princeton Review, named the school “College of the Year,” not because of its football team or its great weather or even its academics, but because of the school’s commitment to the community, calling it “one of the most ambitious social-outreach programs of any university in the nation.”

Credit for Volunteering

Through a host of community partnerships, USC’s programs include the high-profile community-safety plan Kidwatch, and the Family of Five tutoring programs--most of which are funded by the university. About 40 classes each semester offer credit for students who volunteer; and, according to Pisano, during the last academic year more than 10,000 undergraduates worked more than 330,000 hours in the community. According to the Los Angeles Police Department, crime in the neighborhood is down, and while University Park certainly still has a few rough edges, the graffiti and vandalism that were once its hallmarks are dwindling.

“When I came here 11 years ago, all the community thought of USC was that they took housing away,” said Howard Lappin, principal of Foshay Learning Center, one of the Family of Five schools. “Now, everything has changed. USC is a real force here. I see my transience rate down, my absentee rate down, my test scores up, and incidents of vandalism decreasing. Kids are safer, and they feel safer. And Jane is the spearhead for all of it. She gets things done.”

“And this,” he added, “is from a former Bruin.”

“It’s quite an acknowledgment,” Sample said of the College of the Year honor, “and I absolutely give Jane the lion’s share of the credit.”

But Pisano, a slight, straight-backed woman with a quiet voice and a direct gaze, is reluctant to take it.

“It [the honor] was a wonderful validation because they made it clear that the commitment to the community is not just something that came out of any one program or this office,” she said, “but that it is deep in the fabric of the place.

“And we can’t rest on our laurels. We have to come up with something that has as much impact on the Health Sciences campus.”

Which is what she is doing in the lovely Victorian on Hoover.

“Lou,” she says, turning to the woman on her right, “you grew up there--tell us something about the community reaction.”

Lou Calanche, the newly hired director of community outreach on the Health Sciences campus, describes at length the esteem in which USC is held by local residents, the excitement the prospect of a satellite office of community affairs has engendered and her feeling that many of the smaller nonprofits have been waiting for some larger group, such as USC, to provide the glue that will make real change possible.

Pisano nods, then very gently reins in these lofty goals.

“I think we need to stay focused,” she says. “ I don’t think we can go in and say we’re going to be your glue.”

Sam Mark, assistant vice president of community relations, suggests looking into any programs that could utilize the school’s interns.

“That’s a great idea,” Pisano says. “Find out if we can partner with clinics.”

Calanche points out that many area residents don’t use the clinics, preferring to seek treatment at the farmacias, local mom-and-pop establishments where everyone knows everyone else’s background and business.

Now Pisano is really excited.

“Now that’s something we can do now,” she says. “We have all these pharmacy students. We need to plug them in somehow. Meanwhile, we can stay focused on the kids, on the schools, keep talking to people and find out what grows out of that.”

She places her palms on the table, and the meeting is over. The battle, however, has just begun.

Pisano has a lot of experience with goal-setting, both reasonable and not. Her own college experience was less than, well, consistent. She left her Maryland home for Northwestern University and barely survived the first winter.

“It was a huge school,” she said, “and I was completely overwhelmed. And I couldn’t believe how cold it was. I just stopped going to classes.”

A Degree From Stanford

She tried again at Georgetown University, where in her junior year she met and married her husband, Mark. He graduated and moved to San Jose, and she followed, finishing her degree at Stanford University.

“It was such a different time then,” she said, laughing. “I mean, I gave it no thought whatsoever. He was there, and I said, ‘Well, OK, I’ll go to Stanford.’ Fortunately, I actually got in.”

Eventually, the two returned to Washington, D.C., where their three children--Leah, 29; Christopher, 27; Marianna, 25--were born. Pisano taught in Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service and was a White House fellow on the National Security Council staff in 1976.

Just as that fellowship began, Mark was asked to become executive director of the Southern California Assn. of Governments (a position he still holds), she said, “and we just jumped.”

Far from having stereotypical East Coast reservations about Los Angeles, Pisano was ecstatic about the move.

“If I stayed in Washington, I knew exactly what my life would be,” she said. “I wanted to go somewhere where people were doing things we had never heard of. I thought, and it’s true, that if you are 3,000 miles away from that Washington/New York corridor, you will definitely think differently, and that’s what I wanted.”

Within a few months, she was executive director of the L.A. 200 Committee, the organizing force behind the city’s bicentennialcelebration, and her introduction to community relations, L.A.-style had begun.

“The mayor said, ‘You’re perfect for the job.’ I said, ‘But I don’t know anyone.’ And he said, ‘So you don’t have any enemies yet.’ ”

For five years, she worked with a wide range of community leaders to develop and help implement an agenda of civic action called “L.A. 200: A City for the Future.”

As soon as she got to USC in 1991, Sample asked her to be vice president for external relations. For the next three years, Pisano, dividing her time between her deanship and the new position, (she only relinquished the deanship in 1998) turned her direct gaze on the school’s relationship with its community.

“The health of the school is dependent on the health of the community,” she said. “It’s as simple as that. When I started [in external relations], I took a big step back. I said let’s talk to our partners in the community. Let’s ask them what they want.

“I invited the principals of the five closest schools and asked them what we could do as a family. Their main concern was safety--the kids walking to and from school, or to the libraries or museums. That was the beginning of Kidwatch. Now we have 600 volunteers, who have all been screened by the LAPD, keeping an eye on our kids.”

The Family of Five program was also conceived in those early meetings. Every year, about 1,000 students at five local elementary schools receive tutoring through the USC Readers project, and more than 6,000 kids participate in the After-School Enrichment and Sports Connections programs. Most of these programs are funded by the USC Neighborhood Outreach program.

“I spent a summer asking faculty and staff what they would give to,” Pisano said. “They said something close by, so we started Good Neighbors, which is basically a recast United Way campaign. We started with donations of $150,000, and last year we raised $517,00. This year’s goal is $600,000, but I’m committed to growing it to $1 million. We certainly have the capacity.”

Sounds reasonable. And, considering who’s doing the talking, highly probable.

Mary McNamara can be reached by e-mail at mary.mcnamara@latimes.com.