A Common Vision

The social experiment that is L.A. Urban Funders really began eight years ago, during those frightening days of April 1992.

In the aftermath of the riots following the acquittals of police officers in the Rodney King beating, many people looked at each other and asked, “What went wrong?” In government offices and boardrooms, on sidewalks outside of schools and churches, around dinner tables and soccer fields, the question soon became, “How can we make it better?”

Within the philanthropic community, those questions seemed even more pointed. The ReBuild L.A. Philanthropy Task Force was quickly created to examine the nature and level of support from grant-making foundations for low-income neighborhoods. The task force soon merged with the Southern California Assn. for Philanthropy and, during the next three years, meeting followed meeting followed meeting; surveys and studies were done, an interim board was established, program consultants were appointed and tomes of information were produced.

All of which seemed to point to one theme: If local foundations wanted different results for their dollars, they were going to have to try something new. Instead of depending on existing agencies to identify problems and appeal to the foundations for grants, the foundations were going to have to go into actual communities and find out what type of support people really wanted.

And they were going to have to collaborate.

In 1996, groups that agreed with these conclusions formed L.A. Urban Funders, numbering 12 at first and now made up of 26 foundations ranging from large and broad-based (the James Irvine, the California Wellness, California Community) to corporate (Prudential, Bank of America, Wells Fargo) to small and specific (the Amateur Athletic, the Crail-Johnson, Liberty Hill).

Committing to Go the Distance

Each foundation committed to a five-year program, working from the ground up in neighborhoods chosen by the board of directors, and participating in a two-pronged funding system consisting of independent grants and a communal pot that, by the end of those five years, would exceed $5 million.

Nothing like it had ever been tried in this country before.

Yes, there had been attempts at foundation-funded community initiatives, and a few tries at short-term collaborations, but nothing worked as a model for what the group wanted to do.

“We couldn’t find anything that would apply to Los Angeles,” says Wendy Schine of the Joseph Drown Foundation, who was one of the early leaders of Urban Funders. “We found a few who had tried and failed, and they were happy to share what had gone wrong. I don’t know if we were stubborn or stupid,” she adds, laughing, “but we just kept on, undaunted.”

“Traditional grant-making just wasn’t working,” says Elwood Hopkins, who was hired as project director for the nascent L.A. Urban Funders in 1996. “What was needed were major comprehensive community initiatives. And for that to work, there was going to have to be collaboration.”

Foundations tend to have distinct areas of interest--the arts, say, or at-risk children--and traditionally, have depended on nonprofit agencies to approach them individually, with related grant proposals. Even the more proactive foundations tend to identify good agencies and work within that agency’s existing programs.

Urban Funders chose not to establish an agenda but, rather, to identify three communities first, each with very specific geographic boundaries: Vermont/Manchester, Hyde Park and Pacoima.

“We were looking for sites where there was half an initiative already in place,” Hopkins says, “where there was an outcome around which people were already organized.”

In Vermont/Manchester, the issue was land use: Since 1991, the Community Coalition to Prevent Substance Abuse had been battling the crack epidemic, working to close liquor stores and seedy motels, clean up abandoned lots and generally make it more difficult for drug dealers to ply their trade. In Hyde Park, a group of block clubs and neighborhood safety watches were already working to lower crime, beautify the area and increase economic development. In Pacoima, local schools had thriving parents’ groups where immigrant and first-generation Latinos congregated and helped each other solve immigration and job issues.

But instead of just handing these groups a packet of money, Urban Funders used them to get to residents, to conduct community meetings and door-to-door surveys to find out what, exactly, the community thought it needed, and then set up an infrastructure of services to meet those needs. All of which cost money without having direct and immediate results. And foundations tend to like direct and immediate results--numbers of children inoculated, or basketballs purchased--things they can show their board members.

“To really help a community, you have to find out how it lives and breathes, where it shops and hangs out, what families do on the weekends,” says Hopkins, who was hired from an urban research project based at New York University. “This kind of long-term proposition was a real leap of faith for everyone at [L.A. Urban Funders]. They were making grants they would not normally make, based on an overall vision.”

A Wary Welcome From Residents

The neighborhoods they had chosen had to learn how to work closely with funders as well. In the year or two following the 1992 riots, South-Central residents had been surveyed, canvassed, poked and prodded by politicians, journalists, sociologists and general do-gooders with little tangible results; they did not exactly rush to throw flowers at the feet of this new batch of investigators.

“We had to rebuild trust,” says Lisa Nichols, who was hired by Urban Funders in 1997 to organize the block clubs in Hyde Park. “So many people had been coming around with plans and questions and then after a year they would leave. We had to prove that we had made a commitment.”

What Hyde Park residents said they wanted was better communication between the block clubs, a better-looking neighborhood and economic development. Urban Funders and Nichols began tackling these issues one at a time. First, they held a community fair, which brought 2,000 residents together for the first time. Then they founded a phone system through which one call could be made to thousands of numbers to get a message out. After that, they erected a series of neighborhood welcome signs and markers because, Nichols says, “the first sign of pride is marking your territory.”

Through these and other follow-up actions, Nichols says, the community is learning to work together, and to work with foundations. Residents now feel they have access to a whole new world, Nichols says.

A few miles away, activists and residents in Vermont/Manchester have also been introduced to the world of foundation money. However, when Urban Funders members began talking in 1993 with Karen Bass, executive director of the Community Coalition to Prevent Substance Abuse, it was not an instant match. Urban Funders had not committed to specific neighborhoods yet, and Bass wasn’t interested in outsiders telling her what to do.

“After ’92 we had all sorts of people coming in here, offering us money to do all sorts of things,” Bass says. “People think you’re just waiting around for them to come in with their big ideas and that isn’t the way it is.”

Since its inception in 1991, the Community Coalition had been receiving 90% of its money from the federal government. Then in 1996, Congress cut the budget for such programs; the coalition fought the cut and won a 50% reinstatement, but Bass says she realized they were going to have to look elsewhere for money. Besides, the coalition was getting ready to enter a new phase of activity--their efforts to close nuisance properties along the Vermont corridor had been successful in large part; now they had to figure out how to revitalize the business district.

“We were approaching the ‘What next?’ phase,” Bass says. And the Urban Funders, she says, was willing to discuss the question rather than impose an answer.

The coalition serves the entire South-Central area, but with Urban Funders money, they hired staff dedicated solely to the area surrounding the Vermont/Manchester business corridor, a neighborhood defined not by consultants but by residents.

By doing door-to-door outreach and community development education, they found that, yes, residents wanted safer streets and better schools, but they also wanted a place to gather, sit-down family restaurants rather than the endless array of fast-food fare and they wanted cleaner grocery stores. So the Urban Funders and Bass came up with a list of goals.

By documenting poor meat storage and general squalor, the community was able to force the local markets to improve the quality--Super Buy went so far as to print the coalition’s certificate of approval in a recent series of ads.

A troublesome alley was also converted into a community garden, and strategies to coax more family restaurants into the neighborhood are being discussed.

Meanwhile, Bass has been working to acquire space in the big, blue Art Deco wedding cake of a building across from the coalition’s headquarters. Once a high-end supermarket and part of Pepperdine College in the ‘70s, it has been vacant for years. Bass, who is in negotiations with the owner, would like to see a restaurant there as well as a multicultural center and a place for local teens.

Outreach Fuels Local Initiative

Meanwhile, residents are doing research into the community’s educational needs, and into whether some of the buildings that housed former nuisance properties could be used as schools. Bass recently met with the rather disgruntled owner of a motel that had been closed down who wanted to know just what he was supposed to do with his property.

“I’ve got someone checking into the acreage,” she says with a laugh. “My first reaction was, ‘Is it big enough for K-3; maybe we could get the district to buy it.’ ”

Miles away in Pacoima, the schools are the keystone of Urban Funders’ work-force initiative. Building on existing parents’ groups, and in conjunction with the Valley Economic Development Center and Family Care/Healthy Kids, Urban Funders developed a list of obstacles facing the largely Latino population--English literacy, lack of work experience, lack of child care--and a corresponding list of projects or programs that would provide solutions--adult-literacy classes, work-experience programs, a child-care cooperative. In 1998, they hired Mario Matute, who had been working with the San Fernando Housing Project, to direct the initiative, and he in turn hired four “career coaches,” residents who would act as advisors and bridges between these services and those who seek them.

“Employment is only part of the problem,” Matute says. “We provide a whole range of support.”

The program has been so successful, says Gloria Lazaide, who has been working as a career coach for more than a year, that local employers are now calling her, wanting “more people like the ones we’ve sent them.”

Ideally, says Hopkins, employers would come to see the project as a resource, perhaps even paying a fee to use their work-force pool.

Because one of the goals of Urban Funders is to make itself unnecessary.

“We are committed to five years,” Hopkins says of the collaborative effort. “After that, who knows? Probably the individual foundations will continue to fund certain parts of the various programs, but we want to leave behind strong coalitions. Community efforts fail because a particular program is weak.”

“People have to create their own success,” adds Hyde Park’s Nichols. “When we started, the culture here was to kick the pity can. I said, pick up that can, recycle it, get your nickel and move on. We’ve got to move on.”

Mary McNamara can be reached at mary.mcnamara@latimes.com.