Thousands Attend Parley to Improve Life in County

Thousands gathered at the Los Angeles Convention Center on Sunday to hear an advocacy group’s plans for improving education, health, housing, employment and public safety in the county.

The meeting was billed as a “founding convention” for One L.A., made up of schools, unions, churches and nonprofit organizations. Until Sunday the group was called the Greater Los Angeles Metro Strategy-Industrial Areas Foundation.

Along with the new name, the meeting introduced a roster of issues that organizers said were important to working families. Some, such as the need for safe streets, were discussed in general terms. But the group also took specific stands on various state and local matters, including opposing the expansion of the Bradley landfill in the northeast San Fernando Valley and supporting driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants.

The group’s broad scope is necessary in Los Angeles County, organizers said, because few entities exist to address all the problems faced by a typical family.

“Los Angeles is so fragmented and diversified that there isn’t one political power who can do anything about the problems that are destroying families,” said Msgr. David O’Connell of St. Michael Catholic Church in Los Angeles.

The group is part of the nationwide Industrial Areas Foundation, a Chicago-based nonprofit founded in 1940 to organize civic groups for political action. The Los Angeles branch was active in the 1970s and ‘80s, when it pushed to ban some assault weapons in California and bring reform to the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Activity waned in the early 1990s but took off again in 1999. Since then, the group has sponsored meetings bringing parents and teachers together to discuss school issues, hosted forums on the troubled King/Drew Medical Center and brought concerns about blighted neighborhoods to Police Chief William J. Bratton.