Cross-posted from the Huffington Post

In a striking reversal of the suburban sprawl that has marked the last 60 years, job growth in America's cities is outpacing that in the suburbs as more and more people choose to live, and work, in urban areas. This trend, as noted in a report released by think tank City Observatory last week, has some pundits heralding an urban renaissance, where all city dwellers thrive as innovation blooms and downtown economies flourish. As we've seen in booming cities like San Francisco, however, where job growth and skyrocketing inequality have gone hand in hand, the equation is rarely that simple. This trend has immense potential for revitalizing cities after a slow economic recovery, but only if city leaders take decisive steps to ensure that everyone can participate in and prosper from these new job opportunities.

She was her father’s daughter. Or, as she told an assembled audience at Black Male Re-imagined II in March 2013, “a daddy’s girl.”  She spoke those words with such pride that she lit up the stage.
 
Indeed, Dori Maynard was a bright, shining star in the galaxy of leaders committed to changing perceptions, opportunities, and outcomes for Black boys and men — and indeed for all people of color. Her years as a journalist taught her the importance of getting the story right. Her father, Robert, was a journalist, former owner of the Oakland Tribune, and co-founder of The Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, the nation’s oldest organization dedicated to helping the news media accurately portray all segments of society, particularly those often overlooked, such as communities of color.  As president of the Institute, Dori extended her father’s legacy by recruiting and training journalists. Both were Neiman Fellows at Harvard.
 
Dori was smart, warm, and a joy to commune with. Over meals, engaged in deep conversation, or providing astute comments in meetings, her passion, commitment, and determination to make change happen was always evident.  She believed in speaking truth to power and never shied away from talking about race and racism.
 
She will be missed for her leadership of a critical organization, for her friendship, and for being the loving and unique individual who shared her light with so many.
 
 

Ballots are in, and voters showed overwhelming support for measures to build a more equitable economy this election season.

Here’s the quick round-up of the victories:

• Minimum wage increases passed in every city and state – including Arkansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, Alaska, and San Francisco and Oakland, California – as did Massachusetts’ paid sick leave initiative.
• California’s Proposition 47 passed with overwhelming support, reducing prison sentences and redirecting the costs of incarceration into important education and reentry programs. Read more about this important victory.
• Voters in Clayton County, Georgia, passed an important sales tax to bring mass transit back for low-income residents.
• Illinois voters passed a state amendment protecting the right to vote.
   

However, several important measures failed to pass, including Oregon’s measure to create a state investment fund for low-income college students, San Francisco’s tax on housing speculation, and Connecticut’s measure expanding early voting.

Read our earlier story on these ballot measures.

Thank you to everyone who voted, and to the countless volunteers who helped get these measures passed. Today, we celebrate the victories. Tomorrow, we continue on the long road for a more just, fair, and inclusive economy.

On Election Day, Californians achieved an important step towards equity — just and fair inclusion so that all can reach their full potential — by resoundingly approving Proposition 47, which will fix unfair sentencing laws that have resulted in prison overspending and overcrowding. Prop 47, the Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act, will reclassify six nonviolent felonies — such as simple drug possession and petty theft — as misdemeanors, shifting several hundred million dollars annually from California’s broken prison system to schools, mental health and drug treatment, and victims’ services.

While we should take the time to celebrate this landmark victory — spurred by the concerted efforts of equity advocates across the state, including unified coalitions of black and Latino communities — we must also start thinking about how to ensure Prop 47 is implemented in an equitable way. Our state’s courts are busy planning how this change will impact the judicial system — is the community also getting ready to be sure that Prop 47 leads to real change?

California’s communities of color have faced disproportionate arrests for minor crimes. Now, in addition to stopping the unfair stigmatizing and sentencing, up to 30,000 currently incarcerated Californians may be returning to their communities because of Prop 47’s effects. We must all be engaged in making sure they can smoothly reconnect with their families, be active in community life, and find opportunities for job training and jobs.

The safety net of supportive services will need to be expanded to respond to the needs of those returning home as well as those who have come to the attention of the courts for minor offenses that may indicate need for services. Putting these supports and connectors in place will require creative political and community leadership. For instance, the network of community-based organizations that currently serves low-income communities and communities of color should be utilized to provide support, services, and jobs to returning community members. This requires that philanthropy, government, and the private sector step up and channel capacity-building resources to these groups.

Prop 47 continues a welcome trend in California of moving away from harsh and ineffective incarceration towards rehabilitation and hope. To truly achieve success, we must successfully reintegrate currently incarcerated Californians into our communities using advocacy and investment in the areas of health, housing, education, employment, and financial security. This will create a path for our returning neighbors to get back on their feet and contribute to their families, communities, and the economy.
 

Election Day — Tuesday, November 4 — is just around the corner, and a number of statewide propositions on this year's ballot have important equity implications.

PolicyLink strongly supports Proposition 47, the Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act. Prop 47 would reclassify six nonviolent felonies — such as simple drug possession and petty theft — as misdemeanors, shifting several hundred million dollars annually from California's broken prison system to schools, mental health and drug treatment, and victims' services.

Prop 47 would have a profound impact on California's communities of color — due to systemic racial bias, people of color are disproportionately arrested for minor crimes that Prop 47 would address. Prop 47 would reduce barriers to employment, housing, education, and public benefits faced by Californians with a felony record — a benefit made even more impactful because individuals currently serving a felony sentence for any of the included offenses could petition for resentencing.

While 62 percent of likely voters support Prop 47, its passage will depend on voter turnout and on equity leaders who are working across issue areas to rally their communities to the polls.

PolicyLink also supports Proposition 1, the Water Quality, Supply and Infrastructure Improvement Act, which would allow for much-needed investments in California's water infrastructure, ensuring that all of our state's communities — including the most disadvantaged — have access to safe and affordable drinking water, wastewater treatment services, and other water resources needed to support healthy outcomes.

For more on this year's statewide propositions, please click here.

California Renews its Commitment to Equity

The end of September marked the close of the legislative session, and the dedicated efforts of California’s equity advocates continued to pay dividends. Governor Jerry Brown approved a range of bills that advance equity — the idea that investing in low-income communities and communities of color is essential to achieving a healthy and prosperous California.

The new policies continue a trend of improving the way California regards and embraces its most vulnerable populations. For example, to address crises caused by California’s severe drought — especially in low-income communities lacking clean drinking water due to contamination or poor infrastructure — the state passed a package of bills that will help restore groundwater basins.

The state also led the nation by building on its inclusive approach to integrating undocumented Californians. New policies will reduce the possibility of deportation for minor infractions and allow undocumented immigrants to obtain professional state licenses — expanding last year’s policy admitting undocumented attorneys to the California Bar. The state also created the California Dream Loan Program, allowing state public universities to administer loans to undocumented students, and allocated $3 million to provide legal services for approximately 4,000 unaccompanied refugee children in California.

Finally, a slate of new laws supported by the Alliance for Boys and Men of Color will help improve the lives of people struggling across the state. For instance, a new law will eliminate the unjust disparity between penalties for crack and powder cocaine possession — an infamous policy that unduly harmed communities of color. A series of bills will remove barriers to good jobs for Californians returning from prison, establishing technical education and workforce training programs and creating new opportunities to work as a certified nurse assistant or obtain a professional license. Other Alliance-supported policies focused on getting young Californians out of the school-to-prison pipeline will ease the transition back to school for young Californians caught in the justice system, protect the due process rights of involuntarily transferred students, and eliminate an unfair payment associated with student truancy.

Did we leave out any important equity-focused bills? Tweet at us with the hashtag #CAEquity and let us know!

California has one of the largest and most expensive prison systems in the nation and is currently under a federal court order to reduce its prison population. System and community leaders across the state have recognized the urgent need to lower the numbers of current prisoners and the rate of recidivism, in order to decrease state prison costs and increase public safety. 

Earlier this week, Governor Jerry Brown helped California take a major step toward achieving these goals by signing AB 2060 (Supervised Population Workforce Training Grant Program) into law. Authored by Assemblymember Victor Manuel Pérez and co-sponsored by PolicyLink, Communities United for Restorative Youth Justice, and the California Workforce Association, AB 2060 will establish a new competitive workforce training grant program for women and men re-entering our communities and families after being released from prison, to ensure that they have access to training and education, job readiness skills, and job placement assistance. The bill was also identified as a priority by the Alliance for Boys and Men of Color.

Law enforcement officials and judges agree that opportunity-enhancing strategies are less expensive than incarceration and more effective at reducing recidivism and improving community safety and stability. Investing in workforce development opportunities for reentry populations is a critical step toward expanding access to well-paying jobs and careers, which in turn will improve offender outcomes and reduce recidivism rates, resulting in economic savings and improved public safety.

The program established by AB 2060 is designed to serve the distinct education and training needs of individuals who require basic education and training in order to obtain entry level jobs with opportunities for career advancement, and also individuals with some postsecondary education who can benefit from services that result in certifications and placement on a middle-skill career ladder.

Administered by the California Workforce Investment Board, the new grant program will build on the most promising workforce development strategies and incentivize counties to foster collaboration and coordination with Local Workforce Investment Boards (LWIBs), the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, community-based organizations that serve re-entry populations, labor, and industry. Regional coordination also advances realignment goals, which shift some of the responsibility for housing prisoners from the state to the local level.

An allocation of $1 million from the Governor’s Recidivism Reduction Fund was secured to launch this effort through the budget process earlier this year. AB 2060 will leverage the State’s investment by rewarding counties that commit matching funds. This translates into additional dollars for the program and will help to sustain the strategy over time, ensuring that more women and men can be served.

We must work at the regional and state levels to ensure that every Californian has a fair chance to contribute and thrive. By investing in workforce training and job placement for the women and men re-entering our families and communities, we can improve neighborhood safety and stability and secure a more prosperous future. 

Originally posted in the NY Times

Like too many young men in his East Oakland neighborhood, 21-year-old Shaka Perdue spent the earlier part of his youth “living like I was becoming a statistic,” as he put it. At 16, he landed in juvenile hall after robbing a pedestrian in broad daylight. Two years later a friend was shot right in front of him in a drive-by. “In Oakland, you run into all the people you have problems with,” he explained.

Perdue still hangs out in the neighborhood — but he now wears a stethoscope around his neck. He is one of 90 or so graduates of EMS Corps, a pioneering five-month program spearheaded by the Alameda County Health Care Services Agency that trains young men of color to be qualified emergency medical technicians. “You are the first person to approach the patients,” Perdue said of his future as an E.M.T. “The nurses and doctors get them after they’re stabilized in the field.”

Started in 2012, the corps is a novel effort to recruit, train and mentor a new generation of emergency medical professionals: young men growing up in communities in which concentrated poverty, violence and unemployment are well-documented barriers to health and longevity. Graduates like Perdue have a singular perspective on health disparities — they’ve lived them.

“The young men who are vilified as noncontributing members of society are not the problem,” said Alex Briscoe, the agency’s energetic director, who got his start as a dropout prevention counselor at a tough Oakland high school. “They’re the solution.”

A founding premise of the corps, which has received just over $1 million from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, is to create a strong pool of professionals who reflect the neighborhoods they serve. Though participants are trained to save peoples’ lives, the corps strives to transform the young men themselves, and influence others who see them, by training them to do meaningful and decently paid work.

“Many of these young men have experienced a significant amount of violence,” said Marc Philpart, an associate director of PolicyLink, a national nonprofit research and advocacy group. “Yet they are now exposed to a profession where they become healers.”

Jimmy Jordan, another recent graduate, never knew his father and met his mother only once, six months before she died. He had a rocky adolescence, lost his first job, grew alienated from the older woman who was his guardian, and spent a number of years bouncing from sofa to sofa, shelter to shelter, occasionally sleeping in his car. “I used to be outgoing,” he said. “But once I hit the homeless part of my life I sort of shut down.”

Through a friend, he heard about the EMS Corps, which not only teaches lifesaving care but also provides a kind of life support for its trainees: five weeks of mentoring and “manhood” development — designed to strengthen leadership skills and cultivate a healthy African-American identity — followed by life coaching, individual and group counseling, and tutoring. Graduates continue to have access to counseling and are matched with paramedic mentors on the job. Each of the 50 or so young men accepted each year receives an $800 monthly stipend during training.

For Jordan, 24, the combination of mastering a skill and understanding the social context of his struggles helped him rewrite his life’s script. Today, he is a health coach at Highland Hospital in Oakland, a county medical center known for its trauma center. He has an easy bedside manner. “I’m a compassionate person, and I always felt I wanted to share emotions with people,” Jordan explained. “But I didn’t know how to work through my anger and depression and have it not affect my future.

“The corps has made me proud of myself,” he continued. “Being with patients is a maturing, humbling kind of experience. I’m not going to be another homeless teenager not knowing what to do with myself.”

Most young men learn about the program by word of mouth, as Jordan did. Applicants — about 250 a year — must have a high school diploma or G.E.D., a driver’s license with no more than two points on it and have no arrests for the past three years. The course meets six days a week and includes a volunteer component in which young trainees serve as educators at health fairs, schools and churches.

“I felt it leave,” Mohamed Diouf, 21, said of the sadness, tightness and anger that came from being physically abused as a child. “The EMS Corps teaches you about values. You go from the boy mind to the man mind.”

The program is part of a larger national movement to improve opportunities and health outcomes for boys and men of color, including President Obama’s “My Brother’s Keeper” initiative. In Oakland, homicide is the leading cause of death for young black men ages 15 to 34. It is a population disproportionately affected by inadequate schools, substandard housing, involvement in the criminal justice system and a lack of access to preventive care.

Rather than considering them “throwaway kids,” the corps regards its young participants as community assets, said Junious Williams, the chief executive officer of the Oakland-based Urban Strategies Council, a research and advocacy organization. “Even if they decide an E.M.T. career is not for them, they leave the program with an understanding of health careers and confidence for the next stage of life,” he said.

The $600,000 yearly tab for the program, which guarantees a job to all graduates who pass the National EMS Certification Exam, comes from a county sales tax for emergency health care.

Rachel Unruh, associate director of the National Skills Coalition, a Washington, D.C.-based work force development group, said the corps incorporates many of the current best practices in what is known as “sectoral-focused employment training” — programs that tailor job training to the needs of local employers. Many programs focus on high schools: last year, for instance, the New York Alliance for Careers in Healthcare launched a program with a grant from the Heckscher Foundation for Children that is training 30 high school seniors and unemployed young adults to be certified as pharmacy technicians, “an occupation anticipated to have strong growth in New York City,” said Shawna J. Trager, the executive director.

The EMS Corps began as a modest urban health initiative at Camp Wilmont Sweeney, a minimum-security residential program for adolescent males in San Leandro, Calif., run by the Alameda County probation department. The program didn’t jell until the life coaching, mentoring and manhood development elements were added, said Michael Gibson, the EMS Corps director, who, himself, grew up in East Oakland, and whose parents both struggled with addiction. Gibson spent his youth in and out of juvenile hall for drug offenses. At 16, he was sentenced to eight and a half years in the California Youth Authority (now the California Division of Juvenile Justice).

He managed to break the cycle of self-destruction with the help of mentors from an African-American male transition program. “They pointed out what I was doing — the fake sense of manhood,” he said. “They saw something in me that I didn’t see.”

He wound up with a full scholarship to Morehouse College. Now the EMS Corps members Gibson mentors mirror his younger self. “They have issues with low self-esteem, a negative attitude, and a lack of confidence due to trauma and family environments,” he said. “They are young men ready for a second chance.”

Much of the hands-on training for the Corps is provided by Bay Area EMT, a coed emergency medical worker program for 18- to 24-year-olds co-founded by two Oakland firefighters.

To date, about 75 percent of the graduates are working as E.M.T.s or in related positions. Some drop out for personal reasons and some are unprepared for the academic work. Dale Feldhauser, the chief operating officer of Paramedics Plus/California, which handles about 88 percent of the county’s 911 calls with 62 ambulances, has hired five graduates and is expecting to hire three more. They are doing well on the job, he said, adding that he’s only had to let go of one part-timer with an “attendance issue.”

A challenge for the program is that there are now more graduates than jobs, so the health services department is scrambling to identify other opportunities, such as working with hospital health coaching programs or assisting at a local detox center.More serious is a cautionary tale from Washington, D.C. A cadet program designed to train young firefighters fresh out of high school is currently under scrutiny after a 77-year-old man died of a heart attack across the street from a firehouse, where a rookie cadet at the station’s watch desk was unclear how to respond, according to a Washington Post investigation. This program has a history of problems: in an earlier incarnation, a 19-year-old cadet was arrested and booked on a first-degree murder charge, one of a number of criminal incidents.

The corps goes to great lengths to avoid similar problems, screening its candidates carefully, said Dr. Jocelyn Freeman Garrick, deputy medical director for the Alameda County EMS Agency. The mentoring and coaching are essential, she added. “We can train all day, but if the young man’s attitude, hope and vision is not re-directed, the same learned negative behaviors will continue,” she said.

Teetering between his old life and his future one, Shaka Perdue asked himself a hard question: “Are you going to be the person who inspires the next generation to be good?”

Were it not for the corps — and “the support of 20 other guys who came from where you came from,” he says that he would probably be earning minimum wage somewhere. Today, walking through his neighborhood, he often runs into the “O.G.s,” or “older gangsters,” who now treat him with respect. They don’t resent his stable income or aspirations for a better life, he said. Instead they say: “I want you to talk to my son.”

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Patricia Leigh Brown, a former staff reporter for The New York Times, writes regularly for The Times and The Center for Investigative Reporting from San Francisco. She was awarded a Loeb Fellowship at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and has taught at UC Berkeley and Yale.
 

Earlier this year, Salinas grappled with the death of four community members killed by the police. In East Salinas, residents are healing from these tragic events by demanding respect and equity and lifting themselves up by their “Rootstraps,” part of La Cultura Cura.

La Cultura Cura is a transformative health and healing philosophy led by Jerry Tello of the National Compadres Network that recognizes the importance of cultural values, traditions, and indigenous practices on the path to healthy development, restoration, and lifelong well-being.

MILPA (Motivating Individual Leadership for Public Advancement) — a Salinas-based collective “think tank” of women and men who are cultivating a movement of community health — is advancing the philosophy of La Cultura Cura and leading efforts through culture and critical consciousness. MILPA is “Cultivating Changemakers for the Next Seven Generations.”
 
The video below features traditional healing circles (círculos) led by MILPA and community leaders. As one of the leaders of the movement describes, “these círculos have catalyzed a change in our community. They have given people hope.”

• Click here to view the English version of the video
• Click here for the Spanish version (forward to 52 seconds)
   

The Equal Voice for Southern California Families coalition is calling for the state to fight poverty through a Sunny Day Fund of $4.1 billion for California families. The infographic above explains where in the proposed state budget the revenue would come from and where it would be invested.

>>>Read the rest of the California Equity Quarterly, Spring 2014 issue.

Equity leaders across the state are preparing for an opportunity to allot greater benefits from cap-and-trade revenues for investment in California’s disadvantaged communities. These revenues, generated by quarterly auctions held by the Air Resources Board, are deposited into the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund with the goal of reducing California’s greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2020.

The 2014 state budget allocated $130 million of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund to the Strategic Growth Council to develop and administer the Affordable Housing and Sustainable Communities (AHSC) program. Additionally, SB 862, accompanying legislation recently signed into law, requires that 50 percent of AHSC funds — $65 million this year—be utilized to provide housing opportunities for lower-income households.

Over the next few months, the Strategic Growth Council will refine the Affordable Housing and Sustainable Communities program. To maximize the program’s equity potential, community leaders are urging the Council to establish a robust grant review process, solicit community feedback in a meaningful and deliberate way, and provide technical assistance to underresourced applicants to help develop high-quality grant proposals. Grant proposal support is critical, since disadvantaged communities often lack the experience, resources, and capacity to submit competitive proposals despite overwhelming needs.

Equity advocates have also recommended that the Council prioritize projects that meet multiple needs of disadvantaged communities, consider the specific needs of rural communities, and require all affordable housing projects to include provisions to prevent displacement. Other recommended guidelines for grant proposals include rewarding jurisdictions that already have policies to maximize greenhouse gas reductions or co-benefit policies, such as those that target hiring for disadvantaged residents.

In addition to the Affordable Housing and Sustainable Communities program, state and local agencies must make significant Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund investments in “disadvantaged communities.” The Air Resources Board is currently holding public workshops to help finalize criteria to help define a “disadvantaged community.” The California Environmental Protection Agency has also developed CalEnviroScreen, a screening tool that identifies disadvantage based on 19 environmental and demographic indicators. Some equity coalitions, concerned that CalEnviroScreen does not qualify certain marginalized communities as “disadvantaged,” are developing alternative tools and measures.

Click here to read Public Advocates’ primer on the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.

Click here for Strategic Growth Council and Air Resources Board meeting dates.

>>>Read the rest of the California Equity Quarterly Summer 2014 issue.