A Call to Action: Los Angeles' Quest to Achieve Community Safety

"A Call To Action: Los Angeles' Quest To Achieve Community Safety" is a report and policy brief telling the story of L.A.'s extraordinary experiment to keep kids safe in the City of Los Angeles' worst gang zones, and laying out a new comprehensive set of recommendations. The document also explains Advancement Project's comprehensive violence reduction strategy and shows how it could be used in other communities suffering from gang violence. The report, assembled by Advancement Proejct's Urban Peace and Healthy City programs, highlights progress the City of L.A. has made toward greater public safety, and how to build on those successes to achieve comprehensive community safety in places where children are still exposed to chronic trauma and violence.Five Years of ProgressIn 2007 Advancement Project released "A Call to Action: A Case for a Comprehensive Solution to L.A.'s Gang Violence Epidemic", a roadmap that explained why Los Angeles' 30-year "war on gangs" was failing to quell gangs and gang violence and laid out a comprehensive set of recommendations to reverse course. Since then, Advancement Project has worked closely with City officials to put these recommendations into place.Los Angeles has seen greater success in decreasing gang violence with gang-related crime reduced by over 15% and 35% fewer gang-related homicides surrounding neighborhoods served by the Mayor's Gang Reduction & Youth Development (GRYD) Office and by Summer Night Lights, a summer violence reduction strategy. In 2010 the homicide rate was at its lowest since the 1960s.Success in significantly reducing violence can be attributed in part to the following:Catalyst to City's new approach to gang violence: Based on the 2007 report recommendations to create a central entity that manages gang violence prevention in areas where violence was concentrated, the City of L.A. created the GRYD Office to focus public resources where it is needed the most -- on 12 gang violence hot zones identified in conjunction with community leaders.Transformation of L.A. Police Department: The LAPD has transformed the way it deals with gangs, from an overbroad suppression strategy to relationship-based, problem-solving policing.Training gang interventionists: The Urban Peace Academy was established to train gang interventionists, the only publicly funded training program in the nation for gang interventionists. The academy has trained more than 1,200 gang interventionists and more than 400 police officers to work together, which has resulted in collaboration and shared accountability to achieve public safety.In fact, efforts in Los Angeles have been so successful that other cities across the nation are working to adopt some of the strategies that have succeeded in Los Angeles.Time for a New Call to ActionDespite amazing gains in violence reduction for the City of Los Angeles as a whole, there is still much left to do. We are not yet fully cured of this complex epidemic -- the conditions that spawn and sustain gang violence remain largely unchanged in L.A.'s most vulnerable communities. We continue to require holistic, systemic, and politically difficult solutions."A Call to Action: Los Angeles' Quest to Achieve Community Safety"explains why, despite these significant accomplishments, the City faces a number of ongoing challenges and opportunities for investment.The Urban Peace program advocates for the leadership of the City and County of Los Angeles to publicly commit to achieving the following goals:GOVERNMENT AND COMMUNITY ACCOUNTABILITY: Government at every level must be held accountable for the basic safety of every child.SCALING UP PREVENTION, INTERVENTION, AND TARGETED SUPPRESSION: The City and County of Los Angeles must bring up to scale prevention and intervention efforts to meet the need in the hot zones in a culturally competent way.ACHIEVE FEAR-FREE SCHOOLS: Beyond Safe Passages to and from school, all students should attend public schools free of bullying, gang intimidation, and all forms of fear.REGIONALLY COORDINATED COUNTY AGENCIES: County agencies must cooperate with each other and with the City to achieve reductions in violence, trauma, and crime.BUILD A REENTRY NETWORK: The County must seize realignment as an opportunity to make coordinated, seamless reintegration a reality for its citizens returning from incarceration.EQUITABLE COMMUNITY BUILDING: These neighborhoods must receive the same capital, business, educational, and infrastructure investment from which affluent Los Angeles already benefits.CREATE VIABLE EMPLOYMENT: There needs to be an immediate economic and employment plan for the hot zone communities of Los Angeles.Ending the public safety inequity that renders gang violence hot zone communities invisible to the rest of Los Angeles means we must provide youth greater alternatives that preempt gang joining. Political will is necessary to pull together a truly comprehensive solution with real government-community partnerships at both the City and County level, tailored to yield and sustain results for each individual neighborhood. Los Angeles cannot rest until every family and every child enjoy the first of all civil rights -- safety -- and the first of all freedoms -- freedom from violence

Special Issue: Hunger, Nutrition, and Health

Everyday millions of Americans face barriers to accessing food, housing, and other supports–––making the impossible decision of whether to put food on the table or cover other essential needs. Food insecurity and diet-related diseases, such as heart disease and diabetes, affect people of all ages and in all communities. It was for this reason that the Biden-Harris Administration hosted the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health in September 2022. As the President said at the Conference, “No child should go to bed hungry. No parent should die of a disease that can be prevented.” It will require all of us to take these challenges head on in the coming years. This special issue of the Journal of Food Law & Policy extends the critical conversation conducted at the Conference to reduce diet-related diseases and make hunger a thing of the past

Special Issue: Hunger, Nutrition, and Health

Everyday millions of Americans face barriers to accessing food, housing, and other supports–––making the impossible decision of whether to put food on the table or cover other essential needs. Food insecurity and diet-related diseases, such as heart disease and diabetes, affect people of all ages and in all communities. It was for this reason that the Biden-Harris Administration hosted the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health in September 2022. As the President said at the Conference, “No child should go to bed hungry. No parent should die of a disease that can be prevented.” It will require all of us to take these challenges head on in the coming years. This special issue of the Journal of Food Law & Policy extends the critical conversation conducted at the Conference to reduce diet-related diseases and make hunger a thing of the past

Beyond War: Empowerment for Senior Citizens in a Nuclear Age

An educationally focused non-partisan grass roots peace movement is described, as are the empowering effects of being involved in such a group. Beginning attempts to utilize this approach with senior citizens are explored, and further experimentation is encouraged

A study of how school board members acquire their knowledge of educational issues

The purpose of this study was to determine how School Board Members acquire their knowledge of educational issues. A questionnaire was used to examine the socio-economic background of Board of Education members, along with their acquisition of knowledge. The questionnaire was distributed to Elementary and High School Boards of Education in the Southern New Jersey area. The data collected from the questionnaires, research on Boards of Education and conclusions drawn from the summary of the data are presented. The study of the data indicates Boards of Education consist predominantly of white males, age 40 - 49, who have attended college, and have had a child in the district. Most School Board Members indicated they were satisfied with their Boards of Education, and rely on school board discussions and superintendent recommendations to acquire their knowledge of educational issues. All of the members questioned were unpaid, the majority did not belong to any outside educational agencies, and a large majority did not rely on personal research or discussion with school personnel to gain educational knowledge. The major finding of this study indicates School Board Members rely heavily on superintendent recommendations to gain educational knowledge

Sketching to learn, learning to sketch: students' ways of sketching in architectural designing

Architects when sketching take time to pause, to look, to sketch, to look and sketch again. Described by some as the passing of an idea, a place or an experience from eye to mind to hand, the act of sketching is a means by which architects come to see and to understand the unfolding outcomes of their designing and make sense of aspects of the world. For many practitioners, scholars and eminent architects, sketching is fundamental to their architectural disposition and an integral part of thinking in an architectural way. To become architects, students need to learn this kind of sketching and few students in the early years of their studies are able to sketch in this way. Experience in teaching reveals architecture students are able to produce sketches, yet many struggle to grasp how to use their sketching as an integral part of their thinking and of progressing their designing. Far too rarely is using sketching an explicit focus of teaching and learning in the design studio. This research is directed towards understanding the different ways students are sketching when designing, on the basis that understanding these ways provides a useful and appropriate basis upon which to found improvements in teaching and learning about sketching in the design studio. Synergies between architectural sketching, visual thinking and how students learn, give rise to an investigation into the ways students are sketching, its approach, the form and collection of the data, the tools of analysis and means of interpretation founded on what is shared. The phenomenographic perspective on teaching and learning (Marton and Booth 1997) provides a means to analyse students' sketching, its iterative and interwoven cycles of considering, discovering and reinterpreting, suited to making sense of and seeing below the surface of the loose, searching and at times unclear design sketching. The analysis findings identify and describe differences in what and how students are sketching and are synthesized into a visual framework of 'palettes', describing three different and increasingly complex ways students are sketching. Using the descriptive framework in the studio offers students and teachers, through the understanding it depicts and the language it provides, opportunity to see, to make sense of, to compare, to complement, to improve and to discuss their own sketching and the sketching of others, and in so doing provides a means by which to help bring sketching into being an explicit focus of the day to day exchanges which lie at the core of learning in the design studio. Consideration is given to how teaching and learning in the studio might change were sketching to take this focus

Sketching to learn, learning to sketch: students' ways of sketching in architectural designing

Architects when sketching take time to pause, to look, to sketch, to look and sketch again. Described by some as the passing of an idea, a place or an experience from eye to mind to hand, the act of sketching is a means by which architects come to see and to understand the unfolding outcomes of their designing and make sense of aspects of the world. For many practitioners, scholars and eminent architects, sketching is fundamental to their architectural disposition and an integral part of thinking in an architectural way. To become architects, students need to learn this kind of sketching and few students in the early years of their studies are able to sketch in this way. Experience in teaching reveals architecture students are able to produce sketches, yet many struggle to grasp how to use their sketching as an integral part of their thinking and of progressing their designing. Far too rarely is using sketching an explicit focus of teaching and learning in the design studio. This research is directed towards understanding the different ways students are sketching when designing, on the basis that understanding these ways provides a useful and appropriate basis upon which to found improvements in teaching and learning about sketching in the design studio. Synergies between architectural sketching, visual thinking and how students learn, give rise to an investigation into the ways students are sketching, its approach, the form and collection of the data, the tools of analysis and means of interpretation founded on what is shared. The phenomenographic perspective on teaching and learning (Marton and Booth 1997) provides a means to analyse students' sketching, its iterative and interwoven cycles of considering, discovering and reinterpreting, suited to making sense of and seeing below the surface of the loose, searching and at times unclear design sketching. The analysis findings identify and describe differences in what and how students are sketching and are synthesized into a visual framework of 'palettes', describing three different and increasingly complex ways students are sketching. Using the descriptive framework in the studio offers students and teachers, through the understanding it depicts and the language it provides, opportunity to see, to make sense of, to compare, to complement, to improve and to discuss their own sketching and the sketching of others, and in so doing provides a means by which to help bring sketching into being an explicit focus of the day to day exchanges which lie at the core of learning in the design studio. Consideration is given to how teaching and learning in the studio might change were sketching to take this focus