USC logo

Park Equity Symposium

Published by USC Bedrosian Center on

Park Equity in Los Angeles

July 10, 2014
9:30am to 4:00am

Confirmed Guest Speakers

State Senator Kevin de León

Senator Kevin de León was elected to serve the 22nd Senate District in November 2010. The district includes all or parts of the City of Los Angeles, Alhambra, East Los Angeles, Florence-Graham, Maywood, San Marino, South Pasadena, Vernon, and Walnut Park.

After a unanimous vote on June 15th, the California Senate unanimously voted in Senator de León as its next president pro tem. This historic action marks the first time in modern
Senator De León has spent a lifetime fighting to empower working families and the poor—as a community organizer, English as a Second Language and U.S. Citizenship teacher, and an advocate for public schools.

In addition to his focus on improving public schools, De León is committed to improving the air quality in his district, which has some of the country’s worst air quality, as well as expanding park space in critically underserved communities.

When he was in the Assembly, De León authored the Statewide Park Development and Community Revitalization Act of 2008, establishing a needs-based competitive grants program, managed by the Department of Parks and Recreation, for the distribution of $400 million in Proposition 84 funds for local park assistance and development. That measure allocates the single largest investment in local park space creation in the nation’s history and ensures that those funds are targeted to areas with the highest needs.
Senator De Leon is also the author of SB 1086, the Safe Neighborhood Parks, Rivers and Coastal Protection Bond Act of 2014 which will expand funding for local, regional and state parks, as well as, restoration of California waterways and protection of our state’s coast and open space.

 

Chris Boone, Ph.D, Arizona State University, School of Sustainability

Christopher Boone is the Dean of the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University. His research contributes to ongoing debates in sustainable urbanization, environmental justice, vulnerability, and global environmental change. He is a co-PI for the urban Long Term Ecological Research projects based in Baltimore and Phoenix, both supported by the National Science Foundation. During his academic career, he has been a principal or co-principal investigator on research grants totaling $26 million. For the past three years he has sat on the scientific steering committee for the Urbanization and Global Environmental Change project, a core initiative of the International Human Dimensions program, and also participated in the US Global Change Research Program’s US National Climate Assessment for Cities. He is an active contributor to Future Earth, an international initiative that aims to integrate the global environmental change community with a focus on sustainable outcomes. He is the author of two books on urban sustainability, City and Environment and Urbanization and Sustainability, and is the associate editor for Current Research on Cities. Dr. Boone serves on the editorial board of the International Journal of Sustainable Development and Environment Justice. For Cambridge University Press, he is the co-editor of a book series on sustainability. He is a member of the external advisory board for the University of Puerto Rico-Rio Piedras IGERT program on the Urbanizing Tropics. For the Mayo Clinic, he serves on its Green Committee. At ASU, he has taught classes on sustainable urbanization, urban and environmental health, principles and methods of sustainability, environmental justice, and interdisciplinary methods for socio-ecological research. He has a PhD from the University of Toronto and served as a post-doctoral fellow at McGill University.

 

Laura Pulido, Ph.D, University of Southern California, Department of American Studies & Ethnicity

Professor Pulido researches race, political activism, Chicana/o Studies, critical human geography, and Los Angeles. She studies how various groups experience racial and class oppression, how these experiences differ among particular communities of color, and how they mobilize to create a more socially-just world. Asking such questions, Professor Pulido has done extensive work in the field of environmental justice, social movements, labor studies, and radical tourism.
About the Los Angeles Neighborhood Land Trust

The Land Trust is the leading nonprofit working to create urban parks and gardens in the Los Angeles region. The organization was formed in 2002 as a 501c(3) with initial funding from the City of Los Angeles in response to a 2000 report by The Urban Land Trust Task Force, which documented the shortage of green and recreational spaces in the city’s underserved neighborhoods. Since then, the Neighborhood Land Trust has played an important role in the creation, renovation and opening of nine parks and gardens, seven of which are managed and programmed by the Neighborhood Land Trust and local community management committees.

This symposium is made possible with support from the Bedrosian Center on Governance, USC Price School of Public Policy. Funding provided by Proposition 84 to Improve the Sustainability and Livability of California’s Communities through the Strategic Growth Council’s Urban Greening for Sustainable Communities Grant Program. This symposium is also funded by Community Health Council’s United for Health, a Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Community Transformation Grant–Small Communities Program.

Contact: [email protected] or (212) 797-6559

Bedrosian Center