Summer break is here

We’re on a event break for the summer, so you have plenty of time to check out our past events and catch up on your blog reading!

Let us know what you’d like to see next year! In the meantime, here are a few of our speakers from this past year:

Jan Perry

“By having relationships with people, I get to see what kind of public policy I actually need to develop because I see it playing out right in front of me,” Perry said. “It also keeps me grounded because I know what people want outside the walls of City Hall … the time I spend outside in the community actually getting things built.”

Read about her visit here.
View the photos here.

Aja Brown

“I’ve always worked in community building and done volunteer work at the grass-roots level,” Brown said. “I had no intention of running for office until I worked [in Compton] for a couple years, and I realized that it doesn’t matter how many great programs you do at the staff level, you really need a change in leadership to provide a strategic plan, a gameplan, or a blueprint that the community can follow. When I worked in government, I really saw the need for good policy and planning, and that’s what motivated me to run. And we’re off to a great start so far.”

Read about her visit here.
View the photos here.

Karen Bass

“One of the things I’ve had the most fun with has been applying grass-roots community-based strategies in a legislative context,” Bass said. “That’s been great fun. You’re not supposed to do that. It’s not expected, very disruptive, and consequently, a lot of fun.”

Read about her visit here.
View the photos here.

Tom Bakaly

“You learn about engagement and strategic planning here at USC,” Bakaly said. “A lot of times it sits up on a shelf. This time it’s been pretty real, especially when people are yelling at you. We’re engaging the whole community and looking at their values. Rarely does a city have an opportunity to define itself, but that’s what we’re trying to do right now.”

Read about his visit here.

Jackie Lacey

“With rehabilitation and alternative sentencing programs, those recidivism rates have been shown to drop down to about 20 percent,” Lacey said. “We have not fully used rehabilitation programs to the extent we should have. But now we really are being forced to do that.”

Read about her visit here.

View photos of her visit here.

John Szabo

“We’re doing really great work with the Affordable Care Act and partnering with Covered California because we know that with the health exchange coming along, people are going to come to the public library because of our technology, because we’re the place to go for information and because we’re trusted,” Szabo said. “But we’re also doing a lot of work in the public health arena, looking at where health disparities are in L.A., and targeting specific health programming around that. So if there’s a health disparity in one neighborhood, say a cardiovascular diseases health disparity in this neighborhood, we’re looking at how we can provide target programming around that. Where are the food deserts? Are there things that we can do with urban gardening and that kind of work?”

Read about his visit here.

View photos of his visit here.

Michael Govan

“The museum needs to be flipped upside down,” Govan said. “There’s a lot that I think needs to be really reconsidered about these organizations, and Los Angeles was the only place you could do that. We live in a globalized society, multicultural society, and Los Angeles is probably the best representative of that. If you want people to understand each other and the world, you want a museum that would deal with the environment, the cultural questions, the points of view, the time we live in.”

Read about his visit here.

View photos of his visit here.