St. Francis Center welcomes new director



There is a little street south of downtown. The buildings of the city center cut out the skyline to the north; the blue line light rail runs perpendicular to the south. On this two-block chunk of Hope Street, food insecure families and homeless people gather several times a week, all turning to help from St. Francis Center, a nonprofit that aims to feed and assist the needy.

imageBut on Sunday, Jan. 23, a different crowd gathered at St. Francis. The center was filled with people dressed in their Sunday best and traveled from all over Los Angeles. They were donors, friends and family, there to attend a celebratory mass and brunch in honor of the new Executive Director, Jill Remelski, and the transition of the former Executive Director to the President of the Board of Directors, Gerald A. Gumbleton.

Remelski came to St. Francis Center in summer of 2002, when she was an undergrad studying business at the University of Southern California.

“I had plenty of opportunities to get a job downtown,” said Remelski. “But I didn’t feel that I was going to love going to work everyday. I wanted to love to go to work.”

The center offers a variety of programs to help feed the needy. Its soup kitchen is open to the homeless six days a week, and its Family Food Distribution program provides families with bags of free groceries every week.

Remelski says that her motivation stems from the relationships she has built with the people who come into the center.

“That’s always been really interesting,” said Remelski. “Because when you see someone on the street, you don’t think about, that person has a mother, that person has a father, or they might have kids who are worried about them. It’s interesting to think about the human that is there, and that we don’t really treat the homeless as people.”

The center started as a Franciscan Friars outreach program in 1972. The first parishioners gathered extra food from their own pantries and gave them to the homeless.

Today, the center has grown and offers 100,000 meals a year to the hungry and provides groceries to 300 unique families every week. Though it is still loosely affiliated with the Franciscan Friars, the center receives no resources from the church.

Gumbleton has been with the organization for over 30 years. After years of training Remelski, Gumbleton is officially transitioning to Chair of the Board of Directors, a fundraising role.

“My goal is to raise enough money to support Jill, so that she can be successful,” said Gumbleton. But Gumbleton is careful to not measure success exclusively in numbers. “The emphasis is not the number that we serve, our emphasis is in the way that we serve them, treating each person with dignity.”

Remelski hopes to provide more comprehensive services in the years to come. For example, she hopes to hire a full-time advocate for the families and the homeless. Remelski says that landlords take advantage of families with illegal members, using their immigration status as leverage to avoid meeting minimum requirements. She hopes an advocate will be able to get them in touch with the right opportunities and organization.

“It’s not an opportunity for us to recreate the wheel and do things that other organizations in the area are already doing, it’s just a chance to be able to direct them to the right spot and introduce them to the right people so they can feel that trust with those organizations that they feel with us,” said Remelski.

Among her other plans, Remelski wants to help families get on food stamps and expand the center’s hygiene program, which provides showers, clean clothes and toiletries to the homeless.

Photographs from the St. Francis Center:

The center operates off of private donations and grants from foundations, with a small federal grant. The grant is from FEMA, because homelessness is considered a national emergency, and makes up $40,000 of the center’s $900,000 budget.

Gumbleton says the last four years have been touch and go. The center doesn’t have an endowment, so they raise the money year by year.

“We can do whatever we want, if we have enough money for the programs,” said Remelski. “We do what we can with what we have.”

Remelski says that the recession has fueled individual donations, as hard times make individuals more aware of hunger and food insecurity.

For Remelski, working at St. Francis has given her a new perspective on her own waste. She says she no longer will throw out food just because it’s beyond the expiration date, if it still smells and tastes fine.

“It’s not just a job, and none of our employees treat it like it’s just a job,” she said. “That’s what really makes the difference.”

Gumbleton echoed this sentiment.

“[The homeless are] my life,” he said. “I love what I do and I continue to do it. I only do what I like to do. I’ve never done anything for more than 15 minutes after I did not enjoy it.”

More stories about food issues in South Los Angeles:

Los Angeles school cafeterias boast healthier options

Experts discuss the ‘politics of food’ in South L.A.

Food Not Bombs takes alternative approach to feeding homeless

William Grant Still Arts Center commemorates Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day



imageTo raise awareness about HIV/AIDS, the William Grant Still Arts Center held a doll-making workshop and offered free HIV/AIDS testing on Saturday. National Black Awareness Day is Monday, Feb. 7.

The event coordinated with the center’s Black Doll Exhibit.

HIV/AIDS infects 56,000 new Americans every year. Infection rates are especially high in the African Americans.

Estimates say 15,000 people in Los Angeles are infected with the virus and don’t know it. These people will be responsible for 50 percent of the new HIV/AIDS cases.

Dolls of Hope

When Cynthia Davis traveled in Sub-Saharan Africa and visited orphans from HIV/AIDS, she was surprised to see that they didn’t have any toys.

“They were playing with rock and pieces of tree bark and old tires,” said Davis. “I thought having a doll would be something that would comfort them.”

A doll collector herself, the assistant professor at Drew University of Medicine and Science and HIV/AIDS advocate started a new group. She called is Dolls of Hope. It aims to bring dolls to orphans from HIV across the world.

Davis taught a doll-making workshop at the arts center. A group of volunteers, primarily children from the neighborhood, gathered to stuff and sow cloth dolls. These dolls will now be sent across seas.

“Everybody loves dolls, especially children,” said Davis. “The doll represents life, it represents children, it represents unconditional love.”

To date, Davis has given out over 6,000 dolls.

imageDolls of Hope have been meeting at the center for the last three years for Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day. The organization also has workshops all over the world, with the first during 1998 world AIDS Days.

Before the workshop began, Davis spoke to the group about HIV/AIDS and the impact on the African American community. Working in the black community for almost three decades, Davis has found there’s still a lot of stigma and fear surrounding AIDS.

“People who are infected, they need love and care and support,” Davis said.

The Van

In front of the center, a medical van offered anonymous and free HIV tests. The van is part of another of Davis’ project she started at Drew University.

“In the hood, it’s known as the AIDSmobile,” laughed Albert Washington, one of the technicians on the van.

Davis got funding for the van 1991. At the time, it was the first mobile testing van in Los Angeles. Today vans like this are standard as outreach to at-risk communities.

The van is the size of a trailer home. Steep steps lead to a little reception, with an exam room on either side. The test is just an oral swab and results come back in 20 minutes – a vast improvement to the method of drawing blood from yesteryear. Back then, tests were done off site and results took 5-7 days.

This van is the only unit to patrols South Los Angeles, which has one of the highest concentrations of infection in the county. Washington says he usually finds two to three positive cases a week.
Washington says administrating the test is a small part of the job. The harder part is telling people they have a life-changing disease.

“It becomes part of you, because you get used to doing it,” said Washington. “You can see the pouring of expression from their faces. You can see the face of betrayal. These faces never leave you.”

If someone tests positive, the van is prepared to tell him or her what to do next. They try to make is as easy as possible to take the next steps. Otherwise, Washington says, they could be out infecting more people.

“We cross the T’s and dot the I’s,” said Washington. “We will make the appointments, we will get them a contact person, we give them literature.”

Like many organizations with a free service, the van is always fighting for funding. Davis is worried they may not be able to stay open. They ironically didn’t have the money to remove their sponsors’ names on the side of the van after those sponsors dropped them.

Remember, Recycle and Revive

Davis’ doll workshop coincided with the center’s Black Doll exhibit. The exhibit opened Jan. 8 and will close Feb. 19.

Cheryl Williams, the show’s curator, explained that the name of the show, Remember, Recycle and Revive, is based on remembering black heritage, making dolls from recycled materials, and celebrating the revival of black culture.

Photographs from Black Doll Exhibit:

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Experts discuss the ‘politics of food’ in South L.A.



imageThis week, the United States Department of Agriculture and Department of Health released new dietary guidelines. Updated every five years, the food pyramid taught in classrooms around the nation is a beacon of healthy food choices.

This year, the pyramid says Americans have been eating too much salt, so much so, in fact, that it urges them to cut their salt intake in half.

Despite the revamping of the food pyramid, despite the flashy graphics and colorful design that becomes more aesthetically pleasing twice a decade, Americans are getting fatter. Almost one third of adults in the United States are overweight or obese, compared to about 15 percent 30 years ago. Diabetes rates are skyrocketing.

The food pyramid is based on the assumption that good nutrition stems from individual behavior; individual behavior drives our consumption. People make choices, and making a healthy choice is a good decision. The question becomes, can everyone make that same healthy choice?

David Sloane, professor of Policy, Planning and Development at the University of Southern California, says we can’t. Sloane spoke Thursday in the Tudor Campus Center to a room full of University of Southern California students and faculty. He was one of four speakers during a lunch panel discussion on the “Politics of Food.”

Sloane, who has been studying food distribution for 11 years, says residents of South Los Angeles have far fewer choices than those in more affluent communities.

It is a crisis of equity.

Sloane’s research team did a series of comparisons between restaurants and grocery stores in West and South Los Angeles in 2001 and 2006, and is gearing up for another round this year.

Restaurants

Sloane’s team found that there was a discrepancy both in choice of restaurants and on the menus within the restaurants in South and West Los Angeles.

“West Los Angeles is one of those places where people have the ability to make those choices,” said Sloane. “It’s one of the richest food environments one could imagine in the United States. There are tons of fast food restaurants, but there are tons of fast food restaurants everywhere in the United States. The difference is, do you have a choice?”

Three quarters of the restaurants in South Los Angeles are fast food restaurants, compared to less than half of the restaurants in West Los Angeles.

“But restaurant distribution are just points on a map,” said Sloane. He also wanted to know about the options once inside the restaurant.

In 2001 and 2002, Sloane sent people into restaurants to answer a simple question of the menus. Not of people, just the menus. The surveyors noted the transparency of healthy alternatives.

The difference was statistically significant. In West Los Angeles, it was common; in South Los Angeles, it was practically nonexistent.

These choices, or lack thereof, make up the profile of the separate food systems. To create a comprehensive food profile of the two areas, the team factored in grocery stores, community gardens and alternative sources of food.

Sloane discovered that places with high minority or low-income populations have a very different profile than places with lots of money. Namely, they have far fewer choices.

“The simple statement that policy makers often make to those kinds of people, ‘Oh, just eat better, and you’ll be healthier,’ isn’t actually that easy to do,” said Sloane.

The impact is evident. South Los Angeles has both the poorest and most overweight people in the Southland. Over 30 percent of the population lives under the poverty line. Thirty-five percent of adults are overweight or obese.

Grocery Stores

imageGrocery stores between the two communities had a gap just as wide as restaurants.

“I’m an aficionado of Trader Joe’s,” said Sloane. “I can go to Washington and I can go to Trader Joes, I can go to Atlanta and go to Trader Joe’s, but I can’t go to Trader Joe’s in South Los Angeles.”

When looking at a map of grocery store locations in Los Angeles, the sparse distribution of stores in South Los Angeles might make one think that the community can’t support more. Sloane says that isn’t true.

Through tracking spending patters, Sloane found that tens of millions of dollars are exported annually to the ring of grocers around South Los Angeles, such as Culver City, Westchester and Downtown Los Angeles.

Not only does this mean money is leaving the already impoverished community, but it also indicates the grocers within South Los Angeles are not meeting the needs of the residents.

The team created a neighborhood food watch. Made up of community residents, the food watch group went to grocery stores with a checklist. They found a significant amount of grocery stores in South Los Angeles have expired food on the shelves. Sloane was surprised to learn that that there is no governmental body that regulates expired food in the US, with the exception of baby formula. Everything else is managed by private sector manufactures.

Steps Taken

The group came up with strategies to address problems at restaurants and stores.

Working with the community redevelopment agency and grocers, they began a campaign to get better food into South Los Angeles grocery stores about 10 years ago.

The group also developed incentives for grocers to move into South Los Angeles, including subsidies for opening stores in underserved neighborhoods.

Sloane says the initiatives have made a difference. “Is the food profile different today? Yes, it’s better than it was back then. It’s not better enough, there’s not enough choices, and there’s still big food deserts, places where it’s hard to make those choices.”

It was more difficult to think of solutions for restaurants. Because a large part of the problem were lack of choices within restaurants and a saturation of fast food, advocates pushed for a moratorium on fast food restaurants while the residents of South Los Angeles figured out how to improve the food system.

In the fall of 2008, the Los Angeles City Council passed the Interim Control Ordinance. The ordinance made a two-year ban on permits for stand-alone fast food restaurants.

When the ban ended last fall, residents came to the city council with a new solution: they wanted to manage the number of curb cuts.

All drive-thrus need to cut into the curb so cars can go in one side and come out the other. That means two new curb cuts per a fast food restaurant. By controlling the number of curb cuts, the community can control the number of new fast food restaurants.

The Planning Commission, the body that currently regulates the number of curb cuts, passed a piece of legislation giving the control of curb cuts to the communities in South Los Angeles.

Though it is small, it is enough to ensure South Angelenos can prevent fast food restaurants from clustering in one area.

What Next?

Sloane’s group hopes to create an economic food development food trust. Modeled after a program in Pennsylvania, the trust would have resources for people to start grocery stores in underserved communities that they would then pay back into the trust.

To address the lack of healthy options in restaurants, Sloane wants to create healthy food zones to complement the idea of curb cuts. The program would provide subsidize to healthy restaurants.

“We don’t just try to keep bad food out; we try to get good food into South Los Angeles,” said Sloane.

Photos courtesy of Creative Commons

City Planning postpones ruling on luxury apartment complex



Los Angeles City Hall overflowed with people Thursday, as hundreds attended a public hearing for the Lorenzo Project, a $250 million luxury apartment development Palmer Construction proposes to build on the corner of Flower Street and 23rd Avenue. At the end of the six-hour hearing, the City Planning Commission continued the issue until February 10.

The Lorenzo Project is the newest in a string of Italian-style apartment complexes developed by Geoffrey H. Palmer, who built Visconti, Orsini and Piero, among others.

The location of Lorenzo was chosen in part because of the Expo Line, the new light-rail that is scheduled to open in 2012. The building is designed to have easy access to the Expo Line, a gesture by Palmer to help Angelinos move towards public transportation.

Currently, the proposed site is zoned as a Q Condition, meaning only medical or educational facilities can move there. If the commission chooses to approve the project, they will have to rezone it for residential use.

During the open comments portion of the hearing, members from the community spoke of the need for better health services in the area, especially in the wake of the closure of other nearby hospital and clinics.

Palmer Construction attempted to assuage these concerns during the project’s presentation. Among the retail space available, Palmer says they will provide a unit for a community health center rent-free for the next 20 years.

The Lorenzo Project pledges to make 5 percent of their units affordable housing, but community members say that isn’t enough. During public comment, a member of the local neighborhood council said the council had unanimously opposed the project on the basis that it would not be accessible to the people of the area.

Among the supporters of the project were 200 construction workers clad in bright orange shirts with slogans such as, “Si Se Puede, Put LA Back to Work” and “GH Palmer Provides Jobs.” The majority were workers from a Palmer Construction site, where they had been given the day off to appear at the hearing.

Both sides urged the commission to think about the economic benefits for an underprivileged population: Palmer arguing that they were creating jobs, the community arguing that health and education should come before luxury apartments.

“This may create jobs for two years,” said an attendee during open comments. “But we are going to have to live with the building forever.”