Protecting Renters: Discussions of Rent Control, Stabilization, and Evictions
2018-02-26 12:30 - 14:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, Room 2343, 337 Charles E. Young Drive East, Los Angeles, CA, 90095-1656, United States
California’s housing crisis is hitting renters hard. With rents fast increasing in Los Angeles, many people are scared. Whether they fear rent increases that push housing costs out of reach or being scared that improvements to the building mean a rent increase is imminent, the rental market can be scary. California is known for strong tenant protections, but existing state laws like the Ellis Act (evicting tenants to convert buildings to ownership) or Costa-Hawkins Act (not allowing new construction to be under rent control) weakens these tenant protections. What’s the appetite for reforming these laws? How are they currently affecting residents in Los Angeles? What can be done to put renters in Los Angeles on a more stable foundation?
Speakers:
Joan Ling, UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs
Tony Samara, Urban Habitat
Doug Smith, Public Counsel
Moderator:
Mike Lens, UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs
Lunch will be provided.
Livestream available here.

The Intersection: Woke Black Folk
2018-03-02 18:00 - 22:00 | Barbara Morrison Performing Arts Center, 4305 Degnan Boulevard #101, Los Angeles, CA, 90008, United States
26th Annual Pan African Film Festival

Featured Theater Event
Playwright, Poet, Scholar and Activist FUNMILOLA FAGBAMILA performs for ONE NIGHT ONLY her one-woman, hip hop, spoken word theater piece:
THE INTERSECTION: WOKE BLACK FOLK
The Intersection: Woke Black Folk explores and deconstructs black political identity, foregrounding the forms of ideological conflict and difference that exist within what can be understood to be black radicalism. It calls into question the coherence and singularity of the political category, “woke black folk,” demonstrating the deep differences and divides within black communities and within black mobilization.

View the trailer here.

Friday, March 2nd, 2018
DOORS: 6PM
SHOW: 7PM
at the Barbara Morrison Performing Arts Center | Leimert Park
4305 Degnan Blvd #101, Los Angeles, CA 90008
“This is Baduizm.”
-Erykah Badu
“This work is timely, brilliant and necessary.”
-Angela Davis
General admission $20
18 & Under $15
Tickets can be purchased here.
Dinner / refreshments will be provided!

Economic Policy and the Civil Rights Movement: How Coretta Scott King Helped Change Federal Reserve Policy
2018-03-05 12:00 - 13:30 | UCLA Bunche Hall, Room 6339, 315 Portola Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
The UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy presents…
“Economic Policy and the Civil Rights Movement: How Coretta Scott King Helped Change Federal Reserve Policy Workshop” featuring David Stein.

A Conversation with Chelsea Manning
2018-03-05 18:30 - 20:30 | UCLA Royce Hall, 340 Royce Drive, Los Angeles , CA, 90095, United States
UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs presents
A Conversation with Chelsea Manning
Monday, March 5, 2018
6:30 p.m. @ Royce Hall
$35: General Admission
$15: UCLA Faculty/Staff
Free to current UCLA students with ID

As an intelligence analyst for the U.S. Department of Defense, Chelsea Manning disclosed classified documents to WikiLeaks that revealed human rights abuses and corruption connected to the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. She was convicted and sentenced to 35 years in a military prison, but released in 2017 after President Obama commuted her sentence. While in prison, Manning publicly identified as a trans woman and asserted her right to medical therapy. Now an advocate for government transparency and queer and transgender rights, Manning will speak about topics including resistance in the age of artificial intelligence; activism and protest; transgender issues; and the intersection of technology and people’s lives.
Part of the Meyer and Renee Luskin Lecture Series
luskin.ucla.edu

Contact Zone: UCLA Activists-in-Residence
2018-03-12 11:00 - 13:00 | UCLA Young Research Library, 11360 Main Conference Room, 280 Charles E. Young Drive North, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
Contact Zones are social spaces of engagement. Join us for this speaker series from the Library Diversity Committee that will bring together community leaders and experts to help navigate issues of equity, diversity, and inclusion. Learn from the experiences and projects of UCLA’s Activists-in-Residence. Hear their tips and advice on how to create a more diverse and inclusive environment at UCLA.

Manuel Criollo is the Activist-In-Residence at the Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA Luskin and has served as lead organizer on a wide range of local, regional and statewide campaigns, including solidarity work with social movements in Chiapas, Mexico, El Salvador and Venezuela. He received his BA from University of California, Santa Barbara, where he organized youth and students against anti-immigrant and anti-affirmative action ballot initiatives in California.

Yvonne Yen Liu
Yvonne Yen Liu is the Activist-in-Residence at the UCLA Asian American Studies Center and the co-founder and research director of Solidarity Research Center, a worker self-directed nonprofit that cultivates solidarity economies through data science, story-based strategy, and direct action. She is based in Los Angeles, California, where the sun smiles on her every day. She has a BA in cultural anthropology from Columbia University and a MA degree in sociology from the CUNY Graduate Center, where she pursued a PhD.
RSVP preferred. This is a free event open to all audiences. Questions: diversity@library.ucla.edu
Downloadable event flyer.

Organize, Walkout, and Transform
2018-03-17 10:00 - 14:00 | YouthSource Center, 1006 E. 28th Street, Los Angeles, CA, 90011, United States
50 Years of Youth-led Struggle for Educational Justice
Join youThink for dialogue, art, & action commemorating the 50th anniversary of the L.A. Walkouts in East & South Los Angeles Walkouts. FREE! Transportation and food will be provided.
If under 18 years of age, please fill out a permission form by clicking here and either text photo to (310) 721-0037, email scan/photo to youthink.youth@gmail.com, or fax scan/photo of form to (323) 761-8990

Just Culture
2018-03-25 11:00 - 17:00 | UCLA Wilson Plaza, 220 Westwood Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, 90095-1656, United States
Underground Scholars Initiative would like to cordially invite you to be a part of an upcoming concert and community gathering—”Just Culture.” The purpose of the event is to raise awareness for formerly incarcerated students. On the day of the event, they aim to create a space for people of color and/or those impacted by mass incarceration to enjoy elements of their culture in an elite academic institution, while addressing systemic barriers faced in their communities. Community cultural elements will be brought to the campus in an effort to bring an underrepresented culture to UCLA. Underground Scholars Initiative is looking to showcase performances and art by local artists that speak of the struggles they face as members of historically marginalized populations.
Downloadable Flyer

The Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA Luskin is happy to be a co-sponsor of this event.

Underground Scholars Initiative is a student group at UCLA that supports all current and prospective students impacted by mass incarceration, imprisonment, and involuntary detainment of any kind. They aim to create a pathway for formerly incarcerated and system impacted individuals into higher education.

Santa Ana Community Development in Action
2018-04-20 08:00 - 17:00 | Delhi Center, 505 E Central Ave, Santa Ana, CA, 92707, United States
You are invited to Santa Ana’s first…
Thrive Conference
“Santa Ana Community Development in Action”
Learn local and national community-based models & obtain tools for community-driven development.
Keynote speakers: Ananya Roy and America Bracho
Sessions include:

Community Land Trusts
Alternative Economies
Transportation Oriented Development
Urban Agriculture
Tools for Organizing
Role of Government

Free event, community members, residents and practitioners welcome.
Friday, April 20th, 2018 | 8–5 p.m. at the Delhi Center in Santa Ana 505 E Central Ave.
REGISTER HERE
Share with your friends through this Facebook event:
https://www.facebook.com/events/931043660391422/
Or contact them for more information:
thrivesantaana@gmail.com

Black, Brown, and Powerful: Freedom Dreams in Unequal Cities
2018-04-26 - 2018-04-27 | Los Angeles Trade Technical College, 400 W Washington Blvd, Los Angeles, CA, 90015, United States
SAVE THE DATE:
Los Angeles Trade Technical College, April 26–April 27, 2018
In Los Angeles and elsewhere, black and brown communities face multiple forms of banishment and exploitation. At this event, convened by the Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA Luskin, we share and discuss research and activism to analyze structures of urban displacement, racialized policing, criminal justice debt, forced labor, and the mass supervision and control of youth. But unequal cities are also where freedom dreams are created and enacted. Located in, and thinking from South Los Angeles, we shine a light on organizing frameworks and resistance strategies that challenge exclusion and refuse subordination.
We invite scholars, students, activists, artists, community-based and nonprofit organizations, foundations, policymakers and public officials, and all those interested in social justice work, to join us. Information on registration and participation will be available in early April.

Thursday 4/26
5–8 p.m.
LATTC South Campus Tent
FROM BANISHMENT TO FREEDOM
A collection of talks outlining the main dimensions of inequality in Los Angeles and highlighting key visions and practices for building power.
Special Performance: Lockdown Unplugged

Friday 4/27
8:30 a.m.-3 pm
LATTC Aspen Hall
LATTC South Campus Tent
Research and Activism Workshops:
Freedom is a Place: Land, Rent, and Housing
Pay for Freedom, Work for Free: Economic Extraction in Criminal Justice
Disentangling the Web of the Juvenile Justice System
Special Performance: Woke Black Folk
Joint Convening of Workshops
Printable flyer

Legislative Theater for Racial Justice
2018-05-18 18:00 - 20:00 | UCLA Northwest Campus Auditorium, 350 De Neve Drive, Los Angeles, CA, 90024, United States
Join us on May 18, 2018 at the UCLA Northwest Campus Auditorium at 6 p.m. to engage in a transformative Legislative Theater event bringing together community, campus and incarcerated participants to envision and propose solutions to racialized mass incarceration. Legislative Theater is a technique in which public dialogue, debate and performance are used to develop legislative solutions to problems identified by community participants. Emerging from Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed, this methodology was used to passed 12 laws during his tenure as a vereador (legislator) in Brazil.
Absolutely no experience in the arts, theater or legislative process is necessary to participate.
During a Legislative Theater event, community participants stage a play demonstrating an oppression they face. Participants in the audience —“spect-actors”— are invited into the scene to rehearse strategies for transformation. Between scenes, participants draft ideas for new laws aimed at ending that oppression. All of these ideas are collected and given to a lawyer and legislator on site who work together to organize the ideas into related groups. As the group builds consensus, with the council of the lawyer and legislator, participants debate the proposed laws until an agreement is reached on a new law the community agrees to champion. The legislator then takes the legislative proposal to their governing body for a vote in hopes of implementation.

Passing Through Movie Screening - LA Poverty Department
2018-08-03 19:00 - 21:00 | Skid Row History Museum & Archive, 250 S Broadway, Los Angeles, CA, United States
Skid Row Musuem
“Passing Through” – Directed by Leslie Dektor and produced by Tom MacMaster
Q&A with Manuel Compito, Leslie Dektor and Tom MacMaster and others.
This beautiful movie is back because of popular demand: COME SEE IT IF YOU HAVEN’T HAD THE CHANCE YET!
Los Angeles Poverty Department’s Movie Nights at the Museum:
Free movie screenings, free popcorn, free coffee & free conversation. Every 1st and 3rd Friday of the month, we screen movies about issues that are important to our Skid Row and downtown community at the #skidrowmuseum.
Passing Through focuses on an art studio that was initially launched in Los Angeles’s Skid Row that, for years, offered the disenfranchised an opportunity to discover their creative voice and the dispossessed a sense of belonging. For decades, the poor and marginalized have been herded and confined to Skid Row but many found refuge, comfort and even a path to a new life there.
Leslie Dektor, a 2-time winner and 13-time nominee of the DGA Director of the Year Award, was inspired to embark upon Passing Through in part due to the research he’d been doing for a film on the Great Depression. Dektor saw parallels between the subjects in those photos and the poor and dispossessed in Los Angeles while also recognizing the power of art to bring light and hope to the darkest times.
Proceeds from Passing Through will be donated to the Art Works Continuum as well as other organizations that serve the unhoused population and support the arts in Los Angeles.
Please visit our website for more information: https://www.passingthroughfilm.com/
Pre-Order available on iTunes : https://apple.co/2F9X4ee
Manuel Compito aka OG Man is a Homeless Advocate and Community Organizer, an author and highly skilled and gifted Fine Artist. He is a husband, father and grandfather. He has been featured in several documentaries including “Lost Angels,” “Humble Beauty,” and “Passing Through” as well as numerous other documentaries available on YouTube which feature his works.
Manuel learned to draw as a child from his brother. He would later spend a considerable amount of time cultivating his talents during a lengthy period of incarceration. Even today, Manuel’s artwork derives from sketches based on his visual life experiences. Art serves as the nexus of his ideas, projects, programs and writings. “Art is my passion. Being of Service is my calling. Skid Row is ‘Ground Zero’ when it comes to community organizing. It’s the right place and the right time for those who want to make a difference.” says Manuel Compito.
This mindset has been the motivating force which led to Manuel’s creation of the award-winning Skid Row 3on3 Streetball League, grass-roots organizations such OG’s N Service Association, Skid Row Brigade, Operation Facelift-SkidRow, Skid Row Artist Collective aka Hidden Treasures and “Peace- N-Hood,” a neo-novel and coloring book for the urban area.

Los Angeles Poverty Department’s Movie Nights at the Museum
2018-08-17 19:00 - 21:00 | Skid Row History Museum & Archive, 250 S Broadway, Los Angeles, CA, United States
Screening: Brooklyn Castle (2012) 101 min., Directed By Katie Dellamaggiore
Produced by Colin Davis, Nelson Dellamaggiore, Brian Schulz, and Katie Dellamaggiore

Free movie screenings, free popcorn, free coffee & free conversation. Every 1st and 3rd Friday of the month, we screen movies about issues that are important to our Skid Row and downtown community at the #skidrowmuseum.

Synopsis: Amidst financial crises and unprecedented public school budget cuts, Brooklyn Castle takes an intimate look at the challenges and triumphs facing members of a junior high school’s champion chess team.

Location: Skid Row History Museum and Archive, 250 S. Broadway, Los Angeles, CA 90012

Black Convocation 2018
2018-10-09 17:30 - 20:00 | UCLA Carnesale Commons – Palisades Room, 251 Charles E Young Drive West, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
The Black Convocation is an annual event that welcomes new and returning students to the UCLA campus and makes them aware of the different organizations, departments, and resources available to serve them. It is an evening full of Bruin pride, providing encouragement, anecdotes about the past, and a glimpse of the future from UCLA faculty, staff, and alumni dedicated to supporting all students. The event is free and open to the public.
RSVP at https://uclablackconvocation2018.eventbrite.com.
To download a printable version of the flyer (8.5×11), click here!
The 2018 Black Convocation at UCLA was organized by the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies, UCLA Department of African American Studies, UCLA Black Alumni Association, Office of Residential Life (ORL), Afrikan Student Union (ASU), UCLA Career Center, UCLA Black Graduate Student Association (BGSA), Academic Advancement Program (AAP), UCLA Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, Connecting Communities to UCLA (CCU), UCLA Community Programs Office & UCLA Student Affairs – Enrollment Management.

Save the Date - Pro-Bono Expert Witnessing: A Role for Academics in Asylum Cases
2020-05-20 11:00 - 12:30 | CA
Pro-Bono Expert Witnessing: A Role for Academics in Asylum Cases
Featuring Leisy Abrego (UCLA), Cecilia Menjívar (UCLA), Steven Osuna (CSULB), and Alex Sanchez (Homies Unidos)”
Details coming soon.
