Knowledge and perceptions of human trafficking among community-based and faith-based organization members in South Los Angeles

The objectives of this study were (1) to assess the knowledge and perceptions of human trafficking (HT) among leaders and staff from 11 community-based organizations (CBOs) and faith-based organizations (FBOs) in South Los Angeles, and (2) to identify gaps in knowledge of HT and inform community organizations regarding possible best practices in health promotion for addressing this emerging public health problem. A self-administered survey was conducted during the period from 4 December 2015 to 28 January 2016. Descriptive statistics were generated and a logistic regression model was constructed using SAS 9.3. A total of 277 CBO and FBO leaders and staff completed the survey. Participants demonstrated high levels of knowledge of HT but their knowledge was not comprehensive, as gaps exist in recognizing the context in which HT usually takes place; understanding the local laws that govern this activity; and ways to follow related policies/procedures when the problem is suspected. A majority (a) believed there were not enough services in Los Angeles County to help survivors of HT, (b) could not recognize the signs of HT, and (c) did not know what steps to take if they suspected this criminal activity. A statistically significant association was found between education and participants’ knowledge of HT, and with their beliefs and attitudes toward this violation of human rights. Study findings suggest that, generally, CBO/FBO leaders and staff in South Los Angeles have good knowledge about HT. However, notable gaps in knowledge and misperceptions remain, suggesting opportunities for Public Health to further educate and intervene.

Grocery Workers

This chapter analyzes the labor movement’s challenge to retail giant Wal-Mart, which in 2002 announced plans to open forty Supercenters in California—threatening to undermine labor standards, and union strength, in the grocery sector. It focuses on the confrontation with Wal-Mart in the separately incorporated city of Inglewood, a historically working-class African American community in South Los Angeles. There, a community-labor coalition, led by LAANE, organized to stop Supercenter development through legislative and legal challenges—a technique known as a “site fight” because it aimed to block Wal-Mart at a specific location. The chapter examines three phases of the fight, tracing how the coalition mobilized law to defeat the Inglewood proposal, design innovative policies to limit Wal-Mart’s entry into the Los Angeles market, and thwart Wal-Mart’s effort to bypass those policies by opening a small-format grocery store in historic Chinatown. In evaluating the campaign, the chapter suggests that the outcome was, in part, a product of Wal-Mart’s political miscalculation: The company’s drive for a Supercenter in Inglewood failed despite evidence of public support, in large measure because of an ill-conceived attempt to gain voter approval through a city initiative that would have completely circumvented the local planning process. Yet Wal-Mart’s defeat was not merely self-inflicted. The company’s miscalculation of the local response to the initiative was politically consequential precisely because there was a sophisticated team of activists and lawyers who used Wal-Mart’s disregard of public input to successfully mobilize community opposition to the Supercenter and build new anti-big-box policy. In that sense, the presence of a political-legal support structure, with experience mounting development-oriented campaigns from the community benefits context, was essential to Wal-Mart’s defeat—strengthening grocery labor standards in Los Angeles going forward.

Helping Optimize Language Acquisition (HOLA) Online Parent Training Modules for Latinx Parents of Toddlers at Risk for ASD: Protocol for a Pilot Funded by the Organization for Autism Research

Background Culturally competent parent training in evidence-based intervention for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) can provide young Latinx children from underserved communities with early interventional support while they wait for professional services, thus reducing the impact of intervention delays. Providing parents with brief bilingual training in Pivotal Response Treatment (PRT) is a strategy that can overcome these barriers and is inexpensive to disseminate. Brief PRT training has been shown to significantly improve joint attention, expressive language, responsivity, and adaptive skills in young children with ASD. However, it is unknown whether an interactive, culturally competent online parent training in PRT is effective in a Latinx population. Objective To this end, we will recruit 24 children (16-36 months old) at risk for ASD and their parent(s) from East and South Los Angeles and provide them with a series of 6 online learning modules in their choice of Spanish or English. Methods This pilot study will utilize a single-group, pilot, pre-post design with follow-up assessments 6 weeks later. Linear mixed-effects model analysis will be used to explore most parent-reported and coded outcomes. Results Brief online parent training in evidence-based treatments has the capacity to increase access to culturally competent early communication interventions for young children at risk for ASD. Conclusions The results of this trial may have particular salience in additional underresourced communities where children have limited access to interventions prior to entering school. International Registered Report Identifier (IRRID) PRR1-10.2196/18004

Hybrid Problem Solving

This chapter evaluates how the close juxtaposition of civic and noncivic in hybrid civic action provides better ways to discern whether or not, and how, nonprofits express the will of people in their immediate locale, and whether or not they pose an effective alternative to governmental action, as some commentators argue. All that should help clarify how civic action really works. The chapter focuses mostly on a locally prominent and successful, nonprofit affordable housing developer, Housing Solutions for Los Angeles (HSLA). It then compares HSLA briefly with efforts by a Tenants of South Los Angeles (ISLA) committee to administer the housing provisions of the community benefits agreement (CBA) that ISLA's campaign won from the Manchester apartments developer. This was a different kind of hybrid. ISLA's affordable housing work for the community ultimately was both financed and constrained by a big, for-profit real estate developer — the Manchester property owner.

How Homelessness Does Not Become a Housing Problem

This chapter explores how, if at all, housing and homelessness advocates made claims about both homelessness and housing problems together. Many advocates make fleeting claims about homelessness or homeless people. Yet they do not talk much about homelessness as a housing problem, even though it may seem like the most urgent one. Here is where investigating discursive fields and style can help. The chapter compares Tenants of South Los Angeles and Housing Justice coalition members' claims about homelessness with those of professional-led volunteer efforts organized to address homelessness as a problem in itself. The evidence suggests that in Los Angeles, cultural conditions conspired to make homelessness a marginal topic across different quarters of the housing advocacy world. And homeless service workers talked little, if at all, about affordable housing as a public issue.

What Is Winning?

This chapter looks at scenes from the two main coalitions (Housing Justice and Tenants of South Los Angeles) to show just how different their campaigns were and why that matters, even though both fought for affordable housing. Accomplishments make sense only inside strategic arcs; scene style shapes the strategic choices advocates make. Scene style inflects the meaning of particular strategies and goals as well as winning itself. The chapter presents two trajectories of collective problem-solving that unfold on varying timelines, toward tentative and evolving goals. The two coalitions and their trajectories reveal different trade-offs that go with each, differently styled line of action. None of this is to imply that goals and outcomes themselves do not matter. In fact, accumulating evidence shows that different styles do shape outcomes that matter to advocates and the scholars who study them. There is much more to find out about how style contributes to outcomes as scholars usually treat them. The point is that one learns valuable and practical things when one understands particular outcomes in the context of strategic arcs that make those outcomes more, or less, meaningful to advocates and their constituencies.

Solving Problems by Fighting for an Interest

This chapter shows how fighting for an interest works as a strategy of collective problem-solving. It describes what that strategy sounds and feels like, and the central dilemma it produces for participants. The chapter also looks closely at everyday tests: points at which participants in a community of interest are faced with challenges and potential alternatives to their usual style of action. The activists' responses to these tests show concretely what kinds of decisions, arguments, and avoidances perpetuate a community of interest. A community of interest is not intrinsically more strategic or effective than other forms of collective problem-solving. The Housing Justice (HJ) and Inquilinos del Sur de Los Angeles / Tenants of South Los Angeles (ISLA) coalitions both experienced victories and disappointments. When it was time to end the field research, ISLA participants had won more of what they said they wanted than did the more conventionally strategic-sounding HJ coalition.

Who Can Say What, Where, and How?

This chapter studies how advocates “construct” social problems through claims making. Claims are demands, criticisms, or declarative statements that actors make in relation to public debate. By definition then, claims makers publicize problems for collective problem-solving. Claims making is thus a crucial part of civic action. Claims making happens in the context of not only a style of interaction but also a set of conventional categories for making claims. A discursive field provides those basic symbolic categories that advocates on multiple sides use to make claims about a problem. Scene style keeps some ways of talking about social problems outside the discursive field altogether, and relegates others to marginal enclaves or subordinate status inside the field. Following the action of claims making in the Tenants of South Los Angeles and Housing Justice coalitions, one can learn how a discursive field works.