DataCorps Fellowship Continues with Visits to Several Sites in Los Angeles
Earlier this June, the DataCorps fellows and Workforce Development & the 4Rs research team visited Los Angeles. The first stop on our Los Angeles trip was the LA Works office, located in the Los Angeles River Center and Gardens, a beautiful green space in an otherwise bustling urban area. While there, our research team conducted a focus group with AmeriCorps Seniors volunteers to discuss their experience with service. Many of the volunteers at LA Works shared that, in retirement, they felt called to dedicate their time to give back and enrich their local communities. The individuals who participated in the focus group shared their experiences volunteering in food banks, sports teams, and beyond. Volunteers lamented the amount of loss their community has experienced in recent years due to wildfires. Due to lingering challenges facing survivors, some expressed feeling as if their community was enduring a perpetual state of disaster. Despite what has been lost, as well as the current challenges facing their community, the volunteers believed strongly in the importance of volunteerism in building resilient communities, with one participant remarking that “volunteering is the soul of humanity”.
Following our time at LA Works, our research team visited the Eaton Fire Collaborative, where LA Works is one of over a hundred community organizations working on providing aid to those impacted by the devastating Altadena fires that took place last year. The Collaborative operates out of one large building, a former NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory site, allowing those in need access to a wide range of resources from food assistance to counseling to job support and more. The entry of the Collaborative featured a map of the destruction casued by the Altadena fires. Upon initial inspection, the map seemed a sorrowful reminder of what Altadena lost. However, alongside the thousands of red-labeled houses that had burned down, looking closer, viewers notice the blue stickers representing rebuilt homes were scattered across the map, reflecting Altadena’s resilience in the face of an unimaginable disaster.
Our team also visited the LA Conservation Corps (LACC), an organization focused on urban conservation and workforce development. We spoke with members of various LACC crews working on a multitude of urban conservation projects including fire resilience, recycling, and tree planting. The lobby of the building included a map of Los Angeles with LACC’s various projects outlined across the city and surrounding areas, a testament to LACC’s wide-reaching impact. During our visit to LACC, we also conducted a focus group among corps members. Several of the corps members expressed their gratitude for LACC and its training and education programs, which they hoped would propel their professional careers after their corps service. One of the focus group participants shared that, thanks to the educational opportunities provided by LACC, he was preparing to graduate next month, eliciting a round of applause from everyone in the room.
The two organizations our team visited in Los Angeles represent the wide variety of programs and initiatives being implemented to promote community resilience in an area that is all too familiar with disaster. While the organizations themselves are vastly different, their goal is the same: to help create a more resilient Los Angeles.
Written by: Natalie Hinderliter
