Paul's Message
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I like to believe I was of some help to my mother, 91 years old and worn down by age, as she left this world October 2. I worked nowhere near as hard, of course, as she did to bring me into it.
Among the slew of ways to think about communities, the one that shapes us the most and that we can influence the least, is our community of origin.
We have no control, for better or worse,
Democracy works in part because of its vast and varied quilt of systems. Yes, they are sometimes slow and unwieldy. And yes, affecting needed change can seem
The bud
stands for all things, even for those things that don’t flower,
for everything flowers,
I recently polled a number of people about an important question. The group included a couple of lawyers, community activists, a retired elected official, several business people, a retired
We Angelenos may not see in our lifetimes a harder slap upside our civic heads than the searing report just released by the Kantor Commission’s Los Angeles 2020 report, “A Time for Truth.”
“All of us in this room share two things in common,” said Denny Zane at Community Partners’ December 10 holiday gathering, “love and indignation.” It’s both of those seemingly conflicting feelings
No big fan of sweeping, abstract terms like civic engagement so much in vogue these days, I stand guilty of using that expression and others equally vague as a kind of lazy shorthand. Anna Núñez,
When young people these days seek my counsel on what needs doing in society, they often want me to help them find a place in the nonprofit sector. I turn the tables and test their interest in
Achieving common ground among widely disparate players in a hard-charging urban political pressure cooker like Los Angeles generally fails when directed from above.
A recent conversation
Dowell Myers keeps a very sympathetic perspective on how most of us cling to views forged by past realities, even when the facts that framed those views have changed. Take, for example, the matter