Dominant ideas about poverty shape how social welfare solutions are constructed and how community members are treated when seeking services. At the same time, community-based organizations (CBOs) can reproduce or challenge ideas of poverty through their interactions with community members. Through an ethnographic study of two CBOs in Los Angeles that combine services with organizing, and using a relational poverty framework, this dissertation examined how narratives of poverty were communicated and challenged through frontline work. The two CBOs work in Los Angeles, a city that has a history of radical organizing alongside deep inequality and criminalization of low-income communities and with a post-welfare social service landscape that includes both punitive and supportive policies. As a result, this is an ideal site to study contested ideas in community organizing and social services. I purposively selected two CBOs that combined services and organizing. CBOs were selected due to their critique of traditional human service provision and their reputation, but they also had a key difference with one CBO having a greater emphasis on organizing and the other having a greater emphasis on services. Data included participant observation from a one-year period at each CBO; 70 interviews of staff and community members across the two CBOs; and a review of organizational documents. The two CBOs had common repertoires within their frontline work, which resulted in long-term relationships with community members that differed from community members’ relationships with other service providers. These more personal relationships resulted in communities of care and a distinct from of service provision, described in this dissertation as “organic service provision”. These long-term, supportive relationships then created a space to reframe ideas about poverty and community for staff and community members. Ideas about poverty were influenced by each CBO’s organizational mission, history, and neighborhood location, but both CBOs found openings to introduce ideas about poverty across multiple interactions. In addition, CBOs drew from their frontline work to introduce ideas to larger audiences. This study discusses ways that this type of frontline work led to new forms of poverty politics and why both CBOs saw changing narratives and how people talk about poverty as “an issue worth fighting for.”

In April 2018, the Institute on Inequality and Democracy convened scholars, activists, policy advocates, community residents, and nonprofit workers to share and discuss research and action pertaining to processes of inequality in Los Angeles. We sought to shed light on the entangled structures of oppression, including urban displacement, housing precarity, racialized policing, criminal justice debt, forced labor, and the mass supervision and control of youth. Through keynote talks, group dialogue, and workshops, we analyzed how in Los Angeles, and elsewhere, black and brown communities face multiple forms of banishment and exploitation ranging from the criminalization of poverty to institutionalized theft.

The question of racial banishment has been an important one for the Institute since its inauguration two years ago. This year though, amidst the troubled times of Trumpism, we wanted to shift our focus from banishment to freedom. In the reports that follow, you will find many examples of what Robin D.G. Kelley, a key presence at the Institute, has famously called “freedom dreams.” Located in, and thinking from South Central Los Angeles, the event’s participants provide insight into organizing frameworks and resistance strategies that challenge exclusion and refuse subordination. From tenant organizing to debtors’ unions, from underground scholars to educational reparations, visions of freedom abound. The Institute on Inequality and Democracy is convinced that university-based research can, and must, support such freedom dreams. Such partnership – between the public university and social justice movements – requires careful attention to the difficult task of decolonizing the university. This mandate is evident throughout this collection of reports. There is no easy alliance between academic power and banished communities; there is no obvious solidarity between urban plans and freedom dreams. This event was intended to be a step towards building such alliances, especially by reconstructing the curriculum and canon of knowledge.

Context

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion

Key message