Denise Fairchild On Community Development And the Promise of L.A. Mayor Villaraigosa

Denise, you are an appointed member of Mayor Villaraigosa's transition team. Tell us what talents and experience you bring to that assignment, and what your expectations are in the way of community economic development for the new administration?

Well, I supported Villaraigosa in his previous run for mayor as well as this one, because he had a sense of energy and he conveyed a sense of what LA, with its highly diverse communities and other assets, could be. He has a vision for creating a better quality of life for all Angelinos, and for me that is what is most important because that's what I have been working towards for 30 years. My work has been about making a visible difference in Los Angeles, from how the roads and transportation issues are addressed to providing quality housing and economic opportunities. Those are the mayor's priorities, and those are my priorities because I live it day to day.

Could you explain to our readers what activities fall under the banner of "community development" and who is involved in these efforts?

Well in many ways what we do in community development is help community organizations, church based organizations and other stakeholders improve the quality of their lives. We do this through helping them become critical partners with their legislators, the Mayor, and councilmembers.

We live with the potholes day to day. Day to day we live with not having a place to shop or to have a cup of coffee. And day to day we live with the high cost of housing and not having a place for our sons and nephews to live because they can't find affordable housing. Community development is about these quality of life issues, and it is about teaching people how to help themselves fill the gap by finding out where the money is, and giving people the skills to be their own community builders.

I think what we learned from the 1992 civil unrest is that we rely too much on people outside of our neighborhoods to rebuild them. One of the things that I did was to raise $1 million to help ten neighborhoods that were affected by the riots to bring together the merchants, the residents, the nonprofit organizations and labor so that they could sit down and create a vision for their own communities and figure out what their priorities were and to begin to bring resources to bear on the need for parks, better schools and after school programs for the youth. Through that kind of community initiative, grassroots planning and development, things actually do get done and people solve problems. We get people to create solutions to problems.

Elaborate on the mission of the Community Development Technologies Center (CDTech), the projects you're working on, and how they might be relevant to the new administration's economic development agenda.

The Community Development Technologies Center is looking forward to its tenth anniversary this November. The core of our work is training and capacity building. CDTech formed a partnership with Los Angeles Trade-Technical College in 1995 to create jobs and economic opportunities in inner city neighborhoods. We also offer Community College certificates and degrees and community based training programs in organizing, nonprofit development, property management and community lending through our Community Development Department at Trade Tech. We're involved with a number of neighborhood councils. We're working with youth based organizations and teaching them leadership skills so that they can become actively engaged.

So we really have three components to CDTech, strengthening working democracy and civic engagement, strengthening working families and strengthening working capital. Those are the pillars of a working community. You don't have a viable community-you don't have quality of life-unless you have a working democracy, so we do the leadership development training. In the working families arena we actually train individuals for jobs, focusing on technology as the key for getting better jobs. We teach cabling. We teach computer repair and we teach people how to use technology for secretarial work so that they can be more competitive in the job market.

We also work with small businesses. We acquired Rebuild LA in 1996 and part of what they did was to identify the strong manufacturing base in these inner city neighborhoods. They identified six dominant sectors through that effort, including the toy industry, ethnic food processors, and bio-med. After identifying those we started to form industry networks. We now have over a hundred small business, often family owned, immigrant entrepreneurs that are now working together on issues relating to regulation, workforce development, and to access to capital. We are working with small businesses and helping them grow because we don't have the ARCOs of the world. We don't have the corporate headquarters like we used to, so our new civic entrepreneurs are the small businesses. We have to give them the forum to talk about their issues and to be concerned about not just their company, but industry needs, as well as community and regional issues.

The working capital division aims to bring capital and financial services into the community to increase the rates of home ownership. We're finding that we cannot grow a new middle class if people don't even bank anywhere. We have financial literacy and education services and we developed the first employer-based IDA program in the country through which we go into the workplace and teach people how to save and manage their money, start a business and buy a home.

That is what we do. We develop working democracy, working families and working capital to create viable working communities.

You've been involved with Los Angeles city administrations dating back to Mayor Bradley. What vision and resources need to be marshalled by the Villaraigosa administration to be of practical benefit to South LA and Pacoima and other areas in Los Angeles that need investment and revitalization?

Well the first thing you need is a champion and a true leader, somebody with energy and the political will to pull the city together, and we have that in our new mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa. Los Angeles needs to be seen as one family and we have to incorporate every element, every corner of Los Angeles into this administration, and that's the work that the transition team has been doing. We have been looking for the best and brightest to work in the administration. It doesn't matter whether you're Jewish, black, Latino, Korean, Buddhist or Christian.

I think that the piece that resonates with me most is the job and economic development priority of this administration. The city will be divided if people don't feel that they have a piece of the economic pie. As a result, we have to develop economic opportunities and this requires thinking about things in different ways and not just building shopping malls. We first have to think about how this city and region should grow. There should be an economic vision and plan for Los Angeles that has a regional framework, and which incorporates smart growth principles in terms of integrating our land uses, incomes and classes. The plan needs to consider not how we grow out from the city, but how we build our communities up in new ways. We have to confront the issue of gentrification, because part of the challenge of our communities today is that people are coming back into the inner city. We need to ensure that this happens in a way that creates a rich fabric of economic and social life without pushing out the long-term residents. I look to this administration to care about the working poor as much as we care about the middle class and creating upper income communities in new loft developments. I'd love for us to really think about how to use Community Redevelopment Agency money in new ways similar to those mentioned in the book Restoration Economy in order to create more job opportunities.

One of the bright spots in the vision and planning process is the work of New Schools Better Neighborhoods. It has given a lot of us an opportunity to think about how communities can function with schools as the center. We have to build more than 100 new schools in this city and region, and we have the potential to either destroy neighborhoods or to revitalize neighborhoods.

Schools need to be small enough for young people to get quality education. I know from experience with my own sons, who went to LAUSD schools, that a small school environment makes a positive difference. If we can leverage our resources by co-locating other services with smaller schools sites it will be a significant, catalytic change for Los Angeles. We should follow New Schools Better Neighborhoods' lead and use the current school building program to improve education and improve neighborhoods at the same time.

Lastly Denise, what are your plans for the future? Are you going to be joining the administration?

Right now, I am considering how I can be most effective. No matter what happens, I am sure I will continue to work with this administration in some way to improve economic opportunities for people.

In the past few months, a number of interesting political opportunities have developed.

I am exploring some of those, including the 10th Council District seat vacated by Martin Ludlow and the 48th Assembly District seat. I have been a resident of CD 10 and the 48th Assembly district since 1977. That is my neighborhood, my community, and I want to continue woking to make life better there.