As a Jesuit University LMU has a commitment to social justice and the common good, while at the same time supports private Catholic elementary, middle and high schools. In Southern California many of the extant Catholic schools are located in working-class communities and many have very diverse enrolments, both in terms of ethnicity and religious background.

QUB and LMU have a long-standing relationship, mainly through work on shared education and school collaboration. LMU supports a ‘family of schools’, including traditional public schools; charter schools, which are publicly funded, but exempt from the authority of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD); and private Catholic schools. As part of our on-going conversation, particularly after the experience of Covid, we recognised a common interest in the civic and community role of higher education and agreed to explore our work on this issue in more depth. In consequence three staff from QCAP spent a few days in LMU meeting with staff and community leaders to learn more about their work and compare notes with practice in QUB, and what follows are some reflections on those conversations.

It quickly became evident during the conversations that central to the engagement work of LMU is the Psychology Applied Research Center (PARC). This was clear even from the first day when we joined a bus tour for students working on applied projects to look for visual and physical differences in different neighbourhoods in South Central LA. A little to our surprise, supermarkets, motels and churches featured heavily in the discussions. Supermarkets provide an interesting proxy for the economic state of an area given that the companies make decisions on the location of shops based on local area economic metrics. The more distressed parts of the city also seemed to have a disproportionate number of small liquor stores, motels and small churches. Also evident was the greater provision of fences around properties, metal grills on windows and derelict buildings. Like many US cities these days there was also plenty of evidence of homelessness.

A meeting with staff in PARC underlined their commitment to community-based participatory research, working with communities to address pressing issues and help them influence policy. The tension between funders’ priorities and PARC’s commitment to community was evident: they were committed to working with communities to inform evaluation strategies, even though funders sometimes wanted to apply pre-established approaches, however inappropriate they might be. This tension was also evident in the differing assumptions and preferences taken by official agencies, as compared with community organisations. In relation to a programme on young people, crime and custody, for example, some official organisations worked on the assumption that control and surveillance was the preferred approach, whereas community organisations were more interested in prevention or rehabilitation.

(L to R) Dr Gavin Duffy [QCAP], Prof Vicki Graf [LMU], Dr Diane Terry [PARC], Dr Gareth Robinson [QCAP]

There was also a tension between community interest in achieving short-term goals and PARC’s interest in identifying upstream solutions for sustainable long-term change and improvement. We also heard of examples of the fragility of initiatives, especially where their success depending on a constellation of community organisations –at worst, if one partner decides to withdraw, for whatever reason, a programme of work might fall apart.

Impressive as the work of PARC was, it looks like an outlier within LMU. The University clearly values the work of PARC but appears to provide limited institutional support. The intention to address this was discussed at a meeting with the Dean of Education, Estela Zarate, and the Director of Engaged Learning at PARC, Deanna Cooke. Prior to Covid a strategy paper on connecting community and university had been prepared, but during the pandemic crisis it had been set aside with the intention of revisiting it at an appropriate time. They recognised that, for the moment, LMU is one of the few Jesuit universities that does not have a formal, that is institutionally supported, placed-based engagement initiative. As noted, PARC provides an exemplar of this through its programmes on community engagement, all informed by a social justice dimension. However, the absence of formal institutional backing has placed constraints on its capacity. While institutional buy-in has so far been limited, there are highly motivated and committed individuals working to change this—reflecting the same underlying conditions that catalysed a shift toward institutional support for place-based engagement at Queen’s University Belfast.

At a meeting with LMU Faculty we learned about a number of other engagement activities, including a programme for students offering a community-based alternative to ‘spring break’. LMU has also provided students with experiential opportunities during ‘one-off’ events, such as an initiative to provide a form of non-competitive Olympics for people with disabilities. We also discussed some research initiatives from LMU that contribute to civic life, including the work of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles which advocates for a better, more equitable city through research, student mentorship, and engagement with residents and leaders. The Center was also part of a group of universities which came together to support household and business recovery in the wake of the Eaton and Palisades Fires.

(L to R) Dr Gavin Duffy & Dr Gareth Robinson [QCAP], alongside Gerri Lawrence & Patricia Gerra [CoCo].

Two of our most compelling meetings came towards the end of the visit. The first was with community activists from the Community Coalition in South Central LA, or ‘CoCo’. This Center was formed in 1990 by a group of activists, including the current Mayor of LA, and has promoted a public health and public safety approach to community challenges, while pushing back against criminalisation models often advocated by official agencies. They have pursued strategies focused on environmental and education issues and gathered data on the impact of the crack cocaine crisis so that more effective interventions could be established. As the demographics of South-Central LA have changed, so more time is devoted to building multi-racial coalitions to address the challenges facing the communities. They also work through art, poetry and song to help members of the community better understand issues and develop solutions and have mapped the prevalence of liquor stores and motels in the area, not least as some have been acting as hubs for the drugs trade and sex-trafficking. CoCo’s goal is to transform South LA and they are a key partner for PARC is this ambition.

Mural outside the Community Coalition building in South, LA.

Our final meeting was with the Elder Joe Paul Jr., a Pastor and community activist who, as a youth, spent time in jail as an accessory to murder. That experience motivated him to do something about incarceration among youth and the wider issue of gang violence in LA, and he works closely with PARC as a community activist to bring that experience to the students. He talked about his community work and some of the approaches he used. One focused on the role of ‘credible messengers’, people of influence who he felt often used their position to fuel violence and retribution. In his view this role was often a form of ‘misdirected passion’, but rather than try to stop them or silence them, he sought rather to persuade them to act as ‘credible messengers’ to promote positive messages for change in communities. He also provided insightful, and critical, comment on the plethora of small Churches springing up in South Central LA many of which, he felt, were more interested in gain for their pastors, rather gain for the community.

We experienced engaging, productive and insightful days in Los Angeles, and gained much from the conversations we had in the university and community. People gave generously of their time and were honest on the long-standing challenges they were facing. Despite the scale of the challenges they discussed, which were all too clear to us as we walked the streets of South-Central LA, our conversations were almost always informed by a spirit of optimism that better was possible and achievable, a spirit which also animates the civic engagement work of Queen’s and QCAP.