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And the next career for me was in the public sector. And in the public sector, I worked in local health departments. I was the public health commissioner, they call it on the East Coast. A director out here. And I worked for two mayors in Philadelphia, Wilson Goode and then Ed Mandell, Ed Mandell now running for governor, for a second term, in Pennsylvania. And so I made the shift from retail medicine to wholesale medicine. Where now instead of having a patient as my customer, it is now a community. And that’s what public health does. You look at a population as your customer.
And in the shift from the practice of medicine on a retail level to working in a policy environment, even though it’s at the local level, I got another wake-up call. And that wake-up call was how policymakers make decisions. And how elected officials make decisions and why they make the decisions they make, how they don’t make the decisions they don’t make, and how the machine works.
And that is, if you haven’t had an opportunity to work in the public sector, it is much like making sausages. Where everything that I was taught and trained in my university background, which was the importance of good data, and good evidence, and I remember my public health and health management professor lecturing to our class at the University of Pennsylvania saying, “Good data drives good policy, and don’t you forget it.” Right? And by the time I got to the City of Philadelphia, I said what happened to the good data drives good policy? Second lesson.
Third lesson is now I am in this field of philanthropy. I’ve been, I want to thank our board of directors at The California Endowment for taking a chance on someone who had very little to no philanthropic background to run this foundation. I’ve been in the field now for six years. I still feel like I’m on a learning curve as a philanthropic professional, and we’re on a learning curve as a foundation. Our foundation is now 10 years old. We’re kind of a kid on the block. But our foundation, in terms of its age, is not much different than the field of philanthropy within Los Angeles. I think that two-thirds of the foundations in Los Angeles are less than 15 years old. So much of the largesse of philanthropy is still young and trying to find its way. It’s different perhaps than the East Coast, but I think it’s an opportunity for us to not be wedded to concretized notions of how to draw up change and move things forward.
So I wanted to give you that context because it’s going to influence what I share with you in terms of what philanthropy must do differently.
Second point in context. Where are we? How thriving and healthy is our democracy? How healthy and thriving is our Los Angeles? And I want to share with you a couple of points that hopefully you will at least agree with – and I don’t want to spend a lot of time talking about how bad things are because that’s not the point of the invitation here.
But we are now facing a situation where we had a range of unsustainable trends in Los Angeles, and broadly speaking, in this country. But certainly here in Los Angeles. Among them, poverty. We seem to have given up on the War on Poverty. I thought for a minute we might think about it again after Hurricane Katrina. Remember, in the days and weeks that were following Hurricane Katrina and the pictures and photographs, and the stories about Americans left utterly behind to fend for themselves. The face of poverty in America on Time Magazine and Newsweek Magazine. “We’ll never look at poverty the same.” And “We’re getting a wake-up call about poverty.” And “This will start the dialog again about what to do about poverty.” Bull-diggy. That has not happened. Within 120 days after Hurricane Katrina, what did Congress do? Congress scaled back on the Medicaid program, on the nutrition programs, food programs for the elderly. In fact the food program for the elderly was actually eliminated within 120 days after Katrina. Pulling back on affordable housing and college tuition.
So, in other words, Katrina happened, and the federal government effectively shrugged its shoulders. Oh well. Message to us, to those of us who actually care about issues of poverty and inequity: We’re on our own.
I understand, and Torie Osborne shared with me that we have 88,000 homeless people, and we have 162,000 millionaires in Los Angeles. The wealth gap between rich and poor, that reality is not sustainable. That is not a sustainable trend for something remotely resembling a healthy Los Angeles and a healthy democracy.
An additional unsustainable trend is what’s going on with high school drop-out rates. Forget about arguing over the percentage points of the LAUSD data versus what other people are saying. Half of our particularly black and brown men dropping out of high school is not a sustainable trend for a thriving environment and democracy.
Related to that, incarceration and recidivism. The numbers of, particularly again, black and brown men that are being incarcerated, particularly if you don’t have a high school diploma, are not sustainable.
And then finally, the issue near and dear to our heart at The California Endowment, health care. The numbers of uninsured, the lack of affordability, and add to that we have unaffordability of housing.
And there are other issues. But those are five or six that set the stage for a reality check for all of us that whatever we are doing is not enough and it is not working. That is the vantage point. That is the context to which I bring to you of what philanthropy should do different.
In addition, what is the response of the policymaking leadership to address these challenges, that are very real, that are threatening a vibrant, sustainable, meaningful, democratic society in this country. Well, at the federal government, what do you have? Do you have on the agenda any of the issues that I mentioned to you, do you have a federal blueprint or a strategy for addressing any of those issues in a meaningful way? No. You might argue in education, with No Child Left Behind – and I’m not an education expert, but certainly there are decidedly mixed reviews on the federal government’s success with No Child Left Behind.
So on the major issues and challenges that we have, you can add transportation, you can add the environment, all those issues, we see virtually zero lack of a national strategy or blueprint for solving those problems. What you have right now, defined in Washington, is ideological, partisan bickering through which ideas can’t possibly break through the ideologies. The ideas for change, the ideas for problem-solving. And you can pick an example: immigration reform, campaign finance reform. Just pick an issue. Pragmatic, workable ways to solve problems are being suffocated by the atmosphere that’s going on in Washington. It’s not just this year or this month. It’s not like this is a bad year in Washington. It’s been like that for really quite some time.
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