Social justice and community engagement in downtown Los Angeles

¶ … Community Analysis

Describe

The community that I am a member of is downtown Los Angeles. This is an incredibly diverse and vibrant community; it is one of the most diverse communities that I have ever been a part of. The community consists of young urban professionals who are unmarried or are co-habitating in large loft spaces. The spaces where most people live in downtown Los Angeles make this in part such a remarkable community: people have wonderful industrial spaces which are converted to living spaces. This means that people have the pleasure of creating unique homes in massive open spaces. The fact that so many of the apartment buildings in downtown Los Angeles are loft spaces means that the community attracts a great deal of artistic types such as painters, designers, architects, actors and musicians.

Another aspect of the community is its close proximity to skid row. The fact that it is located adjacent to where one of the poorest populations in the nation resides, makes it a very unique community. This is because of the fact that the wealthy, young urban professionals have to constantly encounter some of the most forgotten members of society. These are drug addicts and the homeless and they populate the streets of downtown Los Angeles very heavily, asking for change and other handouts. Their strong presence has a marked effect on the people who live in this area of the city: they still give an atmosphere of "unsafeness" to the city at large and they create more of a renegade atmosphere in the downtown sector. Furthermore, people who aren't prepared to deal with the sense of danger or lawlessness that the skid row inhabitants help to create; people who don't want to think about or see the problems of society each day will also continue to avoid downtown los Angeles because of this factor. This means that many of the inhabitants of downtown Los Angeles are deeply feeling, deeply caring people who understand the difficulties and imperfections that continue to plague society. These are often members of society who are willing to do their part to make the world a more cohesive and peaceful place.

Articulate Learning

One of the major things that I learned using this assessment is that relating and personal growth can and will occur as long as people desire it. Personal growth is truly up to the individuals involved. In that sense, members of the downtown community really are able to grow and thrive in that they have a willingness to communicate and have dialogue and ultimately better understand members of their community that are different than them.

The bulk of the learning that occurred was through intense observation. If one has a desire to observe things as they actually are there is really no limit to all that one can learn. The other means by which learning occurred was via informal interviews with downtown residents. I spoke to members of the community who had lived downtown at varying lengths of time and who had various viewpoints on the community there.

Uncovering this information truly does matter because it sheds light on the various ways that members of the community can better relate to one another. Figuring out how the wealthy can live empathetically among the very poor and how both groups can contribute to making each other's lives better is something which is phenomenal and deserves attention.

In the future I will use these lessons to reach out to other communities and to show other people how the rich and the poor can learn from one another. This experience also demonstrated the overwhelming power of art and artwork, and how making and displaying art can be a truly therapeutic and revelatory experience for all members of the community. These tools can be utilized again to help different facets of society meet and discuss and come to a greater and deeper understanding.