update to the September 2016 blog article “Alisa Has A Vision” by Tom Grode — Skid Row Resident from 2013 to 2017
Alisa Has A Vision
September 15, 2016
Alisa Orduna is the Homelessness Policy Director for Mayor Eric Garcetti and she has a vision. Her vision is an Emerald Necklace for Skid Row.
Just as an emerald necklace is a series of precious green stones connected so they can be worn, an Emerald Necklace is a series of green spaces, at times connected by Walking Paths and Bike Paths. Multiple cities have an Emerald Necklace.
Amigos de los Rios is a nonprofit in the San Gabriel Valley. From their website:
“Over the past 13 years Amigos de los Rios has worked as a liaison between the community and public agencies to facilitate the collaborative effort known as the Emerald Necklace Expanded Vision Plan. In 2005, Amigos de los Rios introduced the initial Emerald Necklace Vision Plan that outlined a detailed strategy for the development of a 17 mile loop of beautiful multi-benefit parks and green-ways connecting 10 cities and nearly 500,000 residents along the Río Hondo and San Gabriel Rivers watershed areas located in East Los Angeles County.
The plan’s parks and green-ways provide desperately needed recreational areas for communities suffering from extreme density, urban decay and the social and health issues they bring.”
A nonprofit with a dual mission to pursue environmental preservation and economic development, The Conservation Fund is located in Arlington, Virginia, just outside Washington D.C. From their website article, “An Emerald Necklace for Los Angeles”:
“The new vision has its roots in the original “emerald necklace” in Boston designed in the late 1800’s and a Los Angeles County plan for an interconnected network of parks, trails and green spaces completed in 1930 by the firm founded by urban park pioneer Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr., who believed that everyone had the right to common green space.
In 2012, we brought our national expertise in green infrastructure planning to the table to help Amigos de los Rios and its partners expand and update their 2005 vision to include all of Los Angeles County. The plan, The Emerald Necklace Forest to Ocean Expanded Vision plan for Los Angeles County, completed in 2014, outlines eight regional goals including promoting active transportation such as walking and biking; designing and building communities that are resilient to the current and projected impacts of climate change, and fostering a strong green economy.
The ongoing implementation of the Expanded Vision plan, focused thus far mostly in eastern Los Angeles County, complements the investments being made by the City of Los Angeles, the US Army Corps of Engineers, and other partners in revitalizing the Los Angeles River and supports the goals outlined in the recent ‘Sustainable City pLAn’. “The Emerald Necklace Expanded Vision plan is a visionary framework to link important LA area watersheds and the communities they touch,” said Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti. “Much in the way that our vision for the LA River encompasses its entire 51 mile length, both inside and outside our city limits, the Expanded Vision takes a regional approach to providing much needed open space in some of our most park poor neighborhoods.”
The City of Los Angeles — The County of Los Angeles — just outside Washington D.C. — now back to Skid Row.
What needs to be dealt with in Skid Row so this is not the most disturbing Walking Path/Bike Path in the history of Emerald Necklaces? A partial list:
1) Rats
2) Violence
3) Trash
4) Drugs
5) Feces/Urine (lack of public bathrooms)
6) Vomit
7) Hypodermic Needles
That’s Walking Path/Bike Path concerns. There are also Emerald concerns.
Skid Row has two green spaces that are much more than green spaces — Gladys Park and San Julian Park. These two small parks are the social hubs for Skid Row as a street-based community. Improvements, physical and programming, to these parks requires green, as in money. Maintenance is a must. For example, some trees in Gladys Park recently died.
Identifying other existing Skid Row green spaces to be part of the Necklace as well as creating new green spaces for the Necklace will be an exciting journey in Skid Row Community input. Our Skid Row, a resident-driven vision for a vibrant and equitable Skid Row, was released to the public last November 2015 at a gathering in Skid Row co-hosted by the Department of City Planning. Alisa credits the plan as inspiration for her vision.
And so…..now what? I don’t know. Genuine visions have a life of their own. But perhaps this ancient Chinese proverb speaks to us in Skid Row: “Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. But today is a gift…”. (Okay, that’s actually a line from the movie Kung Fu Panda, but it sounds better to say ancient Chinese proverb.)
That was September 2016. In February 2017, Alisa sent an email out to a dozen Skid Row folks saying go ahead and extend the invitation if you feel I missed anyone and 23 people ended up on March 17th attending the first meeting of Emerald Necklace in Skid Row. During the meeting, Alisa emphasized the phrase is a placeholder for the City, meaning it got the ball rolling in City Hall.
After a few months of meeting regularly, Emerald Necklace in Skid Row became the Skid Row Community Improvement Coalition. The first major project the Coalition took on as the most pressing need in Skid Row was to create an outdoor integrated hygiene center later named the Skid Row Community Refresh Spot.
During the December 2017 Grand Opening of the Refresh Spot, Mayor Garcetti highlighted the Refresh Spot as a “community driven” project which is absolutely not a phrase Skid Row is used to hearing from the Mayor of Los Angeles.
As Alisa continued to work on getting her Ph.d, she left the Mayor’s Office to go to Santa Monica City Hall where she had more authority when it comes to Homlessness Policy. After a couple years working for the City of Santa Monica, she left to create her own Consulting firm.
As for the Community Improvement Coalition, it has continued to meet monthly since 2017. Recently it’s gone through some structural changes to make it more about direct empowerment of Skid Row residents and Dr. Alisa this past June came on board as a pro bono Consultant.
On June 28th, through the initiative of Supervisor Hilda Solis, the County Board of Supervisors passed the motion, Skid Row Action Plan: Improving the Lives of Residents on Skid Row by Addressing Homelessness Stemming from Decades of Institutional Racism.
Dr. Alisa was hired by the County to co-facilitate a process for the rest of this year into the beginning of 2023 to create the Skid Row Community Action Plan.
As for Kung Fu Panda, there was a sequel, Kung Fu Panda 2, and here is a quote: “Time is an illusion, there is only the now”.