The Bigger Picture

Today, USC Senior Olivia Olson, speaks with USC Price Center for Social Innovation and Imagine LA to understand a partnership study that examined the complex social safety network for low-income working families to identify stagnation points. The study looked at the total resources families have available and identified the threshold points where the safety net may actually become a barrier towards economic independence — a benefits cliff, where an increase in earnings leaves a family worse off, or a resource plateau, where such an increase leaves a family no better off in terms of the total resources available to them (income and benefits). Most families receiving social benefits will experience lengthy resource plateaus, where an increase in earned income is met with the equivalent loss of some benefit. However, the ecosystem of social benefits is challenging to navigate and protects mainly families with extremely low incomes by providing childcare and housing benefits. This partnership also created a tool for families to use to help with the complexities of the myriad benefits available to them, how these benefits overlap. Learn about the policy recommendations and demystify the complex social safety for low-income working families. Olivia Olson, USC Dornsife Senior Leilani Reed, Imagine LA Program Graduate and Ambassador Jill Govan Bauman, President & CEO, Imagine LA Brit Moore Gilmore, Director Of Business Development at Aneuvia | Social Enterprise & Small Business Consultant Soledad De Gregorio, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Price Center for Social Innovation Gary Painter, Professor, Chair of the Department of Public Policy, Director of the Sol Price Center for Social Innovation Director, Homelessness Policy Research Institute

Even before the COVID pandemic brought the notion of precarity to the mainstream, many populations in the U.S. and abroad faced life through different types of insecurity. In 2019, after hearing  story after story from students, the Leonetti/O'Connell Family Foundation created an emergency aid program. The project was co-designed with researchers at the USC Sol Price Center for Social Innovation and students experiencing precariousness. Emergency Aid programs work! Using aid from this pilot program, students at USC and LACCD were able to continue schooling under tenuous circumstances. So ... what now? Our guests are: Cara Esposito, ED of the Leonetti/O'Connell Family Foundation Gary Painter, Director of the Price Center for Social Innovation Hilary Olson, PhD Candidate, USC Price Victoria Ciudad-Real, Project Specialist Price CSI

Conversations about governmental and social services can get pretty wonky ... and yet ... they are often vital for making real change, particularly at the local level. Social Impact Bonds (SIBs) allow governments to take risk without footing the bill unless & until there are results. Gary Painter from the Price Center for Social Innovation joins research partners Chris Fox and Susan Baines from Manchester Metropolitan University to share findings from recent evaluations of SIBs in the wild. Some of the recommendations for making the tool better include increasing co-creation in the design and evaluation phases. Including affected communities is vital to making policy work, to making these programs do what they can & should do. Our goal here is to take this wonky idea of how to have more innovation in the creation, funding, and production of social services ... and make it more clear. Are SIBs a way to move us from a "winner take all" society to a more egalitarian/democratic one?  

The folks from the USC Safe Communities Institute stopped by to tell us all about the new LEWIS Registry. The LEWIS Registry is a crowdsourced public database for police officers who have been fired or resigned during an investigation of their behavior. In addition to the front, public-facing, end there is a backend for use by Law Enforcement.

Olivia Olson speaks with Professor Jody Armour about the power of "word work to really make the frozen circumstances that somebody is stuck in dance, by playing them to their own melody." In Prof Armour's latest book N*gga Theory, he focuses on the n-word to delve deeply into the social meaning behind the use of words. How can language challenge cultural boundaries? How can one word carry so much power? Certain language is a form of mutual aid. This is a powerful conversation on community. When the power of the state used language to sow inequality, how must we unlearn the language, how do we redefine the words we use to re-root community, to reclaim morality, to grow justice?   For links : bedrosian.usc.edu/bigpicture

Falling is the number one cause of injury and the seventh leading cause of death in adults ages 65 and older. In “Breaking Down Silos to Improve the Health of Older Adults,” Richard Green, Patricia Harris, and Anthony Orlando make the case for Medicare coverage of home safety renovations to minimize injuries (and death) due to falls. Olivia Olson speaks with Richard Green, Patricia F. Harris, and Anthony W. Orlando about their recent paper and the changes they hope to see in Medicare coverage.

Los Angeles County has a housing problem. There have been at least a dozen studies just at USC in the last year which tell us housing is not affordable and hard to find. So how have recent ballot initiatives worked toward increasing density and affordability for county residents? USC Professors Jorge De la Roca, Marlon Boarnet, and Richard Green are here to discuss their new analysis of inclusionary zoning and Transit Oriented Communities planning affects on the county and city of Los Angeles. How are we doing? Are we seeing signs of hope?

Victoria Ciudad-Real, John Roberson III, Gary Painter, and Jeffery Wallace join us for a conversation about Fair Chance Hiring. We'll get to the root of their collaborative project, "Accelerating Fair Chance Hiring Among Los Angeles Employers." The project, in which the Price Center partnered withLeadersUp and the State of California Workforce Accelerator Fund, used an employer survey and co-design sessions with Angeleno employers to determine the best way forward with Fair Chance hiring processes. We unearth how employers can benefit from this project, how Fair Chance Hiring benefits our communities, and why this practice will be vital for a sustainable future.

Daniel Flaming & Anthony Orlando stopped into a Zoom room with our ED  a few weeks ago to share findings from a new report. Their focus is on homelessness during and after the COVID pandemic. Anyone in Los Angeles during the 2008 recession will recall the growth of people who became unhoused. Following that recession 10% of those who found themselves jobless became unhoused. The Economic Roundtable report uses past pandemic as well as data from the 2008 recession to predict how COVID joblessness might translate into homelessness over the coming years. Looking at joblessness as well as the housing market, the authors predict that the pandemic recession will see more than double the unhousing that we saw in 2008. Our guests bring dire predictions and come prepared with concrete policy solutions that can help prevent a "great unhousing." These policy solutions could also prevent catastrophe after the next recession or pandemic. 'Locked Out: Unemployment and Homelessness in the COVID Economy' is underwritten by the Economic Roundtable, and is written by Daniel Flaming, Anthony W. Orlando, Patrick Burns, and Seth Pickens.

As soon as someone mentions housing affordability, and at the Price School that is everyday, I can't help but think of Jimmy McMillan. You might not remember his name, but likely you remember the name of his party: the Rent Is Too Damn High Party. It is. We know that. We know rent is high, in part its wage stagnation, slow development, high cost of living, low renter protections ... Today, we're speaking with folks from the Price Center to discuss a new report on housing affordability in L.A. This isn't just another report on the monetary cost of housing, telling us more of the things we already know. The report covers findings from a door-to-door survey done in 2019 to unearth the realities of families living with rent burden. What do real people have to give up when their rent is 30%, 40%, 50%, or more of their take home pay? Policymakers need to think about the other costs Angelenos are facing "when creating policy responses to protect renters during the COVID-19 pandemic." Too many of our neighbors faced rental precarity before the pandemic. "Researcher and practitioner efforts must address the impending eviction crisis stemming from the pandemic shut-down as well as the more enduring task of tackling long-term rental affordability." Aubrey Hicks speaks with Gary Painter (Social Innovation), Jovanna Rosen, Sean Angst, and Soledad De Gregorio about the impact of rent burden on two neighborhoods in Los Angeles.  

"The past decade has elevated the urgent need for police reform, brought to the forefront by high-profile police killings and movements like #BlackLivesMatter. To better understand conceptions of public safety and support the growing public interest in criminal justice reform, the USC Price Center for Social Innovation partnered with Microsoft and the USC Price Safe Communities Institute to launch the NDSC Criminal Justice Data Initiative in the spring of 2019." Today, Aubrey Hicks (our ED) speaks to Gary Painter (Social Innovation) and Erroll Southers (Safe Communities Institute) about the germination of the collaboration, the process of understanding community needs, the impact they hope to see, and thoughts on the next stages of this project.