Business Has Learned to Let Community Lead
Mixed Messages 10 Years After The Riots
Commentary By GARY STEWART
In the spring of 1992, the sight of men and women dashing from looted supermarkets with a six-pack of beer or a package of Pampers shocked many in L.A.’s business community. But that scene shouldn’t have surprised us. The magnitude of economic deprivation and neglect in south L.A. and Pico-Union was clear for anyone who wanted to see it.
When we in the business community finally faced cold reality, we wanted to help. But for those of us who didn’t run big retail chains, who couldn’t make a commitment to locate stores in impoverished and underserved communities, it wasn’t so obvious how to help.
The last 10 years has given us time to learn a thing or two about what truly transforms the despair that erupted a decade ago. The programs that have accomplished the most have emerged from citizen and community-led efforts that have quite literally invented new ways of doing business.
In the mid-1990s, hundreds of Koreatown restaurant employees were working 60 to 70 hours a week, often at subminimum wage. A group called Korean Immigrant Workers Advocates approached the problem by inventing a new strategy tailored for the particularities of the ethnic enclave economy. Rather than adopt the familiar union model, KIWA staff met with employers, educating them about U.S. labor law and making clear what American law and basic decency expected of them.
Wage and workplace violations plummeted. Confounding conventional wisdom, organizers and managers began to see each other as allies as managers discovered that abiding by the law wasn’t a threat to their livelihood and improved their standing in the community.
Other community-led innovations have emerged in the last 10 years. In the immediate aftermath of the unrest, a south L.A. residents group called the Community Coalition made sure that torched liquor stores were replaced with retail businesses the community wanted and needed. (At the time of the riots, south L.A. had more than twice the number of liquor stores found in the entire state of Rhode Island.)
Forty new laundromats, food markets and retail outlets have opened in the last decade. Most of them are flourishing. Meanwhile, crime in the surrounding areas is down. To this day, residents drop by the coalition offices to express their gratitude for having someplace nearby to take their wash.
When L.A.’s living wage ordinance was passed five years ago, it was widely opposed by business leaders, but the combined efforts of residents, clergy and union membership made it reality. Now, a Public Policy Institute study found that the living wage undeniably lifts people out of poverty. It also reduces staff turnover, improves morale and increases staff loyalty.
Ten years ago, when L.A.’s business community was searching for new solutions to urban poverty, we weren’t talking about “a living wage” or replacing liquor stores or improving workplace safety. Despite our good intentions, we didn’t know how best to solve the myriad problems of urban poverty. Nor did we realize that small investments in effective grassroots groups could pay off in highly leveraged solutions to those problems.
The lesson is that when business wants to help, we have to let the community lead. What the business community can do best, now and in future, is to support groups like the Korean Immigrant Workers Advocates, Community Coalition and L.A. Alliance for a New Economy (which organized the living wage campaign).
We in the business community need to rein in our “fix-it” impulses and let the people who know the problems inside out exercise their own entrepreneurial know-how. They don’t need our ideas. They’ve got plenty of their own. They need our financial support and, on occasion, the barest bit of our business savvy. After that, our job should be to move out of the way.
Gary Stewart is the president of the board at the Liberty Hill Foundation and a former board member at the Social Venture Network, a group dedicated to using business as a force for social change.
