Most social activists haven’t changed the landscape of the business community, but Madeline Janis certainly has done so in Los Angeles. As executive director of the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, she was the driving force behind Los Angeles adopting and expanding a living wage ordinance, which requires companies doing business with the city to pay their workers substantially more than the minimum wage. The ordinance was passed in the 1990s and has since expanded to include hotels around Los Angeles International Airport. Janis has also pushed for worker retention ordinances, including one at supermarkets, which was adopted but is under legal appeal. In addition, as a board member of the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency since 2002, she helped push through a project labor agreement requiring contractors to hire workers through union hiring halls. Janis, 49, grew up in the San Fernando Valley, then moved to Mexico in her teen years with her single mother. She returned to the United States to attend college and then embarked on a career of social activism. She detoured from that path with two short stints as a corporate lawyer at the big downtown L.A. law firm Latham & Watkins LLP. But because she believed that an underlying cause of the 1992 riots was poverty, she co-founded the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy with several prominent local labor leaders to address the plight of the working poor. Just before leaving on a grant-funded three-month sabbatical from the alliance, Janis discussed the challenges of reconciling the business community with social justice, all while finding the time to be a wife and mother.

Question: How did you decide you wanted to be a social activist?

Answer: When I was 13, my mother divorced my father and decided to move to Mexico so she could get into a master’s program in art education. We settled in San Miguel de Allende, which is about four hours drive north of Mexico City. I grew up in the San Fernando Valley, so the tremendous poverty and inequality that I saw in Mexico was a very dramatic contrast for me. From that point on, I knew that I wanted to do something to fight that type of poverty.

How did you get started in social activism?

I knew I wanted to go to law school, but I figured before I applied, I needed some work experience. So I joined the Committee on the Rights of the Disabled as their administrative advocate.

What was that like?

Both rewarding and frustrating. Rewarding in that I felt like I helped a lot of individuals who had gone through a lot of suffering and had a difficult time navigating through the aid system. Frustrating in that I was representing one person after another in what seemed like a never-ending line. That made me want to work more on changing the rules and changing the system.

This was about the time you met your first husband.

Yes. All the while I was working at the disability rights group and attending law school, refugees were coming to Los Angeles from the wars in Central America. One refugee that I met, Edgar Aparicio, had fled the brutal war in El Salvador. We fell in love and got married. I was pregnant with twins during my last year in law school.

It must have been tough raising twins and continuing with your activist career.

Yes, it was. But I thought nothing was going to stop me: you know, the modern woman who can do everything. It took me a while to realize that this so-called modern woman doesn’t exist.

What do you mean by that?

It wasn’t an antifeminist statement. Raising kids and having a career is hard no matter what. You can’t do both perfectly. Even in the best of circumstances, there will be some tradeoffs. But I had come out of the 1970s like so many women saying, “We’ve broken the glass ceiling and we can be great moms and great professionals.” But I realized there are tradeoffs and women can’t be perfect at everything.

Later, you worked at the Inner City Law Center on Skid Row. What was that like?

I was mostly doing slum housing cases, representing immigrant tenants in what were truly horrible housing conditions in and around downtown. I mean this was really horrible, even worse than the poverty I saw in Mexico. There were roaches and rats, and people were constantly getting sick. There was this one hotel, the Edward Hotel, where nearly every day I would go in and have to put new rat traps in, right next to where babies were living. I collected evidence, wrote declarations and worked up cases against the slum landlords.

How did that make you feel?

This reinforced for me that I wanted to work on policy change to lift all boats and keep people from being poor in the first place. One of the keys I realized was that to keep people from slipping into this type of poverty, they must earn a living wage.

But then you went to work at Latham & Watkins, one of the biggest corporate law firms in town. How did that come about?

I wasn’t making a lot of money and I still had student loans from my days at Amherst and law school. Also, I had a growing family and I felt I needed more money. So I decided to test out working at a big law firm and see if I could become a more skilled lawyer. This was at a time in the late 1980s when the big law firms in town were hiring, so I applied to Latham & Watkins and they accepted me practically on the spot.

Was it difficult to adapt?

Yes. I worked on litigation, basically cases where one corporation was suing another corporation. It was still very grueling; big law firms at that time were not exactly the most friendly places for a young mother. But they did allow me to do pro bono cases. And I tried to stay away from cases where I was representing the Goliath against David; I just didn’t want to hurt the little guy.

Why did you leave Latham & Watkins the first time?

I was trying to come up with a balance, where I could do both the money-making work and the pro bono work on behalf of the poor and immigrants. Through my husband, I really got involved in trying to help refugees from the wars in Central America. Then, along came an opening for an executive director at Caracen, the Central American Resource Center. I decided to take it, even though I was only 29 at the time and had absolutely no executive experience.

What was it like at Caracen?

There were two major external forces pulling at Caracen: a massive and desperate population fleeing from the wars in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala, and then dealing with all the human rights violations in those countries and the cases of police abuse here. On top of all this, I had to learn how to run an organization: the budgeting, the fundraising and the personnel issues. I learned an awful lot in the three years I was there.

How did the 1992 riots affect you?

It crystallized for me the overpowering devastation of poverty. Yes, you had the people stealing TV sets. But you also had people who were stealing diapers and when they were interviewed they said they couldn’t afford to buy diapers for their children. In the aftermath of the riots, what most upset me was the utter lack of strategy to deal with the underlying causes. Yes, you had Rebuild L.A., and that was good as far as it went. But no one was really tackling the issue of poverty.

Why did you decide to go back to Latham & Watkins a year later?

Partly this was not my choice. By 1993, there was a real push at Caracen to have Central Americans in the top leadership positions, so I realized I had to step aside. I had started to get more interested in land use. So, I rejoined Latham & Watkins and focused on land-use cases and real estate law.

You had a turning point at that time.

One day, while I was down at City Hall representing a client, I looked around the room and realized that there were only businesspeople and lobbyists there. I had access to the council members and could bend their ear at any time, then things would usually go my way. But there were no ordinary citizens, no poor people, no community organizations. That’s when it struck me that there was a golden opportunity here for access to powerful elected officials and nobody knew about it. I had learned to become an effective lobbyist but now I wanted to teach people to become their own lobbyists.

You only stayed at Latham for a few months. What happened?

LAANE happened, or rather the idea for LAANE. I was in conversations with several community and labor leaders: the late Miguel Contreras, Maria Elena Durazo, Kent Wong of the UCLA Labor Center and others. We were talking about what we could do next to create more infrastructure for the economy, this time focusing on lifting all boats and dealing with the deep issues of poverty. We decided to form a new organization.

What were LAANE’s goals?

We wanted to combine a think tank tackling the issues of poverty and raising all boats with a community grass-roots organizing model. This was very unusual at the time, though it has become more common since then. But it took a couple of years to raise the money and get the research going. By late 1995, we were finally ready to tackle our first project, pushing for a living wage in Los Angeles.

What was the key to LAANE’s success?

Most importantly, we encouraged poor working people to go to City Hall and tell their own stories. This had never been done before and it had a powerful effect. In my mind, that was the key to getting both the worker retention policy and the living wage passed. It was the fulfillment of that cathartic moment I had had a few years earlier at Latham.

These campaigns prompted a lot of opposition from the business community, which argued that the policies would cost jobs.

Look, there has to be thought put into shared prosperity. We can’t just assume that the market will lift all boats. But that doesn’t mean we just get rid of the market economy and the profit motive. We want businesses to make a profit. I have good, strong relationships with many developers and business people.

Some business people say it’s not government’s role to mandate workers pay above minimum wage.

There’s a big misconception that we want to impose the living wage law on everybody. Our work is incremental, that’s how we approach things. You can raise the bottom a little and have a healthy impact on the economy. We go step by slow step.

What has been your biggest personal challenge at LAANE?

Realizing that as the organization grew to a certain size, I couldn’t supervise every aspect. I had to let go a bit and let others take leadership roles with certain programs. Of course, that has meant bringing talented people on board who are trained and supported over time so that they can be leaders in their own right.

How do you view your role as a board member of the Community Redevelopment Agency?

Contrary to what some might believe, I’m very pro development. But I want good development that meets public goals, including good jobs and helping communities thrive.

You live in a loft in downtown Los Angeles. How has that experience been for you?

I love it. We were one of the first buyers in the Toy Factory Lofts building. We have an amazing view of the downtown skyline from our north-facing window.

What will you be doing on your sabbatical?

I received a grant from the Durphee Foundation to relax and do nothing. The Durphee Foundation gives grants to executive directors of non-profit organizations to take three-month sabbaticals. We’re going to spend some time with my husband’s family in New York, we’re renting a house in the Sea Islands off South Carolina and then renting a house in a little town in Nova Scotia. And I’m planning to visit my eldest son in El Salvador.

You like hiking. What are some of the most memorable hikes you’ve been on?

One of the most beautiful trails I’ve ever been on is the Mountain Lakes hike out of Vail in the Colorado Rockies. It’s a very rigorous trail, walking up to those lakes. But the flowers are just gorgeous and I’m definitely a flower person. Locally, I like the Santa Anita Canyon trail, which goes up into the San Gabriel Mountains. I hike up to a waterfall there; that’s another very beautiful spot.

What are some of the most exotic places you’ve hiked?

Well, I’ve hiked in Chile, El Salvador and Jamaica. I really like the Blue Mountains trail in Jamaica.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?

Take a deep breath before you speak. Think carefully before you speak. That’s something I’ve tried to follow and it’s especially important to keep that in mind as a passionate advocate for the causes I believe in.

Madeline Janis

Title: Co-Founder and Executive Director

Organization: Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy

Born: Los Angeles; 1960

Education: B.A., political science and Spanish, Amherst College; juris doctorate, UCLA Law School

Career Turning Point: While working as land-use attorney at Latham & Watkins LLP, she realized that poor residents were not well-represented at L.A. City Hall and co-founded LAANE with a group of prominent labor leaders

Most Influential People: The late Father Luis Olivares, a “sanctuary priest” who opened the doors of his L.A. church to refugees fleeing wars in Central America in the 1980s; Amrita Vasu, political science professor at Amherst who introduced her to issues of poverty; late union leader Miguel Contreras and current L.A. union leader Maria Elena Durazo

Personal: Lives in the Toy Factory Lofts in downtown Los Angeles with second husband Donald Cohen, director of the Center on

Policy Initiative, a San Diego non-profit progressive think tank; three grown children from first marriage to Edgar Aparicio; two stepchildren through second marriage

Activities: Practicing yoga, cooking for family and friends, hiking, reading and traveling – especially to Central America