Arts, Advocacy, and Intergenerational Healing for Eastside Students & Families

K-12 STEAM education

Pilot or new project, program, or initiative (testing or implementing a new idea)

After five calendar years, Covid-19 has exacerbated the chronic disinvestment in public education and its impact on student success for BIPOC low-income students who lack housing stability, family support, and other basic needs. Recent LADPH data reveals the Eastside with one of the highest rates of Covid-19-positive cases, and as a result, its tremendous burden on community mental health and at-risk behaviors for substance abuse. Amidst the 71,000 eviction notices filed in LA City in 2023, CD14 led all districts with more than 10,244 evictions. Above these systemic conditions, recent anti-black, anti-indigenous attitudes amongst elected officials contribute to a generation characterized by voter fatigue and severe governmental mistrust. In this unfounded moment of pandemic recovery, community organizing efforts compete with the long-lasting effects of the pandemic on young people and their families and their ability to advocate for better conditions in their classrooms and beyond.

In response to these conditions, ICS commits to engaging students and parents in advocacy for improved conditions within their classrooms and resources needed for students and families to recover and heal from the significant and inequitable impact that the pandemic has had on their academic and social-emotional health. Whereas the current membership structure holds each of its intergenerational cohorts as separate and autonomous, ICS is committed to building out a space which cultivates cross-cohort power, alignment, and consistency of engagement across a unified membership body by engaging in arts activities as a means to reenergize and sustain members’ emotional strength and capacity for intersectional campaigns that contribute directly to student success. Atardeceres con la Lucha will serve as neighborhood-style events that provide an additional entry point for Eastside residents to get involved and a monthly wellness and healing justice activities, featuring local practitioners, performance artists, local food and vendors, community closets, take action booths, and a community resources booth to connect Eastside residents with relevant resources and services. The organization will leverage its new Power Building Center to convene and grow the intergenerational base. The project will consist of four, coterminous components throughout the duration of the project period, including 1) Research and Collaboration, 2) Strategy and Planning, 3) Implementation, and 4) Evaluation.

The proposed experiment makes deep inquiries into how the intergenerational dynamic can improve upon itself. In this vision of a singular unified membership body, ICS can appropriately build and share with other regional movement-builders a unique model of basebuilding with a community wellness approach. As thoughtful, effective base-building feeds directly into movement building, ICS will have contributed directly to LA2050’s vision of a built and sustainable infrastructure necessary to driving transformative structural change for students and families both locally and throughout LA County. Furthermore, while informed by its immediate constituency within LAUSD BD2, ICS’s student-led educational justice organizing and advocacy efforts benefit students across all of LAUSD’s Board Districts - a total of 565,479 students - by continuing to safeguard and protect more than $700 million annually in district funding to LA’s highest-need schools.

InnerCity Struggle’s work is strong in the very sense that it is traditional – its intergenerational movement organizing is a trusted decades-long formula that has effectively contributed to grassroots powerbuilding in the Eastside, and one of the primary reasons why the organization maintains an appetite for innovation. Evaluations of the programming are scheduled to take place during ICS’s Strategy Team meetings after each Atardeceres programming, incorporating the feedback of the community, including their resonance, value, and utility in the elected activities. Apart from these qualitative metrics, the organization expects to observe quantitative growth in each of its component membership bases, including their leadership involvement in organizational campaigns. Deepened, meaningful basebuilding will continue to prove itself as foundational to any significant wins and progress made in these campaign areas.