Beyond the Manuscript: Podcast Interview Transcript
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Beyond the ManuscriptPodcast Interview Transcript
In each volume of the Journal, the editors select one article for our Beyond the Manuscript post-study interview with the authors. Beyond the Manuscript provides the authors the opportunity to tell listeners what they would want to know about the project beyond what went into the final manuscript. The associate editors who handled the articles conduct our Beyond the Manuscript interviews. This edition of Beyond the Manuscript features Becky Dennison, author of Organizing for Health Communities: A Report from Public Housing in Los Angeles, and Special Issue guest editor Nicole Vaughn.
Hi Becky. Can you talk a little bit more and provide a summary of your project including the purpose and the results to orient the listeners to the work?
Our project highlighted the community organizing and community engagement work of the Los Angeles Human Right to Housing Collective in public housing communities in Los Angeles, and it’s a case study of two years of our work in building a coalition across public housing communities, which in Los Angeles as well as other places have significant racial and ethnic and language and particularly geography in Los Angeles barriers to working together and to creating a citywide coalition. It was our intent to build the citywide coalition, engage community leaders in the broad community health issues in their own communities as well as in public housing communities broadly throughout the city.
Some of the outcomes were our initial successes in doing that coalition building, leadership development, and community organizing, where we begin to have some policy impacts on the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles, and starting to shift the dynamic from basic community engagement or community outreach to real deep community engagement and listening to community members and shifting Housing Authority policies based on their opinions and positions. We were able to address some issues around health within people’s units. There was an issue around very high maintenance fees and folks not being able to get the repairs that were needed to keep their homes healthy and safe and we were able to reduce and eliminate many of those.
We were also able to get the Housing Authority to slow down if not temporarily stop the efforts to privatize public housing and that’s really a core issue for our coalition is keeping public housing in the public domain with very strong protections and deep affordability and not subject to market forces. So it’s a longer-term effort to build deep and broad community health in each of the communities as well as impact the citywide policies that promote tenant engagement in community health. [End Page 83]
So Nicholas Dahmann is not able to be on this podcast today. Can you describe a little bit about your partnership and your work with him over the course of the project?
Nicholas Doman is a PhD student at the University of Southern California, which is located in South Central L.A. and right in the heart of Los Angeles, and was very interested in doing some studies around gentrification and public space and access to public housing and public space more broadly. He was a volunteer with the Los Angeles Community Action Network, which is my organization, at the time when the Human Rights Housing Collective was in its formation stages.
He wanted to come and do on-the-ground work that supported community leadership and community organizing so that he would have a much better sense to drive his long-term academic research. He played a very core role in helping with coordination efforts, providing the basic research that helped to educate tenants, and then more recently has become less of an active partner on a day-to-day basis but still helping a lot with the research, data, community survey projects, things like that, that bring those academic and research skills into the community.
You described in the manuscript the influence of the United Nations Special Rapporteur. Can you talk more about that?
Sure. UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to...
