Had the honor of being invited by Coro Southern California to speak to the 68th Class of Fellows in Public Affairs at The California Endowment in downtown Los Angeles. For those unfamiliar, Coro runs one of the most recognized civic leadership fellowships in the country — a full-time, 9-month program that develops the next generation of leaders who go on to run cities, agencies, and institutions across LA.
They’re researching the impact of the tech sector on LA’s coastal communities. And they reached out to Defend Venice intrigued by the kind of informed, authentic, generational Venice activism perspective that’s apparently rare to come by in these types of conversations.
I got to share some in-the-trenches perspective on what community defense actually looks like when you’re not theorizing from a classroom. The fights. The wins. The machinery we’re up against. We talked about how displacement doesn’t start with a rent hike or a demolition notice — it starts with policing, with narrative control, with someone rebranding your neighborhood after their industry without ever asking the organic community. We talked about the stages of that machinery and how each one sets the table for the next.
We also talked about what building from the ground up actually means. Not waiting for institutions to include us. Not petitioning or trying to appeal to the moral integrity of the agents exploiting us. Building our own media. Documenting our own history. Controlling our own narrative infrastructure — because whoever tells our story controls our equity.
I planted a few seeds around the Indigenous and Black radical traditions that inform how we approach this work. I loved the diversity of the group, but especially their sincerity and enthusiasm to hear some of the organizing wisdom I had to share.
These young civic leaders were engaged, curious, and hungry for perspectives they clearly weren’t used to hearing. That’s encouraging. Because if the people coming up in LA’s political and institutional pipeline are actively seeking out the culture bearers of communities like ours — the families who built this place and are still here holding it down — then, if we play our cards right, we can restore some of that stolen equity back to our future generations.
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