In 2006, three days after a 14-year-old boy named José was shot and killed in front of his house, I rang his mother’s doorbell holding nothing but a handwritten condolence note from a city councilman.
I was 27, a former cocktail waitress and aspiring actress who had stumbled into a job as a field deputy for the City of Los Angeles. For years before that moment on a porch in Echo Park, I had been consumed by the big stuff: the Iraq war, Guantánamo Bay, the machinery of the Bush administration. I had marched, organized and fumed. A local politician, taking pity on my righteous exhaustion, suggested I come work for his office. “You are so mad at the government,” he told me. “Why don’t you come see how it works?” It wasn’t the revolutionary action I had in mind, but as I was tired of cocktail trays and subpar Juliet monologues, I said yes.
The job was, in a word, mundane. I got streetlights fixed. I procured portable toilets for street festivals. I sat in a cheap suit answering emails in a cubicle while the world, as I understood it, continued to collapse. Then I started reading the crime statistics for my district.
Turns out, people were dying of gang violence in the same neighborhoods where my friends and I brunched on weekends. Almost exclusively people of color, on streets I recognized, at a rate that would have dominated front pages if the victims had been white. My fury, which had been aimed at Washington, suddenly found a closer target.
That’s what brought me to Lupe’s house. When I arrived there, she opened the wooden door but not the screen. She had a baby on her hip and half-filled cardboard boxes behind her. In the dim room, she looked about my age, but the weight of a mourning mother hung on her in a way I couldn’t know. Gesturing at the boxes she noted that she wanted to move. She asked if I could help with that. Affordable housing in Los Angeles was nearly impossible and I didn’t know what to tell her. Standing in her living room, I racked my brain for anything useful and landed on the only thing I could actually deliver: “Would it help if we got local restaurants to send your family dinner for a while? For free?”
She looked at me with the exhaustion of a woman who had learned not to expect much from officials. “Sure,” she said. “Yes. Thank you.”
For three weeks after her son’s murder, restaurants across Echo Park delivered meals to Lupe’s family. It felt good. It also didn’t solve anything. A Band-Aid at best. One that did no work to heal the wound.
But that wound became my education. I started to look away from cable news and toward root causes — the relationship between poverty and gang involvement in my own city, the failed logic of the war on drugs, the way punishment was consistently levied over investment in the communities that needed it most. And slowly, a parallel I hadn’t seen coming came into focus. Everything that kept me up at night about America’s foreign policy was present in how we treated members of our own communities here at home: the same impulse toward force over healing, the same mantra that some people deserve support and second chances and some don’t.
The difference was that there, in Los Angeles, in my small city job, I had the power to Do Something. Nothing revolutionary. But something. With guidance from community members, I helped design “Summer Night Lights” — free evening programming in one of the district’s most violent neighborhoods. That summer in Glassell Park, no kids died.
I didn’t end gang violence. But I had alchemized my fury at a federal administration into something local and measurable. A hyperlocal thing that actually worked. Local government and local elections matter so much more than most of us imagine.
The councilman who hired me later became mayor. I went on to graduate school to study justice policy. The Summer Night Lights program eventually expanded to 34 parks across Los Angeles. Because I had gone local, I was able to spark some change.
This is not a story about giving up on the big fight. It’s about understanding where you can actually land a punch. We saw this so brilliantly in Minneapolis this winter. We see it when New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani walks into the Oval Office and speaks only about New York City. As our world burns and overwhelm churns around us, there’s one thing you can always do: Look for the wound closest to home, and work to heal it.
Kabira Stokes is a former chief executive of two L.A.-based social enterprises focused on employing people returning from incarceration, including Homeboy Electronics Recycling. She is writing a memoir.
The post My frustrations were global, but the solutions were local appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
