Over the past month, we checked in with our 2024 grantees to learn how their funded programs, projects, and initiatives are progressing – and to better understand the impact they’re making across Los Angeles. Now, we are excited to share these interviews, with stories of growth, challenges, and community transformation.

ACT-LA received funding through the LA2050 Grants Challenge from the Goldhirsh Foundation to support creation of the Los Angeles People’s Transportation Plan, a leadership development tool for transit rider advocacy. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation with their team.

LA2050: Your project is about reclaiming narrative and decision-making power. How do you prepare community members to advocate for better transit?

ACT-LA: As a coalition of 50 member organizations we convene groups throughout Los Angeles City and County to build collective visions and strategies towards housing and transportation justice for our region. Through coalition-building, creating strong centralized narratives, and moving community-centered campaigns we build the capacity of our member organizations to organize their community base to advocate for a public transportation system that serves their needs.

Current mainstream prevalent narratives on safety denigrate public transit, resulting in extra policing on transit and freeway expansion. ACT-LA is building narratives to refocus the conversation on healthier means of creating holistic, care-based safety – encouraging more riders on public transit, advocating for better infrastructure in transit stations, increasing Transit Ambassadors, and highlighting public transit as a convenient experience. These aspects are what actually makes people feel good about using transit to get from Point A to Point B. That sort of reframing is the driving force behind a lot of our work.

ACT-LA provides community members with an orientation to LA Metro and decision making processes. We keep people up to date through memos and briefings of moving policies with Metro and other city and county offices. We’re also able to offer opportunities for community members to participate in advocacy, and share about their own experiences of riding transit. Furthermore, we give them the tools they need to understand how Metro works, and how advocacy works. As a coalition we really are centering and prioritizing the everyday, working-class transit rider because they are the heartbeat of the region. These are the perspectives we are prioritizing and uplifting, because these folks keep the county going.

LA2050: What are some of the nuances that you’re navigating between long-term community visioning and the more immediate realities of high-stakes, top-down planning for the Olympics?

ACT-LA: One of the nuances we are navigating with long-term community visioning is balancing long term needs with the more immediate realities of high stakes planning for the Olympics.

The Olympics are coming to LA in 2028, and it is being promoted as a car-free event that will take place throughout the county. At the same time, our city is navigating through the aftermath of the historically devastating fires and in a visible housing and public health crisis. The Olympics also have major implications for everyday residents, especially poor and working class people that are disproportionately negatively impacted by these mega events. These communities get their priorities and needs pushed aside, while cities scramble to prioritize the tourism industry for a few weeks. Many of our member organizations are internally creating their stances towards the Olympics and we are navigating how to balance their priorities while still building towards our community led visions and goals.

ACT-LA’s current strategic plan wraps up in 2028. At the time the plan was created, we wanted to decenter the Olympics planning because the housing and transportation needs of our coalition members are systemic, long standing, and unlikely to be solved by an infusion of global capital associated with the then-undetermined Olympic venues.

If the Olympics are going to produce long standing legacy projects for public transit, we want to ensure that they are in line with our vision of providing public transit in high need areas and end up benefiting the everyday public transit rider. Our current work has gone through deep community engagement processes that have identified high need areas and complete street infrastructure needed to improve the ridership and experiences on LA’s public transit systems.

As we are preparing to leverage Olympics planning, we are also trying to understand how the planning entities are driving some of our Olympic visionings. One of our goals is to be leaders in an Olympics-focused coalition that is uplifting community visions in the sectors of transit, housing, and labor.

LA2050: What do you hope to achieve in the last six months of the grant, and how can the broader LA2050 community support?

ACT-LA: During the last six months we aim to consolidate our Vermont Corridor campaign to highlight all the organizing and community infrastructure that went into that visioning. We aim to replicate similar community engagement processes in other identified corridors and activate more transit riders towards advocating for the public transit that they want to see and need in the region. We want to showcase our work through a possible webinar and also continue bus station activations throughout the summer.

We will also be doing some coalition building to ramp up our capacity. We have included two new chairs into our transit justice space. One of them is the LA Black Worker Center, who are bringing in the priorities of Black workers to create quality job pipelines in both Metro and other safety and infrastructure needs. The second organization that joined as chair is People For Mobility Justice, lending perspectives from the biking community to highlight the need for infrastructure that also prioritizes cyclists and pedestrians to keep transit safe and accessible. Overall we really want to round up our expertise and get ready to engage transit riders in the summer.

In terms of a call to action for the LA2050 community, we really need folks to support bus lanes.

When people engage with Metro to offer input, it’s often those that are expressing that they don't want a lane coming through their neighborhood. So if you see a bus lane rolling out – and there will be a few rolling out from now to the Olympics – we encourage you to write to Metro and express your support so they can hear those supportive voices as well. Robust bus lane infrastructure in LA is going to completely change the way we navigate our region, and it's going to relieve so much of the congestion that none of us enjoy.

Right now we are in a multi-issue crisis, and instead of just more policing, we want to support ideas that are going to make our transit systems better. We are also due for a cultural shift, since Los Angeles is very car-centric by design. We must acknowledge that our current trajectory of prioritizing cars over people is continuing to exacerbate our climate crisis and the number of lives lost or injured through car related accidents. It is the responsibility of our generation to really shift that narrative, and expand our worldview into other ways of living that don't involve being anxious in your car stuck in gridlock traffic or experiencing the negative health impacts of pollution. Other realities do exist, and we are deserving of experiencing reliable and convenient experiences on a world class transit system by and for Angelenos.

Interview Participants:

Scarlett De Leon, Executive Director

Cynthia Bourjac, Power Building Director