Hi Everyone! I have been in Australia for the past week and returned yesterday.

I am thrilled to report that Lisa Sarno of Million Trees LA has just given me the date (referenced above) for our tree planting. We will start at 8:30 in the morning and she tells me the work is usually completed by noon.

My tasks now are: 1. To help the Neighborhood Council arrange a meeting wherein they have a quorum to vote on the expenditure, which, will be $2400.00 per year for 2 years. 2. I must recruit 100 Volunteers.

Both tasks are daunting. When I was on the board of the Neighborhood Council we went several months without a quorum and this contributed to my decision to resign from the board. BUT– I am energized and determined to make this happen, so somehow, some way, the Neighborhood Council WILL have a quorum and approve the expenditure soon.

Having to find 100 volunteers scares me, I must admit, but, again– my energy and determination will have to make this happen. I have not spent the past two years of my life working towards this for it not to come to fruition.

If you are reading this, I am asking for your help. If you know someone who would enjoy doing something to make LA a better city, please send them to our event.

When: January 23rd, 2010
Where: 1730 Manchester Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90047
Manchester, between Western Ave. and Harvard Blvd.
What: Planting 20 trees. Each tree requires 5 volunteers.

Ralphs will be providing refreshments
Million Trees LA will be providing Community Service Credit to students on the spot. They will stamp and sign the forms.

Million Trees LA will ALSO be GIVING AWAY fruit trees to the first 200 LA residents who show up and request them.

Please join us!!!

Thank you so very much for your support!

Toni Ann xo

Yesterday I went to City Hall and met with Lisa Sarno, who runs Million Trees LA and with Rose Ibanez, who is the Done representative for our Neighborhood Council.

It was a privilege to speak with them. I’ve known Rose for a couple of years, since I began attending Neighborhood Council meetings. She is always patient and supportive. I honestly marvel at how she holds up amidst all the drama that swirls around our Neighborhood Council.

Lisa Sarno is awesome. We are simpatico. Like me, she is Type A in business dealings. She expects people to do what they say and like me she holds them accountable. We discovered that we’ve both experienced resistance from people who don’t appreciate this approach. It’s not easy to demand the best from people, unfortunately.

I couldn’t be more thrilled to be working with her, because she inspires me to stay on top of what I commit to do.

What I’ve committed to do is to reach out to the Neighborhood Council– yes THE Neighborhood Council mentioned in my previous post; The one whose chair was arrested last week for embezzlement. I will be appealing to them to ask that they come in as a partner with Ralphs and Million Trees LA in this project at Manchester and Western Blvd. We need the Neighborhood Council to allocate some of its funds to pay for the maintenance of the trees for 2 years.
Neighborhood Councils receive $45,000 per year to spend on improving their communities.

To my surprise and delight, this planting project is going to be far greater than I’d dreamed! I had envisioned just a few trees, maybe 10, along the sidewalk in front of Ralphs.

But Lisa Sarno’s vision is for about 3 times the number of trees (!) and she envisions trees on BOTH sides of Manchester Blvd. AND these trees will be 24-inch box trees, so they will be large enough to create a visual impact immediately!

AND, the day of the tree planting will be a BIG EVENT! Million Trees LA has committed to give away 5 gallon fruit trees to the first 200 LA residents who request them at the event. AND, teenage volunteers can get credited community service hours. Representatives from Million Trees LA will be present to sign and stamp their paperwork that day.

And Ralphs will be providing refreshments! Amazing.

Once we have the funding of the maintenance in place, we will firm up the date. It will be either January 9th or January 23rd.

The way this has unfolded is awe-inspiring to me. The fact that it is now bigger than I’d dreamed is humbling and deeply gratifying. It confirms my belief that there is a power greater than any one of us at work in our lives. And even when it seems like things are not going our way, that power is quietly working away and when we least expect it, it reveals itself. I am so very grateful!

James Tyrell Harris, 46, surrendered to police. He is suspected of misappropriating $85,000 in city funds while serving as chairman of his neighborhood council.

by Maeve Reston

October 9, 2009

Police on Thursday arrested James Tyrell Harris, a South Los Angeles community activist and previously convicted felon, on suspicion of misappropriating $85,000 in city funds while serving as chairman of his neighborhood council.

Harris is the fifth neighborhood council member in the city to be charged with a felony for allegedly misusing money over the last two years. The cases have raised questions about how closely officials monitor the 89 volunteer neighborhood councils, each of which is annually given money for supplies and community projects. The amount has historically been $50,000, reduced this year to $45,000.

The funds can be drawn down through a credit card issued to each treasurer or through city checks. The agency that works with neighborhood councils does not require their members to undergo financial background checks.

Harris, who is known for his anti-gang efforts and work with ex-offenders in South Los Angeles, surrendered to police. His bail was set at $1,085,000.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Max Huntsman said Harris, 46, has two previous felony convictions for robbery in Los Angeles in the mid-1980s. With two previous strikes, the maximum sentence if he is convicted could be 25 years to life, but prosecutors are expected to seek substantially less prison time because the alleged crime was not related to violence and the previous strikes are more than two decades old.

Harris’ attorney could not be reached for comment.

Prosecutors allege that while acting as chairman and treasurer of the Empowerment Congress Southwest Area Neighborhood Development Council, Harris bought money orders and made a series of cash withdrawals and credit card purchases that were not authorized.

Huntsman said Harris spent some of the group’s money on travel and to hire his daughter to handle administrative work for the council. City officials expressed concern in a memo to police last year about what they termed “questionable time sheets and excessive payments” for two accounting workers hired through an employment agency. Those payments totaled more than $53,000 between June 2006 and January of this year, accounting reports show.

“The key thing here is that almost none of this stuff seems to be approved,” said Huntsman, who said Harris submitted fraudulent receipts for work that did not appear to have been done. “Any dime he spends must be with board approval.”

Harris has been working at the Community Coalition, a group focused on improving the quality of life in South L.A.

maeve.reston@latimes.com

The above LA TIMES article by Maeve Reston is about the chair of my neighborhood council.  I met James Harris 5 years ago at City Hall in Los Angeles when I was there with some neighbors appealing to a judge to prevent a store from obtaining a liquor license.   Having lived in a Beverly Hills bubble prior buying a house in South LA, I didn’t even  know that there was such a thing as a Neighborhood Council.  To my surprise, during the hearing, the board of the Empowerment Congress Southwest Neighborhood Council marched in with photos, data and prepared speeches about the damage an additional liquor store would inflict upon our community.  They saved the day!

It would be a few years before I would join the board, but I began attending meetings.  It was James Harris who encouraged me to apply for the Community Beautification Grant and it was he who introduced me to Alex Kenefleck and Steve Cancian, who helped me to develop a project would win the grant.  James arranged meetings wherein Alex and Steve provided advice and James took his time to sit in on these meetings.

James brought our project to the board and encouraged the board members to vote in favor of offering matching funds, and they did.

Whenever I would attend community meetings, James would be there.  As we worked on our beautification project James showed up.  He didn’t follow through with everything he’d promised– like youth volunteers and the full amount of money he’d agreed to.   When it came time to collect the funds, he reduced the amount to less than half of what he’d initially offered.  But he did follow through with a check that covered a significant portion of the project, and for that I was grateful.

From what I could tell, he was sincerely committed to the community.  I believe that a part of him WAS.  I may be wrong, I know I’ve been naive where he’s concerned, but I sensed that he really did love our community.  Somewhere along the way, however, something unraveled and he began to harm the community he’d been committed to helping.

When I received an email from the funding office suggesting that James had misused funds, I emailed back saying that there must be some mistake.  The James Harris I knew would not do that.  When one of the board members told me James was a crook, I dismissed her claim, too.  I just could not bring myself to believe that this man I appreciated and admired had done such a thing.  But as time progressed, concrete evidence of his guilt presented itself and I couldn’t remain in denial.

I was not brave enough to ask James about it.  I was angry with him, behind his back.  I’m sure he knew he’d lost my admiration.   I was no longer eager to attend meetings and when I did was not happy to see him and I didn’t pretend to be.  I rarely returned his calls unless they had to do with the goals I was pursuing for the community and ultimately, I resigned from the board.

This has been a deeply disappointing experience for me.  I had been so excited to make a difference in the community.  I volunteered time that I really didn’t have to give, because I thought it was meaningful to do something that would benefit others.  But I had to face that James, ultimately, did not value me, or my time, and that I had wasted a lot of it.  In my many months on the board, despite my efforts and diligence, I was not able to accomplish one thing.  From my perspective, this is, at least in part, due to the fact that James was mercurial in his support.  He would tell me to pursue things, and then when I’d get close to succeeding, he would withdraw support.

I’ve come close to accomplishing getting trees planted at Manchester and Western, but I had to resign from the board in order to make that progress.  Even after my resignation, however, I was still consulting him, because in order to pay for the maintenance of the trees, I’d need Neighborhood Council funds.  On the Friday prior to his arrest, I emailed him to let him know that things were finally happening and I was ready to appeal to the board to allocate the funds to pay a nonprofit for the maintenance of the trees.  His first response was, “Can we pick the nonprofit.”  There was no congratulations.  No acknowledgement of his former stance of being in support of this effort.  Later in the weekend he expressed concern for what he believed would be a 5 year commitment and said that the board would not be behind that.  The commitment is actually only for 2 years and he answered for the board without asking them.  The Neighborhood Council now received $45,000 per year (down from $50,000) for community enhancement.  James has, for the past several years, committed $10,000 a year to a neighborhood jazz festival.  Just weeks ago he signed off on approval of those funds without the participation of the entire board.  This led to the resignation of the treasurer.   Astounding that he would speak for the whole board, telling me that they would not agree to the tree maintenance when he didn’t even know how long the commitment was for and he didn’t know what the cost would be.  It would be significantly less than the yearly jazz festival expense.

One of the things that I’d tried to do for the community while on the board, was bring a screening of a documentary film called “The Pact,”  to our youth.  The film was directed by a colleague of mine, Andrea Kalin, and it’s based on a book with the same title.  It’s about 3 men who grew up in poverty in Newark, New Jersey, who made a pact to support one another in to do well in high school, get into college and to go on to medical school and ultimately become doctors.  They succeeded and now they spend some of their time motivating kids to pursue education as a way out of poverty rather than putting their dreams in becoming rappers or professional ball players.

Because I knew the director and producer of the film, I was able to contact her directly and ask about how we could bring a screening here.  James acted like he was eager to do it.  He gave me dates and asked me to make the arrangements.  I did.  He changed the dates without telling me, and didn’t follow through on the new dates he’d chosen.  After he asked me to forward the contract from Andrea Kalin’s office, he never followed through.  He sabotaged my efforts and compromised my relationship with a valued colleague.  We never got the screening.  It would have cost less than $2,000 to do it and I believe it would have been a blessing to South LA teens, but it was not to be.

I’m sad for James.  I don’t know what took place in his mind and heart to cause him to make such bad choices, to steal from the community that depended on him, believed in him and admired him.    I’m angry and disappointed.   I won’t remain angry for long, though, because that won’t benefit me or anyone else.  Not sure I can recover as quickly from being disappointed, but I will not remain in judgement despite feeling so let down.  Human beings are complicated and imperfect and if they could do better, they would.  It’s taken me years to recover from refusing to forgive the past, so rather than hold onto my anger I will try to find compassion.

I believe that somehow things are always progressing for the good, even when that appears not to be the case.  Sometimes, there’s destruction, but when we look back, years later, at the terrible thing that took place, we can find value in them because they led to new beginnings.   Sometimes things get so bad that they must completely fall apart before we can rebuild.   Here’s hoping my community mourns its loss and recovers, and that our next incarnation is better than the last.

Lisa Sarno of the Million Tree Initiative is awesome. She has persuaded Ralphs to accept the trees!

I received an email from her on Friday telling me this and I must admit, I was moved to tears. It’s been a long time coming.

I’ve been trying to get to this place since fall of 2007. When I began, I would never have imagined how difficult it would be to get Ralphs to agree to accept FREE TREES.

Initially, I thought it would as easy as asking the store manager. That was very naive, of course. Ralphs is a corporation and everything must go through the corporate office. The manager’s assistant told me to contact Barbara Janeway in public relations. Barbara Janeway told me to contact Carrie Ridge in Community Relations.

Carrie Ridge had a nice manner and seemed to want to help me, but ultimately she did not. She told me that Ralphs was working with Million Trees LA and had plans to green several needy locations. In the fall of 2007 she told me that by Arbor Day 2008 I’d see some green at our Ralphs.

Of course Arbor Day came and went. I had a movie in theaters and I was also a full time graduate student, too busy at the time to hold her accountable for what she’d told me. During my last semester of grad school, things had calmed down and in the fall of 2008, I reached out to her again.

She was aware that no trees had been planted. She also admitted that she was not even the person to handle the request. That would be Kenneth Boatner.

Kenneth Boatner asked me to jump through hoops and I did. He wanted a site map with a rendering of where the trees would go. I didn’t know how to make a site map! I’m a screenwriter. My partner Los who’s much better with computers than I am, helped me take the photo off google maps and in photo shop or some similar program, he put tree symbols where I envisioned them planted.

Boatner also asked for photographs of the site, which I took, and sent along with the site map.

And after all that, he said no. He said Ralphs didn’t want to be responsible for any potential damage the trees would cause to the sidewalk. Ralphs didn’t want to be libel for any potential lawsuits over injuries cause by the trees and Ralphs didn’t want to water the trees.

I was flabbergasted! If you’ve looked at the pictures, you can see that nearly every other Ralphs in the city of LA has trees.

Things became acrimonious between Mr. Boatner and I. I was so disappointed to hear no. It reeked of environmental racism. I told him I felt my community was being disrespected. He told me that Ralphs did a lot to help my community. I asked him to name something. He could not and instead said firmly that there were no plans to green that store and probably never would be.

This enraged me.

I sensed that Boatner was both amused and put off by my response. He bristled and became rude. But I’d become rude myself. I’d felt that my position was the righteous one. My community had a dearth of green space and I was giving him an opportunity to let Ralphs help rectify that. I still think that’s true, but I could have and should have been more polite. I’ve since reached out to him to apologize for what I said, which was something like, “Okay. Then it’s going to get ugly.” To which he kind of laughed and said something like, “Yeah good luck with that,” and hung up.

I fumed. I could have burst into flames I so angry.

I signed up for twitter and started Tweeting nasty things about Ralphs. I ranted on my myspace page which I’d previously ignored and haven’t looked at since. I facebooked about it. People egged me on. Told me to “SHAME THEM.” It was suggested that I stage a protest.

I reached out to some community advocates and found out that our Ralphs had been part of a previous controversy in which they were sending spoiled meat from other stores to our store, re-dyeing it and selling it to our community. CBS did an investigation and shamed them on the news. I also found out that the lot Ralphs sits on is 50,000 square feet and that the ordinance requiring a percentage of green space on a project did not go into effect until 1996 and the store was built in 1985, which meant there wasn’t a way to legally force them to green.

I wrote an angry op-ed which included all of the negative information. The op-ed editor at the LA Times didn’t publish it, but she liked my writing enough to hire me to write an alternative op-ed, one which celebrated the community I’ve come to love and how it was weathering the recession. It was called, “The Financial Gurus Next Door.”

It was the first piece of nonfiction I’ve ever published and it was exciting.

Several weeks after that Op-Ed ran on March 9th of 2009, I asked about my earlier op-ed– the ranting raving one complaining about Ralphs. The lovely and amazing editor gently advised me to tone it down and broaden it. She ultimately published the new version and by that time, I had calmed down and become more reasonable about the whole thing.

The night before the paper was coming out, I emailed Ken Boatner to let him know and to apologize for how I’d handled our conversation. I did not hear back from him. A part of me was gloating ever so slightly. I’d made good on my threat of it getting ugly. Though it didn’t get ugly in the way of some huge public protest, I’d succeeded in letting Los Angeles know how Ralphs had refused free trees to a community that truly needed them. But I’d been humbled and I’d learned a lesson. First, that I didn’t like myself for having been rude and second and more importantly, I learned that the way to accomplish good things is not by fighting with people or by trying to shame them or make them bend to your will. The way to accomplish things is through developing relationships and partnerships. If I’d not had a good relationship with Michael Espinosa (whom I’ve mentioned in other blog entries) I would not have been introduced to Lisa Sarno who had a relationship with people at Ralphs who were able to say yes. So, I hope my experience might be helpful to someone out there who wants to do good things for his or her community. Be nice, even when people aren’t particularly nice to you and even when they’re wrong. And when you make a mistake, don’t be too proud to admit you were in error.

Good things happen when you connect with people in positive ways and when you show sincere appreciation for their help. When you make it a point to let people know they’re appreciated it gives them an energy boost and they’re glad to support you.

We still have to solve the issue of how the trees will be watered. Ralphs still won’t water the trees. This is fine. We can hire a nonprofit that will do the maintenance, but I have to get Neighborhood Council Funds to pay for it. The cost is $5 per tree per week. $2400 per year. Fingers crossed that the board of the Neighborhood Council will commit to these funds. If not, I will be taking donations!! Please wish me luck.