PHILANTHROPY & COVID-19: RE-BUILDING BETTER VIRTUAL ROUND TABLE REPORT
The COVID-19 pandemic has made giving back a front-and-center issue,
as Los Angeles’s biggest companies figure out the best way to use their power for good and set the example for the change they want to see in the world. CSQ assembled a forum of public and private sector leaders to discuss how philanthropy can help the city emerge stronger from the COVID-19 pandemic—and take on its biggest issues, like homelessness and inequality, to create a better city for everyone.
Q2 2020
PRESENTED BY
PRESENTED BY
// Expert Analysis ABOUT THE PANELISTS: RE-BUILDING BETTER
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ABOUT THE MODERATOR: PETE PETERSON
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Dean, Braun Family Dean’s Chair, Pepperdine School of Public Policy HOW BUSINESSES AND GOVERNMENTS WORK TOGETHER IN A CRISIS
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James G. Featherstone, Executive Director, Homeland Security Advisory Council WHY BUSINESS LEADERS HAVE A MORAL RESPONSIBILITY TO GET INVOLVED
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Peter Lowy, Principal, The Lowy Family Group (LFG) HOW THE PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SECTORS CAN TEAM UP TO FIGHT HOMELESSNESS
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Wendy Greuel, LASHA Member | Former Los Angeles City Controller, City Council Member | Executive in Residence, CSUN Nazarian College of Business HOW CORPORATE LEADERS CAN EFFECTIVELY GIVE BACK AFTER COVID-19
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Emily Kane Miller, Founder & CEO, Ethos Giving
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PRESENTED BY
// Re-Building Better: Round Table Panel
MODERATOR Pete Peterson Braun Family Dean’s Chair Pepperdine University School of Public Policy
James G. Featherstone Executive Director Homeland Security Advisory Council James Featherstone joined the Homeland Security Advisory Council (HSAC) in March 2016, after serving the City of Los Angeles for 30 years. At HSAC, Featherstone continues to strengthen the greater Los Angeles region’s crisis readiness and resilience by executing HSAC’s mission.
Peter Lowy Principal The Lowy Family Group (LFG) Peter Lowy previously served as Co-Chief Executive Officer of Westfield Corporation, a global leader in design, development, and operation of iconic retail destinations in major cities across the globe including Westfield Century City, Westfield World Trade Center, and Westfield London. Prior to the completion of its sale to Unibail-Rodamco in June 2018, Westfield Corporation was valued at $34.5B and held a portfolio of 35 shopping centers in the United States and United Kingdom, along with a seminal development site in Milan. Serving as Chairman of LA’s Homeland Security Advisory Council, a partner with Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy (HSAC@SPP), Lowy’s leadership helps bridge a gap between public and private sectors.
Wendy Greuel LASHA Member | Former Los Angeles City Controller, City Council Member | Executive in Residence, CSUN Nazarian College of Business Wendy Greuel, a veteran housing and homelessness policy expert, was appointed to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority’s Board of Commissioners (LAHSA) by Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti. The LAHSA Commission has the authority to make budgetary, funding, planning, and program policies for federally funded homelessness programming in the Los Angeles region.
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Emily Kane Miller Founder & CEO Ethos Giving Emily Kane is the founder and CEO of Ethos Giving. Equal parts head and heart, Kane has spent her career working for social change. With deep experience in government, advocacy, nonprofit, corporate, and philanthropic work, she has a unique ability to envision and steward philanthropic contributions that maximize benefit and value for all.
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PRESENTED BY
// About the Moderator Pete Peterson is a leading national speaker and writer on issues related to civic participation, and the use of technology to make government more responsive and transparent. He was the first executive director of the bi-partisan organization, Common Sense California, which in 2010 joined with the Davenport Institute at the School of Public Policy to become the Davenport Institute for Public Engagement and Civic Leadership. In 2008, he developed the organization’s annual Public Engagement Grant Program, which has provided over $500,000.00 in grants over the last several years to dozens of municipal governments across California. Peterson has also consulted on several of these projects with local governments, and has directly facilitated public meetings. Peterson has co-created and currently co-facilitates the training seminar, “Public Engagement: The Vital Leadership Skill in Difficult Times” a program that has been attended by over 2,000 municipal officials, and he also co-created and co-facilitates the seminar, “Gov 2.0: What Public Officials Need to Know.”
Pete Peterson Braun Family Dean’s Chair Pepperdine University School of Public Policy
“Rebuilding Better, was originally conceived to discuss how different sectors, the business sector, private sector, nonprofit sector, philanthropy, and government, which have all been impacted by the pandemic can work together in new creative and innovative ways, very Los Angeles ways, to respond to the pandemic.”
Pete Peterson Braun Family Dean’s Chair Pepperdine University School of Public Policy
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PRESENTED BY
// HOW BUSINESSES AND GOVERNMENTS WORK TOGETHER IN A CRISIS James G. Featherstone, Executive Director, Homeland Security Advisory Council
Tell us a little bit about what our leaders here in the city and county, the cities of L.A. County and the region’s public safety leaders are experiencing and contending with this complex environment? Unlike ‘92, we don’t have as many fires, but the complexity and the breadth and scope of today’s crisis is landscaped sized. It’s what we call a horizon-like crisis. And since we can’t see the end of the crisis or can’t see the effect of the crisis, it complicates. Right now, we have a compounding of crises, which pulls on resources. It takes longer. It’s more complex. Also, the demographics of the people that are affected by the two crises that we have going on right now on is much more complex than it was in 1992. As Craig Fugate, the former FEMA administrator used to say, this is a maximum of maximums in the sense that we will see the public sector response taxed here. But it also provides an opportunity for the private sector and philanthropy to assist the government in its efforts to protect lives and property, stabilize the incident, and protect infrastructure and business continuity. How can our region truly “rebuild better”? Ideally, the restoration and recovery starts the moment you get into the response or addressing the crisis. I think there’s a great opportunity here, just as there was in ‘92, for all the various sectors to begin to engage in restoration and recovery.
What are some ways businesses and the nonprofit sector can work together? One of the things I’ve learned is that business is always a lot more actionable than government but government also has a much more broad lift. Government has to serve everyone, all of us. Business serves its constituency or its customer base. Something that we learned in the public safety world a long time ago is that the leadership changes based on primacy of mission and need at the time. So depending on what the big need or the specific need is at any given time, the leadership can evolve. It’s important to have the cultures be able to work together. One of the big benefits that I’ve had at HSAC is to be able to look at the expertise that Peter brings from the private sector, the expertise that Wendy brings in from the government and nonprofit sector, and be able to get advice and guidance from people that represent some really good thinking, very progressive, very actual thinking from different sectors.
This is tricky because this is a novel crisis, although we’ve always been very aware of the possibility of a pandemic and also compounding crisis. We figuratively talk about the silos that exist out there, the private sector, the governmental side, the philanthropic, nonprofits, et cetera. There’s value in those silos, but I think there’s an opportunity to perforate those silos and create a cross flow. A key to resilience is diversity. And we have an opportunity to actually leverage the diversity and the expertise of these various silos can actually bring to the table.
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PRESENTED BY
// WHY BUSINESS LEADERS HAVE A MORAL RESPONSIBILITY TO GET INVOLVED Peter Lowy, Principal, The Lowy Family Group (LFG)
How has your experience as a business leader during 9/11 informed your work with the Homeland Security Advisory Council? The one thing that’s impressed me out of all of the pandemonium that we’ve been watching, both from here in California and right across the country—in both the pandemic and with the protests—is the amount of coordination. While it does look chaotic, there’s a lot of coordination between the states, the cities, the counties, the states, and even the federal government to an extent. And the thing that struck me the most during 9/11 was how uncoordinated all branches of the government were, from NYPD to the NY Fire Department, to FEMA, to the city, to the state. There was a famous story that for instance, NYPD and NYFD couldn’t communicate with each other because their radios were on different frequencies. We bought the retail at the World Trade Center six weeks before and our experience was so chaotic that I thought through the help of the corporate sector and the business world, we could bring government together within itself as well as within the private sector. I think through our work at HSAC, that coordinating ability and that ability to give technology and knowledge to the cities and the states, especially in the local area here in L.A., is probably the biggest contribution that we’ve made. But when you see how this county is coordinating with the city, how they’re coordinating with Beverly Hills and then Santa Monica. And whether it be Orange County or Riverside County, with the products that we’ve developed and those agencies are using, they now see the same strategic information and they can make tactical decisions together they’re all looking at that information. That’s really where I’ve been focusing my philanthropy. How did you make the direct connection between your experience during 9/11 to your work at HSAC? Looking back on it, government is much more open now to help from corporate America or local businesses, or local companies. The biggest issue I think we found was that there were problems that had solutions. But the way government worked, unless they worked within those boundaries, the people actually doing the job couldn’t step out of their box to use creative solutions for the problems that they had. The problem that we found is when we first went knocking on the door saying, look, we know you have this problem, we think we have the solution, is that the officials didn’t even know how to say yes. How do you go through the bidding processes? How do you
go through the bidding processes? How do you go through all the requests for proposal that have to be happening. And we’re saying that we’re trying to give you this. We’re trying to give you ideas that we have, that we think can help solve problems and we’d like to partner with you on working how to solve those problems. Then we started having the conversation. I’ll give the mayor a shout out here because he was the first person to see that. And when we started doing this, they were the most open of all the city agencies to work with us, to talk about what we had seen over the last 10 or 15 years, to understand the problems that we could see, that we believed they could solve, and that it would not be expensive or even extremely difficult. What draws you to helping Los Angeles? I do believe you have a moral obligation. I think it’s part of our democracy. It’s part of being Americans. It’s part of living in a society. It’s part of looking at the world around you. We all live in the fortunate end of the world and you can’t just turn around, and have a look, and turn a blind eye to what else is going on. I believe the more you are part of the community, the more you can give, the more you can do, and not just in a monetary sense, by the way, the more you understand your community, the more they understand you. As an example, I spent five years as a Los Angeles County Reserve Deputy Sheriff and my eyes were opened to a whole range of issues, both from the community, from the sheriff’s point of view, from the county’s point of view, from a policing point of view. That had nothing to do with giving money. That had to do with a lot of hard work actually and law enforcement is under a lot of pressure right now. And we should just let them know we’re with them as well as with the protestors and it’s all one community that we have here.
It is easy to write a check. It is a lot harder to get involved. And
for me, I probably get involved because it’s a lot harder to get involved. And when you do that and you can actually make some change, the feeling of reward that you get is second to none.
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PRESENTED BY
// HOW THE PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SECTORS CAN TEAM UP TO FIGHT HOMELESSNESS Wendy Greuel, Former Los Angeles City Controller
How have you engaged both within government, as well as the philanthropic community to focus attention on the issue of homelessness? On the issue of homelessness, of course during COVID, it was how do we ensure that those that are the most vulnerable, that over 65, underlying health conditions, which is a large part of that population, gets inside. And we actually turned a bit to the not only working with government but the private sector in finding hotels and motels to create a program called Project Room Key that the governor helped set up and provided funding for. And this was looking at a number of hotels. We’ve actually been able to have leases with more than 35 hotels and motels in the L.A. County region. I think a crisis that we have now often times highlights the inequities. More than 30% of the homeless are African American, even though in Los Angeles, only 9% of the population is African American. And so with those kinds of inequities, it’s important that we can work very closely with the business community to help leverage their expertise. And as we look to address homelessness in the future, it is about building affordable housing. It is about ensuring that people have that housing. Government cannot build all that housing. The private sector needs to be part of that and the philanthropic community and the businesses can help us identify new ways of looking at housing that we never thought of before.
few years, which was the public passed two bond measures, Measure H, which is a sales tax, and Measure HHH, which is a bond that allows us to have some funding—although challenged obviously—in these economic times. But what is hopeful to me is that the fact within two months, we were able to find 3,500 beds just like that. And the ability to move mountains, to come through that bureaucracy, which is so important. Well, guess what? Normally, having someone live on the street is an emergency and we need to move mountains to do that. I’m extremely positive about the fact that, as I said, a disaster has outlined not only the inequities but caused it to be a sense of emergency. And the stories that we hear about businesses that may or may not ever be able to open after this pandemic, to individuals who have lost their jobs and are unsure whether they can pay their rent. There are creative ways that people are looking at and changing that box, breaking down that box, breaking down those barriers to say, it is a crisis. We must deal with it and we must be able to see that there is actual movement. The private sector has expertise, has ways in which they can help us, and people are more open to that in a time of crisis. What are some of the solutions you see that can make a real impact on homelessness? Particularly in this pandemic, you’ve seen people step up to the plate and provide funding and donations to the L.A. Regional Food Bank as well as Shelter Partnership, both of which have provided resources to existing shelters and as well as those newly established. There were short-term effective ways that people can assist and continue to help out on the issue of homelessness. But I also think in the long-term, it is looking at new ways of housing people and being able to have the financial resources to do that. A private sector fund that would allow us to move much more quickly than the federal government, or the state or local government would be—to be able to purchase a piece of property. I think there are ways in which the private sector can engage from everyday necessities that are needed for the homeless on the stress of Los Angeles, to literally trying to solve that problem, which is building that permanent supportive housing. I will say, it is important to support that building of affordable housing. We found even when we were placing people in hotels and motels, vulnerable individuals, communities who said no, we don’t want them in our neighborhoods. Again, the homeless have a face, and a name, and so many of them are people like you and me who have fallen on hard times and we have to recognize that.
Is there something that makes you hopeful because we are experiencing these things in Los Angeles, an epicenter of entrepreneurialism, that we’re in some ways uniquely equipped to respond to the challenges we’re currently facing? Absolutely! I think a couple things that happened even in the last
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PRESENTED BY
// HOW CORPORATE LEADERS CAN
EFFECTIVELY GIVE BACK AFTER COVID-19
Tell me about some of the work Ethos did in response to the pandemic.
How should business leaders, who haven’t historically been civically engaged, think differently about their role in this time of crisis?
There was this lack of personal protective equipment right when COVID came. As it happens, my sister is a doctor at a local county hospital and so I was very interested in trying to come up with a solution. I started asking some questions and saying how can we quickly and easily deploy philanthropic capital to get the needed PPE to hospitals across L.A. County. We didn’t have an easy mechanism to get to all 43 COVID treating hospitals and so we built it.
I think businesses have been giving back since commerce was created. It’s not a new idea that a baker would give bread to somebody who was hungry at a very fundamental level. But corporate social responsibility as a concept came about in the 1950s. And since then, businesses have taken that mantle in big ways and in less dynamic ways. And I think we really saw it up until this moment as a nice to have. People needed to say what we did to give back to the community and it was, for many organizations, a check-the-box moment.
Much like a wedding registry, we identified that we needed a registry where hospitals could go and register for the PPE that they needed. And if we could put money on doctor’s faces, we actually in the early moments of COVID would have had enough in L.A. But that wasn’t practical. We needed to put PPE on their faces. And so we also developed quick relationships with suppliers that were trusted and vetted, and worked collectively with government at the city, county, and state levels to build communications channels so folks knew that our lights were on.
I have been advocating for the decade and a half that I’ve been doing this work that that is not the right approach, that this is not a check-the-box effort. This is something that society needs corporate leaders to really take on and to be thoughtful about. And overnight with COVID coming to our shores, I think CSR shifted from a “nice-to-have” to a “need-to-have.” And with the social unrest that we’re seeing in our country, that is even more true today.
We deployed hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of PPE thanks to HSAC, and Peter, and other leaders throughout Los Angeles. And we built a mechanism to make this possible, not just through COVID but potentially longer-term by saying something doesn’t exist. It needs to exist. Let’s build it. And what was so amazing about this was that nobody stopped and said, well, this isn’t the way that things are done. We have lanes. Stay in these lanes. Everybody said, “That’s a great idea. Let’s do it. You have our support.”
Emily Kane Miller, Founder & CEO, Ethos Giving
What would your advice be as a first step to get involved? It seems like a really obvious answer but it’s something that most people don’t start with: check in with your people! I think each organization, whether you have a CSR team or not, you have people within your team that I dub your “chief soul officers,” the people who are engaged in their communities, care about their fellow workers, come to you when there’s a problem that needs to be answered. Bring that team together today on Zoom, but hopefully soon in person. And start by setting the table, saying nothing is off the table. We really want to hear from you all how you feel this organization that you’re dedicated to, that you helped to make better already, how we can answer the call to be of service right now to our employees and to our communities. For most organizations, starting with asking that question internally takes you 80% of the way there. From there, I think the most important thing is knowing that you don’t have all the answers. The last piece of advice that I would say here is identify something that is ambitious but realistic that you can live with and love as an organization for years. Social change doesn’t happen on a quarter-by-quarter basis.
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