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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