Wilmington 20-somethings return home to do good
LA Times columnist Hector Tobar gives some nice press today to a group of young-ish folks who grew up in Wilmington and are trying to make the port community a better place.
The feel-good column is about twentysomethings giving back to the neighborhood that raised them. Tobar dubs it “renaissance by the refineries.”
He writes about 24-year-old Kat Madrigal, who started a blog called the Wilmington Wire, and Robert Jones, a 21-year-old CSU Dominguez Hills student who teaches at the Wilmington Empowerment Project. Jones wants to return to Banning High to teach. Also mentioned is artist Oscar Duarte, who helped start the Wilmington Enrichment Community Artist Network, or WECAN.
The column points out the disparity made evident by Wilmington’s proximity to the affluent Palos Verdes Peninsula:
From just about anywhere in Wilmington and the communities that surround it, you can look up and see the hills of the Palos Verdes Peninsula, an island of prosperity floating in the distance and a constant reminder to locals of where they stand in the world.
Sumiko Braun, a Carson native and actress, recently took a group of Wilmington and Long Beach teenagers up to Palos Verdes as part of a “reality tour” organized by members of the One Imagination collective. It was her way of sharing with neighborhood young people some of the lessons she’d learned in college.
“We started off in Wilmington, by the refineries, and went up to PV … and then back down to South L.A. and Watts,” Braun told me. They compared the schools, medical facilities and grocery stores and looked at other measures of social health. “The differences were drastic and extreme,” she said. “When we were done, a lot of the students got emotional about it, because they didn’t realize until that moment how this city works.”
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