Better known for its decade of activist work as the Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable, the civil rights group has now taken on a new challenge with a national mission to build healthy inner-city communities by awarding self-reliant micro grants.

Launched without any fanfare at the time, from June last year until the end of December, the roundtable has given out 25 Impact Micro Awards, initially beqeathing $100, which has now risen to $250.

Donating projects have included the Southern California Cease Fire Coalition, the Neighborhood Youth Achievers, Centro Latino for Literacy, Korean American Historical Society, the Children’s Dental Center of Greater Los Angeles and the Los Angeles Youth Orchestra.

And the largesse, courtesy of the organization’s 501 public charity status, has now been supplemented with the recent announcement of a major capital fund drive that secured the partnership of the Wells Fargo Foundation, West Los Angeles Church, San Francisco-based New American Media, the Office of Councilman Bernard Parks and the Weingart Foundation.

Along with this development, the roundtable also announced its first monthly awards to support the nation’s five most impoverished cities, which, according to the U.S. 2010 census: are Brownsville-Harlingen, Texas, Pine Bluff, Ark., McAllen-Edinburg-Mission, Texas, Albany, Ga., and Kingsport-Bristol, Tenn.-Bristol, Va.

“With the partnership of Wells Fargo and our other donors we are upping the ante,” said roundtable President Earl Ofari Hutchinson, who urged interested organizations to contact his group via its website, laupr.org.

“We hope to up the awards to $500, with a goal to reach a minimum of $1,000.”
Recalling how the micro awards came about, Hutchinson revealed that he took inspiration from a similar concept that has been used in the developing world.

“We’ve been known for our activism over the last 10 years, but most people didn’t know about the tax-exempt, charity component part,” he explained.

“We didn’t do a lot of solicitations through private donors, but a couple of years ago an organization called Kiva [which means “unity” in Swahili] caught my eye.

“They pioneered this concept [to] give micro loans to businesses and individuals in Asia, Africa and Latin America. For example, it could be a farmer in Indonesia, a merchant in Ghana, a teacher/student in Peru. It could be as little as $50 or $100, but that’s a lot of money in those countries. What they do is match up the donors with donees, so someone would go to their website and say I wanna donate $100 to the farmer. They would find those individuals and loan the money to be paid back.”

He added: “I thought that was an intriguing concept, and over the years we’ve gotten so many calls for help in one capacity or another. But, I’m not a banker and I’m not in the loan business, so I thought why not just make small awards. Thus, we came up with the impact micro awards.

“The concept was to find organizations in our community that are doing things in education, or with at-risk youth, drug abuse, gang violence, the arts, across the board. There’s no strings attached, but they must be doing something in the community that promotes self-reliance and independence.”

According to Hutchinson, the response has been “astounding,” with many letters of gratitude and detailed breakdowns on how each grant has been spent. He’s also quick to emphasize the purity of the endeavor.

“What makes this foundation more unique is that I as president and my staff are all volunteers,” he said.

“No one receives a nickel in compensation, none of the officers receive any money; no one receives any money for [administration] or travel expenses, every penny that comes in goes direct to the awards.

“I think that’s important because unfortunately a lot of people look at foundations as scams. Even the biggest ones, a lot of the officers, collect these huge salaries. I mean they may raise a lot of money, but the next thing you know there’s presidents, vice presidents and officers getting tons of money for travel and so-called admin expenses, which is just another way of padding their pocket books.”

Meanwhile, the L.A. Youth Orchestra’s Sandi Steinberg welcomed its micro grant, adding that though the organization does solicit larger private monies, the bulk of their funding comes from constant small donations.

“We were very pleased because we were in dire straits,” she said.

“At the time we didn’t have enough money to continue. [Subsequently] we went out for a major funding drive to raise $50,000 and actually got $63,000.

“The money goes to pay our coaches and musicians and we provide many, many scholarships. Now we can have a spring season, and that will eke into fall. The orchestra does wonderful things for the kids; they bring in their friends and go out into the community to talk about what we’re doing.

“They learn about community, sharing, working together and it makes them really terrific citizens. We’re very diverse, our kids come from all over L.A., from public and private schools, different ethnicity’s and walks of life.”
 

Photo: Fourteen year-old Amber Daughtry (left), is a young musician, who is a member of the L.A. Youth Orchestra. Credit: Courtesy photo