The fourth-floor workplace of California Endowment CEO Robert Ok. Ross affords an Instagram-worthy view of Union Station, Olvera Avenue, Metropolis Corridor and Chinatown. However I discovered a much more fascinating panorama Friday inside his nook suite.
Shifting bins. Work and photographs bundled up in bubble wrap. Handwritten notes on file cupboards with directions to staffers on what to maintain and what to toss. Awards — dozens of them.
“In every week, man, this may all be gone, brother,” Ross mentioned with amusing as we sat at a small desk, the one place not too cluttered with 24 years of reminiscences. “The county and metropolis proclamations and certificates of appreciation — I imply, I don’t wish to sound ungrateful, however the place am I going to place them? This stuff are large. They take numerous area, you already know, and I don’t need a research that’s like a monument to s— I did, proper?”
Ross, 69, a pediatrician by coaching, is retiring subsequent week after practically a quarter-century heading one of the vital philanthropic forces in California. Its financials are large sufficient — it sits on $4.3 billion in belongings and gave $381 million final yr to greater than 700 teams within the identify of combating the state’s well being inequities. However Ross’ legacy rests on how he helped to rework charitable giving throughout his tenure.
Miguel Santana, head of one other L.A.-based philanthropic big, the California Group Basis, referred to as Ross a “revolutionary” determine who challenged his friends “to consider that the billions we steward belong to the folks” and “belief in these most proximate to the problems and injustice.” Santana was referring to place-based funding — the concept communities, not wealthy organizations or people, know greatest what they want and the way to use grants and donations to realize their objectives.
Ross and the endowment didn’t invent that motion. However their institutional weight made it de rigueur in Southern California philanthropy. Tons of of group teams are witness to this imaginative and prescient. In the meantime, the L.A. political panorama has been remodeled by a brand new technology of elected officers educated within the nonprofit sector — together with Mayor Karen Bass and incoming Metropolis Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson, each former heads of Group Coalition.
Ross cuts an imposing determine along with his peak, stocky construct, thick mustache and completely Bicced head. Beneath is a delicate man with a mushy voice generally drowned out by the symphonies and concertos of KUSC that performed whereas we talked — “my chill music,” he mentioned. Passionate gestures throughout our one-hour discuss — arms clasped in gratitude or tapped on the desk to make a degree, eyes closed in contemplation, considerate silences — and a lifetime’s price of anecdotes introduced his crusading spirit to life.
“I like the work of being on this combat” of social justice, Ross mentioned. “For those who’re not preventing, it’s not social justice.”
The Bronx-born son of a Black father and Puerto Rican mom was galvanized into motion whereas working as a pediatrician in Camden, N.J., and Philadelphia throughout the late Nineteen Eighties, on the peak of the crack epidemic. He described having to scrub up vials outdoors the clinic each Monday. “It was lunacy,” he mentioned. “And, you already know, excuse my language, ‘What the f— is happening right here?’”
Ross left the non-public sector to move Philadelphia’s public well being division, then moved to the same function with San Diego County in 1993.
Philanthropic foundations within the Los Angeles space have been more and more giving nonprofits growing quantities of cash with out restrictions. The leaders of those foundations, together with Robert Ok. Ross, head of the California Endowment, wish to help these closest to the issues the foundations hope to unravel.
(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Occasions)
“I knew this a lot about Cali,” Ross mentioned, pinching his thumb and index finger collectively. “And I flew out in February for the interview. It was a dank, icy, chilly, grey Philadelphia day. And once I landed in San Diego, it was like a chamber of commerce day. Like, image excellent. Seventy-five [degrees], blue sky.”
Ross stayed there till taking the endowment place in 2000, tiring of how “you could have immense sources at your disposal” in authorities “with little or no flexibility when it comes to the way to deploy these.” One instance he got here throughout early in his new function was in Boyle Heights, the place residents had lengthy used the unpaved sidewalks round Evergreen Cemetery as a jogging monitor within the absence of publicly funded alternate options.
“It’s like, ‘How outrageous is that? The one protected place in your group is a cemetery?’” Ross remembered considering. “Individuals would hear that story and form of chuckle — ‘Oh, that’s fascinating,’ or, ‘That’s artistic.’ It’s not. It’s a tragedy.”
He pushed the California Endowment to give attention to place-based philanthropy. Out of that got here Constructing Wholesome Communities, a decadelong initiative that distributed $1 billion to teams in 14 locations from Del Norte County to the Coachella Valley to San Diego.
Early on, although, Ross admits he was generally “properly meant however smug.” He and his workers visited the Youth Justice Coalition, a South L.A. nonprofit that helps previously incarcerated folks. “This place was grassroots — like, old-ass constructing, frayed carpet, paint’s chipping away, however nice power.”
Ross advised the group in regards to the endowment’s applications to assist juvenile parolees. “And this child says to me, ‘Yo, physician, that’s form of good, however, you already know, actually, man, we don’t suppose these youngsters have to be in lockup within the first place.’”
“I’m a board-certified pediatrician, grasp’s in public well being,” he continued, now flashing a smile. “Former head of a well being division, operating California Endowment. And I needed to be subjected to a lecture by a 19-year-old who was previously incarcerated who mainly says, ‘We don’t want to repair youth prisons. We have to shut them’? And I bear in mind leaving that day feeling form of humbled — however enlightened.”
Constructing Wholesome Communities is how I first heard in regards to the endowment. Activists I knew in Orange County had been intrigued however initially skeptical at workers members’ willingness to listen to out concepts, irrespective of how radical, in an space lengthy dismissed by L.A.-area do-gooders.
A type of O.C. activists was Carolina Sarmiento, a group research professor on the College of Wisconsin-Madison who sits on the board of El Centro Cultural de México. The Santa Ana nonprofit makes use of music and artwork courses to prepare residents round points equivalent to gentrification and cultural id, and it additionally places collectively one of many greatest Día de los Muertos commemorations in Southern California.
In 2014, El Centro Cultural was lastly capable of purchase a headquarters, utilizing an endowment grant. It continues to obtain monetary help from the endowment.
“There have been few foundations that will enable us to do the work we do, the best way we do, and the endowment allowed us to try this,” Sarmiento mentioned. She credit Ross with “main the dialog in philanthropy on the way to reward responsibly in a manner that they’re not co-opting social actions however letting community-based teams lead.”
I advised Ross about El Centro Cultural, and he nodded.
“We’re a subject that’s 1725137132 much less prime down in its orientation. Fairly frankly, much less colonial and white supremacist. The place we [used] to say, ‘Now we have the cash. It’s our cash. Right here’s what we want you to do. And for those who beg the suitable manner, we’ll give it to you,’ proper?
I requested whether or not he thought he was profitable throughout his time on the endowment.
Ross took a drink of water.
“Nobody’s requested me that query, as a result of I feel they assume that my profession has been profitable,” he mentioned, trying round his workplace earlier than cracking, “I’ve all these awards! After all I’m profitable!”
He took a deep breath. “I’ve been profitable in modeling what a humble learner seems to be like as a frontrunner … by listening.”
One other go searching his workplace prompted a thought: “My favourite farewell reward — I want I may present it to you as a result of it’s actually fairly one thing to see — is a quilt.”
His workers sewed collectively T-shirts from greater than 20 campaigns supported by the endowment — college truancy discount, well being protection for undocumented residents, applications to assist younger males of shade, parkland fairness.
“That’s democracy in motion. And so I be ok with that,” he mentioned. “A lot extra work to do, clearly.”
Ross isn’t certain what’s subsequent for him, though he’ll stay on the Weingart Basis board of administrators to maintain engaged in L.A. philanthropy. And though he lately moved to Huntington Seashore — “One much less Trump flag there” — Ross continues to consider that Los Angeles activism is main the best way for a greater California.
“We are able to’t look ahead to D.C. to point out us what the beloved group seems to be like,” Ross mentioned, referring to a philosophy of inclusion and neighborly love made well-known by Martin Luther King, Jr. “And what the state of belonging seems to be like. In order that’s on us. L.A. can lead that. I can say that 20 years in the past, I might have mentioned, ‘Effectively, that’s most likely as much as the Bay Space to guide that.’”
What modified?
“Group organizers on this area have gotten terribly refined about influence,” he mentioned with pleasure. “A number of the organizations we help — they’re artful. And they’re relentless. And so they merely refuse to surrender the combat. That’s the distinction. It made the distinction in O.C., proper?”
“We’re nonetheless a piece in progress,” I countered.
“Yeah, a piece in progress,” Ross concluded. “However, man, in comparison with 20 years in the past?”
