ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The Transformative Climate Communities Program funds community-led development and infrastructure projects that achieve environmental, health, and economic benefits in California’s most disadvantaged communities. The program is administered by the California Strategic Growth Council (SGC) and implemented by the California Department of Conservation, along with other partnering state agencies.
We thank the SGC for dedicating resources to conduct a third-party evaluation of TCC investments in South LA. In particular, we thank the TCC team, past and present: Rebecca Avilés, Nicole Cartwright, Amar Azucena Cid, Erin Curtis, Jessica Ison, Anna Jane Jones, Jennifer Kim, Kalin Kipling-Mojaddedi, Lynn von Koch-Liebert, Sarah Newsham, Leticia Palamidessi, Gerard Rivero, and Sophie Young for their commitment to our work and their attention to our many informational requests.
We’d also like to thank our partners at the California Department of Conservation — namely, Jacob Byrne, Julia Estrada, Neel Kasliwal, Brian Newman-Lindsay, and Brendan Pipkin — for their careful review of public-facing materials produced by the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation evaluation team.
In addition, we thank Felipe Escobar of Community Partners, Vanessa Iniguez of TRUST South LA, the South LA Eco-Lab collaborative, and the South LA community for entrusting the evaluation of their initiative to us. And a big thank you to South LA Eco-Lab project partners for sharing so much primary data, as well as reviewing the content presented by UCLA for accuracy.
Moreover, we would like to thank the following Greenlining Institute staff, past and present, for their thoughtful input on how to structure evaluation-related content: Bruce Mirken, Alvaro Sanchez, and Emi Wang.
Finally and importantly, as a land grant institution, UCLA, and the researchers at the Luskin Center for Innovation who work on TCC, also acknowledge the Gabrielino/Tongva peoples as the traditional land caretakers of Tovaangar (Los Angeles basin, Southern Channel Islands) and recognize that their displacement has enabled the flourishing of UCLA.
Top page photo:
A colorful and vibrant mural in South LA
Credit: Kristian Ranker