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I moved to Merced in 1990 when I was 20 years old. Back then the town had 57,000 residents, the Merced Junior College, Castle Air Force base, and a sense that Merced “was a great place to raise a family.”
Merced is still a great place to raise a family because it has retained its small-town feel even while its population has grown to …

I’m the founder and CEO of the Youth Action Project, a San Bernardino non-profit that aims to help hundreds of youth get their homework done, learn the skills and habits they need, graduate from high school, and then, by age 25, own their own business or have meaningful career options. Every year we also engage the services of about 50 volunteers from the community to …

As a teenager, I was the poster child for the school to prison pipeline. Yes, I was the smart girl, but I was the smart girl in trouble. I was the kid who was always in the principal’s office. However, because of strong mentors, I somehow managed to back out of the pipeline. And now, some years later, I’m applying what I learned about that …

San Bernardino is often described as the second-poorest city in America and it is a violent place. It will never be a healthy place—cannot be a healthy place—until we stop the violence. The conventional approaches—heavy policing, targeting gangs—have been tried and they haven’t worked. As deaths from violent crime have fallen around the country, they have not budged here. And so we started walking.
That …

Just before the polls closed on election night, I met with 12 of my townspeople at our town hall in Maine, raised my right hand, and took an oath to uphold the federal and state constitutions.
We were then assigned to bipartisan pairs (Republican, Democrat, and Unaffiliated) to spend the next two-and-a-half hours elbow to elbow, reading aloud each of the 350 ballots cast in …

Yascha Mounk is a lecturer on government at Harvard University and a Fellow in the Transatlantic Academy of the German Marshall Fund. Published regularly in the New York Times and Die Zeit, he is working on a book about the crisis of liberal democracy. Before joining the panel at a Zócalo/NPR Berlin event, “Is Populism Undermining Western Democracy?” Mounk laughed in the Zócalo green room …

There’s a place in California far from Silicon Valley where startups are gaining ground. No, I’m not talking about the “Silicon Beach” of Santa Monica and Venice. I’m talking about the Inland Empire, home to a small but determined—and growing—community of startups. Call us the “Silicon Desert.”
While it’s true Arizona has laid claim to that moniker, I would argue that there are many reasons …

An open letter of apology to my daughters and all the women coming up after me:
I want to start by saying I’m sorry. I have failed you in a way that only now do I shamefully and truly understand.
I am a 48-year-old woman. A mother. A boss. But because of actions I didn’t take, you’re still getting sexually harassed. You’re still getting belittled. You …

In 2010, faculty and staff affiliated with the UC Davis Center for Regional Change, where we work, set out to build maps showing how California’s youth are doing at the community level. We wanted to enable young people to see how their communities fit into the context of opportunities in the state as a whole and advocate for themselves.
This project, called Putting Youth on …

Neighborhoods need many things to thrive, and I’d argue prominent among them is a gathering spot for good food and coffee. Too few Los Angeles neighborhoods boast such a business, especially one that’s not a chain and offers authentic warmth. In a city in which entire neighborhoods lack supermarkets and are forced to rely on gas stations for groceries, this is very much a privileged …