Community leaders, including U.S. Congresswoman Karen Bass, founded Community Coalition as a non-profit organization in 1990 in response to the 1980's crack cocaine epidemic that devastated South LA. The goal was to provide preventative community-centered solutions to the drug problem.

Community Coalition works with African American and Latino residents to build a prosperous and healthy South LA with safe neighborhoods, quality schools, a strong social safety net and positive economic development in order to reduce crime, poverty and substance abuse in our community. 

Watch our Story here:

Igniting Hope in South LA from Community Coalition on Vimeo.

The Beginning

Twenty years ago South LA suffered from a major crack-cocaine epidemic, widespread poverty, unemployment, and mass criminalization.

The 1970s saw a mass exodus of factory jobs and businesses that gave way to unemployment, disinvestment and flourishing poverty in South LA. Hundreds of factories boarded up their doors and moved overseas. South LA quickly became an isolated wasteland that local politicians paid little attention to. The community changed from a multi-class and racially diverse community to a very poor black urban ghetto within a short time.

Introduced in the midst of this tremendous poverty in the 1980s, crack-cocaine spread like an epidemic and wreaked havoc and destruction like no other drug before. Many residents, both men and women, used the drug to self-medicate and numb the despair of poverty and lack of opportunities. Not only did this new, highly addictive and cheap drug destroy individual lives and families suffering from addiction, but it also ripped apart the very foundation of the community itself.

A new profitable but dangerous underground economy surged as crack-cocaine filled the need for jobs. An explosion of gangs and violent crimes became a part of everyday life in neighborhoods that resembled urban battlefields. Many saw law enforcement as the answer to deal with these issues. Rather than investing resources into programs that rehabilitated and treated these issues at the root level, resources were spent on a military-stylized police force that led to the massive incarceration of African American and Latino men.

Many people inside and outside South LA abandoned the community to grapple with these issues on its own. But visionary community leaders, such as Karen Bass, founded Community Coalition in 1990 as a vehicle to turn despair into hope, community problems into solutions and apathy into activism.

Shifting the Debate on Public Safety: One Liquor Store at a Time

One of the first efforts launched by Community Coalition was an extensive community needs assessment to identify the core concerns in the community. The needs assessment garnered 30,000 respondents. To the surprise of organization’s leaders, residents identified liquor stores as the main issue to address in the drug epidemic. This revelation served as the basis for the Coalition’s first major campaign and became a foundational aspect of its core public safety strategy.

Liquor stores were a long-standing problem in the community and in the early 1990s, South LA’s overconcentration of alcohol outlets reached to over 700 liquor stores operating in the area. South LA had more alcohol outlets than 13 other states. Liquor stores served as epicenters of crime, fostering nuisance and illegal activity such as drug trafficking, prostitution and loitering. “Crime clusters” formed between liquor stores, neighboring motels and recycling centers, augmenting the problem.

Community Coalition’s ongoing work against nuisance businesses began in the wake of the 1992 Civil Unrest and continues to present day. In the last 20 years, Community Coalition and its members have shut down or converted almost 200 liquor stores in South LA. Some of the City’s strongest conditions and strictest requirements against alcohol outlets and owners have been placed on South LA liquor stores thanks to Community Coalition’s work. Today, we continue this work through our Communities Rising campaign.

Keeping Families Together: Relative Care in South LA

Of the many fissures left in the wake of the crack-cocaine epidemic, one of the most devastating to South LA was that of broken-up families and homes. Foster care and relative care became a huge issue after unemployment, crack-cocaine, and oppressive police responses left many families reeling and struggling to survive. The Department of Children and Family Services responded to these increased pressures by taking children out of homes and putting them in the care of strangers. African American families in the community were especially hit hard by this chaotic and dysfunctional child welfare system that re-traumatized children and families.

Community Coalition led the groundbreaking charge to recognize that Relative Caregivers – grandparents, aunts, uncles – were the healthiest and safest alternative when placing a child in a new home. Community Coalition identified the gross inequity found in Relative Care – strangers received support and services to care for children than family members did.

By organizing relative caregivers, Community Coalition has won dramatic victories over the years including a dramatic shift in the child welfare landscape. Los Angeles County now works to first keep families together with services and support, and if a child needs an out-of-home placement, Relative Caregivers are called upon as the first option and are given the financial resources to care for their children.

Training the Next Generation of Leaders

In the last 20 years, Community Coalition has organized hundreds of adult residents and relative caregivers giving them the tools and training to create change in their neighborhoods. However, Community Coalition was one of the first organizations nationwide to begin organizing youth to counter the sweeping argument that the “lost generation” of the 1990s was beyond our reach.

Community Coalition is a leader in organizing and training the next generation of leaders from local South LA high schools. In areas like South LA, youth are more likely to end up in jail than in college due to a dysfunctional overcrowded school system that cycles youth into low-wage jobs, gangs, drugs and prison.

Community Coalition identified that school conditions created a “school to prison pipeline,” and called on schools to account for the real world outcomes of their students. Community Coalition was the first to recognize “the disappeared” and demand schools take responsibilities for drop-out rates nearing 70%.

Community Coalition called on the school system to raise their standards and teach a curriculum that would prepare students for the 21st Century workforce and college. Thousands of parents and youth were successful in winning both the policy and public debate making college prep coursework the agreed-to-standard throughout South LA and beyond. Community Coalition continues to find new models like the Architecture, Construction and Engineering (ACE) Academy at Locke High School, which prepares youth for living-wage careers or college.

Community Coalition continues to work with African American and Latino youth in South LA to prepare tomorrow’s leaders today through educational justice, leadership training and organizing.