Extended version: SB County, civics challenges

It's an area driven by years of strong, sustained economic vitality, which has drawn hundreds of thousands of new residents with housing and jobs.
But beneath the healthy facade of the last decade's dizzying growth, a stultifying inequality persists.

It's not wealth or poverty, although those extremes are contributing factors.
It's the yawning chasm between residents in civic engagement and participation in influential community groups, and it works against diversity in elected positions, representation of poor and high minority communities.

In terms of democracy, the Inland Empire is still southern California's dusty netherworld.
That's the picture that emerges from a 19-page report recently published by a professor and three graduate students at UC Riverside.

Titled "Inland Gaps: Civic Inequalities in a High Growth Region," the provocative report suggests the Inland Empire is hampered - more acutely than the rest of the U.S. - by civic imbalances at both the individual and organizational levels.

The inequality is tough to pinpoint, but manifests itself in a variety of ways, including voting rates, ethnic group representation in elected office and financial resources available to community organizations, according to the report.

"In many ways these cities still have a small-town feel to them in terms of politics and civic life," said Karthick Ramakrishnan, a political science professor and the report's lead author and researcher.

"But with the tremendous growth their must be transformation, growth, in local governance. Public officials must step out of existing networks and look to broaden the circle of community organizations involved in local governance."

The report's most salient findings revealed that persistent civic inequalities beset the region, particularly along racial and class lines. Latinos and Asian Americans lag considerably behind whites and blacks in participation in a range of measures, from voting to writing elected officials and attending public hearings, the report finds.

While 37 percent of white residents reported involvement in a volunteer civic organization, 26 percent of blacks and just 13 percent of Latinos reported similar participation.

On an organizational level, significant resource disparities hinder ethnic-focused groups and those representing poorer communities from commanding a stronger presence with local elected officials.

While public officials lend their attentions to a handful of these organizations, "they are largely unaware of the larger array of community organizations serving nonwhite residents," the report states.

Lionel Dew, president of Victor Valley African American Chamber of Commerce, which was one of the organizations surveyed in the study, said his group had vastly increased its reach and influence by broadening its base in recent years.

"We had to develop strategic alliances," Dew said, "Which itself is a recognition that there are not enough black-owned businesses in the High Desert to sustain our chamber."

With membership expansion, more fundraisers and corporate partnerships, the chamber's budget has grown from $5,000 to $70,000 in recent years, Dew said, making the chamber much more effective in its core missions: More scholarships, more aid to businesses, more clout with elected leaders.

"There is a demand, an expectation from our community that we are there and able to help," Dew said. "We must exist and grow to satisfy that demand."

The study's total numbers further underscored a disparity in civic organizations along racial and issue-focus lines. Of roughly 6,800 total nonprofit organizations in the Inland Empire, just 10 percent can be classified as predominately serving nonwhite residents.
"This is a low figure that does not compare favorably with the fact that nonwhits account for 60 percent of the resident population of the region ..." the report states.

When classified into issue and activity subtypes, the data shows scant focus on select issues.

The largest proportion is religious organizations, which make up 34 percent of all nonprofits, while education comes in a distant second at 13 percent. Nonprofits focused on seniors, environmental issues, poverty, immigrant services and labor each make up 1 percent or less of all nonprofit organizations.

"The organizations that do serve immigrant or minority populations in the Inland Empire face several daunting challenges," Ramakrishnan said. "From funding and other resources to a lack in skills or capacity to even achieve nonprofit status."

Lean resources loom largest on the mind of Kathy Binks, a founding board member of the Boys & Girls Club in Fontana. Binks is frustrated by the fact that Fontana is one of the county's fastest growing and most booming cities, yet dollars for its nonprofit services don't seem to be keeping pace.

"The need is certainly greater, and the times seem like their getting harder," Binks said. "There are a few companies that give very generously, but there is a feeling that there are many warehouses and other newer companies that aren't giving much back."

In President George Bush's 2002 State of the Union, in a perhaps less memorable subtext to his coining of the phrase "axis of evil" in describing the nation's security challenges, he proffered a grand domestic agenda to create a "a new culture of responsibility" in America.

Among the prescriptions, Bush asked Americans to devote at least two years -- 4,000 hours -- of their lives to public service. He promised to expand AmeriCorps and the domestic Peace Corps.

To push this end, the president created a new arm of the White House, the USA Freedom Corps.

But the results have been mixed, with a host of competing issues largely stealing the focus from the domestic agenda, and after a sharp upturn after 9/11, the increase in volunteerism nationally has slowed.

Civic engagement and volunteerism, or the decline thereof, first burst back into the public consciousness with Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam's influential 1995 article "Bowling Alone."

Putnam posited a now-familiar thesis that civic engagement -- from neighborhood friendships and dinner parties to club memberships, church committees and political participation - had been on the wane for decades.

And the implicit message was as disturbing as it was profound: These are the activities that serve as the grease protecting democracy's gears, and it's running dangerously low.

Recent economic uneasiness, particularly the collapse of the once booming housing market, does not bode well. Foreclosures have skyrocketed about 160 percent in San Bernardino and Riverside counties in the first quarter of 2008 compared to the year before, according to DataQuick Information Systems.
At the same time, progress toward assimilating residents lured to the Inland Empire by years of boom into their communities and instutitions has fallen short, Ramakrishnan said.

"When you have big gaps in participation and civic involvement, as we do in this region, it brings into question legitimacy of democratic institutions," Ramakrishnan said. "Democratic legitimacy is undermined by low-rates of buy-in among disengaged populations."

One key to bridging the gap between political power and some emerging advocacy groups is simple contact. Harkening back to one of the report's overall assessment - that the region in many ways still embodies the small town mentality of power couched in a few small circles - the authors call on public officials to enlarge their base and contacts with what are now essentially fringe groups.

"Expanding the circle of who they know certainly entails costs for public officials, but it is also likely to benefit them by growing their name recognition and bases of support within different racial and ethnic communities," the report states.

Another proposed solution is for foundations and government agencies to make greater efforts in rewarding fledgling organizations, and those that serve multiple groups as opposed to those focused on ethnic niches. By allocating resources this way, funders can prod established, mainstream organizations to diversify focus and membership.

Lastly, and perhaps most critically, foundations and established organizations must play greater roles in mentoring start-up organizations, particularly in leveraging resources and providing consultative aid in achieving legal nonprofit status, which is key to drawing resources in the first place.

"In the short-term it's not as much of a problem as in the long-term," Ramakrishnan said. "We're not building the team that will take over in 10 to 20 years."
robert.rogers@sbsun.com (909) 386-3855.