Three fresh-faced 20-somethings have shown up for an early breakfast at Jerry’s Famous Deli in Westwood. They are casually dressed in slacks and sweatshirts, attentively receiving what they call “life’s lesson of the week” from a stocky, bespectacled, middle-aged man wearing a brown suit but no tie.
“You have people with $200,000 to $1 million running around on the Westside not knowing where to live,” he proposes. “Now let’s say there’s a living space with the right population density and ambience for $250,000 to $300,000. Would you live there?” His listeners nod. “But how would you sell it?” asks the man, quickly adding: “You wouldn’t sell it as housing. You’d sell it as lifestyle!”
The man is business leader Steve Soboroff, and he is talking with graduate students from the UCLA School of Public Policy and Social Research. What brings them together for bagels and eggs this morning is a top-notch initiative, the Senior Fellows Program, created by the policy school to give its students access to policymakers from the public, private and nonprofit sectors. These are people who have successfully addressed major issues — in Soboroff’s case issues involving housing policy — at the local, state, national and global levels.
Senior fellows counsel up to three students each during an academic year, offering insights into policy issues as well as the concrete benefit of their professional experience. Since its inception in 1997, 329 students and 106 fellows have participated in the program. Many students have benefited greatly: One gained a White House internship; another interned with the Financial Services Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives; a policy student spent time at the offices of The Economist magazine in London; two others attended a monthlong course on human-rights justice systems in Strasbourg, France. Past fellows have included former California Congressman Anthony Beilenson; Theodore Barreaux, director of oversight and evaluation at the HUD Office of Multi-Family Housing and Restructuring; Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Paul Conrad; John W. Mack, president of the Los Angeles Urban League; Andrea Rich ’65, M.A. ’66, Ph.D. ’68, president of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Joseph Haggerty, president of United Way of Greater Los Angeles.
“The Senior Fellows Program is a key part of the clinical education of our students,” says Barbara Nelson, dean of the School of Public Policy and Social Research, noting that the mentorship aspect of the program — which recently received a $30,000 gift from the Harman Family Foundation — grew out of a desire by fellows themselves to have more contact with students. “By accompanying the fellows for such things as nonprofit board meetings, editorial sessions, negotiations or just sharing coffee, our students see how successful leaders work, how they think and how they interact.”
Adds VC Powe ’75, M.B.A. ’77, the school’s executive director of external programs: “The program’s aim is to show students how things work in the real world. Fellows give their time, which is something many people would pay to get.”
Soboroff is what Powe calls a “repeat fellow” — one who is “so good” that he’s been asked to participate in the program for a second year running. Soboroff’s first stint as a senior fellow was in 2002-’03, when he worked with three students, including one who recently won a Fulbright scholarship. This year he was paired with Eriko Wada ’99, who graduated in June with a master’s in policy studies, and Sarah White and Robert De Forest ’99, both first-year students of urban planning.
As an entrepreneur who was Harvard Business School’s Business Statesman of the Year in 1995, Soboroff — a former head of the Los Angeles Recreation and Parks Commission and now the president of Playa Vista, a multi-use land project on Los Angeles’ Westside — knows a thing or two about mentoring. He has worked with fatherless children in Los Angeles for the past 36 years and has lately been helping college students maximize their career options. His method revolves around loosely structured breakfast meetings of up to two hours most Mondays from fall through spring. He talks to his young charges about issues ranging from business and politics to urban development and his family life. A superb storyteller, he has a sharp sense of humor and a knack for encouraging students to approach their careers confidently.
In his talks, Soboroff often mentions that people have different professional skills, mannerisms and characteristics — but “the skills to be successful, whether you’re selling or doing something, are the same.” As he puts it: “Some of us are good salespeople, others are not. But either way, you can win if you know your own strengths and weaknesses and are comfortable with them.
“The key is to pick a niche and be comfortable in it so that you can move on a dime,” Soboroff tells his three apprentices over breakfast. A good example of a niche that has a promising future, he says, is medium-priced housing in downtown Los Angeles. “What will ultimately determine the success and greatness of our downtown is not the Walt Disney Concert Hall or Staples Center, which are wonderful,” Soboroff notes, “but the return of middle- and upper-end housing, along with supermarkets and schools.”
Soboroff also teaches his students something about dealing with difficult policy questions in the glare of public scrutiny. His own Playa Vista project, for example, has been the frequent target of environmentalists’ barbs. In an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times in June, UCLA anthropologist Peter Nabokov condemned the project as a “criminal chapter” in the city’s history because Playa Vista is being built on Native-American burial grounds. Soboroff, however, looks beyond such criticism. “When I talk about Playa Vista as a public-policy project,” he says, “I say these are the things that give heart to L.A.: creating housing for all, including policemen, firemen, teachers and nurses; creating jobs; creating a great park system at no cost to the taxpayer; fixing over 100 traffic bottlenecks that haven’t been touched for 55 years; helping the public education system by adopting 15 schools; and being a great neighbor.”
Soboroff’s talks with the students are not focused exclusively on such policy issues or their future success; he offers concrete advice to help with immediate needs. De Forest, for example, faced a possible layoff due to budget cuts at the Mountain Recreation and Conservation Authority, where he is an urban-projects specialist. But thanks in no small measure to Soboroff, De Forest has managed to hold on to his job. “Brainstorming with Steve has helped me refine and stay focused on both my short-term and long-term goals,” he says. “It’s been the opportunity of a lifetime.”
Being a guide during difficult economic times has been a challenge for Soboroff. Many students are preoccupied with their future job prospects, and that becomes a frequent topic of discussion. “Students are surrounded by people who can’t get jobs, and misery loves company,” he says. “I tell them that I wouldn’t worry about the ups and downs of the economy, and I reinforce their skills and determination.” Then it is up to the students to use their skills and resolve to land a job — but is that enough in these economic times to land an outstanding job? “The point I make to students is that just because the majority don’t get jobs doesn’t mean they can’t,” says Soboroff. “Those who are successful put their excuses aside and move ahead, whatever their adversity.”
Three decades ago, the question of how to get that first great job was much on the mind of Abraham Lowenthal, another senior fellow whose career has offered valuable lessons to his students. After earning a Ph.D. in government from Harvard in 1971, Lowenthal expected to become an assistant professor, only to find that an opening for him at a university wasn’t particularly attractive. “Friends told me that I must get on the academic ladder, that I shouldn’t postpone it,” he recalls. Lowenthal then learned an important lesson from “a very wise man,” David Bell, then the vice president of the Ford Foundation. “Don’t try to plan an entire career right now, but do something you are passionate about and do it well,” Lowenthal recalls being told. “Ask yourself what is the job you would be most excited to do for the next five years … and at the end of five years you will be able to decide on another position to seek. And then you can repeat that.” That advice led Lowenthal on a path that took him from the Council on Foreign Relations to a professorship in international relations at USC and the founding of the Pacific Council on International Policy, an independent think tank based in Los Angeles.
It’s what Lowenthal would call “focus.” When he first met one of his two policy school students, Paula Castro M.A. ’03, a Ph.D. candidate in urban planning, he told her about his own career. “In the middle,” recalls Castro, “he paused and began talking about the importance of narrowing one’s goals to make them achievable instead of trying to solve the world’s problems.” It’s remarkable, says Castro of Lowenthal, “how much he sees his work experience related to his life as a student. He has been completely able to get a synergy from them.”
Castro also learned from Lowenthal about the value of communicating with people. “He knows who’s the right person to talk to at a particular moment, which enables him to state issues directly without going through people who don’t have the power or the position to help,” she says. “I’ve always approached people before, but knowing Abe has backed up my tendency.”
Networking is crucial for upcoming graduates, but for many, a first-rate career is often a question of geography: Networking among mentors and students on the East Coast, for example, has traditionally been more intense than on the West. So it’s not surprising that helping students get key internships in Washington, D.C., was one of the central challenges for senior fellow Barbara Nunberg, a public-sector specialist with the World Bank. Besides discussing critical policy issues that her three students encountered in their course work, Nunberg advised them on approaches to take when they acted like consultants in client-focused projects.
“What they are doing is fantastic,” Nunberg says. But she is concerned that while her protégés have done a lot of work on domestic matters, “they have not had as much exposure to applied international-development issues.” The best thing for them, Nunberg suggests, would be to “get their feet wet working in international organizations — and that is the beauty of an internship.”
Access to the right people matters greatly in public policy. “The problem with public policy [as it is taught in the classroom] is that it doesn’t tell you the lay of the land,” says Ayappa Ponnappa Biddanda, a first-year student of policy studies. “It’s not very good at telling you how things are to be done.” For Biddanda, knowing the “how” of public policy is vital, not least because the focus of his studies is how the arts and popular culture improve community life and help shape public policy.
That link was vividly brought home to Biddanda and his classmate, Shakari Cameron, when they spent a day last December observing the work of their adviser, Kevin Johnson, a former NBA All-Star and founder of the St. Hope Corporation, a Sacramento-based nonprofit group dedicated to revitalizing inner-city communities through charter schools, civic leadership, economic development and the arts. The students met with key figures and partners that Johnson works with in Oak Park, a neighborhood where he grew up. In the meetings, Biddanda and Cameron heard how Johnson and his associates went about planning, implementing and evaluating the success of about a dozen businesses, scores of jobs and $7.5 million in development projects in Oak Park over the past 15 years.
During a tour of a renovated indoor theater at the 40 Acres Art Gallery and Cultural Center, one of Johnson’s public projects, Biddanda came across a middle-aged man in a wheelchair. He was gaping at the 200-seat theater. When somebody explained to him that films, concerts, workshops and special events would be featured at the facility, “he reacted with an expression of disbelief, and then an understanding that he could have access to the theater,” recalls Biddanda. “It dawned on him that art can play an important role in his life.”
On his return from Sacramento, Biddanda resolved to earnestly pursue his ambition of making public policy an instrument of truly constructive social change. He knows well that to succeed he would need to bring “the right resources at the right time to the right people” — just as Johnson has done to great public acclaim in Sacramento. And he knows that as a student he still has a long way to go before he can follow in the footsteps of someone like Johnson.
“Oftentimes it is difficult to understand how best to apply academic course work to practical and real-life situations,” says Johnson, adding that he shared this frustration with his students during their time together. But the important thing to remember, he told them, is that everything they learn, in the classroom or outside it, will equip them to succeed in their future work. As Johnson puts it: “What might not be readily apparent now will shine bright when needed.”
