The Brief

LAist goes big on local elections. For the past few years, we’ve made our coverage more expansive and voter-centric with each cycle, even for the most obscure down-ballot races. It’s paid off in a big way, bringing in record-breaking digital traffic, memberships, donations and a growing reputation as Southern California’s best and most comprehensive local voter resource.

In the lead-up to the November 2024 election, we tried something new: bringing these voter resources directly to classrooms in the form of a workshop.

LAist piloted this workshop to help community members better understand how to research the local races on their ballot. We conducted it for more than 200 students in October, and the feedback was incredibly encouraging: Not only did participants tell us the workshops made them more prepared to vote in local races, but they also overwhelmingly said they were more likely to vote too.

The wheels in our heads have been turning ever since. What more can we do with these workshops in upcoming elections? And what can they do not just to engage people around elections, but also provide more local civic education in general?

We'll dig deeper into these questions below. But first, here’s a closer look at what we did.

A presentation slide from LAist's local ballot research workshops.

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Courtesy Philip Goodrich

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UCLA

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The workshop: Understanding your local ballot

We designed a workshop that was an interactive, 90-minute session about how to research your ballot. We intentionally steered away from the presidential race everybody was talking about and instead focused in on the other 99% of the ballot that was all about local offices.

This was a natural fit with LAist’s work. Our core election product, Voter Game Plan, is meant to help people filling out their ballots who are seeking information about candidates running for local offices — info that in some cases can be nearly nonexistent elsewhere (think local judges, for example).

This workshop would extend that service further, helping people who weren’t even sure what the local offices were, let alone how to decide who to vote for. What do some of these local offices even do? How do you figure out who these candidates are and what they stand for? How would a local ballot measure affect your day-to-day life?

Here’s how the runthrough typically went:

1. Icebreaker: This was a quick fill-in-the-blank prompt: “Filling out my ballot makes me feel [blank] because [blank].” That let us know what the vibes were: Did people feel excited about voting? Anxious? Indifferent? And it helped us calibrate the tone of the rest of the session.
2. Mini-presentation: A quick 10-minute overview of why local offices matter to your day-to-day life.
3. Here's your ballot. What questions do you have? We gave everyone a sample ballot with one race on it, exactly as it appeared on the actual ballot — no context, just names and titles. Participants took 10 minutes to write down all the questions they would want to know in order to figure out how to make a decision.
4. Research! Gathering in small groups, people used whatever device they had on hand — a phone, a laptop or just talking with their neighbors — to figure out the answers to their questions.
5. Discuss. We regrouped to talk about what everyone found. How easy or hard was it to figure out the answers to their questions? What information was available and what wasn't? Then our team went through the questions we heard most often and how we as journalists went about figuring out the answers (many of which end up in our local voter guides).
6. Repeat. We did the exercise a second time, giving everyone a local ballot measure to decipher, research and discuss. People found this to be a notably different experience. This time there was a concrete outcome at stake, rather than vague possibilities of what a candidate might or might not do if elected into office.

We set up sessions at five locations in the lead-up to the November election, all scheduled in October 2024:

• East L.A. College, a community college.
• Cal State Los Angeles, a state college (one in-person session and one virtual).
• My Friend's Place, a local organization serving unhoused youth.
• University of Southern California, a private university.
• Otis College, a small private arts college.

Most of these sessions were arranged through preexisting relationships we had with faculty or staff members through LAist’s years of engagement work.

This workshop doesn’t have to be limited to schools, but classrooms were a natural environment to try this out. Faculty wanted to find ways to engage students with the election, and we wanted to better understand what younger voters — especially those who weren’t already in LAist’s existing audience — needed to make their decisions.

We tried these sessions in front of groups of all sizes — the largest one had about 180 students, while the smallest had just seven — all with different levels of familiarity and interest in local elections.

What participants told us

The overall feedback we heard from participants told us something really exciting — not only did the workshop help students feel more prepared to vote, but it also made them more willing to vote.

We heard this feedback in two ways: verbally during the sessions themselves, and through an anonymous online survey we distributed after the fact.

Out of about 225 students who participated in the workshops, 49 filled out the survey.

We asked everyone to rate how prepared they felt about voting before the workshop, on a scale of 1 to 5 — 1 being not at all prepared and 5 being very prepared. On average, students gave a rating of 2.3.

We asked them to rate their preparedness again after the workshop. The average jumped to 3.9.

In another question, we asked people to tell us whether they agreed with the following statement: "After this workshop, I am now more likely to vote in the Nov. 5 election."

Of the group, 42 out of 49 respondents — 85.7%  —  said they agreed or strongly agreed. Six were neutral. One strongly disagreed, although they wrote in comments elsewhere they were already planning to vote.

In open-ended responses, most of the participants described the workshop as informative and helpful. One mentioned it “made me comfortable in asking questions and allowing myself to not feel embarrassed about being confused”  — something we definitely aimed for.

The verbal feedback we heard during the session was encouraging too:

• Two students said they felt “better” after the workshop because they had a stronger idea of what one of the (very confusing!) ballot measures meant.
• One student who initially said he felt disconnected from the election because the presidential pick wouldn’t affect him either way later said he felt more interested in researching local measures.
• At My Friend’s Place, an organization that serves unhoused youth, attendees learned about Measure A, a county measure to raise the sales taxes to fund homeless services and affordable housing. Most told us they had never heard of the measure before, and one participant asked mid-presentation how to vote on it.

What we learned about LAist's election coverage

Not all feedback was glowing, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t valuable. In fact, the other comments we heard were incredibly useful — and highlighted more information gaps for our coverage to help fill. Here are a few of our takeaways:

• We need to help people feel less anxious about elections. Many told us the election made them anxious — how do you know if you’re making the “right” choice? The workshop itself didn’t do much to ease that anxiety. What else can we newsrooms do to address that? One possibility: Look for clearer ways to follow the people we elect and their actions in office, so that people can better understand the outcomes of their choices and build on that understanding with each election cycle. (This is something LAist is actively working on!)
• We should do what we can to make the research easier. One student said she felt disheartened by how much work it took to research just one race on a local ballot, especially for those without a college education. What more can we do as a newsroom to make the process easier for people, especially across different education backgrounds?
• Don’t skimp on the basics. During a discussion of one ballot initiative on whether to overhaul rent control laws in California, students asked questions like, “What’s rent control?” and “How do landlords price their apartments, anyway?” These questions led to great discussions and helped us realize there was a lot more groundwork we needed to lay for the average voter before discussing the ballot measure at play.
• People are interested in local issues. That doesn’t mean they’ll seek out the information. The most productive, engaging sessions we had were the ones in which attendance was mandatory for participants. Compared to those who voluntarily came to the workshop, mandatory participants were much less likely to be regular news readers or follow the big issues we discussed. Yet the mandatory sessions had more active conversations and more curiosity from participants about the underlying issues they were being asked to vote on. News organizations have a major opportunity to engage with these community members who are less likely to follow our work. We can provide directly helpful information, get them closer to the local issues that affect their lives and perhaps even convert them to future supporters — if journalists can find more ways to get in front of them.

LAist's Brianna Lee conducts a local ballot research workshop at Otis College in October 2024.

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David Rodriguez

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LAist

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Bridging local news and civic education: What’s next?

We talk a lot about journalism as essential to civic engagement — getting people involved with their communities, fostering dialogue, holding officials accountable and empowering residents to vote.

The workshops showed us that there’s also a lot of room for journalism to do more in local civic education  —  helping people understand how local governments work, unpacking the basics of local issues like rent, and drawing clearer connections between actions like voting and the policies that shape our day-to-day lives.

LAist is thinking hard about ways we can use workshops to bring some of our other reporting closer to communities.

What about a workshop about building new housing in L.A.? A local civics workshop for high schoolers? What about ballot research workshops for specific groups, such as seniors, new citizens or formerly incarcerated voters?

We're actively exploring all these possibilities — and more.

• If you’re a local newsroom, educator or civic organization that wants to chat about anything similar you’re doing or thinking about, I’m always happy to talk! Email: blee@scpr.org.
• Does your organization want to financially support our work, which better equips voters to make decisions and become more engaged with issues in their communities? Email: grants@scpr.org.
• Empower more community-focused reporting by becoming an LAist member today at LAist.com/give.

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

Soh Yun Park wants the Korean community to know that she’s listening. Or more importantly, there are nearly 70 volunteer counselors, the majority who speak Korean, who are available to talk with them.

Last year, she founded with her husband a phone line primarily focused on helping the Korean-speaking community during mental health challenges in their lives.

The organization is based in Koreatown, but its reach goes beyond the neigborhood.

“Hearing such heavy stories makes my heart ache,” she said. ”But it’s an honor to be the ears that listen.” 

She and her husband, Sang Kyun Park, founded the Youstar Foundation’s warmline, one step below the type of hotline that’s called during an emergency, in a means to reach the community that is experiencing high rates of suicides and a stigma in asking for help. 

The thrust of the Youstar Foundation’s warmline is to reduce that stigma around mental health and address the generational struggle in seeking support. Whereas most warmlines offer mental health support for diverse groups of people, this warmline offers a free emotional support telephone service for Korean Americans. 

QPR (Question, Persuade, Refer) training for suicide prevention, organized by YouStar Foundation.

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Photo Courtesy of Soh Yun Park

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In many ways, Soh Yun Park’s trajectory to mental health advocacy was not a straight line.

She was born and raised in South Korea and finished college before immigrating to the United States to join her family. Her background was a bit different from her current work as she originally majored in engineering, then worked as an accountant after moving to the U.S.

In 2002, Soh Yun Park met her husband who was working as a journalist at the time. In his work, Sang Kyun Park noticed people struggling from difficulties with physical health to battles with mental health. He wanted to do something to help. 

In response, Sang Kyun created a magazine that advertised local community service organizations in hopes that they would reach the people who needed them.

After receiving a call from a mother whose child was diagnosed with leukemia and required a bone marrow transplant, Soh Yun and her husband decided to create the Youstar Foundation. The organization began with a mission to spread awareness about cancer. 

But roughly six years after they started dating, Sang Kyun Park became ill and had a serious health crisis. 

“My husband has bipolar disorder,” Soh Yun Park said. “ That’s when I realized how serious this illness was, but we didn’t fully know how to treat it.”

At the time, she searched for a pyschologist, but the language barrier was a huge hurdle.

“If you can’t communicate, it’s terrifying,” she said.

Despite Sang Kyun’s diagnosis from a young age, he was unable to find proper treatment in Korea. 

“It’s hard to test different doctors when you are already in an emergency state,” Soh Yun Park said. 

After 10 years of combined therapy and medication, she saw her husband improve and the effects that therapy can have on someone in a crisis situation. She wanted to help others do the same. 

That’s when the couple shifted their organization’s mission to helping the Korean community talk about their mental health struggles.

But Soh Yun Park understood the stigma of getting mental health care in the Korean community. 

“They hide it, which prevents them from getting help,” she said “This leaves not just the individual, but the whole family hiding in darkness.”

The warmline was meant to serve as the first step in getting out of the shadows. 

Out of all Asian groups in Los Angeles County, Koreans were found to have the highest rate of suicide, according to the latest available data. 

With recent federal policies cutting funding for mental health resources and mental health becoming a rising concern in Koreatown, Youstar Foundation’s warmline is one way to address the issue.

Park shares her experience in organizing healing seminars for Korean Angelenos.

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Courtesy of Soh Yun Park

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For a city like Los Angeles where more than half of the population are immigrants, the warmline reduces barriers for Korean American immigrants by operating in two languages, Korean and English. 

Cheryl Eskin, licensed marriage and family therapist and senior director of the teen hotline program, Teen Line, said these types of resources often go unnoticed among the people who need them the most.

 “These resources are staffed by kind, compassionate people who are ready to listen and support without judgement,” Eskin said. 

The worry about being judgme keeps many people from asking for the very help they need, she said.

“Cultural and societal factors often come into play with people believing that their problems are not worthy of support or reveal that something is ‘wrong’ with them,” Eskin added.

Park’s work with the Youstar Foundation aims to address this type of barrier. 

The line emphasizes the benefits of having counselors who share the same cultural background as their callers, who can relate to parent behaviors and generational hardships specific to the Korean community. 

YouStar Foundation’s warmline can be reached at 213-221-2813. Visit YouStar Foundation’s website for more info on their resources. Available from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. The foundation hopes to expand the program to 24-hours within the next three years. 

If you or someone else requires mental health support, call the 24/7 LACDMH Help Line at 1-800-854-7771 or call/text 988 to reach the national Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. 

This story was produced under The LA Local’s Youth Journalism Program. To learn more or to get involved, click here.

California’s largest public pension fund just had a banner year, riding a soaring stock market to record its second consecutive double-digit annual investment return.

The California Public Employees’ Retirement System announced Monday that it gained 14.8% on its investment portfolio in the 2025-26 financial year, more than doubling its target of 6.8%.

CalPERS Chief Executive Officer Marcie Frost in remarks to the board described the return as the fund’s best year since 2014, excluding 2021 when markets rebounded from a crash caused by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

“Our team has maintained a disciplined approach to building the health of the pension system, and our improved funded status shows this effort is paying off for our 2.4 million members,” she said in a written statement.

By the numbers

CalPERS finished the budget year with a portfolio valued at $637.1 billion — about $80 billion more than a year ago.

The investment return is an important number to California government agencies because they have to cough up more money to cover losses when CalPERS comes up short.

CalPERS is considered underfunded because its assets are worth less than what it owes in total to the people who earn and receive benefits through it. Its assets are now valued at 85% of what it owes to members.

That number is also a milestone in CalPERS’ recovery from its losses during the Great Recession. CalPERS’ assets were worth about 68% of what it owed to members a decade ago before it began a set of policy changes that effectively required government agencies and public employees to pay more toward their pensions.

What this means for union negotiations

The earnings report comes at a moment when public safety unions are urging lawmakers to boost retirement benefits for police and firefighters for the first time since former Gov. Jerry Brown scaled back retirement perks with a 2012 law. The big number could make legislators more confident in saying yes to the unions and modifying Brown’s pension reform law.

Some groups have been urging CalPERS to simplify its investment strategies in the interest of making more money faster, which would relieve some pressure on government agencies and taxpayers. That criticism came up in last year’s CalPERS election, where several unsuccessful candidates characterized the fund as underperforming.

Two former CalPERS board members now involved with an organization called the Retired Public Employees Association — Margaret Brown and J.J. Jelincic — have focused on the pension fund’s stakes in private equity, investments that sometimes include high fees and uncertain values. They supported a failed bill in the Legislature this year that would have compelled CalPERS to disclose more information about those investments.

“These are very good results, however you need to think about how you got there,” Jelincic told the CalPERS board. “You expanded high risk private equity and you moved into higher risk segments within that asset class.”

How they got here

Last year the CalPERS board adopted a so-called total portfolio approach that empowers Chief Investment Officer Stephen Gillmore to make decisions more quickly and in the interest of the overall fund rather than specific asset classes — such as private equity or real estate. The policy directs CalPERS to keep 75% of its portfolio in equities and 25% in bonds.

Frost and Gillmore view private equity as an important segment in the portfolio. The pension fund formally opposed the legislation that would have required more transparency about private equity, which the fund projected would have cost it billions of dollars in missed opportunities.

“Investing in the private markets gives us potential to earn higher returns while spreading our risk from the often volatile public stock market,” Frost told the board.

CalPERS earned a 17% return on its private equity investments last year and a 24% return on its investments in stocks. The S&P 500 climbed by 21% over that timeframe.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

The Jordan Brand tent that went up in Inglewood for NBA All-Star Weekend earlier this year is going to become a permanent fixture for school district events, according to a district official. 

Jordan built the structure at 106 E. Manchester Blvd. — a parcel owned by the Inglewood Unified School District — for a string of February promotional events during All-Star festivities at the Intuit Dome and Kia Forum. 

James Morris, the district’s county administrator, told The LA Local that Think True LLC, the company that leased the site from the district, plans to convert the heavy-duty but temporary structure into a permanent event space.

Morris said the district can’t use the building for instructional activities — that would require a rigorous architectural approval from the state — but will be able to use it for events such as career fairs and PTA fundraisers. 

“It’s going to be a pretty awesome event space,” Morris said. 

Think True initially signed a six-month lease with the district in December. The company tore down the vacant former Inglewood Adult School building that sat on the property and built the Jordan tent within months. 

Instead of paying rent, the lease required Think True to build the temporary structure and to allow the district to use the space for events. 

At the end of June, Think True and the district extended the lease until Oct. 20, according to meeting records. 

Morris said the marketing agency will use the remainder of the current lease to add a permanent basketball court, bathrooms, an HVAC system and other amenities needed to get a permanent certificate of occupancy. The new lease still requires no rent payments, though the district is still allowed to use the structure. 

Morris said the lease could be extended again, though no agreement has yet been reached. Think True did not respond to an inquiry from The LA Local.

An outbreak of an intestinal illness that causes diarrhea, nausea and fatigue has been detected in 31 states, according to federal health authorities, but the source is still under investigation.

As of Thursday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said it had received reports of 843 cases of cyclosporiasis, the gastrointestinal affliction caused by the parasite Cyclospora.

But the true number of infections is likely much higher, because that figure only represents cases reported by states directly to the CDC. There is also a lag between symptom onset and reporting, and many people recover from the illness without medical treatment. Michigan alone reported 1,562 cyclosporiasis cases as of Friday.

According to the CDC, as of Thursday, there had been been 86 hospitalizations nationwide and no deaths.

People can contract the illness by eating food or drinking water contaminated with the parasite. Previous outbreaks have been linked to fresh produce. In 2018, McDonald's removed salads from restaurants in 14 states after federal health officials linked them to dozens of cases of cyclosporiasis, and tainted lettuce imported from Mexico was suspected to have sickened 400 people in the U.S. in 2013.

It's typical for cyclosporiasis infections to rise in the spring and summer, but the CDC said Friday that multiple states had reported a larger jump in cases over the previous two weeks than they had during the same period last year.

Where are cyclosporiasis infections occurring?

Health officials from California to Texas to Florida have reported cases of cyclosporiasis since the start of May.

Some of the hardest-hit areas appear to be in the Midwest and Northeast, including Michigan and New York.

The Ohio Department of Health reported 177 cyclosporiasis cases as of July 2, most of which occurred in June. Dr. Bruce Vanderhoff, director of the Ohio Department of Health, said cyclosporiasis is a "serious illness that can cause dehydration and require people to seek emergency medical care, and it should be taken seriously."

According to the CDC, those sickened with the disease have ranged in age from 5 to 88 years old.

The total number of nationwide cases is expected to grow, due to the estimated six-week gap between when illnesses begin and when they are reported to federal health authorities.

What's causing the outbreak?

That is still unclear. The CDC says it is continuing to try to identify the source or sources of the recent surge of cyclosporiasis infections.

Investigators do that in part by interviewing those who've become sick to find out what they've eaten. But since symptoms can appear anywhere between two days and two weeks or more after a person was infected, they may not remember everything they ate during that period.

Previous U.S. outbreaks of cyclosporiasis have been associated with raspberries, basil, cilantro, snow peas and lettuce, according to the Food and Drug Administration.

How to prevent cyclosporiasis

Cooking produce is an effective way to avoid an infection, as heating food to 158 degrees Fahrenheit or higher kills Cyclospora.

Public health officials also suggest that people thoroughly wash all of their fresh produce, including herbs, though the parasites are not easy to rinse off.

It is also important for home cooks to observe standard food safety rules, such as washing their hands with soap and water before and after handling fresh produce.

Anyone who suspects they've been sickened with cyclosporiasis and is experiencing dehydration or severe diarrhea is encouraged to see a doctor. Cyclosporiasis infections are typically treated with antibiotics.

NPR's Allison Aubrey contributed reporting.
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