Picking the Best and the Brightest Ideas in Urban Problem-Solving : Grants: Mega-Cities Project seeks maximum returns by transplanting strategies that have already worked elsewhere.

By LESLIE BERESTEIN

Jan. 29, 1995 12 AM PT

SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

An idea from South-Central Los Angeles that has turned a blighted lot into a garden spot might work just as well across town--or across the country.

With that premise, the Mega-Cities Project has been working for three years to identify the best urban problem-solvers in Los Angeles and New York and help them share their ideas and strategies.

“We’re kind of like the phone company; we bring people together,” said Jane Sweeney, a coordinator in New York who was recently in Los Angeles for the project’s third annual gathering of local grass-roots leaders. Mega-Cities is privately funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

“We take a look at urban problems and ask, ‘Where will the same type of solution work?’ ”

The method is already showing results in Los Angeles, where local groups have been able to cross-pollinate successful ideas using so-called transfer grants provided by Mega-Cities.

Fourteen local inner-city community improvement groups were awarded grants of $3,000 last year to transfer their strategies to another part of Los Angeles, adopt those of another local group or to take successful ideas either to or from a community improvement group in New York.

One such local group to benefit was Jovenes Inc., an Echo Park-based organization that provides food, clothing and shelter for runaway and homeless youths. Jovenes has young people deal with their problems by working on public art projects that stress racial and cultural harmony.

Jovenes recently began transforming a trash-filled, abandoned Echo Park site into a public art space and garden. The idea came from South-Central’s Hope L.A. Horticultural Corps, which creates urban gardens in vacant lots with the help of local youths. The money came from Mega-Cities.

“They have a great list of organizations folded into a network around the country,” said Father Richard Estrada, executive director of Jovenes. “They put us in touch with Hope L.A. and with the Tree People, who donated trees for our garden project and helped the kids plant them. Through Mega-Cities, we got in touch with these people, and they were wonderful.”

Jovenes has also been on the other side of the process. Mega-Cities provided Jovenes with an intra-city transfer grant to replicate in New York a recently completed public art project Downtown dealing with immigration titled “The Bridge.” They were put in contact with a Latino community development group called CHARAS in lower Manhattan, which now plans to work with Jovenes to develop a similarly themed mural on a wall of the country’s oldest public housing project.

Hope L.A. also received an intra-city grant and will be bringing their urban garden ideas to three neighborhood groups in New York.

What works at the community level can often work on a grander scale, so Mega-Cities organizers invited local and national policy makers to a recent gathering at the Los Angeles Convention Center, in hopes that some of the better ideas might rub off and eventually work their way into public policy. Representatives from city government, as well as from the Department of Housing and Urban Development and other government entities, sat in on workshops to learn how successful community improvement strategists had made their ideas work.

Wendy Greuel, acting director of housing for HUD, cited two programs as examples of ideas she believes could be successfully incorporated into public policy in cities around the country. The New Economics for Women’s Casa Loma housing facility in Westlake combines living space, child care, social services and job training for single mothers and their children under one roof. The Los Angeles Men’s Place operates a self-sufficient village Downtown for mentally disabled homeless men and women.

“These are projects you could see replicated,” said Greuel, who worked with several local grass-roots groups while on the staff of former Mayor Tom Bradley.

“I think the Mega-Cities project allows us to look forward. All too often, we in the public policy field spend a lot of time trying to stay above water and just being reactive. Mega-Cities helps us remember why we’re here.”

Mega-Cities has field site teams monitoring community improvement programs in 20 cities around the world. Officials hope to expand services nationally and internationally.