YouTube video
Takeaway
Community Is the Best Defense
In the Neighborhood, Across the Nation, and Globally, Strong Alliances Make Us Resilient
by Talib Jabbar | March 14, 2025
People today live with a heightened sense of peril. At home in Los Angeles, we are rebuilding after January’s fires. And across the nation and world, the political order is shifting in sudden and serious ways.
How can we even begin to combat threats? Last night, Zócalo, together with ASU Mechanics of Democracy Lab, UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations, California Humanities, Los Angeles Local News Initiative, LA2050, KCRW, and the Los Angeles Times, asked: “What Alliances Do We Need in Perilous Times?”
The program featured two back-to-back panels, one focused on Los Angeles’ fire response, and the other on national and global political threats. Both panels left us with an urgent message, and some homework: To defend ourselves and build resilience, we must build strong communities with shared values across neighborhoods, the country, and the world.
The first panel, moderated by Los Angeles Times columnist Gustavo Arellano, included Altadena’s The Little Red Hen Coffee Shop owner Nadeerah Faquir, Center for Cultural Innovation president and CEO Angie Kim, Community Organized Relief Effort climate and disaster resilience manager Nina Knierim, and California Community Foundation president and CEO Miguel Santana.
So, what was “very L.A.” about the fire response? Arellano asked.
Everyone commented on the overwhelming flow of support—people opening up their homes, donating supplies. Faquir, whose family restaurant was lost in the Eaton fire, especially thanked the restaurant community, which showed up for them through fundraisers in the days and weeks following the fire. “People let the heart take the lead,” she said.
The Center for Cultural Innovation is administering the L.A. Arts Community Fire Relief Fund for artists impacted by the fires. Kim said that a lot of the support her group received came from outside of the region. “They were supporting the idea of L.A.,” she said—what Los Angeles means in the national and international collective imagination. Knierim’s disaster resilience-building work also depends on a network of strong alliances that extends beyond neighborhoods, with groups like the U.S. Forest Service, CalFire, the Los Angeles Fire Department, and the Los Angeles Police Department.
The California Community Foundation, one of Southern California’s largest philanthropic organizations, brought in over $80 million from 40,000 individual donations (“40,000 love letters to L.A.,” as Arellano put it). Santana said the organization already had pandemic-era systems in place to help the most vulnerable populations, including elderly people. When the fires struck, “muscle memory” kicked in—and his team immediately began calling on people to see if they needed help. He also bridged new partnerships between the broader community, philanthropy, and business, meeting with Snap CEO Evan Spiegel—a native Angeleno whose father lost his home in the Palisades fire—and creating the “Department of Angels,” linking people impacted by the fires with political leadership at FEMA, the state, and Washington to help solve some of their most pressing issues, like insurance.
Arellano questioned the word alliance, which to him signifies something temporary that can dissolve. Why not focus instead on community?
Artists, Kim said, understand that their cultural work brings people together and creates cohesion. “Unless you have that as a fabric, you can’t weather the next disaster.”
Faquir said people want to preserve their sense of community. “Change is touchy right now,” she said, responding to a question about whether Altadena should change in rebuilding. Altadena wants to preserve single-family homes and small businesses, she argued, in the face of developers’ grander plans.
For Knierim, community fortitude—learning how to take care of ourselves to prepare for future disaster—is crucial.
The second panel zoomed out to the national and international political threats of the current political moment.
“Earlier we were talking about the need for collective community in response to wildfire,” said immigrant rights advocate Angelica Salas. “Well, this is a horrible, political wildfire.”
Salas was joined by two other panelists, American diplomat Nina Hachigian and McCain Institute global democracy expert Laura Thornton. The conversation was moderated by Zócalo columnist Joe Mathews.
Mathews asked Hachigian, who worked as a U.S. ambassador as well as the U.S. Special Representative for City and State Diplomacy at the U.S. Department of State from 2022 to 2025, about the roles of cities and subnational governments. Can they solve “the big stuff” like climate, war, disease?
Yes, she said: “Our cities are global actors.” Mayors challenged one another to de-carbonize the fastest when the U.S. pulled out of the Paris Accords during the first Trump administration, she noted. Cities also make other important decisions that impact climate—which type of buses to procure for public transportation (diesel or electric), how to deal with waste (what type of bins residents should have), building codes, energy sources. The reason Los Angeles introduced drive-thru COVID testing during the pandemic was because of a conversation with Seoul’s mayor, who did it first.
Is the U.S. now aligned with authoritarianism? Mathews asked Thornton.
“This is not a pivot but a complete rupture from a foreign policy we’ve had the last 80 years,” Thornton said. After World War II, bipartisan U.S. doctrine focused on spreading democracy and free markets, she argued, but now we have “a transactional foreign policy” based on “punishment.” And contrary to what many have said or expected, this is not an isolationist vision, but one that expands America’, sphere of influence—into Greenland, Panama, Gaza, Canada—she said.
Hachigian agreed that things have changed. As a foreign diplomat in Asia, she said she learned that one of the U.S.’s biggest foreign policy assets “was that we had close, trusted friends that we call allies”—with shared common values and objectives. China and Russia do not have that.
Worldwide, Thornton said, countries are experiencing democratic backslide, electing strongmen like Russia’s Putin, Hungary’s Orban, Turkey’s Erdogan. “Our adversaries are involved,” she said, “pilot testing ways to manipulate our democracies and publics.”
So, what do we do? Mathews asked.
Thornton is traveling to Warsaw to learn about what she calls the “Polish model”—how a nation that had experienced democratic backsliding came out and elected a government recommitted to democracy. It involved the hard work of detoxing people from wanting authoritarians in the first place, she said.
Hachigian highlighted the importance of independent journalism to countering authoritarianism—subscribe, she urged—and called on the audience to also protect our courts.
And protest.
“There are a lot feisty Americans,” Hachigian said, noting recent town halls where citizens, angered by recent policies and threats to their benefits and jobs, confronted elected officials.
Salas said there is an urgent need for alliances with the immigrant community, which makes up about 14% of the U.S. population, and which needs support to withstand attack. This means making sacrifices and weathering discomfort to get out in the streets and resist.
“You don’t have to wait for that magical moment,” Salas said. “Connect with your friends, go to the town halls, call your elected officials. We have to start protesting in public. Because there is a difference when our disdain is in the public square.”
Talib Jabbar is associate editor of Zócalo Public Square.
Editor: Eryn Brown
---
photos
Photos by Chad Brady.
partners
Featured Speakers
GUSTAVO ARELLANO
Los Angeles Times Columnist
joe mathews
Zócalo Columnist and Democracy Local Founder
Nadeerah Faquir
Co-Owner, The Little Red Hen Coffee Shop
Angie Kim
President and CEO, the Center for Cultural Innovation
Nina Knierim
Manager, Climate and Disaster Resilience, CORE (Community Organized Relief Effort)
Miguel Santana
President and CEO, California Community Foundation
Nina Hachigian
Former United States Special Representative for City and State Diplomacy
Angelica Salas
Executive Director, Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA)
Laura Thornton
Senior Director for Global Democracy Programs, The McCain Institute
listen to the program