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Get to Know Our Keynote Speaker, Stefano Bloch
We're eager to have you meet Dr. Stefano Bloch, the keynote speaker at our 2024 Annual Breakfast & Community Awards. We were first introduced to Dr. Bloch through LISC's Racial Equity Learning Group when he spoke about the complexities of understanding neighborhood dynamics and housing through quantitative, or geospatial (mapping), data.
Dr. Bloch is a professor of cultural geography at the University of Arizona where he teaches courses on cultural place-making and crime in the context of neighborhood change. His research has appeared in numerous academic journals across the social sciences, as well as op-eds published in New York Times, Slate.com, and the Arizona Daily Star. He is the author of Going All City (University of Chicago Press, 2019) and is currently working on his second book, An Urban Autopsy of an LA Gang Killing. He holds graduate degrees in geography and urban planning from the University of Minnesota and UCLA, and was a Presidential Diversity Fellow and Senior Research Associate in the Urban Studies Program at Brown University.
You can explore some of his writing below. In his keynote on November 13, he'll share how laws have been used to push people out of their homes and neighborhoods, worsening economic inequality for marginalized communities. Drawing from his extensive research, Dr. Bloch will shed light on this ongoing history and what we can do to reverse these trends by empowering communities.
Going All CityStruggle and Survival in LA's Graffiti SubcultureBy Stefano Bloch “We could have been called a lot of things: brazen vandals, scared kids, threats to social order, self-obsessed egomaniacs, marginalized youth, outsider artists, trend setters, and thrill seekers. But, to me, we were just regular kids growing up hard in America and making the city our own. Being ‘writers’ gave us something to live for and ‘going all city’ gave us something to strive for; and for some of my friends it was something to die for.” Bloch holds nothing back in this fierce, poignant memoir and ethnography. Going All City is an unflinching portrait of a deeply maligned subculture and an unforgettable account of what writing on city walls means to the most vulnerable people living within them. |
Are You in a Gang Database?The bar for being labeled a gang member is low, and the consequences are serious.New York Times Opinion I found out I was in a gang database — a shared criminal intelligence system used by policing agencies to store information on identified gang members — in 1996 after a dozen members of the Los Angeles Police Department crashed through my front door. The officers were from an anti-gang and graffiti task force and the arrest warrant identified me as a leader of not one, but two, graffiti gangs. When I found out that officers had torn through my family’s apartment looking for spray paint and markers as per the search warrant, it reminded me of the actual gang members who had done the same just a few years earlier. |
2024 LISC Phoenix Annual Breakfast & Community Awards
Wednesday, November 13, 2024, 8:00 – 10:00 a.m.
The Abbey on Monroe, Phoenix
Keynote Address
How Civil Law is Relied on to Displace Communities and Increase Inequality
Dr. Stefano Bloch, a professor of cultural geography at the University of Arizona, will share how laws have been used to push people out of their homes and neighborhoods, worsening economic inequality for marginalized communities. Drawing from his extensive research, Dr. Bloch will shed light on this ongoing history and what we can do to reverse these trends by empowering communities.
2024 Community Award Honorees
Exemplary Project
The Abbey on Monroe
Exemplary Partner
Wells Fargo
2024 Live Well Arizona Incubator Team Graduates
City of Cottonwood Housing Team
Flagstaff Family Food Center
Glendale Elementary School District System of Care Center
Protectors of the Salt River - Onk Akimel Ha Ñukutham
Southern Gila County Economic Development Corporation
Thank you to our sponsors
Award Sponsors
Table Sponsors
Partner Sponsors
B.H.H.S. Legacy Foundation
Southwest Human Development
U.S. Bank
Vitalyst Health Foundation
Ally Sponsors
Arizona Department of Housing | Bank of America | Dudley Ventures | Enterprise Bank and Trust | Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco | Friends of Transit | Gorman & Company, Inc. | National Bank of Arizona | Sunbelt Holdings
It's not too late to become a sponsor. Contact fpollack@lisc.org to learn more.
