Doing Good is an occasional newsletter where we share about the good things people do in our city — and a few ideas to get involved yourself.
It’s gala season!
Way back I used to edit the society columnist for the Press-Telegram, the legendary Shirley Wild. Each week I deleted exclamation points and spell-checked a lengthy — very lengthy — list of names of local notables who were “Seen at the Scene” at various charitable events.
I get it now. A lot goes on in Long Beach beyond the breaking news, investigations and features from our editorial team. The city has more than 300 nonprofits and foundations, and many fundraise and bring attention to their work at dinners, concerts, sporting events and “-a-thons” of all types.
Myself? I’m a gala girl. And this is certainly the season for mass-produced entremets and floor-length attire:
Precious Lamb held its “Reaching for the Stars” gala at the Aquarium of the Pacific; the Public Library Foundation hosted the “Grape Expectations” wine event at Billie Jean King Library; the Ronald McDonald House hosted a “A Few Good Men and Women,” which this year featured two of the city’s most well-known matriarchs — sisters Barbara (Bixby) Blackwell and Jean Bixby Smith.
This week, I attended the Nell and John Wooden Ethics in Leadership Award Dinner hosted by the Ukleja Center at CSULB, which promotes ethical study across the curriculum at Cal State Long Beach.
This year’s event honored Jeff Levine of the Long Beach Rescue Mission, a genuine and effective speaker in part because, as a former addict, he trudged the very path of many of the Mission’s clients. The center also honored the faculty who’ve received grants over the years to incorporate ethics into course study, including two of my bosses: Gwen Shaffer, a tenured faculty member who serves on our board, and the chair of the journalism department at CSULB, Jennifer Fleming.
No entremets at this dinner — but the fancy cupcakes fit nicely in my purse.
A quarter-cent saved
The Long Beach Reform Coalition deserves a shout this week.
This grassroots coalition formed in 2018 when former Mayor Robert Garcia floated a slate of Charter reform changes that included extending term limits for elected leaders. The measure was successful, which means the coalition was not.
But this band of advocacy organizations (the Council of Neighborhood Associations, Eastside Voice, LBHUSH2 and more) has pestered the city over the past eight years with a few wins, and — given the imbalance of power against City Hall — that’s not nothing.
This week the group won a huge victory: A judge agreed that voters in 2020 raised the local sales tax by a quarter-cent in two years, not now — not even after the city voted to remove the “October 2027” effective date from the measure after last year’s passage of a county measure that freed up room in the state sales tax cap. Long Beach officials — mindful of a budget gap in the next few years — reasoned that voters intended to push up the tax as soon as the expiration of the county tax measure, whether it be 2025 or 2027.
And, after writing the above paragraph, I now loathe the word “measure,” and also should give kudos to our city hall reporter, John Donegan, who did a much better job explaining it all.
Last: If you didn’t know, the Post is the city’s largest nonprofit newsroom. Our work is free to the public, but local news done right is expensive to produce — more than a few quarter-cents.
If you haven’t already, please help us out.