AN INTERVIEW WITH CHARLES HANNAH & RICK CORSINI
FALA: How did Forward Alliance Los Angeles get started?
Charles: Ethan Kring, the Gen-Z son of a good friend had raised a bit of funding for an organization he called HereFor and held an ideation meeting in Hollywood in June 2022 where nonprofits, and potential nonprofits, could outline what they are “here for, for Los Angeles”. Three would be selected to receive $5,000. I decided to attend to support Ethan.
FALA: And that’s when you met Rick for the first time?
Charles: Yes. He gave a really interesting presentation about plans for making Silver Lake Reservoir a public park accessible to underserved communities, which encouraged me to pitch an idea for the Sepulveda Basin. Since we moved to Sherman Oaks in 2008, my wife Carrie and I had walked pretty much every weekend morning in the Basin, and had observed that the outflow from the Tillman Reclamation plant went into the two lakes – one in the wildlife reserve and the other in Lake Balboa Park – and then into the LA River and out to sea. So, I spoke about the issue of water – Los Angeles is constantly in a drought – and how the outflow could be used to irrigate a co-operative community garden to be developed in a relatively unused area of Lake Balboa Park. After all the pitches, breakout groups were created and Rick joined mine.
FALA: Did you think it had some potential, Rick?
Rick: I wasn’t really familiar with the basin beyond the baseball fields where I played in high school. But I was very interested in applying what we proposed at Silver Lake Reservoir, which was an environmental studies center for LAUSD using the new park as an outdoor laboratory. So, Charles took me on a tour of the Basin, and I was impressed by its beauty. Mountain views, complex and varied habitat. And one cannot appreciate its enormity until it’s experienced on foot. I was sold that this was a perfect place to apply the Silver Lake model.
FALA: Did you have anything to add to his idea given your experience with the Silver Lake Reservoir?
Rick: Community gardens always sound nice, but they require a motivated community that actually knows how to garden and manage the operation. So, success depends on the skill set and experience of a particular group. Absent that, a community garden will fail.
But the environmental study center there made a lot of sense. When we conceived of the idea for Silver Lake Reservoir, Silver Lake Forward and LAUSD saw the model being applied across the city where there was substantial natural habitat in proximity to local schools. Sepulveda Basin was ideal with so many schools accessible via the Metro Orange Line. I reached out to my contacts at LAUSD and they were very interested in replicating the model (even though the Silver Lake Environmental Studies Center is still waiting to be funded, along with the entire new park).
Charles: Things really began to come together when LAUSD responded so positively. By this time, we had learned that the City of Los Angeles was commencing work on a vision plan for the Sepulveda Basin – in part because it was to be the location for Olympic events in 2028. A short while later, I read about Sean Sherman’s (the Sioux Chef) Native American restaurant in a park in Minneapolis. At that point, I had been researching the original inhabitants of the Basin and the rich environment it must have been – acorn-rich oak trees, deer, rabbits and trout in the river. I also discovered that the land had been stolen twice – once when the Indigenous peoples of the area were enslaved in the missions and again in the mid 1800s when survivors had a 4,400 acre land grant called Rancho Encino, taken from them. Rick suggested we add a native plant foraging garden and this was the plan we presented to the City’s Bureau of Engineering in December – an environmental studies center and kitchen garden, a Native American restaurant and foraging garden – just 6 months after Rick and I first met.
FALA: So, you work well together?
Rick: Sometimes it’s like we’re reading each other’s mind. I shared a story about a restauranteur in Istanbul I Iearned about while doing research for a design studio I was teaching at USC, Musa Dagdeverin, who set out to discover the lost tastes of Istanbul by interviewing grandmothers and great grandmothers, jotting down their family recipes, then growing ingredients that had not been cultivated for decades to make that food. I wondered what the Tataviam, Chumash and Tongva ate, and what it tasted like. Then Charles told me the story of Sean Sherman!
Charles: I have learned so much from Rick in the 3 years we’ve been working together, and have become friends. Really important stuff about cities, the negative impacts of urban sprawl – which you could say Los Angeles is a poster child for – and the importance of social integration and civic engagement, especially now there’s so much divisiveness. Thanks to Rick, I can see how the San Fernando Valley could be a model for the city of the future and how, our project, now expanded to include other elements of the City’s Vision Plan – the resilience and community center and the restoration of Bull Creek – could play an important part in this.
Rick: Our hope is what we build here will be a prototype for holistic environmental and cultural education – for school kids who will be the next generation of leaders, and for the general public. It’s about praxis, the application of theory and knowledge to practical experience, that makes education immediately relevant to the kids. It’s also aspirational: not just making school kids aware of job opportunities, but to show they can apply their education and contribute at the highest level in society.
And it’s about coalition building: engaging diverse communities around good ideas that benefit the broad swath of citizens; demonstrating that with vision and hard work we can actually achieve great things together for our neighborhoods; and developing civic pride and unique identity based on the particulars of our place in the world.
