[Note: updates here and here.]
You may have heard of the LA84 Foundation or seen their logo at a park or rec center. Maybe you’ve even visited their colonial mansion headquarters in West Adams or been to one of their events. But who exactly are they? What do they want? And how do they operate?
On paper, the LA84 Foundation is a non-profit – formerly known as the Amateur Athletic Foundation – formed to manage the surplus from the 1984 LA Olympics (~$93M), which now finds itself with a lot of money. In their own words, they’re “a nationally recognized leader in support of youth sport programs and public education and advocates for the important role sports participation plays in positive youth development.”
They are a “grant making and educational foundation,” which also “trains coaches, commissions research, convenes conferences and maintains the world’s premier Olympic and sports library collection.” They give out grants to “underserved communities” and “track the impacts structured sports has on youth development outcomes,” whatever that means.
“This all sounds great,” you may be thinking. So what’s the problem?
In the abstract, there’s nothing wrong with helping children in “underserved” communities per se. We can all recognize that many children in Los Angeles are not receiving the resources they need in a variety of categories: housing, food, healthcare, safety, clothing, education.
However, we have serious reservations about the LA84 Foundation’s economic interests and their ability to effect meaningful change in poor communities of color. While many of the grantees may be deserving programs*, we take issue with both the process and the undemocratic nature of their operations.
The key problem with the LA84 Foundation is that it is an unaccountable, private body. When the public resources of Los Angeles were leveraged for the ‘84 Games (highways, streets, venues, law enforcement, transit, parks, elected officials’ time), those profits should have been reinvested back into the City of LA. Instead, most of that money went to the IOC, and a fraction of it was funneled to the LA84 Foundation, which is not a part of the public trust.
We share LA84’s desire to help communities in need. But these are programs that should be funded and supported through the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) and thus held accountable to public oversight and chosen by public will. And we will note that LA84 does give regularly to the LAUSD after-school program – between $500K- $1M a year – a number which might seem significant, but which proves statistically irrelevant when one considers the scope of LAUSD. It’s a drop in the bucket.
It looks even worse when one considers that, according to its 2016 tax returns, LA84 has assets of over $150M.
If LA84’s goal really is to improve kids’ lives through sports and extracurriculars, then why not give all of their money to accountable bodies like the LAUSD? Why continue to dole out private grants to select school programs and non-profits, and thereby uphold this fractured mix of public and private interest funding that amounts to little more than half-measures and limited imagination?
It is this lack of accountability regarding LA84’s disbursement of Olympic money that troubles us. Who gets to decide where LA84 Foundation project money goes? Not you. Not us. That most likely falls to a few already extremely wealthy board members.
If it is in fact the community that is allowing the games to come to Los Angeles in the first place, then shouldn’t it be the community that defines where this money is disbursed? The hard truth is that Angelenos are risking a lot by hosting the Olympics. In the face of such risk, doesn’t it stand to reason that any gains or benefits should go back into the public trust, back into public coffers rather than to a private organization over which the public wields zero oversight?
We certainly think so. But it’s not just the fundamentally undemocratic nature of LA84; the LA84 Foundation also actively participates in a system designed to displace communities of color.
Consider the case of LA84’s corporate partners. Their last few years of tax returns indicate that LA84’s major assets are stock holdings in a number of ethically dubious companies. One of those corporate partners is Blackstone, a developer consortium and a key opponent of Proposition 10, the upcoming ballot measure championed by housing activists as Los Angeles’ best chance to achieve real rent control. LA84 have had anywhere between $20-40 million invested in Blackstone during the past several years.
In fact, the LA84 Foundation has over $150M invested in companies from Goldman Sachs to real estate investment firms, and they’re doing this as a fully tax exempt body. How could that be?
Los Angeles faces a massive housing catastrophe with some 40,000 people on the street (and an increase in the number of newly unhoused people). 1 in 4 children in Los Angeles is food insecure, and 17,258 LAUSD students were homeless in 2016 (up 50% in one year and still likely an underestimate). These are true problems which LA84 simply isn’t addressing.
If LA84 exists to serve the community of Los Angeles, then why is it so deeply involved with companies actively working to make this city only more unlivable? It directly contradicts their mission of supposedly serving and strengthening communities in need.
LA84 Foundation’s President and CEO, Renata Simril’s CV tells you everything you need to know about what LA84’s true, unstated mission is.
Simril holds a Master’s Degree in real estate from USC and over a decade’s worth of experience in real estate development. She’s also worked three years for the Dodgers and most recently served as Senior Vice President and Chief of Staff to the publisher of the Los Angeles Times.
She has very little experience working directly in youth sports prior to LA84, and it is unclear how a background in real estate makes her an expert in youth programs. The overwhelming majority of her experience lies in managing money and real estate transactions.
Then again, LA84’s own real estate is valued at $7 million.
She also used to work for the Los Angeles Times as Senior Vice President and Chief of Staff to the Publisher. So the Times‘ as a media partner for events like the LA84 annual summit starts to make more sense.
This is all compounded by the fact the LA84 Foundation clearly supports and serves to function as a cheerleader for the 2028 Olympics, a mega-event that will not just endanger the poor, the unhoused, and communities of color, but also undocumented people in the region. Because Olympic organizers have designated LA2028 as a National Special Security Event (NSSE), the roughly 800,000 undocumented people in the region will be subject to increased risk of detainment and deportation, which, again, blatantly runs counter to LA84’s alleged goals.
Questioning the NSSE designation will likely be met with talk of safety – the need to protect athletes and countless visitors in attendance. But how will such a vague and indeterminate designation – a designation accompanying a planned exponential increase in police and police funding – affect the people that actually live here?
LA84 has no answers for questions like these.
And that’s because – at the end of the day – the LA84 Foundation fails as a social justice organization. In fact, it’s the opposite of social justice; it’s a real estate speculation firm appropriating social justice movements to extract profit from the communities it claims to help.
It’s a bait-and-switch of the most cynical order.
LA84’s upcoming annual summit would seem like a perfect forum for all of these questions. And yet, despite this year’s summit theme of “Athlete Activism and Social Justice: Taking Action for Our Youth,” we don’t believe they will ask any meaningful questions or encourage any serious, critical conversation about the Olympics and how the IOC –in concert with groups like LA84 – exploits, abuses, gentrifies, and displaces people everywhere it goes.
If LA84 wanted experts on social justice, they could have invited members of our coalition to engage in debate.
But with tickets sold at the absurd price point of $395, we won’t be finding out and neither will folks from underserved communities. We know the conversation will be uncritical, because the LA84 Foundation is fundamentally a booster group for its own interests (the Olympics; real estate).
In denying the opportunity for serious debate, they not only shirk their responsibility to the Angelenos whose money they manage, but also deny the possibility that debate might offer valuable ideas for the future.
Are the panelists they booked really social justice experts? Are they able to recount the history of the Olympics’ economic and social impact on other host cities? Will they be able to project what such an event might look like in a city suffering a catastrophic housing crisis? Will they challenge the assurances of a “No-Build” Olympics or question what it could mean for taxpayers to hold the Games with no economic guarantee? Will they question what will happen when we hand over city-wide security to the very department responsible for ICE?
We would like to hope so. But we wouldn’t bet on it.
LA84 wants us to trust them. They want us to feel good about what they do. The optics of this type of organization are designed to seem unimpeachable; those aesthetics make critique difficult by design. There is a reason they changed their name in 2007 to LA84, referencing the one (and only) profitable modern Olympics to ever be held in LA. You should ask them what happened in other cities.
There is a profound taboo in the United States surrounding the critique of philanthropy. Charity is, by and large, seen as an unequivocal good, and critiques of nonprofits are rarely met with anything but pearl-clutching. But are we really upholding our collective responsibilities to one another by passing that responsibility over to private groups? If the collective will to help one another exists, shouldn’t collective action follow?
Kids simply cannot and should not be used as cover from tough questions. By anyone. Because of course we should be helping kids. No one is debating that. But how are we helping them? What constitutes meaningful, material change? And what is simple window-dressing? Branding?
The city is going to give away untold sums in subsidies in the name of the Olympics. And LA84 is asking that we simply take them at their word to manage massive funds – surpluses made by the city – all because of a cloud of good memories and boosterism.
Here’s a simple exercise – replace “LA84” with the Trump Foundation. Are we suddenly all still so eager to trust them with Olympic money based solely on their own assurances? Are we suddenly so willing to believe them when they claim this will be a “No-Build Olympics,” or that the underserved communities they claim to prioritize won’t be targeted by private development interests or the same federal agency that is currently locking up thousands of kids?
Or would we be calling for transparency? For accountability? For evidence?
So who is LA84, really? And what do they actually want? Are they truly in the business of serving the community, or are they co-opting social justice in order to bolster their bottom line?
For now, all we can do is take them at their word. And it seems like they want it that way.
Talk is cheap. This may cost us more than we know.