We Love LA, An Urban Retreat for LA’s Passionate Leaders, was a two-day event mounted at The California Endowment in Los Angeles on October 14-15, 2010 to mark the Durfee Foundation’s 50th anniversary.

We Love LA was conceived as a tribute to magnificent people who set out to change the world – and actually do.

It is thanks for their wisdom, vision, tenacity, ingenuity, and limitless generosity.

It is an invitation to others – hopeful, tentative, aspiring – who are standing in the wings.

And it is a love song to Los Angeles.

Posted on the occasion of the Durfee Foundation’s 50th anniversary, this collection of quotes from Los Angeles leaders is excerpted from applications made over the past several years to Durfee fellowship programs. What you hold in your hands is only a sampling of an astonishing array of testimony leaders have shared with us and with each other. We recorded and posted some of them here and invite you to listen to their voices yourself.

We ask leaders, “Why do you do what you do?” What they do is usually quite easy to understand. Why they do it is often less immediately apparent, and their answers, so often, are disarming.

We ask them, “What have you learned along the way?” Their answers sing a whole chorus of melodies.

It is people, at the end of the day, who make change. Yes, it takes money, and strategy, buildings, infrastructure, and political will. But it is leaders who take up a cause and stoke an ember into a blaze. We are committed to those who tend the flame.

The Durfee Foundation is dedicated to the idea that individuals fuel the nonprofit sector. We believe they are our most valuable resource and that it is in our collective best interest that they be nurtured and sustained.

The voices you read here might be heard anywhere, but they are here and they are ours. Together we call Los Angeles – this sprawling, complicated place – home.

Because they are here, we are hopeful for our future.

Carrie Avery and Claire Peeps