by Karen Ocamb

At first the fit seemed bold and oddly logical. Having cut her LGBT political teeth during the 1970s Women’s Music Festivals and then during the worst devastation of AIDS as executive director of the Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Community Services Center, Torie Osborn wound up at the feisty grassroots grant-giver, the Liberty Hill Foundation, which she turned into a model of nonprofit philanthropy.

So when the new mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigosa, himself a one-time community organizer and ACLU leader, asked Osborn to join his team as a special assistant roughly two years ago, the fit seemed natural. Her task was to spearhead creative new public-private efforts to advance Villaraigosa’s progressive agenda.

But Osborn didn’t realize how dire the city’s economic situation was or how disjointed and territorial the departments of the vast bureaucracy were. And though surrounded by other lesbians in senior management positions, Osborn started to long for her old calling as a social change activist.

“I’ve known the mayor for nearly 20 years, and working here has only deepened my belief in him and my admiration for his boldness and political vision. I expect to work with him for many decades to come,” Osborn said in an e-mail letter to friends and colleagues on Jan. 21, announcing her departure from the team. “But in my soul I am a social change activist whose most effective perch is outside government, in the nonprofit and philanthropic communities. It is now time to return to that world.”

Osborn will continue to work as a part-time consultant and will “keep the door open,” she told IN Los Angeles magazine. “But the primary reason I’m leaving is because I feel called to write a book. I’m really having one of those urges to contribute my voice to the broader national conversation, which I think will increase exponentially when we have a Democratic president.”

She won’t miss the 70-hour work weeks. “It’s hard to move anything, and everybody is expected to do a whole range of things. I feel as if I have to have the space to hear my inner voice,” which is very hard with the constant demands to feed the “starved beast” known as city government, she shares.

But after serving as a political and bureaucratic insider, “I think differently,” she said. “I have learned to think more broadly.” Instead of thinking how to move an organization, a community or a social movement, Osborn says the question becomes how do you take a starved government sector or a fragmented government sector and address a huge social need, such as homelessness? “How do you move anything? How do you do systems reform from the inside?” she asked rhetorically. “It was a tutorial … We were trying to be change agents inside the government,” she said of the senior staff.

And with it came “heartbreak,” she said, the “tragedy” of seeing “the gap between the idea and reality—and the gap not being because of the lack of political will but the lack of money. … We have no money for the homeless, for instance. The problem is the mayor has a bold agenda without the capacity to raise revenue.”

There has been a “systematic right-wing assault on government, defunding local government programs and undermining people’s confidence in it,” Osborn said. “But the people working in government are brilliant and hardworking and dedicated. It surprised me how positive my experience of the people in government was.”

For her part, Osborn said she spent much of her time on the “unsexy back story” of getting different departments to talk to each other to solve common, overlapping problems.

“The mayor is changing how business-as-usual is done,” Osborn said. “We are silo-busting all over the place. I’ve never, ever seen anything like it. From what I’ve heard, it’s the first time in city history that departments have been sitting down together solving problems. This is just inside the city—I’m not even talking about the city and the county. First get your own act together, right?” she said. These people never talked to each other. It wasn’t their fault. It’s just the way bureaucracy is; you have to pro-actively fight against it. You have to see silo-busting as part of your agenda or nothing changes.”

Osborn is aware that Villaraigosa has fallen into disfavor with some members of the LGBT community, but she is far from among them.

“All I can say is that when I look across that table at 20 general managers—and these are some of the smartest people on the planet—and I see Mercedes Marquez and Cecilia Estolano and Helmi Hisserich, deputy mayor for Housing and Economic Development, is chairing the meeting—and I make a casual lesbian joke, everybody laughs. It isn’t just about not feeling discrimination. It’s affirmatively feeling as if people can flourish, can be leaders, can be powerful and be openly gay and lesbian under this mayor. Not that [former L.A. City Mayor Jim] Hahn didn’t appoint gay people or that [former Mayor Richard] Riordan didn’t appoint gay people. But it’s the affirmation of one’s culture, of one’s sensibility. I make jokes, I say stuff, I talk as if I were talking to [another gay person] around the senior staff table or around the Economic Development cabinet. And you know, that never happened before,” she said.

“So it’s never going to be enough, because there’s always more to do,” Osborn continued. “But I think we have a mayor who’s a deep friend to our community. He’s very comfortable with himself. Within his own personal cabinet, he has gay and lesbian people—people who he turns to—whether it’s [state Sen.] Sheila [Kuehl] or his cousin, John Perez, or me [or others]. So we’re part of the fabric of power in the city of Los Angeles, among the best and the brightest; he sees us.”