By Abhishek Jagannathan, 2026 CLA Intern
When my friends, family members, and other treasured acquaintances ask me about my experience at my host office, I often find myself responding with “It was pretty fire, man”.
As you can see, I have a charming way with words.
Of course in my case, this description is a shockingly clever (/s) double entendre, because my host office is the District Office of Assemblymember Jessica Caloza (AD 52), which includes parts of East LA that were significantly impacted by the Lineage Warehouse fire that broke out on June 17th.
Leaving aside my fairly tasteless attempt at a pun, this fire was a serious situation. The Lineage warehouse was a cold storage facility for raw meat, and the nature of the structure meant that when the fire broke out, firefighters could not get into the building to put the fire out completely. The resulting blaze was difficult to put out, and also led to the smell of burning, rotting meat permeating the air, creating significant health concerns about air quality and the spread of toxic chemicals.
This consequently shaped my first two weeks at my host office in an unexpected way. Rather than spending my time just answering phones and writing background memos for community events, my initial days at the district office were almost entirely focused on responding to constituent needs during this crisis, most notably by delivering essential resources, like air purifiers, to locals in the affected areas. This involved a lot of driving around, engaging with members of the community directly, and carrying hundreds of air purifiers to and from various trucks.
While not what I had predicted, this introduction to my host office and the community I was serving is one that felt far more valuable to me than a more typical intern experience, because it placed the act of service at the forefront of my day.
Service can come in a lot of different forms. Oftentimes, the way we find ourselves providing service relates to our strengths. We enter careers based on what subjects we excel at in school. We provide advice to others based on challenges that we’ve already overcome. But service can sometimes be more meaningful when it doesn’t come from a place of expertise, but rather a drive to be helpful in any way. I’m not the best driver in East LA, an area I am still very unfamiliar with. I am certainly not the strongest guy, nor the best at unloading a U-Haul full of air purifiers. But an emergency means all hands are on deck, which means we all have the opportunity to serve outside of our comfort zone - and knowing that something I did immediately improved someone else’s quality of life is a deeply rewarding feeling.
I think this experience of mine also highlights the power of government to connect with people directly and meaningfully. Very often we are witness to a bureaucracy that either negatively affects people’s lives, or seems to lack any tangible impact. My first days at the district office were in many ways a reaffirmation for myself that government is about service, and when it stays true to that core, it delivers.