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Save the Date!
Celebration and Storytelling from the Frontlines of Resilient Communities in the Age of Climate Justice
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Sunday Dec. 13 5-7 PM
Modern Times Bookstore,
2919 24th St. San Francisco
Thurs, Dec. 17,
5:30 - 7:30 PM
Laurel Bookstore,
1423 Broadway, Oakland
Join us for a holiday gathering to celebrate this season of lights, stories of global and local climate justice, and the 20th anniversary edition of
Random Kindness & Senseless Acts of Beauty. Invited guests will share experiences of successful resilient community action in the Bay Area, world community in Paris & Fukushima.
Visit our
website for more information about the book and the resilient communities project.
Questions?
Contact Kaily Heitz at
BreakthroughCommunities@g
mail.com
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Growing Restorative Justice Practices with New Earth Life
The Breakthrough Communities team was inspired by our visit with
Harry Grammer
, founder of the
New Earth Life
school in Culver City, Los Angeles. We first met Harry while teaching a course at Pacifica Graduate Institute through Founding Director, DR. Mary Watkins' Comunity, Liberation and Ecopsychology program.
He is now making a mark for himself and his students by using experiences in the natural world as an entry point for young people who have been caught in the school to prison pipeline. His 50 students attend regular meetings and classes both within the juvenile justice system and at his new center to connect them to nature, technology and green jobs available for the 21st century.
Programs are rich in restorative arts and music practices, practical skill building, and leadership development exercises through outdoor climbing and hiking trips around southern California.
We are excited to continue conversations with Harry Grammer and New Earth Life.
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UC Davis Seminar Presentation:
Community Development and Graduate Group
On October 21, the Breakthrough Communities team was invited to give a lecture for the Community Development Graduate Group Seminar. Students made requests of questions to be addressed before the talk began regarding such topics as how to make work meaningful on a global scale. Carl and Paloma discussed our organizational framework and movement strategies before opening up the floor to an expanded and highly engaged session of Q&A.
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Six Wins Regional Education and Advocacy Day
Every year, the Six Wins Network for Social Equity, of which Breakthrough Communities is a founding member, has hosted a regional education and advocacy day in each of the represented Bay Area counties, in which our partner organizations and their constituents meet with local representative to uphold equitable policy scenarios. This year, our Oakland cohort, including Mary Lim Lampe of the Gamaliel Foundation and our partners at the East Bay Housing Organizations (EBHO), and other local advocates convened at city hall to meet with Mayor Libby Schaaf and her staff to ask her support in ensuring that an EEJ scenario is incorporated into Plan Bay Area 2.0. We made a strong case as a collective group and Mayor Schaaf was receptive to the plan.
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Happy 80th Birthday Ron Dellums!
Join us in congratulating Ron Dellums on his 80th Birthday.
Carl will be serving with Ron Dellums, Paloma Pavel, Margaretta Lin, Congresswoman Barbara Lee & others to promote global equity and justice on the Advisory Committee of the newly formed Dellums Institute. More details to come.
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Carl Anthony, Ron Dellums and former Secretary of Defense William Perry circa 1993
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The following is an excerpt of an historical remembrance of Carl's work with Ron Dellums:
Happy 80th Birthday! Congratulations on your legacy of activism and congressional leadership in the fields that relate to peace, sustainability and justice.
I recall your contribution in bringing activist and practitioners together around the East Bay Conversion and Reinvestment Commission pilot project "Defense Conversion: A Road Map for Communities". You brought Carol Browner, Secretary of the EPA, Defense Secretary William Perry, Secretary of Commerce the late Ron Brown, and President Clinton himself to meet with participants in the SF Bay Area to map our plans for this project, which became a model for the nation. This team, led by national leadership, invented new solutions in a moment of crisis; this included the six major goals of conversion. These goals brought together a host of unlikely partners to collaborate on practical solutions for our region's future.
The conversion efforts represented an attempt to provide a framework for engaging people in developing alternatives to military intervention. As we face new challenges of military build up in the world, there is profound need for leadership, which you exemplify, and solutions that can help society move toward peaceful engagement of people all over the world. Today our communities face many new practical difficulties; in this accelerating global crisis, the wisdom of your intervention is most influential in helping us understand the challenges of the 21st century. Congratulations again on your 80th birthday and looking forward to the implementation of your legacy in years to come.
-Carl Anthony Former Chair of EBCRC Chair and Principal Administrative Officer & Co-Founder of Breakthrough Communities
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Caring for our Common Home:
Conversations on
Race, Poverty & Climate Justice
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October 4th began as a startlingly beautiful and sunny autumn Sunday at the historic Gill Tract Farm in Albany, which hosted the Breakthrough Communities team's event "Caring for our Common Home: Conversations on Race, Poverty and Climate Justice." We were joined by our host committee members, Andrew Baskin (UC Davis) Margaretta Lin (Dellums Institute: Partners for Global Health & Justice), Hank Herrera (New Hope Farms Cooperative & Center for Popular Research, Education and Policy), Belvie Rooks (Growing a Global Heart), Rev. Dorsey Blake (Pacific School of Religion), and Wanda Stewart
(Obsidian Farms),
&
Jon Hoffman
(Gill Tract Farm).
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Hank Herrera, Carl Anthony & Reverend Dorsey Blake
giving opening remarks (left to right) |
Volunteers from the farm worked to create the perfect setting for our dialogue. We gathered on chairs, tree stumps and hay bales in a circle shaded by a neighboring grove of evergreens. Gill Tract gardener and volunteer,
Travis Rios, contributed his solar & wind powered RV, which provided the 100% renewable electric energy that we needed for our AV systems.
Thanks to an ample donation,
we had an abundant spread of food that kept everyone nourished. Considerable thanks to those who rolled up their sleeves to help wash, slice, and arrange food for our guests.
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Host Margaretta Lin discussing victories in affordable housing in Oakland.
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| Artists and musicians Jada Imani and Maleik of Tatu Vision |
As guests began to arrive for the earlier portion of our event at 3PM, Reverend Dorsey Blake and Betty Kissilove, author of the universe story, Great Ball of Fire!, gathered attendees in a circle for a reading of the "Integral Ecology" chapter from Pope Francis' encyclical. Others had the opportunity to take a tour of the farm with Sundeep, a Gill Tract Farm volunteer. By 4 PM, the program continue with the soulful, powerful and inspiring musical voices of Tatu Vision, whose music you can find
here
and
here
.
The program opened with a powerful invocation by Ohlone elder,
Hank Herrera, whose words reminded us of
the painful history of colonization on this land and of indigenous people, including the historic role of the Catholic church. Carl Anthony and Rev. Blake followed with a libation and prayer. The rest of the event proceeded with Dr. Pavel guiding transformative discussion using the compass for community change. Particularly poignant were the emotional, honest, and empowering testimonies from members of our host committee, Belvie Rooks, Wanda Stewart, Margaretta Lin, Andrew Baskin and Kaily Heitz. From them, we heard stories of radical mentorship, of new agri-cultural visions led by communities of color, of success in the fight against displacement in Oakland. We also heard spoken word poetry and testimonies that served to heal our fractured histories through a powerful spoken word piece,
and of revolutionary reclamation of space.
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| Host Andrew Baskin presenting a spoken word piece. |
In the fading light, we closed out these powerful discussions with a circle honoring our beloved community. To nurture the symbolic seeds of hope sowed that day, we watered and planted a seedling pomegranate tree. Thanks go to
Growing Together
and
Planting Justice.
We're excited to co-create and grow what germinates as the result of this gathering.
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Paloma A Fulbright Specialist!
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Join us in congratulating Paloma as she accepts
her position on the Fulbright Specialist Roster!
Universities from around the world may now call on her for her unique set of skills to execute cutting edge global projects.
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Sierra Club Honors Carl Anthony and Paloma Pavel
with the
Trailblazer Award
The face of the environmental movement is changing. Images of denuded hillsides and starving polar bears are beginning to give way to the voices of the people from communities most vulnerable to climate change. This shift to putting racial and social equity at the center of conversations about our environment has happened in part due to the foundational work of Carl Anthony and Dr. Paloma Pavel, who were honored by the Sierra Club with the Trailblazer Award at the annual David Brower Dinner on October 22.
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| Sierra Club Executive Director, Michelle Meyer, Paloma Pavel and City Council Members Gabriel Quinto & awardee, Jovanka Beckles |
The
executive director of the Sierra Club, Michelle Meyer--who has been growing the organization's focus to incorporate a justice perspective--opened the evening's award ceremony, which honored a number of other visionary conservation and environmental equity provocateurs; these included our partner organization at the Rose Foundation, New Voices are Rising. By the time dinner rolled around,
Guillermo Mayer, executive director of Public Advocates, was invited to the stage to introduce Dr. Pavel and Mr. Anthony. But for a few scrapes of forks and knives, the speech he gave left the room silent as he discussed the urgency of putting people of color and vulnerable communities at the heart of the environmental movement and highlighted Breakthrough Communities' sizable contribution to this effort. When it was time to welcome Carl and Paloma to the stage, it was to the raucous sound of a prolonged, standing ovation.
| Jill Ratner with New Voices are Rising Youth |
Carl's acceptance notes were brief and humble, as he paid homage to his roots in West Philadelphia and to our host, the Delancey Street Center and Restaurant, which provides services and employment for the formerly incarcerated. Dr. Pavel's remarks provided the audience with an inspiring story of how her home on
la fronterra has influenced her work in forming cross-sector activist alliances; she also told a tale about her experience in the rainforest in Brazil, in which she came dangerously close to touching a toxic tree. After cautioning her, her guide informed Paloma that the antidote to the toxin lay within 4 feet of the base of that tree. This is an important metaphor for the work of our time--that the solutions to what seem like insurmountable problems are most often found within reach: in our own communities. On that note, the two left the stage to yet another standing ovation.
Congratulations Carl and Paloma!
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| Carl, Paloma and Guillermo Mayer at presentation of awards |
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Team Presents at All In Regional Equity Summit
Los Angeles, Oct. 27-29
The Breakthrough Communities team had a lively, energizing week in LA as participants in the Policylink Equity Summit, October 27-29. Shortly after touching down on the Burbank tarmac--gear, cameras and scooters in tow--we hopped on a bus for the pre-summit tours, which gave participants the opportunity to see how different branches of the equity movement are playing out in the Los Angeles area. Our tour took us to the community activist organization, Inner City Struggle, Garfield and Roosevelt High School in east & south central LA, which are both using restorative justice practices to build student capacity for leadership.
Day one ended with a beautiful patio reception hosted by the Kresge foundation and an exciting opportunity to reconnect with our former office manager,
Esther Mealy.
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The team visits Garfield High School with board member Monica Garcia, SEIU's Bill Lloyd and
Karen Driscoll of Liberty Hill.
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The morning plenary the next day began with a bang. After an introduction by Policylink President and CEO,
Angela Glover Blackwell
, we heard drumming and a chant begin from the back of the room projected through a megaphone. Dancers rolled and glided down the ballroom aisles and onto stage, where they gave an excellent stomp routine. Energized, we made our way to a workshop on using racial and economic justice as a lens for establishing climate resiliency facilitated by
Shamar Bibbins
from the Kresge Foundation, featuring speakers
Denise Fairchild
from Emerald Cities,
Cecilia Martinez
of the Center for Earth, Energy and Democracy ,
Tracy Ross
from Poverty to Prosperity & Alan Hipolito from Verde, Cully Oregon. That afternoon, we presented our workshop on the themes from Carl's forthcoming book, The Earth, The City and the Hidden Narrative of Race. More than two dozen participants arrived, joining the circle we had formed at the front of the room; when prompted many were enthusiastic to share their ancestry and what brought them to the conference. The day concluded with an evening reception that featured a live band playing motown covers. Despite the long day, Carl and Paloma got into the spirit of celebration by dancing along to the music.
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Participants engaged in dyad discussion during Policylink caucus
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The conference concluded the next day with a plenary that featured mayors from New Orleans, Long Beach and other government officials discussing the "All In" initiative for establishing equity policies in their cities. Actress
Sarah Jones closed out the convening with her phenomenal impersonations of characters based upon people she had interviewed in the past. We left feeling re-invigorated, committed and connected to a powerful group of people engaged in creating more just, equitable and sustainable communities.
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