This is a topic near and dear to my heart. Thanks for bringing it up KelKel. I organize within my community in a variety of different ways and find them all enormously satisfying. I was very big into environmental and antiglobalization activism back at the turn of the century but through a series of unfortunate events left it behind to try to sort through some personal things. Ironically, nothing really began to be sorted out until I returned to organizing. It was through reengaging with the activist scene here in Portland that I was finally able to unpack a lot of my fear and shame and find the courage I needed to accept that I'm TG and begin the process of transition.
At the moment I'm involved in quite a few different projects in PDX. First and foremost is foreclosure resistance of illegally foreclosed homes. When the real estate markets collapsed during 2008-2009 due to malfeasance on the part of banks selling credit-default swaps and bundling high-risk mortgages into packages that made them look as though they were stable and steady investments, many homeowners who were struggling found that the company they had been making payments to no longer owned their mortgage and would not accept payment. Unable to work their way through the byzantine layers of documents to find who actually owned their debt, in a lot of cases the first notice the home owner had that they were in serious trouble is when they received foreclosure notices and the sheriff showed up to evict them. What's come out in the several years since then has been the collusion between banks robosigning foreclosure documents with the court, mixing up case and contract numbers, and not providing homeowners the required notifications of impending foreclosure so that they may contest it. The banks would then evict the families and either let the houses sit empty and dilapidated or sell the property to developers who would knock the house down and build high-rent condos and apartments (often financed by the same banks that evicted) that serve to price the working poor out of their own communities.
There are a number of different tactics that we're using to fight this. First has been through active resistance of evictions. The families that have decided to fight eviction coordinate with our group to maintain a round-the-clock vigil at these homes in the event that the sheriff comes. I'm actually sitting in a foreclosed home right now watching for police. If the sheriff comes we send out a call on a rapid response network to get as many defenders as possible to rally outside the homes and protest the eviction. The times we have had to do this have been powerful moments of community solidarity. Several hundred of your neighbors rallying outside your house at a moment's notice is an empowering feeling. The group I'm with is actively protecting 5 different homes in North Portland and a sister group in the East part of town has another 4. While this is going on, lawyers with our group are actively working with the Sheriff and a federal judge to find legal avenues to issue a moratorium on evictions for the county, along the lines of what has happened in Atlanta and Minneapolis. The most important work we're doing, though, is the actual door-to-door work of talking to neighbors and fostering a sense of community resistance. We create events for community members to come together and discuss how empty homes depreciate their own home values, how gentrification divides neighborhoods and drives out the less affluent, and we try to get residents to feel more of a personal stake in how their neighborhoods will evolve and choose the direction they would like to see them grow in. One of the things we've heard again and again is that food independence should be a bigger part of neighborhood living so this Spring we're partnering with some urban farming cooperatives to open up more shared garden space and offer workshops and advice for those who are getting into gardening for the first time.
My other major interest is environmental conservation and addressing climate change. How that looks in my city is manyfold. The former mayor pushed a bill through city council last fall on his way out to add flouride chemicals to our water supply (one of the cleanest and most pure aquifers still existing), unsurprisingly the mayor now works for the industry consulting firm that pushed the measure and stands to profit handsomely from the fluoridation, and we had a massive signature drive in September to require that measure to come to a public vote this Spring. So we're rallying to get people to vote against the measure, just as they have the 3 other times this has come up in the past. Additionally, I work with a group that is trying to block the sale of our water supply to Nestle for bottling. While Nestle stands to profit quite a bit from this, the city and its residents would see no benefits from commodifying a resource that should be freely accessible to all. We're also rallying to block the expansion of a new bridge between Vancouver and Portland because it would expand the amount of cars coming into the city when the city's own green plan calls for a marked decrease in projects like this in favor of promoting more sustainable mass transit and bike options. I also coordinate with a group of environmentalists to block logging on federal lands and state parks so that future generations will have at least some idea of the vast richness of biodiversity that the Northwest is rightfully renowned for.
Those are the big two, but I'm also heavily involved in anti-oppression organizing against racist, sexist, homophobic and transphobic groups and people. I grew up in a very racist city with a large amount of Aryan Nation members and some of my earliest memories are of strangers spitting on my adopted sister because she came from a Korean family so I internalized the lesson at a very young age that hate speech needs to be fought against at every opportunity, that silence in the face of bigotry is tacit agreement with it, and that if we are to make the world a less hellish place then we need to actively call out oppressive behaviors when they occur. Oregon will have the chance to vote on marriage equality in the 2014 election and I'm excited to get involved in the push for legalizing gay marriage with my friend in the lavender caucus for the SEIU who is leading this campaign.
Wow. I just rambled a lot. Sorry, it's a topic I have a lot of passion about. I could go on for days so instead I'll just click Post.
