E2. Front Line Community Green

At the Coalition of Communities of Color, we understand that the tools we use to build systems are just as important as the systems themselves. 

That’s why, we’re excited to announce the 19 community-based organizations who are joining CCC, along with our partners at the City and County, in the Modernized Anti-Racist Data Ecosystems (MADE) for Health Justice initiative.

Our Partners: APANO, Cascade AIDS Project, Coalition of Community Health Clinics, Community Energy Project, Familias en Acción, Hacienda CDC, IRCO, Latino Network, NAYA, Nesika Wilamut, Oregon Health Equity Alliance, Oregon Pacific Islander Coalition, Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility, Street Roots, suma, Urban League, Unite Oregon, Verde, Voz

We are thrilled to work with so many partners representing communities most impacted by climate change. A big thank you to all everyone who joined us at our kick-off earlier this fall!

In November, we had the pleasure of hosting the MADE for Health Justice team from the de Beaumont Foundation, who is coordinating and collaborating with us on this opportunity. We are grateful for their partnership and look forward to continuing to work together in the future.

Dear friend,

As always near the end of the year, there’s a strong urge to get through the remaining weeks of 2023 as quickly as we can with little time for reflection or action. This season, I invite you to slow down from the end-of-year rush and keep your attention on the ongoing events in communities, near and far. 

Below, you’ll learn important news about our changing government in Portland and an exciting new update for our health and climate initiative to create a community-driven data ecosystem. 

At the same time, we also want to take a moment to hold space for the innocent lives of Palestinians and Israelis suffering an onslaught of horrific violence, death, and destruction. At CCC, we unequivocally condemn this violence and call for an immediate end to it through a ceasefire. We urge you to join us on this call. 

We don’t take this stance as foreign policy experts, but as human beings committed to fighting against injustice, anytime, anywhere. 

We encourage you to read our full statement as well as this blog post from the Othering & Belonging Institute to learn more.

This season, I’m remembering all that we have confronted and overcome. Generations of sacrifice, hard work, courage, and resilience have brought us together. Generations more will bring us forward. But only when we act.

I am grateful to be in this work with you.

Warm Regards,

Marcus C. Mundy, Executive Director

Read our full statement on gaza Important Updates for New Portland Gov., Launching Jan 1. 2025

Last November, CCC worked to pass a historic ballot measure to transform the City of Portland’s form of government and elections. We are continuing our work to support a successful transition to a city government that serves Portlanders equitably. Key updates on the transition include:

• The City Council approved a new organizational chart that shows how the city’s services will be organized under the voter-approved charter reform. 

• As part of the recent changes, a non-elected City Administrator will be appointed to oversee the management of the city's bureaus and services. The primary focus of the Mayor and City Council will now be on developing policy and addressing broader issues.

• The new form of government also establishes six service areas, including Budget and Finance, City Operations, Community and Economic Development, Public Safety, Vibrant Communities, and Public Work

• The City of Portland has released an annual report of their work to date where you can read more in depth about the key decisions that have been made thus far, from changes to the salaries of elected officials to the newly formed City Council districts. You can find which City Council district you are a part of at PortlandMaps.org.

• Want to learn more? Sign up for updates from the City of Portland!

Kicking off MADE for Health Justice

Thank you to our partners for joining us at our October kickoff meeting!

At CCC, we understand that the tools we use to build systems are just as important as the systems themselves. 

Today, we’re excited to announce the 19 community-based organizations that are joining CCC and our partners at the City and County in the Modernized Anti-Racist Data Ecosystems (MADE) for Health Justice initiative!

This new collaborative multi-year project is set to establish a health and climate data ecosystem that is built by and for our communities. We are thrilled to work with so many partners representing communities most impacted by climate change.

Our Partners: APANO, Cascade AIDS Project, Coalition of Community Health Clinics, Community Energy Project, Familias en Acció, Hacienda CDC, IRCO, Latino Network, NAYA, Nesika Wilamut, Oregon Health Equity Alliance, Oregon Pacific Islander Coalition, Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility, Street Roots, suma, Urban League of Portland, Unite Oregon, Verde, Voz

Learn more about MADE for Health Justice

Our Statement on the Israel/Palestine Conflict: The Violence Must End

The Coalition of Communities of Color unequivocally condemns the violence, death, and destruction that has been visited upon innocent Israelis and Palestinians.

We also acknowledge the historical power imbalance that has been responsible for perpetuating the conditions of Palestinian suffering over the past several decades.

We may not be experts on these larger forces and history, but we are all humans, all with a moral code. Our mission, while local, urges us to speak out against the oppression, injustice, and horrific violence, including the indiscriminate bombing and siege of Gazan individuals, families, and children.

To that end, we wish to share the words of our colleagues at the Othering and Belonging Institute, helmed by the eminent scholar dr. john powell:

As Palestinians suffer under collective punishment and Gaza is made increasingly unrecognizable and uninhabitable, and Jews suffer from the attacks and worry about loved ones taken as pawns in a political fight, we as a society will also be unrecognizable to future generations if we do not stand up for Palestinian and Jewish humanity and our shared, unequivocal right to belong without othering.

We urge you to read the complete statement from the Othering and Belonging Institute here, which lays out the complex but always critical issues that will begin to direct decision-makers into better next steps.

We, along with millions of others, call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and release of all hostages, and it is incumbent on our congressional delegation to hear the voices of their constituents and join this call to end the violence.

This message is shared on behalf of the Coalition of Communities of Color and does not necessarily reflect the views of all of our members.

 Calls to action:

• Read “We Belong to Each Other: A Call To End the Violence” from the Othering and Belonging Institute

• Sign on to the letter from Jewish Voices for Peace Portland calling for a ceasefire

• Contact your representatives in Congress and urge them to end the violence in Gaza now

 

 Updated November 29: CCC initially neglected to call for the release of all hostages and have updated our statement to include this demand. We deeply regret this oversight and thank the community member who drew this to our attention.

This past spring I was part of a two person delegation of GGJ members to the first ever International English Language Course on Political Training for Political Educators outside of Sao Paolo, Brazil. The 6-week course was coordinated by the Landless Workers Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra [the MST]) at their national school for political education, Escola Nacional Florestan Fernandes (ENFF). I came as a representative of the Vermont Workers’ Center, and was among 60 participants from 47 organizations and 17 countries. Most organizations were members of La Via Campesina, an international organization primarily dedicated to the issues of peasant movements around the world and food sovereignty (GGJ is a member).  Organizations ranges from small farmer movements in Zimbabwe to organizations that work with adavasi (indigenous) movements in India to South African trade unionists to members of the Kurdish liberation struggle to a leftwing Mexican youth organization.

ENFF is the flagship school of the MST. Since their founding 31 years ago, the MST has been committed to political education (or formação in Portuguese). They have schools dedicated to political education in all 23 Brazilian states where they have a presence. ENFF was built 11 years with the volunteer labor of over 1,000 MST members and many other supporters of the movement. It is a gorgeous campus, populated with vibrant flowers, inspiring revolutionary murals made by each class that had passed through there, beautiful architecture, small plots of food productions, and a design that emphasized communal space (a small plaza in the middle of a cluster of dormitories, with benches and a gazebo; the courtyard where we held our daily misticas; the open verandas where we had cultural nights, celebrations, etc., on both stories of the building that held the kitchen, cafeteria, and a small store with MST products). There was also an incredible library that held thousands of books on various subjects, from the history of revolutionary struggles around the world to social theory to agroecology (mostly in Portuguese and Spanish). The MST leaders at the school described ENFF as the “patrimony of the international working class.”

The school was coordinated and “staffed” by a brigade of 40 MST members who took 4 month shifts to help run the logistics and programming of the school. Like all groupings in the MST, they had a name and slogan: “Apolônio de Carvalho,” named after an important Brazilian socialist. To facilitate the functioning of the school, all students were expected to do “militant work,” volunteer labor to support the day-to-day needs of the school community. I was on the coffee team that set up and cleaned up for the multiple coffee breaks through the “school day.” Other militant work ranged from the production team that helped produce and harvest the food grown on campus; a childcare team; a cultural team that helped plan the “cultural nights,” helped with the programming for the campus radio station; collective laundry; cleaning up after meals. Militant work is a central part of the pedagogy of the MST, partly around wanting to put intellectual labor alongside other forms of labor and also as part of creating new social relations, where labor is about meeting collective needs and is not performed because of coercion.

We had classes 6 days per week. Every day began with a 10-20 minute long “mistica,” planned by each of us in our small groups (“nucleos do base” [NB’s]) and by other NB. Mistica both describes a particular activity and a broader concept. The activity is usually a short “performance” that tells a particular story about a particular struggle, while projecting a vision of the future. I put “performance” in quotes because the MST is emphatic that it is not “theater,” but rather an expression of reality as we experience it. Mistica incorporates symbols, music, art, movement, “acting,” participation by “spectators.” One of the misticas my NB planned conveyed the intersection of patriarchy, dispossession, and capitalism. One of the ones that Daryl (the other GGJ representative) and his group prepared conveyed the patterns of state violence around the world and their link to imperialism.

Many MST movement elders attribute mistica as the primary reason they’re still in the movement. It’s spiritual and intellectual sustenance, and stretches minds and hearts in preparation for the activity of the day, Mistica also described the overall “spirit” or “expression” of a group of people, the outward expression of collective revolutionary spirit.

An MST member riding with me and another classmate to the airport at the end of the program commented that our class seemed to have a very beautiful mistica. There were songs that were our songs (some people brought from their movements, others that were brand new and composed spontaneously); chants that were ours; countless manifestations of a profound camaraderie formed through intense, emotional learning together, sharing and hearing each other’s stories, working together, traveling together during the intensive “field week,” celebrating together during various cultural nights and late night festivities.

The coursework itself was incredible. The MST sees left theory as a living body of theory, and draws heavily from the Marxist Leninist tradition. Some of the more interesting courses were on the history and development of imperialism, the reproduction of capital in agriculture, a great session on gender, political organization, and popular education. There was quite a lot of healthy debate on organizational form, the role of the state, the legacy of colonialism and the persistence of racism, the dynamics between the old hegemonic imperial nations and the newly industrializing “BRICS” countries that increasingly play out imperial relations on a more regional level.

I learned an incredible amount about social movements in Brazil and around the world. From the MST, we learned about their incredible dynamic relationship between organizational form, strategy, and tactics. Their process of land takeovers entailed setting up an incredibly cooperative mini-society of several hundred families, a “movement baptism” that created the conditions for embodying radical new forms of human relations. The MST doesn’t actually legally exist in Brazil, and many of the movements represented there were very suspicious of the growth of World Bank and foundation-funded Non-Governmental Organizations and Non Profit Organization (seeing with incredibly clarity the ways in which they coopt movements and movement leaders).

One of the profound lessons for me was on the meaning of true internationalism and solidarity. The MST is in a very challenging moment in Brazil’s political and economic history: the ruling Workers Party has betrayed many of its original principles to the whims of international finance capital; the right wing is mobilizing larger crowds than have been seen in decades. Yet, instead of turning inwards, they continue to launch programs like this training, have helped started countless other movements around the Brazil, and remain committed to the development of an international revolutionary social force. In fact, I believe that’s exactly what see as necessary in this context, rather than turning inwards.

It’s hard to some up any one main takeaway from that 6 weeks. I’m incredibly inspired to be personally connected 60 people fighting in inspiration liberation struggles around the world. I’m inspired by the deep and broad commitment to political education and leadership development. I’m deeply moved by the way in which the MST both fights for total social transformation while building the new social right now. And I’m so impressed with the many examples of the ways in which strategy flows from a profound and sharp assessment of the objective and subjective conditions during this phase of advanced capitalism.