Housing Justice Academy Sparks a Fire!

For the last several months the American Friends Service Committee has been working hard alongside Occupy Our Homes Atlanta to bring struggling homeowners, tenants, and housing justice organizers from around the south east together for a crash course in how to spark local housing justice groups.

Leading up to the academy there were several visits to communities all over Florida and Tennessee to build moment for the academy and build capacity to do housing justice work in the South.

The Academy was held last month and brought folks from all over the south to participate in an intensive three day curriculum designed to arm people with all the tools to build a thriving  housing justice movement in their communities. It was especially exciting to have multiple residents prepared to launch local campaigns around their own housing struggles.

On day one we focused mainly on political education and leadership development through storytelling exercises. We also facilitated an amazing interactive step by step tour through the  housing justice campaign model we've developed over the last two years that has lead to dozens of local victories.

On day two we focused on nonviolent direct action training and took a field trip the Martin Luther King Center for Nonviolent Social Change.


Day there was on the job training as we took to Senator Johnny Isakson's office to demand that he not block a vote to confirm a permanent director for the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) which oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.  Read more about the action here.

After the action we had a graduation ceremony. Since the academy there has been a lot of exciting of developments with graduates. There's been a recent launch of Occupy homes Florida, Occupy Our Home Orlando, and Occupy Chattanooga continues to build momentum around their multiple housing justice campaigns, they also had some great press converge of the academy; click here to see!

As we continue to see thousands of people in our communities left behind in a housing recovery that sees the overwhelming percentage of empty homes, homes lost by real people, bought up by private equity firms with the intention of securitizing the rental market, it's exciting to see new energy organized to take back our homes one house at a time.

We simply can no longer afford to allow the same small group of people to treat the most basic necessities of survival as a way to extract wealth from those that have so little. We simply can no longer afford to see the ratio of homeless people to grow far beyond the number of abandoned housing units. We simply can't afford the ever decreasing number of affordable housing dwellings in our communities. We know there are enough resources in this country to provide a place to call home for all of us.

Don't Break Our Hearts

What social program is most important to you? Will your heart break if the U.S. slashes its funding in order to continue to pay for a bloated Pentagon budget?












Over the last 24 hours a number of community groups around the country have hand made valentine cards to Obama challenging him to cut the pentagon budget, not programs of social uplift. I've included a few of those pictures here, but you can see them all by clicking onto this link.

With all the talk of fiscal cliffs and tightening budgets when one actually looks at the federal discretionary budget there's a clear cruel irony; we are not broke.

That's right, there's actually plenty of resources to go around. The crisis we face isn't one of economic resources, it's a crisis of economic priority, and there are all to many examples.

When the economy crashed in 2008, largely in part to irresponsible, greedy banking practices that put 10 million homeowners out of their homes, how did the federal government respond? They said the banks are too big to fail and bailed them out to the tune of 800 billion. On top of the 800 billion the federal reserve began to give the big banks no interest loans totally 16 trillion dollars...16 trillion! That's enough to buy every American a home free and clear!

Have banks been held accountable for their irresponsible, felony fraud, a fraud that costs 10 million Americans and counting their homes? No, in fact they were rewarded.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan alone have cost over 1 trillion dollars and done nothing to make the world safer. Every dollar spent on that war should be seen as a robbery from our communities. Every multi-million dollar drone dropping million dollar missiles killing poor people abroad represents another school closing, another defunded social program, another debate about whether or not we should provide food assistance to folks who are struggling in the worst economy in 80 years.


There is no fiscal cliff, it's a moral one. Martin Luther King once said that a country that year after year spends more money on the military then it does on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. I often Wonder how Dr. King would react to our current budget priorities if he were alive today.

 

Be The Change Tour Day 5: Atlanta

So every good thing must come to an end, and I must say that although I was pretty tired rolling into Atlanta, I was also pretty sad that the tour was coming to an end.

I do want to take one more opportunity to speak to how moved I was to get to see AAC perform over and over again. Each poet on the tour poured so much heart, talent, and emotion into their performances. I'm sure everyone has their personal favorite piece to the performance. I really thought Tameka Dean was all sunshine during her, "Reintroduction" piece, Paul Grigsby was heartachingly heartful during his, "Mic Stand Revolution", and Mike Scott knocked the crowd out everyday with, "TV Box".

Anyway, back to our last stop, Atlanta. Thatnks to Dawn Gibson we ended up at the speakers auditorium in the student center at GSU. Awesome space!

Turnout was good with members of campus groups including, Progressive Student Alliance, MESPA, Amnesty International at GSU, Georgia Students for Public Higher Education, CaribSA, and community groups including Cop Watch, Food Not Bombs, the International Action Center, and many others also came out.

The discussion after the performances was lively and insightful, students and community members took turns pointing out the connectings between various systems of oppression and economic exploitation. We then discussed several helpful models for community organizing, campaign development, and movement/issue cross pollenation.

I should mentioned that Eldon Baines, The Dalton State Student that organized our stop there and organized peers to ride up to Atlanta for the Board of Regents meeting the past Wednesday, showed up in a velvet blazer. Eldon was asked to share his experience at the board of Regent meeting to the group, I've posted some of Eldon's reflections on the meeting in below blog posts.

I was happy to see so many people from the audience networking after we ended the program.

Everyone was invited to join us for dinner, after which we all were faced with the tough job of saying goodbye:(

But no real goodbyes. Be The Change Tour was actually just a pilot. A chance to get the performance out in front of folks, and explore what the talk back session should look like. All of us on the tour felt the experiement we really well. So we'll be developing a new audio visial component to the tour, some new companion literature, changing up the talk back session, and hitting the road in a much bigger way next fall......anyone wanna help book a tour stop in you town, or on you campus???

I wanted to give a special thanks to John Reynolds, who jumped on the tour very last minute, volunteering to take pictures, record video, and just help out in general. We would have no picture, and the tour would have been much more difficult with out John, thanks dude!

Check out Johns Site: curiousjohn.com

Here's some footage from the GSU event:




Tim Franzen
American Friends Service Committee

A Day at the King Center

As part of our ongoing "Be the Change" curriculum at the Horizon's school AFSC organized a field trip to the King Center where students where able to walk through the museum that lays down a basic time-line of Martin Luther King's life, legacy, and highlights other important factors of the civil rights movement.
Students also learned about the role that young people played in the civil rights movement and we explored much or the unrealized work of Dr. King and his contemporaries around poverty and militarism, work that is still sadly relevant today.

After spending time in the museum we headed to the theater for a screening of "A New Time, A New Voice", which was a 30 minute retrospective on King's life. Many of the Horizons students expressed feeling deeply effected by the film, one 10th grader stated, "I've always known that Dr.King was part of something important, but I never had any idea of the sacrifices folks made in that(civil rights) struggle. I had no idea it was that hard."

After the film we spent some time around Coretta Scott King and Dr. King's tomb and we went inside the Freedom center where there are rooms devoted to Rosa Parks, M.K. Gandhi, Dr. King, and Coretta Scott King.

We're looking forward to processing the experience further with students as we begin to explore modern movements in the south.


Tim Franzen
American Friends Service Committee

The King Center Shifting Focus Towards Local Grassroots work!!

AFSC has a deep connection with Dr, Martin Luther Kings work. It was AFSC that set up and financed a tour of India for Coretta Scott and Dr. King to meet with folks that had worked directly with Gandhi. It was AFSC that first published the famous, "Letter From a Birmingham Jail" and distributed it nationally. It was AFSC that nominated Dr. King for his nobel peace prize. It was AFSC that built the King family a retreat center in North Carolina that Dr. King never got to set foot into as a result of his assassination.
I can honestly say that my choice to pursue employment at AFSC was greatly influenced by the historical connection to Dr. King. His writings have extremely influential and have played a major role in my personal and professional evolution. So I was surprised to discover, after I accepted the job at AFSC Atlanta, that we had really no connection at all to the King Center. In fact in one takes a tour of the King center they would really see or read nothing of AFSC. I've often browsed the King Centers website looking for ways that AFSC could plug into something the King Center is working on.
Finally, the opportunity came! Jeremy Foreman, a staffer from Hands On Southeast Georgia and follow GPJC member, suggested that the King Center sponsor a workshop for our upcoming "Be the Change" Youth Convergence. This of course made perfect sense because the grounding text for the workshop is Dr. King's "Beyond Vietnam" speech. Jeremy had been working with the King Center and was willing to help me make the initial contact.
The King center invited me to participate in a two day Kingian Nonviolence Education training which is part of their "Beloved Community Network" project. In an effort to combat the obvious institutional racism that we live with today the King Center is trying to train hundreds of potential trainers that will be sent out to community centers, high risk schools, and Churches in an effort to institutionalize nonviolence. The Beloved Community, as Dr. King defined it, is a global vision, an all-inclusive spirit of sisterhood and brotherhood, where people can share in the wealth of the Earth. In the Beloved Community, poverty, hunger, racism,violence, and homelessness will not be tolerated because international standards of decency will not allow it.
While at the training I was able to meet trainers that were at the last stage of the training, preparing to use what they has learned to reach out to their communities. There were former Atlanta gang members, felons, members of the clergy. There were a few dozen Nigerians, some of whom were former warlords that had grown heartsick of war and violent conflict resolution.
The workshop taught Kingian nonviolent conflict resolution as a practical alternative to violent resolution.
The workshop facilitated by Dr. Benard LaFayette, who has been a hero of mine every since I started studying King. Dr. LaFayette was a co-founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee(SNCC), a leader of the Nashville Movement, and the Freedom Rides. I had the opportunity to spend one of the breaks talking with him and I learned that he actually used to work for AFSC. He told me that AFSC actually got him involved in the peace movement and proceeded to swap a few AFSC stories with me! Pretty amazing!

Charles Alphin also facilitated portions of the workshop. His story was pretty compelling. He was a police captain in St Louis for 26 years and used to write off Dr. King's nonviolence as a waste of time. In fact he admits to teaching, encouraging, and participating in many violent actions that he's ashamed of. In the late 70's he met Dr. LaFayette and had a convergence experience, retired from the force and at the request of Mrs Coretta Scott King moved his family to Atlanta and eventually became the Director of Education and Training for the King Center.
There was a last minute presentation at the training by CT Vivian! Another giant of the civil right movement. He helped found the Nashville Christian Leadership Conference, and helped organize the first sit-ins in Nashville in 1960 and the first civil rights march in 1961. Vivian rode the first "Freedom Bus" into Jackson, Mississippi, and went on to work alongside Martin Luther King Jr., James Bevel, Diane Nash, and others on SCLC's Executive Staff in Birmingham, Selma, Chicago, Nashville, the March on Washington; Danville, Virginia, and St. Augustine, Florida. Some claim that the St. Augustine campaign helped lead to the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, and Vivian's role in it was honored when he returned to the city in 2008 to dedicate a Freedom Trail of historic sites of the Civil Rights Movement.

During the summer following the Selma Movement, Vivian conceived and directed an educational program, Vision, and put 702 Alabama students in college with scholarships (this program later became Upward Bound). His 1970 Black Power and the American Myth was the first book on the Civil Rights Movement by a member of Martin Luther King's staff. I note all that just to give an idea of what is was like to be in such an intimate setting with these folks, these living breathing history volumes.
So the King Center is currectly looking into the possibility of sponsoring a workshop at thei years, "Be the Change" and AFSC Atlanta is looking at the possibility of getting some of our folks to participate in the Kingian Nonviolence trainings that are coming up some...let me know if you're interested.


Tim Franzen
American Friends Service Committee