Tiny Group, Huge Impact

North Bay’s New Economy Working Solutions (NEWS) helps working families, by getting often-hostile factions to form coalitions and work together

by Mary Eisenhart

"Winning the Community Benefits Agreement from the SMART train transit district has really emboldened all of us. All of these groups have been working in these trenches for years. None of us would have been able to accomplish this alone, but having put together this very coherent entity — we’re on the map now. The policy-makers know us.” – Ben Boyce, NEWS

The old track still runs through downtown San Rafael

Getting the voters to pay for transit projects is often a hard sell. This November, when the voters in Sonoma and Marin Counties, north of San Francisco, go to the polls to decide whether to charge themselves a half-cent of additional sales tax to pay for the Sonoma Marin Area Rapid Transit (SMART) train, the measure they’re considering will enjoy unusually broad community support. Even from groups who are normally a little nervous about being in the same room with each other.

Say, major developers, workers’ rights advocates, union leaders, and environmentalists.

This is no accident. Because these groups and other local stakeholders figured out how to put aside their differences and work together on common goals, the transit plan incorporates a number of community-driven features that probably wouldn’t have come up otherwise.

Instrumental in building this consensus was Santa Rosa based New Economy Working Solutions (NEWS), a Rex grantee in 2003 and again in 2006. NEWS helped put together the Accountable Development Coalition of Sonoma County, which hammered out the agreements with the transit district in return for supporting the ballot measure.

“The SMART board’s political motive was to get all of these groups lined up endorsing the rail tax, which will be on the ballot in November,” says Ben Boyce, coordinator of NEWS' Living Wage Coalition. ”As a result of our involvement, the Santa Rosa SMART train station project is using union labor; it is using green building materials and techniques, and there’s going to be a very large affordable housing component, as well as a living wage requirement for commercial properties within that district. It’s like hitting the trifecta.”

Members of the Living Wage Coalition stand up
at a rally for the United Farm Workers

From Rex’s standpoint, as board member John Leopold explains (see sidebar: Rex Perspective), helping fund NEWS’s SMART train effort in 2006 was a sort of trifecta of its own. Rex originally gave a grant to NEWS in 2003 after Leopold, who’d been involved in similar efforts in Silicon Valley, heard about the Living Wage Coalition project. Since those days NEWS has racked up impressive achievements in the region, from helping pass living-wage ordinances in a growing number of cities to organizing community input in development projects. Most remarkable was its ability to bring disparate groups into coalitions around common interests. All in all, supporting NEWS allowed Rex to support multiple efforts with a single grant.

NEWS is a volunteer-based community organization with several hundred members. Founder Marty Bennett, a longtime labor activist and a history professor at Santa Rosa Junior College, and Boyce, a graduate of Sonoma State University’s master’s program in public policy studies, are the core staff. While Boyce is busy with alliance building, community organizing, and activism, Bennett’s responsible for research operations, which have so far resulted in the publication of three papers and numerous articles on subjects related to the regional economy.

A growing concern is that the North Bay’s economic growth is increasingly lopsided — a so-called “hourglass economy,” with growth in very high-paying jobs and very low-paying jobs, a vanishing middle class, and a general lack of economic sustainability. Addressing these issues led local groups from lobbying for living wage ordinances to the idea of “accountable development”: the notion that, if public funds are going to be used to fund or subsidize a project, it must truly benefit the entire community.

As early as 2000, Marty Bennett invoked the principle of accountable development in connection with the building of the Petaluma Sheraton, a nice hotel on a municipal marina for which the city was lending the developer millions in taxpayer redevelopment money. Bennett successfully persuaded the city council that in return for this largesse, the hotel jobs would pay living wage (so, after all, the workers wouldn’t be forced to get health care from the public sector at taxpayer expense), and the hotel would not oppose its employees’ efforts to organize. “As a result of that, we have a union hotel in Petaluma,” says Boyce.

Petaluma Sheraton worker

We were recently able to speak with Boyce about NEWS’s ongoing work, and in particular the real-life challenges and rewards of coalition-building.

Rex: For the benefit of those who are new to these issues, could you explain a bit about your work, and why it should concern everyone?

NEWS: We’re trying to challenge the assumptions that are condemning about a quarter of the population to low-wage jobs that typically don’t pay health-care benefits, that are very unstable, highly insecure, and don’t actually pay people’s bills. So people have to work two and three jobs and engage in lots of underground economic activity to make up the shortfall.

The NEWS director, Marty Bennett, has made it his mission to awaken policymakers and the citizenry to the growing crisis of the working poor — so they can make appropriate policy solutions for the problems generated by low-road economic development, which has been going on since the ’80s. We’re setting up demonstration projects, and showing people: “This is an alternative. This is what it could look like.”

NEWS founder Marty Bennett, speaking at the
Limits of Prosperity conference in 2005

Different models of economic development place different emphasis on the role of labor and the function of government in relationship to the role of public policy in regulating job markets. The currently dominant philosophy that’s coming out of Wall Street and out of the neoconservative movement is what we call the low-road economic strategy, or free-market fundamentalism, which basically regards labor as a cost center.

What we’re trying to do, at NEWS and with the Living Wage Coalition, is reframe the discussion and introduce people to what we call a high-road, sustainable economic development model, one that looks at labor as an investment; one that seeks public policy that provides incentives for companies and employers to create more good full-time jobs with health benefits, jobs that pay a self-sufficiency wage or a living wage.

We’re establishing a metric other than the minimum wage in order to talk about wages. As the comedian Chris Rock says, minimum wage means “If we could pay you less, we would.” That should not be the standard by which wages are measured. A more adequate standard is the self-sufficiency wage — what it takes to pay for food, gas, rent, basic expenses. That’s the living wage.

From a moral standpoint, paying a living wage is the right thing to do. We as a society have chosen to value work as a way of demonstrating commitment, by showing up and doing the work. There’s something morally odd about a situation in which people make that socially positive gesture, but it doesn’t pay off in terms of being able to support their family. This is not inevitable; this is not because it was decreed by the invisible hand of The Market, like a commandment from God; it’s the result of deliberate corporate decisions, which are then reinforced into the legal structure by their bought-and-paid political functionaries. The crisis of the working poor is a socio-economic phenomenon that we have the capacity to address through public policy.

In our view, the purpose of public policy is to set some kind of norms so it doesn’t become this kind of social Darwinist race to the bottom — particularly since the spread of this low-wage economy is actually reducing our total economic growth. The bottom end of the wage scale has been pretty much stagnant for decades, and increasingly that end of the population is not able to participate in wealth creation: they can’t save; they don’t have the money to spend on the plethora of consumer goods being produced.

Ben Boyce of NEWS addresses the Sonoma City Council

In areas where they’ve passed living wage or minimum wage laws, there’s a measurable uptick in local business activity because of increased disposable income for working people. We support creating this virtuous cycle of economic activity by raising the wage floor, as contrasted to creating a vicious cycle of working poverty through low-road wage and benefit policies.

Rex: There’s a strong presence of churches and religious groups in your coalitions, which some might find surprising.

NEWS: Part of that is the result of a conscious effort on our part, as there’s been a growing realization nationally that we need to bring back into the fold the progressive elements of the religious community.

The high-water mark of the progressive movement in this country was the civil rights era, when there was a deep involvement of the religious community. A number of things — not least of which was a sort of residual hostility on the part of a lot of secular activists toward religious expression — drove out of the movement what should be a natural ally.

This left the field open to the right, which has been vigorous in recruiting the evangelicals and the various conservative religious movements, even to causes that are contrary to their own constituents’ economic interests. So we’re making a deliberate effort to welcome and engage with the faith community.

Also, for us it’s a natural way to help create community support for low-wage workers, who in this area are mostly Latino and Catholic. One of the greatest sources of support for worker organizing we’ve had from the beginning has come from these Catholic social justice groups.

We’re currently supporting the drive to organize the health workers at Memorial Hospital in Santa Rosa. Many of these workers are Latinos, and some of them are parishioners at my church, St. Leo’s. St. Leo’s has also served as base for a local organizing drive for nursing home workers at the Sonoma Valley Health Center in Sonoma, and it gives these workers a great deal of comfort to know that the people who go to the same church they do and share their values are supporting them in their struggle to get representation.

Rally in support of union organizing efforts at Memorial Hospital
in Santa Rosa. Photo: Dogzen Arts

A lot of my colleagues who are what I call secular fundamentalists have this belief that they are oppressed if they have to hear religious language. What I explain to them is that they’re defining a public square in which the only way religious allies can enter is if they shed their religion when they walk in. Now, that’s not going to work, when in fact their primary motivation for being involved is that Moses and Jesus said that you need to help the poor. It’s not that you have to believe it yourself; it’s that you have to allow a space for them to express their engagement in the cause in a way that works for them.

Rex: How did the Accountable Development Coalition emerge?

NEWS: Over the last few years, the living wage movement has evolved to a broader agenda of accountable development: that public money should not be used to subsidize low-wage employment that benefits the owners of the business but has a deleterious effect on the rest of society by offloading their costs, in terms of the low wages and lack of health care benefits.

The thing about the use of public money is that you, we, as a citizen’s group, have standing to come before councils, boards and commissions and demand an accounting. There has to be some accountability for how this money is used. Literally tens of billions of dollars are given away every year under these redevelopment grants, and it’s typically a very shadowy, opaque process.

Two years ago, we joined forces with the North Bay Labor Council, the building trades, housing advocacy groups, environmental groups and others to form the Accountable Development Coalition of Sonoma County, looking at a broader picture of a sustainable and equitable economic development.

We wanted to find a project where we could interject ourselves early on and make a difference, because what normally happens is that people don’t get wind of things until they’re practically a done deal; by the time it’s been endorsed by the planning commission and approved by the city council, it’s too late. And people feel frustrated because their government is not responsive.

There was a $100 million project proposed for downtown Santa Rosa, revitalizing the downtown — the anchor depot for the SMART train. A couple members of our coalition were on the SMART train campaign committee, and they said, this is a project where we should get involved.

The old can become the new

So we got in early on. We lobbied the public officials involved, we held a number of forums and public events to educate people. As a result of close to a year and a half of lobbying work, public education, op-ed writing and lots of groundwork, our group was able to produce an excellent Community Benefits Agreement, or CBA.

For us it’s been very encouraging. It’s proof that this kind of coalition-building works.

Rex: And without that broad network of contacts, you wouldn’t have had allies on the SMART board giving you the heads-up.

NEWS: Exactly. I think it’s really emboldened all of us. All of these groups have been working in these trenches for years — the housing groups have been doing it, the Sierra Club and the environmental groups. None of us would have been able to accomplish this alone, but having put together this very coherent entity — we’re on the map now. The policy-makers know us.

We’re very disciplined; we all walk in, half a dozen of us, we’ll get our speaker cards all in a row, we’ll have caucused with each other so we don’t just get up there and rant about the same thing; each of us is touching on a different point. So they know that these guys mean business. We have material to give them; we’ll be lobbying them. We’ve become hard to escape (laughs) and that’s our goal.

Rex: What are the biggest challenges you face going forward?

NEWS: Currently we’re working to pass a living wage ordinance in Petaluma, which is going to mean negotiating with some of the council conservatives. That’s a difficult process, but I actually think we’re succeeding with that.

Our ultimate goal with that is to pass a countywide living wage ordinance; our biggest opposition in that comes from the Chambers of Commerce, who, at least on the national and state levels, if not the local levels, are dominated by free-market fundamentalists who are ideologically opposed to intervention in labor markets.

In terms of our accountable development work, it’s a constant challenge to hold the coalition together.

One of the places it’s easy for the coalition to break apart is between labor and the environmentalists. The people in the building council — they want to see construction going on. And there are certain elements in the environmental movement who, if it involves pouring concrete, they’re “agin’” it. And so our environmental allies kind of have to keep a wing of their own constituency in check.

What we’re trying to do is move away from this idea of environmentalism as preservationism, toward an idea that environmentalism is more of a strategy that involves what we call smart growth. As long as the population’s growing, there’s going to be growth; the real issue is if it’s going to be intelligently designed and economically viable.

We’re working as a coalition to try to encourage that city-center, infill kind of development, concentrating development along the 101 corridor. So we have our internal work of selling parts of the environmental community on this vision, as opposed to stopping everything they can, a strategy that has historically diminished their power. If people’s only options are unreasonable people who will oppose any project, no matter how socially valuable, or the right-wing guys who will approve it, you’re forcing people into their camp.

We need to provide an intelligent alternative that involves not just approving anything that comes along but looking at whether it meets certain criteria. We try to establish those criteria and make it part of the public conversation. I think that’s a real challenge for us.

Our internal meetings can be pretty fierce. But we try to iron it out behind the scenes so that when we do step forward publicly we’re speaking with a united voice.

Rex: How do you manage to get so much done with so little?

NEWS: Marty Bennett is a driven man. (laughs) He’s 24/7 and brings me along in tow. We have quite a bit of volunteer help; a number of members of the coalition put time and energy into helping us with our lobbying projects or helping us with our materials.

To really get up to speed we need to hire a Spanish-speaking organizer; that’s the missing piece for us organizationally. So much of our work in support of the low-wage worker organizing is with the Latino immigrant community, and it would be really good if we could get someone who’s bilingual and bicultural. I’m not that person.

And at some point we’d like to get a development director, or a consultant that we could hire, because it’s very time-consuming. Marty puts a lot of time into it and I help him, but the funding thing is a whole world in itself, and personally I prefer putting my energy into the organizing part rather than the fundraising.

Rex Board Perspective:
John Leopold

“In my personal experience, I have found that coalitions of interests working together to create community change make the most difference,” says board member John Leopold, who first brought NEWS to the Rex Foundation’s attention several years ago.

John had worked on living-wage issues with a group called Working Partnerships in Silicon Valley, and seen for himself the results that could be achieved when local community groups figured out common goals and worked together. Thus he was intrigued by the fledgling organization’s Living Wage Coalition of Sonoma project. NEWS was achieving remarkable results with very little — and, like many small grassroots groups in outlying areas, it faced a very uncertain future, to the point where a well-timed small grant from Rex could make the difference between surviving and not surviving.

“They were having a hard time getting the attention of funders,” John recalls, “because Sonoma County isn’t considered a major urban area; it wasn’t considered on the front line of the effort to change the way local government treated its workers, or the people it contracts with, their workers, or environmental concerns. But to me they were doing very interesting work. That was a good match with Rex, because so much of what we’ve funded in the past is activity that’s going to benefit many people, where our money can make a big difference, and maybe they haven’t attracted mainstream funding. I thought it was an excellent marriage of interests to create positive change for the community.”

At John’s suggestion, Rex made a grant to the Living Wage Coalition in 2003. Three years later, he says, NEWS’ success in putting together the Accountable Development Coalition and in winning major community benefits as part of the SMART train development were a perfect fit for more Rex support on several fronts. “What impressed me was that they were leveraging the work we had already funded,” he explains. ”They were bringing together the coalitions they had formed around the living wage campaign in Sonoma County to create a larger coalition around community benefits with this SMART train station: Environmental issues, human rights issues, worker rights issues, and transportation issues. Within the SMART train activity were issues we’d supported individually in the past, and here it was all wrapped together.”

The coalition NEWS has helped spearhead has not only produced some short-term victories for the community, says John; the entire process has served as a model for future collaborations. He says, “There are several benefits to the local area: the actual construction and jobs that are created; the environmentally friendly way it’s going to be created, which has a long-term community impact; the fact that everybody who works there is going to get paid a livable wage, that has ripples. But it also becomes an important activity for the community to say: These are the values we care about as a community. So when it’s building the next office park, the next highway or the next school, these are issues that have been identified and supported by a broad base in the community. The ripple effects are that it will affect other projects in the area that will hopefully impact lots of different people, outside the ones directly impacted by just this one train station.

“One of the interesting things that could potentially flow from this is that they’ve brought more people into the coalition around these issues. Once you’ve got a county supervisor who’s worked with this coalition on these various issues, when you come to them and say, now we’d like you to support a living wage initiative at the county level, they’ve already been won over. They’ve already supported that kind of activity, and that will make it a lot easier to leverage this kind of work to the next level of NEWS’s community work.

“To me, people working together is always more powerful than people working separately. When you’ve got, for example, the building trades and the environmentalists and the progressive students working together, you’ll be able to do a lot more things once people have the experience of working together. You’ll find a lot of common goals.”

Suggested Reading

Ben Boyce Recommends:

The Left Hand of God: Taking Our Country Back From the Religious Right, By Rabbi Michael Lerner

A look at the rift between the political left and the faith-based world, and how it might be mended.

The Great American Jobs Scam. By Greg LeRoy

An exposé of how vast sums of public money are handed out to developers in the name of jobs creation and other public benefits, and how little public benefit actually results.

“Maximum Support for Raising the Minimum”

Pew Research Center report on increasing bipartisan support for raising the minimum wage.

“Minimum Wage Lowest in 50 Years”

The federal minimum wage hasn’t been raised for nine years, a period in which Congress voted itself pay raises totaling close to $35,000 a year.

Darfur and the Nature of Giving

By David Large

The Bill Graham Award is designed to support groups that help children who are oppressed or are refugees. The recipient in 2005 was Mercy Corps. The money was earmarked specifically to support their work in the Darfur region of western Sudan where, under the pretext of suppressing an internal rebellion, government-backed militia units have massacred thousands of innocent civilians, and since 1993 the ongoing conflict between non-Arab rebel groups and the government forces has forced the displacement of an estimated 2.4 million Sudanese, many to over- crowded refugee camps in western Sudan and eastern Chad. (Link to more background information on the situation in Sudan.) Over the past year Mercy Corps staff in Darfur have been struggling to provide the refugees with clean water and rudimentary sanitation, and to provide basic schooling to refugee children and to train volunteer teachers and aid workers.

Rex staff recently talked with John Hanson, Mercy Corps Senior Program Officer for Africa about his organization’s efforts to alleviate this very grave and ongoing crisis.

Rex: How many Mercy Corps staff are currently working in the villages and refugee camps, and what are their primary goals?

Mercy Corps:We have a team of 16 international and 200 Sudanese staff working to provide clean water, prevent the spread of infectious diseases like malaria and distribute shelter materials to over 100,000 displaced persons. In West Darfur, Mercy Corps is providing educational supplies and services to over 16,000 war-affected children. We are constructing 180 temporary classrooms and rehabilitating 3 schools for the long term. We’re facilitating the training of 160 volunteer teachers and constructing 88 teacher accommodations. Our goal is to increase the number of war-affected children in school while improving the quality of education provided.

Rex: All the evidence seems to say that, in spite of its denials, the marauding militia is supported by the Sudanese government. What is your organization’s position on this, and if it is true, are your staff themselves in danger of government-sponsored reprisals?

Mercy Corps:Relief operations like this one always involve a certain amount of risk. Our staff knows that. At the same time, if we felt they were in serious danger we would take appropriate action. Our ability to operate in the area depends on the permission of the Sudanese government. Who is supporting whom in Darfur is a fluid debate. What is increasingly clear is that the various militia are increasingly undisciplined. The rebel movement has become severely fractured and the various factions are fighting deadly skirmishes against each other. It is highly questionable if militia once supported by the government can be effectively reigned in, assuming there is the will to do so. Humanitarian efforts have been harassed from militia on all sides of the conflict. Major supply routes have been cut for months and aid convoys frequently have come under attack. Aid workers have lost their lives in ambushes, land mine incidents and, quite recently, in a helicopter crash during an emergency evacuation.

Rex: The situation in Sudan continues to escalate on a daily basis with the recent incursions deep into Chad by the militia, the additional displacement of some 70,000 people as the result of renewed fighting between the government forces and the Darfurian rebels, proliferating banditry, and continuing attacks on civilians by the government-supported Janjaweed militia. How is it possible to carry on your humanitarian efforts in such a volatile and incendiary environment?

Mercy Corps: We are thankful that the camps in which we are working are in a relatively calm area, making it easier for our staff to operate and giving the displaced persons a shelter from the violence, hunger and disease that have forced them from their homes. Still, Darfur is a dangerous environment. We take the security of our staff very seriously and work to limit threats to their security though effective operating procedures and our strong relations with the UN, our government hosts and the communities we serve.

Rex: It’s easy for someone in the West to read about crises like this one and feel that the scope of the problem is so overwhelming that it’s hopeless. What do you say to someone who may ask “What good can my modest contribution do?”

Mercy Corps: One person can do a lot. Mercy Corps and other agencies depend on the contributions of concerned individuals and organizations. Even small donations add up. For example, $22 provides a sheet, a blanket and a woven plastic mat for a displaced person. Just $15 makes possible safe, clean water for one person. For even less money, we can purchase mosquito nets for 10 people, helping prevent the spread of malaria. Also, make your voice heard by decision-makers. Stay informed about the issue and contact your representatives in Congress to let them know you support continued US assistance for the African Union peace-keeping force and humanitarian aid.

Rex: In summary, what would you like visitors to the Rex Foundation’s web page to understand about Mercy Corps’ efforts in Darfur that they may not have appreciated before?

Mercy Corps: Maybe the most important thing is that, despite all the terrible things that have happened to them, the people of Darfur continue to have hope. They continue to look forward to a better future and a chance to rebuild their lives. Whether it’s families and neighbors making traditional music together or kids playing soccer outside their temporary classroom, the resilience and determination of these people is amazing. And Mercy Corps will continue to be there; helping them pull their lives back together and start the long road to recovery.

Rex Board Perspective

Rex’s support of Mercy Corps is a diversion from our tradition. In keeping with Rex’s founding principle of supporting community-based projects, we generally have not given grants to organizations with annual budgets exceeding one million dollars. The urgency of this problem was one factor in our decision. And, although Mercy Corps is a very large organization with a world-wide reach, a staff of several thousand, and an annual budget of approximately $150 million, our research indicated that this organization uses its money very effectively. John Leopold, the Rex board member who initially proposed Mercy Corps for this award, talked to many people working with various relief groups, and, based on a recommendation from the Executive Director of Seva, a long-time Rex grantee, contacted Mercy Corps. In his words:

"After contacting Mercy Corps I found that they were working in a region of Darfur that was not well served by other relief organizations. They had started their relief work in Sudan later than some other aid organizations and did not want to duplicate any other ongoing efforts.

“Their project focuses on helping create a space for children to play, to learn and to train parents and others to help them with psychological counseling. Although they received some funds from the U.S. AID program, their funding for the work in Darfur was dangerously close to running out. Our grant of $10,000 would enable Mercy Corps to continue running a worthwhile program that was under threat of closing for lack of funds. We earmarked our grant for this effort.

“As a relatively small foundation, Rex has always tried to support grassroots groups who have not received mainstream funding and to support organizations where our funds could play a critical role. This opportunity with Mercy Corps squarely fit these criteria.

“In addition to the funding, I hope that the award sparks recognition among the wider Rex community about the crisis in Darfur. Only by shining a light on this terrible situation will we be able to hold leaders accountable for working to end this human tragedy.”

While it would be natural to see the scope of the problem in Darfur as so enormous that Rex’s money looks like a very small drop in a very large bucket, John Hanson makes it clear that in fact here is a situation where, although the need is tremendous, even a few dollars really can make a difference. But the larger question of “why bother when my contribution is so small compared to the need” can be answered, we feel, even in those situations in which, unlike this one, a few dollars may not have a measurable impact. Humans are by their nature communal. By making a contribution, even a small one, we confirm our commitment to the community of man. And by contributing we strengthen our sense of self. We remind ourselves who we are, and what we believe in. This, we believe, gets to the true nature of giving.

Background information on the situation in Sudan

Food for Change

Buy Local, Buy Fresh at Oakland’s People’s Grocery
By David Large

"We envision a future model for the organization in which a farm and a grocery store work together as one whole. This will be an innovative model in reformulating the role of a grocery to become both a central hub of wellness services and of food systems localization."

Since the 1970s, many of us have come to think of more than taste and convenience in considering food — nutrition and health have also become key issues. But they're not the only added concerns.

In recent years, spurred by the growth of the organic food movement, the food supply system — where the food we eat comes from and who benefits from its production and sale — has been linked to the larger issues of community control, access, sustainability, and environmental health. Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, People’s Grocery, a Rex grantee in 2005, is at the forefront of this new consciousness.

Gathering spot near the People's Grocery chicken coop.

People’s Grocery is a community-based organization working to find creative solutions to the nutritional needs of Oakland’s residents by building a local food supply system and economy. Believing that “food justice” precedes food availability, they focus on the issues of food supply and quality as grassroots organizing tools for community building, self reliance, socially-responsible enterprise growth, youth entrepreneurship, sustainable agriculture, and health in the largely low-income community of West Oakland, an area currently served by 40 liquor stores but just one grocery.

People’s Grocery staff members grow produce in urban garden plots, then sell it out of a mobile market van that makes regular stops at local senior and community centers. They also operate an after-school snack program in 10 Oakland schools; they hire and train local youth to farm urban gardens and operate the market van, and to participate in interactive workshops for their peers on topics such as nutrition, food-related disease, and the health and environmental issues surrounding the fast-food industry.

Recently Rex talked with Brahm Ahmadi, who along with Malaika Edwards and Leander Sellers founded People’s Grocery in 2003.

Brahm Ahmadi

Rex: What was your initial inspiration for this project, and why did you choose West Oakland?

PG: Two other local residents and I started People’s Grocery after observing that limited access to nutritious and affordable foods in the West Oakland community was having significant impacts on the health and quality of life of its low-income residents. Seeking to stem the tide of diet-related chronic diseases in our community, we developed People’s Grocery to address local food security and related health issues, while also addressing the local need for economic development and youth training and employment.

My personal inspiration for launching People’s Grocery was rooted in a desire to shift away from a type of activism that was focused on fighting against problems rather than working for solutions. I was burning out from a model of confrontational activism that seldom had tangible results. I wanted to do something that had results I could see and feel and point at. Working around food seemed an obvious choice.

I also wanted to transform my lifestyle to live healthier and be closer to the basic elements of the planet: land, food and water. My inspiration also evolved out of interests in the subjects of community economic development, cooperative business and economics, urban planning and sustainable agriculture.

Rex: Could you envision having People’s Grocery in other communities? If so, what factors would you consider in deciding whether or not to pursue involvement in a given community?

PG: Although the staff and board of People’s Grocery have discussed the subject of expansion/replication, we have not felt that this is really a relevant concern for the current stage of the organization. People’s Grocery is still a small organization with limited capacity. And while we are building our capacity at an accelerated rate, the needs in West Oakland alone require everything the organization is able to muster. This will likely continue to be the case for a while and we are committed to ensuring that we establish a strong foundation for change in this community before considering any expansion.

Also, it is not a value of ours to replicate ourselves in the traditional franchise sense. Rather, we believe in honoring each community's autonomy and unique characteristics that derive from place, culture, history and local sensibilities. Thus, if we ever choose to pursue expanding our efforts beyond our community, we will utilize an approach that adapts our model to the unique needs and ideas of those locations.

We also value community control and would not want to pursue creating a national organization, but rather a type of cooperative network of autonomous entities working together.

People's Grocery staff.

Rex: How do you acquire plots of land suitable for urban gardening?

PG: We gain access to all of the land we farm through partnerships. We partner with residents, organizations and schools to establish gardens. Partnering saves money and brings value to the garden through greater capacity. Our current partnerships are with the North Oakland Land Trust, the local YMCA, Spiral Gardens, Ralph Bunche Middle School and Sustainable Agriculture Education (SAGE).

The fact that we don’t own any of the land we work is a vulnerability — we are always at risk of losing land in the future. The North Oakland Land Trust does, fortunately, present the opportunity for some long-term security, and we are interested in expanding the land trust model to ensure the longevity and continuity of our urban gardens.

Rex: What do you think helped influence both the younger and older members of the community to want healthier foods rather than the “junk food” they had been buying before? Why is this happening now rather than before People’s Grocery got involved?

PG: People want to have healthier lifestyles for one primary reason: to avoid suffering for themselves and their families. West Oakland is a community that has been severely impacted by chronic disease. Heart disease is currently the # 1 killer, with diabetes coming in second. We believe an epidemic of diet-related diseases is devastating this and many other communities.
This experience, coupled with an increasing number of efforts to educate people about healthy eating, is resulting in a shift in low-income consumers’ attitudes. This shift is also associated with an emerging desire to experience a higher quality of life through proactive measures. We categorize these consumers as the “emergent shoppers,” which means that many low-income people are at a threshold for changing their lifestyles and desire a healthier, more active and vital way of living.

Every low-income person carries core aspirations for a better life. Diet, healthy eating and expanded food choices are being recognized as legitimate ways of achieving this.

Another significant factor here in West Oakland has been the reaction against local liquor stores, which culminated in the burning of two stores. These events made it publicly acceptable to criticize the prevalence of unhealthy food sources and demand better ones. While little has transpired on the side of city government in response to this, non-profit organizations such as People’s Grocery are seizing the newly opened door to engage in a conversation about changing the way people eat and live.

People's Grocery staff in the mobile market van, which sells fresh produce at local community and senior centers.

Rex: Your promotional materials make it clear that your work is about much more than just “better eating,” that the inadequacies of the local food supply become a symbol for much larger issues of community-building and self-esteem, of “food justice” and personal growth for young people. Can you elaborate on how you see these issues connected?

PG: The modern industrial food system is replete with social and economic inequities that disproportionately impact poor people on both ends of the food chain: producers and consumers.

The perpetuation of cheap prices for global food commodities is inherently dependent on government subsidies and the exploitation of human labor. The working conditions of global food production are often inhumane and deplorable. For those of us here in California, the sight of immigrant laborers working in difficult conditions is not uncommon. The current model of food production depends on cheap labor precipitated by unjust production practices.

Simultaneously, here in the U.S., there is severe inequity in the distribution of food, to the extent that many low-income communities, urban and rural alike, are faced with severe limitations in accessing better food. Across the entire country hundreds of communities have the same experience: too few outlets for quality, fresh foods, too many outlets of liquor, candy, and unhealthy, processed foods.

With severely limited access to healthier foods, poor people have little choice but to consume foods that are low in nutrition, high in saturated fats and sugar, and loaded with synthetic chemicals. The result is an epidemic of diet-related chronic diseases such as obesity, heart disease, diabetes, stroke, kidney disease, infertility, and cancers.

Because People’s Grocery understands the dynamic of inequity and social injustice in the industrial food system, we insert social justice and human rights at the center of our movement for change in the food system. From this understanding comes the concept of “food justice” — the belief that all people, regardless of social and economic constraints, have a right to access to healthy foods at all times.

The organic food industry has arisen in astounding success in response to the environmental destruction precipitated by industrialized agriculture. This is a necessary and important movement. However, organic foods are not easily available or affordable to many poorer consumers. Thus, we are beginning to see a two-tiered food system in which the affluent have access to healthy and high quality foods, while the poor only have poor quality and unhealthy foods.

The food justice movement is a response to this development in the organic food system — while we support the growth of organic and sustainably produced foods, we want to ensure that social justice is also central to the production model so that both workers and poor consumers benefit from the organic industry’s growth.

Finally, food justice is an approach grounded in traditions of grassroots organizing that are linked to many social justice movements across the world. Food justice is an approach to change that places those most affected by the problems at the center of leadership and voice. Thus change comes from the grassroots level and is not led by external entities using charity models that do not facilitate self-reliance over time. The inclusion of poor people, especially youth, in building a more just food system is the best approach for creating long-lasting solutions.

People's Grocery has regularly scheduled work days in its gardens, and community members are invited to come and help out.

Rex: What have been the most challenging issues you have faced in getting your organization to where it is now?

PG: There are three primary challenges we have faced: funding, staff and knowledge.
As with most nonprofits, the staff of People’s Grocery is constantly faced with the anxiety of having to maintain funding. Over the last several years the organization’s growth has really strained the fundraising abilities of its founders. Periodic layoffs and suspension of programs have occurred. Yet the organization continues to survive and show promise for gaining a stronger financial footing in the future.

The problem of finding, recruiting and retaining quality workers has also been a challenge.
The final challenge of knowledge has been related to the staff and board, and the founders in particular having to constantly learn new systems and techniques relevant to the new stages of growth of the organization. For example, the founders are activists with no background in business. The learning curve has been steep and holds the prospect of continuing to be steep for quite a while.

Rex: Where do you hope to go next with the project?

PG: People’s Grocery’s mission is to build a local food system that improves the health and economy of the West Oakland community. Our primary strategy for creating a local food system is to grow a chain of production, distribution, and educational activities into an integrated network.

The future goals of the organization are to engage in activities that are spread out across the entire food chain. On the one hand we will increasingly become a producer of food by developing urban gardens and micro-farms in the local area. Eventually we hope to develop a larger farm that can make direct linkages back to our activities in West Oakland. And on the other hand the organization will increasingly become a low-cost distributor and retailer of healthy foods in West Oakland. This will primarily take the shape of a cooperative grocery store and wellness village in which food is placed at the center of personal and community health.

We envision a future model for the organization in which a farm and a grocery store work together as one whole. This will be an innovative model in reformulating the role of a grocery to become both a central hub of wellness services and of food systems localization. The grocery and farm together will become a model for how a new food system might look — one in which there is a closer relationship between the producers and consumers of food in a local region. And all of this will be supported by a foundation of education and social marketing focused on engaging residents in transforming their lifestyles towards healthier living and engaging them as participants in forming a local food supply system.

Rex: What else would you like our readers to know about the issues facing the West Oakland community?

PG: An important challenge facing the West Oakland community right now is gentrification — the influx of more affluent populations drawn to the community for its rising real estate values and its ideal location. While an influx of more affluent populations will strengthen the economy and facilitate much-needed development, it also poses the risk of displacing many low-income residents who cannot afford to live in these new conditions.

The challenge before us is to facilitate community development that celebrates and welcomes the new residents while ensuring that existing residents are also honored and included. Our hope is that West Oakland’s future is one of true multiculturalism in which all residents of diverse backgrounds can live productively together. Such a vision has many positive attributes for a future food system in which all cultural traditions are honored.

People's Grocery mobile market worker Aswad, with kids of PG staff members.

Aswad, working the mobile market van out of a park in Oakland, pats two little kids on the head as they pick up two bags of organically grown corn chips. He’s 27, with two young children, and was formerly unemployed. Now he’s “the man” for those kids, and for the adults that he hopes will follow this day.

His enthusiasm for the work is infectious. When we asked him what he has gotten out of his work with People’s Grocery, he responded, “Getting close to the earth and helping people get better food is good, and I’ve learned to focus.”
Aswad is just one of several young people in West Oakland that this organization has helped as they in turn help their community.

"Every low-income person carries core aspirations for a better life. Diet, healthy eating and expanded food choices are being recognized as legitimate ways of achieving this."

Additional Resources
To learn more about the environmental, health and economic implications of our corn and petroleum-based industrial food system, we recommend Michael Polllan’s excellent book The Omnivore’s Dilemma (The Penguin Press, 2006).

Another great read is Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser (Houghton Mifflin, 2001).
To find markets nearest you that specialize in locally produced, fresh foods, go to http://www.ams.usda.gov/farmersmarketsfarmersmarkets.

For a quick guide on how to eat right, and other interesting articles on related subjects, see the "Eating Smart" section on Time's Web site.

Buying produce that is in season is always preferable to buying items shipped from distant growers. Search the Internet for a seasonality chart that applies to your area: for northern California go to www.cuesa.org/seasonality.

Other recent Rex grantees that have food-related programs are NextCourse (2006), Organic Farming Research Foundation (2005), Sustainable Fishery Advocates (2005), Californians for GE-Free Agriculture (2005), and Community Harvest (2005). Descriptions of these programs and others can be found on the Rex Web page under the “Grants and Awards” link.

"The current model of food production depends on cheap labor precipitated by unjust production practices."

Rex Board Perspective
The idea to fund People’s Grocery came from Sandy Sohcot, Rex’s Executive Director, who says:
“I first heard about People’s Grocery about a year ago. A friend and I were discussing various issues related to providing greater accessibility to healthy food. At the time I was talking about my daughter Hilary's work in the Bayview/Hunters Point district of San Francisco in conjunction with her Community Fellowship work at the Coro Center for Civic Leadership. Hilary's project involved analyzing why there were not more food choices in these communities and identifying strategies for increasing access to healthy food. As a Commissioner on the San Francisco Human Rights Commission, I was also interested in this issue. As I related this to my friend, she suggested checking out People's Grocery as an example of a community-based program addressing these issues.

“With this introduction, I did my own research, including talking with people who were familiar with the program from their own funding research and work in Oakland. It became clear to me that People’s Grocery was a program that was doing work consistent with the Rex Foundation’s mission.”

Rex believes that the “food justice” movement has legs. Programs like that of People’s Grocery are springing up in communities all over the world. The author Michael Pollan (see above) explains it this way: “…food is a powerful metaphor for a great many of the values to which people feel globalization poses a threat, including the distinctiveness of local cultures and identities, the survival of local landscapes, and biodiversity.” We’re glad to have had the opportunity to make a contribution to this movement.

Rex Foundation has something to blog about

Welcome to the Rex Foundation blog. We will be posting information about our grantees, the events we are presenting, the musicians and artists that support our efforts and other thought-provoking news. We hope you enjoy reading about our work, get in touch with us about being involved and encourage others to do the same.