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The U.S. energy industry in 2020: though the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic showed up, renewables resources showed out. Here’s the latest update from ILSR’s Energy Democracy Initiative.… Read More

Jess Del Fiacco is joined by Christopher Mitchell and Christopher Ali, Associate Professor at the University of Virginia. Their conversation focuses around the idea of what it means to be local during a time when more and more pieces of our lives are shifting online. … Read More

The Institute for Local Self- Reliance and Zero Waste USA have just sent a letter to ask President Biden and Vice President Harris to establish policies and programs for waste reduction, reuse, recycling and composting that will stem climate disruption, address racial justice, and create thousands of jobs throughout the country. … Read More

The Future Energy Jobs Act, passed in 2016, is a comprehensive bill that established Illinois’s community solar program and a commitment to expand access to solar for low- and moderate-income residents.… Read More

The role of the ReUse Corridor has been to reverse the traditional linear investment in solid waste management that drains the potential resources of the Appalachian Region. Centered on the eight counties surrounding Athens (Hopkins County) in southern Ohio, including communities in Kentucky and West Virginia, the strength of the ReUse Corridor concept and practice is to restore access to and control over the resources that are now filling up local landfills and incinerators at great cost.

The Zero Waste program is based on sharing facilities, transportation and market information for recyclable and compostable materials and repaired products.… Read More

From local government officials to philanthropic stakeholders to Living Cities staff, this story is one in a series that demonstrates the impact Living Cities has across the U.S. — connecting individuals and highlighting successful initiatives.

Dr. Lomax R. Campbell

Director of the Mayor’s Office of Community Wealth Building in the City of Rochester, New York

I’ve grown into my role as Director of the Mayor’s Office of Community Wealth Building in the City of Rochester with Living Cities by my side. Having an Office of Community Wealth Building isn’t common in city government, we are doing something that is counter-cultural to the system by embedding equity across all of our work here in Rochester.

My team is responsible for collaborating with a diverse array of community partners to build an entrepreneurial ecosystem that fosters communal wealth and helps our citizens thrive. By having the opportunity to be a part of Living Cities’ fifth City Accelerator cohort, I was able to grow and learn alongside other city government officials and share in experiences and successes. Thanks to City Accelerator, I also attended the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond’s Undoing Racism® Community Organizing workshop, which provides framing that helps connect city leaders to the framework that is required to undo structural and systemic racism.

We’re trying to shift entire cultures of multiple organizations across communities — that requires significant trust.

We’re trying to shift entire cultures of multiple organizations across communities — that requires significant trust. And trust is gained by proving that progress is happening toward community goals, by having externally funded initiatives that are less susceptible to political influence and through nimble initiatives that can show progress within a short period of time.

Together, we’re learning to be agents of change within city government and to build competencies and better understand how to leverage our power to shift systemic inequities.

Living Cities joins the more than 500 philanthropic leaders who have committed to building multi-racial solidarity and shifting funding to communities of color, including Asian-American Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities, to help dismantle white supremacy and all forms of oppression. 

We mourn the deaths of Soon Chung Park, Hyun Jung Grant, Suncha Kim, Yong Yue, Delaina Ashley Yaun, Paul Andre Michels, Xiaojie Tan, and Daoyou Feng. And we acknowledge the ongoing pain, grief, anger and fear that is being felt within AAPI communities over the last year and beyond, due to the ongoing manifestations of racist hate and violence across the country.  

In honor of those lost last week and to our ongoing belief that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, we are republishing this blog from two Living Cities staff members, Hafizah Omar and Crystal Li. The blog explores the practice of solidarity in the mutual struggle against anti-Black racism and white supremacy. And, we have included updated list of resources at the end for making sense of and responding to the recent shootings in Atlanta. 

This piece was originally published on August 6, 2020.

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We’re at a turning point in American history. More people are waking up and understanding that we have never had a fair and just system that served everyone. People of color, especially Black people, have always been left out. Now more than ever, we need to all have frank discussions on how we can continue supporting the Black Lives Matter movement.

At Living Cities, one way we do this is through our Employee Resource Groups (ERGs), where staff can come together across self-identified categories to reflect on their collective history and support each other to be anti-racist. Our Asian ERG has had multiple gut-wrenching discussions on how we’ve internalized white supremacy in our culture and how we have to actively fight against anti-Blackness within our communities. We believe that in these extraordinary times, a racist system that has tricked a large percentage of the Asian community into complacency, has finally been exposed. Now is the time to come together with other historically disenfranchised groups to combat white supremacist culture.

The complacency began around the 80’s when it seemed like racism against Asians disappeared and the group became the “model minority.” The community as a whole was being praised for keeping their head down, working hard and studying hard– it was the “Asian success story.” However, this sudden change in the system was for a nefarious purpose. That term was coined in 1966, at the height of the civil rights movement, to drive a wedge between Asians and Blacks who were fighting for equal rights. Specifically, the term suggested that Asians were succeeding because of their strong cultural and education values without the help of the system, even though they experienced discrimination as well such as the Japanese internment camps. In actuality, Brown University economist Nathaniel Hilger said in his 2016 research paper that “Asians used to be paid like Blacks but between 1940 and 1970, they started to get paid like whites.” Because white people were a little less racist against Asians, they gave Asians more opportunity in the workplace.

While some touted the pandemic as a “great equalizer,” it is readily apparent that all is not equal, and that uprooting an inequitable system must be our mutual struggle.

Fast forward to today. From the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Asian community has been reliving the past when they were considered the “yellow peril”. The community became a target for our President, who incited discrimination and xenophobia by calling COVID-19 the “Chinese virus” and “Kung-flu”. The “model minority” was no more, and a rapid rise in hate crimes targeted the entire Asian community. However, as the COVID-19 death toll rose, we saw even more the entrenched impact of systematic racism, as non-white communities were shown to be especially hard hit. As of June 24, APM Research Lab found that the COVID-19 mortality rate for Black Americans is 2.3 times as high as the rate for Whites, and 2.2 times as high as the Latinx rate. When we disaggregate the data for Asians, we see that the Filipino community, as a result of American imperialism during the 1900s, has a high percentage of healthcare workers and in some states medical personnel account for as many as 20% of known coronavirus cases. So while some touted the pandemic as a “great equalizer,” it is readily apparent that all is not equal, and that uprooting an inequitable system must be our mutual struggle.

Being in true solidarity is an ongoing practice, not just during moments of crisis.

Solidarity is a verb. It means taking action and being in daily practice. Building solidarity must first begin with building relationships. Being in true solidarity is an ongoing practice, not just during moments of crisis. However, when you are in a relationship with each other, during moments of crisis, you can mobilize quicker because there is already the trust. We both live in Queens and have seen mutual aid networks established quickly in response to the pandemic, in part because communities have been building relationships prior to this crisis. When the uprising happened in response to George Floyd’s brutal murder, the same networks and community organizations were able to come together and do ongoing political education, jail support and mobilizing people to be out in the streets. For Asian communities, witnessing the Hmong officer standing silently as George Floyd was murdered by a fellow officer, we are reminded of the very real violence of aligning with whiteness instead of our mutual struggle for liberation.

Our ERG hosted a space for our non-Black POC colleagues to continue talking about how we might stand in solidarity with Black people in this moment. We discussed the questions laid out in this post and reflected on how an allyship model takes away from being in solidarity towards our mutual struggle. What came out of the conversation underscored the importance of building transformative and trusted relationships.

We want to share two models of solidarity that resonated with us:

• Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM)’s model of transformative solidarity asks us to think about what power we want to actually shift when thinking about solidarity.
• The BIPOC Project’s Principles of Building Solidarity lays out concrete actions that we can start doing: decolonize stories, develop a power analysis, uplift Native and Black humanity, organize your people, build intergroup connections and relationships and commit to personal and collective healing.

This is the time to come together, understanding that the struggles we all face is rooted in white supremacy and a racist system that targets us all. Rather than giving in to the hateful rhetoric that is meant to divide us and pit us against each other, let us lift up each other and continue on this journey together. There are many ways to be involved:

• Organize, organize, organize! Talk to your family and friends about how white supremacy and anti-Blackness shows up in your community.
• Interrogate the networks and circles you are part of and build transformative relationships with your co-strugglers
• Learn more about the history of indigenous people and Black people in this country
• Support Black owned businesses
• Share stories uplifting Black and Asian solidarity.
• Challenge hateful rhetoric between our communities.

We all need to do our part. Just like anti-racism is a daily practice, solidarity is a practice too.

Resources:

• Washington Post: The Real Secret to Asian American Success Was Not Education
• Why We Must Talk About the Asian American Story Too
• Asian American Racial Justice Toolkit
• Asian American Feminist Antibodies: Care In the Time of Coronavirus
• “Similar to Times of War”: The Staggering Toll of COVID-19 on Filipino Health Care Workers

Additional Resources, Updated March 2021:

• War, Violence, and the Exploitation of Girls, Women and Feminized Trans & Gender-Nonconforming Persons: Connecting to the Mass Shooting in Atlanta
• The Answer to Anti-Asian Racism Is Not More Policing
• Statement from Red Canary Song after Atlanta
• Lecture: Tamara Nopper on Anti-Asian Violence and Black-Asian Solidarity Today

Title art by Landon Sheely, from Just Seeds

Susan R. Holmberg is Senior Editor and Researcher on the Independent Business team. She manages the program research and publications and writes on corporate power, small businesses, and inequality. Holmberg co-authored, with ILSR co-director Stacy Mitchell, the ground-breaking essay “Why … Read More

In the Minnesota Reformer, ILSR Co-Director and Director of the Energy Democracy Initiative John Farrell writes about how Minnesota state regulators need to enact stricter rules and regulations on gas monopolies.… Read More

The disaster in Texas resulting from an electric grid that was deliberately left exposed and likely to fail in rare cold weather events has received a lot of dramatic coverage, as well it should given the loss of life and damage to so many homes and businesses. It also raised some questions regarding competition and designing markets. … Read More