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Where APEN works: Richmond and Oakland EJ Communities

Richmond is home to a large Southeast Asian refugee population
Also home to the largest stationary polluter in the state (in GHG emissions), superfund sites, and heavy industry
Oakland is home to a historic Chinatown, an Asian American enclave under high displacement pressure and surrounded by 3 polluting freeways

Start with org intro. Grassroots organizing, basebuilding, has led into policy and voter engagement campaigns, driven by our community members.

APEN started organizing with LOP and AYA back in mid 1990s. Multilingual warning system flagship campaign to ensure Richmond’s diverse communities at the MINIMUM have info about what’s happening to them. But shifting from info sharing - to sharing power and decision making. At the root of EJ is being able to make decisions about our resources and systems that directly impact our lives.

Oakland - began organizing with working class Chinese American immigrants in early 2000s who were facing evictions, polluting and dangerous rental situations and factory-setting workplaces. Fighting big oil and coal across the board, while advancing climate resilience solutions in place that address health, housing, public safety, and justice.

Expanding to LA’s South Bay this year! To also work with API communities impacted by the fossil fuel industry and port of LA.

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August 14, 2020

September 24, 2020

September 14, 2020

August 14, 2020

August 15, 2020

September 29, 2020

Photo Credit: David McNew / Getty Images

Bay Area context: not used to regular heat, but EJ communities do face regular pollution and climate threats. But when a disaster hits, climate change is a risk multiplier - has cascading effects on our systems and infrastructure, and our health.
Very little AC, but very old, leaky housing. Senior and pops on fixed incomes. Still urban heat island affect/limited green space in urban EJ communities.
Consequences of an extractive economy where profit rules over people and planet:
Resilience is the solution, and it has be intersectional and layered
Traditional models of crisis response, however, are proving deeply inadequate: they are coordinated through militarized entities like Sheriff’s depts; they rely upon protocols like evacuating to faraway sites; they share alerts in only one or two languages; they require people to present ID to access services. These policies collectively shutting out many people from the support they need.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/07/19/as-temperatures-rise-cooling-centers-present-an-obstacle-during-a-pandemic/

Scott Strenfel, PG&E’s head of meteorology and fire science: “We’re seeing four extremes … extremely high winds, extremely low humidity, extreme dry fuels due to the hottest average temperatures over the last six months according to records that go back 126 years, and extreme drought across the territory given lack of rainfall.”

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COMMUNITY RESILIENCE

How do we get from previous slide to this vision:

Resilience is a big umbrella - and supporting resilience means investing into a community before, during, and after (over a long time). Opportunity for repair and justice given historic disinvestment. Includes technology and infrastructure that moves us away from fossil fuels, but also address the needs of a community in a well rounded way - a healthy way to get around, healthy/safe space to gather and connect and build social cohesion, and healthy/safe/stable housing to stay rooted over time and have a sense of home and belonging that helps people build social connections and political power to keep fighting for change.
The image on the left is from our partners at CEJA as part of their work on Transformative Climate Communities and gives us one picture of what resilient communities look like - put together by members and member orgs
In the long-term, resilience is fundamentally about building power and addressing underlying systemic inequalities that are oppressing low-income communities and communities of color
defines what kinds of partnership and values underpinning those partnerships are needed.
De-silo: example of member-led bill that was intersectional to look at targeted clean energy, weatherization, health, and tenant protections

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RYSE as a Liberatory Hub

RYSE

Village

Health Justice Center

RYSE as a Liberation and Climate Resilience Hub

Community violence response and care (funerals, vigils, partner/systems coordination, resource support)
Climate Crisis response (relief efforts, clean air during Chevron explosion and wildfire season)
Political/Organizing + Power Building (winning Kids First and the ORESJ)
COVID Community Care launched during the Pandemic (coordination, direct disbursements, education, etc)
A space for art, healing, and community transformation.

Community Care + People Power!

RYSE was born from the imagination and organizing of young people in Richmond. Twenty years ago, after a string of youth homicides near Richmond High School, students came together to address the violence and lack of safety at school and in the larger community: They held vigils and forums, and later, formed the RYSE Youth Center.

Over the years, RYSE became a sanctuary where young people could express themselves creatively, find resources in times of crisis, and organize to build their collective power. Young people have held funerals and vigils at RYSE. During refinery fires and wildfires, it’s been a refuge where young people could organize and distribute relief supplies.

In many ways, RYSE was a ‘resilience hub’ long before the term was popularized–a community space that people know and trust, where they can find resources and organize in times of disaster.

Center to Commons campus. 6k square foot to 45k sq foot with enough solar and battery back up power to power all of its need on site for normal operations.

APEN partnership to add climate to the overall resilience and liberation hub.

TBD: process to determine

What’s the infrastructure, materials, policies, staffing, partnerships, governance, etc. needed to expand/deepen this and how young people can play a leadership role in supporting their community

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Community Resilience Hubs: RYSE Youth Center

Leverage established and trusted community and public facilities
Foster community governance, collaboration, skills building, and leadership development
Integrate workforce development strategies to create high road jobs
Target benefits to disadvantaged and vulnerable communities

Resilience hubs:

Speaker: Shina: Climate Resilience and Liberation Hub

Physical, emotional, political safety

Physical for individual and community
Emotional: is it for them and their families? Is it healing? Responsive? Does it reflect priorities?
Political: do they have an impact? Connected to something larger than themselves? Are there leadership opportunities?

Justice framework for resilience hub, and RYSE calls it a Liberation Hub. based on trust, and being rooted in place. Relationships built before and during climate and other emergencies, with strong foundation to build growing resilience over time through the experience and lessons of activating the hubs in partnership with community members that use it.

Deeper model than pop-up cooling centers, for example. A long-term investment in the health and well-being of a community in the face of rapid and intense change.

Story of the RYSE Center is becoming the RYSE Commons from vision to reality (photos)

2017-2018 youth and staff dream and envision what RYSE Commons could be in a series of ideation sessions, workshops, and focus groups
2018-2019 early architect concepts and designs based on youth and staff input. APEN supports thinking about the climate resilience components and growing shared leadership around the resilience features
2020-2021: APEN goes deeper in community workshops to design the climate pieces hub - focusing on solar and storage. and fundraising ramped up! Landed grants and funds necessary for initial PV and battery system that meet the demands of RYSE and APEN youth. Engaged youth in an RFP process to find the solar and battery installer.
2022 RYSE Commons becomes a reality. The original Center’s building is renovated, there’s a brand new building on site, and outdoor space features. Additional features include youth-driven aspects like meditation garden, teaching kitchen, computer lab, art space (where we wanted to put the battery as an educational piece), theater - need art and places of expression to decompress and deal with stressful emergency situations, or life in Richmond
Liberation Hub. Features: deep organizing, building social resilience daily

safety

Physical
Emotional - sense of belonging, welcoming, can they bring family/loved ones they trust the place, know the staff, speak same language (even if culturally)
Political - sense of being connected to something bigger than oneself, the possibility to affect change

solar and storage that will power critical loads. And this infrastructure will continue to be guided by the youth as we support the creation of a Youth Advisory Body. to learn about how the solar+storage operates when the grid is down, prioritize what supplies are needed when the hub is activated, guide investments into future use based on the potential revenue/bill savings from the system, what training is needed for staff and youth members
and in the future expand to food resilience and medicine with the garden and health clinic/wellness center as part of RYSE Commons that may feature additional solar+storage

For the community = has to be co-designed by community

For example, RYSE is setting up a Youth Advisory Board so that RYSE and APEN youth (aka Richmond youth) can continue to make decisions about the hub and learn how to govern it over time. They will get to determine how to reinvest bill savings or any funds generated from the solar and battery system back into programs on site or in the neighborhood.

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RYSE Youth Center

Process of community design and engagement

2 years of design consultation for the renovation in general, another 2 for the resilience pieces and getting the capital. A lot goes into bottom-up project planning.
Samples from youth workshops, scenario planning (jamboards) - how we prioritized what the critical loads were, the needs to have and what’s nice to have

Resilience and energy 101 curriculum and workshops, including (boxes image) how energy grid works. We are hoping some folks will be interested in clean energy careers
Designing surveys about what climate/natural disasters were they most concerned about, how prepared folks felt, and what they would want to see in terms of support and services at a hub. Trained the youth to create the surveys. They then conducted these surveys amongst peers - did presentations to their classes, etc. Ended up getting 150 surveys completed from highschoolers across the city.

90% very or somewhat excited about a resilience hub in their neighborhood
Top needs at the resilience hub:

Wifi: 119
Phone charging stations: 101
Access Water/food: 110
Personal Protection Equipment (masks, hand sanitizer, etc): 97
Supportive staff: 95
Outdoor and indoor activities (art rooms, sports, library): 91
Air filtration
Refrigeration
First aid
Variety of trainings: Emergency response training, de-escalation training, tech (comp and energy), and know your rights - want to build skills

PSE, supported more technical conversations with the youth to help understand the concept of critical loads, determine what are the critical loads based on considerations about how long a power outage might last, different climate emergency scenarios, the likelihood of them, how much power a solar system sized to the 2 roofs could power.

Helped even determine what questions to ask and at what step of the process.
And how to balance design demands with political and regulatory landscape that we’re working within
PSE helped provide guidance/comparisons based on their expertise about the size of battery needed for various resilience scenarios - and how much that should cost. Helped us navigate grant partnership offers and make decisions between partners that wanted a project in an EJ community but weren’t willing to deeply invest, vs ways to fundraise to cover the full cost of system while supporting organizing, while not taking on too much work of the technical partner’s vision - being able to find funding and stay rooted
Projects like this need timelines that support reciprocal and trusting collaborations where everyone involved can make informed decisions
Extended timeline also made it more challenging for TA bc designs and estimates changed over time. For a nonprofit/CBO with limited resources, was important to get help to keep updating the potential for solar and storage and work with CBO staff to understand that -and have multiple staff in the loop instead of just one point person, better for buy in and decision making and capacity building
Luckily, with PSE, we have 3 year funded partnership, offered an extension, Lots of pivots to make this happen during pandemic.

Additional partners/tech specs:

RYSE used NMTC for capital project/construction
CEG - feasibility studies/initial analyses
PSE -
PSEF - non extractive loan financing
Private foundations for the organizing
BUT state programs like the CDFA and SGC CRCs have been pushed to be flexible sources of funding that do include staff time to have community processes, variety of resilience solutions - not just energy

Places of worship might be primed for these as places of shelter or sanctuary on the regs and in times of all kinds of community crises

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Continuing Community-Based Resilience Advocacy

Slide focus: ongoing resilience advocacy, lessons from how the different sites approach fundraising, local and state budget processes to close the gap. Working with a public site is more challenging due to power differentials (CBO vs a city in decision making, even though we are not in opposition, but not as much accountability, transparency, space to bring in TA partners that are aligned vs city’s own pre-chosen consultants). Timelines for implementation with a public site are also extreme. Can share a 27 year timeline released last week.

But opportunity to serve that many more people - don’t have to be members of anything except that community. Opportunity to go big - do all the things that folks need when a climate emergency hits, while involving them in the solution and supporting their capacity to be community leaders in the fields of organizing, health, clean energy, public safety.

Open to learning how to have a multisectoral partnership in stronger ways - state gov, local gov, community, and scientists that are driven by the on the ground expertise and needs of community while building community capacity to engage.

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Lincoln Resilience and Recreation Center

Speaker: Shina

Lincoln Rec project: the “pearl” of CT. has been a welcoming hub for generations of new immigrants, and folks who attend now can say grandparents got support and connect at the rec center. Place to connect across generations, 7 days a week. Info hub in-language, culturally competent space for info sharing in height of pandemic, broke isolation, and continues to be safe haven in time when much of CT is fearful of anti-asian violence.

A hub of stability in a rapidly changing neighborhood. Although it faces high environmental and socioeconomic burdens, 5000 new housing units have been built in the last several years, some luxury apartments. The center already hosts 1000 visitors a day, from pre-schoolers to octagenarians. It IS the playground for the local downtown school that doens’t have it’s own space. It is the cultural center for tai chi, dancing, music, It is the gathering spot for young people across Chinatown and downtown and West Oakland to get together to play basketball and make friendships. This growing, diverse community deserves investments into its center of gravity to thrive through these changes and storms.

Community is fired up about seeing its remodel into a climate resilience and recreation hub, possibilities for training and more skills and leadership for folks who want to take up action and be connectors in emergencies. Again, looking for a collective response that helps them build their own capacity over time and connect to each other.

Community engagement in even shaping resilience hub programs and investments at the state and local level

Resilience hubs that are already tangible and well loved community institutions leads to really powerful testimony and advocacy, and a clear vision for what folks want to see supported in an emergency. Able to galvanize friends, neighbors, other organizations in the Chinatown community. Makes the state programs stronger, less siloed, and a model for grassroots policy.

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Community wins decades in the making

https://www.friendsoflincolnsquarepark.org/blog/plansandpromises

APEN has been supporting the fundraising a community vision to see this rec center turn into a climate resilience hub. Recent big win from the CDFA CRC program - that we made sure to advocate for at the state level - to ensure CRCs not just fairgrounds are invested in.

Were denied state funding support despite historic surplus in 2021-2022 budget. But our advocacy and deep community support caught the eye of federal reps - won $2M in earmarked funding. Parks and Rec, local budget from infrastructure bonds. Deep learning about multiple sources of public funding - even though APEN itself only familiar with private foundations.

Fund the organizing and the community-level, grassroots forces that can see this through the right way. Work in coalition across levels of governance to create opportunities and draw down resources, while proving concepts and showing ‘decision makers’ what can be done.

And it will TAKE TIME. to win the programs, to pull together a team and create buy in and clear roles for grant applications/funding sources. For the utilities to approve interconnection (esp in neglected EJ communities) - a whole other story.

We can’t wait for any more studies about climate, we know and we live the harm. It’s time to build the new.

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