At the beginning of May, the Peace Center had the opportunity to have a conversation with two organizers with local grassroots group, Concord Communities Alliance (CCA). CCA works with the community to advocate for better affordability, livability, sustainability, and resident empowerment for the most vulnerable. They assert that ALL residents of Concord should be able to comfortably live, work and raise a family there.
Recently, they have been focusing their efforts on supporting those who have been most impacted by COVID-19 – in particular their immigrant and houseless communities. In our conversation, Kenji and Ady touched on the roots of the group, details of recent efforts, and ways the public can join to support them! As a completely volunteer-run operation, every little bit helps!
Peace Center (PC): How did Concord Communities Alliance come together?
KENJI:
The group grew out of my campaign for city council which came from the need to advance the priority and the policies of the city of Concord for vulnerable people. There is a lot that phrase means but there were a lot of us who felt the city was not putting adequate priority on the needs of the most vulnerable residents – our neighbors and some of us ourselves in various ways. For that reason, we wanted to get as politically organized and efficient and focused as we could be in our efforts to influence policy. Part of that was for me to run for city council and while I did not win – we moved on to continue advocating for the same issues of which my candidacy was only just a part, so we formed this organization, CCA.
The plural in that name, communities, is deliberate because the idea of it is that we want to connect many groups of people in the city of Concord who share these values of making sure that those who are most vulnerable are taken into account most highly and their needs are given the greatest consideration by our city government.
PC: Can you walk me through your strategy as a group?
ADY:
I would think that our approach is very similar to other movements that are out there. It is people power, it’s engaging people’s voices in a way where everybody has something to say and we all listen and sometimes these ideas get mushed together and we take actions collectively, and sometimes things move so fast and some people contribute more than others, and that’s okay. Often we split up roles. Kenji is so good at working down complex policies so we can address them properly. Something that sounds so basic to us, might actually be more complex from a city council perspective because the bureaucracy is so horrible. We really try to work together to help each other out and work to our skills and strengths while building new ones.
PC: What do you think is the greatest need in the city of Concord?
ADY:
In terms of biggest needs right now, I would say there are two. One is our immigrant community that are not getting stimulus checks or don’t qualify for certain services like unemployment. They are our most vulnerable community and a big portion of them are not working right now due to the stay at home orders. They are tremendously impacted right now and luckily we have organizations like Monument Impact and the Monument Crisis Center that are providing them with the resources they need, but that does not mean everyone can get to that or that they have enough for everybody. We need to do a lot to make sure their needs are met.
Our other priority is our unhoused population. Our unhoused population doesn’t have anywhere to isolate. It can be hard to get food to them as well as get them resources like hand-washing stations. One reason is because sometimes the city doesn’t have the resources. Would they like to? Yes. Are they allocating some of their resources to something they could cut a little bit to address this issue a little better? I think they can. I recognize that [the pandemic] has impacted our government’s ability to function as well as it needs to, which is only going to make it harder for community groups like us to mobilize them to do what we need them to do.
PC: What sort of pushback has your group faced in doing this work?
KENJI:
In issues we face regarding our Concord residents without homes, certainly the police are often involved, sometimes they are stuck in the middle between competing demands – and I do have empathy for the situations that officers and the police department find themselves in. There are some genuine concerns about the proximity of homeless people to people with homes, including trash and some, I emphasize some, people without homes have commited thefts from time to time. When these thefts occur it is obviously a legitimate grievance and we do recognize there are some legitimate concerns. Unfortunately they also get mixed up with excessive tactics of sweepings, policies, and acts of police that leads people to nowhere they may legally sleep. The pushback we get sometimes is driven by some legitimate concerns and we do not want to be dismissive of that but we are looking for a balance where everyone can live decently. Everyone, without exception. And that is a hard balance to find.
PC: How can people in the community who maybe are just now hearing about you best support your work?
KENJI:
So, for our Concord focused things one call to action we often put out is to communicate with city council and that has the most weight when it comes from Concord residents. It doesn’t have to be Concord residents of course you know what one city does in this region affects others. That’s a big one. If people have Facebook if they follow our Facebook page we put out a lot of calls to action there. I think that’s the main thing for people that want to help from afar.
ADY:
I think there are different ways to help. One is definitely social media. We always need people to share the work that we’re doing because that’s going to give us some visibility and whether it’s impacting someone in the moment it’s like “Oh I learned about that city that was doing it. They had successes and now that knowledge exists out there.” Coverage like this interview will be able to exist our there as a resource for others in the future.
The other thing is if people have the ability to donate! Right now we are focused on helping our on houseless neighbors. We want to get them bottles of water, masks, bottles of hand sanitizer, because they don’t have hand washing stations. We want them to have trash cans where they can put things and have it safely removed. There are also many small actions that can be extremely impactful, especially if you don’t have a lot of time to commit.
We can match people to skills! We need people to write press releases on the fly. We need someone to share things on social media and with others. We can do it, but we’re also doing so much. It helps if someone has two hours and they can knock out a press release in that week and that’s all they did. I mean that’s huge for us. Sometimes it’s just to design an image or get it prepped for social media to use. Everything helps!
PC: What other groups that you have been working with and have been allies in the Monument and Concord area?
KENJ: Monument Impact (MI) is an organization in the Monument community of Concord, where I live, where I ran for council and have a long history with. They have been around for over a decade and they do a lot of direct service to particularly immigrant families. They aren’t so focused on homeless residents, but more on immigrants in Monument and Concord. They do a lot of good direct service work like getting people money to pay rent, getting people food, getting people jobs, the access to gainful employment and the ability to seek it. CCA is not directly connected with MI as such, a lot of individuals in CCA have worked with MI, as you know a lot of us are involved in a lot of different groups. And that’s why there is a plural on CCA. We all come to this group, having been involved in a lot of other groups. Part of the concept of CCA is that we do not go behind those affiliations and involvements, we come together into coordinated action.
PC: What advice would you have for someone wanting to get involved in this kind of work, either with your group or in their own community?
KENJI:
Influencing your city government is a lot easier when you’re a resident in that city and you know it sounds pretty obvious when you say it but I think a lot of people who have values that they feel their city government is not adequately prioritizing don’t realize how much strength their voice has saying that you know “I’m a Lafayette resident” to Lafayette city council. Especially if you can get five other Lafayette residents to come make comments to your city council saying “We’re residents here”. If you want to advance the values of and prioritize the needs of vulnerable people—look first to the government of your own city. That’s where your voice can carry the most weight.
ADY:
What people also need when going into this work is a lot of compassion, a lot of time, and a lot of patience when working with other people. People from different backgrounds will want to support your work and you have to find a productive way to work with everybody and learn to uplift everyone’s voice. That’s not easy to do and it can’t be self serving. This really has to come from a place of wanting to uplift other people and I think that’s where our government fails. We don’t have enough people like Kenji, who are pretty selfless in this work. A lot of us should acknowledge that we come from positions of privilege and even as people of color we have some privilege we can use to uplift others.
We take a lot of pride that we’re just community residents with some expertise here and there that have come together and we feel like our voices are being heard. People know where we come from and what our values are. We wont barter, we stay firm and we will bridge other people to back us up. We won’t shy away from intimidation and from people that tell us no, we can’t do it, it can’t be done. There’s always a way, we just might have to wait a little bit longer and keep pushing. We’re very lucky to have that kind of strong group and I encourage other groups out there that want to build a Concord’s Community Alliance look at the California Progress Alliance and the Richmond Progressive Alliance, two groups that we modeled ourselves after that are doing amazing things with their communities. We’re just another group that have the same kinds of values and we encourage people to form their group the way they want. We’re happy to be a resource to tell you our struggles building it and how it can be done with very little money and sometimes no money at all. Organizing just needs a lot of passion, patience and maybe a few cloned Kenji’s.
Kenji:
A great thing about being city focused is that it allows you to really tailor your methods and I guess your methods to the culture, your community, what’s appropriate. Our fundamental values about what humanity means, how we as a society should treat people are the same as many of the other groups out there doing great work. But our methods differ to some extent as appropriate for our community in Concord and the same could be true of someone starting a group like this in Lafayette or Moraga or Danville or Clayton or wherever. That’s the great thing like Ady said – we really appreciate you giving us a voice here because you’re helping us connect with others so can share what we’ve learned in all directions and move our values forward!