Our Local Peace Hero for this year is Ady Olvera – a community organizer working in Concord around issues of poverty and homelessness. Andy is a fierce activist who consistently organizes spaces for marginalized Concord residents to raise awareness about the issues they are facing. Ady works with homeless communities and advocates on their behalf with the grassroots group – Concord Communities Alliance (CCA) – to urge city officials to take action. 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.
In fact – back in 2020 – the Peace Center held an interview with Ady and fellow organizer from the group, Kenji Yamada. The full interview can be found here: https://ourpeacecenter.org/community-partners/interview-with-concord-communities-alliance/
Below is an excerpt from this conversation:
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.
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.
