A Panel discussion revolving around the Ellis Act evictions and the housing crisis in San Francisco, featuring Chandra Redack, Benito Santiago, Erin McElroy, Tommi Avicolli Mecca, and Andy Blue.
As a long-time housing activist in San Francisco, Tommi Avicolli Mecca works with the Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco, a tenants rights organization that offers free counseling for San Francisco tenants in all types of housing, including rent-control, SROs, public housing and Section 8.
For the past six months, Xi'an Chandra Redack has been helping to organize her building of residence at 1049 Market Street against an impending eviction. She is particularly interested in LGBT people of color, women, youth and transgender issues.
Erin McElroy is the founder and director of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, a data visualization, data analysis, and digital storytelling collective documenting the dispossession of San Francisco Bay Area residents. Erin also organizes with Eviction Free San Francisco, a direct action mutual aid group that fights evictions with tenants facing displacement.
Benito Santiago, born and raised in SF, is a dancer, educator, musician, and activist currently facing eviction by Michael Harrison of Vanguard Properties. Benito is a disabled senior, and has been organizing with Eviction Free San Francisco to fight his eviction.
Andy Blue recently helped organize the Plaza 16 Coalition festival in the 16th/Mission Plaza as a celebration of the community and as a statement against reckless development that drives displacement -- in particular, a 10-story monstrosity of luxury housing proposed to tower over the plaza-- the biggest market-rate development in Mission District history.
For more information, please visit the web sites of these organizations:
Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco
Anti-Eviction Mapping Project
Plaza 16 Coalition
Our guest speaker from the May 23 forum is Antonia Juhasz, a leading oil and energy industry analyst, author, journalist, and activist. She is the author of three books: "The Bush Agenda"; "The Tyranny of Oil;" and "Black Tide: the Devastating Impact of the Gulf Oil Spill." Juhasz is currently a Fellow of the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley where she focusing on the role of oil and natural gas in the war with Afghanistan. Her latest articles appeared in The Atlantic, CNN and Harper's Magazine. Follow Juhasz on twitter.
Andrés Soto is a Richmond, California native, who has devoted his life to being a community organizer and activist fighting inequality and injustice in and around Richmond. Soto has been deeply involved in trying to organize Richmond communities against the Chevron refinery and to ensure that local residents get proper compensation for the destruction caused to their community and health. Soto will be joining us to share about his experiences in Richmond with the Chevron refinery.
Cecile Pineda, author of "Devil's Tango: How I learned the Fukushima Step by Step", will be talking to the SF Mime Troupe and their friends on June 27 about the nuclear industry, and about how the energy and the weaponry aspects are inextricably linked. At the same time, she will be addressing the harms to the enviroment that the industry presents in terms of soil, water, and air contamination through leakage in nuclear waste sites; and permanent contamination to soils of countries where DU has been used by The US and its NATIO surrogates. Read her Blog, follow her on Twitter or LIKE her on Facebook.
How Fukushima affects you (pdf)
Get Active (pdf)
Come hear experts in the fight against the "peripheral tunnel" proposal to ship water south around the Delta, for possible use in fracking, among other things.
Dan Bacher, Editor of the Fish Sniffer magazine, writes investigative articles for numerous publications about fisheries, water and the environment, including the battles to restore Central Valley and Klamath River salmon and to stop the peripheral tunnels and fracking. He is a board member of the California Water Impact Network (C-WIN) and Water for Fish.
Francisco Dominguez, photographer/printmaker, will provide an indigenous world perspective on the current environmental crisis, including fracking and the peripheral tunnels.
Adam Zuckerman comes to Amazon Watch with a background in human rights advocacy. He spent years organizing with activist diaspora communities, and most recently worked for American Jewish World Service, an international human rights nonprofit. Adam speaks fluent Spanish and has worked in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Adam works on Amazon Watch's Clean Up Ecuador Campaign, a movement to hold Chevron accountable for its legacy of contamination in the Ecuadorian Amazon. For more information and to take action visit truecostofchevron.com.