Community

These Black Architects Are Helping Rebuild Altadena After The LA Wildfires

April 24, 2025 Corinne Ruff, Next City. Create! Architecture, Black America, California, Community, Disaster Recovery, Los Angeles, Wildfires

Carla Flagg remembers the joy of growing up in west Altadena. “We had these great pool parties where all the cousins and everybody would come to the Fair Oaks house,” she says, smiling, as tears welled up in her eyes. Her parents owned the house and passed it down to her sister and her sister’s kids. “ We had that home for 50-some odd years, and there are still people who know the original phone number.” Flagg’s family home was one of some 9,400 structures that were destroyed in the Eaton Fire in January. It was also one of many homes passed down within the Black community by family members. Discriminatory redlining of the 1960s steered her parents away from Pasadena, and realtors encouraged them to purchase on the west side of Altadena.

The Homeless Garden Project: Opening Doors To The Unhoused

April 20, 2025 Damon Orion, Counter Punch. Create! Community, Food and Agriculture, Gardens, Homelessness

An analysis of data from 2017 and 2022 by the Pew Charitable Trusts points to a direct connection between high housing costs and homelessness rates in the United States. Unsurprisingly, a Santa Cruz County Civil Grand Jury 2024 report stated that the city, which the National Low Income Housing Coalition ranked as America’s most expensive rental market in 2023 and 2024, has the most people experiencing homelessness in California per capita. A University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), research project called No Place Like Home labeled Santa Cruz as “the least-affordable small city in the U.S.”

Guide To Becoming An Environmental Leader

April 13, 2025 Sam Davis, Resilience. Organize! climate crisis, Community, Environment, Organizers

Your community needs leaders who care about the environment. As climate change, pollution, and loss of biodiversity threaten our planet’s health, we can’t afford to wait for governments or corporations to solve these problems. We need individuals who are willing to take action, inspire others, and make a difference. And those differences need to happen right in our backyards. That’s why we need people like you. You know your community best, which means you can see right through the politics in community meetings and get to the heart of the issues. Becoming an environmental leader is not easy. It requires knowledge, skills, values, and habits that go beyond recycling, using reusable bags, and turning off lights.

Festival Brings Atlanta’s Community And Organizations Together

March 3, 2025 Fight Back! News. Organize! Atlanta, Community, Community organizing, Georgia, Grassroots, Organizing networks

Atlanta, Georgia – On Saturday, February 22, over 40 organizations and vendors came together for Community Connect Fest in the West End. Hundreds of community members kept the venue full throughout the time of the event. Attendees got to meet and learn about dozens of the organizations working to make a difference around Atlanta. The event, organized by the Atlanta Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, aimed to connect fighting organizations to people who want to get involved.

Five Years In, Philly’s Kensington Corridor Trust Is Building Momentum

February 18, 2025 Oscar Perry Abello, Next City. Create! Affordable Housing, Community, Land Trust, Local Economy, Philadelphia

The first time Yolanda Del Valle came to work at Sherry’s Restaurant, she was a teen covering a friend’s shift at the popular local diner, located for 50-plus years at the corner of Kensington and Ontario Avenues in Philadelphia. Eleven years ago, Del Valle returned to Sherry’s as an employee, doing everything from serving to dishwashing to minding the griddle. This past November, she became the owner. And Sherry’s got a new landlord: its community. The diner’s building, which includes three apartments above the restaurant, was acquired a little over a year ago by the Kensington Corridor Trust, a community-controlled commercial real estate entity that recently celebrated its fifth birthday.

How To Start A Free Store In Your Community

December 24, 2024 Chana Widawski, Grassroots Economic Organizing. Create! Anti-capitalist, Community, Free Stores, Zero waste

If you are moved by the abundance of waste in your neighborhood, are concerned about your neighbors in need, are a fan of building and strengthening community, want to take action to reject capitalism, or just enjoy the mystery of seeing colorful displays of random items, each with a story, you’re not alone! And that’s great news because teamwork is the dreamwork for creating a free store or neighborhood sharing hub. Free stores are an extension of the gift economy, where all items are available to anyone at no charge.

Co-Op Rhody Introduces Equity Into Cannabis-Based Business Model

November 2, 2024 Malikia Johnson, Grassroots Economic Organizing. Create! Cannabis, Community, Cooperatives, Marijuana, Racism

Co-op Rhody is a grassroots coalition of worker-entrepreneurs and organizers from local groups such as UFCW Local 328, Reclaim RI, and Break the Cycle Cooperative Hub. It also includes national cooperative and industry specialists who share a commitment to the vision of a worker-owned economy in Rhode Island. We had a conversation with Co-op Rhody members Andre Dev, David-Allen “Bear” Sumner Sr., and Emma Karnes discussing their journeys into the worker cooperative movement, the complexities of implementing social equity in the cannabis industry, and the need for hope that is strategic and withstanding.

How To Build An Ecological Economy

October 30, 2024 Patrick Mazza, Resilience. Create! Communities, Community, De-growth, Food Security, Green Economy

This is the second part of a scenario for how a city comes together to address the multiple economic, social and environmental crises facing our world. The first part of the scenario is here. It covers how the city creates basic frameworks of life. How it gains control of its own finances and local economy through creating a public bank. How it ensures everyone has shelter through creation of social and community housing. How clean energy is supplied while energy use is reduced through creation of community energy cooperatives. In this part, the scenario will cover how the city develops the basics of an ecological economy not dependent on endless economic growth.

Former Prisoners Are Making Sure No One Leaves Prison Alone

October 18, 2024 Cinnamon Janzer, Next City. Create! Community, Criminal Justice and Prisons, New Jersey (NJ), Prisons, Returning Citizens

When Antonne Henshaw was released from a New Jersey prison in 2018, he walked out alone. His sister had planned to pick him up, but she got the time wrong. She made it a few hours later and brought him to stay at her home — but just a few months later, she had to sell her home and move away for a new job, leaving Henshaw alone once again. Henshaw had managed to save $13,000 during the 30 years he was in prison. It was a sizeable sum, considering the paltry pay for prison jobs, but he soon discovered it wouldn’t be enough to get him the apartment he now needed.

Nebula: A Community Centered Approach To Domestic Violence

October 14, 2024 Malikia Johnson, Grassroots Economic Organizing. Create! Community, domestic violence, Police, Tenant organizing

Nebula describes itself as a group that supports “survivors of battering, SA, IPV and DV with community & physical resources in crisis and in their empowerment”. They also “ assist neighbors and mutual aid groups learning how to build liberatory practices in their groups.” Two of the core members came together in the context of tenant organizing. They realized a connection between tenant organizing and domestic violence support. They noticed that often organizers involved in tenants’ rights ended up being involved in domestic violence support because homes are often the center of the violence.

No Coal No Gas Builds On Recent Victory With Focus On Community

October 6, 2024 Siobhan Senier, Waging Nonviolence. Strategize! Community, Fossil Fuels, New England, New Hampshire, Oil and Gas, Victory

David Graeber once posited that “the biggest problem facing nonviolent direct action movements is that we don’t know how to handle victory.” He observed that, by the time activists recognize some of our initial successes, those gains tend to be obscured by infighting and/or repressive backlash. More to the point, he said, activists unsatisfied with anything short of a total revolution miss the steady gains that our movements make. A New England-based campaign to phase out fossil fuels provides a helpful counter-example. Activists with No Coal No Gas, or NCNG, have shown that we do know how to handle victory.

Gig Organizing 101

October 6, 2024 David Rovics, This Week with David Rovics. Organize! Aaron Swartz, Art, Community, culture, Music, Organizing

The great Seattle-based songwriter, Jim Page, was coming to the east coast back in the mid-1990's. I was living in Boston then, and offered to organize a gig. I was already well into my twenties, but I had never done such a thing before. Jim was and is fairly well-known in Ireland, with one of Ireland's most revered musicians, Christy Moore, having recorded a number of his songs, one brilliant example of which became a real anthem for anti-nuclear sentiment in Ireland, "Hiroshima-Nagasaki-Russian Roulette." Boston had (and has) a large population of people who were born and raised in Ireland, and a much larger population of people of Irish descent.

When You Suffer For Your Sanity And Struggle To Get Free

September 27, 2024 Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Educate! Community, COVID-19, mental health

In 1930, Clément Fraisse (1901–1980), a shepherd from France’s Lozère region, was confined in a nearby psychiatric hospital after he tried to burn down his parents’ farmhouse. For two years, he was held in a dark, narrow cell. Using a spoon, and later the handle of his chamber pot, Fraisse carved symmetrical images into the rough, wooden walls that surrounded him. Despite the inhumane conditions in these psychiatric hospitals, Fraisse made beautiful art in the darkness of his cell. Not far from Lozère is the monastery of Saint Paul de Mausole in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, where Vincent van Gogh had been confined four decades earlier (1889–1890) and where he completed around 150 paintings, including several important works (among them The Starry Night, 1889).

‘We Can’t Arrest Our Way To Liberation’

September 26, 2024 Eyad Zeid, In These Times. Strategize! Community, Israel, Palestine, Police, Violence

Palestinians and Palestinian businesses have been frequent targets since the genocide in Gaza began. When we opened, we thought that it would only be a matter of time before someone attacked us. And on a recent evening, someone smashed the window where we displayed our flag. At least two other nearby businesses, the bookstore Women & Children First and the clothing store Naaz Studios, were also attacked in recent months in similar ways. And as we know all too well, attacks on businesses that support Palestinian liberation are just a small slice of the overall violence we have seen over the past year.

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