Grantees Advancing Racial Equity: Moving grassroots power at the polls, in the streets, in our schools

The Salem-Keizer Coalition for Equality began its work in 1999 when parents, students, and teachers decided that they could no longer tolerate the racial and class-based disparities in the Salem-Keizer School District in Oregon. While Black students represented just one percent of the overall student population, they experienced a 49 percent suspension rate. For Latino students, who represented 10 percent of the student population, the suspension rate was 43 percent. And despite the federal funding that the school district was receiving based on its numbers of students of color, it was not delivering adequate education to those students. Black and Latino students were performing at the 30th percentile for reading, writing and math, with graduation rates below 30 percent.

In response, the Salem-Keizer Coalition formed to give parents, students, and concerned teachers a voice in education policy and funding. The Coalition formed a multiracial network called Parents With Voices, to train parents on how to advocate within the school system to ensure that their children received a good education. The Coalition also identified the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act as a tool to demand greater accountability from the School District. In 2003 the Coalition worked with the School District to hold the first Annual NCLB Gathering, which drew over 1,000 parents, children, teachers, administrators, and community members to learn about the requirements of NCLB, and about how community members could get involved to improve the District’s schools. This spring marked the fourth Annual NCLB Gathering.

The Salem-Keizer Coalition is currently receiving a Three-Year Support Grant of $15,000 a year in general operating funds. With this support, in 2005 the Coalition successfully advocated for a provision in the Oregon state education funding bill that would require school districts to report on how they were spending ESL funds. In addition, they secured measures to track ESL funding through the local Salem-Keizer School District Budget Advisory Team. They were also able to help diversify the historically white and conservative School Board, which now includes one person of color and two progressives.

As with all of the Coalition’s efforts, these successes involved grassroots participation and leadership development. Last year, the Coalition trained over 150 Spanish-speaking parents, and involved more than 25 parents in its yearlong leadership development track. In addition to helping to win policy gains, this kind of training has assisted parents in forming two Bilingual Parent Groups at local schools in the last two years.

Apart from the dire problems in the education system, Salem has also faced serious problems with racial disparities in the criminal justice system. In 2002, the Salem-Keizer Coalition successfully organized to create a Community Police Review Board. More recently, last year the Coalition conducted a series of trainings for Rights Promoters, and graduated 15 advocates who are trained in the entire complaint process.

Based in Seattle, the Comité Pro-Amnistía General y Justicia Social (Committee for General Amnesty and Social Justice) formed in 2000 to educate, organize, and mobilize immigrant communities with the goal of achieving a general amnesty for all immigrants, regardless of national origin. Since then, the organization has developed numerous local organizing campaigns to build a unified base of immigrants, primarily in Latino communities along the I-5 corridor in Washington State. The Comité is currently receiving a Three-Year Support Grant of $15,000 in general support from the Social Justice Fund.

In 2005, the Comité focused its work on base building and leadership development. It created 11 new immigrant-rights groups around the state, trained over 50 new leaders to educate the community about the challenges facing immigrants in the United States, conducted 26 community presentations around the Puget Sound area, brought together over 200 community members at its annual General Assembly, and mobilized over 800 Latinos for the 6th Annual May Day March and Rally in Seattle. In total, the Comité secured over 26 local and national media hits in 2005, both in print and on the radio.

Among its many accomplishments, the Comité successfully assisted immigrant brush workers in the town of Forks, on the Olympic Peninsula. The workers are mostly immigrants from Mexico and Central America, harvesting salal, bear grass, ferns, and other non-timber forest products for use in floral arrangements. They are part of a largely invisible workforce, and as such, are often exploited. In 2005, these workers asked the Comité to help with a recurring problem. A private security guard for Rayonier, a leading international forest products company, was using a pattern of entrapment to issue fines to brush workers for harvesting on Rayonier-owned lands without permits. The fines were $500 apiece, creating a tremendous hardship for the workers. With the Comité’s assistance, the workers were able to have the fines dismissed.

On the policy front, the Comité also celebrated victory with its successful ICE Melt Campaign, which effectively reduced the number of raids in Latino communities by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, and stopped the passage of an inter-department agreement between ICE and the King County Sheriffs office. The Comité also counseled Gov. Christine Gregoire’s office on the impacts of the REAL ID Act. As a result, Gregoire is the only governor who has refused to sign the memorandum of understanding requiring states to verify immigration status.

The Comité also made great strides in developing its organizational leadership structure in 2005. It held its first Immigrant Youth Conference over the summer, and now includes a youth representative on its Board of Directors. It incorporated a total of eight new leaders on its Board, which now has 70 percent low-income representation. The Social Justice Fund is proud to support the Comité’s work. In addition to the Three-Year Support Grant, the Fund provided the Comité’s with a Rapid Response Grant of $1,000 this year, to support its mass mobilization for the April 11th immigrant rights rally in Seattle, which drew 100,000 marchers.

In Idaho, there are several organizations working collaboratively for racial justice and human rights. Among these, the Idaho Hispanic Caucus has led two projects with support from the Social Justice Fund: Idaho Latino Vote and the Tribal-Latino Caucus.

The Idaho Latino Vote project began in 2000 to encourage greater participation by Latinos in the political process, through voter registration, education, and Get Out The Vote (GOTV) efforts. As a result, the number of Latinos registered to vote in Idaho has doubled. In addition to building greater political power for Latino communities, during the course of their work, organizers with Idaho Latino Vote ran across new opportunities to work in coalition with tribal communities, to share strategies and resources to build greater political power.

In 2002, northern Idaho tribes were working on a critical initiative: the Indian Gaming and Self Reliance Act, or Proposition One. The proposition would protect gaming and its economic benefits for tribal communities. The Latino community reached out to support this effort, and in the course of what was eventually a successful campaign, both communities realized that they shared many of the same interests — and suffered similar disparities — in the areas of education, health, and public safety. Determined to explore and build upon these shared interests, in 2004, Latino and tribal leaders organized a historic Tribal Latino Caucus (TLC) Summit, drawing more than 150 participants.

The TLC is united by a shared vision of building strong tribal and Latino decision-making power in the political, economic, and social arenas of Idaho. Its mission is to strengthen the political influence of both communities by raising awareness of the issues affecting them, and by building greater resources to address these issues. The coalition includes all five tribes in the state: the Coeur d’Alene, the Nez Perce, the Shoshone-Paiute, the Kootenai, and the Shoshone Bannock. Together, Idaho’s Native American and Latino communities make up 11 percent of the state’s population.

The Idaho Hispanic Caucus is currently receiving a Three-Year Support Grant of $15,000 a year in general operating funds. In August 2005, the Caucus worked with its tribal partners to hold the second annual Tribal Latino Caucus Summit, gathering together nearly 100 participants from around the state, with representation from all five tribes. As in the previous year, the summit focused on a number of issues: health, education, public safety, and political empowerment. The summit yielded shared legislative and political agendas, including efforts to ensure representation from Native and Latino communities on the state Board of Education, and to establish an office of multicultural health.

These are a few of the many examples of effective racial justice work happening around our region. The Social Justice Fund is committed to continuing to prioritize racial justice organizing, both by people of color-led organizations and by white ally organizations. For more information about our grantmaking, please visit our website.