Paragon Promotional Items for LVEJO
|
El Cilantro was established by three LVEJO youth interns who felt strongly about our environment and how we can help make a difference. Since it began as a newsletter published both in print and on the web, El Cilantro has covered many issues and topics and had different guest writers and contributing artists. The youth membership of El Cilantro and YAOTL has expanded and we are reaching more people and addressing more issues than ever before. We are using media and social networking tools, in addition to organizing, protesting and writing, to help us bring the changes we so desperately need in Little Village.
WHAT WE DO:
We meet twice a week (Wednesdays 5:30-7:30 and Fridays 5:30-7:30) we work together on issues ranging from fighting for cleaner air & space to immigration rights but also do fun artistic stuff like paint a mural and produce our own newsletter, El Cilantro. Continue reading The 2010 Sk8 Jam was a much bigger success than even last year’s great event!
How green is Chicago? Ask our Leaders.
Thanks to a growing ward-by-ward grassroots campaign for clean energy, the Windy City has attracted the attention of national environmental and citizens organizations to ask that very question.
On Thursday, July 15th at Dvorak Park, Alderman Joe Moore and Dorian Breuer, of the Pilsen Environmental Rights & Reform Organization, will be joined by an unusually broad coalition of fellow aldermen, clean energy and health care activists, and over 50 Chicago organizations, along the Sierra Club‘s Executive Director Michael Brune and Greenpeace National Climate Director Damon Moglen to call on Mayor Daley and the Chicago City Council to adopt the nationally acclaimed Clean Power Coalition energy platform.
Thirteen aldermen have signed onto Moore’s breakthrough Clean Power Ordinance, which calls for reducing pollution at the city’s two notorious coal-fired plants by 90 percent.
With one of the worst asthma rates in the nation, the Fisk Generation Station in Pilsen and Crawford Power Plant in Little Village–where nearly 50,000 tons of toxic pollution have led to atrocious health care rates over the past three years–were built before the invention of the Model T.
The CO emissions from the two plants are equivalent to the pollution of nearly 875,000 cars.
Over the past seven years, the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization (LVEJO) has been leading “toxic tours” for researchers, journalists, politicians and city officials.
As he pauses at the corner of 31st Street and Central Park in Little Village, Rafael Hurtado can only think about factories. Turn any way, and they’re all he sees, and on the worst days, they’re all he smells. On a drizzly April morning, the smell isn’t nearly as repugnant as it is on unbearably hot summer days, but Hurtado still has a message for anyone listening. Hurtado, an 18-year-old Little Village resident, volunteers as a tour guide for Toxic Tours, which guide people around the load of manufacturing plants and chemical sites that have been polluting the community for years.
The Little Village Environmental Justice Organization (LVEJO) started the tours about seven years ago as a way to educate the community and others about the looming toxic presence of several industries right in their backyards.
On this April morning, in the midst of the murmuring steady rainfall, the noise of sirens, trains and cars passing through puddles briefly disturbs his message, but Hurtado continues with his story. He became involved with LVEJO in 2002 after noticing a rally outside his home protesting for more parks in the area. Continue reading Rafael Hurtado receives national recognition for his efforts to make a clean safe neighborhood for all!
The City of Chicago has a history of privatizing public assets in order to get a quick influx of cash to fill budget holes (the Chicago Skyway and the city’s parking meters were both leased out to private companies, to name a couple examples). Chicago’s economic state is not getting any better, but rather than looking for creative, long-term solutions, the city is continuing with their short-sighted strategy of looking for publicly owned resources to sell off to the highest bidder. The next thing handed over to a for-profit corporation may be a resource so basic that no one can live without it – our public water system. Continue reading Our Water Is Not For Sale
 Little Village, a neighborhood of 95,000 residents, has been fighting for a park for over 10 years. On June 2, 2007 the City of Chicago and Chicago Park District announced they would build a park on the Celotex Superfund toxic waste site on 28th and Sacramento. “The Little Village Community is glad the City of Chicago and Park District have finally decided on a park site,” said Lorena Lopez, LVEJO Community Organizer. “However, we will not accept a park that could put our health and environment at risk.”
The Little Village Environmental Justice Organization, headquartered in a predominantly Mexican-American neighborhood of Chicago, campaigns not only against pollution but for clean power, park facilities, urban agriculture, and restoring public transit. Persistent grass-roots lobbying over the course of ten years for the conversion of the Celotex clean-up site into a much-needed park has kept the issue front-and-center for local politicians and residents alike. LVEJO’s staff and volunteers make significant outreach and education efforts, and it is a fact that many of their most eloquent spoke-persons are teenagers – committed, passionate, and involved. Continue reading We Need More Parks!
 Community Asset Toxic Tours includes visits to drum manufacturing, plastics recycling, chemical sites, brown fields and a superfund in the Little Village Community in Chicago. You will hear about the communities struggles to hold industry and government officials accountable for toxic pollution in their neighborhoods. Learn about how communication travels skills and talents and youth groups that are making a difference in the community as part of the assets. These tours will strengthen personal knowledge of how you can protect your health.
Decatur, Illinois is soy town. It’s also the headquarters city of ADM, Archer Daniels Midland, one of the ABCs of rainforest destruction. For months, we’ve been planning on attending this meeting to express our concerns about the company’s role in rainforest destruction, displacing Indigenous and traditional communities from their land, displacing small farmers and intensifying climate change for soy and palm oil plantations.
A couple months ago, I purchased a share of ADM stock so that I would have the power to attend the meeting as a shareholder and as the Campaign Director for our new Rainforest Agribusiness Campaign. During this time, I also met with shareholders and institutional investors about our interest in attending the meeting with delegates. The City of New York, which holds over 1 million shares of ADM stock, and Trillium Asset Management, a socially responsible investment firm based in Boston, helped secure proxys for our delegates to attend the meeting. In my experience in attending shareholder meetings of companies like Chevron, Conoco Phillips and Exxon Mobil, if you have a valid proxy to attend the meeting, you enter and are allowed to speak on behalf of the shareholder who secured the proxy. Not at ADM.
Apparently ADM was concerned about what RAN and the delegates were going to say or do in the meeting, so they changed their rules of their meeting to exclude our presence. They suggested the delegates sit in an “overflow room” instead of the main auditorium. We argued that this was unjust and that they should all be allowed to sit in the main auditorium. They agreed to let one representative, Hiparidi Toptiro and his translator, into the meeting with me. The other delegates decided that they would rather protest outside than face humiliation and watch the meeting on a TV in the “overflow room”.
So, before entering the meeting, we gathered outside the James Randall Research Center, where the meeting was held. We met up with students and local residents holding banners saying:
- ADM: Investing in Human Rights Abuses
- ADM: Destructive by Nature
- ADM: Investing your $ in Climate Chaos
- ADM: No Rainforest Destruction for Biofuels
We were few people, but our message and our presence was extremely powerful. This is why as the press interview me and filmed our protest, the police and security surrounded us. They tried to rush us into entering the meeting right away, but I told them that we still had something to do.
Before entering the meeting, Hiparidi led us in a couple chants saying:
If the Cerrado lives, the people live. If the people live, the Cerrado lives. He sang a song in his native language while we all listened to get grounded before entering the meeting. Once he finished his song, we left the protest where the rest of our delegates stayed. They stayed holding the banners and enlarged photos of communities impacted by agribusiness in Paraguay.
Hiparidi, Andrea (one of our Rainforest Agribusiness campaigners and his translator) and I were escorted by at least 5 security guards down a grassy path to the entrance of the meeting. We were met by more security and representatives of ADM’s Corporate Communications Department. We were given our passes to enter and were escorted to the main auditorium to take our seats. The room was silent as we walked to our seats. We were definitely noticed, especially Hiparidi with his face painted in red and black as a Xavante warrior.
We listened and watched the meeting take place for about an hour before we were able to speak during the public comment. We listened to the CEO talk about the ADM’s plans to address the global trends of: increased food and protein demand, more energy from diverse sources and environmental improvement (ie…plastics from plant based sources). ADM’s plan is to be a leading bioenergy company, expanding feedstocks such as biomass, soy, palm and sugar for biofuels.
When the public comment period began and the end of the meeting, I stood up until I was recognized by the CEO. I expressed RAN’s concerns about ADM’s role in tropical rainforest destruction, the displacement of communities and global climate change. I also expressed my disappointment that the company denied access to the other delegates into the main auditorium of the meeting. Read Leila’s Comment at ADM 2007 AGM.
Immediately following, Hiparidi stood and approached the mic to speak. Hiparidi spoke very powerfully about his concerns about the impacts of agrotoxins on the fish, rivers, women and children. He informed the audience of the recent adoption of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People and asked ADM to uphold its principles, such as the right to free, prior and informed consent of communities before converting forests into industrial farmland and everyone listened. In a sea of business suits, Hiparidi stood out with his face painted as a Xavante warrior in black and red colors. I was so proud of him, I was moved to tears. You have to understand that this experience is so foreign to him. He is from the wooded savannah in central Brazil, where addressing shareholders and company executives is not the norm. Even though his message was short, only 3 minutes with translation, it was extremely powerful. The 80 Indigenous nations he represents in the Cerrado would’ve been proud.
We were not the only ones at the meeting that expressed concern. Rev. Martin Woulfe presented a resolution on behalf of the City of New York re: Global Human Rights Standards and Sister Lydia Hayes represented ICCR to announce that they had been in dialogue with ADM about the sustainability of water use in food production. ADM recommended that shareholders not support Global Human Rights Standards resolution. The resolution received 19% of the vote.
After the meeting was adjourned, shareholders approached us and thanked us for being there. We were invited to have lunch (ie…soy burgers) with the employees and shareholders, but we decided to join our friends at the protest instead. We reported back about our experience inside the meeting and held up banners as shareholders left the meeting. From there, we headed out of Decatur and noticed we were being followed by security. They went their way after a few miles, but I thought you’d might like to know that they were really worried about our presence. I think we got our point across. We’ll be back next year ADM!
Excerpted from:
posted by Leila in Agribusiness
Today I’ll focus on yet another community suffering from coal’s pollution — but this community is a little bit larger, and it’s on the front end of an emerging trend. The city is Chicago and it’s starting what could be a national movement to clean up dirty energy in the inner city.
Some of our oldest and dirtiest coal plants are located in major cities across the U.S.; and they are often located in areas with other major pollution sources, exposing residents of these densely populated areas to higher levels of harmful pollution than their neighbors.
What’s happening now in Chicago is just the beginning as residents of these communities organize and rise up against these environmental injustices, finding ways to clean up their air and water.
In Chicago, more people live near the city’s two old coal plants than any other coal plant in the nation. The plants, located on the southwest side of Chicago, cause 40 pre-mature deaths, 500 emergency room visits and 2,800 asthma attacks every year. Continue reading Big Cities Want Big Changes in Energy
Venga y Aprenda Sobre: Computacion, Constuyendo Jardines, Hogar Sano, Racismo, Seguridad en el Barrio, Comunicacion enter los Jovenes, Ninos, y Adultos, como Motivar Participacion y mucho mas…
Para mas informacion y registracion llame al: 773.762.6991
Some of the topics discusses were: Community resources, Little Village volunteer network, Chicago transportation issues. On a national level… Will a war stimulate the economy? Is military spending really taking money away from social programs? Does militarism increase inequality? The workshop looked at “Reagan Vise” which used military spending and tax cuts to squeeze out social spending. The audience of the workshop was neither democrat or republican, antiwar activists or pro-war enthusiast, but the large middle ground of Americans who are questioning the Administration’s agenda.
Work Day and Inauguration of Amor De Dios Community Garden Site
On behalf of LVEJO, we would like to extend a huge thank you to the Comite Primavera, Amor de Dios parishioners, LVEJO board members and all the volunteers who came out and helped with the site.
From the take down of the playground, dead tree, to the installation of the woodchips and soil, building of the low tunnels and coming soon the first planting.
We invite you to come by and volunteer this fall and winter and help in the maintenance of the site.
Thank you for all of your hard work and dedication to help make this happen.
|
|
Your thoughts…