Tonight, we feature organizing at the state and local level.
- Celi Tamayo-Li with SF Rising talks about their work on the College for All campaign in California.
- Deepa Varma from the San Francisco Tenants Union talks about the effort to repeal the California Costa Hawkins Rental Housing Act. She brings us breaking news from the state Housing Committee.
- And we talk with the people involved with Barangay Broadside, an art and activism project in San Francisco’s SOMA Pilipinas Cultural District.
Tonight, we’re looking at movement building and legislative change that is mounting in the new year. But if you take a bird’s-eye view, we’ll see that the repression has been year’s in the making. Whether we’re talking about the increase in higher education tuition, the dramatically increasing rents throughout California, or the forced displacements of communities there has been resistance through people powered solutions.
The first to join us is Celi Tamayo-Li. Born and raised in SF, Celi is the field organizer at San Francisco Rising where they’re focus is on “youth” which is defined as up to 30 years old. Celi taught history at Hilltop High, SF’s school for teen parents, and was the campaign manager for Vote 16 (a measure to lower the voting age to 16 in SF), which only lost by 2 percent. Celi talks about SF Rising’s College 4 All campaign.
Our next segment is hope for housing in the new year with an effort to repeal the Costa Hawkins Act. Our guest is Deepa Varma, the executive director of the San Francisco Tenants Union. Deepa has worked as an organizer, litigator and activist on social justice issues including women’s rights, public benefits, criminal justice reform and immigration. She was a tenants rights attorney in New York and at San Francisco’s Eviction Defense Collaborative. She helped to train a new generation of eviction defense lawyers in San Francisco to enforce the tenant protections we have in the city, and to provide last minute litigation support for tenants in housing court.
Finally, we we are joined by artist Colin Kimzey and Claire Amable, the youth health coordinator at SOMCAN or the South of Market Community Action Network. Colin and SOMCAN were awarded $3,000 from Southern Exposure’s Alternative Exposure grant to “invigorate and transform the San Francisco Bay Area arts community”. The project is called Barangay Broadside and it pays for silk screen workshops at the South of Market Community Action Network.