In Fundraising, The Labor Community Strategy Center

Building a Machine to Take on the System­
Please Help Barbara Raise $50,000 Now

Dear Friends,

This year I’ve done a lot of work with young folks in the High Schools, and I need your help to expand the work that I’m carrying out.

Carlos Elmo Gomez
Co-Lead Organizer

This summer we we’ve able to train nine young people from Roosevelt High School, Augustus Hawkins High School and Ouchi High School in our Freedom Summer /Fall Program. We all organized throughout the Baldwin Hill Community. Surveying and receiving stories about how the Los Angeles Metro is currently and has historical criminalized Black and Latino People and has made it impossible for them to afford the fare or use the Transit System without being criminalized. And building the membership of the Fight for the Soul of the Cities.   We also convened our first intergenerational Senior Strategy Seminars where the core leadership of the Strategy Center studied the 7-Components of transformative organizing for 7 weeks. This December both Freedom Summer/Fall students and the participants in the Senior Strategy Seminar, Myself included will graduate from these programs. The Senior Strategy Seminar helped my own analysis and breakdown of Transformative Organizing theory and in the final session we were required to show what we learned through practice in order to pass the class. The Strategy Center has had a history of training organizers from the National School for Strategy Organizing, of which I am a graduate of, to the Summer Youth Organizing Academy and Freedom Summer, of which I participated in as a High School Student, we are working to continue and to build on this revolutionary history.

Our Taking Action team is a physical manifestation of Transformative Organizing

Bridgette Amaya was a former student member of taking action at Hawkins High School and is now joined by Stephanie Prieto and Kevin Herrera, two former students who are now continuing their development by organizing in both South Central and East Los Angeles. With their help we have been able to build a 30 student club in Ouchi O’ Donnovan High School and a 15 student Club in both Hawkins and Roosevelt. All three are now taking the training that they’ve learned and leading the Taking Action Clubs—taking care of all the logistics, convenings weekly Taking Action and core student meetings, and sitting with I and Channing to plan out the Taking Action goals and objectives for the next weeks.

Our Taking Action students are continuing to grow and transform in to Revolutionary Organizers

We have been able to continue building with Makayla Brown, a senior at Augustus Hawkins, and soon to be graduate of Freedom Summer/Fall and Dana Kitty Diaz, A Senior in Roosevelt High School, and soon to be graduate of both Freedom Summer/Fall and the Senior Strategy Seminar. We have consolidated young people like Aniya Logan, Melissa Ayala, Crystal Montero, and Emily Zamora around what it means to be a core member of not just a student club, but a citywide organization. Now they work with Kevin, Brigette, and Stephanie to build consciousness, leadership and organization on their campus and around strategy and Soul. They were introduced by the Strategy Center by their peers to our Free Public Transportation campaign. Now that we are moving towards our “No Police in Schools” Campaign, a lot of young people will be at the forefront of their schools collecting surveys.

A challenge for this year is to strengthen our Core and the practice and theory of Transformative Organizing. It has been a struggle to get young people and myself to try to focus on some of these ideas but we are in the process of teaching young people the importance of commitment, time management and political clarity.

Please support our valuable lessons on serving the people in the name of Peace, Justice, Self-Determination and Love.

Your donation can help us to continue the work on the ground, through feeding our people and continue our ideological struggle against this system. To be realistic, we have to think about the impossible. We are working to create the world  we want to see and we need your help..

0