POWER to the people

“The thing we do best is allow people to connect with hope for a better future for themselves and their communities,” says Steven Williams, co-director and founding member of POWER. “The problems the city faces are more serious and more urgent, but there is a lot of amazing organizing happening in different communities and the prospect of establishing economic and social justice is much more real.”

The group grew out of efforts of the San Francisco Coalition of the Homeless and the General Assistance Rights Union. At that time, folks on General Assistance were mandated to work for the city in jobs that paid regular employees $15/hour but that that were reduced to about $3/hr for them, according to Alicia Garza, Co-director of POWER. After the passage of Pres. Bill Clinton’s 1997 Welfare Reform, further restrictions were placed on people seeking general assistance to the point where single parents were denied access. Welfare workers were not included in the same protections that applied to other workers. POWER was formed under these circumstances to make sure that “people on G.A. were treated with dignity and respect,” said Garza. In the course of their early campaigns, POWER was able to get free transportation for all welfare workers and raise San Francisco’s minimum wage to the highest in the country.

Working with low-income workers was based on an understanding of how different communities are often struggling against each other rather than together to get their needs met. POWER’s experience with the early welfare workers rights movement helped them expand their political perspective among the staff and membership to see how immigrants are similarly treated. “In 2004 San Francisco underwent massive changes with the introduction of the dotcom boom and then bust, real estate expansion in communities of color like the Mission and South of Market,” said Garza. “As it became more professional, a center for finance and tourism, and had some of the steepest real estate prices in the nation, there was an influx of people to serve those people.”

POWER saw that the majority of folks in the service class were immigrant women and started its Women Workers’ Project to begin organizing those in the domestic work, childcare and elder care fields. “We worked to ensure protections for domestic and informal workers and use that organizing effort to raise standards of living for all workers,” said Garza.

Donaji Lona was a member of POWER’s Women Workers’ Project for six years before joining the staff this year. Along with Beatriz Herrera, she works to bring domestic workers and their families together to fight for justice. Through the project, POWER is part of a statewide coalition fighting for a domestic workers’ bill of rights based on a similar bill of rights that recently passed on Aug. 30 in New York thanks to the efforts of Domestic Workers United. The seven-year lobbying effort was aimed at giving basic protections to domestic workers, such as paid sick leave and vacation. Along with farmworkers, “domestic workers have historically been exploited [out of being covered] in labor laws that provide protections, so this was a comprehensive bill that would radically change working conditions,” said Lona. A resolution to provide a verbal commitment to support the bill was recently introduced in Sacramento by Assembly member Tom Ammiano (San Francisco) and Assembly member Manuel Perez (Los Angeles); the San Francisco Board of Supervisors has also expressed support for the measure.

Another endeavor of the Women Workers’ Project is to obtain free Muni travel for youth throughout the city. Currently MUNI has offered to give 12,000 youth tickets for $10/month, but as Lona points out there are more than 30,000 youth in the free school lunch program so it is yet undetermined how MUNI will decide how or to whom to give these tickets. POWER strives to get free tickets for all youth, not just so they can get to and from school, but so that they have a better chance to see what San Francisco has to offer, giving them more of an investment in the city.

“This is a critical opportunity to bring together all of San Francisco for something we all deserve,” said Williams. “Low income people and especially young people rarely get a chance to get out of their neighborhoods and see what the city has to offer. In order to both save the planet and San Francisco it is critical to have public transportation that is viable.”

Viability also means making sure people feel safe in using public transportation and that is why POWER is also fighting to end the police saturation of MUNI buses when it comes to proof of payment issues. According to Lona, last year MUNI spent $12 million funding police officers to board MUNI buses and demand proof of payment from riders; in the beginning there were as many as 12 to 15 police officers looking for proof of payment and riders in the Mission area were especially targeted. “The way the police would scream at people would make people think it was a raid,” said Lona.

“In the beginning it was horrible,” said Lona. She recounted how one woman who only spoke Spanish was taken off the bus and decided to call her husband before signing the ticket, only to be awarded another ticket from the police officer who told her he hoped she “learned her lesson.”

POWER reports that for a few months the saturations ended, but about a month ago picked up again, although now there are three to four police officers that board buses. Nonetheless, “it is a travesty that people receive $75 tickets because they can’t provide proof of payment,” said Garza.

The Women Workers’ Project currently has about 15 leaders including a team of outreach workers that reach out to women at bus stops, laundry mats, clinics, parks and schools. “The best place is bus stops,” says Herrera. “That’s where we find women; it’s how our community gets around the city.”

“Whenever there’s an economic crisis, people have no jobs, and the price of everything is going up, it doesn’t make sense that working families have to bear the brunt of the cost,” says Herrera. POWER believes the city would be better suited redirecting the money is spends on policing public transportation to making sure youth are able to travel the buses for free, freeing families of the cost and giving youth more opportunities.

Incorporating youth into organizing is another priority at POWER. Their Youth in Power program focuses on young people from working class backgrounds around the Bay area. The main organizing points for Youth in Power are educational equity and issues of crime, safety, violence and restorative justice. Recently POWER has won two major gains in these areas. The first is the establishment of a mandated ethnic studies program that is college accredited in the San Francisco Unified Public School District. The second gain is the creation of a comprehensive restorative justice policy in the school district that is aimed at reducing the suspensions rates of youth in public schools. POWER also provides onsite childcare through their collaboration with a childcare collective that seeks to provide age appropriate curriculum that corresponds to the social justice and unity messages that are provided through their adult leadership training.

“What POWER does best is it brings together people who are impacted by the various injustices in the city and activates and motivates these same people to effect the change they want to see,” said Garza. Garza started out an organizer in POWER’s Bayview Organizing Project, launched in response to the impact that gentrification was having on the Bayview Hunter’s Point neighborhood. Traditionally one of the most populous African American areas of the city, the neighborhood was beset by many environment and economic perils, including the fact that it has one of the “highest rates of asthma and cancer in the city” and that “80 percent of San Francisco’s sewage is pumped through the area,” says Garza. Matters were exacerbated when Lennar Corporation purchased the old shipyards for a dollar from the city with promises to develop the oceanfront property into 20,000 units of housing averaging $700,000 a unit; this is an area that has the largest concentration of public housing in San Francisco. But the clean up of the area has resulted in environmental contamination as serpentine from the area was crushed and turned into asbestos. “People were coming to doors with nosebleeds when POWER was doing its door-to-door organizing,” said Garza.

“The development is so large and poorly planned out, it endangers all of San Francisco, especially low-income people,” said Williams.

It is issues like this that have caused the African American population of San Francisco to decrease by 60 percent over the last ten years. The Bayview Organizing Project aims to unite low-income residents and workers in Bayview Hunters Point to impact the decisions around affordable housing, living wage employment and environmental justice as the community experiences the impacts of gentrification.

POWER work in the Bayview Hunter’s Point neighborhood is intricately linked to the work they do in the Mission because it is “pulling together African American and Latino communities as a model for what it means to come together for a common cause as opposed to struggling against each other,” said Williams.

Recently, POWER has been instrumental in launching San Francisco Rising with eight other organizations to assist community members who will be directly impacted by upcoming local and state elections. “We are creating a space where working class people of color can come together and get educated and inform the broader community,” said Williams. The alliance, which includes groups like PODER, the Chinese Progressive Association, Just Cause and others, is focusing on revenue-raising ballot measures like the proposed Hotel Tax and the Property Transfer Tax as well as expanding democracy measures like the proposal to open up local school board election voting to immigrants.

“We are fortunate to be building [alliances],” said Williams. “We are very hopeful about what is going to happen instead of demoralized by what has happened.”

For more information on POWER, visit their website at www.peopleorganized.org or call 415-864-8372.