’ROOTS!, a grassroots effort to organize people of color around racial-justice issues, recently won a $7,500 contract from the city’s Bureau of Housing and Community Development to coordinate outreach for the city’s residential displacement prevention program. Members of the group are currently knocking on doors in Boise to talk to rental households and homeowners about their housing situations and refer those most at risk of displacement to a cash-assistance program funded by the city.
But ’ROOTS! -- which stands for Reclaiming Our Origins Through Struggle -- is about a lot more than housing.
The 10-month-old group seeks to empower people of color to fight for racial justice and their own economic liberation through education and political organizing. Guiding their work is the belief that the people most affected by an issue should be the ones who are organizing around that issue, explains Tomás Garduño, the group’s organizer. "For a racial-justice organization, that has to be people of color."
Garduño says organizing and empowering people of color to fight for self-determination will ultimately liberate the community and achieve equality with other communities. ROOTS! short-term goals are more modest: It hopes to build a community resource library, host a monthly political education night and hold leadership trainings for members.
So far the group has 30 dues-paying members -- a number Garduño calls "extraordinary" for the organization’s short tenure -- and has won several small grants, including awards from the Fannie Mae Foundation and the McKenzie River Gathering Foundation, as well as the key outreach contract from the city.
‘ROOTS was launched by four staff members of the Community Alliance of Tenants who broke off from the organization to form a group focused solely on racial-justice organizing that was "by people of color, for people of color."
Last spring, the foursome and other interested activists began formulating a mission statement and sketching out an organizational structure. In July, the group named itself ‘ROOTS! and held its first official membership meeting in the living room of a Boise rental house. In September the group’s two staff members -- Garduño, a 24-year-old Chicano, and director Lakita Logan, a 24-year-old African American -- moved into the second floor of the Masonic Lodge on the northwest corner of Mississippi and Fremont.
Currently, ROOTS! efforts are focused around on the issue of gentrification and displacement and the effect it has on low-income communities of color.
Garduño says the current revitalization in Boise and in inner N/NE represents not just an economic change but a cultural shift as well, one that heightens the displacement risk for people of color. The success of urban renewal, he says, depends on the city "making money on its investment" through rising property values. Such approaches, he says, are unlikely to benefit people of color until they gain economic empowerment. "Anything that has a goal of making money is not going to empower oppressed communities," he says.
Instead, Garduño says, urban renewal creates pressure to quickly attract money to a community, which in turn creates conditions that precipitate residential upheaval. Long-term residents are displaced because they can no longer afford to live in the neighborhood, or the neighborhood no longer offers the type of services they need, or the cultural changes are so great that they move to neighborhoods that look more familiar to them.
ROOTS membership is limited to people of color, although one of its projects -- white Allies Against Racism Project, or wAAR! -- is devoted to developing the anti-racist leadership of low-income white people and building a base of white allies. ROOTS! next monthly membership meeting is May 13 at 5 p.m. For more information, contact Garduño at 3503B N Mississippi, 503-288-4021, or tomas@rootspdx.org.