Teenagers in South Texas’s Rio Grande Valley can dance to anything – even two songs at the same time.

Last week, Silicon Valley De Bug paid a visit to La Unión del Pueblo Entero (LUPE), a community-organizing powerhouse created in 1989 by César Chávez. LUPE’s building is adorned with United Farm Worker flags and Diego Rivera-esque murals, evoking generations of struggle in this border town of San Juan, Texas.

LUPE families in San Juan, Texas, talk about their lives and interests with Silicon Valley De Bug before getting down to business of learning the intricacies of social media. Photo by Jean Melesaine

Grandmothers are making homemade tostadas in the corner of the warehouse-sized space, and a team of elders is diligently folding membership newsletters in the back. Clearly, there is work to be done, but all eyes are on the 14 teenage girls who giggle and groove in the middle of the room to a Lil Wayne rap, backed by a cumbia beat that is bouncing off the walls. Everyone, regardless of whether they have heard of Lil Wayne or not, is smiling.

De Bug came here from the San Francisco Bay Area to do a social media training for youth at LUPE and other Rio Grande Valley organizations, in preparation for the Equal Voice 2012 National Online Convention that will be held on May 20.

As part of an activity to get the teens moving and talking, we’ve asked them what type of music they dance to. Some name the traditional Mexican music they listen to at home; some say the rap music they download onto their iPods. So, rather than choose, they simply do what comes natural to them – they play both at the same time, and it sounds just right.

This instinct, to blend and create, rather than choose one or the other, is a way of being in the Rio Grande Valley. These youth live in a community built on the edge of two national boundaries and two cultures. And, most important, they carry two responsibilities: to honor the past and to invent the future. For them, life is not an “either-or”; it’s an “and.”

That’s why the evolution of youth organizing for communities across the country may – unexpectedly – be located here, in the southernmost tip of Texas, where young people don’t choose between the organizing traditions of their parents and carving out their own struggle – they do both.

Organizing: It’s All in the Family

Many of the teens have been coming to LUPE since they were children, brought along by their parents to community strategy meetings. The resident DJ for the workshop, Samantha – a sharp, glowing teen – came with her abuela, Doña Mari, who is making lunch for the group. Natalie, an observant, quick-witted high-schooler, is the daughter of Genaro, a longtime UFW organizer, who at the previous night’s membership meeting shared stories of how black and Latino workers came together to win union contracts in the South.

Organizing – families coming together to demand what they deserve – is the environment in which these young people grew up, just as their parents did.

“Start dreaming now – that is how the movement has carried on,” Juanita Valdez-Cox, the executive director of LUPE, says over a plate of homemade mole. “I tell the youth that nothing is impossible; it is only a matter of time.”

Valdez-Cox became part of the movement years ago the same way Samantha and Natalie did – through her parents.  Her mother joined the UFW when César Chávez was seeding farmworker campaigns in the fields of the Rio Grande Valley. Chávez established LUPE as a nonprofit for low-income families in the region to advocate for themselves. Valdez-Cox’s 91-year-old mother still attends LUPE’s monthly membership meetings.

Youth Issues Are Community’s Issues

That teenagers would join their parents’ and grandparents’ fights for equity may come out of the reality of their communities. Living in colonias – unincorporated communities, often without basic public infrastructure and utilities – organizing is one thing they can rely on. It’s how their families got paved roads, a sewage system, streetlights, dignity.  As such, generational distinctions are a luxury communities here may not have or be interested in.

When LUPE communities recently had success advocating for the building of a much-needed park in an underserved colonia, the victory was not just for the youth, but for the families, just as the advocacy effort to realize that win relied on all of the families’ organizing resources: youthful energy and elder wisdom.

But young people here also know they face issues that are particular to their lives. When asked about what issues they face as young people in the Valley, they quickly rifle off issues around their broken school system, the proliferation of drugs, the lack of hope they see in some of their peers who are struggling to get by.

When asked about causes, they frame the issues in the context of the political landscape of their colonia, the politics of the border. And when asked for solutions, they draw upon the traditions of their parents: power from the ground up, organizing – and amplify it with the skill sets particular to their generation. They talk about murals by young graffiti artists that would both beautify the colonias and convey a message of empowerment. They talk about making a video series so that young people in colonias across the Valley could hear one another.

Hashtagging the Movement

Our social media workshop culminates in a Twitter chat asking Rio Grande Valley youth what they would say to the rest of the country. Most of the youth have Twitter accounts, and so some of them help older participants get up to speed. A few “adult staff” from partner organizations have also come to the workshop, and the youth take particular care that they participate.

Coming from California’s Bay Area, where we’ve spent the last 15 years creating “youth organizations” to carve out and protect space for young people, this impulse to include older generations is striking and illustrates how the Rio Grande Valley youth are showing us the next phase of our work. We hadn’t realized that building a protective wall for young people to build community also meant isolating them from mutually beneficial intergenerational relationships; we didn’t see that a community doesn’t have to choose between tradition and innovation.

On May 20, LUPE – youth and elders – will be participating in the Equal Voice Online National Convention, a convening of organizations around the country that work on elevating the voices of low-income families – from big cities to small border towns, and everywhere in between.

The event, sponsored by Marguerite Casey Foundation, is the first to create a national family platform facilitated through the power of technology. The event, in some ways, is a magnification of what happens here at LUPE every day: to transcend the demarcations that distinguish us – geography, race, age, issue – and to find power in our commonality – the needs and hopes of families.

LUPE youth, like Samantha and Natalie, will likely be twittering their thumbs off on May 20, making sure their issues are heard on the streaming chat, responding to youth they may never meet in person in places like Chicago and Los Angeles, and locating where their Rio Grande Valley issues fit in the national platform. But they won’t be doing so only as “youth” representatives — they will be giving voice to their entire community, including the issues of the older generation as well. Since the lens to look through for the convening is family, they don’t have to choose between their issues and those of their parents. Even if they did, they would probably just choose both.

Raj Jayadev is the director of Silicon Valley De Bug, a community organizing and media outlet in San Jose, CA, founded by New America Media.  Jayadev and the SV De Bug team are working with the Equal Voice Network to train and empower youth across the country as port of the 2012 Equal Voice Online National Convention.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — California’s sputtering economic recovery is putting a heavier-than-expected drag on state tax revenue, leading Gov. Jerry Brown on Monday to propose deep budget cuts across an array of government services and warn again that even more cuts are ahead if voters reject his tax-hike initiative in November.

Brown’s latest budget plan for the fiscal year that begins July 1 proposes $8.3 billion in spending cuts to close a revised deficit of $15.7 billion deficit, an amount equal to 17 percent of the state’s entire general fund.

The plan would reduce child care for mothers trying to get off welfare, in-home supportive services for the needy and health care for the poor, as well as cut funding to courts and postpone payments to schools.

Those reductions come on top of tens of billions of dollars in state budget cuts implemented since the recession started in late 2007.

Brown, a Democrat, also is asking state workers to share the pain by taking a 5 percent pay cut, most likely by reducing their work hours. The pay reduction would be handled in contract negotiations with the state’s public employee unions.

In addition to the cuts, Brown hopes to close the deficit with $5.9 billion in new revenue from the tax initiative he proposed earlier this year that would temporarily add a quarter cent in the state sales tax and collect higher income taxes on those who make $250,000 a year or more.

If voters reject the tax increases in the fall, Brown is proposing $6 billion in additional automatic spending cuts, almost all of which would fall on K-12 schools.

“Cutting alone really doesn’t do it,” Brown told reporters in releasing his $91 billion general fund budget plan. “And that’s why I’m linking the serious budget reductions — real increase to austerity — with a plea to the voters: Please increase taxes temporarily on the most affluent and everyone else with a quarter of a cent sales tax.”

Another $2.5 billion would involve delaying paying debt and other internal borrowing.

Brown said his balanced approach was a fair and reasonable way to balance the budget. The sales tax increase would last four years while the income taxes on the wealthy would be raised for seven.

The revised budget deficit is $6.5 billion more than the $9.2 billion gap Brown anticipated in January.

He blamed the widening shortfall on court judgments that prevented him from making cuts to programs such as MediCal and In-Home Supportive Services and on the state’s sagging economy.

Unlike many other states, California has yet to show significant progress in emerging from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.

Unemployment has crept back up to 11 percent, among the highest rates in the nation. The national unemployment rate has dropped a full percentage point since August — to 8.1 percent in April.

Also in California, home foreclosures also remain among the highest of any state. Home construction, a key driver of the state’s economy, continues to be depressed, while home prices in many parts of the state have not recovered.

Those factors have depressed household spending and led to a decline in most tax collections for the state and local governments.

Democrats who control the Legislature said they would cut as much as they can while trying to preserve what they deem essential services.

Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, said Democrats are not looking for a public fight with the governor.

Republicans said the majority party has refused to enact reforms such as public worker pension and teacher accountability.

“When you have unsustainable policies, you have unsustainable budgets,” said Republican Senate leader Bob Huff of Diamond Bar.

Speaking to reporters, Brown addressed the difference between the optimistic state revenue projections he expected months ago and the reality of today’s numbers.

Based on the best figures the state could gather, he said he believed at the time that there was a “reasonable shot” at getting an additional $4 billion in revenue.

“We didn’t get it. … We always have to prepare for getting less than we expect or in some cycles we get more. That’s the way it is,” Brown said. “But the point is, it’s very easy to play gotcha. But when I have to cut and people lose their jobs — a mother loses her child care, maybe her job — I’m reluctant to do that if there’s a plausible reason why we might not have to.”

Public schools, which account for about 40 percent of state spending, would see a funding increase of 16 percent if voters approve Brown’s tax initiative. More money also would flow to the state’s three higher education systems, which have been the subject of student and faculty protests as courses have been cut and tuition has soared in recent years.

Brown acknowledged that the Democrats who control the Legislature do not want to make more budget cuts, but he said doing so was unavoidable.

“Given the decade of fiscal disconnect, I’ve committed to righting the ship of state and getting it into balance,” Brown said. “Otherwise, we borrow and sink deeper into debt.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — The financially struggling U.S. Postal Service sought Wednesday to tamp down concern over wide-scale cuts, revealing it will seek to keep thousands of rural post offices open with shorter hours.

At a news briefing, Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe said the mail agency was backing off its plan to close up to 3,700 low-revenue post offices sometime after May 15. Citing strong community opposition, Donahoe said the agency will now whittle down full-time staff but maintain a part-time post office presence in rural areas, with access to retail lobbies and post office boxes.

Under the emerging strategy, no post office would be closed. But more than 13,000 rural mail facilities could see reduced operations of between two and six hours.

The Postal Service intends to seek regulatory approval and get community input, a process that could take several months. The new strategy would then be implemented over two years and completed in September 2014, saving an estimated half billion dollars annually.

“We’ve listened to our customers in rural America and we’ve heard them loud and clear — they want to keep their post office open,” Donahoe said. “We believe today’s announcement will serve our customers’ needs and allow us to achieve real savings to help the Postal Service return to long-term financial stability.”

Under the new plan, communities would be given the option of keeping their area post offices open but at reduced hours. Another option would be to close a postal office in one area while keeping a nearby one open full-time. Communities also could opt for alternatives including creating a Village Post Office in which postal services are offered in libraries, government offices or local stores such as a Wal-Mart, Walgreens or Office Depot.

“At the end of the day, we will not close rural post offices until we receive community input,” said Megan Brennan, the Postal Service’s chief operating officer. “We believe very few post offices will be closed over the next few years.”

The latest move comes as the Postal Service is making a broad push for Congress to pass legislation this summer that would allow the agency to move forward on its multi-billion dollar cost-cutting plan, which include an end to Saturday mail delivery.

High concern in rural communities over proposed cuts has been a principal barrier to the cost-cutting effort, with residents in the sprawling and remote areas expressing fears about their ability to get timely mail delivery of prescription drugs, newspapers and other services. That has raised the ire of rural-state lawmakers in particular in an election year.

Families in rural Fox, Ark., high in the Ozarks, are among the communities that fought passionately to save their post office.

“This is wonderful news that will keep many a rural community alive and continue to provide services in these areas that have the least resources,” said Renee Carr, executive director of the Rural Community Alliance in Arkansas.

Throughout Arkansas, residents organized, holding meetings, signing petitions and meeting with legislators to save what, in many cases is their sense of identity and primary connection to the greater world.

“It has also been an eye-opener that rural communities need to be actively engaged in finding ways to increase the business of their local post office,” said Carr.  “I’m hopeful that allowing post offices to sell non-postal items will also increase revenue to local offices.”

Due to rural opposition, the Senate this month passed a bill that would in part impose a one-year moratorium on shuttering rural post offices and place additional restrictions afterward, a move that the Postal Service later denounced as “totally inappropriate” because it kept unneeded facilities open.

In the House, hesitancy among rural lawmakers is helping to stall a separate bill that would allow for far more aggressive postal cuts.

Most of the 3,700 post offices that had been under review for possible closing had been in rural areas with low volumes of business, with as many as 3,000 only having two hours of business a day even though they are open longer. Currently the post office operates more than 31,000 retail outlets around the country.

The mail agency said it expects to save more money off the new plan, mostly by weeding out full-time postmasters who don’t have labor contract protections and replacing them with part-time workers. It plans to offer buyouts for the nation’s more than 21,000 postmasters, noting that more than 80 percent of its postal costs in rural areas are labor-related.

The Postal Service has been grappling with losses as first-class mail volume declines and more people switch to the Internet to send messages and pay bills. The agency has forecast a record $14.1 billion loss by the end of this year; without changes, it said, annual losses will exceed $21 billion by 2016.

It also is pushing Congress to pass legislation by early summer. If the House fails to act soon, postal officials say, they will face a cash crunch in August and September, when the agency must pay more than $11 billion to the U.S. Treasury to prefund future retiree health benefits. Already $13 billion in debt, the health payment obligation will force the mail agency to run up against its $15 billion debt ceiling, causing it to default on the payments.

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Fighting obesity will require changes everywhere Americans live, work, play and learn, says a major new report that outlines dozens of options — from building more walkable neighborhoods to zoning limits on fast-food restaurants to selling healthier snacks in sports arenas.

But schools should be a national focus because that’s where children spend most of their day, eat a lot of their daily calories — and should be better taught how to eat healthy and stay fit, the influential Institute of Medicine said Tuesday.

Among the most controversial of the recommendations: Communities could consider a tax on sugary sodas and offering price breaks for healthier beverage choices.

That prompted outrage from the American Beverage Association.

“Advocating discriminatory policies that uniquely focus on sugar-sweetened beverages is the wrong approach,” said an association statement that added those drinks account for just 7 percent of calories in the average person’s diet.

Most of us know we should eat less and move more. But the institute makes clear this isn’t just an individual but a societal problem: For a host of reasons, sedentary lives have become the norm and we’re surrounded by cheap, high-calorie foods.

The new report offers a roadmap of the most promising strategies to change that — and argues that the solutions can’t be implemented piecemeal.

“Each of us has this role. We can’t sit back and let the schools do it, or let a mayor do it or think somehow the federal government’s going to solve it,” said report co-author William Purcell III, former mayor of Nashville, Tenn. “These recommendations require concerted effort among all.”

A health advocacy group urged governments, industry and schools to adopt the recommendations.

“The country has begun to address obesity but we are still doing far too little given the tremendous burden it places on our health and health care costs,” said Margo Wootan of the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

Two-thirds of U.S. adults and almost a third of children are either overweight or obese, and progress to stop this epidemic has been too slow, the Institute of Medicine concluded.

For schools, it recommended that students get at least 60 minutes of physical activity every day — a combination of physical education, recess and other activities. Many schools have slashed P.E. and cut into recess in recent years in an effort to increase learning time amid tighter budgets. The report also says schools should serve healthier foods, backing national school nutrition standards, and teach nutrition.

Other recommendations include:

—Restaurants should ensure that at least half of kids’ meals comply with federal dietary guidelines, without charging more for the healthier options.

—Healthier foods should be routinely available everywhere, from shopping malls to sports arenas.

—More food companies should improve how they market to children — and if they don’t, the government should step in and mandate changes.

—To make physical activity routine, communities should be designed with safe places to walk and exercise.

—Public and private insurers should ensure better access to obesity screening, preventive services and treatments.

—Employers should expand workplace wellness programs.

—The president should appoint a task force to evaluate the impact of U.S. agriculture policies on obesity.

The Institute of Medicine, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, is an independent organization that advises the government.

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press.

This year marks the 13^th anniversary of the march and attracted thousands of immigrant rights advocates coming together to call attention to a number of local, state and national efforts. Some of those initiatives included the Dream Act, worker rights initiatives, and comprehensive immigration reform.

Free Screenings at Community Health Fair

Then it was off to the Community Health Fair at CARECEN. As part of a partnership with St. Vincent Medical Center, CARECEN hosted a free health fair for hundreds of Pico Union/Westlake residents.

The health fair offered mammograms, ultrasounds, blood pressure, BMI, cholesterol and diabetes screenings. The event also included trained staff that assisted participants in applying for low-cost medical insurance.

Student Mural Unveiling on May 24

CARECEN has been working with the Miguel Contreras Learning Complex ALC (Academic Leadership Community) students for over a year to develop a mural at the school.

The first phase of the project included a series of discussions and activities around the history of Latin America and discussions led by CARECEN’s Day Labor Center participants. Students used that information to develop small art exercises that were merged into a mural.

The message students want to convey in their mural is the importance of preserving and building an understanding of their roots. Now, in its final stages of completion, the mural will be unveiled for students, parents and staff on May 24.

 The vision of CARECEN is for the Los Angeles region to become a place where Central Americans and all other communities can live in peace, with dignity, and enjoy economic well-being, social justice, and political empowerment.

On May 20 Myeisha Hutchinson is giving up part of her Sunday off to join tens of thousands of American families throughout the country who plan to participate in the 2012 Equal Voice Online Convention.

At the convention, which will be broadcast over the Internet, families will determine, and then vote on the issues for a national platform by and for families.

In doing so, they are sending a powerful message to the president, decision-makers and the country that families will be heard in 2012.

Nearly 100 young people at an Equal Voice town hall meeting in Chicago in April discussed issues important to them and their communities. (Equal Voice photo by Jean Melesaine)

“It’s time for people who have not had a voice, not had opportunities, to have a chance to speak up,” said Hutchinson, 28. “I grew up in a single-parent family, in a neighborhood where the playing field was never fair.

“I want people to know we are not going to stand for injustice, that everyone deserves quality and equality. That means child care, health care and safe neighborhoods. It is time for all Americans to truly thrive,” she said.

“You think poverty doesn’t have anything to do with you? Well, that can all change in a blink of an eye,” said Hutchinson, who lives with her mother and grandmother in the same house where she grew up, in Birmingham’s low-income Woodlawn neighborhood.

Hutchinson is right. According to a study by the Corporation for Economic Development, more than 40 percent of families would fall below the poverty line within three months if they lost their jobs or became ill and couldn’t work.

Nearly 49 million people in America struggle every day to meet the basic needs of their families. They are families that work hard, sometimes two or three jobs that pay the $7.25 minimum wage, and still can’t make ends meet.

Despite their numbers, poor and low-income families in America, their views and their voices, are routinely ignored by those who create the policies that affect their lives.

That’s about to change.

On May 20, Marguerite Casey Foundation and Equal Voice families throughout the country will come together online, in a live webcast, to determine their issues and concerns and vote on the 2012 Equal Voice for America’s Families National Family Platform.

Anyone with an Internet connection can join the convention at http://www.equalvoice2012.org/.

Some of the biggest in-person gatherings will be held in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, in Birmingham, Ala., and in Seattle, Wash. Those three gatherings will be webcast live.

Other large gatherings are planned in California, Illinois, Arizona, Mississippi, Georgia and Kentucky. Many more people will meet at coffee shops, community centers and in living rooms across the country.

During the event, participants anywhere in the country will be able to ask questions and discuss issues by using social media, including their own Facebook and Twitter accounts. Then, they will vote – by mobile-phone text messaging or online via Twitter or Poll Everywhere – on the issues most important to them.

Families will text their votes on issues on May 20 to contribute their voice in updating the 2012 National Family Platform.

“We’ve been consumed by the interests of politicians and corporations for too long. It’s time to find our voices and our power by coming together,”  said Jeanette Taylor-Smith, a mother of five in Chicago who works as a parent organizer.

Equal Voice is a network of organizations and families around the country that are working to build a base of families to advocate in their own behalf for policy changes to improve the economic and social well-being of poor and low-income families.

In 2008, some 30,000 families participated in the yearlong Equal Voice for America’s Families campaign, which created – for the first time – a comprehensive platform of values and policy recommendations by and for low-income families.

That time, 65 town hall–style meetings were held in 12 states and 11 languages. Families distilled the vision of a better America into an actionable document: The Equal Voice for America’s Families National Family Platform.

The 2008 issues focused on child care, education, employment, criminal justice reform, immigration reform, housing, health care and safe communities. Some of the policy recommendations made in 2008 have been addressed, but many have not.

And four years ago, few could have imagined the nation’s looming economic crisis.

Even fewer could have anticipated the extent to which the government would bail out failing banks and prop up crumbling corporations, while ignoring families living without electricity or running water, or those without enough food or without health care for their children.

The recession brought record high unemployment, homes lost to foreclosure, blighted neighborhoods when banks refused to care for those homes, and bare shelves at food banks. It helped shift 10 million more people into poverty.

Over the last four years, grassroots organizations have used the Equal Voice national family platform to build civic engagement and to create strong networks in every corner of the country to push for policies that will improve the future for their children.

“Since 2008, many people have looked to the national family platform for information and inspiration,” said Kate Shuster, statewide coordinator for Alabama Organizing Project. She is expecting 300 people to meet at the B&A Warehouse in downtown Birmingham for the Equal Voice online convention.

“Families are joining the 2012 online convention to be part of something bigger than themselves,” she said.

The families’ determination is strengthened by the rhetoric of desperate candidates positioning for the 2012 elections. Candidates have used their podiums to insult struggling families and invoke false stereotypes without being challenged.

The truth is, poor families work, sometimes two or three different jobs. Immigrants pay taxes and often receive none of the benefits. More than half of low-income working families are headed by married couples, not single moms. And, poor people come in all colors, including white.

Families struggle because our policies and our system have failed them. They have the firsthand experience and insight into how public policy, attitudes and systems must change:

• In Florida, Reyna works 12-hour days taking care of another family’s children. She has leukemia, but no health insurance. She pays cash for her chemotherapy.

• In Seattle, Lisa lost her rental house when the landlord died. She and her son lived in her car at a highway rest stop while she saved her minimum-wage pay for first and last months’ rent and a cleaning deposit on an apartment.

• In Chicago, Quabeeny walked 20 blocks through gang-ridden neighborhoods to high school. Arriving late to his 7:30 a.m. class, he was locked out. He was expelled for tardiness.

• In Texas, Jose worked as a restaurant cook for 10 years, often working 70-hour weeks to support his family. He was never paid overtime. When he asked his boss to pay him the required overtime, he was fired.

Sarah White, 52, who worked for 17 years skinning catfish in a processing plant in Moorhead, Miss., plans to take part in the convention.

“We are poor; we don’t have ways to access a better a life,” she said. “We don’t have the security of stable housing or the ability to take our babies to the doctor when they are sick, all the things that are necessary for a family.”

She raised two children while working 10- and 12-hour shifts for minimum wage.

“We never got to go to meetings with our children’s school teachers; we couldn’t take time off,” White said. “I have been where I wondered where I was going to get a can of milk or a chicken to fry.”

Years of working in the refrigerated factory, standing in puddles of water on the concrete floor, ravaged her health. She has asthma, arthritis and diabetes. Now, as a workers’ rights organizer, she has helped win overtime pay, vacation days and health insurance for factory workers.

“You have to fight,” she said.

Families are fighting in Texas, where the Equal Voice network helped defeat nearly 100 anti-immigrant bills and is improving housing, health care and education in the Rio Grande Valley, where the annual income for most families is around $15,000.

Earlier this month, more than 350 Rio Grande Valley residents attended a candidate forum on a Tuesday morning, sending a clear message to politicians that they are organized and that they will vote.

On May 20, they will be joined by families in Chicago, where 100 young people recently gathered at an Equal Voice town hall meeting to talk about the stereotyping of youth and extreme zero-tolerance policies in schools that prevent students of color from graduating.

One young man, O’Sha Dancy, 16, lost his mother and baby sister four years ago while they were boarding a bus in a lightning storm. He was lost, ready to give up on school until he was offered a summer job at the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization that he says opened his eyes.

Now, an advocate for young people in his community, Dancy is taking part in the May 20 convention.

“One person isn’t going to get it done – it takes everyone. People united will never be defeated,” Dancy said.

“Private prison companies like Corrections Corporation of America take in billions of dollars while scrimping on care for detainees and working conditions for staff,” said Lawrence Benito, chief executive at the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights,

“Just last year, CCA settled a lawsuit alleging that at one Idaho prison it ran a “gladiator school” using Hunger Games-style violence to control inmates,” said Benito.

CCA also helped write Arizona’s SB 1070 racial profiling law and was instrumental in ensuring its passage.

“This is not a company that we want setting up shop in Illinois,” said Benito.

On Patricia Jones’ wedding day, her father pulled her aside, holding her arm firmly and speaking so urgently that she stopped hugging her guests to listen closely.

“Buy a house as soon as you can,” he told her. “A house is your wealth, your future, for you, for your children, and for your grandchildren.”

Patricia and her husband eventually saved enough money to buy a house in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans in 2000, walking distance from her parents’ home, and began raising their family.

Jones grew up in the Lower Ninth, like her father and his father. In 1965, her grandfather lost everything when Hurricane Betsy hit New Orleans. Money to rebuild wasn’t given to African-Americans.

In August 2005, Jones and her family evacuated to Georgia in advance of Hurricane Katrina. When the hurricane hit New Orleans and levees ruptured, she and her family followed TV coverage of the disaster. Jones froze when she saw her neighborhood flash onto the television screen. People were trapped on the roof of a two-story building, water lapping at the eaves. She knew that building.

“Oh my God! Our house is under water,” she cried.

Jones paced the room, trying to calm herself, trying to think. They had hurricane insurance on the house. It was going to be okay. It had to be.

A few weeks later at a meeting with State Farm insurance representatives, she began to understand that as horrific as the hurricane and floods were, the real disaster was still ahead.

“At the meeting, State Farm said they weren’t going to be covering our loss. It was a flood, they said, not a hurricane that destroyed our house. And we weren’t covered for a flood.

“My husband had to pull me out of that meeting room,” said Jones.

Tornadoes and hurricanes don’t discriminate. They tear through communities without rhyme or reason. Yet, in the aftermath, when recovery begins, the painful pattern of who is helped – and who is left behind – is undeniable.

Whether it’s Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, Hurricane Dolly in Texas in 2008, or the deadly Alabama tornadoes in 2011, blatant discrimination against low-income families, poor communities, people of color and those with little education or access to technology continues with shameful predictability.

Tishabee, Alabama

The tornados that roared through Alabama on April 27, 2011, didn’t discriminate. They killed more than 250 people across the state and erased complete neighborhoods.

When one of the tornadoes hit tiny, rural Tishabee, the massive twister tore the roof and porch from Idell McShan’s pink trailer. Across the meadow from McShan, a mobile home was untouched. But, down the road, houses were crushed. One family’s daughter was killed.

Idell McShan, inside her home in Tishabee, Ala. The storm tore off the roof and knocked the house from its foundation. Without insurance, she doesn't know what she will do. Photographer: Mike Kane

Neighbors layered blue tarps across McShan’s torn roof. Then it rained. Water streamed between the sheets of plastic and into the trailer, soaking the walls and carpet.

McShan, 78, has lived in rural Alabama her entire life. Fifty years ago, she and her husband bought the acre of land she lives on in this mostly African-American community. The land and the pink trailer, now roofless, waterlogged and leaning, are all she owns.

McShan’s three young grandchildren live with her. They scrape by on her monthly $700 social security check, earned after decades of working in a poultry plant and a cardboard box factory.

A FEMA worker came to assess the damage to her trailer after the tornado.

“It’s in pretty bad shape,” the federal employee agreed, walking around the trailer with a notepad and camera.

When Alabama was declared a disaster area, FEMA was authorized to pay homeowners up to $30,200 to repair their homes “to a safe and sanitary living condition.”

For a brief moment, Idell McShan allowed herself to hope.

But a year after the tornado, without a touch of resentment in her voice, McShan summons the same matter-of-fact tone she always uses to explain disappointments.

“I didn’t get a new place,” she said, her voice flat.

“You know I was hoping. I surely was hoping. They offered me a trailer, but I could only live in it a year, from April to April. And when the year was up, they would take it away and then I would have to find somewhere to go.

She paused. “Where would I go?

“So, I am glad I didn’t get it,” she said. “I thought I wanted it, I surely did.”

She was still holding onto a bit of hope the day the FEMA check arrived with money to restore her home.

“They sent me $900,” McShan said.

“I fixed up my old trailer. I put on a new top. Then my money ran out, and I didn’t get the inside fixed. Some of the walls have holes in them from the water. I need some paneling to cover those, sure do. It might be okay if I could get some paneling. I took up the carpet – it wouldn’t dry.

“You’ve got to do what you can do. I had to do what I could do,” she said. “It’s going to have to be okay.”

Rio Grande Valley, Texas

It’s not okay.

It takes a low-income neighborhood three times longer to recover from disaster than an affluent neighborhood, a full generation, some say, if ever. That is changing as communities share experiences, step up and speak out.

In the Texas Rio Grande Valley, the colonias are among the poorest communities in the country. The average household income is around $15,000.

Colonias are unincorporated subdivisions of simple homes built on former agricultural land, usually without the most basic infrastructure such as sewers or storm drainage. Many of the houses are patchworked together slowly by their owners as money and materials become available.

In 2008, when Hurricane Dolly hit south Texas, drenching the Rio Grande Valley, the water that flooded the colonias had nowhere to drain. Houses stood soaking in water for months. Mold grew, cockroaches flourished.

After Hurricane Dolly, houses in the Colonias stood soaking in flood water for months.

“When the mosquitoes came – and there was a huge infestation of mosquitoes -– they brought a lot of other health problems,” said Juanita Valdez-Cox, executive director of La Unión del Pueblo Entero (LUPE).

“We were hit by one disaster, but there were so many other disasters that followed,” said Valdez-Cox. “FEMA was a disaster in itself.”

Like McShan in Alabama, struggling families in the Texas colonias held on to hope that they would receive enough federal emergency funds to fix their hurricane- and water-ravaged homes. In the end, they were denied assistance, with no explanation.

“You can’t deny someone funding just because you didn’t have your coffee in the morning,” said Valdez-Cox.

LUPE – founded in 1989 by farm labor activist César Chávez – filed a lawsuit against FEMA, requiring the agency to publicly disclose the standards it uses to decide who gets help and who is denied.

“FEMA has a secret rule that only effects poor people,” said Jerome Wesevich, an attorney with Texas RioGrande Legal Aid. “After Hurricane Dolly, FEMA applied that secret rule over 10,000 times to poor colonia residents.

“If, in FEMA’s subjective judgment, your home was in crummy condition prior to the disaster, it doesn’t matter how much the storm damages your home, the government won’t help you,” said Wesevich. “It disproportionately affects poor people, denying families any help after disasters.

“How is it fair that only rich people can get their house repaired after a disaster?” he asked.

LUPE won the first round of the lawsuit, but the federal agency has appealed, and the case will likely wind through the legal system for years to come.

There are other battles. Activists in south Texas are heading into the next round: making sure that when long-awaited Community Development Block Grant money, awarded after Hurricane Dolly, finally reaches them, jobs rebuilding the housing in the communities will go to the people who live there.

About $122 million has been reserved for colonia housing programs, with another $65 million for infrastructure, such as drainage.

Unfailingly, the smell of government money brings big-time contractors from out of state swooping in to grab up contracts for work – then they bring in their own teams.

Local communities and workers are left without jobs and without the economic boost the money is intended to bring. This time, in the colonias, mere hope is replaced by determination.

Families are organizing to make sure they are not left out. They fill the room at state and regional government     smeetings to give a face and voice to the need, and they demand to be included in the recovery.

“We’re not just talking about the hope of jobs, but about the expectation,” said Armando Garza, development director for Proyecto Azteca, which helps families build quality homes and strong communities.

“It’s very powerful when families who are often voiceless have a voice of their own, when they can advocate on their own behalf,” said Garza.

New Orleans, Louisiana

The Lower Ninth Ward, framed by the Mississippi River and Industrial Canal, was home to generations of families. The neighborhood once boasted one of the highest rates of African-American home ownership in the country. When the canal levee was breached, water covered the neighborhood.

The whiter, wealthier neighborhoods of New Orleans have bounced back, businesses are open, new hotels are filled with tourists and conventions. But the low-income, Lower Ninth Ward remains a ghost town.

Only 25 percent of the population has returned. When Patricia Jones and her husband bought their house before Hurricane Katrina, 14,000 people lived in the community. Today, about 3,500 people live there.

Families have moved to places with jobs, schools and normal services like grocery stores. Others have gone to live with their children; some of the older folks have passed away.

As in the colonias, the hurricane and flooding were only the beginning of the disasters dealt the community. Government agencies and government officials turned their backs; banks preyed on frightened and vulnerable families.

City leaders talked about replacing a low-income neighborhood devastated by flooding with a golf course.

“I’ll bet every nickel that the same stories are repeated across the country,” said Flozell Daniels, Jr., president and chief executive of the Foundation for Louisiana. “The question that endures is how we give people equal opportunity to have equal progress in the recovery.”

In the Lower Ninth Ward, just as in the colonias, families are fighting back.

“It took 10 months for us to get running water in the Lower Ninth. We couldn’t get a commitment, they were trying to discourage us from rebuilding,” said Jones, who returned to her community six months after Hurricane Katrina.

“It felt like déjà vu. It felt like the stories my dad had told me about my grandfather,that the whites were given opportunities and the blacks were not.”

“I was angry. I didn’t want anyone to dictate to me that my wealth was not going to be passed on to my children,” said Jones, now executive director of Lower Ninth Ward Neighborhood Empowerment Network Association (NENA).

“There were elderly people in the neighborhood who lost everything they had. They were overwhelmed with the paperwork. You had to go online and register – they don’t have a Yahoo account, they don’t have email. What were they supposed to do?

The elderly people can’t get a 30-year mortgage. They have no choices, their wealth has been pulled away from them, and they are not being made whole.

“I felt a conviction that we needed to help people. I had worked as a paralegal in a law firm; I am familiar with paperwork,” she said. “That’s how NENA got started.”

Families in the Lower Ninth felt the full force of predatory bankers long before the rest of the country as banks foreclosed on destroyed homes or swooped in and took insurance money meant for rebuilding.

“You were still obligated to rebuild, but the bank had your money, you didn’t,” said Jones.

Then came Road Home, a Louisiana state program designed to provide funds to families to rebuild their homes – unless the family lived in a poor neighborhood. The program discriminated against thousands of African-American families in low-income communities.

Grants for home repair were based on the pre-storm market value of the homes rather than the actual cost to repair the house.

In a widely reported example, a woman living in a poor neighborhood received a $1,400 grant. If she had been living in the same home, with the same damage, in a wealthier part of town, she would have received $150,000, using the state’s calculations.

“It’s ridiculous. Home Depot doesn’t say, ‘Oh, you live in the Lower Ninth, we will give you a 40 percent discount,’” said Jones. “Home repairs cost the same in every neighborhood.”

A settlement was reached last July with Road Home, but, in many cases, the damage was done and families gave up hope of returning home.

“It’s like you are constantly holding your breath, with a knot in your chest, just trying to function. We need to keep watching and staying alert,” said Jones.

The Lower Ninth recently received $40 million to repave streets and repair sewer connections. A new neighborhood fire station will be built soon. The next hurdle is to get a high school, and then a grocery store.

“I envision that our community will be thriving in 20 years, in a generation.

“The glue here is our fight to keep what we earned and what we bought years ago,” said Jones. “Even if you don’t value my wealth – I do. What I have is mine, and you are not going to take it.”

More than 22 percent of the families in National City, Calif. live below the poverty line. Some of the sunshine state’s most vulnerable communities don’t have access to the booming green economy because of the cost, said Diane Takvorian, executive director of the Environmental Health Coalition in California.

Instead, many have suffered the most from dirty energy industries and nearby power plants.

Lilia Escalante wanted to “go green” with solar, but she was quickly discouraged by costs. EHC leaders helped her located services for affordable solar installation. As a result, her rooftop solar installation reduced her energy bill by more than 95 percent.

“My kids are proud to show their friends our solar panels, and I’m happy to see them excited about doing their part for the environment,” said Escalante.

The Environmental Health Coalition is one of the oldest grassroots organizations in the country using social change strategies to achieve environmental justice.