After receiving an unprecedented number of proposals (almost 100!), we were faced with a very challenging decision: choosing from some of the most powerful and exciting social change organizations in the US (plus a couple from Cuba and Canada!). The decision was excruciating, and most of you were deserving. But we had to pick one, and after much deliberation we decided to donate the poster to a joint campaign of two Bay Area grassroots organizations building the collective power of working class communities of color: St Peters Housing Committee and Just Cause Oakland.
Design Action Collective and Inkworks Press are thrilled to be supporting the work of these two vibrant and powerful organizations fighting for social, economic and racial justice. An announcement will be forthcoming upon the release of the poster.
About the St Peters Housing Committee and Just Cause Oakland joint project:
St Peters Housing Committee and Just Cause Oakland are joining forces to launch a Bay Area-wide campaign in working class African-American and Latino communities responding to the economic crisis through a grassroots response. The current crisis is hitting working class communities of color the hardest. As the new landlords, banks are not being held to the proper legal standards. People are being kicked out of their homes by the thousands even after the banks have grabbed their federal bailout money. Tenants are having their water and electricity shut off and are being forced to live in outrageous conditions. The same people who have been forced to bail out the banks as tax payers, are now being evicted by those very banks that have become their landlords.
As grassroots organizations with long histories of economic and racial justice organizing in San Francisco and Oakland, Just Cause Oakland and St Peters Housing Committee will be working with Design Action Collective and Inkworks Press to produce a bilingual English/Spanish poster responding to the economic crisis with an anti-displacement framework, targeting the banks, celebrating working class resistance and the historic unity of Black and Latino communities. The poster will be used in service of their community resistance campaign and distributed through their organizing work of door to door outreach, and at neighborhood, tenant, and membership meetings in the hardest hit communities.