What is sanctuary? How can we rethink immigration policy? How can we mitigate the climate crisis and work towards climate justice? Add your voice! Share your story! Be part of the solution!
Join us on Wednesday January 25, 2023, for an opening storytelling event to kick-off the semester-long Amplifying Sanctuary Voices (ASV) exhibit! The exhibit will run from January 25 to May 25, 2023, in Rosenberg Library’s 2nd floor atrium at the Ocean Campus of City College of San Francisco, 50 Frida Kahlo Way. This multimedia exhibit features a history of the Sanctuary Movement in the Bay Area and an introduction to climate migration—positioning climate change as a major driver in the forced migration of peoples throughout the world. The exhibit focuses on various nuances of climate-induced displacement and migration of the Rohingya people, as well as people in the Northern Triangle of Central America, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Syria, and Pakistan.
The opening event will take place on Wednesday January 25from 11AM to 1:30PM!
We are calling on the City College community – students, professors, librarians, staff – to engage in this crucial conversation: bring a class to the exhibit, create and share discussion questions and assignment ideas on migration and climate change in your field, from science to anthropology to art to language to literature. We hope to inspire classes from a variety of disciplines to engage in solutions-focused conversations and brainstorms about migration. To get involved, email CCSF English Professor Steven Mayers (smayers@csf.edu) and ASV co-founder Rebecca Gerny (rebecca@eastbaysanctuary.org)!
Amplifying Sanctuary Voices (ASV) is a storytelling initiative led by East Bay Sanctuary Covenant (EBSC), a long-term partner organization of Voice of Witness (VOW). ASV consists of a coalition of community organizations that includes East Bay Sanctuary Covenant, Voice of Witness, the Public Service Center at UC Berkeley, Inside the Living Room, Youth UnMuted, and 1951 Coffee. The project aims to create space in mainstream political conversation for the diverse voices and experiences of those impacted by immigration policy decisions. ASV is a community-based oral history project centering the stories of Bay Area residents who have come to the U.S. seeking sanctuary. ASV stimulates dialogue and creates space in the mainstream political conversation for the diverse voices and experiences of those impacted by policy decisions.
SPONSORED BY: CCSF ROSENBERG LIBRARY, AMPLIFYING SANCTUARY VOICES (ASV), EAST BAY SANCTUARY COVENANT (EBSC), CCSF PUENTE PROGRAM, CCSF CITY DREAM
The People’s COP27: Voices from the Front Lines of Climate Change
A year ago we joined together on Zoom for the People’s COP26 “Voices from the Front Lines of Climate Change.” Across ten time zones, we asked how did you experience nature as children? What has changed in the environment? How has climate change informed you work as activists and defenders of the earth? Many things have happened since last November — floods in South Asia; wars in Ukraine & Tigray; food shortages; fossil fuel energy spikes. But we resist “doom and gloom” despair and passivity in favor of concrete examples of resilience, adaptation and positive climate action. We believe in the transformative energy of sharing stories of courage, adaptation, resilience. Our theme is From Solito (aloneness, isolation, fear) to Solidarity (joining together to survive, adapt and thrive.)
How has climate change affected you and your region in the last year? Tell us a story that takes us to your world. What resources could compensate your region’s loss and damage and promote regeneration?
We’re inviting each of you to a new People’s COP27, at the end of the UN conference on climate in Egypt. This year Steven and Jonathan will be hosting a two-hour session on November 20, 2022 from 10 am to 12 noon (California time), with simultaneous Zoom sessions in your time zone. Simply, at the same time as last year. Ibrahim Tchan is participating in COP27 and will be on the scene in Egypt to wrap up the event.
We are going to preview an amazing music video: “Solito to Solidarity” co-produced by S2S and Ibrahim Tchan, who you’ll remember playing the guitar from Glasgow. With lyrics created by Steven and Jonathan, original music by Ibrahim and his band was recorded and filmed in Benin, West Africa.
Join the reunion! Bring your stories, your personal challenges and contributions. We can change the Emotion Climate of Fear and Aggressiveness to a Community of Compassion and Positive Action.
This global people-to-people forum will take place on Zoom, so tune in from wherever you are at your local time zone!
Ibrahim Tchan is a Beninese jurist specializing in cultural heritage and the Executive Director of the Corps des Volontaires Béninois (Corps of Benin Volunteers). He is also Director and Co-Founder of the Tata Somba Ecomuseum, the first ecological museum in West Africa. After Koutammakou, Land of the Batammariba, was included on the 2020 World Monuments Watch, he began coordinating the Koutammakou Cultural Landscape Preservation Project, Benin and Togo with his organization, Corps des Volontaires Béninois, with the financial support of the World Monuments Fund. Also a member of the Climate Heritage Network (CHN), he is CHN Africa Region Representative within the Climate Heritage Network-GlobalABC / Green Solutions Award Engagement Task Team. Activist and musician, Ibrahim Tchan is particularly active in projects involving the participation of local communities in the management and animation of world heritage, he designed the ConP’Art (Knowing my world heritage) didactic tool dedicated to educating children (10 and 13 years old) on African world heritage through the character of Comic Strip called Tory, the Little Ecocitoyen.
Lipi Rahman is one of the founders who directly involved in the evolving of Badabon Sangho. She has been supporting organisation with money, labour and suggestion. She worked as Executive Director of Badabon Sangho since its inception on volunteering basis. Currently she is acting as Executive Director and General Secretary of Executive Committee. She worked with non-profit development sector for last 20 years with different capacities. She born and brought up in educated Muslim family. She did masters in Political Science from University of Dhaka. She has strong passion and commitment for the vulnerable women. She is single lady, spending most of the time for organisation wellbeing.
Pedro Uc Be is a poet, teacher, and defender of the Maya land in Yucatan, Mexico. He is a member of Múuch ‘Xíinbal, Assembly of Defenders of the Maya Territory, an organization that aims to defend its territory from the dispossession applied by mega-companies of renewable energy in the Yucatan Peninsula. Pedro is currently a professor at the School of Literary Creation of the State Center of Fine Arts (CEBA), a campus where he also studied. He also graduated as a theologian from the San Pablo Presbyterian Theological Seminary in 1985 in the city of Mérida. He has a degree in Secondary Education in the area of Social Sciences from the Escuela Normal Superior de Campeche. He was a professor of Philosophy and History since 1993 in the city of Ticul, Yucatán at the José Dolores Rodríguez Tamayo Educational Center.
Anahí Haizel De la Cruz Martín is a Maya photographer. She was born in Ticul, Yucatán, on July 25, 1993. She has shown her work in various exhibitions including the collective exhibition The Memories of the Mayan Territory at the Museo Maya Santa Cruz Xbáalam Naj in Felipe Carrillo Puerto, Quintana Roo, Mexico. She was a fellow of the Young Creators 2019-2020 program of the Fund for Culture and the Arts (FONCA) in the Visual Arts Photography Area. She has published her photographs in the magazines La Ojarasca, Revista Sinfín, in the Italian magazine La Macchina Sognante, as well as in the Mexico News Daily newspaper and the Diario de Yucatán. Haizel accompanies and documents processes of struggle for the vindication of the Mayan language and culture as a member of the Assembly of Defenders of the Maya Múuch ’Xíinbal Territory. She has shared his photographs on Facebook and on her blog for the outreach of the communities.
Seifu Assegid works for Save the Children as a Roving Humanitarian Communication Coordinator. Seifu’s photographs and stories have appeared in popular television programs, newspapers, and magazines including the UK Daily Telegraph, Aljazeera TV, and media outlets in Australia and elsewhere. He has been voice to the voiceless by sharing their stories for donors and members of Save the Children. His work mainly focuses on people affected by climate change, and is informed by his personal experiences as a child and adult.
Pascal Broca was born in Tunisia and grew up in southwestern France near Bordeaux. As a child his best memories are of a big oak tree, walnut and apple orchards at his grandparents home near the small town of Royan on the Atlantic Coast. He went to college in Nancy to study engineering and spent a year studying in Sweden. With degrees in computer science and electrical engineering he went to work in Germany for Hewlett Packard and came to the US for a project but fell in love the redwood forests in the Santa Cruz mountains of California. At age thirty-nine, his car was struck from the rear and he suffered traumatic brain injury. Hospitalized in a cell-like hospital room in France, he felt so much joy when he came home to hug the trees. He moved back to the Santa Cruz mountains, where he owns a home surrounded by ten acres of redwoods. One night he was awakened by a tsunami like wind followed by hundreds of lightning strikes in all directions. As a volunteer firefighter, he packed his bag and went to the Bonny Doon fire station. But the wildfire could not be contained, and after a few days the fire crews left the scene. Alone, with a water hose, chain saw, he fought the fires and saved many homes in his neighborhood.
Steven Mayers and Jonathan Freedman complied and edited Solito, Solita: CrossingBorders with Youth Refugees from Central America, which was published by Haymarket Books as part of the Voice of Witness book series in 2019. Since 2019, they have been listening to the stories of environmentally displaced people and defenders of the land. Steven Mayers is an oral historian, writer, and professor in the English Department at the City College of San Francisco. Jonathan Freedman is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, author, and social activist with more than forty years’ experience reporting from South America, Central America, Mexico, and the US border. His six-year series of investigative editorials for the San Diego Tribune was influential in the passage of the landmark 1986 US immigration reforms that authorized 2.7 million undocumented immigrants to become permanent legal residents.
We’ll be releasing our new music video for our song, “Solito to Solidarity,” tomorrow, November 11, 2022, at the COP27 conference in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt. The song’s words were written by Steven Mayers and Jonathan Freedman, and the music was composed and performed by Ibrahim Tchan and his band in Benin. The video was created by Francis Anoum.
The showing will take place at 1pm in Egypt, which is 3am Pacific Time!
#ArtCultureHeritageCOP27 invites you to a day and night to lift up culture at COP27.
Contemporary climate planning has so far failed to keep 1.5 alive or deliver transformative adaptation, especially for the most vulnerability communities. One basic reason: current climate planning doesn’t dare to dream. It fails to help people imagine practical, desirable low carbon, just, climate resilient futures. It relies too heavily on technocratic solutions at the expense of place-based, people-centered, rights-based and demand side strategies. It favors voices from institutions that have helped cause the climate crisis and excludes those best positioned to critique them.
Throughout the day and night of 11 Nov, #ArtCultureHeritageCOP27 offers a joyful, informative, performance filled space that celebrates and unites the diversity of creative climate action:
Traditional knowledge and heritage buildings and landscapes that pre-date the fossil fuel era can point the way to post-carbon living.
The worldviews held by Indigenous Peoples and local communities never co-opted by modern take-make-waste approaches offer counterpoints to unsustainable paradigms of ‘progress.’
Artistic, heritage, creative, and imaginative tools support transformative reinterpretation of inherited mindsets, including the carbonscapes and petrocultures which are the heritage of the Anthropocene.
Attend the daytime programme, the evening programme or both!
Co-Create @ #ArtCultureHeritage COP27
The daytime programme, Co-Create @ #ArtCultureHeritage COP27, is a place to meet, learn, share, collaborate, and act on culture for transformative climate action, featuring artistic performances, discussions, learning events and more.
Doors open at 9am and the programme begins at 10am. A free lunch is offered. Performances will be woven into the day including poets, musicians and cultural voices such as Kathy Jetnil -Kijiner, Poet and Climate Envoy of the Marshall Islands, Cultural Ambassador of Climate Vulnerable Forum; Queen Quet of the Gullah Geechee Sea Island Coalition, and singer and storyteller Sam Lee.
Co-Create sessions include:
Conversation Starter: Four Perspectives on Culture as a Pillar of Climate Action
Climate Education for all: Linking Culture, Education, and Climate Empowerment (offered in French and English)
Culture Networks and Climate Mobilisation: Five leaders of cultural networks discuss their organisation’s approaches to climate action and reflect on the lessons of the morning sessions.
Multiple Paths/Shared Aims: A conversation about the diverse cultural paths to transformative climate action.
The Puente Program and CCSF is partnering with Amplifying Sanctuary Voices (ASV) and the East Bay Sanctuary Covenant (EBSC) to host an exhibit on the history of the sanctuary movement and its roots in Berkeley and the Bay Area.
When: Thursday 11/10/22 to Monday 1/10/23 Where: In the lobby of CCSF’s Mission campus (1125 Valencia St., between 22nd and 23rd)
Please join us for an opening celebration and gathering next Thursday, 11/10, from 10am to 12pm. We’ll gather in the lobby, share migration stories and talk about history of the sanctuary movement and the important role that the East Bay Sanctuary Covenant played and plays in helping people seek asylum.
Amplifying Sanctuary Voices (ASV) is a community-based oral history project centering the stories of Bay Area residents who have come to the U.S. seeking sanctuary. ASV stimulates dialogue and creates space in the mainstream political conversation for the diverse voices and experiences of those impacted by policy decisions.
Timeline of the Sanctuary Movement: 1951-1992
ASV has developed this Timeline to highlight the courage of refugees and activists who have fought tirelessly to protect human rights. Teachers may download the PDF for use in their classrooms. Stay tuned for Part II of the Timeline: 1992 – present. The exhibit is available for display in libraries, museums, and other public spaces. https://eastbaysanctuary.org/our-work/transformation-education/amplifying-sanctuary-voices/
@ccsf_english @ccsfmissionpuentistas Please join us for a special event at the Mission Center of City College of San Francisco! On Tuesday October 25 from 11am to 12pm, fiction writer Norman Zelaya will be reading from his new collection of short stories entitled Gente, Folks, and discussing his experience writing the book!
“Norman Antonio Zelaya characters soar to life in Gente, Folks, prose stories that create a vibrant chorus of voices that illuminate San Francisco’s Mission District, a neighborhood rich in history and culture, violence and loss, love and solidarity. Zelaya shows us a world where everyday survival is foremost, and where family and community come not only from the heart, but from the soul. A wonderful new book by a talented writer.” — Gail Tsukiyama – author of The Samurai’s Garden and The Color of Air.
Soledad Castillo and Gabriel Méndez have been collaborating with filmmaker, poet, and professor Shabnam Piryaei on this film project! Check out the trailer of No Separate Survival here!
May 19, 2022. Steven Mayers reads Pedro Hernandez’s story from Solito, Solita.
Have an hour to spare this May? Join me in supporting the @voiceofwitness #ReadItForward read-a-thon. Read stories of injustice from the people most impacted + raise funds for more voices to be amplified! http://bit.ly/read_it_forward
I’m reading Pedro Hernandez’s story in Solito, Solita: Crossing Borders with Youth Refugees from Central America during the @voiceofwitness #ReadItForward read-a-thon. Join me in learning from these vital narratives: http://bit.ly/read_it_forward
“I want to work hard so that one day my family, my parents, can be proud of me and say, ‘Thank you, son, for fighting for us. You are a good son.’ I want to hug them one day and have my family here. One day.”—@voiceofwitness narrator Pedro Hernandez. Join me in reading #UnheardVoicesofthePandemic during the #ReadItForward read-a-thon. http://bit.ly/read_it_forward
Have an hour to spare this May? Join me in supporting the @voiceofwitness #ReadItForward read-a-thon. 📖 Read stories of injustice from the people most impacted + raise funds for more voices to be amplified! bit.ly/read_it_forward
I’m reading Danelia Silva’s story in Solito, Solita: Crossing Borders with Youth Refugees from Central America during the @voiceofwitness #ReadItForward read-a-thon. Join me in learning from these vital narratives: bit.ly/read_it_forward
“I left. I left everything there: my television, my bed, my clothes, everything. I left with what I had brought with me, nothing more. We only had one change of clothes. As we traveled, sometimes we would clean them in the street, in a church.”
—@voiceofwitness narrator Danelia Silva. Join me in reading #UnheardVoicesofthePandemic during the #ReadItForward read-a-thon. bit.ly/read_it_forward
Novelist Isabel Allende reads from Gabriel Mendez’s story in Solito, Solita: Crossing Borders with Youth Refugees from Central America at our Brave Stories, Bold Movements event. Join the Voice of Witness read-a-thon: bit.ly/read_it_forward.
Solito2Solidarity 