Lisa Oliver-King, a mother and energetic activist, goes house to house in central city neighborhoods to understand and help resolve the pressing issues that matter most to urban families. The community organizer talks about meeting neighbors on the doorstep, empowering people with information, and training with former Vice President Al Gore.
You recently returned from Nashville, TN, where you participated in Al Gore's Climate Project training initiative. How was that experience?
It was a good training. But I'm still struggling with how to take this complicated scientific information and translate it in a way that's meaningful here locally and that connects people here with the broader global movement to slow global warming.
You've spent the past several years as a community organizer working around local health and housing issues? How did you get involved in climate change?
The West Michigan Environmental Action Council approached me to sit on a panel discussion about An Inconvenient Truth, the documentary by Al Gore. Through that I learned about Gore's Climate Project, and his goal of reaching 1,000 people to learn about global warming and go back into their community to educate others. I applied and got accepted.
So now you're what the former Vice President calls a Climate Change Messenger?
I went through the training with about 200 people. We were the third class in the initiative. The first class was fifty people. The second class was about 100. There was representation from all 50 states, plus six different countries. It was an interesting mix of people. There were people like me who knew very little about climate change. There were famous actors, rappers, and directors. And then there were the scientists, geologists, marine biologists, and people from NASA. At times I wondered what the heck I was doing there.
What are you going to do now that you're back?
I have to give ten presentations on global warming. I'm not interested in preaching to the choir, the people who already recycle or have made life changes. Those people get it. I want to reach the people who aren’t yet connected with the conversation.
Is climate change an issue in urban neighborhoods?
People talk about it indirectly. We have families who've told us they've noticed it's been much hotter in recent summers because their homes don’t have air conditioning and they're sitting outside more. Others have told us about vegetables that will no longer grow in their gardens because the soil seems different. There's been a great deal of conversation around the changing nature of winter. So there's a lot of talk around climate change and global warming, people just aren’t naming it that. We have to figure out a way to help people make the connection and then take action.
Did the Gore training help you find ways to do that?
It was a very elitist conversation. I can't go into neighborhoods here with slides of the earth, images of Katrina damage in New Orleans, or pictures of ice shelves falling into the sea and expect to connect with people. The discussion won't work from that perspective. We'll have to tweak the conversation to focus more on basic needs, and come at it through more urgent daily issues like food or energy.
What's the goal of Our Kitchen Table, the organization you started in 2003?
OKT helps everyday residents understand the power of neighbor to neighbor relations. We bring neighbors together to talk about and strategize around community issues.
How do you work in the urban community?
We do door to door work. We knock on doors and ask residents to tell us, from their perspective, what they think the community issues are and what would attract them to come out, bring their neighbor, get involved, and make a difference. That's how we learn what the issues are and what we need to do about them.
Sounds like the dictionary definition of grassroots organizing, a practice that seems increasingly rare when it comes to community building these days.
We're not here to push an agenda. It's not us choosing the issues. It's what we're hearing from the community. We're here to help folks better understand the issues that matter to them in their neighborhoods.
At times, your organizing efforts have been described as adversarial. How do you respond to that?
We try to open up people's minds, provide them with facts and ideas, and prepare them to push for systemic change. We can sit around and bitch about things, or we can get together and figure out what we want to do and put forward solutions. We talk about movement and capacity building.
Where is the work focused?
At this point, we're primarily in Baxter, South East Community Association, and Garfield Park neighborhoods.
What are the top priority issues in those areas?
Food. In Baxter there is something like 4,500 households. We talked personally to about 450 houses. We learned about 41 percent of the households we talked to use the food pantries as their primary source of food. People are frustrated by waiting in line for food, the lack of choice, and substandard food. The areas where we organize have no grocery stores.
What else comes up on the doorsteps?
Asthma, like hunger, is a big one. And shut off notices for heat and power. But we strive to understand root causes. So if you're learning about asthma, you're learning about air quality, you're looking at emissions, you're looking at transportation. It's really a domino effect.
Does that reality make it hard to stay focused?
Our work focuses primarily around environmental justice issues. We started with lead poisoning in area homes. That led us to learn about housing issues. That led us to learn more about food needs and shut off notices. That's really an energy issue and that led us to global warming. We're learning as we go.
Photos:
Lisa Oliver-King in conversation at Kava House - Eastown
Photographs Copyright Brian Kelly