Liberty Hill Blog: News from the Frontlines

Queer Youth Fund Supports Training for Young Women Filmmakers in S.F.

2013-06-07T10:50:15-07:00

By Mark Bizzell, volunteer contributing writer

Queer Women of Color Film Festival 2013 Trailer from QWOCMAP on Vimeo.

This guest blog post is one of a series about programs throughout the U.S. funded by Liberty Hill's Queer Youth Fund.

SAN FRANCISCO—Kebo Drew’s easy laughter and outgoing personality might make you forget she is a tough and effective social activist on the frontlines of equality. But this daughter of parents who fought for civil rights now serves as managing director of the Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project in San Francisco, one of the most progressive arts groups in the country. The organization provides free workshops that train young people to create films that address vital social justice issues concerning queer women of color. We checked in for an update on its “Filmmaker Training Program,” which received a multi-year grant from Liberty Hill Foundation’s Queer Youth Fund in 2009.

“I call the 16-week workshops a positive ‘boot camp’ type of experience,” says Kebo, an activist and artist since childhood and program participant herself. “The intense training not only teaches the technique of filmmaking, it also empowers activism among queer youth through films that spark discussions around important issues— leading to recruitment, visibility and legislative outreach.”

Two of the young adults trained through this program are Chris Valente and Tracy Nguyen. Both have completed the program, with Chris’s film screening at the 9^th Annual Queer Women of Color Film Festival coming June 14 through 16 at the Brava Theater in San Francisco. Tracy’s film is currently in production and slated for next year’s festival.

Chris, a transgender 24-year-old, explores in his work the challenges of dating and forging relationships. Based partly on his own experiences, his debut film “Chasing Love” casts himself and another student as leads. The Filmmaker Training Program lent him the equipment needed to create “Chasing Love” and instructed him in how to foster connections and fundraise so he can make films at little or no cost. This is important because most young filmmakers don’t have access to Hollywood-size budgets that average $1 million per minute of film, or even to independent film budgets that work out to $50,000 per minute.

“Through this film, I want to dispel the myths around transgender relationships perpetrated by Hollywood and the media,” explained Chris. “We want to be open and honest about who we are and are not out to deceive anyone.”

Tracy is currently in production with what will be her second film. “Possibilities” is a fictional narrative and differs from her first effort, which was a documentary.

“I don’t think I would have been able to make films about queer women of color anywhere else,” said Tracy. “In the workshops they taught us to think about how our films and stories will affect and empower others.”

QWOCMAP - Pride Month Champions of Change Video Challenge from QWOCMAP on Vimeo.

The Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project was founded in 2001 by Madeleine Lim, an artist-activist who fled Singapore in 1987 during the Marxist Conspiracy arrests, when the arrest of a co-organizer in the queer underground caused fear for her safety. Lim, who also teaches filmmaking classes at the University of San Francisco, designed the Filmmaker Training Program workshops to be free of charge.

Low-income students and immigrants make up 79 and 43 percent of Filmmaker Training Program students, respectively. In addition, some students are disabled—giving a creative outlet to additional marginalized voices in the community. Alumni have gone on to pursue filmmaking studies at USC Film School and San Francisco State University, and to work in the entertainment industry at studios such as NBC Universal.

This year’s Queer Women of Color Film Festival premieres an unprecedented 55 short films, including Chris’s “Chasing Love” on opening night. The festival’s theme is "Bridge To Truth: Queer SWANA/AMEMSA Communities," and includes a featured screening/conference with a film that explores tradition and culture, feminist waves and the simmering revolutions among Southwest Asian, North African/Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim, South Asian (SWANA/AMEMSA) communities, followed by a discussion with artists and activists. This free event, which focuses on a different theme each year, has grown in stature over the years and attracts youth and elders, providing the opportunity for multi-generational discussion and interaction.

Chris and Tracy agree that the workshops, film festival and relationships formed at Queer Women of Color empower, strengthen and advance opportunities for queer women of color.

“It has helped to come out and accept myself,” said Chris. “My next project is a documentary highlighting positive transgendered relationships from around the county. I would not be doing this except for Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project.”

The Queer Youth Fund is a donor-initiated grantmaking program housed at the Liberty Hill Foundation that awards $100,000 grants to innovative and effective leadership development or organizing projects, or programs that empower gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer and questioning (GLBTQQ) youth up to 24 years old. The purpose of the Queer Youth Fund is to improve societal conditions affecting these youth and strengthen the GLBTQQ movement. The Queer Youth Fund makes multi-year grants to 501(c)(3) organizations (or groups with fiscal sponsors) located in the United States. Several $100,000 grants, payable over three to five years, will be made to groups performing specific work that matches the Queer Youth Fund guidelines, available at http://www.LibertyHill.org/queeryouthfund. Funding decisions are made collaboratively by donors, community representatives and foundation staff.

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FRONTLINES TO HEADLINES MAY, 2013

2013-06-04T17:01:59-07:00

From frontlines to headlines! Take a look at recent news of Liberty Hill grantees.

In May, there was extensive media coverage of Liberty Hill Foundation’s work through its two Common Agenda campaigns. Below are links to (1) an organization profile focused on our environmental justice work, (2) national and local TV, radio and newspaper stories on the Brothers, Sons, Selves initiative’s first and highly successful campaign for changes in school discipline policy.

MAY 2013 IN REVIEW

ORGANIZATION PROFILE

The Summer 2013 issue of Stanford Innovation Review features an insightful, substantive organization profile of Liberty Hill seen through the lens of Common Agenda environmental work.

BROTHERS, SON, SELVES

May 13

The Brothers, Sons, Selves coalition’s proposed “School Climate Bill of Rights” was adopted by the L.A. School Board on May 13. The resolution will (1) halt the practice of suspending students under the much-abused catch-all reason “defiance” and (2) implement positive behavior supports that have been shown to dramatically improve academic performance. On the day of the vote, students from organizations in the coalition watched their peers give testimony and erupted into cheers when the proposal passed 5-2, ushering in a new era in L.A. schools.

BSS Television Coverage
CBS Los Angeles ran several reports, first previewing the issue, then covering the rally and Board meeting live, and then updating the report with final results and interviews.

KABC’s report emphasized that this was a first-in-the-nation reform.

Brothers Sons Selves Newspaper Coverage
The L.A. Times May 12 preview of the issues to be considered by the School Board quoted Liberty Hill campaign lead Tonna Onyendu about the proposal’s significance. The paper’s account of the vote emphasized Supt. Deasy’s support of the change in school discipline policy. In addition, The Times Photo Gallery ran pictures of the Rally at the LAUSD Meeting.

The New York Times covered the historic vote as part of its national briefing.

Other major newspapers reporting were: Wall Street Journal; L.A. Daily News; Orange County Register; Los Angeles Sentinel, which ran an Op-Ed in support of the proposal; La Opinion; Smaller L.A. County newspapers sending their own reporters included the bilingual San Fernando Valley Sun and Our Weekly (African American news). AP’s story was picked up by papers including San Jose Mercury News, Sacramento Bee, and others.

The investigative reporting nonprofit Center for Public Integrity in Journalism, which has produced stories in collaboration with news outlets about LA school discipline issues for the past year, offered in-depth context and statistics in its report and analysis.

Brothers Sons Selves Radio Coverage National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered” reported on the outcome of the School Board vote on May 15.

Southern California Public Radio’s magazine-format show on KPCC “Take Two” discussed the issues [segment starts at around 8:17]. Marqueece Harris-Dawson of Community Coalition, part of the Brothers, Sons, Selves initiative, spoke on KPCC’s “Air Talk” the day before the vote. In a blog post on May 16th, following up, KPCC’s blog pointed out the connection between the school board decision and AB420, the proposed bill to limit suspensions for defiance throughout the state.

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Immigration and the Holiness Code

2013-05-31T14:46:05-07:00

By Rabbi Heather Miller, a Liberty Hill 2013 Leader to Watch

This guest blog post is adapted from an April sermon given by Rabbi Heather Miller at Congregation Beth Chayim Chadashim in Los Angeles as part of a citywide event coordinated by Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice (CLUE). Several congregations around Los Angeles county dedicated Shabbat Services that night to opening up a discussion about immigration reform inspired by study of the Torah portion known as “The Holiness Code,” which teaches, among other commandments: “The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens.”

Who are the immigrants among us? How do we treat them and how should we treat them? What would it mean to truly be holy as this week’s Torah portion commands us to be?

Wrestling with these questions are the members of Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice (CLUE) who work tirelessly to ensure dignity and respect for today’s immigrants who, because of their tenuous legal status, are more vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. Our Reform Jewish Movement, too, has recently formed a group called Reform CA which is a partnership between the Union for Reform Judaism (urj.org), the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism (rac.org), and the Central Conference of American Rabbis (ccarnet.org), and they are working on Immigration Reform from a policy perspective.

We, Jews have a unique relationship with the idea of immigration, don’t we? Our very name declares it– the word in Hebrew for “Hebrew” is עברי –meaning, “one who crosses over” or “one who crosses boundaries.” We, Hebrews, ARE the quintessential border crossers.

Our most often repeated story of peoplehood is that of the Exodus out of Egypt. An immigration story!

But it is not only the stories of long ago journeys, fleeing Egypt or Spain or Portugal, that we know. Almost every one of us, within our own families, has been touched by a narrative of immigration within just a few generations of our own time.

Before he died, my mother’s grandfather, my great-grandfather Julius Kirshenbaum z”l (1899-1981) wrote an essay about his long and remarkable life. Recounting his narrow escape from the pogroms in Ukraine. He and my great-grandmother, with their new baby, knew that they had two choices: emigrate or die. Petlura and his gang were murdering Jews in the streets, storming businesses and homes and terrorizing everyone.

My great-grandfather details hiding in the basement while the home was searched, an icy horse and sled ride across Russia under the cover of darkness, a rush to obtain fake Polish passports for him and his young family. He was almost found out, and at just 19 years old, he cried under pressure when an official grew suspicious of his falsified documents. Eventually and miraculously, he was able to immigrate all the way from Russia to North America.

He wrote, “When we came off the boat, we cried and we kissed the ground. And, we never stopped kissing the ground in our thankfulness for being in a free land.”

That’s the story of immigration of so many Jewish families. Thank God they were able to escape, albeit by surreptitious means.

My stepfather’s mother, my step-grandmother Hana Posin z”l (1914-2001) also wrote a retrospective of her life before she died. Her immigration story was much more tragic. She wrote a difficult and brave autobiographical account for Steven Spielberg’s Shoah/Holocaust Foundation that recounted her experiences as a young Jewish woman in Czechoslovakia, the rise of Hitler, and the uncertainty of the future of the Jewish people. She painfully recalled how emigration from Czechoslovakia to the United States was closed to her and her small family in 1938. She wrote:

“The U.S. consulate was besieged with petitioners. But they had a rigid rule: so and so many people were allowed to immigrate from each country per year. The quota for Czechoslovakia was filled up for many years ahead. Where else to turn, if the most democratic country in the world turned its back to people seeking freedom?”

Unable to emigrate to America, my step-grandmother was sent to several concentration camps—Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, Mauthausen. She survived, though her young husband did not. Ultimately, after the war, she was able to immigrate to Colombia before finally becoming a legal citizen of the United States more than a decade later.

This tragic story of closed borders with eventual immigration is our Jewish story, too. And so are the stories of the Iranian Jews who immigrated here in the 70s and 80s. And so are the stories of Soviet Jews who immigrated in the 1990s. And so are the stories of others who sought to immigrate to a new land, and the dream that it held.

The Torah portion this week is Acharei-Mot/Kedoshim. Within this double portion is a text known as the “Holiness Code.” It teaches many of the obvious tenets that lead a person to act decently in the world. We learn that:

The Lord spoke to Moses, saying: Speak to the whole Israelite community and say to them:

You shall be holy, for I, the Lord your God, am holy. (Leviticus 19:1-2)

But what does it mean to BE HOLY?

Among other commandments, the holiness code itself teaches: When a stranger resides with you in your land, you shall not wrong him. The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I the Lord am your God. (Leviticus 19:33-34)

Do these verses instructing us to be holy still apply? How? And, are we doing what we should to treat the stranger who resides with us with decency?

Rav Eliyahu Dessler, spiritual leader from Latvia teaching in the 20th century, suggests that the obligation to act with respect toward another person derives not from that person’s nationality, but from his humanity. He writes: “The root of this obligation lies in our obligation toward a human being by virtue of his being a human being.”

Do we treat human beings who have emigrated from one country to another with dignity and with respect? Or with indifference, suspicion, or contempt?

Let us especially consider the experiences of LGBT couples who are bi-national. When immigration law is so tied to notions of family and marriage, and when gay and lesbian couples as a community don’t have the legal ability to marry, immigration law makes the families of our community especially vulnerable to immigration policy.

Around us, there are opportunities to consider what it means to be holy and sacred in our interactions with immigrants—as Jews, as members of the Reform movement and as Californians. May we each work to identify ways that we can uplift and dignify their experiences as precious threads in the fabric of our community. Amen.

UPDATE: Rabbi Heather Miller recently organized two delegations of Los Angeles based interfaith clergy to speak with Senator Dianne Feinstein's office to discuss office about the 2013 Immigration Reform Act S. 744.

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Timely Philanthropic Opportunities - Spring-Summer 2013

2013-05-29T13:43:53-07:00

By Blanch Ross

Grantee Spotlight
Periodically, Liberty Hill makes recommendations of exceptionally timely philanthropic opportunities for our donor advised account holders. This time we are recommending two of our Fund for Change grant recipients, Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment and Restaurant Opportunities Center.

Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE) The Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE) is a statewide community organization working with thousands of members in eleven counties creating transformative change by helping ordinary citizens to organize and take action. ACCE-LA plans to pursue an aggresive campaign to win renegotiation of bad municipal finance deals that are providing windfall profits to major Wall Street firms and costing LA taxpayers tens of millions of dollars.

ACCE-LA continues to lead the RE-Fund campaign, a coalition effort including SEIU Local 721 and Good Jobs LA. The coalition advanced major modifications to the city's Foreclosure Registry Ordinance, including raising the registration fees banks must pay for each foreclosed house to fund inspections that could result in fines of up to $1000 per day for failure to maintain those homes.

The Restaurant Opportunities Center of Los Angeles

Did you know that Los Angeles has the largest restaurant industry in the nation – 300,000? And that the restaurant industry is currently one of the largest and fastest-growing segments of the U.S. economy, providing millions of jobs annually both to newly-arriving immigrants and millions of U.S.-born workers? Although the industry offers great potential for immigrants to move to livable-wage positions, most immigrants lack the training, policy backing, and social networks to do so.

The Restaurant Opportunities Center of Los Angeles (ROC-LA) is a multi-racial, grassroots restaurant workers’ center dedicated to winning improved working conditions and raising industry standards for all Los Angeles restaurant workers. ROC has recently released the 2013 ROC National Diners' Guide to Ethical Eating providing information on the wages, benefits, and promotion practices of the 150 most popular restaurants in America in 9 major cities across the country, from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. to New York City. The Guide also lists responsible restaurants where you can eat knowing that your server can afford to pay the rent and your cook isn’t working while sick.

Funding Needs
The LAUSD Adult Education budget was recently slashed creating a vacuum where quality English-as-a-Second Language/Vocational-English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL/VSEL) classes used to exist. With the vision of placing restaurant workers in High Road restaurants and Union Hotels, achieving true immigrant integration and real career development opportunities ROC-LA has partnered with Community Career Development, Inc. and the Hospitality Training Academy on a pilot program offering ESL/VSEL classes to immigrant restaurant and hospitality workers.

Contact a LIberty Hill staff person to discuss making a grant>>

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LAUSD Votes to Shift School Discipline and Limit Suspensions

2013-05-14T18:20:09-07:00

(Los Angeles) Tonight, the Los Angeles Unified School District adopted the School Climate Bill of Rights by a vote of 5 to 2. Approval of the resolution bans “willful defiance” suspensions and directs LAUSD to enact common sense approaches to school discipline and expand programs that support all students in becoming healthy, thriving adults.

“Today our youth rights agenda moves forward as the LAUSD joins our community in accepting the responsibility to support the School Discipline Policy and School Climate Bill of Rights,” said Board President Mónica García. “This resolution means more graduations, less incarceration, it means adults must learn new strategies to teach and practice new discipline policies that support student success.”

As the majority of students in Los Angeles County, young people of color have a vital role to play in making our neighborhoods safer, our economy stronger and steering our city and state towards success. Yet low income and young men of color have the lowest life expectancy rates, highest unemployment rates, fewest high school and college graduates and most murder victims of any demographic group in Los Angeles. This reality starts in school policies that unfairly target students of color for suspensions which ultimately lead to truancy and drop-outs.

“This vote is an important first step in our effort to ensure that every student has an opportunity to thrive,” said Kafi D. Blumenfield, President and CEO of Liberty Hill Foundation which has been managing the campaign. “Passage of The School Climate Bill of Rights signals that L.A. truly wants all students to lead healthy, successful lives.”

In 2007, LAUSD took a first step in addressing school discipline by adopting the School Wide Positive Behavioral and Intervention Supports policy. The School Climate Bill of Rights builds on that effort to ensure that all Los Angeles schools create learning environments that are safe, healthy and supportive for all students.

The resolution will require schools to use measures other than suspension to address minor student infractions, including setting clearer expectations and providing counseling to get at the root of bad behavior when possible, both of which have been found to be more effective approaches. Schools also have the option to pilot additional programs that might prove even more useful, such as detention, or setting up a special classroom, with schoolwork to be done and tutors available, so that students who face disciplinary measures don't fall behind in their studies.

“I am so thrilled that our resolution passed,” said Armando Peña, a youth leader and student at Fremont High School. “It tells me that my school district believes in the right of myself and each of my peers to have a safer and more supportive education.”

For more information or interviews, contact Lester Garcia at 323-633-7288 or lestergarcia@icloud.com.

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Every Student Matters is a campaign of the Brothers Sons Selves initiative at Liberty Hill Foundation. Brothers Sons Selves is a coalition of L.A. community organizations working towards a common agenda to improve the lives of young men and was created in partnership with The California Endowment.

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