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Hamden Celebrates PRIDE Month June 2, 10

by Town of Hamden and the Hamden PRIDE Committee

The Town of Hamden and the Hamden PRIDE Committee are excited to announce free events in celebration of PRIDE Month throughout the month of June.

The Town of Hamden in partnership with the Hamden PRIDE Committee is celebrating PRIDE in June with the Flag Raising Ceremony and Community Conversations: Forum and Dinner at Memorial Town Hall on Friday, June 2 at 5 p.m., and the Pride in the Park Festival at Town Center Park on Saturday, June 10 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.

On Friday, June 2 at 5 p.m., all are invited to attend a PRIDE Month Flag Raising Ceremony in front of Memorial Town Hall, 2372 Whitney Ave., with parking onsite at 2900 Dixwell Ave. Following the flag-raising ceremony, the Town of Hamden and the Hamden PRIDE Committee invites you to stay for Community Conversations: Forum and Dinner also held at Memorial Town Hall. This event is free and will feature educational presentations and a diverse panel discussion over food. Stop and Shop of Hamden will be sponsoring this event by providing the dinner.

On Saturday, June 10 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., the Town of Hamden and the Hamden PRIDE Committee invite you to celebrate the LGBTQIA+ community at the main event, Hamden’s Pride in the Park Festival at Hamden’s Town Center Park, 2761 Dixwell Ave. To park at Town Center Park, please enter through the Hamden Middle School, 2623 Dixwell Ave. Parking can also be found at the Miller Cultural Complex, 2901 Dixwell Ave. The Pride in the Park Festival will be hosted by the talented Drag Performers, Summer Orlando and Barbra Joan Streetsand. Festivities at this free, family-friendly celebration will include kid-friendly performances, various food trucks, a DJ, live musicians, over 35 vendors, and fun kids’ activities.

The Town of Hamden and the Hamden PRIDE Committee invite all to gather to celebrate and embrace the LGBTQIA+ members of our diverse community.

For more information, contact Deputy Chief of Staff, Alexa M. Panayotakis, at (203) 287-7100 or email [email protected].

Housing Tops May Day Rally Cry

by Nora Grace-Flood, New Haven Independent, May 2, 2023

Hundreds of activists took to the streets to commemorate International Workers’ Day — and to celebrate local strides taken to solidify people power not just across jobs, but within New Haven apartments, homeless encampments, and shelters.

New Haveners have formed a tradition of marking that worldwide May 1 labor day each year by embarking on a march for justice throughout downtown after gathering on the Green for hours of music, maypole dancing, and speeches spanning issues from worker protections to healthcare access to immigrant and indigenous rights to environmental action.

On Monday, that standard scene saw activists newly emboldened by a string of recent gains and losses in another foundational fight which New Haveners have largely been leading throughout the state, around affordable housing.

In addition to passing out fliers championing progressive causes and running ribbons around a post, organizers of Monday’s event added some flair to this year’s rendition by pedaling a quadricycle with an effigy of Mayor Justin Elicker strapped into the passenger’s seat over to City Hall where they blasted the administration for bulldozing a West River homeless encampment and sought to stir up more support for tenants’ rights.

Read the entire here in the New Haven Indepdendent: https://www.newhavenindependent.org/article/mayday

NOFA Summer Conference July 24-27, Worcester, MA

The NOFA summer conference returns this July with workshops, events, children’s programming, and more. Join us online and in person in Worcester, MA this summer!

This year’s conference begins online, Monday, July 24 – Thursday, July 27 with evening speakers and workshops, and continues in-person and online on Friday, July 28 and Saturday, July 29 at Worcester State University for knowledge, sharing, and celebration through:

  • Workshops and discussions (including in Spanish)
  • Racial equity caucus groups
  • Children’s programming
  • Local food & drinks, plus music and a fair!

    Spend the week engaging with farming technologies, practices and thoughts around good, vital and just living for all, at the community scale! Register at www.nofamass.org/nofa-summer-conference

PAR Newsletter Job Opening

Paula Panzarella, PAR Planning Committee

There are many tasks involved in creating the PAR newsletter, and PAR wants to hire one or two people to help keep the print version of PAR in production. This is a chance to involve yourself with activism and be paid for it.

We are offering this opportunity first to our print subscribers because you are the most familiar with the quality of our newsletter and aware of the various activist organizations in the greater New Haven area. Without additional people taking part in the work, the printed PAR newsletter may not continue after December 2023.

The new member(s) of the production team must have writing and computer skills and have time flexibility to work on the newsletter intensely in the four days after each issue’s due date for articles. Working as part of the team is vital! If you would like this job, call Paula at 203-562-2798.

Trespassing Charges Nolled Against New Haven Homeless Activist Mark Colville

by Mark Zaretsky, New Haven Register, April 14, 2023

Most people would be happy to walk out of court with the charges against them nolled, a precursor to dismissal. But Mark Colville, an activist for unhoused people who was charged with trespassing last month when the city cleared and then dismantled the “Tent City” encampment along the  West River next to the Ella T. Grasso Boulevard soccer field, seemed Thursday as if he felt deprived.

He did, after all, say at the time of his March 16 arrest that his goal was essentially to put the city on trial for the way it treats people without permanent homes in New Haven. And ultimately, that’s what he did — although perhaps not in the way he initially planned.

That’s because Supervisory Assistant State’s Attorney David J. Strollo, after meeting with Colville and his backup attorney, Patricia Kane, in Strollo’s Superior Court office, told Senior Judge Frank A. Iannotti that while Colville “has every right to challenge” the city’s policies and the charges against him,”the state does not feel it’s the best use of its resources to pursue this case.”…

Colville got to have his say before leaving the courtroom. He told the judge and the prosecutor, “I object to the dismissal of these charges, first of all, because I feel it’s an evasion” of the need to address the city’s behavior.

Colville, who has a home in the Hill section where he allows unhoused people to sleep in tents in his backyard, said his arrest — which came after he pitched a tent at the former encampment the day before the city came to clear it — was not an act of protest but “an act of defense.”

“The laws with which they carried out that action” were “completely disconnected from human rights,” said Colville, who had five former Tent City residents living in the backyard of his Amistad Catholic Worker Home in the Hill in the days immediately after the city moved in. “The city of New Haven continues to carry out a policy of the criminalization of homelessness.”

[Read the article in its entirety at www.nhregister.com/news/article/charges-nolled-new-haven-homeless-activist-mark-17895670.php?src=nhrhpdesecp]

Join the Conversation with New Haven’s Big Read!

New Haven Free Public Library

The NEA Big Read broadens our understanding of our world, our communities, and ourselves through the joy of sharing a good book. This year’s selection is Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body, by Rebekah Taussig. Visit the Arts and Ideas NEA Big Read website for more events and information.

Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body is a memoir-in-essays from disability advocate, Rebekah Taussig, processing a lifetime of memories to paint a beautiful, nuanced portrait of a body that looks and moves differently than most. Through poignant and lyrical essays, Taussig illustrates the need for more stories and voices to understand humanity’s diversity. Sitting Pretty challenges us as a society to be patient and vigilant, practical and imaginative, kind and relentless, as we set to work to write an entirely different story.

Rebekah Taussig writes personal essays about disability and runs an Instagram account, @sitting_pretty, where she regularly crafts “mini-memoirs” that explore what it means to live in her (disabled, female) body.

Free copies of the book are available at any NHFP library while supplies last. Copies are also available for checkout. New Haven Free Public Library, 133 Elm St. nhfpl.org.

Local Bus Riders Express Frustration with Return of Bus Fares

by Megan Vaz and Yash Roy, Yale Daily News, April 6, 2023

Connecticut buses bore a new message for riders this weekend: “Fares restart April 1.” After almost one year of free public buses across the state due to a surge in oil prices and record-high costs of living, travelers across the state had to resume paying fares for buses on Saturday. Connecticut legislation to extend free public bus fares stalled as New Haven State Rep. Roland Lemar, who co-chairs the state legislature’s transportation committee, argued the state did not have enough funding to pay for the program.

Proponents of extending the state’s free public bus system have argued that the program helped alleviate cost-of-living worries as Connecticut residents have faced inflation of six to eight percent, an average rent increase of roughly 20 percent and stagnating wages. Moreover, local bus riders have expressed frustration over the state’s decision to deprioritize accessibility while managing one of its largest budget reserves in state history.

“Statistically, this also translates to disproportionately punishing poor people, women, young people, seniors, and Black and brown people,” said local bus rider Stasia Brew-Kaczynski. “We need authority figures to stop thinking with car-brains and start looking for every opportunity to reward and incentivize people moving without private cars and trucks.”

Now that the fare-free program has expired, most travelers must pay $6.40 for an All-day 2 Zones pass, with prices increasing for each additional zone. Riders may also purchase 31-day passes, which range from $108.80 to $204 based on the traveling zone range…

According to the nonprofit Datahaven’s 2023 Community Wellbeing Index for the greater New Haven area, about 34 percent of local adults making under $30,000 per year experience “transportation insecurity” without reliable access to a vehicle. Black and Latino households are far more likely to lack access to a personal vehicle, especially in those without any employed adults.

Some bus riders told the News that they are experiencing homelessness and heavily relied on the fare-free program for access to food, job opportunities and medical appointments.

King Latif Manns, an unhoused person who rode the bus regularly before fares were announced, told the News that he thinks fares will hurt those of lower socioeconomic classes most. Latif Manns has stopped riding the bus since the change.

“I feel they should think about how many people they were helping and how many people suffer at the fact that the buses started faring people,” Latif Manns said. “It’s tax money, but also, we, the people, are the taxpayers.”

[Article can be read in its entirety at  yaledailynews.com/blog/2023/04/06/local-bus-riders-express-frustration-with-return-of-bus-fares/]

A poet, musician and writer, Ed Sanders edits the Woodstock Journal. His books include “The Family,” “Sharon Tate: a Life,” and the novel “Tales of Beatnik Glory.”

Kali Akuno to Receive Gandhi Peace Award

by Stanley Heller, PEP Administrator

On Saturday, May 13, Kali Akuno, co-founder of Cooperation Jackson, will be given the Gandhi Peace Award. The Gandhi Peace Award has been given out since 1960 by the Connecticut-based organization Promoting Enduring Peace (PEP). This peace, environmental and social justice organization was founded in 1952 in New Haven. Cooperation Jackson was created in Jackson, Mississippi in 2013 to foster a solidarity economy in Jackson anchored by a network of cooperatives and worker-owned, democratically self-managed enterprises.

The Gandhi Peace Award ceremony will take place in the Q House, the Dixwell Community House, 197 Dixwell Avenue in New Haven at 2 p.m. The Q House, founded in 1924, is now in a new state-of-the-art building that opened last year. The ceremony is free. There will be a musical performance by Michael Mills and bountiful refreshments. Parking for the Q House is in back of the building off of Foote Street.

Laura Schleifer, Program and Development Officer of Promoting Enduring Peace, said, “Kali Akuno and his fellow members of Cooperation Jackson are creating a model for how we might be able to transform our communities on the local level and then linking them together to create a new system that both provides for human and ecological needs, and also recognizes the interdependence between the two.”

We also admire Akuno’s writings, how he developed ideas on worker self-management and strategy on how to move the cooperative movement forward. He wrote “Jackson Rising: The Struggle for Economic Democracy and Black Self-Determination in Jackson, Mississippi in 2017,” and this month released a book he co-edited with economist Richard Wolff, “Jackson Rising Redux.” We also admire his bold ideas on the climate crisis and his call for ecosocialism.

For more information visit PEPeace.org, email [email protected], or call 203-444-3578.

 

Tax Day Lesson Takes On Austerity

by Laura Glesby, New Haven Independent, April 18, 2023

Connecticut is the wealthiest state in one of the wealthiest countries in the world, Wilbur Cross junior Dave John Cruz-Bustamante told a crowd of educators gathered across the street from their school. “But you wouldn’t know that from looking at our desks.”

On Tax Day Tuesday afternoon, Cruz-Bustamante joined 50 educators and allies at a rally to call on the state to tax the rich — and pour more funding into public education. The rally featured unions representing New Haven teachers (New Haven Federation of Teachers, or NHFT), paraprofessional educators (AFSCME Local 3429), and community and state college professors (AFT Local 1942 and SEIU Local 1973) — all of whom called for the state to address aging facilities, low wages, and rising tuition across public education institutions in the state.

Ahead of the deadline to file taxes, ​“I scraped together my pennies to pay what I owed,” said Eric Maroney, a Gateway Community College English professor and union leader, as attendees began to gather. ​“I don’t mind paying my share, but I’d like it go to toward helping people in my community.”…
NHFT President Leslie Blatteau and 4C’s faculty union President Seth Freeman offered a Tax Day ​“lesson” to rally supporters.

They started with two vocabulary words: ​“austerity,” or severe restraint in government spending, and ​“equity,” or fair and just opportunities. After Blatteau and Freeman defined the terms, the speakers who followed illustrated their own experiences of what austerity looks like.

For Cruz-Bustamante, an elected student representative on the Board of Education, ​“austerity” means leaky roofs and broken bathroom locks in the Wilbur Cross building.

For Wilbur Cross teacher and counselor Mia Comulada, it means overcrowded classrooms and growing teacher burnout.

For paras [paraprofessional educators] union President Hyclis Williams, austerity means ​“low-wage exploitation” of her colleagues, many of whom live below the federal poverty line….

At Wilbur Cross, Comulada said, an influx of immigrants from Central America and the Middle East has led to more English language learners and more students recovering from stress and trauma.

Meanwhile, at Southern, Bonjo described, more than half of students are people of color, many are parents, and a large number are the first in their families to attend college. And at Gateway, ​“many of our students work two, three jobs,” said Maroney….

In a state as wealthy as Connecticut, Cruz-Bustamante said, ​“We deserve schools that look like palaces.”

[Article can be read in its entirety at https://www.newhavenindependent.org/article/in_tax_day_lesson_educators_call_for_funding]

Medical Assisted Suicide Defeated Once Again in Connecticut

by Joan Cavanagh, Progressives Against Medical Assisted Suicide

SB 1076, making it legal for doctors to prescribe lethal drugs for terminally ill patients, was halted in the Judiciary Committee on April 19. The Committee decided not to call for a vote because there was not nearly enough support to pass the legislation. A number of Democrats on the Committee clearly did not share the enthusiasm of some of their colleagues for this dangerous bill, which would threaten the lives of the most vulnerable in our discriminatory, profit-driven medical system.

During the subsequent discussion, it was clear that opposition to this legislation does not merely come from those with a religious perspective, thanks to Rep. Steven Strafstrom (D., Bridgeport), as well as signs held by members of Progressives Against Medical Assisted. In concluding remarks, Stafstrom acknowledged the pain and grief of some of the individual advocates of the bill, but added: “I also want to acknowledge that this is not an issue where there is only passion on one side. I think there is passion and also rightfully concern on the other side of this, which we heard a little bit on this committee today, and certainly we’ve heard in our discussions in the Democratic caucus on this bill over the last few years as well. And no, it’s not all about religion. I’m tired of hearing that…Frankly it’s insulting.”

Stafstrom said that he had been “struggling” with the bill but had begun increasingly to question it in part because of recent legislative and judicial efforts in states such as Oregon and Vermont, where Medical Assisted Suicide is legal, to weaken or remove even the currently existing restrictions. One of the arguments Second Thoughts Connecticut and Progressives Against Medical Assisted Suicide have repeatedly made against this legislation is that it is the strategy of Compassion and Choices to first get the laws enacted and then to expand their scope either through the legislature or through the courts.

Many thanks to those who have written, spoken, and worked against this bill for the last five months.

Highlights from CT Green Energy News, April 21, 2023

Newsletter about clean energy, energy efficiency, and climate action, focusing on Connecticut. To subscribe, send an email to [email protected]. To learn more about People’s Action for Clean Energy (PACE), visit www.pacecleanenergy.org.

Pass SB 1145 to achieve Connecticut’s climate goals
CT Mirror. ​ ​”​SB 1145, An Act Concerning the Establishment of Sector Specific Subtargets For Greenhouse Gas Emissions Reductions, would provide the necessary tools for our state to achieve the climate goals we have already set. Legislators must make its passage—this session— a priority…we are falling short of our goals…SB 1145 would help address this shortfall by making significant improvements to the Global Warming Solutions Act and helping set a clear path for how we are going to decarbonize​…​our state agencies, particularly the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP), must have at least a minimum of authority to act… our neighbors have already undertaken similar measures. Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, and Vermont have all recently updated their climate laws to adopt more stringent targets, establish greater accountability, and provide mechanisms for enforcing their laws.”

Electric school buses serve as mini power plants during the summer
WBUR. “Beverly Public Schools is one of the first in the country to use its electric buses for more than transportation. The project uses bidirectional chargers that can both charge the bus battery and also allow the battery to send energy back to the grid…The concept is simple, but the execution is complicated. That’s where Highland Electric Fleets comes in; the company has made a business out of buying and then leasing electric buses to schools. It orchestrates everything from constructing the chargers on site to managing charging and discharging of the batteries. The company also maintains the buses and trains the drivers. Highland Electric Fleets sells this service to schools for about the cost of a regular school bus.”

DEEP Says Transportation Still The Main Culprit of Greenhouse Gas Emissions
CT News Junkie. “With the exception of a short period during the COVID-19 pandemic, cars and trucks still remain the top producers of greenhouse gas emissions…The report found that even though improvements in fuel economy have reduced emissions per mile traveled, those reductions have been offset by an increase in the overall number of miles driven…DEEP said that reductions in the transportation sector are a critical component of any strategy the state employs toward meeting the 2030 and 2050 reduction goals…The second biggest culprit of greenhouse gas is residential heating and cooling, which has replaced the electric sector as the second-largest emitter in the state; and electric-sector emissions continue to decrease. While Connecticut has met its initial goal for 2020 emissions set by Connecticut statutes, further sharp reductions are needed to meet the medium- and longer-term goals, the agency said.”  ​

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