For decades our communities have been the economic backbone of the largest economies in the Rogue Valley, yet we have been left out of socioeconomic, environmental and political decisions that impact our everyday lives. In the midst of a global pandemic, on September 8th of 2020 the Almeda Fire scorched over 2,600 homes displacing our historically low-income, Latinx and Indigenous neighborhoods and revealing just how climate vulnerable, economically exploited and politically underrepresented our communities have been. A month after the Almeda Fire we found ourselves in a High School gym at a Northwest Seasonal Workers Association (NSWA) membership meeting with many families who were growing frustrated with the lack of answers from landlords and government officials. We sat there brainstorming solutions to our collective nightmare and in the middle of our meeting, one of our community elders who is now an ancestor, Don Leonso Solis, stood up and asked, “why don’t we just buy our neighborhoods back?”

That day was significant because we all remembered that we have the knowledge and the skills to create our own solutions and that we have each other. We also took power into our own hands and led a community-driven participatory action research project to understand the extent of our loss and damage. It has been the findings and the personal stories of our communities’ grief and Spirit of perseverance that have shaped our vision, grounded our work, and our strategy.

We are driven by the hope that we have the power to create something better than what we lost.