Mark Ridley-Thomas Addresses Activists at Annual Summit
This is the second post in a brief series about the 18th annual summit of the Empowerment Congress, which was held last Saturday at CSU Dominguez Hills. (The first post is here.)
Mark Ridley-Thomas spoke at the gathering, offering a year-end review of activities in the Second District during 2009, before introducing keynote speaker Marian Wright Edelman. The range of activities highlighted included this handful:
- a Florencia 13 gang injunction in partnership with Sheriff Lee Baca;
- beginning a series of motions before the Board of Supervisors to end child deaths – “I am on a mission and I encourage you to join me!”;
- a congestion pricing plan for the 110 and 10 freeways;
- an environmental battle in Baldwin Hills over oil derricks; and, of course,
- the decision of the Board of Supervisors to reopen Martin Luther King, Jr. Hospital (which LA Philanthropy Watch covered in a previous post).
The brief video shown just before Mr. Ridley-Thomas’ remarks illustrated the significance of the Empowerment Congress – and the citizens who are inspired to action on behalf of their communities. There were clips of the Supervisor imploring residents of his district to demonstrate their support for MLK hospital by attending the Board of Supervisors’ meeting when the reopening of the facility was under consideration. And turn out, they did. There was standing room only at the Tuesday morning meeting.
The Empowerment Congress and the citizen-activists who comprise the organization create the conditions to bring about change. Their presence at a Board meeting bore witness to the importance of the hospital to their community in a more powerful way than Mark Ridley-Thomas could have mustered on his own. This gets to the heart of what community organizing is all about.
As I mentioned in my previous post, the Empowerment Congress is a program of the California Community Empowerment Foundation (which is one of scores of projects of Community Partners).
My next post on the annual summit will feature Marian Wright Edelman’s keynote address.
(Photo of Mark Ridley-Thomas holding up his iPhone as he urged the audience, at the beginning of his remarks, to text donations in support of aid efforts in Haiti.)
