Estria Foundation
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A Giant two-block mural about oil trains and climate change, cherishing water,
and building community solidarity was dedicated in Richmond, CA, on August 9, 2014,
during the final day of Richmond’s “Our Power” Convention.
“Water Writes” is the first major initiative of the Estria Foundation, an Oakland-based non-profit that raises social consciousness for critical human and environmental issues through public art projects.
From the Estria Foundation website: The theme of water connects participating communities [in ten cities around the planet] and documents current local and international water crises.
Through our collective creative process, we engage youth, artists, organizers, and environmental activists to create imagery which reflects the relationship between the people and the water of each area. Community members are invited to a public paint day and able to participate in bringing these ideas into reality. The final murals are accessible to view by the public and also to communities across the world through video documentation and the Internet. We hope to spark discussions and cross collaboration between the participating cities and water warriors across the world.
Through painting with some of the communities most affected by water rights issues, the Estria Foundation shares its artistic techniques to assist ongoing grassroots struggles, create a global platform to raise awareness, and inspire a movement.
More photos of the Richmond mural here.
Read about the Water Writes initiative: “Water Writes” Launches in Los Angeles by Haily Zaki of Latino LA.
From Our Power Campaign, Communities United for a Just Transition:
In the face of poverty and pollution, Richmond, California community members are on the frontlines of organizing to create a clean, democratic and equitable economy. This grassroots effort, driven by Richmond’s low-income communities of color, is leading Richmond out of the shadows of the Chevron Refinery into the sunlight of a resilient and thriving local clean energy future. Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN) and Communities for a Better Environment (CBE) are anchoring the Our Power work in Richmond, CA.
Richmond is a working class, and predominantly people of color community impacted by decades of environmental blight and economic divestment. It is home to a 3,000 acre Chevron Oil Refinery – the largest stationary greenhouse gas emitter in the State of California and the effects of this facility are compounded by cumulative health impacts causing kids to have higher asthma rates in the region. We also suffer high rates of unemployment and home foreclosures. In the midst of these challenges, we are building strength to exploit some key opportunities.
Take back the land! Work together to start building “Small Homes” on small to medium sized flat bed trailers. Work together, pool your financial resources and share incomes to build homes for each other. Build a coalition determined to thumb your noses at the worthless criminal banksters and wealthy local landlords and slum lords who enslave the working class, the working poor and the poor. I’m white…but my wife and I have been struggling to survive down here in Smogville (Los Angeles) and I have been working to try and convince her that we need to scrape what money we can together and build ourselves a “Small Home” on the back of a flat bed trailer. The benefits of doing this is that the home cannot be taxed like a home that is built on a foundation and is stationary.
To me, it would make sense for all the communities of poor, working poor and working class people’s of color as well as poor white folks across this country to tell the @#$%ing banksters and the criminal industrialists to go @#$% themselves. It still amazes me that so many people continue to shop and spend their hard earned money at mega-conglomerates such as Wal Mart etc.
I think this mural that your community has created is amazing! It is beautiful! What an accomplishment. My wife and I live in Torrance, California and are only about half a mile from the Mobile refinery…so we know that the air quality here is crap. We have several fossil fuel refineries just in a ten mile radius. There’s a Chevron refinery in El Segundo, CA, which is only a few miles from us and up wind too. Then the Mobile refinery here in Torrance, and then there’s ConocoPhillips in Harbor City about seven miles away to the Southeast…then there’s the Shell Refinery also in Harbor City or thereabouts…and I could list a few more…but I think you get the point. We are surrounded by fossil fuel refineries…and yet, because California has such strict air pollution/quality standards (i.e. laws) we pay more for gas here…even though it is being manufactured here…while the oil and gas industries get HUGE…HUGE tax breaks, tax incentives…and massive tax returns on taxes that they never paid in the first place.
It seems to me that these industries are dinosaurs of the technological age and if the corporate leadership of the various industries and there are many of them aside from the Big Oil and Gas businesses that exist…if these leaders of industry would just wake up and actually try and retool their industries to move help the human race move forward and not backward, as it seems we are doing…then maybe we could have some equality for ALL sooner rather than later. Sadly though, I also think that there is a very pervasive mind-set which emanates from the upper white wealthy class that purposefully propagates and foments racism and bigotry in order to maintain their strangle hold on the lower classes. They use their Corporate Owned Main-Stream Media Conglomerates as the means by which to manipulate the Working Class who are generally less well educated and therefore less likely to think in an intellectual way about the predicament that they find themselves on a daily basis. By using this biased corporate media owned system to manipulate the masses…and keep the “little people” distracted, they maintain “order” but on their terms and not ours.
Freedom and democracy has be fought for every inch of the way…because the Power Elite are not going to give it away. And yours and my kids are not going to learn about the facts and the truth about ours and the rest of the world’s REAL history in our public school system because it is the very same people (the wealthy elite) who own and control the National Education Foundation which was founded by the wealthiest families in this country and who’s system is fed the book supply from their very own “deciders” who control the content of what goes in and what stays out of our children’s history, math, science and other various educational books and materials.
I want to say please keep up the great work that you do.
~Peace, Namaste
~Blaise Gauba
Torrance, CA
Thank you Blaise for your heartfelt words of encouragement and solidarity. Rock on! Make art!