Support El Kilombo! Oppose gentrification and the theft of public Durham space for private profit!
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ashe harris
Mar 15, 2011, 12:48:47 AM3/15/11
to dec...@googlegroups.com, Bull City Song GB
comrades,
Below is a message sent around to folks in the area requesting your presence at an action tomorrow (tuesday, so like today) to show our strength and opposition to the private purchase of Durham public park space.
Details as you read. It is at the main library at 6pm. show up and bring your friends!
We cant let them take what little we have left! Stand up Fight back!
in solidarity,
ashe
Dear Friends,
We request your presence to support El Kilombo and our larger community at a Public Meeting regarding the future of Old North Durham Park on Tuesday, March 15 at 6PM at the Durham Main Public Library.
As you know, our community’s struggle to keep Old North Durham Park, behind our space on Geer Street, as a publically owned and controlled park with a full-sized soccer field that serves our primarily low-income Black and Latino community’s needs has been at the heart of controversy over gentrification in our neighborhood. For several years, the financial interests behind the Central Park School for Children’s board (CPSC) have tried to privatize the park through an attempted park leasing (for $10/yr), the systematic acquisition of properties on its borders, the closing of public access points, and interference with city park improvement plans resulting in the disinvestment that has become an all too familiar starting point for racialized displacement in American cities. In 2007, our community blocked CPSC’s project to lease the park. A new organization called the Friends of Old North Durham Park (FONDP) has since been formed in collaboration with CPSC and has privately designed and privately funded their own plans for the park that specifically eliminate the park features used by our community’s families – and they and the city propose to implement this plan through a “Public-Private Partnership.” In October, our community again blocked their plans and now the future of Old North Durham Park will be determined in a series of “Public Meetings,” which begin next week. We were only informed of these meetings today.
Old North Durham Park is where our community knits its social fabric, but far more than the park is at stake here. At stake is the sanctioning of racialized dispossession in the name of “revitalization” and the dangerous precedent that only those who can mobilize vast sums of money have voice in the future of our city.
We need to demonstrate to the city that FONDP’s plans don’t serve the people of our community, or of any low-income communities. We call on everyone to join us at the “Public Meeting” and support our community in voicing its demands for a publically controlled park, developed through a transparent process, with a full-sized athletic field, and the larger position that we all share against neoliberal development schemes that seek to capitalize on poverty and community.
PLEASE come and support us at the “Public Meeting” to plan the future of Old North Durham Park.
When: Tuesday, March 15, 2011 from 6-730
Where: Durham Main Library Auditorium, 300 N. Roxboro Street - Durham, North Carolina 27701, First Floor.
A large turnout is essential and we very much hope that you will come.
For further information and updates, go to http://www.elkilombo.org/ondparkinfo/ and/or join our new Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/pages/El-Kilombo-Intergal%C3%A1ctico/194109360610178.
Thank you for your support,
-El Kilombo Intergaláctico
--
"the function of freedom is to free someone else" -toni morrison
Below is a message sent around to folks in the area requesting your presence at an action tomorrow (tuesday, so like today) to show our strength and opposition to the private purchase of Durham public park space.
Details as you read. It is at the main library at 6pm. show up and bring your friends!
We cant let them take what little we have left! Stand up Fight back!
in solidarity,
ashe
Dear Friends,
We request your presence to support El Kilombo and our larger community at a Public Meeting regarding the future of Old North Durham Park on Tuesday, March 15 at 6PM at the Durham Main Public Library.
As you know, our community’s struggle to keep Old North Durham Park, behind our space on Geer Street, as a publically owned and controlled park with a full-sized soccer field that serves our primarily low-income Black and Latino community’s needs has been at the heart of controversy over gentrification in our neighborhood. For several years, the financial interests behind the Central Park School for Children’s board (CPSC) have tried to privatize the park through an attempted park leasing (for $10/yr), the systematic acquisition of properties on its borders, the closing of public access points, and interference with city park improvement plans resulting in the disinvestment that has become an all too familiar starting point for racialized displacement in American cities. In 2007, our community blocked CPSC’s project to lease the park. A new organization called the Friends of Old North Durham Park (FONDP) has since been formed in collaboration with CPSC and has privately designed and privately funded their own plans for the park that specifically eliminate the park features used by our community’s families – and they and the city propose to implement this plan through a “Public-Private Partnership.” In October, our community again blocked their plans and now the future of Old North Durham Park will be determined in a series of “Public Meetings,” which begin next week. We were only informed of these meetings today.
Old North Durham Park is where our community knits its social fabric, but far more than the park is at stake here. At stake is the sanctioning of racialized dispossession in the name of “revitalization” and the dangerous precedent that only those who can mobilize vast sums of money have voice in the future of our city.
We need to demonstrate to the city that FONDP’s plans don’t serve the people of our community, or of any low-income communities. We call on everyone to join us at the “Public Meeting” and support our community in voicing its demands for a publically controlled park, developed through a transparent process, with a full-sized athletic field, and the larger position that we all share against neoliberal development schemes that seek to capitalize on poverty and community.
PLEASE come and support us at the “Public Meeting” to plan the future of Old North Durham Park.
When: Tuesday, March 15, 2011 from 6-730
Where: Durham Main Library Auditorium, 300 N. Roxboro Street - Durham, North Carolina 27701, First Floor.
A large turnout is essential and we very much hope that you will come.
For further information and updates, go to http://www.elkilombo.org/ondparkinfo/ and/or join our new Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/pages/El-Kilombo-Intergal%C3%A1ctico/194109360610178.
Thank you for your support,
-El Kilombo Intergaláctico
--
"the function of freedom is to free someone else" -toni morrison
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