It was a typical block party with music, roller skating and food on Buffalo's West Side. However, this one party had a message: a political pitch toward basic economic change.
Organizers from the Crossroads Collective and the New Economy Coalition says the party in Massachusetts Avenue Park celebrated Buffalo and how community change is working toward economic change locally, nationally and across the world. Besides, people want to know what residents in this city have done in building an economy that puts people and planet first.
CommonBound 2016 Buffalo Coordinator Tori Kuper said the idea is to combine activists of all kinds toward a goal. "From Energy Democracy, to Black Lives Matter, to cleaning up our roads, to cleaning up our water, to cleaning up our air, to making sure that people have control of the work place, and Fight for 15 and fight for workplace democracy," she said.
"You bring them together. You put them in a room. You take over a campus and you organize how to strategize, how to work together, how to build across sectors, so we can build a new movement and a new economy because the old one is collapsing under its own weight," Kuper said.
Kuper said this economic shift is occurring across the world and is increasingly visible. She said people are here to look at what is being done in basic local change and to see what might be done, especially among minority groups which will be the majority in 30 years.
"By the year 2045, we will have more people of color than white people in the United States. This is the future. These children are the future of America," Kuper said. "
"These children are coming from all over the world and they can't even graduate from high school because their high schools have been divested in for decades. And, it's time to put money back into our communities, back into our educational system," she said.
