Kai Huschke, Northwest Organizer for the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund led nearly twenty participants through a 3 hour Democracy School at the Newport Public Library.
The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund is a non-profit, public interest law firm providing free and affordable legal services to communities facing threats to their local environment, local agriculture, the local economy, and quality of life. CELDF’s mission is to build sustainable communities by assisting people to assert their right to local self-government and the rights of nature.
The primary focus of the condensed workshop included:
- Why we have a corporate dominated, state-assisted structure of law
- How it looks when communities try to find remedy within that system
- What communities are doing to reclaim their rights for the sake of health and democracy for people, communities, and nature
- How Oregon counties are moving “community bills of rights” to protect communities and move them towards sustainability
Please let us know if you are interested in further discussion of the workshop by contacting María Sause at mkrausster@gmail.com, or by calling 541-961-6385.
Democracy School is dedicated to the memory of Daniel Pennock, a 17-year-old boy from Berks County, Pennsylvania, who died in 1995 after being exposed involuntarily to land applied sewage sludge. Daniel’s parents, Antoinette and Russell Pennock, have traveled across Pennsylvania to end the practice of sludge disposal by which waste management corporations reap massive profits hauling and spreading sludge on farmland. Their work has inspired ours. (CELDF)