Reclaim the Future

Reclaim the Future
Ella Baker Center to Launch New Think Tank
at World Environment Day in June

This summer, the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights will launch a bold new initiative: Reclaim The Future. Reclaim The Future (RTF) will work to build a constituency that can transform urban America by creating jobs, reducing violence and honoring the Earth.

We will formally launch RTF at the United Nation’s global Green Cities Conference (http://www.wed2005.org/) (June 1-June 5), in honor of World Environment Day. As an activist think tank, RTF will develop and utilize a network, a publication, a website, a popular education curriculum (including workshops) and multi-media teaching tools. RTF will engage grassroots leaders, mainstream environmental activists, labor unions and socially responsible business leaders. It will also include youth, artists and faith leaders.

RTF’s founding slogan is: "Green Jobs, Not Jails."

The path to peaceful streets and true community safety is not more prisons, but ecologically sound economic development. RTF will push for the creation of public-private-community partnerships that promote healthy communities.

We envision eco-industrial parks on land once blighted by prisons. We envision non-profit “Solution Centers” training young urban workers in new technologies and ancient wisdom. We envision those Centers sprouting up everywhere and driving down crime in every police precinct.

We dream of seeing kids who are now fodder for the prisons instead creating zero-pollution products, healing the land and harvesting the sun. We dream of a day when struggling cities like Oakland, Watts, Detroit and Newark blossom as Silicon Valleys of green capital.

RTF will help build the pathway from the present “gulag economy” to the future “green economy.” We want California and the United States — the world leaders in locking people up — to become instead the world leaders in lifting people up.


For more about Reclaim the Future, contact
Joshua Abraham, Program Director
(510.428.3939 x229) or Click to E-mail.

For more about RTF at World Environment Day, contact
Lora O'Connor, Project Manager
(510.428.3939 x227) or Click to E-mail.

For more general info about World Environment Day 2005:
http://www.wed2005.org.