CHICAGO ACTIVISTS TAKE CITY WIDE BUS TOUR TO DISCUSS COMMUNITY CONCERNS

A city-wide bus tour was recently organized by Grassroots Collaborative to allow community organizers from across Chicago to share their stories. Photo Credit: Grassroots Collaborative/Amisha Patel
A city-wide bus tour was recently organized by Grassroots Collaborative to allow community organizers from across Chicago to share their stories. Photo Credit: Grassroots Collaborative/Amisha Patel

Chicago Activists Take City Wide Bus Tour To Discuss Community Concerns

BY KATHERINE NEWMAN

The Grassroots Collaborative recently organized a city-wide bus tour with stops on the north side, west side, and south side to share stories and discuss the most pressing issues that they see with the current state of affairs in Chicago.

The Grassroots Collaborative is a coalition of labor and community organizations that represent a diverse set of communities in Chicago.

Together, the organizations are working to build a movement for economic and racial justice, in Chicago and in the state of Illinois, by melding community organizing, grassroots leadership development, civic engagement, and research to win strategic policy campaigns, according to the Grassroots Collaborative Facebook page.

“Most of our work is based around the City of Chicago but we have an organizer placed in Peoria so we can do some statewide work and we also spend some time in Springfield to lobby on different legislation that either our members are working on or that we are working on and a lot of our work is focused on economic and racial justice,” said Marcos Ceniceros, an organizer with Grassroots Collaborative.

The Bus Tour began at the Lincoln Yards site, a new mixed-use development project located at 1499 W. Dickens Ave. near the Chicago River between Bucktown and Lincoln Park. Prior to embarking on the bus tour, Grassroots Collaborative held a press conference to call on the many candidates running for Mayor of Chicago to listen to the needs of city residents on housing and gentrification, school closings and disinvestment, racial profiling and police surveillance.

“We started off at Lincoln Yards because it demonstrates the priorities of the city. You can easily see where the city and its leadership has been placing priority because that’s where investment goes, which ends up being wealthy neighborhoods or downtown. This leaves the rest of the city, particularly the south and west side, with no investment, a disinvestment, or an investment that actually is detrimental to the community,” said Ceniceros.

The bus tour took residents and local organizers across the city from the Lincoln Yards site to the 606 trail in Logan Square, to the site of the proposed Cop Academy on the west side, to James Shields Middle School in Brighton Park, to the Roseland Community Hospital, and to the site of the Obama Presidential Center in Jackson Park to talk about displacement, disinvestment, racial profiling, police accountability, and the public school system.

“The tour was to hear stories from people who live in those neighborhoods and to really lift up the voices of community leaders and grassroots leaders about what we are expecting from the next mayor and the next city council,” said Ceniceros. “On the bus from location to location, we were able to reflect on the stories that we heard and to share how we felt. Even though some of the issues may feel different from neighborhood to neighborhood when we take a step back we are able to see how they are all tied together.”

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