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Abdi
Solanti (Stanford, '95)
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Califonians
for Justice
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profile by
Anne-Marie McReynolds
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1. What
was your first involvement with community
organizing?
As a student,
Soltani was exposed to the Central valley immigrant
community, who at the time was fighting an imminent toxic
waste incinerator. After five years of organized action, the
community defeated the incinerator proposal in 1993. He
professes, "This experience was just an exposure that opened
his interests."
2. What
have been your subsequent
involvements?
As a result, he continued to work while he was a student
building student coalitions on environmental issues. After
graduation, he went on to work at the Center for Third World
Organizing, providing support to high school and college
campaigns to defend Affirmative Action.
3. What
was your initial
motivation?
Soltani immigrated to the United States from Iran. "We were
fortunate that we left a country in war," Soltani shared,
"where children were sent to front with Iraq." At an early
age, he made a commitment to do something positive. He
describes himself in retrospect as simply
"lucky."
4. What
has sustained you in this work/
commitment?
Soltani believes the outstanding human beings he works with,
who have commitment to social justice and the community and
the idea of community, have sustained his
commitment.
5. What
did you call your work (if not "community
organizing")?
Student activism.
6. How
would you characterize your involvement?
He is a community
organizer, staff worker, paid organizer. Californians for
Justice differ from other forms of community organizing in
that they take on state level issues rather than
neighborhood, operating through the electoral process, which
is something most community organizing does not
do.
7. How
did you theorize about your work? What were your theories in
action, i.e., the theories that shaped or informed your
organizing work?
Environmental and
Economic Justice; Race, Class, and Gender Issues. As a
bi-national person, he maintains an international context in
which global issues take place.
8. What
barriers/challenges have you faced and continue to face
now?
Community organizing is an intensive thing to do, requiring
a lot of time and energy -- "difficult." He remarked that at
this present juncture, we are facing historic defeats, such
as the passing of 209, turning the clock back 30 years and
the Federal Law Fair reform, pushing us almost 70 years
backwards. In light of this, the challenge is how to keep
moving forward.
9.
What concerns do you have about community organizing as it
is now being practiced?
- Strengthening the
international focus.
- Making funding of
organizations more self-sufficient rather than dependent
on foundations.
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