CSUN MLK Community Justice Days of Service

CSUN?s Office of Community Engagement is requesting $5,000 to support four community-based events that will take place across mid- to late-January, entitled CSUN?s Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Justice Days of Service. This funding will provide support for transportation, parking, materials/supplies (food, arts and crafts, seeds, and books), along with modest stipends for site facilitators/guest speakers. Our focus for these events is broadly on racial and social justice, with an emphasis on environmental and climate justice and tree/shade equity in our historically marginalized communities. While each event will have specific activities tailored for the intergenerational populations it will serve, during each event, we will have several tables set up to provide additional resources for our participants: information about resources offered by the Office of Community Engagement (funding for campus and community partners, support for social media/grant writing and other infrastructural development); our Institute for Community Health and Wellbeing (resources for mental and physical health); our Food Pantry; our CSUN Act Now (CAN) Voter Engagement initiative, which seeks to register voters and enhance civic engagement opportunities through information about assembly bills and other legislation; and services from our CSUN VITA Tax Clinic, which serves historically marginalized community members in preparing their tax forms. The four event location sites are as follows, and events will take place between January 12, 2023 and January 26, 2023: 1. CSUN Food GARDEN (CSUN campus, Northridge) Our partners at the CSUN Institute for Sustainability, lead by Institute Director Sarah Johnson and CSUN Climate Corps Fellow Hannah Safer-Brickman, will bring together staff, students, and Climate Corps Fellows to host a workshop on food justice, a garden cleanup activity, and a seedling giveaway. 2. Bertrand Avenue Elementary School (Reseda) We are collaborating with the school?s volunteer coordinator, Iris O?Dell, to create a day-long series of grade-level appropriate activities that will serve students K-5 in rotating stations. Students from our integrated elementary education teaching program will help coordinate these activities with faculty from Education, Sustainability, Theatre, and English. These activities will include a literacy and crafts activity about MLK and racial/climate justice (reading + craft/writing), a STEM activity (planting native seeds for younger students, shade/climate justice mapping for older students), an arts and drama activity where students will make puppets, write, and perform content related to climate justice, and a sidewalk chalking activity for students to share messages of positivity and justice with their community. 3. West Valley Regional Branch, Los Angeles Public Library (Reseda) We are working with children?s and adult librarians Roya Rahimi, Hanuel You, Daryl Maxwell, and Kevin Halsey to create two literacy activities that will serve younger audiences through a story hour activity and a reading and discussion for teens/adult audiences in the late afternoon/early evening. We will have guest speakers/readers who will read/perform these works and lead an arts and crafts activity with the younger audience and a discussion with the teen and adult audiences. 4. Jewish Health Association, Northridge We are collaborating with JHA volunteer coordinator Julie Lockman-Gold to create an onsite event for our local seniors to participate in a gardening and arts activity to support elder participation in climate and racial justice events. We will invite them to plant native seeds in planters that can then be used on their site or donated to a community garden, an activity that will be complemented by a discussion of climate justice and tree equity with a focus on the inequities in the surrounding San Fernando Valley area. Seniors will also be encouraged to create short poetic, artistic, or dramatic pieces to reflect on their changing understanding of racial and climate justice across their lifespan. We are engaging our students, faculty, staff, alumni, and community members and partners in these events to create opportunities for intergenerational dialogues at sites on and off campus, with the goal of establishing and/or amplifying reciprocal relationships and collaborations that share resources across these constituents. We are inviting community members and partners to our campus to learn about some of the resources offered at CSUN, and likewise will bring some of our resources to the community as learn more about our shared resources and goals. We also hope that these one-time events will catalyze and support the development of ongoing collaboration between faculty, students, and community partners and members. These events support the following focus areas as outlined by the Partnership Alliance?s MLK Day of Service Grants RFP: * Supporting underserved individuals and communities * Engaging in activities to counter the corrosive effects of hate-fueled violence on our democracy and public safety * Increasing economic, environmental, educational, or other forms of equity and that meet an important immediate community need or advance racial justice and equity solutions * Supporting Environmental Stewardship, including supporting communities to become more resilient through measures that reduce greenhouse gas emissions, conserve land and water, increase renewable energy use and improve at-risk ecosystems, especially in underserved households and communities * Engaging volunteers from historically underrepresented groups?including but not limited to Black, Indigenous, and people of color; LGBTQI+; veterans and military families; persons in rural areas; and persons with disabilities?in order to remove barriers to their full and equal participation