We caught up with Rahwa Ghirmatzion to discuss what it takes to do community organizing around public health and environmental justice; what kinds of things you need to build up to sustain that work; and what all of that contributes to the pursuit of a culture of healing.

Could you tell us more about yourself and some of the breadth of your community development work?

Rahwa: How I came into this work is probably how I came into the world, which was to a beautiful little agricultural village in a small country called Eritrea along the Red Sea. I was born in the middle of a civil war. When I was five years old, we had to flee in the middle of the night for our safety.  The experience was not by choice, quite disruptive, and my family felt deeply displaced. Not only did we leave our home, our village, but we also made a harrowing escape into Sudan by walking for 16 nights while hiding out and resting during the day. After living in Khartoum, Sudan, for two years, my family was able to come to the United States with asylee status. My experience is that every country has its issues. My first experience with racism in this country was at the age of nine. I didn’t quite have the words for what was happening to me; I didn’t have the context. I had only been here maybe a year, but I could feel racism, and it was not a good feeling. All this before the age of ten is the foundation for my purpose or life’s work, to build a more socially just and generative world.

I think my work is to build up communities where we all can just be human. I’ve always worked on the frontlines, either in a volunteer capacity while in high school or my first job out of college at a political activist theater company. This is the place where I got politicized, as the purpose of Ujima Company was to use theater to build the beloved community. They were bold, courageous, and excellent in their pursuit of building a platform for oppressed peoples to have a stage dedicated to their lived experiences, struggles, hopes, and dreams. Ujima is one of the seven principles of Kwanzaa, meaning “collective work and responsibility,”  and it is from that tenet that all work was devised. We believed in owning the means of production, the right to culture, and owning our stories. From there, I worked in public health where I learned about social determinants of health and community-led policy development that address current and historic root cause issues that create the inequitable conditions that disproportionately impact BIPOC communities. Then I came to PUSH Buffalo, an organization committed to addressing racial, economic, and environmental justice by engaging working class and BIPOC folks. PUSH was intuitively working on a holistic community development model that addressed social determinants of health. PUSH engaged everyday residents upskilled in organizing, did policy research and development, then took the policy wins and turned them into community development projects that changed material conditions for the people on the ground.

What are ways that you would advise folks to organize, especially around public health or environmental justice? And maybe, what are some important tactics or nuances you would consider?

Rahwa: There’s a chant our community members came up with, which is, “we know what we want, where we live.” This is the approach of how I do my work – we should always trust that communities do know what they want and build on that. There are a lot of problems in the world, and they can get very overwhelming. So where do you start? You should start somewhere and follow it everywhere. Very simply, start asking, what can I do on my own? What can I do with somebody else? And what do I need someone else to do? These are some of the tools we use when we do community planning and community development. We understand that it’s easy to get overwhelmed so shrink the problem to the capacity we have to begin solving for it. We have to meet people where they’re at and then from there, you follow it everywhere because new opportunities to deepen the solutions will continue to open up. For real impact,  you don’t want it to be individualistic because you won’t be able to go far as an individual. Collective power is what is needed by growing the member base. That’s how you build power. The power is in the people. The solutions are in the people, and the knowledge is in the people.

How do you keep people engaged? 

Rahwa: By making sure that when organizing people, the community is at the center. The work has to be community-centered, and community-led, all solutions are co-designed with deep community benefits. As organizers, we have to create the space and the conditions for people to come together. For example, if we have a meeting every Saturday at noon, we will have childcare, food, and so forth. We want to deal with whole families and with whole communities. When we create the conditions for people to fully participate, then we can expect deep, enduring engagement.

I appreciate both the simplicity and the complexity of “if you build the space, people will come”. 

Rahwa: Communities are complex networks. For me, I like to make sure that I am a navigator, and I’m making sure that resources are coming to my community because that’s really what’s needed. With more resources, we’re removing a lot of the barriers that currently exist and building in supports. You have to be holistic in your strategies that lead to transformative and enduring change. I also think it’s important that the people who are from those communities are participating in their solutions.

Rahwa Ghirmatzion (she/her) is a Policy Fellow at the Just Solutions Collective. She has worked with community-based organizations in Western New York that promote community development, climate justice, public health, and policy. She was previously the executive director at PUSH Buffalo, a grassroots organization revitalizing Buffalo’s West Side.