People often don’t want to talk about racism and discrimination, especially with kids. But some have to talk about it anyway, early and often, because it impacts them directly. Others think their kids might not notice color, that it will sort itself out or maybe racism isn’t really happening here much anyway.

Paige Green, who is white-identified, has long been concerned with these topics. But other parts of her life, including kids and work, ended up taking precedence. Then, earlier this year, she kept hearing local students of color telling their personal experiences with racism and bias in our town. Consequently, she and a diverse group of community members with the same concerns decided to take personal action. Building on the previous work of other organizations focusing on diversity and equality, they began the Team for Inclusivity, Diversity and Equity (TIDE). Their aim is to have a chapter of TIDE in every city school in Petaluma.

“At the Women’s March in January organized by Indivisible Petaluma and North Bay Organizing Project, I heard students talk about the hardship of being a person of color in Petaluma,” she says. “Then I heard more stories at the Bias and Inclusion Forum, held by the Petaluma Community Relations Council at the Petaluma Library. I’d always been concerned about this in our town, and hearing these stories was heartbreaking and affected me.”

Fourteen people from five Petaluma schools attended the first meeting. Three attendees spoke Spanish as a first language, and all attendees were women. They decided together to call the group TIDE.

The goal is to have a TIDE chapter in every school and a city-wide All-TIDE group. At All-TIDE, representatives from each school meet once a month to share updates. Currently, there are TIDE chapters at McNear Elementary, Grant Elementary, Live Oak Charter School, McKinley School and Mary Collins School at Cherry Valley. A chapter at Valley Vista Elementary School is also underway.

The first thing organizers did was talk with the principals of their own kids’ schools.

“Having the principal on board helps a lot,” Green says.

They met with teachers, hosting a lunch and listening to their perspectives. And they reached out to the wider school community with events and a survey. To achieve maximum participation, the survey was available online or on paper, in English and Spanish, and could be completed and returned anonymously.

The results informed a decision to have public diversity training and focus specifically on school librarians.

“Librarians are a good doorway into schools since books are a great way to have some of these conversations,” Green explains.

TIDE held their first series of four sliding-scale public diversity awareness trainings this past fall. They were free for teachers and school staff.

“We expected 28 people at the first training and 40 showed up. Overall we’ve trained upwards of 70 people so far,” Green says.

The group is currently forming an advisory board with representation and inclusivity from all sectors of the community and is in partnership with North Bay Organizing Project, Amor Para Todos, Petaluma Blacks for Community Development and Community Health Initiative of the Petaluma Area (CHIPA). Petaluma People Services is the fiscal sponsor.

Additionally, TIDE is funding the diversity training component featuring Tara Fleming, an anti-bias educator and facilitator, at Casa Grande High’s spring professional development day.

“Hopefully through these various things we’re building trust—it’s all about relationship building, and we know we have lots of different opinions,” Green says. “Our goal is to create safe and welcoming environments at our schools, so all of our children can thrive. One thing that really motivated me is that the Sonoma County Human Rights Junior Commission did a poll of high school kids across Sonoma county, asking: Do you feel safe and have you experienced racism? The results looked OK at first, then when they took out all the white respondents, 100 percent of students of color had experienced racism and discrimination of some kind.”

Kids at Kenilworth Junior High this past year displayed White Power hand signs in their basketball yearbook photo. A student at Casa Grande High reported in the Junior Commission poll that people wore “Go Back to Mexico” shirts to school and chanted that phrase in the quad.

While there is certainly still racist behavior, many are just unaware.

“Training in diversity awareness is the most needed now,” Green says. “The teachers and administrators in our districts are mostly white. It’s hard to be a diversity advocate and make sure you aren’t missing something if you aren’t aware. Through this process, we will also hopefully create a safe and welcoming environment at our schools.”

The 2017 fires displaced thousands of people from their homes. Many were undocumented immigrants who live and work here but unlike others, they could not apply for government aid.

Needs as basic as finding the money for a deposit on a new apartment and restocking the refrigerator were imminent.

“In the first week after the 2017 fire we realized these people aren’t going to qualify, so what will be the remedy for them?” says Omar Medina, coordinator of UndocuFund, an organization created after the 2017 fires to help those who—due to their immigration status—could not apply or were fearful of applying for aid from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)—an arm of the United States Department of Homeland Security.

“Financial support offered by UndocuFund provides critical support to our undocumented community members because they don’t have access to Federal funds like FEMA during recovery,” Medina says. “It’s helping a community in need.”

The organization distributed about $6 million to almost 1,900 families who lost homes, possessions, and earnings in the 2017 fires.

Donations to the fund are slower this year. Because fewer homes burned in the Kincaid Fire, the perception may be that the need is not as great. However, the massive loss of wages that a week or more of power outages and evacuations causes is a very real consequence for undocumented immigrants.

“The Tubbs Fire got a lot of attention because of damaged structures,” Medina says. But he emphasizes that this time, “The need is huge. We have a lot of people needing aid.”

An estimated 38,500 undocumented immigrants live in Sonoma County. With wider evacuations and power outages during this year’s fire, the need for aid relating to lost wages is imminent.

As the UndocuFund website states, “Undocumented immigrants predominantly work in sectors that have been or will be hard hit, including service, hospitality, child and elder care, day labor, wine and agriculture more broadly. Many lost wages in the weeks following the [2017] fires and others worked for companies whose operations were affected at varying levels, from temporary disruption to complete loss.”

Assisting with lost wages isn’t as sexy as helping a family into a new home for the holidays. But the need is there.

“We can help our community and ease the stress on people who want to get their rent paid and put food on the table,” Medina says. “Based on the amount of money we have right now, we can’t help everyone.”

Three organizations that understood the need first-hand started UndocuFund. The North Bay Organizing Project (where Medina was first involved), North Bay Jobs with Justice and the Graton Day Labor Center are all co-organizers. Grantmakers Concerned for Immigrants and Refugees fiscally sponsored UndocuFund in 2017; North Bay Organizing Project currently funds it. UndocuFund’s fundraising proceeds directly assist fire-impacted families, with the exception of the small percentage used to cover administrative costs. Donations are accepted through Undocufund’s website.

“The founding organizations of UndocuFund have a long history of working with immigrant communities, so we’ve established a base of trust,” Medina says.

The initial amount of aid distributed to recipients after the Tubbs Fire—about $3,000—was adjusted based on personal interviews with families.

As a former County Human Services employee, Medina trained for seven years to listen closely to case-by-case details. And that’s part of the process. UndocuFund organizers sit down with families and personally interview them. Medina explains that the interview format has a therapeutic effect.

“We wanted to sit down with people, interview them and simultaneously give them an opportunity to share their own experience and hear the details of the impact on them,” Medina says.

Learn more about UndocuFund at UndocuFund.org.

RAISE UP Local group pushes for minimum wage increases across North Bay as fires cause uncertainty.

Two weeks ago, while thousands of Sonoma County residents fled south in the largest evacuation in the county’s history, hundreds of workers stayed behind harvesting grapes in smoky fields near Healdsburg.

Legally, the workers were not required to work, but, according to several news reports, the workers could not afford to take unpaid time off, especially during the grape harvest. A similar situation unfolded in Napa County during the October 2017 fires, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times.

The scene highlights an unfortunate reality in the North Bay. With a minimum wage of just $12 an hour in unincorporated Sonoma County coupled with soaring housing prices, many workers are too poor to skip work even if they’re working in an evacuation zone and the air is clogged with smoke.

Under state labor law, businesses are not required to pay nonexempt hourly workers for missed hours due to formal evacuation orders, a gas or electricity shut off, or any other “Act of God,” according to the California Chamber of Commerce.

The events of late October arguably fell into all three categories for large swaths of Sonoma County. PG&E shut off electricity to reduce wildfire risk and the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office issued mandatory evacuation orders for tens of thousands of residents and businesses across large swaths of the county.

From one perspective, the current law makes sense. After all, employers cannot predict “Acts of God”—or acts of PG&E for that matter—so they should not be required to pay for missed work. Then again, workers are no better equipped to predict disasters or power shutoffs.

The state’s Employment Development Department does offer unemployment insurance in such cases but the check takes several weeks to come through even when the normal one-week wait period is waived during disasters.

As of Nov. 7, 1,233 people had applied for state unemployment benefits due to the impacts of the Kincade wildfire, according to Barry White, a spokesman for the state Employment Development Department. Statewide, only 88 individuals have applied for insurance due to PG&E’s widespread power shutoffs.

Immigrant workers without proper paperwork are not able to collect any unemployment insurance for lost wages at all.

“Individuals who are not U.S. Citizens or Nationals must be able to show that they have authorization to work in the United States both while earning the wages on which their claims are based, as well as while they are collecting benefits,” White told the Bohemian.

Stagnant Wages

Mara Ventura, executive director of North Bay Jobs with Justice, has witnessed the chaos that disasters can wreak on low-wage workers several times over the past two years, as Sonoma County becomes an epicenter of climate change–fueled natural disasters.

During the Kincade Fire and PG&E Public Safety Power Shutoffs, Ventura volunteered at a Marin County emergency shelter. Some of the recipients lived on such shoestring budgets before the fires that they needed gas money to get back to their homes, Ventura says.

This financial vulnerability is born out in a report published by the Federal Reserve this May. The report concludes that nearly 40 percent of Americans would have to skip bills or borrow money if they were faced with an unexpected $400 expense.

With the track record of natural disasters over the past few years and PG&E’s CEO Bill Johnson acknowledging last month that widespread Public Safety Power Shutoffs may persist for the next 10 years, temporary unemployment due to emergencies may become increasingly common. That’s bad news for low wage workers in the North Bay.

The current minimum wage in unincorporated Sonoma County, where many of the farming operations are located, is just $12 an hour. A 2017 publication by the California Budget and Policy Center estimated the living wage—what it would take to live comfortably—at approximately $21.70 an hour for two parents raising two children in Sonoma County. Of course, housing prices have increased since then.

For years, North Bay Jobs With Justice has pushed for an accelerated increase in the minimum wage across the North Bay to help workers cope with the conditions. Under state law, the minimum wage is set to increase to $15 by Jan. 1, 2023. In its current campaign, NBBJ is pushing for a $15 minimum rate at least two years sooner.

The proposal made some progress in the past year. Santa Rosa, the City of Sonoma and Petaluma have all passed laws speeding up the increase in the minimum wage.

Cotati and Sebastopol are expected to consider similar proposals in the coming months, according to Ventura. After that, the group may take the proposal to the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors.

Ventura says that, while Sebastopol and Cotati are smaller than other cities, the impacts of the minimum wage are generally the same as in the other North Bay cities that have considered the issue this year.

An October 2018 study of the possible impacts of a $15 minimum wage by the University of California, Berkeley, Labor Center found that small businesses would face slight impacts compared to the benefits to workers and their families.

After extensive outreach to the business community by city staff, the Santa Rosa City Council passed the increase unanimously on Oct. 1.

Several council members acknowledged that even a $15 wage is not enough to live on comfortably in a city where housing prices spiked in the wake of the October 2017 fires.

“I’m keenly aware that $15 doesn’t feel like enough,” Santa Rosa Council Member Julie Combs said before the vote.

Even John Sawyer, a longtime council member and business owner who opposed previous efforts to increase the minimum wage, supported the increase this time around.

“I can’t imagine what it would be like to be a teenager or someone in their early 20s trying to make a go of it in Santa Rosa given how expensive it is to live here,” Sawyer said.

Whether it’s Crane melons, Lagunitas IPA or the North Bay Bohemian, it’s about branding a distinct product. Now, California cannabis farmers want to brand their marijuana. If all goes according to plan, a grower in Fresno will not be legally allowed to sell weed under the “Sonoma” label, but someone in Kenwood or Petaluma will. “Go local” will translate into money.

Former Bohemian editor, Gretchen Giles, jumped on the cannabis-branding bandwagon earlier this year by volunteering with the California Department of Food and Agriculture to develop guidelines for cannabis appellations. She helped move the process along at meetings of the Sonoma Valley Cannabis Enthusiasts, an organization that wants Sonoma Valley weed to be as well-known globally as Sonoma Valley wine.

Giles says appellations are legislatively mandated to be part of the cannabis picture as early as 2021, and that “the state of California is ‘looking forward to the day cannabis is legal nationally and sold internationally.'” She adds, “Italy protects Parmigiano Reggiano and France protects Champagne. California will do the same for Sonoma County and Emerald Triangle weed.”

The label “Grown in Sonoma” will greatly help farmers who cultivate weed in direct sun and good soil, without chemical herbicides and pesticides, and who allow crops to reach maturity.

The Sonoma label will also mean something to consumers such as Paul G. in New York who enjoy Sonoma weed and wine.

“When I smoke marijuana from Sonoma Valley, I think of the landscape, the climate and the farmers—the terroir, as the French call it,” he says. “It’s not from anywhere, but from a specific place I feel connected to.”

Governor Newsom helped overcome some hurdles last month when he signed SB 185, a bill drafted by Senator Mike McGuire who is looking out for some of his own constituents in the Emerald Triangle.

“Customers have come to expect truth in labeling in wine,” McGuire said in a press release. “This bill ensures that manufacturers market products that meet similar appellation requirements with cannabis.”

The California State Association of Counties, the Humboldt County Growers Alliance and the California Cannabis Industry Association have all endorsed McGuire’s bill. “Sonoma Weed” here we come.

Jonah Raskin is the author of “Dark Day, Dark Night: A Marijuana
Murder Mystery.”