Meet My Housing Justice Internship

Hello all! This is my first post for Voices, although I am already a little over one month in at my summer internship in San Francisco. Thanks to funding through the CDO, I am able to work five days a week at a housing justice organization in the Bay Area. This organization uses a service approach based on that of the Black Panthers’ community work, hence the photo. I am loving my work here with this organization, and I’d love to tell you a little/(a lot, because I get very excited) about what we do here and what I do on a daily basis.

The Black Panthers distributed free bags of groceries to community members in Oakland during the late 60s and 70s as part of their efforts to mobilize community members. Source: http://maosoleum.wordpress.com/2013/05/28/notes-on-mass-line-communist-organization-and-revolution/
The Black Panthers distributed free bags of groceries to community members in Oakland during the late 60’s and 70’s as part of their efforts to mobilize community members.
Source: http://maosoleum.wordpress.com/2013/05/28/notes-on-mass-line-communist-organization-and-revolution/

I work at the San Francisco tenants’ rights clinic in the Mission neighborhood. The clinic uses the “serve the people” approach based on the Black Panthers’ Survival programs for Oakland residents developed the late 1960s and early 1970s. Here at the clinic where I work, we assist community members to attain basic services as a political organizing tool. We work with residents of the Mission and the Excelsior, who are predominantly Latino immigrants. Gentrification in San Francisco’s historically working-class neighborhoods during the last twenty to thirty years has forced, and continues to force, many of the longtime tenants out of their homes and apartments. Tenants come into our clinic for help defending themselves against evictions, foreclosures, illegal rent increases, harassment, and a slew of other damaging side-effects that accompany the rising housing costs across neighborhoods San Francisco. Our counselors help tenants learn about and assert their rights through written communication with landlords, sometimes coupled with legal action if necessary. Part of the tenant-counselor meetings in the clinic focuses on recruiting clients to become members of our organization – counselors discuss how abuses of tenants rights are connected to larger forces such as gentrification and racism (not mutually exclusive!). Members participate in political action, political education, as well as building unity with the working class Black and Latino communities across the bay in Oakland.

I am thrilled to get to be part of an organization like this that employs a transformative approach; the work addresses not only the symptoms, but also the diseases of oppression in our culture. I’ve never been involved with an organization like this before, which is one of the reasons why this internship is such excellent learning experience for me. Our model is often contrasted with what is called the Nonprofit-Industrial Complex, which employs the symptom-focused approach. The critique is that if you only ever address symptoms, you will never be able to address the root cause of the problem; your nonprofit organization is sustainable because people will always come in seeking the same services. In a transformative justice framework we are working toward the roots of the problem.

Where do I fit in to this as an intern? I spend half my day doing intake at reception: answering calls and greeting people who walk in the door. I figure out whether people need immediate assistance with emergencies like their water or electricity being shut off without warning (this happens), getting a three-day eviction notice without warning (this happens weekly), or that they are having an ongoing issue with their landlord harassing them, for instance. The other half of each day I spend working on clinic projects, like designing a brochure. During the last month-plus of work, I’ve memorized almost all of the basic information about rent control in San Francisco and what to do in the case of other tenants rights issues. A good tip for anyone? Always request a receipt when you pay rent, and remember that landlords must communicate with you in writing for anything to be official and law-abiding.

Thanks for reading!