Canal Youth Concilio Fills the Gap – Launches Recycling Cooperative

In early February 2009, teenage members of El Concilio, the Canal Community Council, launched a Canal neighborhood greening/recycling cooperative.

The Youth Concilio want to remove excessive litter to benefit the environment but also by doing so they will be taking steps toward a moratorium of the City of San Rafael’s policy of towing during street sweeping that has adversely affected Canal residents for more than 15 years.

El Concilio kicked off its “Clean Up Canal Days” campaign on February 28 when 25 youth and adult volunteers collected more than 20 industrial-sized bags of trash from neighborhood streets and sidewalks. A second clean-up day took place on Cesar Chavez Day, March 31. Unique to the effort was the use of large industrial “trikes” to haul the trash, which were purchased with funds granted to El Concilio by the Stuart Foundation and Youth Leadership Institute.

Clean Up Canal Days is just the start.

Youth Concilio members have developed a building-to-building education campaign to deliver messages about recycling and greening. The campaign began this spring in three pilot Canal residential apartment buildings where the Youth Concilio held town hall-style “chats” to introduce Canal residents to the neighborhood greening campaign. Topics of discussion included:

• What and how to recycle in their buildings
• Local greening initiatives and mitigation of global climate change.
• The connection between cleaner streets and the practice of towing during street sweeping days.

As part of this pilot program, the Youth Concilio assigned recycling responsibilities for three buildings to tenants who already recycle for a living. They will sort and clean recyclable items, pick up trash from the building premises and sidewalks, and transport recyclables to Marin Sanitary using the industrial trikes. The recyclers are responsible for tracking how much the Canal is recycling. The project professionalizes what these recyclers are already doing. The Youth Concilio has purchased recycling bins for the buildings.

David Escobar, Assistant to Supervisor Steve Kinsey, trained the youth on key messages for their community greening campaign. Escobar leads the "Going Green" initiative that includes workshops to communities of color regarding global warming and sustainability and the emerging green economy. He is heading a Bay Area Spanish-language summit on the green economy to be held on September 9. Members of the Youth Concilio are invited to present their recycling cooperative and greening campaign to summit attendees as a replicable model for other Bay Area communities.

The Concilio was created by Canal Alliance with funding from a place-based grant from the Stuart Foundation.

About Canal Alliance
Since 1982, Canal Alliance has provided highly specialized bilingual/bicultural advocacy, immigration legal services, academic support, and economic and leadership development for Canal families.

For further information contact Janice Vela at (415) 306-0415 or email her at janicev@canalalliance.org.