PowerVote 2010

Empowered. Connected. Strong. That’s how I felt after spending this past weekend in Chicago meeting and working with fellow youth activists from across the nation. The connections I made there are deep-seated and lifelong, and I am honored to call each and every one of them my friends. They are working on projects ranging from ending mountaintop removal, to creating urban gardens, to starting bike cooperatives and banding their communities together for a common cause. Each of them has story to tell, we all do.

And that’s what this weekend was about: listening and sharing, and finding the extreme value that lives and breathes within all of us. We did a lot of contemplation and activity over the week, working with each other to explore our abilities to empower ourselves and each other.

We banded together with a local community organization working hard simply to have the basic right to clean air and a healthy life. LVEJO, the gracious and inspiring organization, showed us the power of community, even as they faced living with coal ash in their backyards and their lungs. What’s more, they helped us build OUR community.

You see, our community, the PowerVote community, is not about a single issue or simply switching a few elected officials. We know far too well how dirty the game of politics can be, and how promises often fall short when money comes into play.

WE are about clean energy and the right to live fully, healthily, without pollution and waste simply because of the color of your skin. WE are about a world where people don’t live in fear and ignorance of the atrocities around them. WE are about a world where children know where their food comes from and what it feels like to be one with the ocean. We are about a world where we can live in harmony and simply be.

So who exactly are we? Well, for starters, we’re not made up of simply the people we met this weekend. We are global and we are many. We are found in every person who has ever spoken out against prejudice and injustice, in every person who has ever found peace in the middle of a forest, calm in the sound of rushing water, or happiness in the love and energy at a family dinner. We are a network of citizens, fed up with partisan politics and a system that no longer serves the people it is supposed to represent. We are a group of young hearts who hurt every time we see continued concessions that affect our lives and the place that makes it possible: our planet, our home, our Mother Earth.

We are everywhere. We are growing. And you are a part of us.

http://www.powervote.org/