Category: Civil Rights Forum - PACG - Progressive Action for the Common Good

Cobham Missions System Donation for Racial Equality

9/20/2020

Cobham Missions Systems Donation

A Message from the President

The committee for Charitable Contributions at Cobham Mission Systems in Davenport reached out to PACG in July, stating that “…we have been seeking organizations to donate to that help promote racial equality in the Quad Cities.”

We were very honored and excited! Further communication included: “Cobham is…very interested in donating to your organization. Our senior leadership has approved us to give a donation…due to your work in our community and your mission to help drive positive change.”

The Cobham donation was $2500, which will be put to good use by PACG.

This is a reminder for our members and the broader community that the hard, sometimes seemingly thankless, work that we do has payoffs in unexpected ways. Keep up your dedication to making change for the common good.

Allison Ambrose

Third Informed Voters Town Hall on Civil Rights

9/16/2020

Third Informed Voters Town Hall via Zoom
Tuesday, September 29th from 6:00 to 7:00 pm

Civil Rights Forum

The NAACP Davenport Branch, the PACG Civil Rights Forum and other organizations listed below are sponsoring the Third Informed Voters Town Hall on Tuesday, September 29th from 6:00 to 7:00 pm. This is our "Civil Rights and Juvenile Justice Town Hall." We have questions for candidates about reducing the number of juvenile detainees in our community.

This webinar is limited to the first 100 people who register. Contact PACGoffice@gmail.com with questions.

Click the image below or use this link to register: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_IQT9lq8XR8qLSmApsW39Ww

21-Day Equity Challenge September and October Sessions

9/8/2020

21-Day Equity Challenge
September and October Sessions
Tuesday, September 15th Deadline for the Second Session

Civil Rights Forum

The Civil Rights Forum would like to thank the United Way of the Quad Cities for bringing the 21-Day Equity Challenge to our community. Many of us have participated in the first session and have found it rewarding. We encourage all members of PACG to take advantage of this opportunity!

Join the United Way and our partners in the community as we learn to change our habits to imagine and build a more equitable Quad Cities with the 21-Day Equity Challenge.

Sign up at https://www.unitedwayqc.org/21-day-equity-challenge for one of the next two sessions. You will receive an email every day with suggestions for readings, podcasts, videos, observations and ways to form and deepen community connections and understanding.

Listen, learn, reflect and act to help us live our lives Stronger Together through these challenges that can be done individually, with friends and family, or organization-wide.

Participants will be invited to the Quad Cities Equity Summit in October. Registration closes for the second challenge on September 15th!

Alta Price

No Hate In Our States - Pulitzer Prize for "This American Life"

9/3/2020

Pulitzer Prize Awarded to This American Life

Online

This American Life received the first Pulitzer Prize ever awarded to a radio story for its episode, “The Out Crowd.” This is a stunning piece of journalism about what is happening in refugee camps on the Mexican side of the border.

Visit www.thisamericanlife.org/clean/704.mp3 to listen to this podcast.

Julie Ross

Be An Unlikely Ally - No Hate In Our States

8/25/2020

Want a More Just World? Be an Unlikely Ally

Online

Here’s a short Ted Talk by founder of The Equity Project, Nita Moseby Tyler, on How to be an “unlikely ally.”

Julie Ross

Iowa Voters - Track Your Absentee Ballot

8/25/2020

Iowa Voters - Track Your Absentee Ballot Status

A Message to Our Membership

Did you submit an Absentee Ballot Request form? You can now track the status of your request and ballot from the Iowa Secretary of State website by visiting: https://sos.iowa.gov/elections/absenteeballotstatus/absentee/search.

You will be able to track your ballot once you have turned it in through links on this page: https://sos.iowa.gov/elections/voterinformation/index.html.

Allison Ambrose

Deportation Defense Summit via Zoom

8/13/2020

Deportation Defense Summit via Zoom
Saturday, August 22nd at 10:00 am

Deportation Defense Summit Registration

Join us for a virtual Deportation Defense Summit on Saturday, August 22nd from 10:00 am to noon, to learn how you can help in the fight to stop deportations and keep families together. This dynamic training will offer an orientation on protective accompaniment and how we can use organizing, direct action and movement building to win!

Read more about the Deportation Defense Summit in Newsweek.

Registration is free, but required. Speaker announcements will be coming soon.

Julie Ross

View Our "Understand the Need" Webinar for the Y15K Initiative

8/8/2020

**Y15K Initiative - Understand the Need Webinar Available for Viewing**

A Message from the Board

To help you learn more about the Y15K Initiative, we recently hosted two Understand the Need Zoom webinars where representatives from each group we plan to assist explained how they function to benefit our community and why they are in additional need today. Our webinar is available for viewing on our PACG YouTube channel here.

Here are more details about the organizations that we have chosen to support:

QCAIR - Quad Cities Alliance for Immigrants and Refugees
Grant Curtis, President

1. QCAIR helps immigrants and refugees become strong, productive members of the Quad City community. We do this in one of two ways: providing direct assistance or referring to other agencies as appropriate and educating the Quad City Community on the talents, skills and abilities immigrants and refugees bring to our community. We pledge to uphold the following core values which provide us with the purpose and direction for our work: Quality – Collaboration – Advocacy – Integration - Respect.

2. The donated funds will provide cash assistance to low-income immigrants and refugees in Iowa who have not received relief from the federal government and have suffered adverse impacts as a result of the Covid-19 virus. The Illinois state government has given assistance to immigrants in their state, but Iowa has not.

3. To learn more about QCAIR Inc., donate or volunteer, please visit our Facebook page QuadCityAllianceforImmigrantsandRefugees or our website www.qcair.org.

Heart of Hope
Lynda Sargent, Founder and President

1. Heart of Hope is a ministry of Hope and Healing to the Hurting, dedicated to serving the community of Rock Island and the greater Quad City area. Our vision is to revitalize Rock Island neighborhoods, provide opportunities that empower individuals to become self-sufficient, and equip future generations for success.

2. Heart of Hope is a nonprofit outreach organization solely dependent on contributions from individuals and from grant funding sources. We do not receive any state or federal funding. We are able to provide outreach-based services to those in need within our community because of the generosity of caring individuals who are able and willing to help us be the hands and feet to those in need within our neighborhoods. 19.8% of the residents in the City of Rock Island live below the national poverty rate. 38% of these residents are children under the age of 6. Another 38% are residents over the age of 60. Heart of Hope has provided food and toiletry items for over 44,000 of these residents since opening our food pantry on May 1, 2014. We have distributed over 115,000 pounds of food in 2020. We continue to see the need for food escalate. Our records show a 40% increase in food pantry visitors between June and July of this year. We had 359 visitors to our pantry in June and 504 visitors in July!

The funds we receive as part of the Y15K Initiative will mean we will be able to continue to meet this great need for food assistance within our communities. A second imminent need is the replacement of our 19-year-old, 15-passenger van for picking up the 3,000 to 5,000 pounds of food we distribute weekly. Funds would be used for both of these great needs.

3. Heart of Hope website is HOHQC | Hope & Healing | Community Service | Quad Cities.

Palomares Social Justice Center and Catalyst Kitchen
Melissa Freidhof-Rodgers

The Palomares Social Justice Center exists to help address the socio-economic needs and interests of the Floreciente neighborhood and other less empowered communities through advocacy, grassroots outreach, and culturally sensitive services:

Collaboration and Inclusiveness
People to People Empowerment
Cultural Awareness and Diversity
Equity
Creativity (supporting a space for critical thinking and activity)
Advocacy

Catalyst Kitchen Information:

1. The Palomares-St. John’s Catalyst Kitchen is a commercial kitchen located at St. John's Lutheran Church that neighbors can rent from the Palomares Social Justice Center. The kitchen can be rented by the hour and is an initiative to motivate our community to start a business and obtain official certification for the handling and selling of food. This space helps launch budding entrepreneurs in taking the first steps in starting their business. Brick and mortar spaces require large amounts of funding and the Catalyst Kitchen provides a space to start a food business for a reasonable cost, while providing ongoing bilingual support and mentorship. Additionally, we provide individuals with the opportunity to obtain information on the certification process (in Spanish and English), starting a business, and general information on how to cook safely following sanitation codes.

2. The funds from PACG will be used to help immigrant entrepreneurs pay for the ServSafe Food manager class and the required textbook, giving them a needed boost in taking the first step in starting a food business. With the Covid-19 pandemic we have had more immigrants wanting to start food businesses after losing their jobs and not qualifying for government assistance due to immigration status. This class is offered in Spanish and creates equal access needed to start a business. Funds may also be used to rent the kitchen for new business owners or to purchase small equipment.

3. Connect with Catalyst Kitchen on our Facebook page. Information about the Palomares Social Justice Center can be found at their website.

Cobblestone Place
Allison Ambrose, PACG President

Cobblestone is a 28-unit affordable housing building in downtown Davenport, IA. The PACG office is located there; and, we hold many of our meetings and events in community rooms in the facility. Since management has always treated us so well, we decided to offer to help the people who live at Cobblestone. We asked residents what their needs were, and the Y15K funds will help fulfill those requests. Money will provide a park bench for the outdoor yard, a dining set for the community kitchen that the smaller units use, and bus passes for residents. We are pleased that we can be "good neighbors" to those that live at Cobblestone.

View our PACG Understand the Need Webinar here.

Allison Ambrose, President

"People of Power" Puppet Performances - No Hate In Our States

7/28/2020

People of Power - Puppetry Performances

Online Viewing

Many artists have had to change their performance options because of the quarantine. Some puppetry companies have found creative ways to share their art and messages.

Wonderspark Puppets is partnering with ShakesBEARS to create a series of short performances on People of Power.

These are well worth your time - and are perfect for sharing with children.

Watch People of Power on Facebook or YouTube.

Julie Ross

Support the Y15K Initiative - What You Can Do Now

7/25/2020

15 Years - Y15K - $15,000

Please help us celebrate our 15th Anniversary by supporting our Y15K fundraiser! Our goal is to raise $7,500 from donors, matched with PACG funds on hand, for a total of $15,000. We will donate the $15,000 raised to nonprofits in the community serving those in need. We especially want to help those negatively impacted by COVID-19.

Our funds will benefit:

The residents of Cobblestone Place which provides low-income housing;
Immigrants negatively impacted by COVID-19 through Quad Cities Alliance for Immigrants and Refugees (QCAIR);
Families experiencing hunger due to job losses through Heart of Hope;
Immigrants (and others) by providing food service job training and commercial kitchen support through Catalyst Kitchen.

To help you learn more, we are hosting Understand the Need Zoom webinars where representatives from each group will explain how they function to benefit our community and why they are in additional need today.

Please click on one of the links below to register.

If you try to register before the event and the registration says it is closed, please contact our Office Manager at (563) 676-7580. She will send you a webinar link.

Y15K - Understand the Need - Tuesday, August 4th at 5:30 pm
Register: https://pacg.z2systems.com/eventReg.jsp?event=489&

Y15K - Understand the Need - Saturday, August 8th at 10:00 am
Register: https://pacg.z2systems.com/eventReg.jsp?event=494&

Download the flyer below to invite your friends!

y15k_flyer_.pdf
File Size:	527 kb
File Type:	pdf

A Message from the Board

Progressive Action for the Common Good (PACG) is celebrating 15 years of working tirelessly for liberty and justice in the Quad Cities! We organized out of the belief that bringing progressives together on the issues that matter to them is important for democracy to succeed. Your support has allowed us to defend and advance progressive causes. In celebration of our 15th Anniversary, we would like to give back to our community and, in particular, to those who have been negatively impacted by COVID-19.

On behalf of the Board, I would like to announce the Y15K (15 years/$15,000) initiative. We will match donations to PACG in the hopes of raising at least $7,500 from members so that we can infuse $15,000 into our community. These donations will be threefold:

to Cobblestone Place to help meet residents’ needs;
directly to immigrants who have been affected by COVID-19 (with the help of Quad Cities Alliance for Immigrants and Refugees - QCAIR);
to local non-profits that serve populations of interest to our Issue Forums.

You are someone who has supported PACG in the past. We ask you to consider donating to our Y15K initiative. Remember that PACG is a 501(c)(3) organization and your donations are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.

We are hosting Zoom presentations so that members can learn more about who we will support with Y15K. I hope you can join us! Please see the flyer for more information about this fund drive and our presentations. Thank you for your continued support for progressive issues and for PACG.

Allison Ambrose