 So our third panel today is actually a really incredibly important one, and we know that we just had the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Maria's landfall yesterday. And we know that the impacts of that disaster are continuous and are happening in many, many different ways. So this particular panel will review the residual impacts of the hurricane on Latinx communities in western Massachusetts, exploring the lived experiences of the latest Puerto Rican migrants to the region, and the challenges of housing this displaced population. And the panelists will discuss the narratives and activism that have emerged through this post-Maria moment. So I know we're at the end of our program, so some of you guys are feeling a little tired, so if you can just stretch a little bit. Yes, thank you. And I say that because this topic is a little heavy for many of us, and a lot of us are still carrying the weight, so let it go. Deep breaths. And so what we wanted to do is just briefly just talk a little bit about the work that WGBY as a public television station has done over the past year. And it's just one piece, one small, tiny piece of all the work that has been done in this community, in the region. And there's people in this room right now that has done some amazing work, so I want to acknowledge them in this room. Some of you guys, if you missed out, Holyoke had some amazing programs yesterday. And I actually had, while it was heavy on my heart, I got to end the evening laughing. So they had an amazing comedy night. So I want to thank Josie and Miriam back there for helping organizing a lot of that effort and just being instrumental in just making sure that our stories are being told. So thank you. So we thought we would take you back to tell you where we are today. So as community organizing work, many of us that are in this room know that it could be very lonely and it's hard. And sometimes, and in many places, most of us do it because it's in our heart and we lose sleep because of the amount of work that has to be done in order to accomplish it. But we don't always have allies. But I think one instrumental thing that happened at WGBY is that we were able to engage an amazing group of Latino advisors and non-Latino advisors. And I just want to kind of honor some of them that are listed on this slide. All of them have helped in numerous ways in the effort of the work that we've done in the Latino community over the years. I will say that many of you guys may have been members, supporters, viewers of WGBY and we're grateful and thankful. But it has taken us many years to get bilingual programming on the television station. So a lot of that is because of the supportive view that are in this room. But people on our advisory board like Madi who have been instrumental in bringing in resources that we don't currently have. And so I just kind of wanted to just start off with acknowledging that and that as organizers all of us need allies, all of us need support, all of us need a shoulder to cry on, to complain, to fight and to say nomas. And sometimes we need other voices in places that you work because you sometimes are the only representative of those communities. I just wanted to just say just a few words about the Latino advisory board. We aim to get together definitely once in the fall, not every season. So fall, spring, and then if we can manage also summer, but a couple of times even in those seasons as well. And one of the key things that has been important with regards to this advisory board, as you could see it's a cross-section of folks. So it's not majority necessarily professors or people from K-12. It includes those folks but also other community folks too that really get the mission of not just what's happening with WGBY but the work that Vanessa and her crew is doing through the station to really engage the Latinx community in the region and particularly in Springfield. And so we've had this board for a very long time now. 2005. 2005. So over a decade at this point that many of us have been original board members. I've continued to be board members actively involved but also have been very important I think voices in supporting Vanessa and the team in trying to move forward the kind of initiatives that are happening. And I think a lot of times people think about community partnerships as only at the grassroots level and I wanted to really emphasize how important it is to have someone like Vanessa in this level of working at these kinds of institutions as well that is really critical for us to be supportive and to try to figure out ways of how the resources that we have at our institutions can then be supportive of the work that they're doing as well. So that was a key thing that I wanted to mention. And as a result of a lot of our organizing work together the Latino advisory board was instrumental in not only helping us engage in the Latino community with different events and activities but what we realized was that yes we launched the Latino Youth Media Institute yes we opened a facility in the North End yes we did all of these we did a Presencia Gala and that's how the show came about. But we didn't have TV content. So yes great you have a community engagement department in education but there's no content and we're a television station. So hello you organized this since 2005. It took us to 2016. To put a show on air. So I say that because patience is huge in the work. And it's something that I've had to learn because there's been many times where I just wanted to throw my hands up and say I'm done. Like it's not worth it. It's too much work. No one's listening no one's paying attention but then you have groups of individuals that come in and say well Vanessa remember this is why you and your team is doing this work. If you leave who else will they feel that will they even feel the position right. And so those are all just discussions that we've had that it's hard but we were able to put a show on air. And so you know I want to acknowledge Veronica who is here as one of our hosts that we you know she didn't come into WGBY to be on TV she came to engage the community but we were able to put the show together and it took risk. It took for an institution that doesn't necessarily ever did bilingual program to take a risk right. So the issues and challenges of oh my god we're going to lose viewers we're going to members are going to stop. You know all of these risks that they had that I didn't see and for me was more like you're going to gain so much more. Let me give you some numbers let me give you some stats of how many Latinos are in our region did you not know. And so it took us a long time. Yeah. Yeah I also wanted to note in terms of the long term relationships and again these partnerships you know they're not one stop deals right you don't show up on one semester and you're like bye. You're like this is a long term commitment that we're making and that's the thing. That's the one you know the commitment that you have and the long term commitment and that's really key and central in being able to then see the long haul and being able to really be committed to the work that's taking place you know in these various different partnerships that we have. Yeah and so I just wanted to since the topic is about Hurricane Maria a year ago I think because of the work that we've done for such a long time it allowed us and the station to really take a risk one that we haven't done before and you know my heart was really heavy and we were at a television station and there was no plan there was no there was no plan of how we would react how we would respond what stories we would tell the idea of doing something that we do every single day what became kind of like oh well is that our space and so it took us to go in the office and say what are we doing if it ain't a clothing drive if it ain't opening up our doors if it ain't doing a fundraiser what are we doing and it was hard it was hard to convince that our airwaves was important to educate non-Spanish speakers and so we took a risk and in the middle of season three of Presencia we were given like three days to pull the show together and I will say because of our advisory board and the community everyone responded immediately and we were able to put a show together there's many challenges that people don't understand and know but captioning bilingual show is not easy there is no one in the region that can caption live bilingualy believe it or not so it's an opportunity there is a lot of challenges in regards to just putting bilingual content on air so we are doing something I think as a station that a lot of other stations nationally even PBS are not doing and so I'm proud of the work that me and my team and when I say a team is really me, myself Veronica and we can count herself I mean a team is just like there's not many of us there's like three of us and allies in the community so we were able a year ago to do this anniversary special we chose to do it in English which was very difficult but we captioned it in Spanish and then through conversation we said well we need to do more so our flagship program connecting point and their producers decided well you know what we're going to use our airwaves to tell more stories and say they had their producers go out in the community and capture those stories and yes while they were only in English we felt that that was an audience that didn't really understand the dynamics of what was happening and the numbers and how many people were still suffering and you know I had to even educate people in our station of Puerto Rico's part of the United States so it's hard it's a hard job it's not an easy task but I think it has been very educational and we had the opportunity every summer to do a media workshop and so Veronica and I and others decided to okay well we're going to take our media program and this summer we're going to bring in a combination of students that are recently relocated from Puerto Rico that have been displaced with students that live here on the island of Springfield and Holyoke and we are going to bring them together and we're going to have them learn about the history of Puerto Rico about what it is being Puerto Rican of the diaspora and if they spoke English great if they didn't that's fine between Veronica and I we created a dual language summer initiative and and those students that are Puerto Rican that never been to the island of Puerto Rico had to practice their Spanish and those that came here that didn't have really good English language skills had to practice their English even myself so it was a great experience we were able to take them on field trips at Hunter College and you know all of these all of these things but it all happened collectively. They also had the opportunity to read Sonia Nieto's autobiography if you haven't read it's a beautiful book and so they had the opportunity to read that and meet with her and talk to her about that and interview her yes. So we definitely had some scholars and we did a lot of it what we found as challenges was that you know we went into it as our past experience the work that we've done in the past but what we realized was that a lot of these young people were dealing with some mental they needed to heal right and they were asking them to tell their stories and to kind of relive them and so we had to kind of take a step back and we had to sit there and we had to create spaces where that they were going to be productive today and me and Veronica would have conversations and it's like it's hard it's hard how do we get them to be productive if right now they're the only people that are bringing income into their home for the summer because we made sure we paid them a stipend so it's difficult to try to get them to tell their story to be able to come to a space to learn new skills when their mindset wasn't there they're not knowing if they're going to go back to Puerto Rico or stay here not knowing where is home not knowing if I'm going to have lunch I mean dinner when I left here so you know me and Veronica would strategize of like okay we just either I'm buying lunch you're buying lunch or the station is buying lunch but we need to make sure that they leave here at least with one meal for today and the challenges of I have to take public transportation what what does that even mean so we went through a lot of emotions I think this past summer but it's been it's been amazing and what I do want to do quickly is just show you time for one so so we will we can send a link but if you're more than welcome to go to WGBY and look up the Hurricane Maria project and you'll be able to see all of the digital stories that the young people produced but I do want to leave you with one just for the sake of time and again we want to just note that it you know again there's still a lot of recovery efforts that are happening not just on the island but also here in western Massachusetts and particularly in the larger New England northeast area that a lot of families are still struggling I mean some of you know FEMA stopped paying for some of the folks actually a growing issue of homelessness that a lot of us are sort of becoming aware of trying to grapple with and so this is just one one little piece of the larger sort of issues that are that we're engaging with but that these even the storytelling is not innocuous it's important to document it and to make sure that they get seen and recognized music FEMA, FEMA knows how Puerto Rico is and there's still a lot of houses that we're still seeing in the news these communications, we're still seeing houses that don't have a roof yet, they don't have light, there's no road, no road there are people camping on the ground because that was a storm on the ground and now you don't know which one is your condensation or anything so Puerto Rico is still not up yet we work with children with different severe conditions paying for drugs, laboratories and medical treatment but given the circumstances of everything that has touched us through the Uracan-Maria, being sensitive to the pain of the genes and this population that has been so vulnerable the donations that come in addition that have absolutely nothing to do with the economic part whether it's the diapers, the disposable towels, the gloves well yes, we've made the approaches to all those houses to be able to support them in that specific area you know, that's the most tiring, that's the most tiring because that was a motto to help and motivate but we have to keep working wow, how strong, because Puerto Rico is still working the debt is there, no bank has lost it no government institution has lost it here you cover the interest, the contributions as you want and if you don't pay, I'll stay with whatever you have I'll teach you look at the Macau, the Macau doesn't have money the Macau doesn't have a store for you to leave to wash your mind, eat your butter sit with your family you know, the same town is a terrible deterioration here there's nothing, you have to go to another town to Fajardo or to Cagua, to Junco, to Distancia all human beings that somehow or another have really been affected we have to recognize that what they need is the support of all those organizations that are in the condition of holding their hands of guidance, giving them the tools that what we've found is just giving youth that platform is the most important and the most rewarding part of my job and I think Veronica would agree that is the most important part of our work and why we, I think, deal with the day-to-day you know, there's a word, I just can't come up so I heard I have time to show one more and so this one is about a young lady that lives in the island of Springfield and never been to Puerto Rico I thought in order to know more about where I come from I do some research about the hurricane and why people like my family left the island even before the hurricane close to a million people left the island from 2010 to 2016 this could have been because of Puerto Rico's debt crisis better economic opportunities education, poverty or other reasons depending on the individual these problems become a lot more prominent after a hurricane damage the entire power grid was completely shut down it was built in the 1970s where the minority of Puerto Ricans live and had little improvements made over time this is important because Puerto Rico was left in the longest blackout in US history and the second biggest in global history people had no power for around 10 months and some still don't even have power right now this left families that lived on the island with little resources and 92% of hospitals affected close to 5,000 people died due to the effects of the hurricane according to a recent Harvard study in fact around 135,000 people left Puerto Rico to come to the US just six months after the hurricane hit 135,000 people may not seem like a lot but that's the size of a whole city and more than the people that attend the Super Bowl these families migrated to mostly New York Texas, Connecticut Massachusetts and even Pennsylvania you might even know one of these people so keep in mind that when Puerto Ricans as you and US citizens come to your community they still have to face the challenges of adapting to a new environment they will have to adapt to the cultural, social and economic changes while even encountering language barriers and discrimination this shows that migrating might not be something Puerto Ricans want to do but rather something they feel they need to do I feel like we need a comedian right now I wanted to tell a joke so while Joseph just sets this up our intention was not to leave you with a heavy heart but it's to really send the message of the power of storytelling and how all of us in this room have a story that we can share and it's why we do presencia it's why we do the work that we do at WGBY and why we need all of your support our next series of panelists we're going to continue this conversation in another direction I want to just start by saying that when we introduce students to some of these stories there are a lot of different reactions when people hear these stories and for some of us it encourages us to think more about our own story and to have different kinds of conversations in our communities and with our families and if we're faculty with our students and our colleagues and for a subset of our students and our colleagues they really want to do something and whether that doing something is opening your home or opening your wallet it encourages us to think more or opening your wallet or whatever and for for us in the Department of Anthropology and the UMass Alliance for Community Transformation I work with students who are really invested in social change and are really interested in power and learning more about how power works and how to address some of the structural inequalities the ongoing colonial relationship that characterizes what happens in post disaster the sort of disaster capitalism that creates these conditions that shape our stories and one of the things and the resource that I have found to be the richest for engaging people and for my own learning about how to shift power has been basic relational style community organizing so I I work with community organizers who are engaged in sort of ongoing ongoingly building relationships with both institutions that anchor communities and with community leaders and building up community leaders capacities to address to understand how power affects those communities so that they can intervene when they decide to come together to make change so I want to sort of I think that an instance like this is an opportunity to sort of show how that actually looks when a community comes together what do we mean by community organizing and what do we mean by social change work what are the details of that what are the kinds of relationships and relationship building and how do we turn into how do we use stories to speak back to power what does that even mean so I'm not the person to answer that but the Pioneer Valley project has been working directly with folks who are who have been displaced by Hurricane Maria and are living in the island of Holyoke in Springfield and with some of the community institutions that support them so I'm going to pass it over to them to tell that story oh does that work good afternoon I'm Tara Parrish I'm the director of Pioneer Valley project and our organization has been around since 1996 and we came together as a group of congregations multi-faith organization labor unions and other community groups in Springfield most recently we began a chapter in Holyoke and that's how we got engaged in the work of organizing with displaced families from Hurricane Maria our initial the goal of Pioneer Valley project is to bring people together around shared values so either faith values democratic values social justice values and to build collective power to develop grassroots leadership and to create systemic change around issues that people in our community define for themselves and also then have the tools to engage directly with decision makers to create structural changes so we've done a lot of work on a lot of issues over the years and in our effort to build new relationships in Holyoke and to grow our presence in western Massachusetts we began meeting with pastors Latino evangelical congregations that's where we have started and it was during these conversations that we met some of these families who then after coming here had connected with these faith communities and then joined the congregation and so I can remember we have an organizing staff whose work it has been whose work it has been to really build the trust and relationship with these communities but it started in the congregations led by Latino clergy and who brought these people into meetings and said you need to hear these stories these are the stories that we're hearing every week now and this was months after the storm right it was sort of like these families had been shut away somewhere and then people started to hear their experiences we didn't know that we were receiving the second highest number of evacuees until we started meeting the families and we started looking at this yeah we were second only to Florida in terms of the number of people and so it was through hearing those stories and and then families starting to share with each other because again families were living together really in hotels whether you like it or not there's this community of people it's the community that we didn't choose but then we have to figure out because as of right now there are still families in these hotels but these folks really in many significant ways came together in their shared experience but also sharing their hopes for what was ahead because without that it appeared to be and was described as a pretty hopeless situation and so you know we began engaging with these families and building relationships and trust and then eventually began bringing the families together who then started to ask some questions about their situation and you know why are we still in hotels why aren't we in apartments now why won't our senators meet with us even though we've been requesting it for months why will they meet with other groups of people but why won't they meet with us so there has been this process of asking questions and then looking at well how can we answer these questions and making the connection between the stories of struggle and also the policies that could begin to answer parts of those questions right and looking then at what are the structural barriers that exist at this moment related to this storm related to why we're in our hotel room six months later right so our relationship with these families has been around them seeing their stories as a tool to build power and also a way of examining the structures that were in their way from creating the life that they seek to have here in a post Maria environment right so I'm gonna pass to Emily to talk more about the process of people coming together but then also experiencing themselves in a different way and their own path to power so like Tara said after we met and heard of the stories of the family Rosa brought the families to us and we started hearing the stuff that was happening in hotels that we never heard of and how the families they were self medicating they were using drugs they were depressed so we heard and said we gotta do something this is something that is happening in hotels to people who are invisible to our community this is something that nobody knows that is happening and somebody have to do something so we got the pastors and we said what are we going to do about these stories what are we going to do to make sure that these families become part of our community so we started organizing the families sorry I work really close to them and I have seen and I know a lot of the stories so sorry that I get emotional but so we organized the family and we decided that it's time to make sure this family come out of the hotels and then they go into permanent housing and they have a normal life so we started requesting for meetings with our elected officials we did a big action in Holyoke and we invited almost everyone and all the city councilors from Holyoke and Springfield where most of the people are or the Latinos, Puerto Ricans and other are and we invited Stay Wraps which most of them didn't show up and those who show up some of them were really supportive like Josie that's here and Nelson Roman of course and others like Senator Staff and didn't have an answer for the families of how they were going to help them and if they were going to fight for these families and at that moment we decided that we needed to register all these families to vote and make sure they have a saying and make sure they put people in seats that would work for them so after that meeting we decided to continue to escalate to different areas and we requested a meeting with our elected officials Elizabeth Warren and Markey we were denied so we took the families to downtown Springfield and say if you don't come to us we're going to go to you and we're going to make sure you hear their stories and you know what these families are going through we continue to request meeting and we continue to ask them to be champion to make sure that they were so FEMA to continue to support this family because they were going to extension to extension and every extension that was coming up they were like afraid to be homeless they were scared what's going to happen to my kids they have a lot of kids with disabilities most of the kids who have come from Puerto Rico they have like a 40% of them have some special needs and we continue to ask them to be champion but they continue to push to the side and like yeah we're already doing what we need to do we're already fighting for them but they were not fighting enough they were not doing enough for these people because it cannot be possible that from September and we are now when it was like around May May and this family were staying in hotels and they didn't know much about this family they didn't know the numbers of families that we had and at that moment we had like a 180 families already in hotels thus that were registered who knows how many more were staying with relatives and at that moment we got tired of asking for meetings with them the staff will always say all the senators are not around all the senators cannot meet so I was like okay and we're gonna go to them so we took 100 families 100 people 100 families put it in a box and we drove to Washington and we went there we put it together within like three days we're like okay then you're not gonna meet with us and we're gonna show you the power that these people have we're gonna take them to Washington and they're gonna speak to you directly and hopefully you're not gonna say no and we got those meetings we met with StayRab we met with Elizabeth Warren we met Markey we met everyone like Richie Neal everyone who was there they wanted to meet with us we had time to meet with you guys we gave them a photo op so at that moment the families were taking control of what was happening the families were leading those conversations at the table we make sure that every single family had an opportunity to speak to a different elected official so they took the control they asked the questions and they asked them directly in their faces are you gonna fight for me are you gonna make sure that I'm not homeless Kat was there so she can talk a little bit more about it hello everyone my name is Kat wow that's thank you Emily first I wanna just talk about how I was introduced to PVP and I was taking a class called grassroots community organizing within the class grassroots community organizing I was introduced by introduced to PVP because it was within one of my group's project and let me tell you I was wild and astonished by how dedicated the people of PVP they had they had the most integrated way to to put themselves within a community and allowed them to find and build their own voice so I guess I'll talk with when I love them so much in what they're doing I love them so much in what they're doing that I interned from May the end of May through the end of July I accompanied them to Washington DC and I was there the first day they told me Kat you have to get these buses call every single one of these people and give me quotes I was like okay they're just giving me so much so much responsibility for something that was not only near and dear to my heart but they had actual people behind it all the families that I grew so close to this beautiful little girl I I'm not going to tell her name but she was I talked to her very personally and I built such a relationship with her and her family I mean it just shows that building relationships defines everything within a community and that receiving I don't know what else to say I'm like I'm lost for words because I'm so blessed to be even considered in the fight for them that's fine I guess I just want to I just want to say that it is actually really difficult within the context of the university sometimes to communicate the the power that we say that relationships are at the center of everything and that in community organizing and it's very difficult to communicate what that means and it's hard to communicate it to students as well as colleagues but the relationship between story and voice and collective power is something that community organizers are really adept at building at helping people to come at shaping spaces and structures for people to come together and realize they're not alone and understand how power works and why they're suffering understand that it's not them that it's not them alone and that it's not their community's fault that there are reasons and analyze those reasons together and mobilize collective emotion rather than individual emotion because that's when shame turns into anger and righteous anger that is not individual but it's collective and then doing something with that and that process is something that I haven't figured out a shortcut for students for anyone to understand except by accompanying it and Cat mentioned, thanks for using that that word accompany because I think that ultimately that's what that's what I think has been so powerful in working with these organizations and working with students to integrate students it's not to help it's to accompany and witness and accompaniment is not easy it requires understanding who you are in that and our students are a diverse range of students some of whom are Puerto Rican students for whom this is their history and some of them are white middle class students from the suburbs of Boston who maybe didn't know that Puerto Rico was part of the United States and these folks who have been displaced are citizens of the United States and who they are is really different and you can't run from yourself when you're doing this work when you're talking to other people when you're learning how to listen deeply but I want to pass it back to Tara to talk about the end results of this and it's not over but the interim results what is going to DC and mobilizing this kind of power lead up to what does it all mean so of course yesterday there were many remembrances of the one year anniversary and we were in Holyoke with the pastors with many of the families talking about how struggling together has been a really important part of this journey but that the struggle is not over and this has been an experience and I can say this as someone who's not from the Puerto Rican community that I have experienced the sense of that there really is this idea of tiered citizenship I mean I've never seen it so clearly as I have in this experience but I also want to say that in the process of these families sharing their stories and building a narrative that's not just about those poor people who lost their homes but we are Americans we want a future we want what every other person wants right we want our family to be safe and secure and we want to move forward and by doing that strategically and powerfully in a variety of different spaces with decision makers these families on September 14th when the final FEMA deadline passed none of them became homeless because they mobilized our legislators who mobilized our governor to create or to allocate funding to ensure that they would not be on the streets and folks in Florida don't have that just Massachusetts and so the other thing that I want to say is that not only are those who unfortunately are not quite into permanent housing able to stay in hotels still but as of right now over 50% of those families have received permanent housing so in the course of their first meeting on April 5th their first public meeting till now they've prevented their own homelessness and those of all the other families in Massachusetts they've gotten several FEMA deadlines not just for Massachusetts but for any family in any state and they've also accessed hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Commonwealth to ensure that they not only remain housed but that they can access resources to access permanent housing and so this isn't just a story of struggle this is a story of hope mobilized into collective power and now the struggle isn't over but it's a worthwhile struggle this is the last panel so we are going to go into our table discussions but we have about 5 minutes so we haven't done this today but why don't we just take a question if there's any kind of key questions amongst the panels themselves or someone from the audience for the panel just let me get you I was just at an emergency preparedness conference in Florida that I got a full scholarship to attend thanks to an organization called Naleo which is a national association of Latino electric officials and there were a lot of folks there actually from Orlando which Florida received I think it was the number one state at this point in terms of the influx of displaced families after Hurricane Maria the number was something like 300,000 people by the time they had stopped counting and I think it was December some insane number but anyways so this woman was there from Orlando and she's an electric official there and she said that basically when the last FEMA deadline expired what they ended up doing was because they didn't have what we got with Governor Baker what they ended up doing was basically reaching out to a collaboration with the Hispanic Federation and every family got $1,000 so if you do the math, $1,000 is not really a lot so I'm in a room of electric officials and they're celebrating that families got $1,000 and I'm looking at them like did you all have your coffee this morning but it just shows how again I think it was Tara that mentioned the whole tiered citizenship we don't really need further proof of that other than Hurricane Maria and Carmen Julian Cruz, the mayor of San Juan says we can no longer hide behind Viña Coladas and palm trees and that is a perfect analogy because those of us who are Puerto Rican and who know our history and the painful history and the fact that Puerto Rico is a colony and everything that comes with that we knew this was kind of the reality but it took a lot of people to see the post-hurricane Maria life to really kind of realize that so I just wanted to kind of give that as an example of how there is so much discrepancy even between the states and how what other group does this happen to and there's this parallel in these analogies to like Hurricane Katrina that are very visible but then I think it almost went to a whole different level when you talk about that tiered citizenship and just a reminder that we're in a nation that is not really conducive to welcoming folks that are not the norm and I think somebody used white supremacy earlier this morning and I know it's a difficult term but it's just we keep having kind of these examples so I just wanted to give that that very clear example which was just like a week ago from that feedback regarding Florida Any question? Any other? I need to take into deep consideration for and you saw it on the panel is that we suffer from PTSD this is not something that just happened and it just went passing these are human beings and we are all complacent in the system what are we individually doing about it it's not about what we do with these people what are we doing in our daily lives to change the systems that created this and that continued to create this because as a Puerto Rican going to college and I see the stats I'm like why are the Puerto Ricans at the bottom of everything every social ill so this didn't just happen they knew we couldn't fight back but we have and we will continue as we have systemically through people power through spiritual power but it's understanding the depth of this and that gets started through Hurricane Maria this has been systemic and it's not just with us so it's about that level of praxis it's about that level of reflection not only in the classroom not only when we volunteer and then go live our lives it's about in our daily reflection of how we live what we choose, where we put our money and I just feel like I just ETSD of this has been incredible that the minute we see anything Puerto Rico Maria it's like it just gets us all emotional for on levels and levels and levels and levels and levels whether we lost someone during that time whether our community is just feeling the scars just open so please understand that that this was not something that just happened and it was in the news like Katrina to us many of us Katrina was something that happened over there this is in our blood and it's through generations of this generations so those of us that live this work it is lives and the more that we teach our young people community members that they are powerful which is what they try to shut down our people will rise thanks you know I can't think of a more powerful way to go into our question that we are going to have because it really addresses that very directly so the question that we want to have for this kind of dialogue session now is what can we do to support Puerto Rican climate migrants and other Latinx communities relocating to the region to become active agents in their new communities so I think that in a way that's the call to arms so I think in this kind of conversation now you know let's write it out let's plan it out use the cards because I think there has to be an actual plan for dealing with this moment and I think that we are all involved in it all can be agents so that's the question so the question what can we do to support Puerto Rican climate migrants and other Latinx communities relocating to the region to become active agents in their new communities and you can kind of take that from any perspective any point that means what do you do as an academic what do you do as a community member what do you do as a student what do you do as a staff member as a librarian as a postman whatever it is you're doing what role can you play in getting through the change that Eveline just kind of urgently described needed so what the tables can get a little bit more denser maybe people can join if you're only a table with one or two people join one of the other tables and same routine that we've been having all afternoon so just have that conversation write out those cards and put them up and we'll say a couple of words before we move on to the transition to the last part of our day today