Crossing Borders: GANE’s Immigrant-African-American Dialogue Series

GANE is working with the Laborers union to build a new local for residential workers from the ground up.  Local 55, which will be based in Newark, is a multi-racial local which will represent both immigrant workers and African-American workers.

GANE and our partner group New Labor have worked with two expert faciliators, Bernard Moore of UNITE HERE and Mayron Payes of the Center for Community Change, to organize a series of three African-American/immigrant dialogues over the last few months.  We have used the Center for Community Change’s model, in which organizers conducted one-on-ones with workers and then convened first a meeting in which workers from the two communities met separately and then a meeting in which the two groups came together.  At the first meeting, with the help of generous support from the New World Foundation, we invited Gerald Lenoir of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration in Oakland to speak on the historic roots of the current situation in which workers find themselves in Newark.