kneedeep times: Uncertainty Requires a Buffet of Resilience Choices
by Tanvi Dutta Gupta, Justin Lai | Aug 20, 2024
Intro to a August 2024 article in Kneedeep Times:
On August 14, over 70 community members gathered outside of Oakland Chinatown’s Lincoln Square Recreation Center to assemble hundreds of emergency resilience kits, courtesy of the nonprofit Asian Pacific Environmental Network.
“How many of you have eaten at a buffet?” asked the APEN coordinator. The intergenerational audience of volunteers—from children fiddling with toys to elders picking at the remnants of their catered lunch—raised their hands. “Well this will be like a buffet, but you have to pick everything,” she explained. Off to her side, a translator repeated her instructions in Cantonese for a large group of Asian elders, most of whom were wearing bright green APEN shirts. For the rest of the afternoon, the Lincoln Center echoed with bouncy hip hop and peals of laughter, as a rotating assembly line of community volunteers stuffed drawstring bags with Advil, peppermint tea, medical-grade face masks, COVID tests, and other supplies. All the volunteer groups took home 500 kits at the end of the day for their communities.
“Our communities are primarily monolingual, immigrant, working-class renters who live on the front lines of environmental injustice – heavy industrial pollution, high traffic corridors, unsafe housing, and unsafe workplaces, and climate change,” explains Shina Robinson, APEN’s resilience hubs manager. With plans to add new solar panels, backup battery power, and HVAC systems, the long-planned Lincoln Center resilience hub will act as a safe place for people to turn to during wildfires, heat waves, or other extreme weather challenges.
