Beyond the Elections

The Political Revolution Continues

A National Dialogue for Revolutionaries

Presented on

Saturday, November 16, 2024

and Hip Hop Congress

Beyond the Elections

The will of the people has been temporarily crushed by the deadly combination of evil lies, open hatred, corrupt courts, corporate media, and billions of dollars of dark money. But we who believe in freedom cannot rest. Now is the time to double down on defending our communities facing mortal danger from Project 2025. The workers’ movement has no alternative but to rise again, beginning at the local level, and defeat every fascist policy initiative, turn back every attack, and continue building the power we need to get the justice we deserve.

Beyond the Elections Featured Speakers:

Melinda Lavon is a mother, midwife, and community organizer in Kansas. She did the deep canvassing and campaign planning behind Vote No Kansas with her Lawrence DSA Chapter, and shared the recipe for mass movement with other states fighting abortion restrictions and constitutional amendments. Melinda was an author of DSA National’s new priority campaign – Trans Rights and Bodily Autonomy. Kansas has plenty of billionaires funding parts of the authoritarian plan outlined in Project 2025, and extremists, including Christian Nationalists, hold Republican supermajorities in both sides of the state legislature. This fall, she asked everyone to vote against fascists and their authoritarian friends every chance they get.

John Janosko is a person with lived experience of homelessness who is dedicated to helping ensure housing becomes a human right. When he was younger he found himself in trouble that landed him in jail, which gave him time to get his GED and focus on himself. After leaving jail he opened a catering business for ten years. John moved back to the Bay Area to be closer to family and friends but the cost of living in the Bay Area pushed him into homelessness. John did what he could to survive until he found a community with the Wood Street Commons community. He has been working with other homeless leaders to organize other people ever since.

Liz Gonzalez is from East San José and the daughter of immigrant parents. She began organizing in high school around issues of racial justice in education with Californians for Justice. She is a co-founder of Silicon Valley Debug – a nationally recognized organizing and media collective – working as a media editor and organizing around worker’s rights, immigration issues, against police violence, and housing justice issues. She was a leader of Silicon Valley Renters Rights Coalition 2015-19, and the Incorporator and current Board President of South Bay Community Land Trust.

Rahman Jamaal is a community organizer and pioneering Hip Hop teaching artist who traverses the worlds of music, martial arts, education, acting, and filmmaking, in an effort to unite people through a collective global vision of creative sustainability through the grassroots nonprofit network Hip Hop Congress, Inc. He began his organizing work at the turn of the millennia with what would become the largest grassroots nonprofit organization in Hip Hop history. Peaking at over 70 school and community chapters worldwide, the mission of Hip Hop Congress is to uplift culture through the creative development of artists and young people by investing in education, civic engagement, and equitable resource exchange. He ran HHC’s first college chapter at USC before becoming its West Coast Regional Director in 2004. Rahman Jamaal turned the creative page for artists by writing California’s first Visual & Performing Arts (VAPA) and Common Core standard-approved rap curriculum. He now works with a coalition of organizers as the current Executive Director of Hip Hop Congress, Inc., introducing the first state-sponsored Hip Hop Education Grant Program (H2E2) in the United States while he continues to teach and serve clients through his personal brand, Rap Force Academy at his martial arts dojo Afro Bushido Academy, SPC.

Danny Park founded Skid Row People’s Market when he took over his family’s store in 2015. The store’s motto is “a safe space to heal”. Danny has partnered with Creating Justice LA, a Black-led nonprofit serving Skid Row residents and the unhoused, to operate an affordable market with a mission of fostering social and economic health for the people of the neighborhood. For Park, this is about healing the historic tensions between the Korean American and Black communities in LA. “Skid Row is predominantly Black. And residents who live in a neighborhood should rightfully have some control over the institutions that serve the neighborhood,” he says. Creating Justice LA founder, Pastor Stephen Cue JnMarie, says he saw Park face historic racial tensions with honesty, and flip the stereotypical narrative that all Korean Americans extract wealth without putting anything back. The Creating Justice LA’s recent projects include community programming at the Peace and Healing Center in Skid Row and a worker-owned co-op called the Hip Hop Smoothie Shop. Park hopes this story can be a source of inspiration to others. “That would be a great privilege,” he says.

Katherine Venn’s activism began with organizing against the Vietnam War at San Francisco State University in the 1960s. This led her to becoming a member of the League of Revolutionaries for a New America at its inception. She now serves on the League’s Peace and Social Justice Committee in Los Angeles and the National Basic Needs Electoral Committee. In 2002 she co-founded San Pedro Neighbors for Peace and Justice to promote anti-militarism and local justice campaigns in LA’s South Bay, holding forums and weekly anti-war street vigils that continue to this day. This in turn led to youth work and the development of Peace Clubs in several high schools, including Summer Peace Camps held over the last twenty years.