United States

On July 28, after years and years of grassroots pressure, the United Nations’ General Assembly will finally consider and debate a resolution supporting the right to "safe and clean drinking water and sanitation.” Grassroots International embraces the human right to water and has signed on to an open letter supporting the resolution entitled “The human right to water and sanitation.

Maude Barlow, former senior advisor on Water to the President of the United Nations General Assembly, described the denial of access to clean water as the

Grassroots International recently supported a delegation of Haitian social movements to attend the U.S. Social Forum in Detroit. This diverse group represented several of our partners and allies on the ground in Haiti and offered them a unique networking and educational platform.

The former capital of capitalism lies in ruins. The fourth richest city in the world in the 1940s, Detroit, East-Central U.S.A., has become a graveyard of buildings and factories. The Michigan Central Train Station symbolizes the city's crisis: inaugurated in 1913 and abandoned since 1988, the eighteen-story train station with hundreds of broken windows dominates the skyline and continually reminds one that of the devastation that is Detroit.

In another great piece in GRIST, author Tom Philpott stresses that we can’t change the broken food system only through changing what food we consume and how, important thought it may be. This echoes what progressive U.S. food system advocates have been saying for some time: to fix the current food system we need structural change. “We also have to get out there and organize for policy reform: to become, in short, a countervailing force that challenges the power of the food lobby”, Philpott contends.

Today Iara Lee, a Grassroots International supporter and an independent documentary filmmaker and activist, posted online more than one hour of unedited video taken aboard the Mavi Marmara.  The video, recorded in high definition, shows clear uninterrupted footage of the events that occurred before, during, and after Israeli Navy Commandos raided the boat in international waters.  At least nine passengers were killed during the raid, and dozens more were wounded.  The video provides a previously unavailable timeline of the raid as it unfolded, and may shed light on disputes over how and why violence ensued. 

Below is a blog from our colleague Stephen Bartlett of Agricultural Missions entitled “Praying with our Feet Journal.” Along with 1,000 others, he participated in the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) Farmworker Freedom March, a three-day trek of 25 miles ending in Lakeland, FL where Publix supermarket chain corporate headquarters is located. The farmworkers are calling on Publix to pay them a penny more for every pound of tomatoes they pick, which would nearly double their meager wages. CIW and other marchers are also asking Publix to sign onto a code of conduct which would prevent the from buying tomatoes from any growers that did not meet certain basic working conditions.

Some say that the devastating earthquake in Haiti that killed more than 230,000 and displaced more than a million people has left Haiti with a "blank slate."   

Former Grassroots International Board member and current Board member of the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, Bill Fletcher Jr. recently blogged on CNN.com about the "frequent tendency to misrepresent the lessons of [the U.S. black freedom] movement and apply them to other social movements overseas in a way that misses the mark.