Page 16 RAIN January 1980 During the recent Oregon Energy Independence C~nference at Lewis and Clark College here 'in Port/arid I had the opportunity to have lunch with Valerie Pope Ludlam (Co-fa.under and Director of the San Bernardino West Side Community Development Corporation}, Michele Tingling (Chairperson of Minorities Organized for Renewable Energy-MORE) and Dusky Rhodes (Regional Coordinator for the Center for Renewable Resources). I was curious about the beginnings of MORE, its program r:znd perspective. In true Watergate fashion I taped the conversation and then edited out the sunfl,ower seeds and tea stains to produce this piece. -CC VP: It really came home to me that the solar and renewables movement is trying to become a middle class issue and more specifically a white middle class issue when I went to the first Center for Renewable Resources Solar America Conference. We ~ouldn't really be heard. The only person that kinda hung onto us was Jim Parker (from Montana). He was concerned about the same issues. A few of us asked the conference to adopt a minority platform and to set up a minority coalition made up of the minority delegates that were there, so that the center could start to look at,issues that related to the ethnic minority community. There was a fight! They wanted to know why did we need more.minorities! DR: It had to do with the question of affirmative action for the next conference. It wasn't " We don't want minorities involved...- VP: They wanted to know, "How many do we have to have?'.' I heard that! Anyway, we were all together ... all the goodies . .. Jim Parker wrote the resolution and it was introduced and we got it through. _ MT: Let me ask you, did the question ever come up about the resources being diverted from other "more important" activities? That's what happened at the first Citizen Labor Energy Coalition conference. I put through this memo about the importance of having a minorities coordinator. In order for the movement to have legitimacy it needs to have minorities. If you just put them in as a subset of your regional organiz~rs it's not going to be a priority. You demonstrate where your priorities lay by where you put your Most of us have been hearing about Valerie Pope and the San Bernardinq CDC for some time. As Michele says, "If you go anywhere in Washington where they do anything in solar and renewables and you mention minorities, the name they will bring up is Valerie Pope." The fact is their project is one of the most viable nationwide-in the majority or minority communities. I had never heard Valerie describe its inception, so when she began to in her address to the conference, I taped that too. "In 1968 there were about 300 women in the city of San Bernardino who all fourid themselves on welfare: We were the whipping boys for politicians who said welfare mothers were keeping ,ou_r federal budget up in the sky. We knew that all kinds of programs were coming down the pipe to deal with the problems we were faced with, but none of those programs were reaching us. They were being stopped somewhere along th.e way in the form of administrative budgets. We wer.g the ones being accused of ripping off th ~{pxpayers' money and we were not receiv,ing it. One of the things that bothered us a lot was the fact ~hat our kids were going to school and graduating from high school without learning
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