jonathan, Author at GRASSROOTS ALEXANDRIA

February 22, 2024April 21, 2024

Please support Alexandria for Palestinian Human Rights

As many of you may be aware, a growing coalition of individuals and groups, acting under the banner Alexandria for Palestinian Human Rights, is calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. Specifically, they are calling for the Alexandria City Council to join cities across the USA by passing a ceasefire resolution. On February 5, 2024, Grassroots Alexandria voted to join this coalition.

Please Act: there is no time to spare

Please support the call for a ceasefire by requesting a yard sign: https://bit.ly/m/ceasefirenow
Please write to city council with a simple message: Please support human rights by calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.
Please sign a petition calling for an Alexandria ceasefire resolution: https://www.change.org/p/alexandria-calls-for-a-permanent-ceasefire-now
Individual activists can join this growing coalition: http://bit.ly/alx4pal
Organizations can join this growing coalition: https://forms.gle/zCceX1weKs

January 9, 2024January 9, 2024

Current Medicare Enrollees Should Support Medicare For All: Here’s Why

by Cedar Dvorin

As a Medicare counselor, the most frequent question is “Why is it so complicated?” In my 20 years with the State Health Insurance Assistance Program, I’ve helped Medicare beneficiaries and their caregivers with the many decisions and choices they are called on to make. A common problem is the continued high expense for those who need care for vision (other than eye diseases), hearing, and dental. My work shows that Medicare has become overly complicated for current enrollees. It needs a reset. If given a chance, currently proposed Medicare For All legislation would do exactly that.

September 6, 2023September 6, 2023

Is Antiracism Still Allowed?

by Jonathan Krall

In January 2023, Alexandria city announced a BIPOC Small Business Grant Program to address negative pandemic-era impacts on local businesses, impacts that were “particularly felt by Black, Indigenous and people of color (“BIPOC”) owned businesses due to structural barriers and discriminatory financial lending practices.” Sadly, an “equal protection of the laws” lawsuit alleged discrimination against White people, causing Alexandria “to scrap the grant program.” Reacting to this lawsuit, Meronne Teklu of the Economic Opportunities Commission told me that “City Council needs to push back without compromise; these people want us to believe that reparations of any kind are illegal.” Ms Teklu, and City Council, recognize that it is unjust to treat people “equally” in a society that routinely produces “tailwinds for White people and headwinds for Black people.” Shouldn’t we be allowed to measure and address the impacts of systemic injustice? In some areas of law, the answer is yes. We need to expand that “yes.” The key is to focus on, and push back against, the very real impacts of racial disparities.

As activists, it is up to us to choose where and how to spend our energy and how we frame our messages. In a nation where White people are implicitly raised to be ignorant of racism, how do we identify and oppose racism? How do we address systemic racism, where no specific person can be identified as the cause of the harm? In many instances, as in pandemic impacts on Black-owned businesses, we have numerical measures. As reported by ALXnow, in the USA, “Black-owned businesses were disproportionately hit by the pandemic, showing a 28% earnings decrease in 2020 compared to a 15% drop for White-owned businesses and a 17% overall decline.” The Community Foundation for Northern Virginia found that 79% of White-owned firms received all of the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) funding they sought, compared to 43% of Black-owned firms. In our quest to push back against systemic racism, instances where we do have clear evidence of racially-disparate impacts seem like a good place to start.

March 20, 2023March 20, 2023

The Alarming Privatization of Medicare Should Alarm You Too

by Jennifer O. and Jonathan Krall

The ever-expanding privatization of Medicare should be of concern to Alexandrians who have Medicare. Alexandrians over age 50 cited aging-related health concerns as one of the community’s top health issues. More than a third of residents worry about paying rent or mortgage. Low-cost healthcare is even more important for low-income seniors and people living with disabilities. The more we learned about the privatization of Medicare, the more alarmed we became. Fortunately, there is hope. Growing nationwide support for universal healthcare suggests to us that Medicare should be expanded not exploited.

Requested action: Alexandrians can join the action by signing our petition: please tell City Council to pass a Medicare for All Resolution for Alexandria.

February 9, 2023February 9, 2023

We can, and should, hear the underrepresented people of Alexandria

by Jim Durham and Jonathan Krall

As we work together to support equity, we look for and support initiatives that increase civic participation for all Alexandrians. Fortunately, with the Duke Street in Motion project, Alexandria city staff has proven itself capable of effectively reaching previously-marginalized communities. Specifically, they used both Internet outreach (the usual method) and in-person outreach for the same project. They showed that only the direct method–several pop-up “tally poll” events at apartment buildings and public places in the project area–reached a population that represents both the project area and Alexandria as a whole. With this project, Alexandria city staff set a higher standard that should be followed in future projects. Put simply, all such outreach should be required to represent either the population of the project area, or Alexandria as a whole. Here’s how they did it for the Duke Street in Motion (DSIM) project.

DSIM concerns improved bus service, including dedicated lanes like those on Route 1, on Duke Street. To measure public priorities, Alexandria City Staff asked: “Is faster and more reliable bus service a priority, even if that means car trips on Duke Street take slightly longer?” They began with conventional outreach, using online polling and feedback forms to ask about travel time for buses versus cars on Duke Street. In a parallel effort, they visited the project area to conduct “pop-up tally poll” events, where people could enjoy snacks, ask questions about the project, and answer the central question: “Is faster and more reliable bus service a priority, even if that means car trips on Duke Street take slightly longer?”

These two approaches engaged very different populations. Here is the data:

Tally-poll votes: 410 responses, 59 in Spanish, 26 in Amharic, 325 in English. That is, 79% of responses were in English.
Internet poll and feedback form: 1228 responses; 9 completed in Spanish, 1219 in English; 99% of responses in English.
Results: 69% of tally-poll respondents, but only 41% of Internet-feedback form respondents, say it’s important to make the bus faster and more reliable even if that means cars take slightly longer.

Using language data, we can compare the two respondent groups to Alexandria as a whole. We recommend that this type of analysis be applied to all such project outreach. In the tally-poll data, 79% of responses were in English. According to the census, 70% of Alexandrians speak English only. The other 30% speak languages other than English, including 11% Spanish. This suggests to us that the tally-poll data (69% in favor of bus lanes) is representative of Alexandria as a whole.