Again I am grateful that Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday falls in the beginning of each new year so that we will not be disheartened for the work ahead.

Nearly a year ago, in response to the inauguration of one of the most vile men elected to any office, women along with men from all over this country marched to defend the dignity and common decency that our democracy should embody.

We must not be disheartened in our fight for the right to health care, when Baltimore security men were allowed to push a sick woman in her hospital wrap, unable to afford the medical attention she needed, out the door onto frozen concrete late at night.  As women, we must not be disheartened in our fight for decency when many other women vote for a political party who would be represented by a child molester.  These things are not America’s destiny. 
 
Instead, we are inspired by black women who organized with complete abandon to defeat that political party in Alabama.  Many of those women learned to do it decades ago walking with Martin Luther King who taught: “We need not follow the do-nothingism of the complacent…” The rest of us will not be disheartened, because we will follow the black women of Alabama.  They organized and they won. This is America’s destiny.

Women march again this January 20th in the midst of a flurry from white men crying “I didn’t hear that.”  “Not those words.”  We will walk in the cold and we will not be disheartened.  We will carry Dr. King’s letter from the Birmingham jail in response to a public statement of concern issued by eight white religious leaders. He wrote “We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.”

2018 will be another marching year.  It is the year we start crawling out of the hole that the Republican Party dug for us.  We will stand up for the Dreamers.  We will organize like the black women in Alabama and the like the brave first-time candidates who got elected to the Virginia Legislature. We will organize like Fannie Lou Hamer who desegregated the Mississippi delegation to the Democratic National Convention in 1964.  We will march for every woman who has been sexually abused and harassed and called out “Me Too!” Like women of the Old Window Workshop Cooperative we will fight to keep our safe work place and to own our own labor.  We will fight for health care as a human right and WE WILL VOTE. 

This year Springfield Women Organize will march on International Women’s Day.  Go to the Facebook group to stay informed and join us.

​With gratitude for Martin Luther King Jr. “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.”

As we near our milestone of 10 tons of reusable wood and glass saved from landfills, women of the Old Window Workshop are celebrating our skills, knowing that our work can save our environment while we provide for our families.   

And this is our challenge:  Educate all who would replace our environment with concrete, fake wood, shiny vinyl and triple plate glass that the true energy savings is in preserving and re-using what already exists.   

This is our calling:  “As we work for a more sustainable environment, we will create a more just economy.”

Now, please take time to read the article in YES Magazine by Penn Loh about the new economy of cooperation and watch the “Real to Reel” TV coverage of the OId Window Workshop.

Old Window Workshop has six suggestions for Springfield to increase opportunities  for residents and save its historic heart. 

1. Offer low-interest loans for window restoration: Cooperative Banks and Community Development Block Grant funds could offer low-interest loans to low-income homeowners to restore and retrofit windows for energy efficiency.  Pre-approved loans are a common tool used by salesmen of new replacement windows. Some homeowners have spent many thousands of dollars unnecessarily simply because they could get a loan to replace their windows. Loans to re-use windows have triple-value:  improved living conditions for homeowners and tenants, jobs and skill-building for workers, quality windows and energy improvements for property-owners.   

2. Educate Homeowners: An Information Sheet comparing replacement windows to restored windows could be available at the Building Inspector’s Office when property owners apply for permits to replace their windows.

3. Offer Window Restoration vs. Replacement: Property managers and owners could be required to get window restoration bids along with their application to replace windows.  Building Permits could require an estimate of the cost of replacing demolished windows, as well as reusable doors, interior trim and flooring. 

4. Expand Job Training: Remodeling and restoration contracts for city properties could require job training for no less than 2 Springfield women or youth.

5. Create Higher Ed Opportunities: The City Council should request that STCC and UMass create a Historic Preservation and Restoration Trades Institute where students earn income and gain skills on-the-job while taking courses that lead to Associates Degrees and higher education.

6. Set The Example: Soon Springfield City Hall will need windows maintained, re-glazed and re-finished.  This cost can be incorporated into the city’s monthly building maintenance budget.  At-risk youth could be trained and paid in the summer or after-school during the year, on the condition that they complete high school.  Women could job-share and stay in school.  

Can you participate to help organize the Springfield Day Without Women March, a march for for women’s lives on March 8th, International Women's Day?  

Our first Organizer's meeting is Thursday, March 2nd, 11:00 AM at 806 Main St. Springfield (office of South End C-3 Community Center)

If each of us could help:

• Spread the word - DOWNLOAD Flyer  (post wherever you can)
• Provide cardboard and markers to help women make signs of things they want to say
• Be a Speaker about how we can protect ourselves, girls, people of color and Muslims and Jews and immigrants and our health and our water and our trees and gardens or what we need right now in our neighborhoods
• Lead the march with songs and drumming
• Sing or play music at the pre-march rally
• Provide a loud speaker system
• Serve as peacekeepers and safety guides—maybe wear white shirts or scarves.  This group should meet before the march.
• Take steps to make sure the march on March 8th is a good experience for women and children learning to speak out.

Join and SHARE our Facebook Event and please invite your friends.

The event will be 3:00 - 6:00 PM, giving us time for speakers, music and marching. Tell us your thoughts. Thanks so much.
In Solidarity with All Women, in Springfield and everywhere across the world.

The Mass DEP has issued a request for comment on the Construction and Demolition Best Management Practices Guidelines.  

We have responded this way:
Our goal is to create jobs and prevent the indiscriminate demolition and disposal of wooden architectural components on buildings where public funds contribute to the overall project.

We recommend that the Mass DEP C&D Best Practices include a 90-day public review and comment period on all demolition contracts in order to create jobs through material reuse.
Money spent by the State Division of Capital Asset Management and Maintenance (DCAMM) is sadly paying for trucking large quantities of original materials out-of-state for incineration or landfills. In contrast, cities all over the country are witnessing job opportunities created through the building materials reuse industry.

One example of opportunity lost is the Springfield Technical Community College campus where thousands of taxpayer dollars left the city in dumpsters without creating one lasting job.

To prevent further demolition of wooden components, please consider the following points:

1. Preserving buildings through centuries has been one of the contributions of skilled labor to civilization.  And the knowledge of preservation craft passed down over generations instilled the population with the resilience needed to rebuild after wars, depressions, floods and tornadoes. Women developed these skills as well as men.
2. All that remains of the original forests of New England are old growth trees that were incorporated into buildings.  Structural posts and beams, windows, doors, trim and columns were hand-crafted from wood that grew on this land as many as four hundred years ago.  That is why the original Springfield Armory windows still have structural integrity after nearly two centuries of exposure to weather.  Unlike PVC, wood can be repaired, maintained and repurposed for generations.  
3. Our government spends millions of dollars trucking and disposing of historic wood instead of seeding economic opportunity that is environmentally sustainable. 
4. The Springfield National Armory once employed a labor force of 14,000 workers.  The city became known as “The City of Homes.” The black middle class came into prominence here because of more equal access to skilled jobs and managerial positions at the Armory.  But since the 1968 conversion of the Armory from a military to civilian purpose, the interrelationship of the Armory to the people of Springfield has been severed.  The State Division of Capital Asset Management and Maintenance, which today controls all buildings of the former Armory, offers no connection to the once great, indigenous workforce. Neighborhoods surrounding the Armory are left to disintegrate by poverty and joblessness.
5. New livelihoods can be created in preserving materials.  Worker-owned businesses in lead and asbestos abatement can increase competition in this specialty where historic buildings are an endless resource of jobs.  Skilled crafts in preservation and reuse of original materials can re-build the local workforce and teenagers can get real work experience.  In this way inner city residents can regain a sense of place and being part of history through generations of economic and social connection to their environment. For example:  every restored window puts food on a worker’s table for a week.  But that same worker only gets paid half-an-hour to destroy an old window and another half-hour to install a new one from far away.  

This practice of wasting our natural resources and our money through thoughtless demolition must stop.  We call upon Mass DEP and DCAMM to include in Best Management Practices a 90-day public review on all demolition contracts in order to create jobs through material reuse.  Use the Building Materials Reuse Association (bmra.org) for examples of city ordinances from all over the country that are being used to realize the value of repurposed and preserved materials.