East Phillips: Fight For Our Air

• Right now, while national news covers the City’s settlement regarding the horrific killing of George Floyd, Minneapolis City Council is in the middle of a land grab that will DIRECTLY HARM BIPOC communities. This is happening two blocks north of Lake Street, the epicenter of last year’s collective trauma following the killing of George Floyd.
• The East Phillips community, which is 86% BIPOC, planned to revitalize the former Roof Depot site as an income-generating urban farm, small business space, and affordable housing community.
• While Lake Street still languishes with burned out businesses and piles of rubble, the City of Minneapolis intends to demolish the building on the site – a building which, notably, is still sound, functional, and undamaged. Demolition is scheduled for APRIL 2021. 
• The City of Minneapolis intends to use the site for a heavily polluting public works facility, including a multi-story parking ramp and sandbox for teaching the operation of diesel trucks.
• Other Minneapolis communities have offered land for the City of Minneapolis public works facility, and the city STILL insists that the site should be located in the East Phillips neighborhood, where the BIPOC community continues to be disproportionately impacted by air pollution. 
• Little Earth of United Tribes, the largest urban Indigenous community in the country, is half a block from this site. 
• The children of the East Phillips neighborhood, where the site is located, already have the highest number of hospitalizations from asthma of any community in the county. 

This is systemic, environmental racism. The City of Minneapolis refuses to allow our primarily BIPOC community to have a voice in decisions that directly affect the health and well-being of our own community. Minneapolis has the opportunity before them to make proactive reparations, and they are adamantly refusing that opportunity. 

• Learn more at EPNIfarm.org. 
• Contact Christina Dovolis at chr.dovolis@gmail.com for more info.
• Donate at https://gofund.me/4402214e
• Sign the petition at http://chng.it/nmKXM5Vkfx