Dear Friends,
This past week has been a whirlwind of action and emotions. Just seven days ago we were at City Council for the historic vote to legalize street vending in the City of Los Angeles through a permit process. For our team here at ELACC, this is a powerful milestone in the formation of a street vendor movement. In 2008, ELACC community organizers responded to a call by our resident leaders to support their neighbors vending on the sidewalks of Boyle Heights. Today, we’ve grown beyond those initial one on one conversations with a small group of street vendors to hundreds of vendors involved in the policy and strategy development of the LA Street Vendor Campaign.
After ten years of engaging our neighbors and policymakers to achieve this monumental win, there is much more work to be done by ELACC, street vendor leaders, and our partners. In 2019, we continue our community organizing with street vendors to ensure the City of Los Angeles permit regulations are fair and inclusive. ELACC’s community organizing efforts will include outreach to vendors across California to ensure they know their rights under SB946 Safe Sidewalk Vending Act (Lara), which legalized vending statewide.
In an era where more of our workforce is in the informal economy with zero protections and safety nets for emergencies, ELACC’s organizing for a street vendor movement is critical to building local solutions that can scale up and reach thousands of precarious workers across Los Angeles and beyond. To learn more about how the informal economy is touching the lives of people in California, check out KCET’s City Rising, featuring the LA Street Vendor Campaign.
And to learn more about the milestones of the LA Street Vendor Campaign check out our past blog post on how we reached this historic victory.
To get connected and support our efforts into 2019 you can click here to donate or you can connect with me directly at igracian@elacc.org.
Thank you and onward!
Isela Gracian | President