The Jefferson Center for Education and Research creates opportunities with rural working people in the Pacific West, across languages and cultures, to achieve environmental, economic, and social justice. We bring people together to learn from each other. We start with stories and experience, encourage structural analysis, and facilitate the development of regional networks, relationships, and collective capacity to move towards transformative action.

Our vision is a society in which everyone is able to address injustice, and no one feels that justice is beyond their reach. A society in which education is lived experience and shared reflection, rather than an expensive service or rare privilege that happens within the confines of four walls. A society where people are safe and free to think and act for themselves and their communities; where all may learn and all may teach.

Mutuality

We value mutuality as the keystone and basis of all right relationship, recognizing our interdependence, and that we need everyone’s story. Mutuality requires humility, and is the basis of trust and cooperation.

Solidarity

We are committed to walking side-by-side with those of less privilege, finding common goals and interests, and accompanying them as they build the skills and knowledge necessary to, eventually, walk on their own.

Integrity

What we say is what we do.

Accountability

We offer ourselves as an organization which is transparent and accountable to the communities we work with, to our partners, to our funders, and within the organization itself, among board and staff.

Democracy

We strive to reclaim and recreate the concept and practice of democracy, within our organization and in our work with communities. Justice and equity will only come about with the active participation of all members of society, especially those who have been traditionally marginalized and excluded from decision-making.

Our story begins with a rural woman named Beverly Brown who believed that everyday people could change the world. Beverly had a deep belief in democracy and was inspired by places like the Highlander Center in Tennessee. She had learned from other struggles that you had to get people talking to each other if you were going to figure out how to make concrete plans for justice. In 1994, after many long dinner conversations with rural working people in Southern Oregon, she decided the time was ripe to start an organization that would catalyze dialogue and action in the rural northwest. (For more information on the Jefferson Center's founder, Beverly Brown, please click here.)

Initial Jefferson Center efforts focused on increasing the participation of low-income forestry workers – particularly those engaged in non-timber related jobs, such as special forest product harvesting, reforestation, and other forest contract work. Together with workers in rural communities from Washington, down through Oregon and into northern California, we successfully:

• Initiated dialogues and facilitated numerous multilingual gatherings among and between community leaders of a multicultural workforce of low-income forest workers. This constituency is parallel to farm workers in agriculture. Participants included Southeast Asian, Latino, Native American and low-income European-American residents who previously had little or conflict-ridden communication with one another.

• Accompanied and provided support for forestry workers from different cultural backgrounds in their efforts to learn from each other, then to educate policy makers, agency officials, and community forestry activists about their concerns through meetings, publications, an oral-history project, conferences, and participation in national lobbying days. Low- income forest contract labor issues became a hot button issue in national forest circles and national legislation.

• Supported workers in creating their own multicultural networks, organizations, and projects to address their concerns and advocate on their own behalf. Early Jefferson Center gatherings led to the creation in 1998 of The Alliance of Forest Workers and Harvesters. The AFWH is now its own 501(c)(3), led by forest workers themselves. Also a result of the Jefferson Center’s work, mushroom harvesters in OR have joined together in a culturally diverse, multi-party monitoring team that successfully negotiates with the Forest Service around resource management decisions and continues to engage large numbers of harvesters in ongoing advocacy and educational efforts. Latino/a “brush” (wild forest florals) harvesters in the Olympic Peninsula have cooperated in civic forums and in educating agencies.

• Changed the conversation around community forestry – helping make what was once an “invisible” population of non-timber forest workers (largely immigrants and people of color) active participants in shaping forest policy and rural economic development.

These early JC efforts were extraordinary in their ability to unite people across differences and organize and empower people who had previously felt deeply alienated and highly uncertain of their self-worth and ability to make change. Key to our success was our groundbreaking work in using technology to create truly multilingual spaces – where everyone could simultaneously speak and be heard in their own language – and our unique, Popular Education approach to organizing.

 
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