Partner Spotlight: Coalición Fortaleza

Erica Alexia Ledesma grew up in a close-knit farmworker and pinero community in Southern Oregon. She is the Executive Director of Coalición Fortaleza, an organization rebuilding and reimagining land, homes and community spaces in the Rogue Valley after the destruction of the 2020 wildfires. Erica’s story highlights the power of grassroots community organizing and dispels the misconception that first-generation community members returning to their home communities are not success stories.

Coalición Fortaleza sprouted from the ashes of the Alameda wildfire. On September 8, 2020, thousands of community members woke up to smoke, strong winds and evacuation orders. Amid a pandemic and an already existing housing crisis, thousands of neighbors lost their homes in a matter of hours, the fallout of which would hit BIPOC and lower-income families the hardest.

In the wake of the damage, Erica and other community members in Talent and Phoenix, Oregon went to Northwest Seasonal Workers Association, a trusted organization that has been in the community for over 30 years. There, they started doing mutual aid work to bring food and supplies to those most impacted by the fire.

“I love that I was born here,” Erica says. “These are such beautiful lands. My roots are so deeply embedded here. My mom and dad met in Talent, Oregon, and they worked the land as farmworkers and land caretakers. I feel honored to say that we come from three generations of tree planters, pineros. That’s a bit of my history, but really it’s the history and the identity for this community here in Southern Oregon.”

Though Erica had experience with community organizing, she didn’t expect to start a nonprofit. But on a Thursday evening in early October, 80 community members gathered at Medford High School to develop a way forward. “You can imagine the grief everyone was carrying, just seeing the loss,” Erica shares. “People wanted answers. People wanted solutions. We were there trying to understand the extent of our loss.”

During that meeting, an elder stood up and proposed coming together to buy the community’s neighborhoods back, including a manufactured home park where over 19 homes had been lost in the fire. Erica says she remembers another person standing up in agreement. “We took out a calculator and people started raising their hands. We were really trying to figure out how much money was in that room and if it was feasible to buy one of the parks.”

“In that moment,” Erica says, “I looked to my best friend Niria Alicia Garcia, the co-founder of Coalición Fortaleza. We were tasked with this. Our elders spoke and they gave us this task to figure out how we could buy our neighborhoods back.”

Erica and Niria Alicia started researching. They discovered something called a resident-owned community (ROC) — cooperatives in which residents can own their communities, a model that’s particularly empowering in manufactured home communities. With their community organizing experience, research and motivation to help their community, Niria reached out to CASA of Oregon, an organization that works with manufactured home communities to secure financing and purchase their homes.

One of those manufactured home communities is Talent Mobile Estates in Talent, Oregon, a neighborhood that’s been around for 70 years, housing many low-income families and farmworkers. Of 100 mobile homes, only ten survived the 2020 fire. In the three years since these devastating losses, CASA has helped the community buy back the land and secured funding to rebuild 77 homes and the land surrounding them.

At the heart of Coalición Fortaleza’s work is the community’s voice and ensuring that those impacted by decisions are involved in every step of the process. Erica and her team lead their work with the phrase “No solutions about us without us.”

She explains: “We heard ‘No solutions about us without us’ echoing in the environmental movement and the disability movement. It means that there should be no decisions made about a specific community without the involvement, voice and input from that community. Right after the fires, we realized that our frontline communities were going to have the hardest time recovering. We weren't seeing authentic voices and leadership in the spaces that held the funding and the decision-making power that will ultimately impact our community's recovery. And that's why we mobilized. We are the experts in our own lived experience.”

The conversations Erica was having with her community were not siloed to housing security, however. Housing justice, immigrant justice and food justice are deeply interconnected. In conversation with those who would be living at Talent Mobile Estates, Erica heard many folks raise the need for a community garden and spaces to grow foods they were used to growing and preparing themselves, like maiz, calabasa, chiles and tomatillos. Those conversations about food security also highlighted the community’s desire to build spaces where they could come together to cook for their small businesses, teach children to grow food and learn to cook from their parents and grandparents and bring the community together through food.

As those seeds were planted, Coalición Fortaleza worked with Oregon Food Bank to host a FEAST (Food, Education, Agriculture, Solutions Together), a program that brings people together to build more just and resilient local food systems.

“Education is like power,” Erica shares about the FEAST conversations. “When we learn together, we're able to figure out what solutions could look like for our own community.”

Erica shares that representation needs to be authentic to make real change. “We push for representation, but we want to make sure it is authentic and it's going to push the actual needs of the community. We have cultures of resilience and sustainability. We can create the solutions, and we can also be the solutions to our problems.”

Today, Coalición Fortaleza is working on several community development projects — including the rebuilding of Talent Mobile Estates — as well as community education and advocacy classes around the organization’s four pillars of land, community, culture, and legacy.

Three years after the fires, the work of rebuilding remains critical in the Jackson County community. Hundreds of community members are still in transitional housing, and everyone in the community still carries the grief of an unimaginable loss.

“People lost their homes, but people lost their community, their sense of belonging,” Erica shares. “And every month that there's no recovery and people don't transition to permanent housing, it’s crumbling families. I want to rebuild our neighborhoods, but we also need to work on rebuilding that sense of community and collectiveness that we've had. We need to work on that spiritual and emotional healing. But how can we do that when people are still in crisis and survival mode, waiting for recovery and permanent housing?”

Though the road ahead is long, Erica and Coalicion Fortaleza are not going anywhere.

“I'm proud to say that I was born here,” Erica says. “I was raised here. I'm working with the community that has seen me grow up. I can't just pick up and leave. These are my family, my friends, my relatives. I feel conviction and I'm committed to this work and to see what's possible. To dream.”

Donate to Coalición Fortaleza

To learn more about Coalición Fortaleza and support their work:

• Visit their website at coalicionfortaleza.org. Follow and share their work on Facebook and Instagram.
• Donate to Coalición Fortaleza
• Check out Coalición Fortaleza’s updates and upcoming opportunities to get involved: coalicionfortaleza.org/updates.

Learn more about Oregon Food Bank’s FEAST program and find application information at the link here.