Choosing to Help
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Camden Grassroots Coalition Fighting Corruption & Standing For Community
Camden is a historic city with protests and activism in its blood. Through its history, it has largely been defined by a populace that pride themselves on perseverance so much that the city’s unofficial motto – “In a dream, I saw a city invincible” – is displayed or referenced in locations as varied as signs in the windows of apartments to the City Hall itself.
This resilience in the face of what some might call bad luck or what others might call a systemic failure is due in part to the city’s grassroots activists that provide aid and interface with the political leadership as needed. Among this community of helpers, the Camden We Choose coalition is a very well known quantity. Among other services, they have a yearly Thanksgiving food drive and have partnered with the New Jersey Working Families political party on their endeavors.
Camden We Choose and its network of grassroots organizations are in part overseen by Ronsha Dickerson, an advocate for many causes that concern the people of Camden that might feel overlooked or forgotten by the city’s larger ambitions as a recovering Delaware River power. In addition to helping lead the coalition, Ronsha also delivers aid to the people of Camden in her day to day job as a doula.
“Another part of work that I do is I founded the first African American owned doula association: Community Doulas of South Jersey is a birth support group that supports a pregnant person through pre-pregnancy, to post-partum… a black woman having a baby is three times more likely to pass away than any other race, it is our job as doulas to make sure that no one births alone” Dickerson explained.
Among CWC coalition’s concerns, first and foremost, comes education. After Governor Chris Christie moved the Camden School District and its board directly under the power of the New Jersey state government and away from municipality-elected members in 2013, Dickerson and members of what would become the CWC coalition mobilized and forced a vote to return power back to the city school board.
“One of the things that we’ve won as a coalition was we fought for the return of an elected school board in Camden. When that right was taken away…this is the noose that fell around Camden Education’s neck. It wasn’t perfect before, but it had autonomy. We could elect our board, hire teachers, set budgets, this Urban Hope act was enacted with the problem of: our schools are old, our buildings are aged, our system isn’t working, and under that pretense we saw the power being taken from families and teachers and going to the elected officials…”
“ …The state sponsored superintendent doesn’t have to answer to the board, they don’t have to answer to families. They answer only to the state, and there are no checks and balances and they don’t go through anyone local to Camden. That is dangerous.” she said when asked to describe the motivations that drove her organization to take up the cause.
Dickerson and her comrades, fighting the better-funded parties in city and state legislature, took the decision to New Jersey’s appellate court where it was decided that Camden still had the right to vote for its own school board.
The controversial decision to shutter the Camden City Police Department in favor of a Camden County police force was another one that Camden We Choose spoke out against.
“That’s the schools dismantled, and now the police dismantled… We have students from this city leaving, attending Ivy League schools, that want to come back and raise families, and there’s nothing here to attract them. Nothing but dilapidation and high taxes. I wouldn’t come either. We have been warning the city for years not to turn a blind eye to what is going on.”
Many commuters and lifelong residents alike might be inclined to say Camden is in a struggle against urban decay, and Dickerson has strong opinions on how to move forward: people power and representation from the bottom up.
“Here’s the thing about Camden city and the boogeyman Norcross family: Camden residents just want a simple life. We don’t want handouts… We want jobs, a supermarket, decent schools. We know what we need…. All we want is for Camden residents to show you what we can do. Let us have a decent representative in office. Let’s have a decent school board… When you break a community by stealing its security, its economics, its way to get fresh food, it suffers. The media and powers that be say that Camden is doing great, but ask the residents and they’ll tell you what it really is like.”
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