This is the fifth piece in the Blueprint for Belonging commissioned papers and conversations series, "New Organizing Strategies for California’s Future." It features Hazel Davalos and Lucas Zucker, Co-Executive Directors of the Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy (CAUSE).

Hazel Davalos

Lucas Zucker

CAUSE is a base-building organization committed to social, economic, and environmental justice for working-class and immigrant communities in California’s Central Coast. Born of two separate organizations in Ventura County and Santa Barbara County, it formed in 2013. Since then, CAUSE has fought for and won living wage ordinances, community environmental protections, increased funding for education and youth programs, tenant protections, funding toward legal aid, and much more.

Hazel Davalos is a Co-Executive Director of CAUSE. The daughter of a Mexican immigrant mother and an ironworker union member father, Hazel’s family background drew her to a life path of organizing working people around immigrant rights and economic justice issues. She has been organizing since the age of 16 around a wide range of issues affecting undocumented immigrants, farmworkers, bus riders, renters and LGBTQ youth. Prior to becoming Co-ED, Hazel served as CAUSE’s Community Organizing Director, training organizers in base building through the house meeting model. She is on the UCSB Labor Center Advisory Board, and chairs the board of 805 Undocufund, a disaster relief fund for undocumented immigrants. Hazel graduated from UC Santa Barbara with a bachelor’s degree in Sociology and Women’s Studies. She lives in Santa Maria, CA with her partner and two children.

Lucas Zucker is the other Co-Executive Director at CAUSE. He was raised in Oakland and Ventura, CA and graduated from UC Berkeley with a bachelor’s degree in Political Economy. First volunteering for CAUSE at 13 years old, Lucas joined the CAUSE staff in 2012 as a youth organizer and researcher, and went on to serve as the organization's Policy Director. At CAUSE he has worked on community organizing campaigns and policy advocacy around voting rights, healthy food access, public transit, environmental justice, education equity, immigrants’ rights, housing affordability, and workers' rights. Lucas serves on the boards of Powerswitch Action and California Calls, and the Planning Commission of the City of Ventura.  

This conversation with Hazel and Lucas was in dialogue with Christina Long, Research Associate at OBI.

Christina Long (CL): Hazel and Lucas, you both started as youth organizers at CAUSE and have been working in the Central Coast region of California for over a decade. Thinking about this part of California – made up of six counties and home to the Port of Hueneme – what would you say are the most common misperceptions, or important things about the region that people elsewhere in the state might not realize? 

Lucas: I think probably the biggest misperceptions are because a lot of people from outside of the Central Coast only come to the region to go to our college towns, like Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz, or San Luis Obispo, or vacation destinations. So the perception of people from outside of the region is shaped by some very small, very affluent communities within our region. They may not realize that the largest city in the Central Coast is Oxnard, where most people from outside the region have never been. Communities like Salinas or Santa Maria are way bigger than Santa Barbara or Santa Cruz. People are often surprised to know that the Central Coast is majority people of color, that it’s a very working-class area with pretty low median wages, and that industries like agriculture are so huge here. Particularly, the Central Coast specializes in really labor-intensive crops like strawberries and leafy greens that employ many farmworkers. Those communities are often kind of invisible.

A second misperception about the Central Coast is, if you are from a bigger city in California, you might see the Central Coast as homogenous politically. It can go both ways. It might be seen as very conservative and rural, or it might be assumed very liberal, with the image of communities like Santa Barbara. The reality is that it’s kind of both. 

There was a really great multiracial working-class polling project recently, and it highlighted that our region is number one for what they classified as the “Next Gen Left.”1 This included people who are young, left-leaning, and social justice-oriented. But then we were number two in the state for hardcore MAGA. I would say it’s not even necessarily that it’s a moderate region. I think it's just a very politically polarized region. There’s a lot of folks on either end of the political spectrum.

Often the places that people come to in the Central Coast are the very beautiful, scenic areas. We do have a lot of amazing natural open space, and mountains and coastlines. We also have communities like Oxnard that are very heavily industrialized, have everything from manufacturing to ports and power plants. The Central Coast is also one of the biggest oil-drilling regions in the state.

CL: Thank you for describing that. It’s important to understand the difference you mentioned between so-called “purple” political contexts that are that way because voters are moderate versus because they are actually polarized. 

How do you feel your experience rooted in youth organizing has informed the way that CAUSE approaches intergenerational organizing? What would you offer to other organizers across the state as important strategies or practices needed to better connect generations? 

Hazel: Yeah, I actually have some thoughts on the reverse. Historically with CAUSE, our organizers had held both an adult committee and a youth committee. I felt that I learned important lessons in organizing with adults, emphasizing self-interest and having members see material impacts of the movement, so that they feel their time was well spent. Movement-wide, I see that focus lacking sometimes in youth organizing. Often spaces become more of a feel-good social leadership development space, and not necessarily focused as much on material changes and wins. And so translating that skill and practice – having a quick rap, emphasizing self-interests we can achieve, and maximizing what people get for their time – over into the organizing we do with young people has also led to a lot of success for us. 

Another big takeaway I had as an organizer early on was just how beautiful it can be when you pair up an adult leader and a youth leader, for example, sending them out to canvass together. An adult member may be a monolingual Spanish speaker, but has the lived experience and is ready to mentor. Sometimes I would see adult leaders even blossom more, because they were like, “Oh, I have a youth with me. I may be a little nervous and shy about knocking on this door, but I'm not gonna show it. I'm gonna get out there and do it, because I'm setting the example for this young person.” And then, in that same experience, the young person isn’t just along for the ride. Someone who only speaks English opens the door, and it’s, “I gotta take the reins now.” So that’s that beautiful combination, and the recipe for a beautifully strong base that’s resourced in different ways.

Lucas: We've often had our youth and adults kind of lead and support on different issues. Our adult committees tend to lead a little bit more on our tenants’ rights and workers’ rights issues –  things that are often really material, to Hazel’s point  – and then sometimes our youth are in a different place in their lives and communities. They might be able to focus on things that are more long-term, or in a different place on a hierarchy of needs.

I think the cool thing about our intergenerational model is that people expose one another to different issues through their experiences. Youth and adults can really provide political education and ground one another, including when sometimes we have hard conversations within our base around certain social issues. Adults can learn, but they can also pull the youth back sometimes and remind them where the majority opinions sometimes are in our communities, and what a lot of regular working class people are focused on. So intergenerational organizing really benefits each other’s political consciousness and development – in both directions – and also our organization’s balance of focus across issues. 

CL: There's something so special, that image you painted, Hazel, of the two people canvassing – the ways everyone grows and learns in those situations where you have intergenerational connection and leadership happening together.

I read CAUSE’s recent strategic plan, and something that jumped out was that CAUSE noted that it has really been seen as the “go-to” hub of organizing and advocacy in the Central Coast for a long time. This can be taxing for an organization with limited capacity, and that can make for worries about being overstretched. But I imagine it might also lead CAUSE to collaborate in ways that are innovative or different from what we see in places where there are lots and lots of organizing groups that can turn to each other for coalition support. Are there ways that CAUSE has collaborated in the region across different sectors, or other unlikely partnerships, to get results for communities? 

Lucas: Yeah, I sometimes tell folks from our bigger cities in California, if CAUSE was in LA, we’d be like ten different organizations, right? But we’re here, there’s not a lot of organizations in the Central Coast, and we’ve had to take on whatever we take on. 

But because people live multi-issue lives, our organization working across issue areas makes us stronger and is supportive of being authentically base led. One of the coolest things is our intersectional work, and how we’re able to see how all these issues connect together. For example, working on an environmental restoration project in South Oxnard, we focus on cleaning up pollution in our community, and making more access to green space – benefitting our communities’ health. But then, we work on issues of gentrification and housing costs. So we need to also think about the way that environmentally restoring areas contribute to those, and we weave protections into the work. And, then also, if investment comes in for this environmental restoration project on hundreds of acres of land, could the farmworkers who work in our community maybe get jobs doing that restoration work? And can we create some sort of pipeline or local hiring for that? And so we know nothing is a single issue; once you start pulling the threads, it’s all connected.

Hazel: Being impacted by wildfires in our region led to CAUSE’s role in the formation of the 805 Undocufund, along with partner organizations like MICOP (Mixteco Indígena Community Organizing Project) and Future Leaders of America. We came together and saw, as a limited number of advocacy organizations in our region, we can’t afford to have to adjust to direct-service disaster response each time one of these disasters hits. And so we formed the 805 Undocufund, initially as a natural disaster response organization, and ultimately that’s evolved into the primary frontline rapid response organization to the political disaster we are all living through. In the first Trump administration, CAUSE was the organization housing the mass texts notifying people about ICE activity, and the way we were able to transition that to this administration, that’s all led by the 805 Undocufund. And so I think in many ways the lack of infrastructure in a suburban/rural region has led us to be much more… with a closer eye to ecosystem building.

And Lucas has really led the development of our local civic engagement table, Unidos 805. A lot of the same organizational partners came together to build that infrastructure, and we’re now seeing the fruits of that in these election cycles this year, having a whole other entity, supporting voter outreach.

Lucas: Yeah, and as Hazel was talking, it inspired me to think of some other collaborative efforts, because the mention of the Thomas Fire in our region, and the really intersectional way that that work was approached. It’s a perfect example of the way that climate change touches all of these issues, right? What we saw when we actually had this huge climate disaster in our region was that the people impacted the worst were immigrant workers who were working under really dangerous working conditions in the smoke and fire, people who were undocumented and excluded from federal disaster aid. And so that’s why we’ve made those interventions where maybe a traditional environmental climate group might not have, and it enabled us to shift the narrative and build some of that long-term infrastructure. 

Hazel: I would also add some of the education and enforcement support we did around rent gouging happening in our region. Being in high-cost coastal California, and being impacted by these disasters, and seeing landlords try to profit off of that.

CL: CAUSE has seen a number of wins in tracking corporate polluters and holding them accountable for harm done to communities. Can you tell us about how you’ve gone about organizing community members and bringing new folks into the fold around issues or problems of environmental injustice that may be unfamiliar to many in those communities?

Lucas: In general, many in our communities are and aren’t unfamiliar. We definitely do a lot of popular education. Some environmental justice issues get into really technical stuff, and a lot of environmental agencies and decision makers are very hard to influence and access without having a high level of technical knowledge. That’s because there’s not only the economic, policy, and legal aspects, as in a lot of our work, but there's also a whole scientific aspect to it too. Together, all of this can make it feel very inaccessible. People may think they can't go speak at a hearing if they can’t speak the scientific language, for example.

But at the same time, people who grew up in Oxnard know the smokestacks in their community; they see the trucks coming from the port; they know the pesticides are sprayed in the field. Sometimes what we find is that the youth that we work with, mostly on environmental justice issues, may not have seen the opposite. That’s so normalized in their community, and they may not have had a lot of opportunities as working-class young people to travel to other communities that aren’t impacted by environmental injustice. It can be really eye-opening for them to see the opposite – to see the environmental privilege.

When organizing, we really try to make the health aspect really clear. This is cutting people’s lives short, right? We bring the issues home to those kinds of impacts. And then also connecting it to people's broader experience of, in so many ways, their neighborhood getting treated like shit, right? People feel how their neighborhood is dumped on, not just environmentally. So it resonates with what people already know to be true around the way that their county, their state, their country, treats their community.

Hazel: Yeah, really well put. When it comes to environmental justice organizing, we do need to dedicate a lot more resources to the political education on the front end, to be able to help people become aware of their stake on the issues. 

Also we've had the opportunity to take on projects around air monitoring and truck counting, where our youth learn technical skills – data skills – that also help them make really concrete arguments around this work. For youth in Oxnard, they learned diesel pollution is one of the main reasons for the common occurrence of early onset asthma in the community, and a location really close to their high school happened to be a major corridor for diesel trucks. Being tasked with counting trucks and being able to report that this many trucks pass by a day – that is something anyone can understand. 

With the experiences our communities have, connecting the dots is often a lot easier than you would imagine. When so many of our leaders and our members have worked in the fields in the summertime, they know what it felt like to feel their skin burning, their nails burning after work – it isn’t a big jump to understand those fields across the street from my high school are also poisoning me day to day.

CL: Given that body of work, I am thinking about something that’s in the news and on many people’s minds right now: data centers. What kind of opportunity do you see for the environmental justice movement to expand at this moment? How are you all thinking about this conversation around data centers and how that impacts where we’re at right now?

Hazel: Just the other day, when I saw a really public call connecting the dots between data centers and the EJ movement, I actually told Lucas, “I'm so relieved.” Our organizing team has been trying to grapple with these questions. First, with our base, who are primarily immigrants themselves or children of immigrants – are they still interested in working on environmental justice issues when everyone's attention, and rightfully so, is around fighting ICE and workplace raids? And I think the answer has been mixed.

The second question was, will people broadly in the community still be interested? Will we be fighting for their attention? Is this the way we continue to move forward? I think knowing what’s at stake and how important these issues are, we weren't going to accept the answer of no – that we can't work on EJ anymore. We've always had an intersectional approach and understood that we have to carry all of these issues. Again, people lead multi-issue lives.

So we brainstorm around, for example, if we are fighting a port expansion, is there a way that we can point to our city council and the fact that they're providing subsidies to this company while they simultaneously say that they can’t provide legal aid funding for immigrants? Our work has to involve identifying those places where we can point to how this is one shared movement. So yeah, seeing the focus on data centers comes as a relief, because it’s an example of an issue where pieces are intersecting clearly for people. In that case, it’s the fight against authoritarianism and the fight for clean water, et cetera.

Lucas: The [political] energy around data centers across the country is just wild, and it crosses partisan divides, which is really interesting. We had tons of people come out here in Ventura. There was a proposal to build data centers on the county fairgrounds. That project basically wasn't going anywhere. There was so much intense public opposition to it; it was swatted down pretty quickly. 

So it’s clear that people will come out of the woodwork to work on issues like this, especially because they can see in things like the data centers this very intersectional dynamic. Data centers are tied to labor, to AI taking our jobs, and also tied to the environment, and to energy. Then, all of a sudden, it becomes the most important issue that there could be. So that’s what the data center issue taps into for people, and it shows a way that environmental justice can be brought to the surface for people. 

You know, big corporations often use affordability as a wedge against environmental justice. Like, “look, this is what’s making your bills go up.” An interesting piece with data centers is this is an issue where you can organize around an environmental justice issue that’s also a clear affordability issue. A data center may not use all of the water in your community, and leave you with none. It’s more likely that a data center will increase water usage, energy usage, and drive up your bills, right? You’re going to pay twice as much for your electric bill because the data center is consuming so much electricity. I think that’s a really key opportunity to be tapping into what's on people’s hearts and minds, while still doing political education around environmental justice.

CL: Yeah, that’s interesting to hear the way that affordability has been wielded, and how it could look to build up really strong connection points and narrative to counter the image of environmental justice as too costly. A follow up would be: What advice or lessons does CAUSE have for sustaining this growth in EJ organizing work? 

Hazel: The last couple of years, we’ve tried to put a renewed focus on the basics, actually. A focus on the rigor and discipline of base building. Movement-wide, many of us have sort of struggled with maintaining that rigor, being completely candid. But building powerful membership bases that are ready to go when an organic kind of spark moment strikes is the best thing that established, institutionalized organizations can do right now. And based on what we see, it needs to be that organic spark. Across the movement spectrum and labor spaces this year, we worked hard to put a focus on May Day and took seriously the goal of showing how economic disruption can have the impact we need in this moment. Yet, even with all the organizations going in 100 percent on May Day, it did not create the type of spark moment that we saw in Minnesota a few months prior, right? That was organic.

So we've done a lot of reflection, and it really just feels like it’s the responsibility for us as established organizations with resources and organizers to be as disciplined as possible – doing our sprints, doing our conditioning, to use an exercise metaphor – so that when the public is ready to go and hit the streets, we can lend the fuel and the resources to that and be ready to go. 

We also want to dedicate time each day to how we’re bringing in new contacts – keeping an open door. It’s an experiment we’re still trying to figure out. Looking at the ecosystem locally, rapid-response groups have done the best job of absorbing willing volunteers that want to do something and can get plugged in quickly. In our space, we're really trying to experiment more with the idea of membership orientations. When we get deep into campaign work, it can get a little less accessible. We really want to try to figure out how to create more spaces that welcome people from where they're at.

Lucas: Yeah, I would totally agree with everything Hazel just said. Early on in the Trump administration, we were really asking, “How does CAUSE absorb all these people who want to get involved right now, in this moment?” But a lot of those folks gravitated to rapid response networks, because it was so immediate and tangible, and they wanted that and to feel that impact they were having. Our role in this region is more about building the kind of long-term movement infrastructure for the region, as Hazel spoke to. We feel proud that we basically seeded the rapid-response network in our region. We created the 805 Immigrant Coalition and the infrastructure of the 805 Undocufund that kind of blossomed beyond our wildest dreams. The infrastructure needed to be built years ago, and that was us. 

So we recognize the role we play is in the longer run. There are people who have been politicized in these spark moments, and some will want and need a long-term political home. That’s what our base-building organizations can fill. As Hazel spoke to, we have to make sure our organizations and others like us have our door open wide enough. We want to bring in as many people as we can, and have a clear membership structure that’s easy to join, and have recruitment tactics that make sense for different demographics, different neighborhoods.

Hazel: One other piece, as far as our role right now. I think being able to influence and shape local governance and what that looks like also is a role that CAUSE fortunately, has a track record around. In the first Trump administration, we began saying, “Hey, not all policy is developed in the White House. Let's recruit people to run, in a nonpartisan way, invite people to up their civic engagement responsibilities and roles.”

That history of working in that way served us well. So when we experienced a nightmare of immigration enforcement, a worker died, and 300 people were just stolen, kidnapped from our community in a day, it was important for us, as local advocates who have history with these elected officials, to turn to them and say, “No, no, no – you don't get to just cry and throw your hands up and say, ‘man, this federal government.’ You have a responsibility to support the resilience of the communities impacted.” We got ourselves poised to where we know where to point locally, and we have relationships. We know where to go and say: “What's going to happen next month when families who just lost their primary breadwinner can't pay rent? You could consider a moratorium on rent after moments like this. You could consider long-term rent stabilization. You could consider increasing the wages of farm workers, and supporting the economic resilience of immigrant families who are experiencing nightmares day in, day out.

Lucas: Yeah, it’s been really important to have the ability for an inside-outside governance approach. I think being in a more conservative region has always sharpened us. Things like movement infighting, the hollowing out of the grassroots base, and just having a professional class who kind of speak on behalf of the people – we don't have the luxury to do any of that here, right? We count every ally we have, and work on issues that can build a broad majority in a community that is politically polarized. It has made us very pragmatic, and I think that positioned us well for a moment like this.

CL: Thank you so much for this time. I want to make sure, if there’s something that we didn’t yet ask about that is particularly important for organizing at this moment in time, please take a moment before we close out.

Lucas: We've all gotta be able to take risks, and be humble about what we know and what we don’t know, and be willing to experiment, and also maintain the level of joy and power – not look defeated, not feel defeated, because we’re not. I think people are drawn to that. What’s magnetic is people showing strength and joy in their community, and I think that’s what we have, and we just need to own it.

Hazel: Absolutely, all of that! And I know in the early days of this administration, I already had a decade of immigrant rights organizing under my belt, but I felt lost in the beginning of not knowing what a world where ICE is conducting workplace raids all the time might look like. To be able to turn to our elders within our membership base, within my life, to tap into all the wisdom and longer histories was really important. To have members be like, “Yeah, we pumped gas at night instead of the morning, because we knew ICE was going to be out. We would do this, we would do that.” That brings us solace and, I think, strength, to tap into the strengths and wisdom our community has. It can relate to other challenges too, like food insecurity, and the knowledge we have around cultivating food and living under conditions that were already a reality for a lot of people in our community’s history. It’s humbling and also consoling to be able to turn to that.

Disclaimer: The ideas expressed in these publications are not necessarily those of the Othering & Belonging Institute or UC Berkeley, but belong to the authors and interviewees.

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  On this body of research and its typology of working-class constituencies, see Working Families Power, “Multiracial Working Class Research,” https://workingfamiliespower.org/class-and-worldview.