Advocacy

Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy

CAUSE organizes low-income and immigrant communities across Ventura and Santa Barbara counties on housing, environmental justice, and civic engagement. The Ventura office anchors the Choice Neighborhoods fight in La Colonia and the farmworker advocacy that runs from Oxnard through the citrus belt.

Location
Oxnard, CA
Founded
2001
Website
https://causenow.org/ventura/

Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy opened in 2001 to bring a county-scale organizing capacity to the Central Coast, where most labor and community organizations had historically worked town by town rather than across jurisdictions.

CAUSE runs three linked programs out of the Ventura County office. The housing team organizes La Colonia residents through the HUD Choice Neighborhoods Transformation Plan, pressing the Oxnard Housing Authority to tether the planning process to residents rather than to developers. The environmental-justice program works on oil-and-gas setbacks, pesticide exposure in the Oxnard Plain and the Santa Clara River valley, and the industrial-air-quality pressures on farmworker communities. The civic-engagement program runs voter registration, resident leadership training, and policy advocacy at the county board of supervisors.

The organization draws on the multi-generational organizing record of the Oxnard Plain, from the 1903 Japanese-Mexican Labor Association strike through the Cabrillo Village cooperative purchase of 1976 and the Rancho Sespe eviction fight of 1979. The Choice Neighborhoods planning process has put the 1963 cancelled urban-renewal fight back into active circulation, and CAUSE’s residents-first framework is the direct successor to the community pressure that defeated the original designation.

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