Where It All Started: OUR MISSION

In the fall semester of 2005, Daniel Espinoza and Daniel Lewkowiczfounded the political action organization, Community Roots. On the University of Maryland campus, Community Roots is an activist based organization that attempts to unite the different ethnic and activist organizations on campus to be heard as one united student voice for change. Within the first semester, Community Roots membership jumped from an initial 5 members to 40 members with an additional 130 members on our email list serve. This organization has been responsible for leading the way in university and state divestment from the genocidal government of Sudan, creating a twenty-five group coalition of student organizations at the University of Maryland, and led a movement to defend two Students who were assaulted by police officers in the New Leonardtown housing co-op. We helped organize a 1000 person hip-hop concert with Immortal Technique as the headline artist, two protests dealing with immigrant rights, and we co-sponsored a panel discussion in the Nyumburu Cultural Center discussing Protest and Revolution in the Black community. We are currently organizing a prison project to help educate prison inmates, working with local community leaders to establish Community Service programs in local communities, and working to create a Progressive Student Union with the goal of further uniting the different student organizations on campus.

 

Community Roots is fundamentally an activist based organization that works to unite the different ethnic communities at the University of Maryland to be heard as a united voice for change. Our goal is to motivate and inspire the ethnically diverse student body of the University of Maryland to take definitive action in the face of domestic and international social injustice.​