About Crane Ledge Woods Coalition

The Crane Ledge Woods Coalition embodies the true meaning of grassroots activism. We are an assemblage of neighborhood associations, nonprofit organizations, individual residents and other entities. This includes:

  • Belnel Family Neighborhood Association

  • East River St. Neighborhood Association

  • Greater Mattapan Neighborhood Council

  • Hyde Park Neighborhood Association

  • Mt. Hope/Canterbury Neighborhood Association

  • Rosebery-Ruskindale Rd. Neighborhood Association

  • Southwest Boston Community Development Corporation

  • West Fairmount Hill Community Group

  • And other concerned residents and local advocates

All of us uniquely add to the highly diverse perspectives and approaches needed to resist the many systemic, institutional and historical forms of oppression embedded in our society and manifesting in the proposed project that threatens to destroy Crane Ledge Woods and our community.

We all have a pivotal role in protecting and honoring the unceded lands and waters of the Neponset (now Ponkapoag) band of the Massachusett tribe. These lands and waters sustain, nourish and protect us, and we are an integral and inseparable part of them. To live sustainably and veer from our current self-destructive path, we must profoundly shift how we perceive and engage with the rest of nature. We must stop uncritically reproducing relationships with land based on a violent colonial history and property law that is blind to the rights of nature and the commons.

While we have benefited and suffered in profoundly unequal ways from past and ongoing injustices, we acknowledge our shared responsibility in the pursuit of ecological restoration, social justice, reparation and liberation for and with our human and more-than-human community.

The Crane Ledge Woods Coalition views diverse lived experiences and the conflictual world views and approaches to activism they produce as inherent, essential and beneficial to successful coalition-building and impactful coalition work.

The Crane Ledge Woods Coalition is wary of the manipulative and oppressive history of ‘consensus-building’ in our ‘liberal democratic’ society. All too often, those in power have succeeded in convincing those with less power to concede in ways that betray their most deeply held values and beliefs. This unjust pattern is being blatantly reproduced in the current Article 80 process for the proposed project.