While Rome Burns, The Go Cats and Michelle Alany want to help.
Voz is a worker-led organization that empowers diverse day laborers and immigrants to improve their working conditions and protect civil rights through leadership development, organizing, education and economic opportunity. While Rome Burns is honored to support this wonderful organization at this month’s WRB benefit, and we’ve got some great music to help celebrate Voz and the essential work they do.
Benefit for Voz Workers’ Rights Education Project
Featuring The Go Cats and Michelle Alany
Sunday June 30, 5-7 PM
Mississippi Pizza Pub & Atlantis Lounge
3552 N. Mississippi Ave
Portland, Oregon 97227 (map)
$10 (100% goes to Voz)
– ALL AGES –
Voz History
In 1996 the Worker’s Organizing Committee was formed in response to repressive tactics by police and immigration agents that discouraged day laborers from seeking work on the corners of two major intersections in Portland, Oregon. As day laborers began to organize, they found they shared common experience of discrimination and repression.
A clear need for leadership development, as well as local and national networking, emerged. Workers and community members subsequently founded Voz Workers’ Rights Education Project in June 2000, to organize around day laborer and immigrant rights in the Portland Metro Area.
The Go Cats
The Go Cats are a local litter of domestic cats, who have scratched together a surf-like rockfish collection of music they call “Cat Box Rock”. A nice tin can full of their own renditions of some classic, neoclassic, and even perhaps a few hairball surprises mixed in for your listening and dancing pleasure.
Michelle Alany
Journey through exotic lands with this fiddle-driven caravan of Jazz Manouche, Balkan, Klezmer, Sephardic & original soul music, spiked with a Texas fiddle twist. Really. Michelle Alany & the Mysics music is captivating, in no small part due to Michelle Alany herself. It’s impossible to look away when Michelle steps up to coax a 500-year old tune from her violin, to make it her own, and then to cast it upon the audience like so much fairy dust. Oh, and she sings, too. Boy, can she sing. Resistance is futile, truly.