Right to Refuse: When Community Rights and Corporate Rights Conflict and What to Do Next

Financial aid may be available. If you are seeking funds to participate in this program, click to review and complete our Financial Assistance Application and a Pendle Hill staff member will follow-up with you shortly (please do NOT register online). Thank you for your interest.

Whether it is a pipeline, a fracked gas well, or an incinerator, there are countless examples of corporations moving projects forward despite community resistance and environmental impact. Why? How has law evolved to protect corporate interests and what are a community’s options? What is a Home Rule campaign and why is it necessary? Explore these questions and more with a weekend with front-line organizers from across Pennsylvania. This is a workshop for those engaged in protecting their community from environmental threats for education and strategic planning.

Leader(s)

Malinda Harnish Clatterbuck is an educator, community organizer, and Associate Pastor for Family Ministries at Community Mennonite Church of Lancaster (PA). She lives with her family in rural southern Lancaster County, where she grew up and where her family has lived for centuries. Throughout her adult life, she has lived and worked on an Indian Reservation in Montana, worked in higher education in Washington, D.C., served as youth director and counselor at multiple churches, taught high school, college, and pre-school. Her passion for justice and compassion have embodied her work in each of these settings. In the past three years she has become more aware of the injustices surrounding corporate overreach violating the rights of local communities via Williams Partners’ proposal to put a natural gas transmission line through her backyard on its way to the eastern seaboard for export. She started Lancaster Against Pipelines, a non-profit grassroots coalition of county residents opposing construction of the Atlantic Sunrise pipeline. For their work in protecting community rights and the environment, she and her husband Mark were awarded the Peace Mug Award for 2017 by the Atlantic Coast Conference of the Mennonite Church. As a board member in the Pennsylvania Community Rights Network, she is engaged in fighting to change this imbalance of power of the few over the many in the Keystone state. She willingly shares her experience and knowledge for the sake of the future of her community – and world.

Dianne Herrin is running for mayor of West Chester Borough after many years of service to that community as an organizer and advocate for climate justice, renewable energy, quality education, and local control. She is a vice president and partner with Practical Energy Solutions, serving as an energy efficiency consultant for commercial, nonprofit, municipal, and educational clients. Dianne was a founder of the West Chester Community Rights Alliance in 2015, and she continues to serve as chair of the West Chester Borough Sustainability Advisory Council. Dianne also served as founder and chair of the West Chester Borough Leaders United for Emissions Reduction from 2006 to 2015. See her résumé here.

Chad Nicholson is the statewide Pennsylvania Organizer for the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). The work keeps him on the road constantly, working with communities facing industrial threats in all corners of the Keystone State. Recent work has, included CELDF’s role in defending two communities in federal court (including Grant Township) facing toxic injection wells; multiple communities pursuing Home Rule campaigns to increase community control over harmful corporate projects; and work with dozens of other communities fighting harms that range from corporate herbicide spraying, to factory farms, to sewage sludge spreading, to fracking, to massive energy corridors. Chad began rights-based organizing in Spokane, WA, in 2009, coordinating Envision Spokane’s first campaign attempting to amend the city’s Home Rule charter to recognize expanded rights for residents on issues that ranged from healthcare, affordable housing, worker protections on the job, and environmental rights. With colleague Ben Price, Chad co-authored the Pennsylvania Community Rights Cookbook, a 700-page volume on the history of people’s movements, and the tragic rise of corporate power, in Pennsylvania. The Cookbook serves as the curriculum for two-day Community Rights Workshops, which have graduated hundreds of Pennsylvania residents asserting their community’s rights over corporate control.

Paula Kline is a Quaker educator and peace and environmental activist, has a doctorate in Human Development from Harvard. As a climate activist she has focused on divestment and reinvestment and promoting the shift to 100% renewable electricity for schools and faith communities. She currently serves as the coordinator for PA Interfaith Power and Light’s Sustained Climate Advocacy and on the Eco-Justice Collaborative of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting.

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