EJ Hero: Sue Melkonian

The Brightline Podcast: Season 3, Episode 3

Don't miss the latest episode in our Environmental Justice Heroes series, featuring Sue Melkonian, a lifelong resident of San Francisco and housing counselor with the Central City SRO Collaborative. A self-proclaimed optimist, Sue is passionate about empowering her community to improve air quality and amplify their voices. Tune in for an inspiring conversation about her journey to environmental justice.

Trigger warning: This episode contains references to domestic violence.

Transcript:

Sue: Because maybe a larger group will be able to be more effective than just one person. We're going to be heard.

Aubrey: This is The Brightline Podcast from Brightline Defense. We explore environmental justice or EJ, issues in the Bay Area and California, highlighting the work of community-based organizations, including our own. My name’s Aubrey and this season, we're introducing you to some of California's EJ heroes. These are people who are out there, working on environmental justice issues in their communities each and everyday. They may not always be in the headlines, but they are the lifeblood of EJ work in California. Sue is one of those heroes. And just a heads up, this episode contains references to domestic violence.

Sue: My name is Sue Melkonian, and I'm a native San Franciscan. So that means I've been here for 60 years in this city.

Aubrey: To say that Sue cares about her hometown would be a huge understatement

Sue:  I love San Francisco. I truly love San Francisco. I never seen myself living anywhere else but here. So, I'm glad to still be here.

Aubrey: So besides her love for her city, there are two important things to know about Sue. First, she's an optimist.

Sue: I always have had an outlook on life that tomorrow is going to be better than today because we know something new tomorrow, what we didn't know today.

Aubrey: And second, she's a helper.

Sue: So I always had feelings that I wanted to help people that didn't quite know how to say those first words to get their point across, or was kind of reluctant to raise their hand and say, “I have something I would like to say.”

Aubrey: Sue sees the roots of this personality trait in some of her earliest memories.

Sue: I believe that it came from when I was younger,I have all brothers and I was the only girl. And I felt like, really like an outcast, like I didn't want to play with them because they just showed no mercy. They just were boys and they played like boys and I was a girl. And so I would just be alone a lot of the time

Aubrey: But that feeling of being an outsider didn't make her bitter or resentful. Instead, it built her empathy.

Sue: I know how it feels to not feel that you're not heard or that what you're thinking doesn't matter, when everybody on this planet's word and thoughts matter

Aubrey: But Sue's kindness hasn't always been returned.

Sue: I'm a survivor of domestic violence. So I was married, had a home, um, family. And my husband became very, just very different than when I married him. So after 13 years, he became very violent and, um, started using drugs and just was not a good person to be around my children or myself, he wanted me out of that house and didn't care where I was going or what happened to me.

Aubrey: Eventually, the police intervened.

Sue: They suggested that I find another means of living arrangements. Because if I went back to that home, they might, the next time they came out, I might not be alive.

My mind was just gone. It was going through so many things about what am I going to do? This is my whole life. Where am I going to go? How am I going to support myself? What am I going to do? So in the midst of all this, I was able to go to find a safe house, a domestic violence safe house that I stayed with like for a year

Aubrey: Sue started the long and painful process of building her life from the ground up. She moved around a few times, including in a housing program for battered women in Oakland. Even though [00:04:00] she was safe from violence there, she found herself confronting some new risks. She learned that the land the community was built on was contaminated. 

Sue: So they had above ground nurseries to where you could have a garden, you know, because of the women and the things that they had gone through in their lives, the community wanted to offer them something that might help them get along and, and be able to cope with everything. So they had above ground planter boxes that were built. So you could only eat anything that was grown above ground, not in the soil. Couldn't drink the water. The air we were breathing was not good. So it's like, how dare you say that it's okay for people to live here?

Aubrey: Sue moved out, and eventually settled into an SRO, or Single Room Occupancy Hotel, where she's lived for the past 10 years. And despite everything she'd been [00:05:00] through- or maybe because of it- she still wanted to help. So she became a housing counselor with the Central City SRO Collaborative, a non profit that works to organize tenants. 

Sue: And I help them to understand like the laws of the SRO hotel living and make sure that they know that they have rights, even though you might be at a low income bracket, you still have rights. 

Aubrey: And like at the battered women’s shelter, Sue started to notice some environmental quality concerns in SRO housing, too.

Sue: And that was the air in the SRO hotels that we live in is not high. It's poor air, poor air circulation. There's [00:06:00] so much matter that gathers inside. And it was, I sweep maybe four times a day sometimes, and like, how is there all this matter that I'm sweeping up, where's it coming from?

Aubrey: She suspected that this pollution was coming from outside, and also maybe from the building itself.

Sue: Most of the hotels here in San Francisco are historical buildings. That means that they were built either before the big earthquake that they had here, or shortly after, and there was a lot of materials that they used during those times that are health hazards to people, like asbestos that they use and things like that.

Aubrey: She decided she had to do something.

Sue: So, to me, I needed to make sure that where I was living was safe for me to live. So that meant that it had to be healthy for everybody else around me.  So when I met Brightline, I was like, Oh my God, this is like a heaven sent. 

Aubrey: Working with Brightline, Sue learned more about poor air quality in [00:07:00] the Tenderloin, and eventually brought her concerns to the city.

Sue: They taught us how to do public speaking. So we were able to speak to the board of the board that, um, that is in charge of the air quality here and at the time one of the people on the board that were sitting there, he said “I can vouch what she's saying because I also had lived in an SRO before and the air quality is very poor,” And at that moment my heart just shined. I was like so grateful to Brightline for bringing this to the, to my neighborhood and allowing people, everyday people like myself be able to understand what's going on in the air that we're breathing 

Aubrey: Sue also wanted to help spread awareness of these air quality issues to other SRO tenants. But this kind of EJ work comes with some complications

Sue: Because it's hard to get people to talk about where they live because they're in fear that if [00:08:00] they say anything, that the owner of the hotel is going to kick them out, they're going to become homeless. And it was so such a struggle and a long road to get housed, you know, for some people.

Aubrey: But despite everything she's been through and all the barriers she’s faced to making change, Sue is still an optimist.

Sue: So I took my hardship, the things I was going through, and turned it into a positive step up in life. Like I said, I am a person that likes to deliver justice to ingest things. it may be not just my voice. But people that I recruit or that I inform, give the information that I get from Brightline, that by me giving this out to people, that it's going to help us all come together and be a larger group. Because maybe a larger group will be able to be more effective than just one person. We're going to be heard and they're going to have to accept what we, the knowledge that we have, the information we have, and help us to clean up the environments that we live in.

Aubrey:  This episode was written and produced by me, Aubrey Calaway. Original music by Maya Glicksman . Thank you to Eddie Ahn, Carolina Correa, Merha Mehzun, and Jacob Linde for help with research and writing, and to Sue for sharing her story. For more information about Brightline, you can visit our website at BrightlineDefense.org or on social media @brightlinedefense. You can also find a transcript of this episode on our Medium Blog or our website. And finally, don't forget to give us a follow and leave a review if you enjoyed the show and lease stay tuned for more from us, wherever you get your podcasts. Take care.