LEWISTON – More action.

That’s the agenda for the Many and One Coalition in the next year, says new coordinator Paul Young. He hopes the group will begin offering programs aimed at poverty, education, transportation and child care.

“The big barrier to full employment for new immigrants is not language,” Young said. “Most often it’s transportation or child care. They cannot get to work. We’re hoping to help that.”

Young is one of the founders of Portland’s Conference on Race and Culture, organized in 1998 to discuss social issues between Portland’s ethnic groups and public and private institutions.

The Many and One Coalition began in the fall of 2002, in response to an anti-Somali rally held in Lewiston by a white supremacist group. The coalition sponsored a diversity rally of its own on Jan. 11, 2003, which drew 5,000 people.

The coalition now has a core group of several hundred members and 2,000 supporters. Young said it’s time to get them mobilized.

“The great thing about this organization is that it took all that hatred and resentment and turned it around and made an idealistic, progressive movement out of it.” Young said.

“It took a social negative and turned it into something that built the community,” he added.

Young said any programs the group offered would be aimed at full employment for Lewiston’s poor.

“Fund-raising is going to be our next big thing,” Young said. The group likely will ask for donations to pay for administration and for offering programs. “The key for us is community building,” he said. “It always has been, for this group. It’s the best kind of a grass-roots organization.”