In June 1943, workers from the Winston-Salem tobacco plant walked off the job, sparking an organizing campaign that would reverberate throughout North Carolina and across the South.

What began as a strike led by predominantly Black women workers at R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company quickly grew into thousands protesting dangerous conditions, low wages, and discrimination. Their efforts helped create Local 22, an interracial union that would influence labor, politics, and the struggle for civil rights for years to come.

Local 22 won better wages and working conditions for people, but its vision extended beyond the factory floor. After successfully unionizing the most powerful corporation in the city, union members registered thousands of Black voters and developed Black political leadership, helping elect Reverend Kenneth Williams to Winston-Salem’s Board of Aldermen—the first Black person to hold this position since the Reconstruction. Ten years after the Local 22 strike, the foundation I lead was established with a $12 million bequest from Mary Reynolds Babcock, the daughter of R. J. Reynolds. These unionized women carried the origins of what we now call radical imagination: to see beyond the conditions imposed on us and work towards the promise of a just and joyful life—our rightful inheritance.

The South is too often described by what it lacks, where it falls behind, and what needs to be fixed. But the region has long been a place where supposedly impossible democratic ideas have been imagined and made real.

Across the South, there is a story of industries accumulating wealth and power. There’s also a story of workers—disproportionately Black women—organizing for dignity, economic power, and political voice. We cannot tell one story without the other.

Our responsibility is not to rewrite history, but to be accountable to it. As the United States marks 250 years, our next chapter requires us to recognize and resource the democratic leadership that Southern communities have been building for generations.

The South Is an Offering

One of the most important lessons the region offers America at 250 is this: Democracy has always depended on people imagining the world as a better place and then organizing to make it so.

Communities in the South continue to build democratic possibility under conditions designed to constrain it.

The South is too often described by what it lacks, where it falls behind, and what needs to be fixed. But the region has long been a place where supposedly impossible democratic ideas have been imagined and made real. For instance: freedom in a society and economy built on enslavement; a multiracial democracy under the ravages of Jim Crow; worker power despite an extractive economy; and political participation among people violently excluded from it. These gains were not bestowed by institutions. They were built by people who knew the existing order excluded them—and organized anyway, for a future that they likely would not see themselves.

That tradition is alive today. Communities continue to organize around voting rights, the economy, racial equity, climate justice, community power, and so much more. Take the Promise of Justice Initiative in New Orleans, for example, an organization leading the fight to end mass incarceration, such as the forced labor system at Angola, a Louisiana State Penitentiary where agricultural labor conditions for incarcerated people—predominantly Black men—are reproducing conditions of chattel slavery.

Another important example is the Immigrant Alliance for Justice and Equity (or CASA IAJE) in Mississippi, which built vital safety nets during severe regional emergencies. CASA IAJE coordinated food donations, secured personal protective supplies, and redistributed essential resources during the worst periods of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Jackson water crisis. Communities in the South continue to build democratic possibility under conditions designed to constrain it.

Democracy Requires Racial and Economic Justice

The South also makes another truth impossible to ignore: There is no multiracial democracy without racial and economic justice. Economic power and democratic power have always been intertwined. In the US, a racial order historically has determined who can vote, own property, earn a living with dignity, and shape public institutions. Local 22 understood that changing one required changing the others. These connections remain true, and more leaders should take note.

Racial justice cannot be a priority only when it is politically comfortable to do so. A democracy cannot fulfill its promise while entire communities remain systematically excluded from economic and political power. Nor can it thrive when resources pledged during the racial reckoning of 2020 are withdrawn, leaving mission-critical organizations powerless—organizations that sustain civic participation, protect hard-won rights, and build the community needed to meet moments of democratic crisis.

Philanthropy historically has treated the South as a risky investment. We should instead recognize it as a source of movement wisdom, democratic imagination, and leadership.

This is precisely why we must look to the South when we think about this country at 250. Across the region, communities are organizing against this exclusion, while building the collective power that meaningful democratic participation requires.

The Mississippi Black Women’s Roundtable offers a powerful example. Through its statewide, intergenerational network, MSBWR shifts power by engaging and empowering Black women and girls at the voting booth, at policy tables, and in their communities. Through its Power of the Pocketbook campaign, the organization helped establish Mississippi’s equal pay law in 2022. Their Power of the Sister Vote Project has also helped to register and mobilize Black women and young voters across the state.

When equity becomes harder to name, fund, or defend, we should remember why it matters: Expanding who has voice, power, and agency is how the national project of democracy gets built, protected, and improved.

What Philanthropy Can Learn

Philanthropy historically has treated the South as a risky investment. We should instead recognize it as a source of movement wisdom, democratic imagination, and leadership.

For more than seven decades, the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation, where I serve as CEO, has had the privilege of learning alongside Southern communities. That experience has shaped not only what we fund, but what we believe about power and our practice of philanthropy itself. That has meant looking beyond the next policy victory and to the communities that respond when the terrain shifts. It also means investing for the long term, providing flexible support, and recognizing communities as leaders, rather than treating them as sources of information or labor. The goal is not to determine the future for communities in the South, but to move resources and power to the people who are already building it.

We’ve put that commitment into practice through an 11 percent payout strategy—more than double the 5 percent that private foundations in the US are legally required to distribute each year to the communities they serve. Earlier this year, we doubled down by extending that 11 percent payout through 2031, timed to match the 2030 and 2032 census and redistricting cycles. These are once-in-a-generation opportunities to reshape the balance of power across the South.

Instead of retreating, we are choosing to remain in the work alongside our grantee partners and communities, providing the sustained resources they need to build power, strengthen institutions, and shape what comes next.

What We Build Next

Like the organizers who created Local 22 in the 1940s, we are living through another moment when the boundaries of what is possible are being contested. The instinct, especially within institutions, can be to become more cautious. The South offers another path. Collective liberation asks us to understand that our struggles are interconnected, that our futures are bound together.

As America marks 250 years, we should imagine our future as boldly as generations of Southern organizers have imagined theirs—and move resources and power toward the people best positioned to build it. Democracy has always depended on people who could imagine something more and organize until the impossible became possible.

Many of us in the South have been imagining and acting toward that possibility for generations. Our task now is to recognize it, resource it, and help carry it forward. Our just and joyful future depends on it.

In an era of widespread anger over unaffordability, corruption, inequality, and sclerotic institutions, we need to think much bigger about reforming US democracy. People are putting forward bold proposals to create a multiparty electoral system, abolish the Senate and the Electoral College, and transform the Supreme Court. To build a multiracial democracy that is resilient to authoritarianism, we also need that same level of ambition in rethinking democracy locally where government most directly touches people’s daily lives: in cities, counties, schools, and public agencies.

Sixty years ago, the United States attempted exactly that. The federal government launched the Community Action Program (CAP), one of the most ambitious democratic experiments in American history. CAP sought not merely to reduce poverty, but to redistribute governing power itself. The experiment lasted only a few years before it was largely dismantled amid fierce political conflict, and it is usually remembered, if at all, as a failed anti-poverty program.

That is a mistake.

[Community Action Program] is usually remembered—if at all—as a failed initiative of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. But that framing obscures what made it remarkable.

Across the political spectrum, most Americans believe government no longer responds to ordinary people nor improves their lives in tangible ways. Representative democracy will always remain the constitutional foundation of our political system, but elections alone cannot generate the accountability, trust, and civic capacity that healthy democracy requires. We need stronger institutions that enable government to govern with communities rather than simply for them.

CAP—with its mandate of “maximum feasible participation”—was the country’s first major attempt to build those institutions. It’s time to revive that audacious democratic ambition.

Community Action as Democracy-Building

CAP is usually remembered as an ineffective part of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, but that framing obscures what made it remarkable. CAP was one of the most daring democratic reforms in modern American history—a politically explosive, deeply imperfect effort to redistribute governing power. Its history offers rich lessons for how we might build a new generation of democratic institutions, this time with the benefit of six decades of additional learning.

In 1964, amid the Civil Rights Movement, urban uprisings, and growing national awareness of the depths of both Black and White poverty, Congress passed the Economic Opportunity Act. Its most radical provision required the “maximum feasible participation” of poor people in planning and governing anti-poverty programs.

That phrase was revolutionary. Rather than designing programs for poor communities, the federal government sought to create institutions through which poor people could help govern them.

Within two years, more than 1,000 CAP agencies—the local institutional vehicles for this new model of shared governance—were established in cities and counties across the country. Through these agencies, hundreds of millions of federal dollars flowed to neighborhood organizations, legal services, Head Start, job training, community development corporations, and countless other local initiatives. Implementation varied enormously from place to place, but the underlying premise remained the same: Residents must be given a meaningful role in helping to set priorities, shape programs, and hold public institutions accountable.

For perhaps the first time in American history, hundreds of thousands of low-income Americans—not only Black communities, but also Mexican American, Puerto Rican, Native, Asian American, and poor White communities—were invited not merely to vote or offer public input, but to exercise meaningful governing authority.

The results were extraordinary and messy.

CAP helped launch a generation of organizations and leaders who reshaped American civic life. It strengthened organizing among farmworkers, expanded opportunities for tribal governments to exercise greater control over federal resources, supported community development efforts in Appalachia, and incubated organizations at the forefront of the Black Power, Chicano, Puerto Rican, and Asian American movements. It also trained a generation of community leaders, especially Black women, who would later enter public agencies and forever change the composition of government itself.

Yet from the beginning, CAP was one of the most politically controversial elements of the War on Poverty.

In city after city, mayors, political machines, and established nonprofit organizations suddenly found themselves competing with newly empowered neighborhood organizations for funding, influence, and legitimacy. In Philadelphia, for instance, Mayor James Tate agreed to allow residents to elect representatives to the city’s anti-poverty board but then worked behind the scenes to shape who would ultimately be nominated and elected. Community organizers pushed back, winning important concessions while exposing a larger question that haunted the program nationwide: Who had legitimate authority to speak for poor communities?

Elsewhere, conflict flared up along lines of race. In Los Angeles, for example, Black and Mexican American communities found themselves competing over a limited pool of CAP funds. This was in part due to the failure of both Congress and President Johnson to pair CAP with a robust national redistributive program, which set up inevitable local conflicts over scarce resources. It also played out within the context of a rapidly changing demographic and political landscape, urban uprisings (in Los Angeles, Watts burned in August 1965), and White backlash.

The tensions that emerged around the program were thus never simply about the program itself. They reflected much larger conflicts over race, democracy, and the distribution of political power.

The backlash came quickly.

CAP’s architects failed because they underestimated the institutional and political work required to make ambitious democratic reform both operationally effective and politically durable.

Big-city mayors argued that Washington had empowered unelected neighborhood organizations at the expense of democratically elected local governments. Facing sustained lobbying from local officials, growing public backlash to urban unrest, and mounting conservative opposition to civil rights and the War on Poverty, Congress weakened CAP’s commitment to “maximum feasible participation.” It returned authority to local governments and transformed most CAP agencies into largely depoliticized social-service providers. Although more than 1,000 such agencies still exist today, America’s largest experiment in shared governance was largely dismantled just three years after it began.

For decades, this history has often been treated as evidence that ambitious democratic reform is politically naïve. The opposite conclusion is closer to the truth. CAP demonstrated that government could share meaningful governing power with ordinary people on an extraordinary scale. The conflicts that emerged were not evidence that participation had failed. They were evidence that participation had begun to matter.

CAP’s architects failed because they underestimated the institutional and political work required to make ambitious democratic reform both operationally effective and politically durable. They asked local political systems to share authority without building foundational buy-in and sufficiently broad governing coalitions. They expected communities to make consequential decisions without giving them adequate time, resources, or institutional support to build trust and shared governing capacity. And because Congress democratized decisions about poverty without pairing participation with a sufficiently robust redistributive agenda, communities were too often forced to compete over scarcity rather than to govern abundance together.

These were not failures of democratic aspiration. They were failures of institutional design, and they point toward a different question for our own time. What would it look like to pursue the same democratic ambition as CAP with 60 years of additional institutional learning?

Lessons for Today

The answer to that question begins with recognizing that the decades since CAP have produced two complementary traditions of democratic innovation.

One is deliberative democracy: institutions like civic assemblies that select small numbers of demographically balanced participants to stand in for the broader public as they deliberate on tricky policy questions and develop recommendations for government. Deliberative democracy helps broaden and deepen public voice, strengthen democratic legitimacy, and provide government with better information for navigating difficult policy choices.

The other tradition is co-governance: long-term partnerships between legislators or public agencies with organized communities in which both parties lean into their respective strengths as they share responsibility for designing, implementing, overseeing, and improving public policy. The central actors are not randomly selected residents, but member-based community power-building organizations like labor unions, voters’ groups, tenant organizations, parent organizations, and disability groups that are rooted in the communities most affected by the policy in question.

Deliberative democracy asks how representative members of the public can inform and improve government decisions. Co-governance asks how public institutions should share governing authority with organized communities over time. Healthy democracies need both approaches—and, indeed, some models like participatory budgeting draw from both traditions.

Taken together, CAP and the last six decades of experimentation with deliberative democracy and co-governance teach us at least four key lessons.

First, democracy requires civic infrastructure. CAP assumed that government could simply invite residents into decision-making and expect shared governance to emerge. Experience has shown otherwise.

Democracy depends on civic infrastructure: the relationships, organizations, leadership, knowledge, trust, and institutional capacity that enable communities and governments to solve problems together over time. Both community organizations and government have key roles to play in building this infrastructure.

Community power-building organizations do far more than advocate for particular interests: they contribute capacities that government rarely possesses on its own. They cultivate leaders, organize participation, build long-term relationships and trust, develop community knowledge, and sustain democratic engagement between election cycles. Government brings complementary strengths: legal authority, professional administration, technical expertise, and the resources necessary to implement policy at scale. Neither can govern effectively without the other.

And in a political economy warped by the outsized power of billionaires, finance, and corporations, government has a vested interest in cultivating independent community organizations. They can serve as a countervailing force to concentrated economic power and as a bulwark helping to protect popular democracy.

Second, democratic institutions should be matched to democratic problems. CAP’s goal of “maximum feasible participation” was an inspired ambition but should not have been pushed top-down through a single institutional solution.

Some policy challenges require sustained partnerships with communities who possess lived experience and organized collective power. In arenas like enforcing labor standards, protecting tenants, addressing racial inequities, advancing environmental justice, improving public health, strengthening schools, and building neighborhood safety, co-governance with organized, member-based community organizations can be powerfully effective. With deep roots in frontline communities and deep knowledge of particular policy issues, these organizations can help design policy, improve implementation, monitor public performance, and strengthen accountability in ways government cannot accomplish alone.

Other policy challenges call for different democratic tools. Sometimes a policy challenge requires collecting input from and building political agreement among a broad and diverse cross-section of the public at large, as when establishing overall budget priorities, citywide land use policy, or climate adaptation strategies. In these instances, civic assemblies and other broadly representative participatory models can help both government and stakeholder organizations better understand and act on broad public values and priorities.

The goal here is matching the right democratic institution to each governing challenge.

Third, democratic infrastructure must be supported, institutionalized, and scaled.

If CAP’s greatest mistake was trying to transform local governance too quickly through a single federal program, today’s democratic reformers face almost the opposite problem.

Over the past several decades, hundreds of promising democratic innovations have emerged across the country and around the world. Yet in the U.S., most remain isolated pilots that depend on time-bound philanthropic grants or brief windows of support from political leaders. Democratic participation beyond elections works, but we have yet to fund and institutionalize the civic infrastructure needed to bring co-governance and participatory democracy to scale.

The next generation of democratic reform should combine CAP’s ambition with today’s institutional sophistication. That does not require imposing a single national model. Quite the opposite. Federal and state governments should establish broad democratic commitments—modern equivalents of “maximum feasible participation”—while providing funding, technical assistance, evaluation, and accountability systems that encourage local government and community organizations to engage. They should also build in enough flexibility for localities to slow down and move at the speed of trust, and to adapt institutional models to their local circumstances. And foundations have a critical role to play in helping fund pilots plus the community infrastructure, learning, and capacity needed for co-governance and participatory democracy to succeed.

Examples of this approach are already emerging. Chicago is supporting co-governance pilots between multiple city agencies and community organizations. New York City’s new Office of Mass Engagement is experimenting with new forms of participation and co-governance. Washington State convened six Community Assemblies that brought people together from frontline communities to shape public priorities. Across the country, worker centers, tenant unions, public health partnerships, environmental justice organizations, and other community institutions are working with governments not simply to provide input, but to help design, implement, monitor, and continuously improve public policy.

These initiatives differ substantially from one another, and they should. Their common purpose is not institutional uniformity. It is building a democratic state capable of governing in genuine partnership with the people it serves.

The fourth and final lesson from CAP is that democratization is most successful when it is part of a larger political and institutional strategy. In addition to incentivizing and investing in local co-governance and participatory democracy, the federal government, states, and foundations have other roles to play too.

Federal and state government—both legislators and agencies—can pursue co-governance and broader participation themselves. Washington State, as we have seen, funded Community Assemblies, and Wisconsin’s Department of Natural Resources has been working with the publicly elected Wisconsin Conservation Congress since 1937. On the federal level, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Environmental Protection Agency have pursued a range of initiatives involving stakeholder organizations and the public in governance.

Foundations have often a big role in getting such efforts off the ground too. The Ford Foundation’s Gray Areas program was a key precursor to CAP, and more recently Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, among others, has helped fund co-governance work across multiple states and localities.

Co-governance and participatory democracy are also most successful when federal and state governments invest in robust redistributive social welfare that meet people’s material needs. Part of the challenge CAP faced was that localities were tasked with administering poverty and scarcity rather than being given the chance to govern shared abundance.

With our economy concentrating wealth at the top and pushing the rest of us into varying levels of economic precarity, too many people have fallen into interpreting the world through the lenses of zero-sum competition and scapegoating. This divides us from one another and corrodes democracy. For co-governance and all models of democracy to succeed, we need a baseline of economic security, solidarity, and a sense of shared abundance and possibility.

Reviving our Democratic Ambition

Sixty years ago, the United States attempted to institutionalize shared governance on a scale we have never since matched. CAP failed because the institutions needed to sustain that ambition had not yet been developed. But many of those institutions exist today.

Elections and representative democracy should of course remain the foundations of US government. The lesson of CAP is not that elected officials and public agencies should surrender their authority. It is that they can govern more effectively by learning when, where, and how to share it.

We know far more today than we did in 1964 about how to institutionalize effective, long-term partnerships between public agencies and organized communities. We know how to convene representative deliberative bodies that can grapple with complex public questions. We know how to invest in civic infrastructure, leadership development, facilitation, technical assistance, and institutional design so that participation becomes an enduring feature of governance rather than a fleeting experiment.

What we lack is not institutional knowledge. It is political ambition. If the great democratic achievement of the twentieth century was expanding who could vote, the greatest opportunity of the twenty-first century may be expanding who helps govern.

When she returned this year, she gathered in front of the complex alongside faith leaders, migrant justice organizers, and members of her church to begin a 96-mile pilgrimage that ended on Tuesday at the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles.

“I remember them being so young and not understanding why their dad had gone to work one day and never came back,” said Cristiana, who is using a pseudonym to protect her family’s privacy. “I see the trauma that it caused.”

Today, over 2,000 people are jailed at the three detention centers that form the complex in Adelanto. The sites have repeatedly come under fire for holding migrants in inhumane conditions and denying them access to medical care, resulting in at least two deaths in the past year.

“For me, walking the 96 miles is a testament to the men and women that are in Adelanto and any other detention center in this country, and for all the families left behind, the children, and the grandchildren,” Cristiana said.

The eight day-long “Clear the Road to Freedom” Interfaith Pilgrimage left Adelanto on September 26 with a core group of more than a dozen faith leaders and migrant justice organizers committed to walking the entire route to downtown Los Angeles. The pilgrims donned sun hats and hiking shoes to cover Southern California’s desert, forest, mountainous and urban terrain in record-breaking heat. Nonprofit organizations Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice (CLUE Justice) and Nefesh, which serves Los Angeles’s Jewish community, spearheaded the event alongside Sacred Resistance, a social justice, solidarity, and accompaniment ministry of the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles.

The pilgrimage is one of the most high-profile actions yet in a string of clergy protests against the Trump administration’s ramped-up crackdowns on migrant communities. Previously, faith leaders have been arrested for demonstrating against conditions at Delaney Hall, a migrant jail in New Jersey, ICE training facilities in Williston, Vermont, and ICE raids in the Minneapolis area.

“Many spiritual traditions have traditions of pilgrimage as a sacred practice,” CLUE Justice Executive Director Jennifer Gutierrez said. “It’s typically to a sacred site, and the idea is that while you’re physically traveling to that site, you are also on a spiritual journey getting closer to God. This is us taking a spiritual journey and a way of calling out where we have been separated from God, where we have failed as a culture, as a society, as a country to follow God’s commands, to care for our neighbor.”

The groups organized the pilgrimage to bring awareness to the ballooning number of migrants jailed nationwide and the grim conditions in detention centers. More than 65,000 people were held in ICE detention nationwide as of July; the number of migrants jailed previously reached a record high of 73,000 in January. Eight detention centers across California were holding more than 6,400 migrants as of July.

“We are holding the third-highest number of detainees in the country, and the fact that more people are not enraged is devastating,” said Michelle Arkin, a lead organizer with No Concentration Camps California. “This pilgrimage is a peaceful, beautiful, and dramatic way to encourage people to learn more, to get engaged, and to see how we can be of service to people.”

No Concentration Camps California and Shut Down Adelanto Coalition, along with nonprofits Inland Coalition for Immigrant Justice and Matthew 25, also partnered with CLUE Justice, Nefesh, and Sacred Resistance to organize the pilgrimage.

CLUE Justice has been organizing with migrant workers in Southern California since 1997 and has ramped up support for migrant community members since federal agents launched a series of violent raids in Los Angeles in June 2025. Agents abducted more than 1,300 people during a months-long operation in the city, according to reports from community groups compiled and verified by L.A. Taco. CLUE Justice now runs an immigration bond fund to help migrants afford bond and return to their communities, as well as a program to train clergy and other volunteers to visit migrants jailed in the area’s detention centers.

“We’ve been very, very aware of the human rights abuses that have been happening inside the detention center, the medical neglect at an extreme level, the spoiled food, lack of access to clean water and sunshine, no air conditioning when it’s 100 degrees out in the desert where the detention center is located—just terrible conditions,” Gutierrez said.

Two people have died after experiencing medical emergencies in the Adelanto detention center in the past year. Last October, 54-year-old Gabriel García-Avilés died from cardiac arrest less than a week after arriving at the facility. Last month, 39-year-old Ismael Ayala-Uribe died after medical staff at the detention center flagged an abscess on his buttock as potentially life-threatening but did not transfer him to a hospital for surgery. When he was finally rushed to the hospital three days later, it was too late.

Walkers who joined the interfaith pilgrimage carried placards with photos of García-Avilés and Ayala-Uribe, as well as those of others who have died in ICE jails or been killed by federal agents during recent crackdowns. Each evening along the way, local sacred spaces hosted the core group of pilgrims for shared meals, prayer, song, and storytelling about those enduring cruelties in the nation’s detention centers and those organizing for freedom and justice.

On Tuesday, around 200 people walked the final stretch from Alhambra to downtown Los Angeles. Gutierrez said that musicians greeted the group as they neared Plaza de la Raza in East Los Angeles, cars honked throughout the city, and children stood outside their schools to watch the pilgrims pass and show their support. The walk culminated in a vigil, where women of faith sang and prayed for those who have been disappeared by ICE.

“The final day of the pilgrimage was the most impactful for me,” Gutierrez said. “There are so many disparate people and groups doing their part to protect their neighbors, and I am grateful that the pilgrimage seems to have brought them together.”

Many who joined the week’s events welcomed the chance to share how their faith informs their commitment to social justice and to push back on the Trump administration’s embrace of Christian nationalist narratives. “It’s such a trend within the MAGA movement to use the Bible to push an agenda that is so antithetical to the teachings they claim to adhere to,” said Arkin. “To be able to claim our faith, and the Bible, and the teachings of Christ and to stand to protect people and act as Christ calls us to act, that to me is a huge gift.”

For Cristiana, the week was also one of hope and repair. “Walking the 96 miles, reliving driving my girls to see their dad, it is extremely painful,” she said. “But at the same time, knowing that God is walking with me and holding me in his arms is a healing process, [and] it warms my heart to know that people are stepping up and saying ‘enough.’”

Philanthropy presents itself as a mechanism for solving inequality. But the structure through which philanthropic money moves can reproduce a familiar hierarchy: People with resources decide which problems deserve attention, organizations compete for funding according to those priorities, and communities affected by the resulting decisions are asked to prove that they can deliver someone else’s definition of impact.

While the problem is often framed in terms of who gets funded and who doesn’t, a growing group of feminist funds and women-led philanthropic organizations argue that this is not simply a funding gap. It is a power gap, and closing it requires changing not just what gets funded, but who decides.

That is the thesis this essay sets out to test: Across four organizations—two in the United States, one global, and one multilateral—feminist philanthropy has treated “who decides” as a design question, not a courtesy. A courtesy is something a funder extends at their own discretion and can withdraw. By attending to design, the decision structure itself is built to share power. What follows is a look at what happens once that question moves from a mission statement into an operating system.

Feminist organizing has long challenged the assumption that authority and expertise should belong primarily to people who already hold institutional power.

Participatory grantmaking is one expression of that shift. The Women’s Funding Network describes it as an approach that brings the communities a funder serves directly into grantmaking decisions. In its 2025 member survey, 51 percent of responding women’s funds reported using a participatory framework, up from 38 percent in 2022; another 23 percent said they were strongly interested in adopting one.

The growth of these practices raises a harder question: Why have women’s funds and feminist organizations been especially willing to experiment with redistributing institutional power?

The answer is not that women are naturally better collaborators or more empathetic leaders; that would turn a political and historical phenomenon into a stereotype. The more useful explanation is that feminist organizing has long challenged the assumption that authority and expertise should belong primarily to people who already hold institutional power. Feminist movements built practices around collective decision-making, lived experience, and accountability precisely because the people inside them were often excluded from formal power to begin with.

None of the four cases below produces a perfect alternative to hierarchy. What they show is something more useful: what happens when an institution tries to make power-sharing an actual operating system, rather than a line in a mission statement.

Boston: When Community Members Become Grantmakers

The Boston Women’s Fund‘s Allocations Committee is one of the clearest US examples of this shift in practice. Rather than leaving grant decisions entirely to professional staff, the fund convenes community members—including people from both inside and outside philanthropy—to decide directly which organizations receive funding. No prior grantmaking experience is required. Members research nominated organizations, speak with their leaders and the people they serve, prepare grant proposals, and take part in a mandatory consensus session to select recipients. The process currently runs 40 to 45 hours, for which members receive a modest stipend.

The significance is not simply that more people get a say. It changes the definition of expertise itself. In conventional philanthropy, professional experience often stands in for knowing which organizations are effective. Boston’s model starts from a different premise: People who live in and understand the communities a grant is meant to reach can hold knowledge that never appears in a proposal or a balance sheet.

This has a longer intellectual history. Sociologist Susan Ostrander’s study of the Boston Women’s Fund, published in Gender & Society, found that efforts to build less hierarchical relationships with grantees changed the fund’s own guidelines and expanded its recognition of community-organizing methods. Ostrander’s underlying diagnosis is blunt: Philanthropic relationships are structurally unequal because funders control resources that grantees need.

The feminist intervention, then, is not simply installing women in positions previously held by men. It is questioning why the position itself carries so much unilateral authority. That distinction matters in practice, not just in theory: A woman running a conventional foundation can still operate a strictly top-down model, while a participatory structure can redistribute authority without requiring every decision-maker in the room to be a woman. Boston’s case is useful precisely because it makes the distribution of power, not the gender of who holds it, the object of scrutiny.

New York: Turning Participation Into an Institutional Practice

The New York Women’s Foundation‘s model shows what happens when the same principle scales into a much larger institution. The foundation says its grantmaking is rooted in gender, racial, and economic justice, and that it practices participatory grantmaking explicitly: Guidance comes from the communities it supports and is shaped by a Grants Advisory Committee. It pairs that with long-term relationships, multi-year support and trust-based practices, and states plainly that it seeks to cede decision-making power over grants to the communities affected by its funding.

That is a different relationship than the conventional one. In a standard model, an organization gets money for a project shaped by a foundation’s priorities, complies with reporting requirements, and competes again next cycle. In a trust-based model, the funder hands the organization real discretion over how it does its work.

The distinction between the two matters because they are related but not identical. Participatory grantmaking is about who makes funding decisions. Trust-based philanthropy is about how the funding relationship itself is built through multi-year unrestricted support, lighter reporting, and fewer administrative hoops. The Women’s Funding Network’s 2025 survey found the second practice spreading fast too, with 69 percent of respondents reporting that they practice trust-based philanthropy, up from 39 percent in 2022.

For a grantee, the practical difference shows up before the money does. A participatory process usually means being interviewed by—and sometimes voted on by—peers, rather than a program officer alone. A trust-based one means a single multi-year check with a short report, instead of an annual reapplication with line-item receipts. Organizations weighing which funders to approach can reasonably ask, up front, which of the two a prospective funder actually practices (or whether they practice both), rather than assuming the language on a website matches the paperwork that follows.

What looks like a technical adjustment therefore carries a political consequence: it moves decision-making power closer to the people who live with the results of that decision.

 FRIDA: Letting the Movement Decide

If Boston and New York demonstrate participatory philanthropy within the US nonprofit system, FRIDA | Young Feminist Fund shows what happens when the principle is built into a fund’s identity from day one.

FRIDA grew out of a shared conviction among feminist activists that young feminist organizers should not simply be recipients of philanthropic decisions, they should help make them. Its model is explicit: Young feminist communities take part in deciding which groups receive funding, on the premise that this changes the traditional power relationship between funder and grantee by centering the knowledge of young feminists working on the ground.

The scale has grown accordingly. In its first three grantmaking cycles (2012–2014), FRIDA distributed $437,000 to 57 young feminist organizations. By 2024, it reported supporting 203 grantee partners across six regions and 103 countries, with more than $2.97 million in direct grantmaking.

The more revealing part of FRIDA’s story, though, is not its growth, it’s the fund’s willingness to examine its own model’s weaknesses. Through its multi-year Resourcing Connections process, FRIDA examined its own participatory system: its politics, its values, and its limits. The evaluation found that the model does produce more horizontal relationships and participants described feeling trusted, in contrast to the control over outcomes and compliance that is often the norm elsewhere in philanthropy. But it also found that participation creates its own difficulties: Someone still has to make hard calls when there are more deserving applicants than money, and meaningful participation itself takes time, coordination and infrastructure that not every applicant can spare.

Equal representation at the table does not automatically produce equal power at the table.

FRIDA’s own research therefore rejects the idea that participatory grantmaking is a finished formula. Its process has been repeatedly revised in response to feedback from applicants, grantee partners, and advisors, a distinctly feminist organizational habit: keeping the system itself accountable to the people it’s meant to serve.

Fenomenal Funds: Can Funders Actually Share Power?

The most ambitious of these four experiments may be Fenomenal Funds, which went beyond participatory grant review into shared governance between funders and the organizations they fund. Fenomenal Funds brought together four private foundations and four women’s funds within the Prospera International Network of Women’s Funds, giving both sides shared authority over strategy and resource distribution. Its steering committee included representatives of both private foundations and women’s funds; an advisory committee supporting the participatory grantmaking work was majority composed of women’s funds. New Venture Fund’s account of the model describes a structure in which four funders, four women’s funds and a representative of Prospera INWF participated with equal voice and decision-making power.

The significance is straightforward: The organizations receiving philanthropic resources were not consulted about strategy after the fact. They were part of the structure that set it. That required real infrastructure and dedicated staff for program management, learning and evaluation, communications, and engagement, while a fiscal sponsor handled HR, finance, and legal support underneath it.

The experiment paired that governance model with non-competitive, multi-year core funding. A KIT Institute evaluation of the initiative found that the combination strengthened organizational resilience and deepened collaboration among the participating women’s funds, identifying pooled resources, shared decision-making and flexible core funding as the load-bearing elements of the model.

None of these models eliminates hierarchy outright. What they challenge is the assumption that hierarchy is the only workable way to organize money, expertise, and accountability.

But Fenomenal Funds also shows why sharing power is hard. Equal representation at the table does not automatically produce equal power at the table. People arrive with different institutional resources, different financial security, different relationships to donors, and different fluency in the language and pace of philanthropic process, all of which can quietly determine whose voice carries more weight even inside a formally equal structure.

That gap points to a distinction worth naming plainly: putting a community representative on a committee changes who is present. Changing who controls the money changes who has power. The second is a far bigger ask than the first, and conflating them is one of the more common ways “participation” ends up meaning less than it sounds like.

Why Women?

None of these four cases shows that women possess some innate organizational talent that makes them uniquely suited to participatory leadership. They show something else.

Feminist movements have historically had to build political and organizational practice under conditions where formal authority was largely unavailable to them. This is why feminist theory has paid unusual attention to the relationship between power, voice, lived experience and institutions that present themselves as neutral.

Elizabeth Gillespie’s research on more than 200 US women’s foundations and funds found that these organizations have built ideas of feminist empowerment into both their grantmaking and their internal practices, while also documenting real tension between feminist ideals and institutional constraints. That helps explain why women’s funds have so often been early adopters of participatory models.

The more useful question, then, is not how do women become more powerful within existing institutions? It is what should power look like inside an institution in the first place? That reframes the conversation away from representation alone. An organization can have women throughout its senior leadership and still run on restrictive grants, top-down priorities, and opaque decisions. Conversely, an organization can start dismantling those structures by recognizing community knowledge and making funders answerable to the people whose work they finance, regardless of who sits in the corner office.

The Cost of Giving Up Control

There’s a real temptation to present participatory philanthropy as a simple fix: Give communities a voice, make funding more flexible, and the power imbalance disappears. The four cases here argue otherwise.

Power does not disappear because an organization adopts a participatory structure. It has to be continuously negotiated, and that negotiation costs something concrete. Committees need recruitment, training, compensation, and facilitation. Consensus takes longer than a program officer’s sign-off. Flexible funding asks funders to sit with more uncertainty than they’re used to. And participation itself can become its own kind of exclusion if only people with enough time, digital access, language fluency, or institutional confidence are able to take part.

Research increasingly bears this out. A study of participatory philanthropy in sub-Saharan Africa found that while these models can shift visible forms of power, unequal resources, and back-donor requirements continue to shape the relationships operating underneath them.

That may be the most useful lesson feminist philanthropy has to offer: the goal is not an organization with no power in it. It’s an organization where power is visible, shared, and answerable to the people who live with its consequences.

What that means for someone reading this from outside philanthropy is fairly concrete. If you sit on a nonprofit board, it’s a short list of questions worth asking your own funders. Who actually decides where this money goes? How long is the reporting leash? What happens if the theory of change we proposed turns out to be wrong in practice? If you’re a funder, it’s an invitation to treat those same questions as design choices rather than as risks to be managed away. And if you’re neither, perhaps someone who gives, it’s a reason to ask a favorite cause not only what it does with a donation, but who gets a say in deciding.

Boston Women’s Fund changes who evaluates and recommends grants. New York Women’s Foundation has folded community-informed decision-making into a broader trust-based funding model. FRIDA has built young feminist participation into the grantmaking process itself and kept redesigning that process in response to community feedback. Fenomenal Funds went furthest, placing funders and women’s funds inside one shared governance structure. None of these models eliminates hierarchy outright. What they challenge is the assumption that hierarchy is the only workable way to organize money, expertise, and accountability.

That is the real significance of women in this story—not that women lead differently by nature, but that feminist movements have spent decades asking a question philanthropy at large is only now beginning to ask at scale: What happens when the people most affected by an institution’s decisions stop being treated as beneficiaries of those decisions, and start being treated as people with the authority to make them?

The answer on offer here isn’t a perfect organization. It’s a different distribution of power and, as these four cases show, a considerably more expensive one to build than to announce.

A coalition in Pennsylvania demonstrated the power of cross-sector organizing by bringing together residents of a senior public housing property to advocate for and help shape immediate retrofit plans for their own building, while also planning ahead for the future.

In late 2024, residents of a senior public housing property in Blawnox, a small Allegheny River community a few miles from downtown Pittsburgh, were living with a failing HVAC system, a deteriorating hot water tank, and air pollution drifting into their building from a nearby coal transport operation.

A few months later, a storm knocked out power to the building entirely. Maintenance staff fired up an aging diesel generator, but it took hours to get the lights back on—and then exhaust fumes began filling the lobby, drifting into residents’ apartments. Staff tried redirecting the fumes with fans. It didn’t work well.

For a building of more than 80 senior citizens, some already managing cardiovascular and respiratory conditions, breathing diesel exhaust in their own living rooms was a health emergency on top of failing housing conditions.

That combination of deferred maintenance, environmental burden, and acute risk from the very backup system meant to protect residents became the pilot case for a decarbonization campaign. The campaign has since moved more than $4 million in public money, created a template for co-governance between a grassroots coalition and a county executive, and challenged the argument that climate action and affordability are competing goals.

The coalition behind it, the Allegheny Decarbonization Coalition, was anchored by Pittsburgh United and made up of 64 partners from 45 organizations, including IUPAT DC57, IBEW Local 5, the Black Equity Coalition, the Keystone Energy Efficiency Alliance, Pittsburgh Gateways, and the Master Builders Association.

Initially, the coalition’s plan was to secure a large federal award through the Inflation Reduction Act’s programs. When federal climate priorities shifted abruptly in early 2025, that path closed. The coalition pivoted to Allegheny County’s own budget instead, securing a $1 million allocation (the first time the county ever directed funds to its housing authority specifically for decarbonization), plus more than $3 million from the Allegheny County Housing Authority’s own budget for energy-efficiency upgrades.

That pivot is the real story, and it’s a story about power and long-term relationships, not just alignment. A coalition without an existing base, without trained tenant leadership, and without a working relationship with county government could not have absorbed the collapse of its federal strategy and converted it into a local win within months. Pittsburgh United could, because it had spent over a decade building exactly those capacities.

Residents were organized, trained, and given a formal role in shaping the retrofit plans for their own building, on the premise that when the coalition wins, residents also win.

For funders, the lesson isn’t just that climate and affordability goals happen to fit together. It’s that putting them together on purpose is organizing work, takes years to build the power and relationships to do, and philanthropy’s habit of funding “climate justice” and “economic justice” as separate portfolios can make that work hard to see, let alone fund.

How the Power Got Built

Pittsburgh United’s approach starts from an explicit power analysis: naming who holds power in the region—large employers, landlords, political campaign donors—and building coalitions large and disciplined enough to move them. The Allegheny Decarbonization Coalition’s diversity, intentionally including labor unions, tenant organizations, environmental groups, and workforce-development nonprofits from the beginning of the campaign, is often described as a strength. But power is demonstrated in what a coalition can push decisionmakers to do that they would not necessarily have done otherwise.

The fact that the pivot in this decarbonization campaign succeeded on a compressed timeline, after a federal strategy failed, demonstrates that the coalition had already built durable leverage instead of scrambling in response to the crisis. Power and relationships built in advance is a transferable lesson for other coalitions and their funders.

The campaign didn’t stop pushing once the county’s $1 million was secured.

A core feature of the coalition’s organizing strategy is that tenant councils were centered and there was direct engagement with residents of public housing in the county. Residents were trained and given a formal role in shaping the retrofit plans for their own building on the premise that when the coalition wins, residents also win—in lower utility bills, better indoor air quality, and functioning heat and hot water.

What turned Blawnox from a maintenance problem into a campaign was organizing. The Blawnox Apartments Tenant Council, led by resident and Council President Joan Mills, had already been meeting, documenting living conditions, and building relationships with Pittsburgh United organizers before the outage, which is part of why the coalition was able to move so quickly. Mills didn’t just describe her building’s problems to organizers; she became a public leader of the campaign. Along with immediate repair, Mills asked for additions such as rooftop solar and battery storage so that the next storm wouldn’t force seniors to choose between reliable power and clean air.

That’s a different posture than “residents were consulted.” Mills and the tenant council were leading the coalition’s public argument, not just supplying anecdotes for it. And the campaign didn’t stop pushing once the county’s $1 million was secured. Mills went on to press state Sen. Lindsay Williams and state Rep. Mandy Steele for another $1 million in the 2026 state budget, treating the county allocation as a floor to build on rather than a finish line.

That’s what tenant power looks like in practice: not a single moment of input early in the process, but an ongoing, named, public role in setting the agenda for what “done” means. This is partially what makes the coalition’s relationship with the county a genuine co-governance arrangement rather than a channel for resident input. Co-governance is at its best when both “sides” understand the constraints of the other and are in a relationship that is about moving an overall strategy together, rather than treating the relationship as adversarial.

What’s Secured, What’s Underway, and What’s Still Ahead

Secured funding: the $1 million Allegheny County budget allocation and more than $3 million from the Allegheny County Housing Authority’s own budget for energy-efficiency upgrades, investments projected to save the housing authority roughly $22,000 a year in lighting and electricity costs at Blawnox alone.

Work underway: The Blawnox retrofit itself, and a new pre-apprenticeship program launched with Pittsburgh Gateways to build pathways into union decarbonization jobs.

Anticipated, not yet achieved: At its December 2025 convening, coalition partners discussed expanding the housing-decarbonization model to other public housing authorities in the region, challenging data center developers on community benefits, and advancing the proposed Pennsylvania Energy Savings and Jobs Buildings Fund (a state-level financing mechanism), along with securing a second $1 million from the state budget that tenant leaders and coalition staff have publicly called for.

Tensions That Could Make or Break This Model

A coalition this broad is not friction-free, and the tension is likely where the most transferable knowledge sits. Labor unions, tenant organizations, environmental groups, workforce-development nonprofits, county government, and potentially private developers do not share a single timeline, risk tolerance, or definition of success.

A union may prioritize wage floors and job quality over speed; an environmental group may push for faster or broader decarbonization than a housing authority’s capital cycle allows; tenants may prioritize immediate relief from a broken HVAC system over a longer, more comprehensive retrofit; and a county government operating under real budget constraints may be unable to move as fast as any of its coalition partners want.

There is also structural tension: The co-governance relationship described here depends heavily on a specific county executive’s openness to it. That is a strength when the relationship is good, and a vulnerability when it depends on one official rather than an institutionalized process. Any argument for replicability elsewhere needs to include what happens to this model under a less receptive administration.

The usual framing of climate action and affordability at odds with each other treats that tension as a natural feature of the policy landscape.

The Heinz Endowments have provided Pittsburgh United with sustained general operating support for more than a decade, funding that helped the organization build the staff capacity, tenant leadership infrastructure, and deep relationships with both county government and a broad array of coalition partners. These relationships made a fast pivot from a failed federal strategy to a local budget win possible. Catalytic, shorter-term grants from national funders including BuildUS, Invest in Our Future, the Marguerite Casey Foundation, Jobs With Justice, and People’s Action helped accelerate specific pieces of the campaign, such as the December 2025 convening and the pre-apprenticeship program launch.

It’s worth distinguishing what each kind of funding actually did. Long-term, flexible local support built durability: the staff time, trust, relationships, and institutional memory that let the coalition absorb a strategic shock and still deliver. Time-limited national funding added acceleration and connective tissue to other regions doing similar work, but it did not build the underlying organizing capacity that had to already exist for the catalytic money to be useful.

That distinction matters for replication, and so do this model’s limits. This case rests on a funder willing to commit a decade-plus of largely unrestricted support to a single anchor organization, a coalition that had already done the work of building tenant leadership and a cross-sector base before this campaign began, and a county executive disposed toward collaborative governance. Those conditions are not universal, and a funder or coalition elsewhere without one or more of them should not expect the same sequence to play out the same way.

An Open Question for Funders

The usual framing of climate action and affordability at odds with each other treats that tension as a natural feature of the policy landscape. The Allegheny Decarbonization Coalition’s experience suggests it’s more accurate to treat it as a condition that persists in the absence of organized power. The tension dissolves, at least locally and partially, when that power exists.

This reframes the funding question for philanthropy. It’s not simply “should we fund coalitions that connect climate and economic justice work?” It’s whether conventional grantmaking organized around issue silos, annual cycles, and program-specific metrics is structured to recognize and sustain the slower, cross-cutting organizing infrastructure this kind of alignment actually requires—or whether it will keep funding the pieces separately and missing their connections.

Pittsburgh offers one data point on what happens when the infrastructure gets built. It does not yet answer how many of the conditions behind it—including a decade of committed local funding, an already-organized tenant base, and a receptive county government—must be present elsewhere for the model to be replicated. That is the harder and more useful question for funders watching from outside western Pennsylvania.

As America celebrated its quarter-millennium, the words of the Declaration of Independence once again echoed:

“Created equal.”

“Unalienable rights.”

“Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” 

But celebration—without repair—rings hollow. We believe that reparations are what justice looks like in the 21st century. As lawyers for the movement, we will defend these programs, not because reparations alone can solve every wound in this country. Neither because money alone can heal a nation that was built through enslavement, dispossession, racial terror, and systematic exclusion. We defend reparations because it forces the question the United States of America has avoided since its founding: What does justice require after a government has caused, sanctioned, or benefited from brutality against its own citizens?

That is why reparations advocates started to organize attorneys across the nation to defend spurious legal challenges from the current administration.

Reparations as Remedies for Recognized Harm

In 2021, the City of Evanston, Illinois, became the first US city to create a reparations program for Black residents who had been harmed by documented housing discrimination, through the adoption of Resolution 37-R-21. After naming the injury, the city quickly moved from apology to remedy. The Local Reparations Restorative Housing Program is a concrete effort to repair government-backed housing discrimination that historically had denied Black residents access to property, stability, and generational wealth. The city has committed $10 million and has distributed much of that money so far in reparations through the allocation of $25,000 per person to use towards a home purchase, mortgage assistance or home improvements.

[R]eparations forces the question America has avoided since its founding: What does justice require after a government has caused, sanctioned, or benefited from brutality against its own citizens?

Unfortunately, on May 23, 2024, the city was sued by the conservative group Judicial Watch and six other plaintiffs, under the pretense that the program discriminates against non-Black people.

The lawsuit against Evanston is part of a broader government-sponsored legal campaign against reparations programs across the country. In February 2026, San Francisco was sued by the Californians for Equal Rights Foundation and two other plaintiffs over its reparations program, in March the Department of Housing and Urban Development began an investigation against Washington state’s reparations work, and in September the Justice Department threatened Buncombe County, North Carolina, with investigation over its reparations recommendations.

In Evanston, Judicial Watch dismissed the program in Evanston as “nothing more than a ploy to redistribute tax dollars to individuals based on race.” Opponents increasingly have framed reparative programs as unconstitutional racial preferences rather than remedies for documented government harm. The US Department of Justice moved to intervene in the lawsuit on June 14, alleging that “the City’s racially discriminatory program is not narrowly tailored to remediating specific, identified instances of past discrimination that violated the Constitution or a statute, and through its actions, the City has violated the Equal Protection Clause and the Fair Housing Act.”

However, reparations are not without legal precedent. In 1892, the federal government paid reparations to the Italian government after the lynching of eleven Italian immigrants in New Orleans; beginning in 1946, it created mechanisms to compensate Tribal Nations for treaty violations and the confiscation of lands; and in 1988, it provided redress to Japanese Americans who were relocated and incarcerated in internment camps during World War II. These examples show that US law has long recognized reparative remedies for grave state-sanctioned harms.

Reparations are remedies tied to recognized injuries. When a government studies its own conduct, documents harm, acknowledges responsibility, and designs a remedy specifically connected to that harm that took place, it is constitutional for the government to make things right.

If opponents can erase the record of harm, repair can be miscast as racial preference. If they can collapse reparations into the broader backlash against racial justice, they can turn a remedial program into a political target. And if they succeed, the law will once again become a tool that creates Black suffering but refuses to remedy it.

Having the local government acknowledge the legitimacy of its own record of harm plays a major role in making these programs legal. Evanston, for example, formally acknowledged that city policies and inaction contributed to housing discrimination specifically against Black residents from 1919 to 1969, then designed its first reparations program around that documented harm. Lawyers are important to this process because they can help local communities build similar records and connect reparations programs to the harms they identified in their research.

While reparations may include monetary compensation, it’s much more than that and can include restitution, rehabilitation, truth-telling, institutional reform, land, housing, health care, education, cultural repair, and guarantees that the harms will not be repeated. Lawyers can help craft those policies and tie the harms that took place in the past to changes that will make life better for all of us in the future.

Over the last 250 years, Black communities have organized, litigated, legislated, educated, and imagined beyond the limits the law tried to impose. Today, that struggle is taking a new form: communities across the country are building reparations into the work of local government, state policy, litigation, and international human rights.

Reparations Are Already Here

Reparations efforts are already underway in cities like Evanston, San Francisco, and Tulsa, where communities are demanding that city government and other local institutions move from apology to remedy. It is happening at the state level also in California, New York, Washington, Illinois, and Maryland, where task forces and commissions are documenting harms and designing reparative policy. It is happening federally, through the long struggle for H.R. 40 and a national reckoning with slavery and its generational consequences.

The movement also extends beyond government. Organizations such as FirstRepair, the National African American Reparations Commission, African American Redress Network, N’COBRA, and the Charles Ogletree Reparative Bar Association are helping communities, lawyers, scholars, and advocates build the infrastructure necessary to turn reparations from demand into durable policy.

This movement is local, national, and global. Just this year, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution recognizing the trafficking and enslavement of Africans as among the gravest crimes against humanity and “that claims for reparations represent a concrete step towards remedy.”

Reparations for Black Americans people remain one of the clearest tests of US democracy.

If a country can celebrate 250 years of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” then it can confront the lives it shortened, the liberty it denied, and the happiness it made impossible. If a democracy can claim equality as its inheritance, then it must account for the people it excluded from that inheritance by law and by force.

Reparations is not the only answer, but it is one way to make freedom ring true instead of hollow.

The repaired future is possible under the law. More than that, it is already underway. The question is whether the legal community will help build it, defend it, and make it durable.

Lawyers and aspiring legal workers can support this work wherever they live. Start the conversation in your city, bar association, law school, congregation, or community organization. Attend a town hall. Ask whether your local government has studied its own history of racial harm. Connect with reparations commissions, grassroots organizations, and national groups already advancing this work.

As Assata Shakur reminds us, we have a duty to fight for freedom. In this moment, we also have a duty to fight for repair. We have nothing to lose but our chains.

Even wearing a T-shirt and jeans, Marvin Dunn still has the military bearing of the naval officer he once was. Dunn grew up in the 1940s under Jim Crow. Now, at the age of 86, he’s  anything but retired.

In 2020, following the murder of George Floyd, he founded the nonprofit Miami Center for Racial Justice with the mission to tell the stories of Florida’s Black community. A grant from the Mellon Foundation allowed Dunn to expand his Teach the Truth Tours, bringing diverse groups to towns like Ocoee and Rosewood.

Never heard of the Rosewood massacre? That, and more Black history, has been suppressed by design, thanks to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ 2022 Stop WOKE Act, which banned discussion of race and gender issues in the classroom. That legislation is now being ruled unconstitutional. 

In 1923, a mob of white outsiders burned down every Black home in Rosewood and shot and lynched many of the townspeople. The rest of the Black community fled by rail, never to return. No white person was ever charged.

“Young students are the ones for whom our history is being denied,” Dunn said. “They need to learn these stories the most. It’s not too early to know these stories. The state is aiming to keep them in the dark.” That’s also why Dunn wrote his new textbook, The History of African Americans in Florida, for middle school and high school students. The book was released earlier this year.

Concern about young students is why Dunn is suing Miami-Dade College, which has granted public land use for the proposed Trump Library. “I was insulted this was being done to the future generations of Miami-Dade County,” Dunn said. “They gave this land away. They did it in secret. It should not have been given away to a politician, any politician. No politician should rob children.”

When he’s not leading a Teach the Truth Tour or on social media, Dunn spends time in Teach the Truth Garden.

Once an abandoned lot in Miami’s urban Overtown neighborhood, Dunn turned it into a community garden and welcoming green space for all where volunteers grow callaloo, collards, tomatoes—and hope. In fact, I first met Dunn in the garden, where I still like to volunteer.

“Our garden is where the police take breaks,” said Dunn. It’s where he goes to recharge, as well. “It’s peaceful and it’s beautiful and it’s positive,” he said. “I can go and find a few moments to reflect and come out of the garden re-energized. It’s the kind of environment where mental health can be sustained.”

Uncovering Florida’s Painful Past

Dunn demands that the truth be taught about our past because he was denied it. “No one taught me history,” he said. “I taught myself. The only Black history I learned as a student in the State of Florida was Mary McCleod Bethune, George Washington Carver, Booker T. Washington—the most innocent of our heroes, the most nonthreatening heroes.” Missing were many heroes, like Crispus Attucks, a Black man and the first American killed in the Boston Massacre.

“I really did not get into history until the riot of 1980,” he said, referring to the Arthur McDuffie Riots. “I had become increasingly concerned that race and ethnic relations in Miami were deteriorating well before then, but I experienced the riot directly. I was, like most of the country, outraged, hurt. As I tried to write about it, I realized there was almost nothing about Miami’s Black history.

“Our stories are getting lost under current administration at an alarming rate. That propelled me into writing Black history and Black local history. I was trying to save Black history for the benefit of future generations.”

Using Social Media to Shine a Light on Injustice

Can storytelling be advocacy? Dunn is sure of it. “You can sit back and tell stories and not do anything,” he said. “Stories that change things are quite different.”

“You build community by getting people who are not in agreement to come together and work things out. I’m trying to keep that going.”

Anyone who’s attended a Teach the Truth tour can tell you that.  “People are shocked and outraged that the truth of our past, about Rosewood and Mims and Ocoee and all over the state, has been buried, whitewashed. The most common response is: ‘Why didn’t they teach us this?’

“I tell them carefully what I want. I tell them, ‘Go to your social media friends, TikTok, share the photos, the videos you took on this tour.’ I insist they communicate what they’ve learned to other people. Given the connectedness this generation has, it’s the best way to keep these stories alive.”

Dunn recalls the first time he visited Rosewood. He came alone, at dusk, as evening fell. “I remember the way I felt when I walked on that railroad track, how much it brought back the story, just being in that physical space where that had happened. It made me attuned to the importance of walking the ground where these stories have taken place.”

“I see my role now as an elder. I can teach these children a lot if they’ll listen…You don’t need a school. Go online and teach what you know.

And yet he feels the biggest impact isn’t made by bringing groups on Teach the Truth Tours: “It’s online,” he said. “At best I can take a few thousand people to Rosewood. I’m training guides to do this so it doesn’t all depend on me. But even so, only so many people can make that trip. How do we have others experience it? By sharing with people who are close to us, sharing it on social media for folks who can benefit from knowing what they did, that’s how to keep these stories alive—online. I’m reaching people in Africa, Thailand and England. The reach is so much more extensive.”

Building Community Through Difference

Dunn has plans for Rosewood, though, seeing it as a place and an opportunity to bridge differences. “I’m building a house in Rosewood for that purpose, to bring people together to work out conflict, to build stories together,” he said. “You build community by getting people who are not in agreement to come together and work things out. I’m trying to keep that going.”

Dunn calls it Rosewood Peace House and it’s built to look like the Black homes burned down in the massacre. “We’ve got to get folks who disagree to come together in a common space, a sacred space, in the physical space where [the massacre] happened, and talk and figure out the many ways we’re alike as opposed to different.

Fighting for Future Generations

“Burnout? What is that?” Daily walks and strong coffee keep Dunn going. So does spending time in Teach the Truth Garden with younger people. “They are not yet tarnished. There, you find hope,” he said.

“I see my role now as an elder. I can teach these children a lot if they’ll listen,” he said, and he urges others to do the same. “Never stop teaching. You don’t need a school. Go online and teach what you know.

“My motivation is based upon what I see happening in the state—trying to suppress Black history, to keep our stories hidden. That’s my motivation, keeping those stories alive. “I believe American democracy will be saved. It’s just taking so damn long. It feels like we’ve lost so much ground so fast. We’re going backwards, we’re moving back to old Jim Crow, back to where I lived 60 years ago. The rules are different but the impact is the same—more isolation, more suppression of minorities.

“In our country, there are more people who want us to live together in peace than there are people who want to divide us. I truly believe that. That’s how I can sleep at night. That’s why we need to commit to writing our history, our impressions, our knowledge,” Dunn said. “Getting families, a child, a parent, a grandparent, to have these stories kept alive through dialogue around a table—that’s the future as I see it.”

This article was originally published on The New Harvest and can be viewed here.

Voices from the Land is a collaborative op-ed and video series between Farm School NYC (FSNYC) and The New Harvest Project (TNH) that highlights urban and rural farmers, policy that impacts their work, and what we can do to uplift legislation reflective of their needs to direct future policy decisions. This project is funded by the Regenerative Agriculture Foundation (RAF) through the Rural Advancement Foundation International – USA (RAFI).

Black Yard Farm sits on 89 acres in Washington County, New York. Many lives live here. There are chickens—48 at the moment, with hundreds more raised throughout the year—along with a pig named Pedro, 11 cats, a turkey, and plans for sheep and goats. I grow 43 varieties of vegetables each year.

I always knew that building Black Yard Farm was never simply about producing food.

I grew up in The Bronx, where my introduction to farming began with my grandfather, Abu Talib, who, along with a few other community members, established Taqwa Community Farm on a vacant city-owned lot in the early 1990s to address food insecurity in the neighborhood. The community farm still stands today, providing fresh food in a neighborhood with limited access to grocery stores, while also giving young people like me a place to learn this work. By the time I was 11, I was helping my family start a youth-run farmers market. That early experience continues to shape the possibility of what the full robustness of Black Yard Farm could look like. To me, I see the farm as an opportunity to build community, housing, education, and, most importantly, connect people to land.

The Beginnings of Black Yard Farm

Black Yard Farm began in 2020 as a collaborative project involving six people. After difficulties with the original property and its lease, and team dynamics, the farm project relocated to its current home in Washington County.

I was fortunate to find landowners who were excited about returning what had become just a residential property back to active farmland and were even more excited about Black Yard Farm’s mission to do so collectively. I envision this farm to be a producer cooperative where various agricultural and farm-adjacent businesses will operate on the same land, caring for it collectively while creating their own products and livelihoods and market these goods under the same umbrella.

This could look like maple production, honey bees and mushroom cultivation, educational programs, visiting chefs using food grown on the property, and eventually housing for people participating in the cooperative. Black Yard Farm will stand as an ecosystem, just how nature does. At one point, my understanding of what a cooperative and farming ecosystem was completely different. I used to think that meant everyone working on the same piece of property, doing the same things together all the time. But I now know that co-existence and cooperative living can look how you want it to.

For small farmers and Black farmers, who have historically been barred from accessing significant amounts of capital, collaboration can expand opportunity without requiring each individual to bear the full cost of land, infrastructure, and equipment alone.

While some recent federal programs designed to reach historically underserved farmers offer meaningful opportunities, the application process can still be difficult. It can be burdensome to understand the language of these programs and applications and to figure out how best to present an entity like Black Yard Farm in the current political climate.

There is so much uncertainty since the turn of the administration. Thankfully, I have a favorable lease for Black Yard, which leaves me with the first option to purchase the land next spring. However, I will likely have to rely on federal funding.

In the current moment, I worry about the discomfort of identifying as a Black-led and centered business, particularly when it comes to applying for federal funding since diversity, equity, and inclusion are being actively targeted.

What Are We Owed?

As stated in The Color of Money: Black Banks and The Racial Wealth Gap, by Mehrsa Baradaran, the wealth of the United States was built on the labor of Black people in agriculture, specifically through cotton production, and we seem to be forgetting that. I will always bring up reparations.

Not only were enslaved Black folks exploited for their labor during slavery, but they were traded and sold as commerce—liquid assets, if you will. Black folks were prevented from participating in receiving profit or any benefits from the institution of slavery and the production of cotton, the very system that led America to economic dominance worldwide. Federal laws were put in place to uphold slavery and the notion of Black folks being inferior to whites, being considered  ⅗ of a man, and that it was God’s will for slavery to exist were spread far and wide. When slavery ended, white farm owners were compensated for their “loss of capital”, after no longer being allowed to exploit black folks for profit. After slavery was abolished, the era of Jim Crow was ushered in, and laws were put in place to continue restricting access to resources and funding to Black folks. This perpetuates today in the current wealth and land ownership gaps amongst black and white folks.

Black Yard Farm is an opportunity to hold space for this knowledge and build new restorative systems that value all beings present, working the land and beyond. We are owed the same opportunities to build sustainable, profitable businesses that nourish our lives and communities.

That is a radical idea in a capitalist society, and we must hold on to it.

For years, nonprofit organizations have asked Americans to believe in the power of collective action. They organize communities, advocate for workers, challenge discrimination, defend civil rights, and push institutions to become more democratic. Increasingly, though, some of the people doing that work are asking a question closer to home: What happens when the workplace itself falls short of the values an organization promotes publicly?

For nonprofit workers across the United States, unionization is often the answer. Nonprofit workers’ unionization efforts have grown beyond isolated disputes over wages, expanding into fight over transparency, job security, racial equity, workload and a greater voice in decisions that shape both their jobs and the missions they carry out. The result is an emerging test for the sector on whether organizations built to advocate for a more equitable society can build workplaces where employees hold meaningful power themselves.

A Test Case at the Southern Poverty Law Center

The Southern Poverty Law Center offers one of the clearest examples of this test. In December 2019, employees at the civil rights organization voted 145 to 42 to unionize with the Washington-Baltimore News Guild, amid broader turmoil over workplace culture, discrimination, compensation and management. After roughly 60 bargaining sessions, the union and management reached their first contract in 2022, including paid parental and sick leave, retirement contributions, remote work provisions, professional development funding and a Labor Management Committee focused on racial justice and equity. At the time, then-CEO Margaret Huang called it “a proud day for the SPLC,” and management noted that it was proud to be unionized.

But in the years that followed, SPLC announced a restructuring that led to dozens of layoffs. The union argued the cuts had disproportionately hit union members and key areas of the organization’s work. This dispute fed into a vote of no confidence in Huang by unionized staff. SPLC management responded by defending the restructuring as difficult but necessary “to strengthen our strategic framework and focus.” It was a reminder that even a unionized nonprofit can face fundamental disagreement over who decides what the mission requires.

Then, in March 2026, after nine months of negotiations, SPLC workers ratified a new agreement covering 220 unionized employees. This also included continued remote-work flexibility, four additional weeks of parental leave, wage increases weighted toward the lowest-paid staff, guaranteed union involvement in any future layoff planning, and new provisions on artificial intelligence in the workplace.

“We are living through a moment that demands leadership. This agreement is leadership in action,” said Lee Warnecke, a member of the union’s bargaining committee, adding that the deal reflected “the power of trust, solidarity, and shared purpose” at SPLC.

That trajectory matters. The union that emerged from an internal crisis didn’t dissolve when leadership changed or the organization restructured. Instead, workers used collective bargaining to build in more mechanisms for having a voice the next time a major decision threatens their jobs.

Mission Work and Its Costs

Nonprofit workers occupy an unusual position in the labor market. Many enter the field because they believe in the mission, and that commitment can be a source of real meaning. But it can also make it easier for organizations to take advantage of their efforts and passion.

The Associated Press reported in 2023 about how nonprofit employees confront low pay, burnout,  and management dysfunction. At SPLC specifically, the reporting captured just how adversarial that first contract fight had become: Lecia Brooks, the organization’s chief of staff and culture and management’s lead negotiator, recalled the union treating negotiators “like we were all the devil” at the table. At other organizations, staff described stagnant wages alongside rising workloads.

These are familiar tensions in the nonprofit sector. While employees may support the mission, the mission doesn’t pay rent. That contradiction becomes especially pointed when an organization’s public advocacy centers on economic justice or workplace rights. For some workers, unionization offers a way to turn those broad commitments into enforceable workplace standards.

The experience of SPLC is part of a broader wave of union organizing among nonprofit workers. While SPLC employees are represented by the Washington-Baltimore News Guild, other nonprofit workers have organized through the Nonprofit Professional Employees Union (NPEU), which represents employees at dozens of nonprofits nationwide. NPEU members have used collective bargaining to negotiate standards for pay, benefits and working conditions while building a stronger voice inside their organizations.

Pew, Carnegie, and a Widening Pattern

Recent unionizing suggests this isn’t simply a post-pandemic reaction to burnout. In January 2026, employees at the Pew Research Center voted 74 to 45 in an NLRB election to unionize with NPEU, after management had declined an earlier request for voluntary recognition. NPEU President Amy Chin-Lai said the vote reflected workers’ desire for “clear desire for a constructive partnership at work.” That framing is notable given Pew’s own business: an institution devoted to producing research that informs public understanding was itself confronting the question of how much internal power its employees should have over the conditions of that work.

To date, Pew management has not publicly commented on the vote.

A similar dynamic played out at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where staff won their union election in October 2025 with 87 percent of the vote, forming the Carnegie Endowment Workers Alliance around what they described as a push for transparency, equity and accountability. “I’m hopeful about what we can accomplish,” said Haley Clasen, a senior editor at Carnegie and a member of the organizing committee, of the group’s move toward first-contract negotiations.

In both campaigns, workers didn’t frame unionization as a rejection of their organizations’ missions, but rather they presented it as a way to strengthen the institutions. That distinction is key, and runs through much of the nonprofit labor movement.

What Collaboration Can Look Like

Part of the problem is that unionization is often cast as an adversarial fight between workers and management that diminishes an organization’s value or harms the mission. Yet workers, particularly those at mission-driven organizations, tend to unionize in defense of the mission.

Consider the Healthcare Anchor Network, which offers a vision of what a more cooperative relationship can produce. Staff first unionized with NPEU in 2022 and negotiated a contract establishing wage standards, parental leave, and a Labor Management Committee. In May 2026, they ratified a four-year successor agreement expanding compensation, leave, and professional-development benefits, including targeted raises for employees earning $70,000 or less.

HAN president and founder David Zuckerman said that the deal “strikes the right balance, providing meaningful compensation and benefits improvements for staff now while building a foundation for their career growth and our shared organizational sustainability.”

On the union side, bargaining committee member Lauren Worth described the contract as reflecting “the power of collaboration and a shared dedication to strengthening” the organization. In a time when nonprofits face even greater  financial constraints, this kind of relationship matters. But financial limitations shouldn’t automatically translate into unilateral management decisions. Collective bargaining changes the terms of that conversation. Instead of employees individually requesting raises or flexibility, they negotiate as a group, and workplace policy shifts from management’s discretion to a binding contract.

Winning a Contract Versus Enforcing One

The Philadelphia Museum of Art shows both the promise and the difficulty of collective bargaining. Museum workers voted to unionize in 2020 and struck for 19 days in 2022 before ratifying a first contract with wage increases, health care provisions, paid parental leave and longevity raises. Workers later disputed whether management was properly implementing those longevity provisions, a public reminder that winning a contract and enforcing one are different stages of the same fight.

“I was happy to vote for our contract at the end of the strike,” said Sarah Roche, a label technician at the museum, of the longevity clause she’d fought for, only to watch management apply it more narrowly than the union believed the language allowed.

By July 2025, the museum’s workers had ratified a second three-year contract with a higher minimum wage, guaranteed annual raises, eight weeks of paid parental leave, and stronger protections against unjust discipline. Then-CEO Sasha Suda called the agreement “probably the thing I’m most proud of with the staff” in an interview shortly before it was finalized. Suda was fired that November amid allegations, which she is fighting in an ongoing lawsuit, that she misappropriated museum funds—a reminder that even a management voice praising a labor deal doesn’t settle the larger, separate questions an institution can face about its own leadership.

Workers aren’t arguing that they don’t care about the mission; they’re arguing that caring about it is exactly why they want more say in how the organization runs.

That progression is why workers often describe unions as more than a mechanism for higher pay. A contract can set rules for how decisions get made, how grievances are handled, and what protections exist when management changes direction—a form of workplace democracy, even if it’s not identical to democracy in government. Employees don’t elect their CEOs, and a union doesn’t turn a nonprofit into a cooperative. But collective bargaining can redistribute some decision-making power by requiring management to negotiate over certain conditions of employment, which matters most in organizations whose missions depend on public trust and democratic values.

Applying the Mission Inward

This raises a question about a tension within the nonprofit sector: Employees can be deeply committed to an organization’s mission while still needing adequate pay, manageable workloads and a meaningful voice in decisions that affect their work. As the Associated Press reported in 2023, nonprofit workers have faced low pay, high stress, understaffing and rising workloads. A person can believe deeply in a mission and still need a salary that covers rent, a manageable caseload and transparency from an employer that asks other institutions to uphold those same values.

A nonprofit can promise equity; a contract can require specific pay standards.

That may be the deeper significance of nonprofit unionization. Workers aren’t arguing that they don’t care about the mission; they’re arguing that caring about it is exactly why they want more say in how the organization runs. It also suggests that workplace dignity is becoming part of how nonprofit accountability gets defined. For decades, that accountability was measured mostly by how organizations spent donated money and whether their programs hit their goals. Workers are adding another measure: how the organization treats the people responsible for carrying out its mission.

Through 2025 and 2026, NPEU has continued announcing organizing wins and new contracts, including the Carnegie and Pew elections and the Healthcare Anchor Network’s successor agreement, and its membership now spans thousands of nonprofit workers. The question is no longer whether nonprofit employees can unionize. They can. The more consequential question is what happens after they do: Some organizations have responded with negotiated agreements that improve wages, leave, and workplace protections while others have faced contentious bargaining, strikes, or disputes over enforcement. Those differences show that unionization creates a structure through which workers can exercise power. However, the quality of that democracy still depends on whether management treats workers as legitimate participants in how the organization is run.

[I]t’s difficult to advocate for a more democratic society while running a workplace where employees have little real influence over their own conditions of work.

For workers, unionization offers something a mission statement can’t: enforceable rights. A nonprofit can promise equity; a contract can require specific pay standards. An organization can say it values transparency; workers can negotiate provisions governing how information and decisions get shared. A leadership team can call employees essential to the mission; a union gives those employees a collective way to hold the organization to that claim.

The nonprofit labor movement is, in effect, forcing organizations to confront a basic contradiction: It’s difficult to advocate for a more democratic society while running a workplace where employees have little real influence over their own conditions of work. The workers organizing inside these institutions aren’t asking them to abandon their missions. They’re asking them to apply those missions inward, and increasingly, they’re using collective power to make sure that happens.

The principles of participatory coordination become more tangible when translated into a practical platform framework. Rather than creating another centralized charity system, such a platform would function as a lightweight orchestration layer connecting three forms of community capacity: human expression and need, underutilized resources, and voluntary contribution.

Human Expression and Need

Rather than viewing people’s needs only as standardized data, the platform can provide a way for individuals to express their immediate requirements and, where they choose, their interests, creative work, skills, or aspirations. With appropriate safeguards and validation through trusted partner organizations—such as youth centers, shelters, or social service agencies—or through appropriately trained and authorized community participants, individuals can be represented as whole human beings rather than as lists of needs.

The purpose is not to make support conditional on what someone can contribute. It is to ensure that people have the opportunity to be seen beyond their immediate circumstances.

Asset and Resource

Supporters and organizations can contribute not only through financial assistance, but also by making underutilized resources visible. These may include surplus materials, excess inventory, unused spaces, transportation capacity, professional expertise, knowledge sharing, or other assets that might otherwise remain disconnected from community needs.

By revealing and reconnecting these hidden resources to the people and opportunities that can benefit from them, the system expands the definition of what a community can contribute. A wedding venue, for example, might register floral arrangements that would otherwise be discarded after an event.

Volunteer and Orchestration

Volunteers play an essential role in orchestration. They can make their available time, skills, transportation, workspace, and level of commitment visible. Rather than functioning only as request processors or delivery agents, they can help identify connections among people, resources, and capabilities and collaboratively design appropriate ways to turn those connections into meaningful relationships and outcomes.

Consider Jack, a child supported by a youth center. His immediate need is a blue winter jacket. At the same time, with the appropriate consent and support of the youth center, one of his drawings—a basket of flowers—has been shared as an expression of his creativity.

Around the same time, a local event organizer makes surplus flowers from a recent wedding available through the platform. Volunteers recognize a possible connection. One volunteer collects the flowers, another provides access to a suitable workspace, and others transform the flowers into an arrangement inspired by Jack’s drawing.

The resulting arrangement is then offered through the platform at a price intended to contribute directly to the cost of Jack’s blue jacket. The supporter receives not only the floral piece but also a clear account of how the purchase contributes to meeting Jack’s identified need. Another volunteer completes the final delivery of the flowers to the supporter, while the proceeds are used to purchase the specific item Jack needs.

To complete the circle of trust, the platform provides traceability across the exchange. The supporter receives confirmation of the purchase and, where appropriate and with the necessary consent and privacy safeguards, confirmation that the jacket has been delivered to the youth center. The purpose is not surveillance or proof for its own sake, but to close the loop between contribution and value—allowing supporters to see that their participation translated into a tangible result. For the supporter, this is where the ritual begins: the contribution is connected to a human story, the outcome becomes visible, and the possibility of continued participation emerges.

The important outcome is not the flower arrangement itself. It is the coordination that made the outcome possible.

A material surplus that might otherwise have become waste becomes an input for creative expression. A child’s drawing becomes visible beyond the walls of a youth center, allowing Jack to see how his imagination can become a tangible outcome. Volunteers contribute not simply labor, but creativity, innovation, coordination, and practical capabilities. A supporter participates through a transparent, meaningful exchange rather than an anonymous financial transaction. And Jack’s need is addressed without reducing him to that need.

The platform does not need to determine a person’s value or assign them a permanent role. Jack is not merely a recipient because he needs a jacket. In another context, his creativity may become a contribution to someone else. Likewise, a supporter may become a volunteer, and a volunteer may eventually need support themselves.

The architecture therefore remains fluid. Its purpose is not to organize people into fixed categories of giver, volunteer, and recipient, but to create the conditions in which people can participate in different ways as their circumstances change over time.

In this sense, technology is not the innovation itself. The innovation lies in the orchestration model by making human expression, underutilized capacity, and community resources visible enough to be connected at the right moment.

The platform simply provides the infrastructure through which those connections can emerge. Because this architecture is not inherently tied to a single geography, participation could also cross borders. For example, a person facing a challenge could be in Africa, volunteers could contribute from Asia, and supporters could participate from Europe.

The model also suggests that social systems do not need to choose between organizational efficiency and human empathy. Organizational efficiency can be strengthened by human connection rather than achieved at its expense. By intentionally remaining asset-light—relying on existing community spaces, donated materials, and distributed volunteer routes—the platform can minimize capital overhead while maximizing shared value.

Designing for Human Motivation

The power of participatory coordination extends beyond the efficient movement of resources. At its core, it reshapes the human experience of giving, contributing, and receiving support.

Traditional support systems often separate people into fixed roles: those who provide, those who organize, and those who receive. While operationally efficient, these rigid boundaries can unintentionally stifle deeper human needs for recognition, choice, connection, and equity.

A participatory model creates a fundamentally different experience for each participant:

• For supporters,contribution becomes more than assistance. They experience a stronger, visible connection between what they give and the lives they help to improve. They gain the autonomy to choose how they contribute, developing deeper relationships with the communities they support while empowering those facing adversity. Their role evolves from simply providing capital to becoming active participants in creating social value.
• For volunteers,participation moves beyond task execution. They become connectors who activate capabilities, build relationships, and help transform hidden potential into tangible reality. Their work gains greater autonomy, purpose, clarity, and deeper collaboration.
• For community members facing challenges,the most important transformation is the shift from social passivity to active agency. They are no longer just recipients of support; they are individuals who experience belonging while retaining the opportunity to choose how they participate. Participation can create opportunities to rebuild confidence, strengthen capabilities, and gradually re-engage with the community as equals.

In this way, participatory coordination does not simply match needs with resources. It creates an ecosystem where people experience dignity through recognition, agency through choice, connection through relationships, and fairness through meaningful participation.

The Future of Social Design

As we look toward the future of social infrastructure, our metrics of success must expand.

Traditional systems often measure impact through volume, cost, and speed. While these metrics remain necessary, they are fundamentally incomplete. To build resilient communities, we must also consider:

• Agency: the degree to which individuals influence their own outcomes
• Connection: the durability of human relationships formed through repeated, meaningful participation
• Meaning Creation: the transformation of surplus resources into shared value.

Ultimately, people are not defined by their scarcity, but by what they can still create, share, and become. In the future of social design, dignity should never be treated as an accidental byproduct of a transaction. It should be treated as a primary design requirement.

The true measure of social infrastructure is not only how efficiently it moves resources, but how effectively it preserves human dignity. Participatory coordination demands not greater sacrifice from communities, but a broader vision that encompasses unmet needs, inherent capabilities, untapped resources, and expanded pathways for involvement.

By shifting our paradigm from passive charity to participatory orchestration, we can create systems where every individual has the opportunity to be seen, heard, and respected.

In 2024, we saw the tightest congressional race in California’s 13th district, with the House of Representatives race being decided by 187 votes. For context, that means that less than a tenth of one percent of the 210,000 voters made the difference.

Our organization, Asian Americans Rise, registered 702 voters in the district earlier that year; 454 of them turned out to vote.

A single, modestly funded registration effort added more than twice the number of voters that ultimately separated the winner from loser.

Now multiply that across the country. In 2024, 13 US House races were decided by fewer than 8,000 votes apiece. Zoom in and it gets starker: the entire majority turned on just 7,309 votes—the combined margin of the three seats that flipped control of Congress. At those margins, the election isn’t necessarily won by the best argument. It’s won by whoever did the unglamorous work of finding eligible people, registering them, and getting them to the polls.

We are told, election after election, that low turnout is a story about apathy—that people don’t vote because they don’t care. That explanation is comfortable but doesn’t tell the full story. In our experience, people who don’t vote are people the system never reached in time—they were never asked at the DMV, never contacted in a language they speak, never given a reason to believe their ballot would count in time to cast it.

Apathy Is a Convenient Lie

The uncomfortable truth is that this country never built voter registration to work at national scale. Historically, it was designed as a gate. What exists today is a fragmented ecosystem defined by:

• Local silos. Civic engagement is organized state-by-state and org-by-org, with little ability to redeploy resources quickly to where elections are actually competitive.
• Short time horizons. Most operations—including state party infrastructure—spin up months before Election Day and dissolve immediately after, taking institutional knowledge with them.
• Inconsistent data systems: Voter files, outreach tools, and field operations often don’t integrate, slowing execution.
• Volunteer-heavy models: Work that now requires logistics, data, and compliance is still treated as episodic grassroots labor.
• Episodic funding: Resources arrive late, unevenly, and often after strategic windows have closed.
• Candidates: they are incentivized to spend their money on their own name recognition instead of voter participation that benefits all races.

We would never tolerate this in disaster response. We don’t rebuild the emergency system from scratch every time a hurricane forms, then disband it once the storm passes. Yet that is exactly how we treat the machinery of democracy.

A Tale of Two Districts

In 2024, we tried something different. Asian Americans Rise targeted 12 toss-up congressional districts with large, historically under-registered Asian American populations. Instead of a last-minute turnout push, we built a registration-first system months in advance.

We used voter-file analysis and demographic modeling to find people who were eligible but unregistered. We reached them with direct mail and follow-up texts tailored to each district’s rules and deadlines. And we treated registration and turnout not as two separate campaigns, but as one continuous system.

The lesson was simple and decisive: When outreach is early, consistent, and credible, voters show up.

Why This Doesn’t Happen Everywhere

Registration is largely left to state parties that face high staff turnover and rarely have the funding or technical know-how to run mass registration year-round. So a proven, repeatable method stays the exception—not because it doesn’t work, but because no one owns the job of making it standard.

This is not a messaging problem. Better ads won’t fix a system that never contacts the voter in the first place. It’s an infrastructure problem, and infrastructure problems have infrastructure solutions:

• Permanent, professional registration operations that run year-round, not just in the frantic months before an election.
• A national database of unregistered but eligible voters that any on-the-ground organizer can use to target outreach by canvass, phone, text, or mail.
• Dedicated, durable funding—including a standing commitment that a small share of candidate campaign dollars, say 5 percent, is set aside for registration and turnout that lifts every candidate up and down the ballot.

In short, treat voter engagement as infrastructure, not charity.

This story was originally published by Mother Jones and can be read here.

Last year, on Labor Day weekend, an immigration attorney named Cooper Richardson spent her Saturday calling the Phoenix-area shelter where one of her clients—a child from Guatemala—was being held. She was checking to see if Immigration and Customs Enforcement was on the way: Her colleagues at the Florence Immigrant & Refugee Rights Project had received word that the Trump administration was finalizing plans to summarily deport the roughly 600 unaccompanied Guatemalan children detained across the country.

Richardson made one last call before she went to bed—and that’s when she learned the shelter had been told to have her client ready to leave within two hours. She rushed to her car, then spent the half-hour drive calling colleagues to see if they had advice for how she could ensure her client wasn’t taken. “I was nervous and shaking and scared,” she says, “and I’m not the one who might have been put on a plane.”

That frantic weekend is indicative of the immense pressure that Trump’s campaign to deport roughly 14 million undocumented Americans has put on legal aid groups.

Ana Islas, who heads the Florence Project’s Tucson office, was on the other end of one of those calls. She had pulled together a rapid response team of lawyers and social workers available over the holiday weekend—a blood-pressure-spiking task in the best of times, made even more so by the Trump administration’s effort to cut off more than $200 million in federal funding for the legal defense of migrant children. Like many of its peers around the country, the Florence Project had been forced into layoffs earlier in the year, which meant the remaining attorneys were working longer hours to ensure clients got the representation they needed. “I talked to about 30 kids that Friday,” Islas says. “Including one as young as 3 years old.”

After Richardson arrived at the shelter outside Phoenix, she talked quietly with her client while the other detained children remained in their beds, trying to sleep. When a van from a company contracted to transport migrants arrived, Richardson met the drivers at the door. As soon as she explained who she was, they got on the phone. “I don’t think they were expecting to have any resistance,” she says. The contractors left; early Sunday morning, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order against the Department of Homeland Security, which was forced to bring the children who had already been put on planes back to their shelters.

That frantic weekend is indicative of the immense pressure that Donald Trump’s campaign to deport roughly 14 million undocumented Americans has put on legal aid groups, whose work often goes beyond representation in immigration court to include giving know-your-rights presentations at shelters and employing social workers to connect migrants with housing and food assistance.

Within his first few months in office, Trump ended “humanitarian parole” for the 1.4 million refugees and migrants who entered the country during the Biden administration and appointed an acting director of ICE who pledged to make deportations as efficient as Amazon Prime, “but for human beings.” Since then, Trump has invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to remove migrants accused of a violent or drug-related crime without a trial, terminated Temporary Protected Status for 350,000 Haitian migrants, canceled the resettlement of all refugees who aren’t white South Africans, and closed ports of entry to asylum seekers. Ever more hardline policies continue to be batted around the White House, with adviser Stephen Miller pushing the president to invoke the Insurrection Act to quell anti-ICE protests and unilaterally suspend habeas corpus for the undocumented.

The impact of these policies has been amplified over the past 20 months by the Trump administration’s quieter efforts to defund the nonprofit legal aid organizations that provide free assistance and representation for migrants. Immigration law is infamous for its impossible hours and laughable salaries, but since early 2025 the sense of purpose that animates so many immigration attorneys has been tested by the federal government’s efforts to target them—and their budgets. The ensuing chaos nearly broke them.

In the first few months of 2025, the Trump administration attempted to cancel around $267 million in federal spending on legal aid for migrants. That effort was headlined by the attempt to cancel the Unaccompanied Children Program, which provides legal representation for more than 20,000 kids by attorneys at nearly 100 organizations, but the White House didn’t stop there: It also set out to kill an initiative providing legal support for families that had been separated during the first Trump administration, as well as a suite of programs that fund basic legal orientation services for immigrants in ICE detention.

Texas’ Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services was hit particularly hard by the sudden withdrawal of federal funding. In an all-staff email sent a week after the Unaccompanied Children Program was taken offline last March, then-CEO Dolores Schroeder wrote that the contract covered more than half of RAICES’ annual budget, and its cancellation would require laying off 159 employees, adding to the 61 layoffs that had been announced a month earlier, after the Trump administration eliminated funding for refugee resettlement programs.

Georgianna Pisano Goetz recalls looking up from reading that email to see colleagues in RAICES’ Houston office just as shocked as she was. “There’s no meeting with a supervisor, no inclination around the office that this is happening,” she says. The next week, the woman who oversaw operations in Houston was gone. Goetz remembers the office feeling like “a real madhouse,” with everyone comparing notes about who else had been laid off and wondering aloud “Who’s our boss?” or “What are we supposed to do?” After the smoke cleared, less than half of RAICES employees across Texas still had jobs.

For legal aid groups all over America, recovery from the tumultuous early months of the second Trump administration has been excruciating. Some organizations, like the Florence Project and the Immigrant Defenders Law Center (ImmDef) in Los Angeles, were able to quickly rebound from forced layoffs. Others have shrunk in the face of the MAGA onslaught at a time when their services have never been more needed.

After the smoke cleared, less than half of RAICES employees across Texas still had jobs.

The pressure only ratcheted up over the winter, when immigration enforcement sweeps in Chicago, New Orleans, and Minneapolis hit at the same time philanthropic sources of legal aid funding—like the Soros family’s Open Society Foundations—were being threatened with investigations from the Justice Department and the IRS. The latest body blow came in August, when a no-bid contract to administer the entirety of the Unaccompanied Children Program was awarded to a group called Our Rescue, an anti-sex-trafficking outfit that is led by a former ICE administrator and has no history of providing legal representation.

Through it all, the shifting immigration landscape has presented a succession of new hurdles. “Our work has changed dramatically,” says Lindsay Toczylowski, the leader of ImmDef. While previously much of the group’s work had been oriented around migrants claiming asylum upon reaching a port of entry, Toczylowski says the vast majority of new clients are “people who’ve lived in Southern California for 10, 20 years, most with no criminal history, many with US citizen children and grandchildren, who are being picked up through racial profiling and warrantless arrests and being thrown into detention centers.”

Pivoting from representing clients awaiting their court date while on humanitarian parole to people in detention is a massive shift, with ImmDef’s lawyers now making frequent trips to remote facilities to consult with their clients. Likewise, the summary detention of so many migrants by ICE has forced lawyers with limited expertise in immigration to learn how to file habeas corpus petitions in federal courts. Meeting so many new challenges while scrambling for funding has only made the situation feel more dire. California, New York, and other blue states have stepped up with new grants that have allowed organizations to replenish staff over the past year, but that support still hasn’t been sufficient to alter the exhausting reality every legal aid group in America is facing: more work, less money.

The first significant wave of undocumented migrants crossing the southern border came in the late 1970s, when tens of thousands of Salvadorans and Nicaraguans fled civil war. Though some of these refugees initially received legal assistance from aid groups that dated to the civil rights movement, in 1980 Congress prohibited the federally funded Legal Services Corporation from offering its legal aid to anyone but American citizens. This meant that the legal aid groups geared solely to migrants that were founded in the ’80s (including RAICES and the Florence Project) initially relied on philanthropic or local government grants.

That began to change in 1993, when the Supreme Court ruled in Reno v. Flores that “the Fifth Amendment entitles aliens to due process of law in deportation proceedings.” Subsequent litigation compelled the federal government to extend due process to particularly vulnerable migrants, which it mostly did by setting up block grants that legal aid groups could apply for. The most prominent of these is the Unaccompanied Children Program, which was created after a 2008 law required the government to provide counsel to children who arrive in the United States without a guardian.

These grants helped legal aid groups become more firmly established during the Obama administration, but it was only after Trump first came to power in 2017 that they really entered the public eye. That winter, ImmDef’s Toczylowski was one of the hundreds of lawyers who showed up at LAX days after Trump’s inauguration in response to his attempt to prohibit travelers from seven majority-Muslim nations from entering the country. Airport terminals packed with protesters became an early flashpoint of public resistance to Trump’s immigration regime, and groups like ImmDef used the ensuing uproar to raise the money necessary to meet the growing need for migrant legal defense.

ImmDef was raising almost $6 million a year by 2020. It was hardly the only group to find itself flush with cash. RAICES brought in more than $25 million to support its family reunification initiatives; in California, Al Otro Lado drew national attention after filing suit on behalf of six refugees whom Customs and Border Patrol refused to admit across the southern border, leading to a $2 million jump in annual revenue for the small organization.

As she prepared ImmDef staff to confront the second Trump administration in late 2024, Toczylowski put together a presentation that doubled as a highlight reel from those years. “How did we survive and thrive in the first Trump administration?” Toczylowski asked her team, which has grown to more than 200—large enough that she needed a microphone to address them. She reviewed every phase of ImmDef’s resistance, from Remain in Mexico to family separation, to remind the organization, “We were on the front lines of all of those struggles.”

With tens of millions of dollars in funding withheld, the bottom quickly fell out of a number of organizations. Lawyers soon cut clients adrift.

Almost immediately, though, groups like ImmDef were confronting unforeseen obstacles. On day two of the new Trump administration, the nonprofit that allocates the bulk of federal funding for migrant legal aid, the Acacia Center for Justice, received a stop-work order on all of its legal orientation program grants, which totaled almost $27 million. Sara Van Hofwegen, the managing director of the Acacia Center’s legal access programs, says legal orientation initiatives previously enjoyed bipartisan support. “They made everybody’s job easier,” she explains. The funding helped aid workers guide a detainee through the legal process by giving them a presentation or materials to review so they “can come to court saying, ‘I think I’m eligible for asylum, I want to apply.’”

Though that money was briefly restored while a court challenge played out, legal orientation was fully terminated last April. Now, Van Hofwegen says, “Those programs do not exist.”

The Trump administration had more latitude to do away with the legal orientation programs than it did the three contracts with the Acacia Center that had been created by court orders or an act of Congress, including the Unaccompanied Children Program. Nevertheless, last March, the Trump administration unilaterally pulled the more than $200 million directed to those contracts. It was as shocking as it was illegal.

Several litigators, including the ACLU and ImmDef, immediately sued to reinstate all three programs administered by the Acacia Center. But with tens of millions of dollars in funding withheld, the bottom quickly fell out of a number of organizations. Lawyers soon cut clients adrift.

After the all-staff email from Dolores Schroeder, RAICES’s Georgianna Pisano Goetz says, “We had a 60-day period where they were like, ‘No new clients’—and not only no new clients, but ‘No consultations, no pro se workshops, and withdraw from every single pro bono client.’” Though the organization disseminated detailed guidelines for transferring cases, it was up to the lawyers who had been laid off to contact their clients to explain that they were going to have to withdraw from representing them.

Not only were lawyers and social workers losing their jobs, but management appeared to be in retreat, raising fears that they were capitulating to Trump.

One told me about putting together a long email detailing every case they were working on in hopes that their supervisors would find somebody to take on clients they weren’t able to personally refer to another lawyer. The attorney said they never received a response. (A RAICES spokesperson disputed this account.)

In an email, Faisal Al-Juburi, the co-CEO of RAICES wrote, “Our team’s extraordinary effort last spring kept RAICES standing to serve our communities. Within days, we established a case triage and wind-down framework, issued procedural updates, led live trainings, and built robust referral systems.” Al-Juburi said he was particularly proud that RAICES was able to maintain services for families and individuals detained at the infamous facility in Dilley, Texas. “To fulfill our mission,” he continued, “we must acknowledge that this administration is actively upending legal norms and escalating violence in communities nationwide. We bear a responsibility to adapt to this shifting landscape to safeguard our core work.”

Elsewhere, not only were lawyers and social workers losing their jobs, but management appeared to be in retreat, raising fears that they, like so many other American institutions, were capitulating to Trump. That spring, nine white-shoe law firms pledged $940 million in pro bono work to the administration, Columbia University agreed to pay $221 million to the federal government to end its probe of antisemitism on campus, and the CEOs of dozens of companies joined Trump on an official visit to the Middle East.

Meanwhile, Al Otro Lado laid off eight employees and fired two more with cause—eliminating a quarter of its unionized workforce—while also pulling out of California state grants geared toward legal representation for refugees. The employees that remained became concerned that their leaders were falling in line, too, with several theorizing that, by exclusively focusing on helping migrants on the Mexican side of the border, Al Otro Lado could avoid confrontation with the Trump administration while at the same time taking advantage of Mexico’s permissive labor laws and low cost of living (management had rejected previous campaigns by the union to equalize pay between its Mexican and American lawyers).

Melissa Flores, a spokesperson for the organization, denied that any shift in priorities away from migrants in the United States was ever on the table. “Like many organizations in our field, we’ve had to navigate difficult terrain—but our focus has never wavered,” she wrote in an email. “We remain steadfast in our mission to defend and uplift the rights of immigrants, asylum seekers, and deportees on both sides of the border.” Indeed, Al Otro Lado has begun hiring again in the United States, which union members hailed as a direct result of the pressure they’ve put on the organization’s leadership. This August, management finally agreed to negotiate with the union after 18 months of resistance.

The union-management tensions at Al Otro Lado are hardly unique. Two days before Schroeder announced that RAICES had lost more than half of its budget, the organization had agreed to a wrongful-termination settlement with a union lawyer named Maria Osornio who had been fired in December 2023. A longtime leader in the group’s appeals division, Osornio had publicly protested Schroeder’s decision to wind down her office in 2024. She was terminated shortly afterward, in part for allegedly bullying another employee.

“It’s such a disservice to the people who really need our help to put ego before talent,” Osornio says. “We were spending so much time fighting with our bosses instead of focusing on the issues.” The organization found itself paying $225,000 to Osornio, and trying to heal internal tensions, at the same time the government tore a multimillion-dollar hole in its balance sheet.

Asked about the settlement with Osornio, a spokesperson for RAICES declined to comment on “specific personnel matters,” but called the timing “purely coincidental.”

A similar situation transpired in New York City last spring, when the nonprofit Bronx Defenders put an attorney named Sophia Gurulé on unpaid leave for “multiple recent performance failures,” namely a handful of late court filings. Gurulé had never faced any disciplinary action before, and soon 24 colleagues signed a protest letter to Bronx Defenders’ executive director, Juval Scott, alleging that she’d been suspended for her vocal union advocacy. “We’ve witnessed a mind-boggling number of changes in federal regulations, agency precedent, and circuit case law that radically reshaped an already complex area of law,” the lawyers wrote. “Suspending Sophia at a time where the Immigration Practice…is hanging on by a thread is inappropriate, concerning, and harmful to staff and clients alike.”

A spokesperson for Bronx Defenders said that while the organization doesn’t comment on personnel matters, “what we can say is that every decision we make is guided by our responsibility to the people we represent and the Bronx communities we serve.” The spokesperson specifically objected to the characterization that the organization’s immigration practice had been hampered by the suspension of Gurulé, pointing out that around the same time it had secured emergency funding from New York’s city council, hired new immigration attorneys, and provided training on filing habeas corpus petitions.

The simmering tension at Bronx Defenders, RAICES, Al Otro Lado, and other organizations hasn’t stopped them from playing crucial roles in the broader fight to defend migrants in court. Still, their inability to speedily resolve whatever personnel issues arise has been a counterproductive distraction. “I want to be out there helping,” Osornio says. “That’s what’s so heartbreaking: I want to be out there advocating, but I essentially lost my job for calling out the C-suite.”

Ana Islas, from the Florence Project, was one of the few dozen supervising attorneys from all over the country who attended an Acacia Center conference in Atlanta the same weekend that the administration pulled funding for the Unaccompanied Children Program. Midway through a presentation in a hotel conference room, everyone’s phone lit up. The agenda had to be put on hold as attorneys ducked into the hall to confer with their colleagues. Waiting for her flight home to Tucson, Islas remembers sitting in the terminal with her mind racing: “The kids are here and they need to know their rights even if we’re not representing them. And if we are representing them, we can’t just drop them like a hot potato.”

By and large, immigration attorneys have remained focused on that mission. “We are winning cases despite all the terrible stuff that’s happening out there,” says Chiqui Sanchez Kennedy, the leader of the Galveston-Houston Immigrant Representation Project. “We are gaining asylum for our clients. We’re getting clients released from detention.”

For many attorneys, the sense of momentum felt like it began to turn in their favor last September, when the Acacia Center was finally able to begin restoring funding for the Unaccompanied Children Program after a series of court orders ended six months of uncertainty. I talked to Van Hofwegen when the last suspended grants had been restored, but she sounded less triumphant than steely, acknowledging that more threats lay on the horizon. “I think the cuts to federal funding are really clearly happening in this larger context of a federal government that wants to make it as difficult as possible for immigrants to navigate their legal process and who wants to remove legal access and due process as much as possible from folks,” she says.

ImmDef’s Toczylowski agreed, telling me, “It’s an assault from all angles on the organizations that serve immigrant communities.” One of the more alarming vectors of that assault is the demand by the former chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn.), that 215 NGOs provide records to the panel about how they “benefited from the border crisis created by the Biden Administration.”

In this climate of ever-changing rules and constant threats of funding cuts, legal aid organizations cannot afford to allow internal backbiting and score settling detract from their core missions. In May, an arbitrator found that Sophia Gurulé had been unlawfully terminated under the terms of her union’s collective bargaining agreement with the Bronx Defenders, even as the arbitrator didn’t dispute the organization’s reasons for suspending her. “I feel vindicated,” Gurulé told me. She added: “It is sad that a public defender nonprofit located in the South Bronx, historically one of the poorest congressional districts in the country, spent a year and who knows how many thousands of dollars to try to justify their bad behavior.”

“Where are the lawyers for the kids? They’re at the nonprofits doing this work without pay, and that’s because we are qualified, dedicated, mission-driven people.”

Aside from a few notable exceptions, most legal aid organizations have managed to get out of their own way this year and settled into a grinding legal war with the Trump administration.  That made them better prepared for the most recent assault, an overhaul of the Unaccompanied Children Program that Roxana Avila-Cimpeanu, from the Florence Project, calls “monumental.” Under a new plan proposed by the Department of Health and Human Services, pro bono representation would be prioritized—a cost cutting measure that would mean detained children were working with attorneys with little immigration expertise—and all lawyers would be limited to virtual consultations with detained children. Avila-Cimpeanu says these changes could be devastating because there’s no substitute for “being able to meet in person with the child and really having them know that we don’t work for the shelter, we don’t work for the government. We’re there for them.”

In August, the administration awarded a $158 million contract to administer the entirety of the new version of the Unaccompanied Children Program to a group called Our Rescue, whose operations are devoted to stopping sex trafficking and do not currently include any sort of legal assistance. Notably, the group is led by a former ICE official named Derek Benner and was founded by another former ICE employee, Tim Ballard. The latter is best known for being portrayed in a popular QAnon-backed anti-sex trafficking film, Sound of Freedom, which came out shortly before he himself was accused of sexual coercion by seven women. (Ballard has denied the allegations, even as he resigned from Our Rescue after they became public. Our Rescue did not respond to emailed questions about its capacity for providing legal representation to migrant children.)

At a virtual event organized by the Acacia Center a month after funding for the Unaccompanied Children Program lapsed, Michael Lukens, the head of the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, rejected the idea that Our Rescue can provide the same services as organizations like his. “Our Rescue does not do this work,” he said. “They are not qualified, and there has been no indication that that contract has been signed, that work has started, that Our Rescue has made any move to actually help a child.” That puts Lukens and his peers in the unsustainable position of working pro bono for the foreseeable future. “Where are the lawyers for the kids? Right now, they’re at the nonprofits who are doing this work without pay, and that’s because we are qualified, dedicated, mission-driven people.”

At the same time the old system for funding legal aid for migrant children has been detonated, the administration has spent the past few months illegally withholding payment for work done under the old Unaccompanied Children Program contract. This means that, yet again, nonprofits are scrambling to provide needed services. Avila-Cimpeanu says that Florence Project will find a way to continue representing its clients on a pro bono basis, a resolve shared even by lawyers at nonprofits without the same resources.

Melissa Lopez, the head of a small group in Texas called Estrella del Paso, posted a “heartbreaking update” in late July, saying that she had been forced to lay off 13 staffers because the administration was overdue on nearly $1 million in payments for completed work. Still, Lopez said, “We currently represent about 243 unaccompanied children. We have an ethical, legal, and moral obligation to continue representing these children, and with or without money from the federal government, we must do that.”

Nearly every lawyer I spoke with over the past year reflected on the reality that the Trump administration will keep finding ways to deny migrants their legal rights for as long as they’re in power. For many, finding the motivation to continue fighting requires staying connected to the clients themselves. Sanchez Kennedy, from the Galveston-Houston Immigrant Representation Project, makes a point of commemorating every case with her team, even the unsuccessful ones. “We call them hard-fought losses,” she says. “Every time we help a client access due process and actively participate in their immigration case, help them defend themselves against deportation—that means that they are getting a fair shot. That alone is worth celebrating.”