She’s set up benches and toys outside for Chago and his friends to play with, strung lights over the trailer the way she used to over her front door, and hung up a smiling sun ornament that looks like the one they lost in the flooding that devastated parts of southeastern San Diego on Jan. 22, 2024. 

But lately Chago has been asking Calix a question that breaks her heart, one that she doesn’t know the answer to: Will we ever live in an apartment again?

“I basically told him, ‘We’re not going to be able to move soon,’” Calix said, sitting outside her trailer on a recent evening. “How do I explain the current housing market to an 8-year-old?”

Calix and Chago are among approximately 5,000 San Diego–area residents impacted by the historic downpour last January that led to dramatic flooding in parts of the city and county, with particularly severe damage in Southcrest and Shelltown. The mother and son were among hundreds of people who suffered severe property damage and displacement. Five people died.

While some flood survivors have been able to return home, many others are still struggling to recover, rebuild their homes, or find new places to live. Some survivors, particularly renters like Calix, have been forced to restart life elsewhere, with little hope of returning to their old communities.

Extreme flooding events, even in regions typically associated with dry weather like Southern California, are becoming more common as the climate warms. Climate change, driven primarily by burning fossil fuels, is changing weather patterns, leading to heavier and more dangerous downpours that can overwhelm infrastructure designed for more predictable times. 

But Calix and others impacted by the disaster insist there is another force that exacerbated the flooding, one that also led to what many see as a disjointed and inadequate disaster response: decades of government neglect and indifference toward San Diego’s lower-income neighborhoods.

These neighborhoods, located primarily in southeastern San Diego where much of the flooding happened, are among the most economically stressed and environmentally burdened areas in the region. They were also historically redlined—a racist, government-sponsored practice that made it difficult for people in those neighborhoods to get financial services such as mortgages and insurance, and concentrated low-income and people of color in flood-prone areas.

Residents say the legacy of discrimination continues to this day through lack of city investment in flood-control infrastructure and inadequate disaster planning and support for those affected. The result is even greater hardship and precarity for people and communities already on the edge. The situation is also a microcosm of the inequitable distribution of risks from climate change, and an example of the challenges communities and governments must grapple with as floods and other weather-related disasters become more frequent.

“What happened on that day was a planning disaster,” says Andrea Guerrero, executive director of Alliance San Diego, a community organization whose offices in Barrio Logan were damaged in the flood. “That climate event happened throughout the county, but where was it felt, it was felt in the places where the city had failed to modernize and update its infrastructure.” 

Alliance San Diego is among approximately 700 people and organizations now suing the city, alleging it failed to maintain stormwater infrastructure, and instead prioritized investments in wealthier communities. They point to a 2020 city report that said segments of Chollas Creek, which flooded during the storm, had not been maintained and had the potential to cause property damage. The lawsuit also notes the city’s admission of a severe lack of funding to maintain stormwater infrastructure. Last year, the city estimated it needed about $9 billion in infrastructure upgrades.  

Nicole Darling, director of communications for the city, said it does not comment on pending litigation. But she said the city dispatched more than 300 staff members to clean out storm drains and inlets before the rainstorm, including critical drains in the Chollas Creek area. One segment, close to Beta Street in Southcrest, which suffered severe damage, was scheduled for upcoming debris removal at the time the storm happened, she said in an email. 

Darling emphasized that the storm was historic and its impact unpredictable. “This was an unprecedented storm,” she said. “It was the fourth wettest day in history. We’ve never seen this level of flooding before.”

Guerrero and others participating in the lawsuit said they want the city to compensate survivors for their losses and do more to prevent the Chollas Creek stormwater channel from flooding. Some community organizers and flood survivors are demanding other changes as well. 

Clariza Marin, chief financial officer for the Harvey Family Foundation, a community organization that has been on the front lines of helping those affected, said the response on the ground has been chaotic. She said local authorities need to work in collaboration with residents to create a disaster preparedness plan that reflects what community members need, so they can be better prepared for future disasters.

She and other residents interviewed said they also want the city and county to provide more support to help the many survivors, both homeowners and former renters, who either didn’t receive aid or didn’t get enough to help them rebuild their lives. This would include assisting people like Calix who were displaced from the floods but didn’t benefit from county and city financial aid to help them find housing. “All of our resiliency planning should be community driven,” Marin says. “It shouldn’t be about scrambling to tell (residents) what I can do for you, what you’re going to have to accept.”

Darling pointed to various efforts by the city to support flood survivors, including money for temporary lodging and help for small businesses. She said city officials have been attending public meetings and listening to community feedback since the disaster. She added that the city has also been distributing pamphlets to residents living in floodplain areas about how to prepare for potential flooding in the future.  

Neglected Communities

Calix, who is part African American, liked the multicultural community in the area around Beta Street in Southcrest where she and Chago settled in 2020. The sounds and smells were familiar. She felt comfortable. She liked the cost of rent even more—$1,500 for two bedrooms, the same as she’d paid for a one-bedroom apartment in the northern, more expensive part of the city.

About 80 years ago, the federal government categorized large swaths of southeastern San Diego, such as Southcrest, as “hazardous,” declaring that the properties there were “high risk” for defaulting on loans largely because of the people who lived there: laborers, immigrants, and people of color.

Although redlining has since been outlawed, its impact continues to this day, with people in historically redlined communities experiencing higher rates of poverty and ill health than those in other non-redlined areas. Southcrest, Shelltown, and other neighborhoods that suffered flood damage, including Logan Heights and Barrio Logan, have disproportionately higher rates of residents living in poverty compared to other parts of the city. These residents are also exposed to other negative factors that can impact their health, such as pollution from diesel fumes, hazardous waste sites, and lead from housing, according to California’s Environmental Protection Agency.   

It’s these types of economically and environmentally stressed locations that climate scientists say are most vulnerable to flooding, and where populations have the hardest time recovering from natural disasters. People of color and those living in mobile homes, in particular, are disproportionately exposed to flooding, research shows. And these same populations as well as low-income people in general, have the most difficulty accessing federal flood disaster assistance.

“We know that risks of climate change are absolutely higher in communities of concern or communities that are historically marginalized,” says Darbi Berry, director of climate and environmental programs at the University of San Diego’s Nonprofit Institute and director of the San Diego Regional Climate Collaborative.

But southeastern San Diego is also a haven for people priced out from more affluent areas of the city. Some neighborhoods are full of paid-off homes where families have lived for generations. Low-wage workers and immigrants are also drawn here, looking for an affordable place to rent in a city where the cost of housing seems to rise by the day. 

A Shocking Loss

Calix’s son, Chago, turned 8 the day the flood destroyed their rental home. The day started out normal enough. Calix dropped her son off at school in Point Loma, resisting Chago’s pleas to let him stay home for his birthday. It was drizzling, but she thought nothing of it. She promised to deliver some treats for him and his classmates later in the day and drove to a nearby party supply store.

But during her drive, normality ended. It started raining intensely. At an intersection, Calix noticed a car stuck in what looked like floodwater. By the time she got to the party supply store, she’d passed numerous other flooded streets and stranded cars. The store was closed and the parking lot flooded. Her mind leapt to the rental apartment she and Chago shared in Southcrest, 10 miles south. “Was it OK?” she wondered. “Were my neighbors OK?”

It wasn’t until five hours later, after the floodwaters receded, that Calix was able to return to Southcrest and find out. She encountered devastation: streets and homes caked in black sludge, cars piled on top of each other, dead animals, shellshocked neighbors—some of whom had narrowly escaped drowning. Her apartment looked like the inside of a muddy blender. Her and Chago’s furniture, clothes, and other possessions were destroyed, including her father’s ashes and recently opened Christmas presents.

“To see all that devastation at once, it was very desperate,” says Calix, who spent the next several days trying to salvage what she could: a couple of bikes, a pet snake. “There was probably more stuff I could have saved off the walls, things up in cabinets, but I had to just walk away. I couldn’t do it anymore. And neither could my kid.”

Renters in Peril 

Some of the people who suffer the most in the wake of flooding and other natural disasters are renters—a population that accounts for one-third of U.S. households. Renters tend to have less wealth than homeowners, are less likely to have insurance to recoup lost belongings or the costs associated with displacement, and also receive less help from the government after disasters. To add insult to injury, research shows that rents for the lowest-income households rise significantly after floods. 

In other words, the people with the fewest financial resources to weather losses from a natural disaster get the least help to recover, and then end up paying even more for housing if they’re lucky enough to find another place to live. In California, and in San Diego especially—where more than one in three households already don’t make enough to meet their basic needs, and where the average rent is more than $3,000 a month—losses and displacement from a flood can result in a compounding cycle of long-term financial pain and housing insecurity. 

That’s the predicament Calix found herself in after the flooding. Even though she received $5,000 in emergency assistance from FEMA, that wasn’t enough to secure another apartment rental that she could afford on her salary as a massage therapist, she said. She was also in debt from having to replace clothes, toys and everyday items she lost in the flood, as well as extra gas and food while living in the hotels. 

“It’s overwhelming … ” Calix says. “It shouldn’t be that way.”

The county and city of San Diego, with support from other local cities and community organizations as well as the federal government, have tried to mitigate the challenges facing displaced flood survivors. The county allocated $33.7 million to recovery efforts, including to help provide food, emergency lodging, fund home and infrastructure repairs, and help residents secure federal disaster aid.

Some of this funding went to a program that provided temporary accommodation for people in hotels after the flooding, and housed more than 2,200 people, or nearly 900 households, at its peak. That program ended in June. With about $7 million in support from the county and city, the San Diego Housing Commission then provided up to $15,000 in assistance to people still in emergency lodging near the end of the program to help them pay for rent, security deposits, and other expenses to relocate. 

But there have been problems. Numerous participants in the temporary lodging program have complained they were housed in unsafe or unsanitary hotels and evicted or threatened with eviction because of payment delays from the contractor hired to run the program. Many people who needed accommodation didn’t even get the help because they didn’t know about the program, had trouble accessing it, or were afraid to seek help because of their immigration status, says Clariza Marin, CFO of the Harvey Family Foundation. Others left before they were ready because of conflicting information from FEMA workers that led them to believe staying in the hotels would jeopardize their federal aid money, Marin and Calix said.

The housing commission also limited who could apply for the financial assistance to those still in the program on May 23—a date by which many had left. That meant just 313 families initially received aid. The commission recently expanded eligibility to another 194 families who had applied but left the hotels earlier, offering them up to $5,500. But that doesn’t cover all of the approximately 900 families that were in the program at its peak. 

Calix is one of the flood survivors and former renters who, so far, has not qualified for financial help from the housing commission. She decided to leave the program after three months because at the last hotel she stayed at, she felt unsafe. She was also hearing about other people getting evicted and got nervous that she and Chago would be next. She never applied for aid because she assumed she wouldn’t qualify. Now she’s angry that she, and many of her neighbors, have been left out. 

“We’re all in a hole, and we’re trying to get out and they just keep, you know, letting us fall deeper,” she says. “To be told you get no help and other people do, it is very frustrating.”

Low-Income Homeowners Suffer Too

The disaster has been devastating for homeowners too. Many are low income and elderly and didn’t have any or enough flood insurance. Several of those who received money from FEMA said it wasn’t enough to cover the cost of the damage. According to Marin, some residents have been forced to take out loans, pay for repairs using credit cards, or live in flood-damaged moldy homes. Others have given up, abandoning or selling their residences to out-of-town buyers, she said.

Juan Chavez, a retired truck driver, has been trying to help his mother-in-law, 79, hold on to the Beta Street home she lived in for 30 years before the flood forced her to move in with him and his wife. She uses a wheelchair and has dementia. Although the home had some flood insurance, the payout barely covered the cost of basic cleanup, he said. Chavez estimates he and his wife, a secretary, will have to cobble together $100,000 of their own money to make the home livable again. 

Across the street, Harold Roberts, 74, is still trying to get his home fixed after it was flooded with several feet of water. A caregiver for the elderly, he said he couldn’t afford the $6,000 a year he would have needed for flood insurance on his home, and the FEMA money he received only partially covered the damage. He lost his car and truck in the flood and spent six months at a motel in Chula Vista paid for by the county. Now he’s among dozens of his neighbors receiving assistance from the Harvey Family Foundation to restore their homes.

“A lot of families, for a situation that they didn’t cause, they’re forced to go into debt in order to save what little they do have,” says Armon Harvey, the foundation’s CEO. “They lost cars, they lost everything, and now they have to dig into their own pockets, into their savings, just to save their homes.”

Flood recovery is expensive. The average annual cost of flooding in the U.S. is more than $32 billion and rising. According to a recent study featured in the Fifth National Climate Assessment, California lost an average of $1.7 billion annually to floods as of 2020. That’s expected to rise to almost $2 billion by 2050. Yet federal disaster assistance typically doesn’t provide enough support to the people who need it the most, research shows. 

A Last Resort

After several weeks in the hotel program, Calix learned that her grandfather was selling an old trailer. He offered to give it to her, if she paid for repairs and moving it. Calix saw it as her ticket out of the hotel program, and a chance at some kind of stability for herself and her son. She racked up more debts on her credit cards to pay for new tires, towing, and a parking spot at a local RV park. 

Calix now pays about $1,600 a month for her spot at the RV park. She and Chago have to move to a different park every six months because stays are time limited. She said she’s grateful to have a place to live, but it feels temporary. She’s still in debt because of the disaster, and her credit score has suffered. If she had received $15,000 from the Housing Commission like some of the other survivors, she could have paid off her debt and stabilized her financial situation enough to get an apartment, she said. 

“It would have made a huge difference,” she says. “We would be a lot further along. I’m basically falling behind and my stability is hanging on by a thread, to be honest, and that’s the truth of it. We really needed that help, and we’re not the only ones.” 

The Harvey Family Foundation has been trying to stem the exodus of low-income renters and homeowners from the flood-struck areas. Over the past year, they’ve received about $700,000 in city and county funds and raised another $500,000 in philanthropic support to help repair homes in Southcrest, Shelltown, and neighboring communities.

So far they’ve completed 73 home repairs with 14 more in the pipeline. These include rentals, such as those owned by Tony Tricarico, 77, who before the flood rented 11 small apartments on his Beta Street property for between $1,200 and $1,400 a month. 

The flood destroyed Tricarico’s home and all the rental units on the property. He had no flood insurance and didn’t qualify for FEMA aid. He was ready to give up and sell, he said. But the Harvey Family Foundation offered to help him restore the units if he didn’t raise the rents and offered them back to the displaced families. He agreed. So far, three units are fixed and rented, another three will be completed soon. At least one of the families is living in a trailer in a nearby alleyway waiting to return, he said. 

“I wanted to help” the renters, Tricarico says. “I’ve known them 20 years, I’ve watched their children grow up.” 

Much more funding is needed to help with repairs, Marin said. Even now she’s receiving calls from distressed homeowners who have run out of insurance or FEMA money, or are newly discovering mold or other problems in their homes caused by the floods, she said. 

Investments in infrastructure to prevent future flooding and make San Diego’s most vulnerable communities more resilient to the effects of climate change are vital, Berry with UC San Diego said. Infrastructure projects should include green, nature-based solutions that remove concrete and create more spaces such as parks where excess water can be absorbed into the soil, she added. It’s also important that officials take care to avoid “green gentrification” that drives up housing costs and displaces low-income residents, she said.

A state initiative called the Transformative Climate Communities program is working to address this challenge by funding community-led development and infrastructure projects designed to simultaneously improve climate resiliency and bring economic benefits to California’s most disadvantaged communities. These include investments in affordable housing, bike lanes and walking paths, public transportation, and community gardens. 

Fresno is one community that has successfully used this funding through its Transform Fresno initiative, Berry said. More recently, the San Diego Foundation and Environmental Health Coalition also received the funds to develop climate- and community-resilience projects in San Diego’s central historic barrios.

The dilemma is that more investment is needed and San Diego taxpayers are reluctant to fund infrastructure projects, Berry said. Measure E, which would have raised the city’s sales tax by 1 percent and generated up to $400 million in additional general-fund revenue, including for infrastructure, was narrowly defeated in November.

She said she’s hopeful that the passage of state Proposition 4, a $10 billion bond to help California pay for efforts to address the impacts of climate change, including flood control and sea-level-rise protections, will further improve climate resiliency in San Diego and elsewhere. But it won’t be enough, she said. 

“We can’t keep waiting for disasters (in order) to respond,” she said. “We need to be proactive and not reactive, because we’re well aware that the reactive systems that we have are not sufficient … If we aren’t building resilience, it’s not going to get easier to respond” when disasters happen.

Back at the RV park in north San Diego, Calix is trying to keep herself and Chago focused on the positive. But she, like many other flood survivors, is worried about the next disaster. Worried that the city still hasn’t fixed the problems with its infrastructure. Worried that the local government has no plan in place to better help future disaster victims.

But, for her son, she takes a deep breath and tries to set those worries aside.

“At least we have a place to live,” she tells Chago. “At least we’re not living in a car or sleeping on friend’s couches,” like some of the other people they know.  

At least they have each other. At least they survived. 

Reporter Lauren DeLaunay Miller contributed to this story. This story is part of the Pulitzer Center’s nationwide Connected Coastlines reporting initiative. This story originally appeared in California Health Report.

As cooperatives, St. James and Southbridge are peopled by their owners, families with shares in the company that holds title to the buildings and the land they sit on, those shares entitling owners to apartments and a say in governance. As limited-equity co-ops, the price of those shares—the cost of buying a home—is kept affordable to middle- and lower-income families by restricting their resale value.

These share prices don’t follow the jagged rise and fall of a stock market; they largely track with inflation, ensuring that families can leave with the value they put in, plus all the years of a solid, stable, safe affordable home. That limit on resale maintains the same opportunity for the next family in their wake. This is social housing: kept outside the market, decommodified, permanently affordable, and controlled by its residents. 

At least, that’s how it’s supposed to be. A programmatic change meant to spur more rental development under the Mitchell-Lama program early in its existence had unintended consequences for these co-ops. The controversial loophole allows for cooperators to collectively vote whether to leave the program—or “privatize”—once the building’s mortgage is paid to its public lenders.

Leave the program, and cooperators can sell their share for whatever they can fetch in the market—no small amount in the rabid real estate market of New York. But leaving also means the loss of affordability for the next generation of owners, and the threat of rising costs at home for those who don’t wish to sell out. This is the choice put before the residents of St. James and Southbridge in my book Homes for Living: The Fight for Social Housing and a New American Commons.

Turbo-charged by potential profit and cut through with the ethics of consuming the public goods that support us, the stories of the fraught privatization fights within these co-ops—seen at eye-level from the perspective of the residents—reveal themselves to be deeper than simple morality tales of profiteering vs. altruism, more complex than a battle between selfish privateers and idealistic defenders of the public realm. Rather, the sides that cooperators take in these community-shredding debates, how they construct their arguments—how they justify their positions to themselves and the pitches they make to sway others—all hold key information on the fervent contest over space across the country.

The human perspectives of Southbridge and St. James serve as a prism through which to better distinguish the consequences of how we govern, the language we use, and the rights we feel entitled to—and what they mean for our ability to create and sustain cities that approach the ideal of equity, which, though increasingly invoked, remains painfully out of reach. 

The fights within these co-ops, and the paths their residents ultimately choose, diverge in key ways. We pick up, here, in the aftermath. 

Right around the time that St. James cooperators voted down privatization, David Madden and Peter Marcuse, two scholars of urban studies and sociology, published the book In Defense of Housing, which lay bare the contemporary politics of the places we call home. The authors take issue with the dominant narrative of “a system in crisis” that took hold after the crash of 2008. “We need to be careful with this usage of the concept of crisis. The idea of crisis implies that inadequate or unaffordable housing is abnormal, a temporary departure from a well-functioning standard.”

That isn’t what is happening, say Madden and Marcuse. They add: “Housing crisis is a predictable, consistent outcome of a basic characteristic of capitalist spatial development: Housing is not produced and distributed for the purposes of dwelling for all; it is produced and distributed as a commodity to enrich the few. Housing crisis is not a result of the system breaking down but of the system working as it is intended.”

In short, the very causes of the crisis are one and the same with the central ideology of homeownership. When that ownership carries a perceived right to profit from housing, without any responsibility for the collateral damage, crisis will be perpetual. Housing becomes a commodity, but one that has no rivals in its importance for organizing our lives and our politics. That is distinct from the role of housing that needs defending: housing as home.

Structuring housing as a limited-equity co-op, as the Mitchell-Lama program did, is a defense of home. The program sought a path to sheltering middle-income folks that was different from the exclusive suburbs supercharged by government-backed mortgages—subsidies immediately privatized and transmogrified into morally deserved earnings. The permanence of this defense can, however, never be guaranteed. At the program’s outset, co-op privatization wasn’t a possibility, but then laws and politics changed. The bulwarks against commodification need to be continually maintained, rebuilt, occupied, and augmented. 

A total of 194 St. James cooperators, with their votes on Feb. 23, 2017, managed to preserve their collectively owned social housing. Southbridge’s defenders were unable to do the same. That fortress against commodification in Lower Manhattan was transformed into a pillar of the housing system it had once stood against. How, exactly, did the Concerned Shareholders of St. James, with so many prevailing winds blowing against them, achieve their victory?

There is no exact formula or single answer. But we can learn lessons from how the battles at St. James and Southbridge diverged and in their different qualities as places and communities. These are applicable to how we might preserve other social housing in the future. As Madden and Marcuse point out, housing can be “a vehicle for imagining alternative social orders. Every emancipatory movement must deal with the housing question in one form or another. This capacity to spur the political imagination is part of housing’s social value as well.” The lessons of Mitchell-Lama extend beyond the housing sphere. Any attempt at realizing a truer, deeper form of our commonwealth must heed them.

Where Southbridge’s defenders spoke solely of the financial side of privatization—countering its alluring rewards with the specter of its risks—St. James’s concerned shareholders broadened the frame. They stressed that privatization wasn’t just a financial decision but a moral one: a statement about who the city was for, what recipients of public support owed to future generations, and how their own lives and choices intersected with those around them. They coupled this altruistic message with information that showed how privatization presented a financial risk—not only to the wider community but to the cooperators themselves.

They activated three different forms of unselfishness: empathic unselfishness through identification with future beneficiaries, communitarian unselfishness through identification with their neighbors who feared maintenance increases, and moralistic unselfishness through arguing that privatization was, in a sense, theft. In doing so, they triggered a key causal mechanism of collective action: a shared narrative, with which defection (privatization) was incompatible.

St. James’s predominately Black cooperative body, situated in a neighborhood where gentrification and displacement had transformed the streets for all to see, was particularly well primed to hear these messages. Many of the cooperators had themselves experienced discrimination in the housing market. Even among those who hadn’t, most knew the history of Bed-Stuy and could see where its future seemed to be heading if action wasn’t taken. Moreover, that future was not abstract but proximate, already right outside their doors.

The prospect of big money through privatization came with an asterisk: They would still be Black in a real estate system that had racism baked into its core. They’d internalized the need for social housing. At Southbridge, Lower Manhattan’s luxury turn didn’t have the same effect on the residents. The already-insular community remained at a remove from the rest of the neighborhood. As the prices on everything from groceries to movie tickets shot up with the glossy skyscrapers catering to capital, they felt under siege.

Privatization beckoned as a bulwark against those high prices. If you can’t beat them, the pro-privatizers seemed to say, join them. This call simply did not appeal to the residents of St. James in the same way. Because they had connections to their wider neighborhood, joining “them”—the monied companies and individuals snapping up buildings for passive profits—would have meant selling out their very sense of community.

Just as St. James’ defenders didn’t see their privatization decision as only about their individual well-being, they also didn’t go it alone in the debates. Where Southbridge’s pro–Mitchell-Lama residents considered it too risky to bring in outsiders, their counterparts at St. James heard those critiques and pushed through anyway, calling on the solidarity of citywide advocacy group Cooperators United for Mitchell-Lama (CU4ML) and local officials. In doing so, they gained access to crucial resources while also broadening the debate. CU4ML brought tactics, expertise, and the kind of political education that both Southbridge and St. James were internally starved of.

Public Advocate Tish James and her coterie of other officials packed up their bully pulpits and stationed them onsite, driving home the need for cooperators to consider a “we” beyond their own building. They connected the struggle at St. James to other struggles, and the strugglers to one another, activating another causal mechanism for collective action—what sociologist Charles Tilly calls “straightforward coercion by outsiders.”

Southbridge’s privateers had been able to keep most politicians out of their debates by wielding the sheer heft of their voting bloc. That complex is roughly 4.5 times as populous as St. James. It was thus much more difficult, and ultimately impossible, for the St. James privatizers to drown out the local politicians speaking to the clear public interest of preserving social housing amid a housing crisis that they had been elected to address. Southbridge board president Harvey Marshall, looking on from his now-privatized home across the East River, considered the politicians’ involvement at St. James to have been instrumental in defeating privatization there.

One can’t say what the outcome of the final Southbridge vote would have been if the anti-privatizers there had recruited nonresidents to their fight or if they had added moral, normative arguments to their rhetoric. But if Daniel Brampton can wring his hands over the additional flyers that his Venice vacation left unwritten, it’s also valid to speculate that those approaches may have closed the paltry 11-vote difference by which Southbridge’s privatization passed. Then again, it’s worth recalling that Southbridge had thwarted an earlier attempt at privatizing their co-op years before. At any Mitchell-Lama co-op, voting down privatization is never a permanent solution. Within a year, the whole process could start again. St. James remains an island of social housing, destined to be eroded if its floodwalls aren’t maintained.

For that reason, Madden and Marcuse endorse some skepticism around housing models like Mitchell-Lama that both oppose and exist within a larger system of commodification. “Human relationships cannot be confined to the boundaries of a housing estate. It is not possible to insulate a small group from what goes on in society as a whole; any such group is likely to be shaped by broader patterns of oppressive relationships. And islands of residential liberation will have limited impact in a sea of housing oppression and commodification,” they write.

Islands are good locations for lighthouses, though. They continue: “But experimental dwellings and emancipatory movements have wider significance as living demonstrations of housing’s potential. They should be seen as beacons pointing towards a broader possibility: that housing might support non-oppressive social relations, not in some utopian realm but in everyday life.”

That is one of the beauties of social housing: The models exist, and they work, even here in the capitalist United States. Activists like Graham Hales, Tia Ward, and Wenna Redfern have managed to keep the light on at St. James. And across the country, interest has grown in establishing new limited-equity co-ops, community land trusts, rent control, and public housing at a level that, less than a decade ago, seemed politically untenable. But as with all infrastructure, just building these refuges in a sea of commodification is not enough.

Our public goods need to be maintained, and central to the maintenance of social housing is a wholesale transformation of the prevailing American conception of homeownership. We must abolish the notion that ownership includes a right to profit. The defenders of St. James and Southbridge point the way toward an ethic to install in its place. Those who claim that ownership endows one with absolute control over some definable thing—a piece of land, a house, an instrument, a toy—are preachers of isolation.

As I took in the stories of Southbridge and St. James, I was struck by how pro-privatizers willingly curtailed their perception of the spheres of their influence and concern. They didn’t consider their neighbors or even friends with whom they’d built a community over decades. They denied any ties between their own decisions and the well-being of their fellow New Yorkers, save for the hypothetical rich family who would now have another housing option at their disposal, possibly at a slightly lower price.

Their sense of entitlement to profit overpowered any sense of connection to a public program that had provided them a most fundamental need: a safe, stable, affordable home. They were under the sway of what Rebecca Solnit calls the ideology of isolation. “If you forget what you derive from the collective, you can imagine that you owe it nothing and can go it alone,” she writes, but “we are nodes on intricate systems, synapses snapping on a great collective brain; we are in it together, for better or worse.”

Those who fought the privatizers largely bought into an ethos of connection. Their definition of ownership, of course, was still not entirely devoid of rights and entitlements. Just as James Szal could decide to paint his walls a screaming shade of red to complement his shoe-shaped furnishings, he could also tell you to get the hell out should you find his aesthetic, or the barking of his senior shih tzu, to be too much. But he and his allies also saw the layers of responsibility that came with owning something.

As residents of social housing, they knew this entailed more than just paying their share of collective costs or ensuring that their leaking toilet was fixed before the apartment below suffered a collapsed ceiling. They recognized their responsibility to steward the public good they’d been given control of, even if that meant declining a major influx of personal wealth. They operated on a different spatial and temporal scale. In doing so, they fulfilled their responsibility as stewards of not just a building but a neighborhood, a city, and, crucially, the future inheritors of their homes, be they a family member or a stranger pulled from a list.

For the pro-privatizers, their right to profit came first, and their responsibility to care for their asset—to “conduct your business well,” as Lester Goodyear put it—came in service of realizing that right. For those who believed in social housing, ownership was bundled up with a responsibility to steward. This understanding is similar to the idea of reciprocity in gift economies that predominate in Indigenous societies. As Potawatomi writer and scientist Robin Wall Kimmerer describes it, “Responsibilities and gifts are understood as two sides of the same coin. The possession of a gift is coupled with a duty to use it for the benefit of all.”

A safe, stable, affordable home is a gift, just as land and life are, and residents’ fulfillment of their responsibility to steward that gift is what made their ownership real. When pro–Mitchell-Lama cooperators stood up for their co-op as a public good, they affirmed their ownership of their homes, their communities. “True ownership,” to borrow a phrase from an exasperated Goodyear, isn’t achieved when the possession can be sold off at any price. True ownership is consummated with care, maintenance, and preservation—with faithful stewardship.

Pro–Mitchell-Lama cooperators weren’t the only stewards in those communities. Folks like Lester Goodyear had also done their part, serving in service organizations and advocating for what they thought was right. Goodyear and other pro-privatizers worked to keep St. James a great place to live despite the tumult outside its doors. This was its own kind of stewardship, even if these residents eventually wanted to transform it into undue profits. Casting a narrative of heroes vs. villains is easy. Less so is highlighting the gray areas—all the folks who struggled with this decision and all the reasons why supporting privatization is understandable though unjustified.

Those personal decisions are indicative of the wider difficulty of maintaining commons, but this hardship doesn’t alone stem from the prevailing commodification of place and home across the United States. It’s also born of narrative, held up by ideology, supported in policy, and fueled with the scraps of a collapsing safety net. Buying and selling a home for profit is held up as the American Dream. It’s positioned as the way to attain full citizenship and a voice.

Home equity is the only tool many Americans have to attain economic, educational, and aspirational family goals at a time when wages aren’t what they should be, work security is nonexistent beyond unions, and higher education is dependent on increasingly large sums of cash in its own commodified hellscape. Equity in a place one calls home is the backstop for disaster, for the unexpected or inevitable. 

Excerpted from Homes for Living: The Fight for Social Housing and a New American Commons by Jonathan Tarleton. Copyright 2025. Excerpted with permission by Beacon Press.

Rachel Pyon, research director at EAT Chicago, who leads the CFF pilot programs, spoke with YES! Senior Editor Sonali Kolhatkar on YES! Presents: Rising Up With Sonali about CFF’s promising results for employment, housing, stress relief, and more.

Legal experts speculate that, in practice, it will be much harder for the Trump administration to actually pull back funding. But the IRA doesn’t just tackle climate; it represents a wide-reaching grab bag of progressive policies addressing everything from carbon emissions and health care to tax codes and the economy. (It’s worth noting that the link to the comprehensive overview of the IRA that I used for my reporting back in December has since been removed from whitehouse.gov.)

Often considered a landmark achievement of the Biden administration, the IRA includes, among other policies, an ambitious set of initiatives for clean energy jobs, funding for climate resiliency infrastructure and disaster relief, and more aggressive taxation for large corporations. But perhaps one of the most important, if under discussed, aspects of the IRA is its impact on prescription medication costs.

At a time when nearly 40 percent of Americans have opted to forgo prescription medication due to the expense, the IRA gave the government the ability to curb rising drug costs through a variety of strategies. Most notably, the law gave Medicare the power to negotiate prescription prices directly with drug companies for the first time, which could have a cumulative, long-term impact on drug prices. 

“[The IRA] has given the government for the first time the ability and also the tools through which it can negotiate drug prices” says Richard G. Frank, director of the Center on Health Policy at the Brookings Institute, a nonpartisan research organization. This ability ramps up over time, allowing a set number of additional drugs to be negotiated each year. “That really changes the ball game in an important way—not so much today or even tomorrow, but over time, you’ve equipped the government with a whole bunch of new opportunities to keep prices in check.” 

As far as immediate price reductions, the IRA also guarantees that many Medicare beneficiaries will pay no more than $35 out-of-pocket for insulin. This price cap is not only a practical win for people on Medicare, but a symbolic victory for many activists who have long lobbied to make predatory insulin and drug pricing a national concern for politicians.

In recent years, insulin has become a poster child for the broken health care system. By manipulating patent law and squashing competitors, a mere three pharmaceutical companies control an estimated 90 percent of the global insulin market—and this monopoly has given them free reign to crank up the price of insulin over the past few decades.

A recent study from the Health Care Cost Institute found that from 2012 to 2021, the price of a 30-day supply of insulin nearly doubled from $271 to $499. The estimated cost of manufacturing a vial of insulin, meanwhile, is only $2 to $4. When compared to international prices, insulin in the United States is eight times more expensive, per a 2020 report published by the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation. For many, these discrepancies are particularly outrageous; without insulin, people with diabetes can die within days.

It’s unclear exactly how Trump’s executive order will affect the IRA’s climate initiatives, let alone how or if it could have any effect on other aspects of the law, such as insulin price caps. But just a few years after Biden signed the IRA into law, it is clear that its benefits are under threat. Project 2025—a harrowing, authoritarian “wish list” published by the Heritage Foundation and meant to guide the next Republican presidency—calls for the repeal of the IRA. Republicans, too, are already pushing for a complete repeal of the IRA and its so-called “woke agenda,” including its climate provisions and tax increases for corporations. (Republicans’ continued distaste for the IRA is not surprising, however, as every single Republican in Congress voted against the bill. But that partisanship does not extend beyond the halls of Congress: The majority of Americans, regardless of political affiliation, support government-negotiated drug prices.) 

The main goal of Project 2025’s repeal is to strip Medicare of its power to negotiate with corporations, according to Andrea Ducas, vice president of health policy at the Center for American Progress, a nonpartisan policy institute. “To achieve that goal they’re willing to undo progress and throw prescription drug affordability into jeopardy for everyone in Medicare,” Ducas says. “By and large [Project 2025], this mandate for leadership, is grounded in a worldview that prioritizes profits, corporations, and business over people—full stop.”

In short, Project 2025’s IRA repeal would throw the baby out with the bathwater. In order to maintain corporate monopolies and profits, Americans would lose out on insulin price caps, health care savings, climate initiatives, clean energy jobs, and a whole lot more.

Yet even with the IRA currently in place—and a general consensus from voters that health care and insulin prices are simply overwhelming for most Americans—people with diabetes still struggle to afford their insulin on a day-to-day basis. In 2021 alone, more than one million Americans were forced to ration their life-saving insulin, with Black Americans, the uninsured, and those too young to qualify for Medicare being the most vulnerable to rationing. 

Clearly, the IRA represents only one step on a much longer journey toward equitable health care access. But health advocates, grassroots organizers, and people living with diabetes continue to lead the way in advocating for a future where accessible insulin is a reality for all.

Insulin Policies for All

While the IRA is an achievement, it’s important to understand its limits. The IRA grants a co-pay price cap for certain Medicare beneficiaries—not a holistic price cap. This difference is an important one, according to Shaina Kasper, executive director of T1 International, a grassroots nonprofit run for and by people with diabetes. 

The $35 co-pay limits monthly out-of-pocket expenses for certain people with Medicare, but it does nothing to regulate the actual list price of insulin, the initial price of a drug set by pharmaceutical manufacturers before any rebates, discounts, negotiations, or insurance kicks in. As a result, Kasper says people without Medicare, premium insurance plans, or any health care coverage are still left in the lurch. (It should be noted that the IRA initially did include a $35 co-pay cap for those with private insurance, not just Medicare recipients, but it was shot down by Republican lawmakers.)

“Our goal is an absolute price cap [and] lowering that list price of insulin to make sure that it’s affordable and accessible to all,” says Kasper. Together, Kasper says, lowered list prices and co-pay caps would impact the full spectrum of people in need, including those with private insurance, those without insurance, and those with Medicare benefits. (Even without a full price cap, however, the IRA did play an important role in pressuring all three insulin giants to announce their own price caps or reduced list prices for some insulin products—an important, if incomplete, step toward affordability.)

But affordability and accessibility aren’t always the same thing when it comes to medications. The fact that insulin and diabetes supplies need to be prescribed also means added barriers. Tracy Ramey, leader of the Ohio Insulin for All chapter and T1 International organizer, has recently helped pass an updated version of Kevin’s Law in her state, which grants pharmacists the ability to dispense an emergency supply of a chronic maintenance drug without a prescription. The law was named after 36-year-old Kevin Houdeshell, who died during the holidays in 2014 after being turned away from a pharmacy and unable to contact his doctor for an insulin refill.

The impact of Kevin’s Law is immediate—even for Ramey’s own daughter, who has Type 1 diabetes. While Ramey was between jobs and waiting for Medicaid to kick in, her daughter was still able to get her supplies, even after a prescription had run out. “I’m very proud that my daughter was able to benefit from that as well,” Ramey adds. 

Since 2016, 26 states have passed some version of Kevin’s Law, but Kasper says expanding the law is an important way to ensure equitable access to health care across the country. Taken together, these policies—universal price caps, lower list prices, and an expanded scope of practice for pharmacists—would add much-needed guardrails for people struggling to afford and access their medications.

Insulin Access on the Ground

However well crafted or impactful a potential policy may be, people urgently need insulin access here and now. To fill in the gaps, communities across the country are creating their own mutual aid networks.

“We can’t sit and wait forever for someone else to save us. It’s just not going to happen,” says Brandon Lopez, founder of the Embrace Foundation, a nonprofit, volunteer-run organization in Arizona that sends free diabetic supplies to people who need it. “Who knows, maybe a policy will pass or something will change where health care will be free, but until then it’s our job as a community to take care of each other.” 

The Embrace Foundation has its roots in Lopez’s own health care experiences. In 2017, Lopez was working full time, living without health insurance, and struggling to afford his insulin. 

“With bills, rent, cost of living, I had no money for diabetic supplies, [which] added up to almost $1,000 a month. I simply couldn’t afford it,” says Lopez, who has Type 1 diabetes. “For months I didn’t test my blood sugar once. I couldn’t afford the strips. I took insulin when I felt high and ate something when I felt low, completely in the dark. I spread out what insulin I had, skipped meals, took half doses, and reused the same bag of dull pen needles I had over and over, completely unsanitary and unsafe.”

To get by, Lopez described how he sold whatever possessions he could and spent days going from hospital to hospital, “practically begging for insulin.” Eventually, Lopez landed a better job that provided health insurance. But he continued building an ad-hoc insulin-supply-sharing network on social media, where he connected people experiencing insulin insecurity to a growing inventory of donated supplies.

In 2018, Lopez formally launched the Embrace Foundation, and nearly seven years later, says it has expanded to 19 volunteers, three storage units of supplies, and more than 2,500 people served across the country. According to Lopez, the majority of supply requests come from people who don’t qualify for insurance, college students who may have aged out of their parents’ insurance, and people who are out of work. But plenty of people with insurance still can’t afford their supplies.

“It’s either have insurance [with] a co-pay or pay [more than] $600 to live,” says Lopez. “This month we had a woman reach out that was a single mother with three children and was rationing her supplies so she could keep the power on and feed her family. We’ve set her up to where she will receive a package from us every month so that she can [have] one less thing to worry about.”

Lopez says the Embrace Foundation is meant to continue the legacy of Frederick Banting, the Canadian researcher and doctor who discovered insulin in the early 1920s. “Banting sold the patent for insulin for $1 … saying, ‘Insulin does not belong to me, it belongs to the world,” Lopez says. “We will always stay true to that.”

When scientists came up with a new climate-friendly food plan in 2019 and published their findings in the medical journal The Lancet, I read with interest. The guidelines called for more vegetables, legumes, and whole grains, which seemed doable to me. The authors even allowed for meat and dairy consumption, albeit in small quantities. Both are major drivers of the climate crisis: The United Nations estimates that meat and dairy produce more than 11 percent of all global greenhouse gas emissions, and some experts put the figure at up to 19.6 percent.

But I’ve long wondered whether the widely respected food plan could work for most Americans. In my hometown of Baltimore, a quarter of all people live in food deserts, a figure some researchers say is an underestimate.

Nationally, grocery stores have shuttered left and right in recent years. Increasingly, many Americans are relying on a very particular kind of shop for food: dollar stores, which are the fastest-growing retailers in the U.S. In Baltimore, there are dozens.

Those factors dictate how sustainable—and nourishing—individual diets can be.

“Our food choices are largely shaped by the food environment around us, including which foods are available, affordable, convenient, and desirable,” said Raychel Santo, a Baltimore-based senior food and climate research associate at the nonprofit World Resources Institute. “Everyone deserves the opportunity to enjoy healthy, sustainable meals that nourish both people and the planet.”

Can dollar stores provide Americans with that opportunity? I decided to find out. For one week, I attempted to follow the Lancet planetary health diet while grocery shopping at them exclusively. The experience left me feeling dejected—and bloated.

The Dollar Store

Other people have created extensive spreadsheets and meal plans for their forays into the planetary health diet. I’ve never been a planner. To guide my grocery shopping, I merely typed the basic tenets of the food plan into my phone’s notes app: 34 percent of daily calories from starches like rice and wheat; 23 percent from legumes; 18 percent from fats; 8 percent from fruits and vegetables; the remaining 10 percent from dairy, meat, and sugar. I planned to head to the store after my first meeting but got busy until mid-afternoon.

When I reached Dollar Tree, I quickly filled a cart with beans, tortillas, pre-cooked brown rice, oatmeal, peanut butter and other staples. I was in desperate need of vegetables, but the options were highly limited. I sighed as I placed some canned ones in my cart.

In the checkout aisle, I saw a can of Pringles chips. Having skipped breakfast, I was starving, so I impulsively added them to my haul and ate them on the drive home.

Hours later, I realized I’d made a mistake. The diet encourages limiting consumption of both starchy vegetables and saturated oils, which are both surprisingly emissions intensive to produce, and I’d gone over my daily allotment of the latter. I resolved to be more careful.

I was in desperate need of vegetables but the options were highly limited.”

For a proper lunch, I heated some brown rice and whipped up black beans from a can, which were more expensive than the ones I buy from my usual grocery store. As luck would have it, my can opener broke, so I was forced to hack open a can of corn with a knife. I ate my austere lunch with little pleasure.

For dinner, I had leftovers with half a slice of tinny-tasting cheese. I desperately wanted to add some fresh produce to my meal, but the Dollar General had none.

When I sat down to analyze my day’s meals, I realized I was way behind on my fruit and vegetable intake, since the Lancet authors classify corn as a starch. I quickly stir-fried some tinned green beans with salt and pepper. They were awful.

Breaking the Rules

I woke up the next morning and realized something would have to change. I’d prepared my first day’s food with only ingredients from Dollar General, but since the Lancet study doesn’t address spices, I decided using seasonings from my cabinet would be OK.

This helped, but new problems arose. I’d planned to eat liberal scoops of peanut butter each morning since the diet calls for a high intake of legumes, but the brand I’d purchased had added sugar, which is discouraged in the climate diet (since it’s surprisingly land, water and carbon intensive to produce and linked to health issues like diabetes), so I had to instead rely on salted peanuts.

The tortillas I’d purchased also had a surprising amount of added sugar, as did the mandarin orange fruit cups and tins of pineapple I’d bought in a desperate attempt to integrate fruit into my diet. For the next couple of days, I stuck to brown rice and corn to meet my starch intake, and rinsed the fruit off thoroughly before eating it.

Experts say eating a wide variety of fruits and vegetables is beneficial for gut health, but I quickly realized that wouldn’t be an option, since the Dollar Store doesn’t offer much variety when it comes to plants.

In Search of Produce

When I began my experiment, I resolved not to eat out for the week. I figured it would betray the spirit of the project to go to restaurants, as much as it pained me to refuse a friend’s invitation to grab pizza.

But on night three, I caved. At a work event, I munched on a handful of cherry tomatoes and carrot sticks—climate-diet-friendly foods, sure, but ones that surely didn’t come from a dollar store.

Those bites of crudités left me fiending for more fresh food. Dollar General has since last year been adding produce to more of their stores, so the following morning, I called around to find one.

Soon, I found a location that offered fruits and vegetables a 15-minute drive away. I was excited by the prospect of a salad, but I felt ridiculous. That week, I’d already driven to my closest Dollar Tree, and now I was going to have to drive even more. Using an online carbon calculator, I learned that my round-trip drive could generate up to 5 lbs. of planet-warming carbon dioxide, meaning it could be more emissions heavy than a 3 oz. steak.

I started to spiral. I’m no believer in emphasizing the personal carbon footprint, and yet I’d taken on this project! But I pushed these thoughts aside as I drove.

Slim Pickings

The Dollar Tree produce pickings were slim: browning bananas, bags of potatoes and onions, and some uninspiring pre-made salads. The cherry tomatoes were starting to mold; the mushrooms were covered in soft, dark spots. The iceberg lettuce looked OK, but the more nutritious romaine was wilting—and twice as expensive. The plastic-wrapped bell peppers were in the best shape, so I felt I had to grab some even though they’re my least favorite vegetable.

I reluctantly placed a sad-looking selection of produce into my cart, then went in search of other groceries. This time, I was equipped with a more extensive list.

But many of my desired items were nowhere to be found. There were no lentils, no whole grains other than rice, and no loaves of bread, tortillas, or yogurt that didn’t have added sugar. I had also hoped to find some climate-diet-friendly frozen meals, but save for the bags of fries, every single option contained meat, cheese, or both.

I went home and cooked some black beans for the second time that week, adding peppers, tomatoes, and a whole onion. I ate my stew over brown rice with a whole head of romaine lettuce. It would have to do.

Off the Rails

The following day, I had oatmeal with bananas and strawberries for breakfast and more rice, beans, and salad for lunch. But that evening, things went off the rails. It was the weekend and I had family in town, so I decided to break the rules to show them my favorite local oyster bar.

When we placed our order, I thought all bets were off for my meal plan. But as it turned out, I didn’t fare so badly. The oysters were allowed, and even the half a burger I had fell within my red meat allotment. I ate some much-needed brussels sprouts, beets, and nuts. And since the diet didn’t mention drinks, I suppose even my martini—fine, two martinis—was all right.

But nothing I ate that night could have come from the Dollar Store. In fact, my dinner cost more than all my other meals that week combined. While eating some dollar-store popcorn later that night—a whole grain, so diet friendly—I perused the menus of the cheaper local restaurants I frequent. They invariably offered meat, cheese, and sugar-heavy fare.

In the final days of my experiment, I tried to use up all of my Dollar Store purchases, but some of my produce spoiled quickly. I’d unintentionally contributed to an issue the Lancet authors highlighted: Food waste is a major contributor to climate-warming emissions, and the authors say it should be cut by half.

But dollar stores alone aren’t the problem, so they can’t be the only locus of the solution. ”

On my final food-plan day, I noticed a purple head of local radicchio in my crisper drawer, which I’d bought at the health food store the previous week. I was fresh out of Dollar Store vegetables and didn’t want it to spoil, plus I was sick of beans and rice, so I cheated and ate the whole thing with lemon juice and olive oil.

Targeted policy to expand food access, experts have pointed out, will be necessary for the Lancet climate food plan to become effective. Amid research showing that many people lack access to nutritious meals, advocates are pushing for Dollar Stores to stock fresher, more desirable healthy foods. That could help improve people’s overall well-being, and it could also improve the health of the planet.

But dollar stores alone aren’t the problem, so they can’t be the only locus of the solution. The broader food system must change to ensure people can eat sustainably.

“Increasing access to a variety of plant-based foods [and] the presence of these options at stores and other food providers is the first step,” said Santo. “Other factors—including the cost, quality, convenience of preparation, variety, and cultural relevance—are also key to shaping a food environment that enables healthy and sustainable food choices.”

In the meantime, I’ll no longer take my ability to access and afford a variety of food for granted. That goes for fruits, vegetables, legumes, and whole grains—but now that I’m off the climate diet, I might also eat another can of Pringles.

This story is part of an ongoing series of reporting on a just and climate-friendly food system produced in collaboration with The Guardian, Nexus Media News, Sentient, and Yes! Magazine with funding from the Solutions Journalism Network, advisory support from Garrett Broad (Rowan University), and audience engagement through Project Drawdown’s Global Solutions Diary.

Helping communities eat more plants has many benefits—health and food justice among them—but it’s also good for the climate. Food production accounts for a third of global greenhouse gas emissions. According to Brent Kim, a researcher at Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future, the largest source of these food-related emissions comes from the farm itself, not food miles. “What we eat and how it was produced matter more for the climate than how far it travels.” Eating a plant-based diet, even for just one day a week, can have a greater positive impact on greenhouse gas emissions than eating local food every day, Kim says.

While the largest source of food-related emissions stems from meat from methane-belching ruminant animals, namely beef and lamb, successful grassroots initiatives, like community gardens and farmers markets, play an important role too when they help shift what people eat. Local programs encourage sustainable and healthy food choices, but also offer a path for addressing challenges important to each community. Elizabeth Bowman, former executive director at Food Access LA, sees these local efforts as part of a broader vision for sustainable food that includes but also goes beyond greenhouse gas emissions.  

“To me, sustainability is very holistic, bottom up, top down, and allows people to have access to healthy foods without barriers,” Bowman says. Transparency and food sovereignty are two very important goals in the work. And, Bowman adds, making food choices from the “soil up”—starting with healthy soil but also thinking about whether farm workers have good working conditions.  

Bowman’s work with Avenue 33, a small hillside farm in the Lincoln Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles, illustrates this approach. Avenue 33 partners with Los Angeles Leadership Academy (LALA) to operate LALA Farm, which offers opportunities to zero in on different aspects of food systems. Classes held on the farm include hands-on topics like composting and its climate impacts to science students learning about photosynthesis. Lessons also include the history of agriculture, the farm labor movement, and how farming practices of some Indigenous populations compare to contemporary farming.

Both Avenue 33 and LALA farms provide fresh produce to farmers markets that are EBT authorized (an electronic system that enables people to use government assistance dollars for food purchases) as well as a free weekly food distribution at a nearby school. Food grown on the LALA farm, like tomatoes and peppers, are added weekly to the high school’s salad bar, sometimes alongside a nutrition lesson. 

California supplies nearly half of the fruits and vegetables eaten in the United States. Yet a significant portion of the population, around 8.8 million Californians, face food insecurity. The issue is not only economic—though affordability is a key factor—but also one of access, rooted in land-use policies. These policies have contributed to a disparity in food access, with larger supermarkets concentrated in wealthier neighborhoods. This is known as “supermarket redlining” and forces people to rely on convenience stores or fast-food outlets as their main source of food. A 2008 study found that individuals without access to supermarkets were 25 to 46 percent less likely to maintain a healthy diet.

Farmers markets, supported by federal, state, and private food assistance programs, are helping to bridge the gap by offering a direct distribution model. While there are systemic abuses that stem from a system of “food apartheid,” these programs are at least an effort to get more produce at competitive prices in markets close to food insecure communities, at prices lower than those in chain grocery stores. 

A 2021 study highlighted the role farmers markets can play in reducing food insecurity, noting that by 2019, around 50 percent of farmers markets accepted some form of federal food assistance. Access alone does not address all of the challenges associated with dietary change, programs like California’s Market Match, where EBT value is doubled, can help improve the affordability of fresh, local food. The Florin market has become one of the top 10 EBT markets in the country, with around $300,000 in EBT and Market Match funds spent in 2023. 

“Neighborhoods that lack access to fresh produce have an abundance of fast food and heavily processed foods,” Bowman writes, yet “communities are responsive when fresh produce is simply made available and especially when incentivized with programs like Market Match.”

“I think that when people have access to fresh produce, they will buy it,” Bowman told Sentient in an email. There are many reasons they might make a change in what they eat. “In general fresh produce is less expensive than meat products, so there is evident economic value there,” writes Bowman. 

Earlier this year, budget cuts in California threatened the program’s success when California Governor Gavin Newsom proposed a $37.8 billion cut to the state budget. The threat was averted after advocacy groups, including Alchemist CDC, were able to persuade Newsom to preserve the program’s full $35 million budget. 

There are other challenges however, says Kim Bowman, who worked on food security for decades in Southern California. “Accessing healthy food in Los Angeles can be really challenging. While grassroots initiatives are making strides, there is a lack of infrastructure to support these efforts comprehensively.” 

Bowman stresses the need for policies that not only help younger generations enter agriculture by making land acquisition easier, but also support farmers adopting regenerative practices. Subsidies for such practices could help reduce reliance on synthetic chemicals and build a more sustainable agricultural sector. However, these efforts must be paired with broader systemic changes. This can mean subsidies for farmers like Bowman mentions, or in other cases could be changing livestock productivity.

“Ultimately there’s no one silver-bullet recipe for a sustainable food system—and we benefit from a diversity of different scales, including local, regional, and, sometimes, national or international,” according Johns Hopkins’s Brent Kim. “The important thing is approaching what we grow, how we grow it, and what we eat with an eye toward kindness, conservation and equity.”

This story is part of an ongoing series of reporting on a just and climate-friendly food system produced in collaboration with The Guardian, Nexus Media News, Sentient, and Yes! Magazine with funding from the Solutions Journalism Network, advisory support from Garrett Broad (Rowan University), and audience engagement through Project Drawdown’s Global Solutions Diary.

Meanwhile, Public Citizen has pointed out Öz’s direct conflict of interest in overseeing CMS as an advocate of expanding Medicare Advantage. Öz owns significant shares in UnitedHealth Group, a private insurance company notorious for denying claims and making money off Medicare Advantage.

Eagan Kemp, a health care policy expert who previously served as a senior policy analyst at the U.S. Government Accountability Office, spoke with YES! Senior Editor Sonali Kolhatkar on YES! Presents: Rising Up With Sonali about the possible impact of Öz’s appointment.

Just meters away stands a library where several men either watch an educational program on television or immerse themselves in books. In a nearby carpentry workshop, three men work on furniture and model ships, while another room serves as a textile workshop. 

These diverse activities are part of Liberté, a cooperative association operating within Unit Number 15 of the maximum security complex of Batán, located in Mar del Plata, Argentina. This penitentiary facility houses approximately 1,600 inmates. But many individuals here, deprived of their liberty, have found a way to reclaim some for themselves. 

At first glance, the entrance to Liberté may appear to be just another barred gate within the prison. Yet on the other side of this barrier, things feel distinctly different.

“When we cross that gate, we forget we are in a prison. We feel free,” says Ariel, who works in the textile workshop. (Incarcerated individuals are being identified by their first names only, for legal reasons.) 

This sentiment is common among the 80-some men who make up Liberté today. They don’t define themselves as prisoners. Instead, through work, education, sports, and cultural activities, they are people preparing to integrate into society.

“If the punitive model of punishment worked, it might be worth pursuing,” says Xavier Aguirreal, who founded Liberté. “But what truly works is restorative justice.” 

A Different Kind of Opportunity

“In prison, you either become dependent or beg,” says Aguirreal, 55, who is known to everyone as Pampa. “You come in with a couple of pairs of shoes and a shirt, but when those wear out, you cannot obtain new ones unless a family member or an NGO provides them. I didn’t want that for myself,” he recalls. So in 2014, two years after arriving at Batán, he asked permission from the Penitentiary Service to launch an entrepreneurial initiative. 

The head of the Work Department told Pampa that he needed at least two people to start, so he and his cellmate made a proposal to bring in materials and produce something that they could then sell outside the prison. “We started manufacturing wall clocks,” Pampa says.

According to official statistics, last year less than half of people incarcerated in Argentina were involved in an educational program. Only a third had paid work in prison. 

But, says Diana Márquez, a lawyer and the coordinator of Víctimas por la Paz, “Most prisoners want to leave their cells and desire to work or study.  The problem is that in prison there are very few educational options available—mostly just elementary school—and nearly no job opportunities, many of which are undignified.” 

The Víctimas por la Paz association was created by people who were affected by crimes and now works to promote restorative justice. This organization has supported Liberté since 2017, thanks to Judge Mario Juliano, who believed that model was the best route to restoration. 

Liberté operates on a self-management model, where each participant is responsible for doing their own work to earn their own money. “This fosters autonomy and self-esteem, essential values for successful integration into society,” Pampa explains. 

Liberté has launched various work projects, including leatherwork, carpentry, blacksmithing, radio programming, baking, beekeeping, and organic gardening workshops. There is even a small grocery store where incarcerated people can purchase their food and a restaurant named Punto de Paz. The meals prepared in Liberté’s kitchen have received official permission from the Buenos Aires government to be sold in supermarkets outside the prison. 

In addition to these ventures, Liberté has developed educational, cultural, and sports programs—such as soccer and karate—to support personal growth and promote teamwork. 

“Liberté offers something broader than just a single workshop or course. That’s its richness: Our lives consist of various interests and needs. Everyone has different preferences, and when I enter Liberté, it feels like a small neighborhood with diverse activities,” Márquez says.

An Effective Model for Change

“If you deprive someone of their rights for decades, what do you think they learn?” Pampa asks. “That human rights don’t exist.”

There are no official statistics regarding recidivism in Argentina. However, the Latin American Center for Studies on Insecurity and Violence at the Tres de Febrero National University estimates that seven out of 10 individuals who regain their freedom commit a crime within the first year after leaving prison.

“Prison should not be a place of punishment but of restoration. When we leave, we should be seen as people like anyone else—not as those deprived of their rights.”

Over the past 10 years, more than 1,000 people incarcerated at Batán have participated in Liberté. Of those, 104 have been released—none of whom have reoffended.

Moreover, Liberté’s vision of self-restoration involves recognizing mistakes and addressing the harm caused by those actions. This is why they created the Victim Support Fund: They donate part of their grocery earnings to organizations that assist victims of crimes. 

“Liberté has changed my life,” says Omar during a break in his carpentry work. While at Batán, he got married in a ceremony at Punto de Paz. “I’ve learned to value things I previously overlooked,” he says. “All of this will help me in the outside world.”

“Here, I can do things like I would outside; I don’t feel like a prisoner,” says Roberto, the current coordinator of Liberté. Before arriving at Batán four years ago, he worked as a cook and played soccer for a club. Now, he cooks in Liberté’s kitchen and coordinates a soccer team. He has learned new recipes and how to manage with limited kitchen utensils. “All of this will help me in the future; otherwise, it would just be wasted time in jail.”

More than that, Roberto says he has experienced personal growth that is not always available in the environments in which people grow up. “Liberté gives us the chance to depend on ourselves and appreciate every little thing. Outside, I used to be more selfish; here, I’ve learned about solidarity,” he says.

Carlitos shares a similar sentiment. He coordinates the library, which houses more than 5,000 books and offers opportunities for discussions and screenings of educational films. “Outside, we didn’t learn to love or respect one another or how to share. Here in Liberté, we’ve come to understand that dialogue through love is essential.”

Punishment vs. Restorative Justice

Marcelo spent the day selling religious ornaments in Mar del Plata. After work, he visits the homeless to distribute food with a Christian group. After that, he’ll travel to La Plata to visit his mother.

His life was very different two years ago when he was still at Batán. He arrived with mental health issues that led him to contemplate suicide. For a time, he felt guilty and worthless.

One day, Pampa invited Marcelo to lunch with other Liberté members and brought him a plate of burgers with French fries. “I started to cry. I couldn’t remember the last time I had eaten something like that,” Marcelo recalls. “I felt I was regaining my dignity.”

An engineer and teacher, Marcelo was drawn to Liberté by its library. He soon began participating in various cooperative activities, including restoring an old laundry facility into the current Liberté space. Eventually he became the cooperative’s treasurer, managing the accounts for Liberté’s grocery store. This role gave him a sense of worth.

“When my daughter and son visited me, they didn’t have to bring food for us to share. I could offer them a cake made by one of Liberté’s bakers or invite them to drink mate with my own yerba,” Marcelo says, referring to the traditional infused beverage that holds great cultural significance in Argentina. “I don’t know what would have become of me if I had spent all my time in the pavilion.”

That sentiment is shared. “Prison reinforces resentment and hatred, but Liberté fosters courage and helps us overcome those feelings,” explains Michael, a member of Liberté who runs the radio program. “In Liberté, you stop viewing prisoners as mere characters from movies; instead, you see them as individuals with new possibilities who can even find joy within prison walls. Because without joy, how can you move forward and experience change?”

Broader Cultural Change

Liberté’s innovative approach encourages a fundamental shift in how society at large perceives incarceration. To promote this model, Liberté launched a diploma program three years ago in collaboration with the Mar del Plata National University that focuses on restorative justice, social integration, and peaceful coexistence within prison contexts. The program is open to anyone who is directly or indirectly linked to the prison environment—from detainees to prison officers, as well as students and professionals in law, social work, and psychology. 

The program is conducted online using platforms like Zoom and a virtual campus, along with YouTube. Since the pandemic, people incarcerated in Buenos Aires Province have been allowed to use cell phones, which has also facilitated the program’s operation. The curriculum combines theory classes with practical workshops and activities, equipping participants with tools to understand and transform the penal system while promoting a vision of justice rooted in care, dignity, and reconciliation.

The program was initially designed for 100 students but has attracted more than 8,000 participants. “Preliminary data indicate changes in perceptions among those who held prejudices and stigmas. They have broadened their horizons by understanding the realities of prisoners and now see solutions as a collective effort,” stated Claudia Perlo from the Rosario Institute for Research in Educational Sciences in a 2023 interview with RED/ACCIÓN. She highlights Liberté as a model for policymakers regarding prison reform. And Liberté continues to innovate, now developing a Popular University based on a German model. 

Márquez attests to the impact of these programs: “Liberté has made me feel free too. It helps me shed my prejudices. When I come here, I see people—not prisoners or inmates.”

Ongoing Challenges

Despite ongoing legal blocks and bureaucratic hurdles thrown at them by the Penitentiary Service, Liberté persists. The group achieved legal status as a cooperative in 2021. “Every single piece of paperwork is difficult. For example, to create a bank account, a bank manager had to visit the prison, which took considerable time and goodwill,” Pampa explains. But the hard work is paying off.

“In 2021, the head of the Penitentiary Service told me he had received many calls from various places interested in replicating our self-managed model,” Pampa recalls. Prisons in Neuquén in southern Argentina and Rosario and Victoria in the north have expressed interest in Liberté’s work. Last year, Liberté began expanding its efforts into a prison in Rio Grande, Tierra del Fuego—the southernmost province in the country.

“We are convinced that ours is not the only model or even the best one. But it’s working, and we want to share it,” Pampa says. “If we do that, human rights and dignity will emerge.”

But Eric Blanc, assistant professor of labor studies at Rutgers University, says all is not lost. He believes there’s no stopping the recent surge in labor organizing in the United States. Blanc blogs at the Substack Labor Politics and is the author of We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing Is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big. He spoke with YES! Senior Editor Sonali Kolhatkar on YES! Presents: Rising Up With Sonali about how labor can survive and even thrive over the next four years.

The upcoming presidential election will be critical for these growing unions and their workers. The candidates offer contrasting approaches to engaging with organized labor and regulating the world of work. While former president Donald Trump and his running mate, Ohio Senator JD Vance, have tried to fashion themselves as champions of working people, experts, including those leading some of the nation’s largest unions, call this rhetoric bogus.

“[We’ve] seen what a prior Trump administration did for workers, like replacing an Obama overtime rule with a less protective version, trying to make it easier for employers to take workers’ tips, and making it easier to misclassify employees as independent contractors—taking away their rights to minimum wage and overtime,” says Rajesh Nayak, a fellow at the Harvard Center for Labor and a Just Economy. “Those policies can undermine organizing by making workers feel like the laws are stacked against them.”

Nayak says he expects more of the same anti-worker policies from Trump if he were reelected this November. “You can see it in Project 2025, which promises to undo many of the pro-organizing positions taken by the Biden National Labor Relations Board [NLRB],” he says.

Project 2025, the presidential playbook drawn up by the Heritage Foundation, to which at least 140 of Trump’s former staffers contributed, promises to disrupt labor agencies, including the NLRB, a low-profile but high-impact government office tasked with enforcing labor laws in relation to collective bargaining and unfair labor practices. 

President Joe Biden made pro-union appointments at several federal agencies, including the NLRB. Under Biden, the board has issued rulings that make unionizing easier for workers, including widening the scope of protected organizing activities and implementing a more protective threshold for determining whether employees have been misclassified as independent contractors and are being denied their rights. 

A second Trump administration is expected to reverse this momentum. Project 2025 calls on Trump to fire the NLRB’s Biden-appointed general counsel after taking office, despite precedent that the general counsel serve the remainder of their four-year term even under a new administration. (Biden was actually the first to break this long-held precedent when he fired Trump appointee Peter Robb in January 2021, 10 months before Robb’s term would have ended, to replace him with a candidate who would be less hostile to unions.)

Project 2025 also calls for cutting budgets at labor agencies “to the low end of the historical average.” While the NLRB has been stronger under Biden than it was during Trump’s first term, it still lacks the funding it needs to fulfill its mission. Additional cost-cutting could weaken its enforcement powers further and heighten barriers for workers and unions to seek recourse for unfair labor practices or access other essential support. 

Nayak also expects a second Trump administration to bury unions in paperwork, for example, by reinstating duplicative reporting rules that the Biden administration rescinded in 2021. “Project 2025 threatens to repeat a long-running anti-union playbook of layering more and more reporting requirements on unions that go well beyond transparency and just serve to slow them down,” he says. 

It’s not only Project 2025 that promises a hostile approach to workers and unions. Trump offered a grim preview of his labor policies during his first term in office, appointing anti-union officials to labor agencies, rolling back basic workplace protections, and selecting the conservative Supreme Court justices who would go on to rule that the nation’s entire public sector is “right to work.” That decision in Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees made a significant dent in the member-fees-based revenue of public sector unions. (Though it should be noted that the ruling has not reduced membership as much as the anti-union firm that argued the case might have hoped.)

If he were reelected, Trump is expected to take aim again at unionized public sector workers. Project 2025 urges the administration to “consider whether public-sector unions are appropriate in the first place” and promises to revive a trio of executive orders targeting federal employees that Trump was unable to force through in his first term. The orders would shorten the timeline for unions and agencies to negotiate contracts, reduce the time workers would be allowed to improve their performance before being terminated, and reduce the hours that union representatives are allowed to spend doing union-related activities on government time.

Doreen Greenwald, national president of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), which represents tens of thousands of federal workers across 35 departments and agencies, says these executive orders “were designed to decimate federal employee bargaining rights and the ability of unions to represent them.”

The highest-profile threat that a second Trump administration poses to federal workers is an executive order called Schedule F. If passed, it would remove civil service protections for many federal employees and reclassify them as at-will appointees who can be fired for any reason. This policy would allow candidates in critical government positions to be hired and fired based on their partisan leanings and willingness to follow orders rather than their qualifications and skill sets.

“The policy makes it easier for politicians to push bureaucrats to act in ways that allow them to violate the law and undermine the public interest,” explains Donald Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. “Civil servants take an oath to serve the Constitution, but Schedule F would force them to choose between serving that oath and serving whoever occupies the White House,” he continues.

Trump tried implementing Schedule F at the end of his first term in 2020, but it was never fully realized. “If Schedule F had been fully implemented in 2020, thousands of employees could have lost their civil service protections, been fired at will, and replaced with partisan loyalists,” warns Greenwald. 

The policy could have wide-ranging effects far beyond the federal workforce. Many people would experience this in the breakdown of vital government functions that are often taken for granted, such as enforcing food or workplace safety regulations. If qualified experts are forced out of regulating agencies in favor of appointees who are politically aligned with the administration, those agencies will become less competent and less able to deliver results.

Moynihan says Schedule F is a dangerous policy under any administration—Democrat or Republican. However, under Trump, it carries unique risks. “That is because Trump has shown himself to embrace authoritarian positions, ignoring the rule of law and wanting to use state power to suppress dissent and attack his enemies. With Schedule F, he would be able to do what authoritarians in other countries have done to consolidate his power—purge the bureaucracy of anyone who opposes democratic backsliding.”

To refuse the hostile anti-worker and anti-democracy policies of a second Trump term, many of the nation’s largest unions are backing Kamala Harris for president. As soon as she announced her candidacy, Harris gave the keynote address at the American Federation of Teachers convention. That union and almost every other major union nationwide has endorsed the current vice president. 

The groups aren’t just opposing Trump, they are also bracing for a potential second Trump term. In July, Gwen Mills, president of Unite Here, which represents workers in the hotel and food service industries, told HuffPost that she expects her union to be forced to “play defense” if Trump is elected. 

For Greenwald of NTEU, the best defense is a good offense. To help protect employees against future implementation of Schedule F, NTEU proposed a new rule reaffirming that employees keep their rights even if they are involuntarily reclassified. The Office of Personnel Management affirmed and issued that rule earlier this year. 

NTEU is also renegotiating contracts now to avoid having to do so under a possible Trump administration. “Our experience from President Trump’s first term is that his administration did not negotiate in good faith when contracts came open,” Greenwald says. “It only makes sense that employees would fare better if there are fully and fairly negotiated contracts in place and not subject to renegotiation during a second possible Trump term.”

Nayak urges other federal employee unions to do the same. He also suggests that all unions and other labor organizations be informed about what the candidates’ platforms offer to help their members understand the possible outcomes and make informed decisions at the ballot box.

He offers one silver lining: “If President Trump wins this November, he’s not going to automatically reverse the very real momentum that unions have had in this country. We’ve seen it both in public opinion surveys and on-the-ground organizing activity, and it’s not going away that easily.” Greenwald agrees, saying union leaders are “prepared to fight” if the next administration is anti-labor.

What would a progressive vision for labor and capital look like? As part of YES! Media’s Progress 2025 initiative, Natalia Renta, senior policy counsel for corporate governance and power at Americans for Financial Reform answered that question in conversation with YES! Senior Editor Sonali Kolhatkar on YES! Presents: Rising Up With Sonali.

Polling from the National Parents Union (NPU) has found that heading into the election, economic issues are top of mind for many parents of school-aged children. “Times are tough, and parents are walking an economic tightrope every single day,” wrote Keri Rodrigues, co-founder and president of the NPU, about the poll results.

While the U.S. boasts one of the largest economies in the world, it leads high-income countries in the proportion of kids living in poverty at over 16%. 

The good news is that these issues can be addressed through government policies. Past policies and policies pursued in different countries offer an evidence-based blueprint for doing so. 

A recent example of an intervention that lifted kids out of poverty in the U.S. is the 2021 American Rescue Plan’s Child Tax Credit, which provided monthly checks to families earning less than $150,000 per year with young children. The program delivered dramatic results, cutting child poverty almost in half and narrowing the racial child-poverty gap. However, Congress allowed the program to lapse after just one year, and child poverty predictably shot up again.

Canada also saw striking results when it implemented the Canada Child Benefit in 2016, providing monthly, nontaxable payments to low- and middle-income families with kids between the ages of 6 and 17. That program cut child poverty, supported families’ food security, and boosted the economy. Similarly, some European countries have reduced the proportion of children at risk of poverty by as much as 16% through universal programs supporting families with children with cash assistance.

Similar programs exist in the U.S., but they are patchwork, and many are still in the testing phases. At the state and local levels, more than 150 guaranteed-income initiatives have been launched nationwide since 2017, showing positive effects on kids and families. In Jackson, Mississippi, participants in the fourth cohort of the Magnolia Mother’s Trust Program, which gives $1,000 per month for 12 months to Black mothers, reported that the funds helped them purchase needed shoes and clothes for their children, allowed their kids to participate in more field trips and cultural activities than before, and improved their relationships with their children. 

Beyond direct cash support, universal preschool and childcare programs in some European countries have been shown to support childhood development, especially among kids from marginalized communities. Currently, childcare is one of the biggest expenses for families of young children in the U.S., often rivaling rent. Government spending on early childcare programs can help address poverty, reduce gender disparities in the workforce, and support women who pursue careers alongside parenting.

“The research is pretty clear and universal,” explains Michelle Bezark, a senior researcher at the Center for Early Learning Funding Equity at Northern Illinois University. “Early childhood programs that are well funded have immense long-term benefits for children, families, and society at large.”

The bad news is that if Donald Trump is re-elected, he is not expected to pursue the interventions needed to address the dire issues facing the nation’s children, such as poverty. Rather, he’s likely to do the opposite, judging by the presidential playbook drawn up by the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. At least 140 of his former staffers are involved in the project, whose mandate lists protecting children as one of its main goals. Yet Project 2025 promises to reorganize or even eliminate lifelines for families, including subsidized housing, cash assistance, school meals, and Head Start programs. 

“It would be a disaster,” says Timothy Smeeding, the Lee Rainwater Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Public Affairs and Economics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and former director of the university’s Institute for Research on Poverty. “Some of these programs are really important, and they would be cut by Project 2025.”

If Trump were elected and Project 2025’s proposals pursued, experts anticipate that children and families could face worsening impoverishment, hunger, and homelessness. Households with marginalized members, including immigrants, disabled people, and people of color, are the most at-risk under the proposals for families and kids.

Child poverty often manifests as homelessness. More than a million school-age children face homelessness each year nationwide, and tens of millions of kids live in households that teeter on the brink of eviction. Despite the urgent need to address homelessness among children, the proportion of families benefiting from Housing and Urban Development subsidized housing programs has declined in recent years as the number of families in need rises, the number of affordable housing units falls, and federal housing assistance remains underfunded.

Rather than bolstering subsidized housing programs to keep kids housed, Project 2025 proposes new restrictions on access to these programs. Proposals in Project 2025 would also bar mixed-status households from accessing federal housing subsidies, making families whose members include people with different citizenship or immigration statuses ineligible to receive support. Trump floated the idea of implementing restrictions on mixed-status households during his first term in 2019, and analysts estimated that children would make up more than half of the population to lose housing under such a rule. 

Food insecurity and hunger are also manifestations of childhood poverty. Today, more than 17% of households with children are food insecure. The authors of Project 2025 propose gutting programs that help keep kids fed, including the Community Eligibility Program (CEP), Summer Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT), and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). CEP and Summer EBT, also called Sun Bucks, support school-age kids. The former allows low-income schools and school districts to provide free meals to all students. When the school year ends and children no longer receive free or reduced-price school meals, Sun Bucks helps fill the gap. 

Meanwhile, SNAP provides EBT to low-income individuals. While the proposals in Project 2025 would not eliminate SNAP, they would implement stricter work requirements and provide fewer exceptions, threatening access for many families.

Both SNAP and Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, another program on Project 2025’s chopping block, have existing work requirements for recipients. These requirements were already broadened last year in response to a demand by House Republicans as a condition of raising the debt ceiling. Work requirements are rooted in racist and sexist tropes, such as the so-called “welfare queen” and “con artist” that Ronald Reagan popularized in the 1980s as a way to target government assistance. 

Research has shown that work requirements do not improve employment outcomes, and for parents, the requirements can mean having less time to spend with their kids. 

The proposals in Project 2025 go beyond threatening the housing, financial, and food security of families and kids, and take aim at the government’s Head Start programs, which offer early childhood education, health, and social services to children from birth to age 5 and their families. Bezark says this would have ripple effects across every area of childhood development. 

“It would mean a lot of kids would not get the developmental support they need,” says Bezark. “That means early intervention services and screening for developmental delays would not happen; kids would not get needed pediatric checkups and immunizations and dental checks, and all of the other wraparound services that Head Start provides.”

Eliminating Head Start programs would hit rural areas, disabled kids, and communities of color the hardest. Latine families are more likely to live in childcare deserts and need the services of Head Start. Head Start programs include Migrant and Seasonal Head Start and American Indian and Alaska Native Head Start, which serve agricultural and tribal communities, respectively. Children in foster care and those experiencing homelessness are automatically eligible for Head Start, while disabled kids must fill at least 10% of enrollment slots. Currently, over 787,000 children nationwide participate in Head Start programs.

Rather than gut Head Start programs, the Democratic Party platform promises to expand them. In fact, since entering the presidential race, Democratic nominee Kamala Harris has made childcare a tenet of her campaign. She has also promised to increase the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit (CDCTC), which Smeeding argues should be a central part of a new tax plan to support the nation’s kids and families. The CDCTC would help working families with children offset the cost of childcare. Alongside it, Smeeding suggests increasing the Earned Income Tax Credit and reinstating a Child Tax Credit to ensure “no one falls through the cracks.” 

Supporting kids and families with solutions like these is popular with voters, too—Democrats and Republicans alike. When polled by the NPU, more than 80% of parents with school-age children supported reinstating the Child Tax Credit, including 84% of registered Democrats, 81% of Independents, and 75% of Republicans. Another poll from the First Five Years Fund found that 86% of voters believe improving the quality of childcare and early learning programs, and making them more affordable for families is a good investment of taxpayer money. 

Bezark agrees: “Laying that foundation is crucial to long-term child outcomes and societal outcomes.”

Grace Garcia, a cashier at Vons in Glendale, California, with over three decades in the grocery industry, as well as a member of UFCW Local 770, spoke with YES! Senior Editor Sonali Kolhatkar on YES! Presents: Rising Up With Sonali about why workers like her are opposing the merger.

But experts on economic inequality—and activists working to end it—say such a policy would do little to help workers relying on tipped wages. Instead, the question arises, what would it take to achieve an economy where tipping is simply not part of the equation, because everyone is paid a fair living wage?

Saru Jayaraman, president of One Fair Wage and director of the Food Labor Research Center at University of California, Berkeley, spoke with YES! Senior Editor Sonali Kolhatkar on YES! Presents: Rising Up With Sonali about ending what she calls “sub-minimum wages.”

John Boyd, president of the National Black Farmers Association, spoke with YES! Senior Editor Sonali Kolhatkar on YES! Presents: Rising Up With Sonali about systemic discrimination against Black farmers and what else is needed from the federal government.

The report comes just months after the release of data from the 2023 Black Census, a poll of more than 200,000 Black people across all 50 states, considered to be the largest such survey of Black Americans in U.S. history. The census results were used to guide the economic road map. 

Kristin Powell, principal of the Black Futures Lab, which conducts the census and the Black to the Future Action Fund, spoke with YES! Senior Editor Sonali Kolhatkar on YES! Presents: Rising Up With Sonali about the Black economic agenda.

The Om Sleiman farm in the village of Bil’in is part of a growing agroecology movement in the occupied West Bank that is turning to sustainable farming as a way to resist the Israeli occupation and stay rooted to the land. Established in 2016, Om Sleiman—Arabic for “ladybug”—aims to connect Palestinians to the produce they consume and to promote food sovereignty.

“We share the yield of the farm with 20 to 30 members, depending on the season,” explains Loor Kamal, a member of Om Sleiman, as she prepares raised beds where eggplants, tomatoes, watermelons, peppers, and beans will be sown. The farm operates on a community-supported agriculture, or CSA, model in which members pay for their share of the produce at the beginning of each season, sharing both the yield and the risks of production.

One day in April, Kamal shows us around the property, which is located in Area C of the West Bank, under full Israeli military control. Here vegetables are grown alongside olive and fruit trees, but Kamal, who works at Om Sleiman with a team of five other women, mentions that a part of the land is inaccessible. “In March, we were walking around the farm, checking the carob trees inside our land, and suddenly soldiers started shooting at us,” she recalls.

Growing food under military occupation has become increasingly dangerous as settler violence and repression escalate. Even with the world’s attention focused on the war in Gaza, Israeli soldiers and settlers have killed more than 563 Palestinians in the West Bank since October.

Despite the dangers, Om Sleiman’s team is determined to continue their work. “We have to go on, even when there is fear, because our presence here is important,” says Kamal as she picks eggplants, apples, and mulberries from the farm.

The land on which they grow organic produce has special significance. The concrete wall that cuts through the West Bank expropriated hundreds of acres of Bil’in’s agricultural land in 2005. After years of protest and legal action, residents managed to regain about half of the lost farmland, a victory that turned the village into a symbol of popular resistance.

A part of the reclaimed land was donated for the establishment of this agroecology farm. For members of Om Sleiman, growing food in defiance of the encroaching wall and settlements is a way of continuing the struggle for freedom.

Agroecology As a Tool for Liberation

“If we want to be free, we need to plant our own food,” says Angham Mansour, who is from Bili’in and joined Om Sleiman two years ago. The farm aims to promote independence from the occupier’s economy but also to reconnect Palestinians with the land. “Farming is part of our heritage. Going back to the land is going back to our roots, to our identity,” she says.

Palestine is part of the historical region of the Fertile Crescent, seen as the birthplace of agriculture, where people started cultivating grains and cereals as they transitioned from hunter-gatherer groups to agricultural societies.

For Saed Dagher, a farmer and agronomist who started working with agroecology in Palestine in 1996, sustainable farming is a crucial tool for liberation. “As a farmer I am free when I don’t depend on outside inputs, when I produce the food in my land the way I see fit, with my own seeds, and the inputs that are locally available. I am not dependent on seed and chemical companies. And I don’t depend on the occupation,” he says.

Dagher is one of the co-founders of the Palestinian Agroecology Forum, a volunteer group aiming to spread ecological farming in Palestine. In the past decade he has noticed a growing interest in agroecology, an approach that tries to minimize the environmental impacts of farming by using local, renewable resources. This method reduces dependency on purchased inputs and prioritizes soil health and biodiversity.

According to Dagher, Palestinian farmers have practiced forms of agroecology long before the term was invented. “Traditionally, Palestinian farmers would plant olive trees with wheat, barley, beans, potatoes, tomatoes, onions, and garlic. In the same field, we would have fig trees, grapes, almonds. It was diverse,” he says. Palestinian farmers used to rely mostly on local resources and rain-fed agriculture, helping preserve local varieties in the fields, orchards, and terraced hills.

The establishment of the state of Israel in 1948—through a violent process that entailed the destruction of hundreds of Palestinian villages and the forced displacement and dispossession of Palestinians—meant farmers lost most of their lands and livelihoods.

Since the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1967, the remaining Palestinian territory became a captive market for Israeli products. The local food system was transformed from a food-producing to food-buying one, deepening Palestinian dependence on the occupying forces.

In the decades since then, Palestine’s diverse agricultural heritage has been in decline, as Palestinian growing traditions have been increasingly displaced by monocultures and industrial agriculture, which are reliant on agrochemicals and genetically modified seeds, particularly after the Oslo accords signed in 1993.

“Israel wants to destroy Palestinian agriculture, so [Palestinians] become dependent on them and on humanitarian assistance,” says Moayyad Bsharat, project coordinator at the Union for Agricultural Work Committees, or UAWC, an organization supporting Palestinian farmers. “If Palestinians are food secure and don’t depend on Israeli products and Israeli markets, they will dream of freedom, and Israel doesn’t want it. It wants Palestinians as slaves working for them.”

The importance of food sovereignty has been highlighted by the catastrophic situation in Gaza over the past 10 months. According to human rights reports, Israel has been using starvation as a weapon of war by deliberately blocking the delivery of food and by destroying farmlands.

As dependence on Israeli produce and agribusiness grows under occupation, so does the land grabbing. This year, Israel has declared a record 2,743 acres of land in the occupied West Bank to be state-owned—a move that paves the way for continued settlement construction.

“The occupation keeps trying to take the land from us, to restrict our access to it, and prevent farmers from reaching it,” Mansour says. “The goal is to make our lives here impossible, to make us leave. They want to uproot us.”

The systematic appropriation of land and water resources by expanding Israeli settlements, the separation wall, and the military have all alienated Palestinians from the land and caused the loss of native seeds and traditional practices. 

But despite farmers’ continuous dispossession and the widespread destruction of agricultural land, Bsharat says farmers haven’t been defeated. “We will rebuild again. We will support farmers with local seeds and continue our projects to build food sovereignty. We will use all our efforts to dismantle the colonial project by sowing local seeds, taking care of the land, and teaching our children not to forget.”

The Union for Agricultural Work Committees is collecting and distributing 60 varieties of heirloom seeds and is working on the rehabilitation of agricultural land in Gaza and the West Bank. In recent years, it has helped establish agroecology projects and trainings in some of the villages most affected by settler violence.

“We are still present in the land, despite the restrictions imposed on us and the violence of the settlers,” says Ghassan Najjar, who manages an agroecology cooperative in Burin, a village surrounded by extremist Israeli settlers who regularly attack Palestinian farmers, burning orchards and uprooting olive trees.

“Agriculture is resistance,” says Najjar, standing in a greenhouse where members of the cooperative grow cucumbers and tomatoes using agroecology techniques.

Despite the growing settler violence and repression, Dagher says he is motivated to “do more and more.” He considers the fact that many Palestinian workers have lost their Israeli jobs since last October to be “an opportunity to encourage more people to work in agriculture.”

The farmers at Om Sleiman will keep sowing the land, spring after spring. “These days when the situation is so difficult, we feel this project is even more important. We feel we have to continue, we have to be present,” Mansour says.

“Every day we come and we work the land because we have hope,” adds Kamal. “Because we believe that we will be free.”

I’ve begun to think that our relationship to the environment around us operates in the same way. Capitalists have tried everything under the sun to make farming—and everything associated with it—­faster, cheaper, bigger, better. Call it the God complex in them. Time and time again we find out that these human interventions are disrupting an age-­old process. Instead of deferring to Indigenous expertise, the pursuit of money will always lead greedy people to believe they know better than anyone else. Capitalists’ hubris is not-­so-­slowly killing us all, including this planet we call home.

Our family’s land is inland, but not too far from the coast. North Carolina’s barrier islands have historically protected the rest of the state from natural disasters and the Atlantic Ocean. Increasingly, as the utility of those wetlands and small islands has been ignored in favor of resorts and golf courses, floods swallow up streets, destroy dams, and make gainful farming even more precarious than it already was. After Hurricane Matthew ravaged most of the state, the dam on our family land cracked and the lake that once teemed with beavers and fish is now more mud than anything else. Water from nearby creeks and brooks flows through the area with nothing keeping the water in place. The flooding is insistent. Working-­class Black people and other marginalized people across the country are forced to live in areas where no one else wants to live: places with infertile soil that flood easily; areas categorized as food deserts; crowded apartments with lead poison in the paint, toxins in the playground soil, and pollutants in the air.

This is not accidental or naturally occurring; often Black and Indigenous people are pushed onto depleted land and forced to bear the weight of problems created and exacerbated by wealthy white people, primarily because the powerful get to decide who pays their consequences. Land theft, then, is a centuries-­long public health crisis. Sometimes, especially throughout the nineteenth century, environmental degradation was a purposeful act of warfare against an already disenfranchised people. 

Unfortunately, the generals who ordered the destruction of land, animals, and natural resources were too shortsighted to see how those choices would ripple out and impact their own descendants as well. In his piece “A Rational Agriculture Is Incompatible With Capitalism,” Fred Magdoff argues that the strategies that “make eminent sense for the individual capitalist or company … end up being a problem not only for workers, but the capitalist system itself. … Many practices and side effects of the way the system functions degrade the ecosystem and its processes on which we depend and may also directly harm humans.”

Public educator and self-­described eco-­communicator Leah Thomas has heavily explored the relationship between social justice and environmentalism. In The Intersectional Environmentalist, a book named after both a term she coined and the platform she founded, Thomas introduces readers to Black environmental activists who have been sounding the alarm on the extractive practices of engaging with the planet for decades, as well as naming and amplifying the dire consequences for biodiversity, wildlife, and natural resources. Those outcomes in turn are deadly, and the people doing the most harm—­those who hire private firefighters in the face of incessant wildfires, for instance—­move around the globe freely, even search for new planets to hide on, while the rest of us shoulder the burden. 

One of the advocates whom Thomas profiles in her book is Hazel M. Johnson, a Black woman from the South Side of Chicago who became a researcher and community activist after watching her husband and neighbors die from lung cancer at alarming rates. Johnson’s research revealed that Altgeld Gardens Homes, the housing project where she lived, was constructed on a plot of land known to have abnormally high asbestos levels, and that their neighborhood was surrounded by landfills and toxic waste sites. Having abruptly become a single mother of seven, Johnson began investigating the respiratory, carcinogenic, and skin conditions that her loved ones were facing after extended exposure to the fumes and water of the Altgeld Gardens area. Johnson later coined the term “toxic doughnut” to describe the phenomenon experienced nationwide but especially in urban centers, as well as throughout the South, where you are exposed to high concentrations of hazardous waste.

The ominously known “Cancer Alley,” which some residents feel is more apt to be called “Death Row,” is a less-than-100-acre stretch of land in southern Louisiana with the ninth-highest cancer death rate in the nation (as of 2020) and is responsible for more than a quarter of all petrochemical production. According to the 2021 Toxics Release Inventory Factsheet, which tracks the management of chemicals that threaten human health and the environment, Louisiana has the second-­highest amount of toxic releases per square mile in the country. Along the Mississippi River, industrial headquarters and towering metal forts have been stationed as great return on investment to shareholders, but the greatest cost being paid is by the Black residents along the riverbanks and nearby parishes.

In one parish that falls within Cancer Alley, St. Gabriel residents are surrounded by more than two dozen chemical plants within 10 to 15 miles of their homes. Further south, in Wallace of St. John the Baptist Parish, where 90% of the population is Black and has spent the majority of their lives just miles from where their ancestors were enslaved, petrochemical plant emissions have created abnormally and astronomically high cancer rates. Clint Smith quoted civil rights leader Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, who said this of Cancer Alley: “The same land that held people captive through slavery is now holding people captive through this environmental injustice and devastation.”

The density of chemical plants in such a small area has compounded risks for many Louisianans who call the St. James Parish area home. Despite decades of protests, plans to build new chemical plants continue to be introduced and approved by local officials while more Black people die or lose the only land they’ve ever known. In 2018, the St. James Parish Council approved a private development initiative led by one of the largest plastics facilities in the world. The “Sunshine Project” would build 14 new facilities in Cancer Alley atop 2,400 acres, thanks to more than $1 billion in government subsidies and tax breaks. If successful, the project would allegedly bring in $9 billion and countless jobs in exchange for more than double the risk of being diagnosed with cancer for St. James Parish residents. Representatives of the United Nations have resisted the proposed expansion, claiming that the emissions of a single parish would exceed the emissions of 113 countries.

The hazy, smoke-­filled air, full of mysterious chemicals that simultaneously flow into the river, affect the almost 1 million people who live in what has been dubbed a “sacrifice zone.” Just as it sounds, these zones have been deemed irreparably damaged for both people and land. The term first popped up to describe the ghost mine sites and the long-­term effects of extracting so much from the land that there is little else to do with said land. That’s not to say that sacrifice zones are uninhabited, but that the damage will be felt by anyone deciding—­or forced—­to remain post-designation.

As Naomi Klein divulged in her book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, “Extractivism is also directly connected to the notion of sacrifice zones—­places that, to their extractors, somehow don’t count and therefore can be poisoned, drained, or otherwise destroyed for the supposed greater good.” One Brooklyn high school teacher, Rosemarie Frascella, explored the concept with her 11th grade students, breaking down the idea that the sacrifice came without choice: “Someone else is sacrificing people and their community or land without their permission.”

The same violent methods used to push Black and Indigenous people off of land have had dire consequences for the planet, too. Public health and environmental health are inextricably linked; what hurts soil, water, animals, and air almost always hurts us as well. By separating ourselves from the natural world, we are dooming the planet to apocalyptic nightmares, and Black and Indigenous people to early graves. With each species of animal that goes extinct, every site of natural beauty that is desecrated, all of the trees that are torn down, and every body of water that turns sour from oil, trash, chemicals, or a combination of the three, we all suffer.

Only when we release the need to be subduers of all else will we return ourselves and this land to its rightful equilibrium. Indigenous people across the world have always centered reciprocity with all living things and the refusal to mind that wisdom has proven fatal. History has shown us repeatedly that Indigenous and Black people must lead the charge to remembering and restoring. We crave a return to the land, yes, but the land wants—­needs—­us back too. Reparation is a racial and economic justice policy as well as a climate necessity. The future of this planet depends on our collective willingness to deliver that justice. 

Excerpted from Rooted: The American Legacy of Land Theft and the Modern Movement for Black Land Ownership, copyright © 2024 by Brea Baker. Used by permission of One World, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Recently, dragon fruit burst into the global market. In Ecuador, this has created a boom that is changing the economic fortunes of many Indigenous Amazonians. Like Chamik, hundreds of Shuar individuals—the country’s second-largest Indigenous group—have increasingly turned to the exotic fruit as a means of subsistence.

Now, as Chamik and other growers prepare for their first harvest, Shuar people wonder: Can dragon fruit help trigger something grander? In the Shuar Association of Bomboiza, a land reserve of 10,000 hectares (nearly 25,000 acres) and 27 communities in Gualaquiza county, in southeast Ecuador, they certainly think so.

Sovereignty Through Seeds

The idea started two years ago when an old, beat-up truck rumbled into Gualaquiza with 9,000 pitahaya seeds, worth an estimated U.S. $9,000. The seeds were a donation, intended to boost economic well being and self-reliance among Indigenous communities.

The project was not run by the state or an NGO, but by the Shuar themselves. “We want to expand local harvests to increase our export capacity,” I was told by Germán Tsamarenda, president of Etsa, a neighboring Shuar reserve, at the heart of the pitahaya boom.

Tsamarenda, a young man wearing a traditional red and yellow toucan feather crown, was personally delivering the seeds. In a political rally organized for the event, he proudly told a crowd in Bomboiza how they were already exporting the fruit to the United States, Canada, China, and Russia. “We achieved all that,” he said, “without forgetting our sovereignty, our customs, and tradition.”

He also encouraged the audience to work hard and with ethnic solidarity during the first challenging two years: Pruning and nourishing the spiky plant until the first harvest is no easy task. “Until then,” Tsamarenda added, “I urge you all to push elected officials to develop our rural infrastructure. It is their moral obligation, and we have the right to demand it.”

Tsamarenda’s words were timely and strongly resonated with the audience. Mauricio Pujupat, or Kunki, by his Shuar name, is president of the Bomboiza Shuar Association. He welcomed the donation and, nodding, outlined a political road map for the future. Kunki was the person responsible for pumping up hope in the exotic fruit. But behind all the entrepreneurial aims of the day stood more profound, ambitious objectives.

Kunki wanted the world to know what they are doing in Bomboiza, so I, as a videographer, recorded the event and much of the work that has followed. We have since been working together to set up a website for the association to showcase their ongoing efforts.

Could dragon fruit help change the future of the Shuar people of Gualaquiza? Could it help support a broader platform to help overcome colonial inequality and strengthen Shuar political autonomy and territorial sovereignty?

Ongoing Colonization

Historically, Shuar people were mostly known—and feared—as fierce Amazonian warriors. The practice of taking the heads of their enemies as war trophies and shrinking them to seize their opponent’s vital power captured the imagination of European travelers and ethnographers. Their infamous love of liberty, radical egalitarianism, and staunch resistance to being governed by powerful outsiders granted them some celebrity across colonial sources. In fact, for almost 300 years past the European invasion of the Americas, Shuar were able to live independently.

Since the 1800s, however, colonial expansion and missionization has systematically encroached on Shuar lands in Gualaquiza. A Roman Catholic mission run by the Jesuits was established in 1815, but after a smallpox epidemic, Shuar attacked and burned down this mission and the Jesuits left by 1872. Salesians established themselves in the region in 1893, and this proved to be a more lasting and impactful endeavor.

Settler colonialism slowly eroded Shuar control of Gualaquiza, carving itself into the land with the help of epidemics, trade, and boarding schools. Over time, Salesian intrusion, brutal at first, moved away from repressive evangelization to support land demarcation, Indigenous self-rule, and cultural revival. Shuar people today remain bitterly divided on how to perceive the mission’s legacy and historic influence.

Earlier this year, I taught a graduate course on Amazonian anthropology and invited a group of young students from Bomboiza. This is how one of my students explained Salesian tutelage: “First, they told us we shouldn’t speak our language, and they used to hit the old people with sticks when they did. Later, they encouraged us to keep speaking our language and preserve our traditional dances.” 

“And there are so many things we have kept quiet,” another student added.

Still, some Shuar are appreciative of the education they received from the Salesians, especially for what it helped achieve when mediating relations with the state. Shuar people overwhelmingly recognize the joint efforts made by some missionaries and their elders to demarcate and acquire land titles in their territory. This process led to the creation of the Shuar Federation in 1964—a powerful grassroots organization that spearheaded Indigenous rights in Latin America and delivered world recognition for Shuar identity politics. “Without the Federation,” the same students ventured, “we may have disappeared.”

In contemporary Ecuador, many ethnic tensions remain fundamentally unchanged. Shuar people know that despite the efforts advanced by the Shuar Federation, Indigenous land was stolen, allowing settler colonists to grow wealthy and benefit from a racialized political system.  

This is seldom, if ever, discussed in the Ecuadorian media, education system, public policy, or public debate. Yet, unequivocally, in the everyday life experience of Shuar people, the inequity is ongoing. I’ve been told so many times doing ethnographic fieldwork in Bomboiza that “colonization is not over.”

“It is no coincidence,” Kunki tells me, “that our province has one of the higher rates of poverty in the country. The scheme of things keeps us Shuar impoverished.”

Real Indigenous Representation

Today, Gualaquiza county is still ruled by the homonymous city left by the missions and colonization, with cobbled roads, old houses with balconies, and a viewpoint to the surrounding forest. But increasingly, Shuar people are refusing to allow the status quo to go on.

Here’s where Shuar politics meets entrepreneurialism. Kunki and other young political activists in Bomboiza are trying to build a material platform for their people that they expect will better serve their ethnic interests in the long term. What they really aim for is to govern the county themselves, from the city of Gualaquiza.

“It’s the only way forward,” Kunki says. “For years, we have experienced apaach management”—management from non-Shuar Ecuadorians—“and even with Pachakutik [Ecuador’s Indigenous party] governing, our needs and demands have not been met.”

For more than a decade, Pachakutik has been very successful among large Indigenous constituencies, and the current mayor in Gualaquiza got into office by aligning with the Indigenous party. Although he is not Shuar, he was elected by most people in Bomboiza. But support waned when a WhatsApp video circulated that showed the mayor drunk, calling a Shuar group “savages” and other racist slurs when they demanded he fulfill his campaign promises. “It was a disgrace,” the outraged people in Bomboiza protested. “They simply use us for our votes.” 

Since then, the idea of a Shuar mayor in the city has taken root.

But electoral politics are expensive, and even the most humble of campaigns can amount to several thousand dollars. This is an important reason why, even in an Indigenous party, non-Indigenous politicians have historically been more successful.

By growing dragon fruit in the jungle, the people in Bomboiza aim to create an economic boost to help Shuar people better fund their own forays into national politics. 

Hope for Indigenous Futures

Shuar leadership is not unprecedented; there are already several regional offices in the same province under Shuar administration. But it has never been achieved in Gualaquiza before and, crucially, it has never been achieved through Shuar self-funding.

In the past, external funding has opened the doors to political co-option, corruption, and mismanagement. Now, despite the great pride Shuar have for the historic achievements of the Shuar Federation and their electoral aims with Pachakutik, for many, the current situation is nothing short of heart-breaking. Following years of mismanagement, the Shuar Federation is but a shadow of its former glory. Pachakutik is not faring much better either. 

For two decades, the large-scale development of industrial mining in Shuar lands has severely compromised Shuar political autonomy. In April of 2023, the president of the Shuar Federation was violently ousted after it was discovered he had traveled to Toronto, at the invitation of Solaris Resources, a Canadian mining corporation interested in exploiting a copper deposit in Shuar territory. He was rumored to have been paid to rewrite the Federation’s statutes to allow mining activities in common land, which he did.

Despite years of Shuar resistance against resource extraction, Chinese and North American companies are now major employers in the region. And there are troubling rumors that Mexican cartels may be behind smaller gold mining operations inside Shuar territory.

“Young people have been left no choice but to work in mining or risk their lives migrating abroad,” Kunki notes. Indeed, in Gualaquiza alone, hundreds of Shuar people, along with other Ecuadorians, are increasingly choosing to trek across Central America in the hope of reaching a better life in the U.S. 

People in Bomboiza hope that by growing dragon fruit and tapping into its export market, they will provide an answer to some of these local economic woes. At the same time, they are wary of their production morphing into monocultures and so are working on a project to harness women’s ecological knowledge and the incredible diversity of traditional gardens. 

They also believe that, in the colonial context reigning in the region, they need to develop a larger political project. The new president of the Shuar Federation, who is also from Bomboiza, is one of the leading Indigenous activists against mining in Ecuador, so there are reasons to be hopeful. 

“If mining undermines our territorial sovereignty, and we’re doing it out of necessity, or if we’re leaving abroad,” Kunki says, “then we need to provide our people with an alternative.” 

“But,” he says, “we won’t be able to develop economic opportunities if we don’t maintain our political strength.”

These street vendors, who call themselves tiangui sellers (street marketers), bazareñas, or mercaditas, are mostly women and nonbinary people. They fill their tiny street shops with drapes, small tables, or suitcases and display their secondhand or handmade products without official permission from local authorities.

In 2021, the National Survey on the Dynamics of Household Relations found more than 16% of girls and women over the age of 15 had experienced economic, patrimonial, or labor violence in Mexico City in 2020, while 20.8% were victims of workplace violence and 9.8% received less than pay their colleagues doing the same job.

As Carla Carpio, sociologist and investigator in the gender research center at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), explains, mercaditas aren’t interested in getting approval from the government for street vending because they’ve experienced so much discrimination and exploitation.

“The mercaditas’ protest is uncomfortable [for institutions] because it questions the patriarchal and neoliberal system,” Carpio explains. “With their activity, these women prove they can be free. … As mercaditas, they run their own business independently. No family members administer their wages and they collaborate among women.”

Typically, street vendors are charged 13 pesos per day or 390 pesos per month ($23) if their stand takes up less than 1.2 meter (or 3.94 feet) of space, and between 1,140 and 2,220 pesos per month if they’re operating a daily stand. But for mercaditas, informal sales are a form of mutual support, a protest against gender-based economic violence, and a network of solidarity.

From the University to the Streets

At the onset of the pandemic, a group of tiangui sellers started Mercadita Vassincelos, a self-managed market at Mexico City’s Buenavista Metro station. Flores, a 25-year-old student who sells secondhand clothes and glasses, says the market was created to make a “safe, separatist, and dissident point” that “formal jobs do not respect women and nonbinary people’s rights.”

Street selling is a risky activity in Mexico City, especially for women and nonbinary people. Beyond the potential for exploitation, several mercaditas told YES! they have experienced physical and verbal aggression from potential customers. However, these sellers have banded together to create solidarity networks that allow them to work safely. 

“In 2023, after the sexual assault on a student, dozens of university street sellers organized months of protests and strikes,” says María Azucena Feregrino Basurto, a postdoctoral fellow in social studies at UAM. “Thanks to these protests, the university authorities accepted street sale activities in the garden as long as it is done only by students.”

Now, street vendors at UAM typically sell goods on weekdays and they are able to manage themselves. “At the beginning, to feel safer, a group of our colleagues was in charge of the surveillance, but now we do not need it anymore,” says Meneses, an economics student at UAM who sells stationery and crocheted homemade flowers. “There is extensive communication between us; we support each other.”

Bernal agrees, adding that selling at UAM has been essential to ensuring her safety. “Selling here is fundamental for us because carrying out the activity outside the university means a waste of studying time and puts us in danger, since attacks on street vendors are a very widespread phenomenon,” she says.

UAM street sellers organize through Facebook groups, some of which have more than 5,000 members. “I sell biscuits and sweets with a friend,” says Perla Lima, a biology student at UAM. “When I’m attending a lesson, she is in charge of selling, and I do the same for her.” Lima has been a street vendor since she was 8, selling goods to help her family. Now, as a student, she is able to afford her meals, some bills, and the transportation needed to travel to and from her college every day.

This commitment to fighting against repression is a hallmark of the mercaditas’ movement. “The mercaditas’ objective intersects moral and ethics through the reappropriation of public space and an explicit breaking of the stigma linked to informal jobs,” explains Basurto. “All those factors are combined with feminism and creation of solidarity networks.”

For Teresa Bernal, a 22-year-old UAM student majoring in Spanish literature, community is essential to her ability to sell goods. “I prepare everything that’s needed for my vegan café the previous evening, then I get up at 5 a.m.,” she says. “It takes me 45 minutes to arrive at the university and set up my stand. I have to do this with the help of my friend because I have a physical disability, and then I have to get to class on time.”

Ana Patricia Serrano Herrera, a literature student at UAM, sells K-Pop products, including photos, stickers, and posters. “I live with some roommates, and I pay 2,200 pesos per month [around $130],” she says. “My family helps me, but they cannot afford all the expenses. I don’t earn a lot with my business, but it’s a flexible job, which gives me time to study and follow the lessons.”

Collective Prosperity

Outside of UAM, street sellers work in different universities, the metro station, and public squares, and they are informally organized. In Mexico City, there are five collectives with between 30 and 40 women and nonbinary sellers. These collectives go beyond organizing sellers around safety.

“In some cases, the groups of mercaditas not only deal with selling, but organize workshops and training courses on reproductive health, solidarity economy, self-handling,” explains Carpio. “On certain occasions they organize events, photographic or artistic exhibitions. The bazaars become places with a cultural and political [purpose].”

Many of these sellers dream of opening a shop of their own. For Plumita, selling handmade punk collars and feather earrings is crucial to caring for her three children. “My income goes from a minimum of 1,500 to a maximum of 10,000 pesos per day [$89 to $596],” she says. “My dream would be to have my own shop where I’ll be free and not exploited or discriminated against.”

Elizabeth Torres Barranco, an anthropology student, sells secondhand clothes online, in the neighborhood she lives on the outskirts of Mexico City, and at the Chabacano metro station, a famous delivery point for online sellers.

Torres dreams of converting her experience as a bazareña into a thesis for her anthropology degree thesis. She wants to share the stories of women like her, who use street sales to create bridges of solidarity, balance care work, and fight economic violence.

Some of the mercaditas hope that organizing through collectives will make street selling more appealing to women and nonbinary people in Mexico City looking to earn income for themselves. “For me, selling here is liberating,” Torres says. “We are organized; we have a group on social media with [more than] 4,000 participants. I feel safe here, and I have also made some friends. That’s the reason why I would like to involve more women in this type of work. I feel that our actions have a strong feminist component because we collaborate and show solidarity among women sellers.”

Alex Press, a staff writer at Jacobin covering labor issues, spoke with YES! Senior Editor Sonali Kolhatkar on YES! Presents: Rising Up With Sonali about the proposed heat protections. She also discussed the legacy of the late labor strategist and organizer Jane McAlevey, who recently passed away from cancer, and was a friend and mentor to Press.

In 2023, Austin City Council Member Leslie Pool introduced the Home Options for Mobility and Equity Initiative (HOME), a land development code change that allows three units on lots that were originally zoned for single-family dwellings. Pointing to research by the libertarian, Koch-funded Mercatus Institute, Pool claims that increasing supply will provide housing for middle-income families and resolve Austin’s housing crisis.

“When I started on Council in January 2015, Austin was still a place for working families,” Pool said during a December 2023 press conference. “After all, the median home price was $238,000, and there were a lot of options in almost every neighborhood.” Now, Pool claimed, the “median home price in Austin is $540,000—well beyond the reach of a middle-income earner whose price point is limited to $350,000.”

From Pool’s perspective, HOME is supposed to change that, making Austin, once again, a place for “young people who came for college or for work and wanted to stay” able to do so.

There was an immediate uproar: More than 40 grassroots organizations, including the NAACP, Austin Mutual Aid, PODER, VOCAL-TX, and Indigenous Movement Crew, led an organizing effort against HOME.

As Rich Heyman, Ph.D., a lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin, notes in a 2023 report commissioned by the City’s Equity Office, upzoning policies lead to market-rate/luxury housing being built in working-class communities of color, where land is cheaper. Then, the increase in property taxes, demolition of existing affordable housing, and other displacement pressure eventually leads to those communities being pushed out.

“Everybody knows that affordability is a big problem in Austin,” Heyman told the Austin Monitor after the December press conference. “And I think that everybody who was at the podium today has all the best intentions, but I think that they are mistaken about what the impact of this initiative is going to be.”

Supporters of HOME and similar policies say they will transform Austin into a more modern, dense, walkable, and sustainable city, but who can afford this version of the city, and who is excluded from this vision?

False Solutions

Housing costs are rising across the U.S., with investors buying up properties to turn them into short-term rentals and renters often being stuck between large rent increases and the elusive dream of ownership.

In particular, as community member Cynthia Vasquez shares, for many urban Black and Brown communities, “The homeowner–to–renter–to–being unhoused pipeline is a lived reality. We are seeing developers make record profits as our communities suffer from displacement.”

In Austin, these issues have deep roots: Like all major U.S. cities, Austin was deeply shaped by systemic racism and redlining. In 1928, the Master Plan, a land development code, pushed Black American and Mexican American communities to East Austin. Since then, East Austin has experienced systemic disinvestment in infrastructure, housing, social services, and environmental protection, leading to land being relatively cheaper compared to central and west Austin.

When activists began kicking polluting industries out of East Austin in the late ’90s and early 2000s, the tides turned. Suddenly, the area became a desired development zone while West Austin became the watershed protection zone, where development was limited in order to protect the water ecosystem. As a result of the increase in market-rate/luxury development, East Austin zip code 78721 is now the fourth-most gentrified neighborhood in the U.S.

For example, the 700-acre award-winning Mueller community, located in central east Austin, is touted for its “sustainable,” “transit-orientated,” “new-urbanist” design. Those residents, however, are whiter and wealthier than surrounding neighborhoods, and among the East Austin community, Mueller is known as just another example of a gentrifying project.

“The Mueller development plays a role in gentrification and the reproduction of social inequalities in Austin,” writes sociologist Sergio A. Cabrera in a 2019 study published in Sociological Spectrum. A 2023 study published in Sociology of Race and Ethnicity documents a rise in racist experiences in East Austin as a result of the Mueller project.

These false solutions aren’t unique to Austin; other cities across the U.S. are also pushing for similar policies. Research based on Minneapolis and New York City demonstrates how upzoning has led to gentrification and displacement. Council Member Mary Black shares that in Raleigh, North Carolina, upzoning has led to a surge in luxury housing. In 2021, rent in Raleigh spiked by 21%, displacing and replacing once-thriving communities of color. “My background is in climate and environmental advocacy, so I know the importance of building dense, walkable cities to act on the climate crisis […] but this means little if low-income communities of color that rely on public transportation are displaced,” Black says.

Community Solutions

The term green gentrification, first coined by professors Alessandro Rigolon and Tim Collin in a 2023 study, describes how projects that may seem to increase sustainability efforts, particularly introducing or renovating parks, can be drivers of gentrification and displacement, thus hurting low-income communities of color.

“By targeting neighborhoods that are already gentrifying, these projects may primarily benefit recently arriving affluent residents, developers, and other business interests,” Collins said in a recent press release. “At the same time, these projects may displace disadvantaged longtime residents, including lower-income renters, who are often [people of color] in cities like [Los Angeles] and Chicago. If these projects displace residents, then this approach ultimately won’t address the health and economic challenges faced in low-income urban communities.”

Rigolon agreed, noting in the press release, “A lot of research frames gentrification as an unintended consequence of a well-intended effort. We argue instead that in many cases, green gentrification is by design.”

In the face of green gentrification, grassroots groups are promoting sustainable development that prioritizes affordability, inclusivity, and the preservation of cultural heritage.

Community Powered ATX, Causa Justa :: Just Cause, CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities, and other organizations have been developing solutions to the housing affordability crisis that center communities directly impacted, including protecting tenants and public processes, building deeply affordable housing at 30% and 50% median family income, investing in community development corporations, building community land trusts, and using overlays and historic districts to protect Black and Brown neighborhoods.

“We need community-led policies, intentional development of deeply affordable housing, and nonprofit housing models such as land trusts and community development corporations, which have proven to be effective in other cities,” says Misael Ramos, president of the Blackland Community Development Corporation.

By treating housing as a human right instead of an opportunity to profit, we can prioritize the needs of vulnerable communities. In effect, planning and zoning processes must be driven by communities of color who are directly impacted by the affordability crisis and gentrification.

HOME Phase I passed on Dec. 7, 2023, and Phase II, alongside other upzoning policies such as compatibility changes, passed in May 2024. It is history repeating itself: Wealthy, predominantly white investors are taking land from working- and middle-class communities of color. “I feel tremendous pain in my heart walking on my ancestral and contemporary homelands and seeing displacement continue,” says Chiara Do’wal Sehi, a Karankawa artist and educator.

But it’s not too late; in Austin and across the U.S., we can build sustainable and affordable cities without displacing working-class communities of color. Our efforts will only be fruitful if we stop prioritizing investors’ and developers’ interests and begin listening to working-class communities of color.

Boykoff is a professor of politics and government at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon, and a former professional soccer player who has written several books about the Olympics, including NOlympians: Inside the Fight Against Capitalist Mega-Sports in Los Angeles, Tokyo, and Beyond. His latest book is titled What Are the Olympics For?He spoke with YES! Senior Editor Sonali Kolhatkar on YES! Presents: Rising Up With Sonali about whether the Olympics are relevant in today’s world of climate chaos, genocides, and global political instability.

The question of what was stolen and what is owed to Black Americans is central to the United States as whole. In a new book, Rooted: The American Legacy of Land Theft and the Modern Movement for Black Land Ownership, activist and writer Brea Baker explores a crucial and very tangible facet of this question. She spoke with YES! Senior Editor Sonali Kolhatkar on YES! Presents: Rising Up With Sonali about her book.

Chris Harris, policy director at the Austin Justice Coalition, explains that the 2020 demands were rooted in a vision of public safety that ensures communities have access to “different means by which people get their needs met, [and] that people’s needs are actually being met, and they’re not just being sent police because that is the only public service that the community has invested in or that’s available.” By the time the general election rolled around that November, however, establishment figures, including soon-to-be President Joe Biden, were distancing themselves from the demand to defund the police. Cities such as Minneapolis, Seattle, Austin, and Los Angeles that took initial steps to cut police funding in response to protesters’ demands soon faced challenges. 

Today, the struggle to realize the movement’s central goal of reimagining public safety continues in the streets, the conference rooms of community justice organizations, and in discussions around government budgets despite roadblocks and a lack of mainstream support. 

“The importance of this work is to see public dollars invested in and meeting the needs of people in our community and prioritizing those who have been historically marginalized,” says Harris.

Following the George Floyd protests, some cities initially made big changes, shifting hundreds of millions of dollars of city funds away from law enforcement. In August 2020, the city council in Austin, Texas, voted to make direct cuts to the city’s police department budget totaling about $150 million over a year and to reallocate those funds to violence prevention, food access, and abortion access programs. That November in Los Angeles, California, voters approved Measure J, requiring that 10% of the county’s unrestricted general funds, totaling between $360 million and $900 million per year, be invested in social services and prohibiting the county from using the money on prisons, jails, or law enforcement agencies.

These wins soon faced establishment opposition. A superior court judge in Los Angeles issued a tentative ruling declaring Measure J unconstitutional just months after voters approved it, claiming it improperly restricted the L.A. County Board of Supervisors from deciding how and where to spend county funds (an appellate court overturned the judge’s ruling and upheld the measure last year). Meanwhile, the Texas state legislature passed House Bill 1900 in May 2021, which levied penalties against cities that reduced police budgets. This legislation forced Austin to halt plans to reallocate police department funds and restore funds it had cut from its police budget the previous year. Similar legislation is being considered in Arizona to ensure that even in cases of a city budget shortfall, “the police department will be the last department that would be defunded,” according to Representative David Marshall, one of the bill’s Republican sponsors.

Democratic politicians on Capitol Hill have also rejected calls to defund the police, even condemning Republican-led moves that would reduce funding for law enforcement in federal budget appropriations using the talking point that “defund[ing] law enforcement hurts communities.” During his 2022 State of the Union Address, President Joe Biden declared that when faced with questions about safety and justice, “We should all agree the answer is not to defund the police.” During Biden’s tenure, in 2023, more people were killed by U.S. law enforcement than in any other year in the past decade. Since 2020, state and local governments in dozens of states have also green-lit militarized police training facilities, often called “cop cities,” some with federal funding. 

Research shows that the growing militarization of police forces nationwide threatens rather than improves communities and disproportionately worsens law enforcement outcomes for marginalized groups, such as disabled people and people of color. Claims that funding police training could help better protect communities fall flat, too, with research showing that even training programs designed to reduce implicit biases against marginalized groups do not improve police interactions with those communities. 

Communities of color have led the movement against police violence for decades, recognizing that the institution of policing is rooted in racism. “Historically, those who were involved in lynching people in our community were local judges and sheriffs up into the 1950s and ’60s. We have continued to have similar incidents with police departments and abuse,” says April Albright, legal director of Black Voters Matter. 

With stubborn opposition from both sides of the aisle to reducing police budgets, organizers have shifted tactics. Harris says community leaders in Austin are now focused on preventing the city’s police budget from growing. They are also working on allocating funding from the city’s general fund in ways that align with some of the aims of movements to defund the police through a community investment budget.

“This is a community-built and collaborated-upon set of budget recommendations at the city level, designed to invest in the community with a focus on equity, meaning particularly folks who have historically had their neighborhoods and communities disinvested by the city,” explains Harris. “We’re pushing forward for recommendations to see services, programs, and direct dollars given to people in those communities.” A similar budget-focused initiative is being pursued in L.A.

Starting the struggle with budget allocations is practical. “Most budgets—whether at the municipal level, county level, state, or national level—almost a lion’s share of these budgets are committed to public safety. And what safety looks like, traditionally, is law enforcement,” says Albright. Most cities dedicate between 25 and 40% of their budgets to policing.

Recommendations in Austin’s annual community investment budget include funding harm-reduction services, homeless services for Black youth and adults, emergency rental assistance, and alternative forms of first response to reduce police interactions with community members in crisis. “We have community health paramedics and community health workers [who] have proved pivotal in responding to both health and mental health issues in the community, particularly among unhoused folks, and connecting folks with services rather than pushing them into the criminal legal system,” explains Harris. 

When armed police are dispatched to an individual in crisis, especially those experiencing a mental health crisis, results can be deadly: According to The Washington Post’s database of fatal police shootings, at least 20% of those killed in a police shooting since 2015 were experiencing a mental health crisis at the time. 

Austin is one of dozens of cities to have launched or scaled up non-police first-response programs since 2020. Early research on these programs suggests that not only do they improve outcomes for people in crisis but they also reduce low-level crime and save taxpayers money. The public agrees: According to a recent national survey, more than 70% of Americans think “sending behavioral health care workers to certain calls related to mental health, substance use and homelessness” would help improve public safety.

Efforts like those in Austin have also garnered some institutional support, with organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) backing them as evidence-based approaches to community safety. “We’re looking at shifting the paradigm in community safety to more front-end, solutions-driven approaches,” explains Cynthia W. Roseberry, director of the Justice Division at the ACLU. 

The ACLU recently held its inaugural Community Safety Week on Capitol Hill to brief Congress and the White House on research showing the success of non-police first-response programs and investments in solutions to prevent crime, including addressing rising housing costs and improving access to mental health care. One of the ACLU’s asks to Congress was for $100 million to be earmarked for mobile crisis response in the appropriations process, which Roseberry says was well received by lawmakers.

There are legislative efforts already underway to reimagine public safety and first responses. Arguably, none is more promising than The People’s Response Act. This legislation, introduced by U.S. Representative Cori Bush in 2021, would establish a Division on Community Safety within the Department of Health and Human Services and provide funding for noncarceral first responders, restorative justice, and harm-reduction-based mental health and substance use treatment programs for communities nationwide.

Albright says that recent actions to stop Cop City in Atlanta, Georgia, and high-profile brutal crackdowns on pro-Palestine protests on college campuses have brought the demand to defund police back into the national spotlight and could help spur change. “Cop City and the movement against cop cities around the country, as well as what we see happening on campuses… is renewing the cry for folks to find a way to redirect the funds that are normally given to law enforcement to other areas,” she says.

While the demand to defund the police may not have the sort of establishment lip service it got four years ago, organizers say the issue remains top-of-mind in communities nationwide and will be on the ballot this fall. “We have to join forces and use every tool that we have available—from voting to protests to boycotts, whatever it is,” Albright says. “History shows us that when we do that, we win.”

The constitution is one of many in a new database created by Beth Redbird (Oglala Lakota and Oklahoma Choctaw), a sociologist at Northwestern University, as part of the Tribal Constitutions Project. The effort aims to find, preserve, and catalog the documents written by various tribal governments from 1820 on. The database contains constitutions from more than 350 of the now 574 federally recognized tribes, documents that serve as written records of the many ways tribal governments have asserted independence within a colonial system. They also detail how the tribes address problems inherent in governing bodies, like who has rights, what rights might exist for people who are displaced, and the potential rights of natural places.

One of things missing in our history, Redbird says, “is access to this whole story of what these are, how they came to be, and how they work to structure modern tribes today.” Whether it’s engaging in national policymaking or constitution-making, or asserting tribal rights in courts, Redbird says, “These constitutions can and do matter.”

Redbird started the project four years ago when she asked a researcher to search for tribal constitutions so they could analyze the documents. How many were there, and how many survived? The Native American Rights Fund Indian Law Library had a limited database, and the Library of Congress had a fraction of those passed by federally recognized tribes.

To find more, the team Googled, called up tribal offices, and phoned regional Bureau of Indian Affairs offices. They searched law libraries. They discovered constitutions in appropriations bills from the 1940s and others attached to court cases.  

Redbird employed the expertise of Erin Delaney, a law professor at Northwestern University, to help analyze the documents. The pair got a National Science Foundation grant to code the documents—a process that allows someone reading documents to search the text—and they continued looking. Eventually, the team compiled more than 1,000 constitutions into a database that now includes both originals and updated versions.

The database shows how tribes have reacted to U.S. federal policy over time. It tells a different tribal history than the one told by lawmakers of their time or explained in textbooks. It could also give tribal governments more information about how different tribes have governed themselves; how that resulted in different social outcomes, like access to education or housing; and what that might mean for tribal governance in the future.

“It’s the first time that this has been done comprehensively,” says Maggie Blackhawk (Fond du Lac Band Ojibwe), a law professor at New York University and partner of the project through the NYU-Yale Sovereignty Project. 

The tribes in what is now the U.S. wrote constitutions under a variety of circumstances and histories. Some tribes have treaties, some have reservations, and some exist in a state where laws have been applied to them, making each document unique and different.

The bulk of the tribal constitutions in the Tribal Constitutions Project database were passed in response to the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, often called the Indian New Deal. The purpose of the law is contested; according to some accounts, it was an attempt to decrease federal control of Native peoples and increase self-governance. Others saw the Indian Reorganization Act as a continuation of a typical government policy toward Indigenous people.

The Act’s passage marks the first time in decades of federal policy that a tribe could have a legal government in the open. That’s not to say that tribes didn’t have governments between then and the passage of the Dawes Act in 1887, says Redbird. It just means that Native people didn’t share them with U.S. government entities for fear of arrest.

Individual tribes voted on whether to adopt the Indian Reorganization Act. If they did, the Secretary of the Interior approved or denied those constitutions and any subsequent amendments.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs created a template for tribes, which should have opened the door to millions of dollars in loans from the federal government. But the government spent $38 million in the 1920s on Native people, and that number had not budged two decades later. At first, it only took a couple of months for the federal government to approve a constitution, but by the end of the decade, it took an average of two years.

“If you’re a tribe, and you’re hoping to do the kinds of things that the government does, like offer assistance to people who are in need, and manage your own land and your own affairs, then two years is a long time to wait,” Redbird says.

The rate of approved constitutions slowed over time, and the ones that were approved were simpler and more standardized. These documents may not have represented the values and interests of tribes wary of the federal government.

Still, the Indian Reorganization Act, according to Blackhawk, “is the legal framework that continues to structure the government-to-government relationship between the United States and Native nations today.” In short, she says, “It was a very different way of doing colonialism that empowered Native people to form governments and establish a formal relationship with the United States beyond the treaty process.”

Many of the constitutions followed the guidance to include a branch of government called a business council, showing how the Indian Reorganization Act may have been an effort to mold tribes into businesses that cost the federal government less money to administer than tribal states.

There’s some evidence to suggest that the federal government wanted to turn tribes into private corporations that could make a profit and go away, Redbird says. She sums up the government stance like this: “If we can teach them to work, they’ll become white, because the secret to being white is to engage in capitalism. …Like, the biggest problem of Indians is they haven’t learned to be selfish yet,” she says.

In 1953, the federal government passed a resolution approving a measure that allowed states to make tribes illegal, essentially terminating them. At that point tribal constitutional amendments dropped off as tribes kept their policies close to their chests, Redbird says. 

Many tribes have since revised their constitutions and continue to do so, particularly those that address current issues like climate change and the rights of non-human relatives, like rivers. This is where the database could prove particularly useful today: providing references, inspiration, and solidarity among tribes to set the course of their own futures. 

“There’s lots of pragmatic and hopefully beneficial knowledge to help tribes in their constitutional processes achieve their goals, whatever those goals may be,” Delaney says.

Redbird and her collaborators plan to eventually make the database public and include introductions from the tribes. That way, she says, they could narrate the history of their documents. Though there is inherent risk, considering the tribal and federal government relationship, there is also value, Redbird says.

“Transparency does a lot for you, even if there’s not a direct, immediate, obvious benefit to it,” she says. “The ability to have civil society depends on the ability of people to see the actions of a government, and that means a government both at the tribal level and a state and national level.”

For far too long, we have followed the policy guidance of unfettered capitalism—an economics devoted to growing the fortunes of billionaires without regard for the consequences for the living Earth and most of Earth’s inhabitants. Focused on maximizing individual financial return, contemporary economics is more accurately known as ego-nomics. Featuring the Latin word for “I,” the teaching of ego-nomics is best confined to history courses reviewing the devastating consequences of the human embrace of this flawed theory as settled science.

Finding our way to a viable human future will require the guidance of a true eco-nomics. “Eco” comes from the Greek oikos, meaning household. Grounded in biology and ecology rather than finance, the new eco-nomics will guide us to an ecological civilization devoted to caring for the living Earth’s household and all its living beings.

Of course, navigating the essential transition to an ecological civilization presents daunting challenges. There will be no winners on a dead Earth. Consequently, we have a shared interest in joining in common cause to create the alternative future now within our means.

The environmental and social failures of modern society highlight two foundational self-evident truths that conventional ego-nomics ignores. First, Earth is our common home and the source of our existence and well-being. Second, money has no meaning or utility beyond the human mind. Indeed, most modern money is only invisible electronic traces stored on computer memory chips.

Ignoring these truths, ego-nomics has guided us to a world that confines the vast majority of the planet’s people to servitude to the already rich, whose defining purpose is growing their personal financial assets. The resulting growth in inequality is beyond obscene.

In January 2023, the World Economic Forum reported that the financial assets of the world’s super-rich were growing by $2.7 billion a day. The average billionaire was gaining roughly $1.7 million in new financial assets for every $1 in pay received by a person in the bottom 90%.

Earth is distinctive among the planets we have so far observed in its ability to sustain life. And we humans are distinctive among Earth’s beings in our ability to choose and create our future together. This gives us special privileges—and special essential responsibilities consistent with what science now identifies as our distinctive human nature. As science affirms, mentally healthy humans get deep satisfaction from caring for others.

We also now know that a small minority of people, deprived of proper care in their earliest years, find pleasure in demonstrating their power over others by inflicting harm. They suffer from a grandiose sense of superiority and self-entitlement known as narcissistic personality disorder. Such individuals have a disproportionate presence among society’s wealthy.

The flawed and selfish promises of ego-nomics promoted by these individuals have so misled us that we have allowed money to replace mutual care in mediating our relationships with other people and the living Earth. This love for money now so dominates our consciousness that we have come to idolize financial predators.

The challenge of our time is to fulfill our true and largely unrealized human potential by learning to live as beloved communities rooted in mutual caring and service to one another, and to the natural and human commons consistent with our true nature.

The new eco-nomics calls us to:

1. Replace GDP with valid indicators of beneficial economic performance.
2. Confront and dispel the illusion that money is wealth and that growing money benefits us all.
3. Embrace biology and ecology as the disciplines most foundational to eco-nomics for an ecological civilization.

We currently debate a choice between socialism (an economy ruled by politicians and public officials) and capitalism (an economy ruled by private financiers). Many of us are fearful of the potential melding of the two into fascism.

Yet we rarely mention the people-power alternative, rooted in democratically self-managed communities and markets foundational to an ecological civilization. Realizing this alternative will require that financial assets are equitably distributed to assure that re­sponsibilities for making significant decisions are truly shared. Predatory, monopolistic, profit-maximizing corporations will need to be converted into worker/community cooperatives responsible for serving the needs of all their stakeholders.

We need to minimize reliance on money as a substitute for caring relationships. The private banking system that currently operates beyond accountability to national governments and interests must be replaced by a global system of community banks cooperatively owned and operated by the communities in which they do business.

We are not dealing with a broken system in need of repair. We are dealing with a failed system in need of replacement. We will achieve this transformation to an ecological civilization only through a people-powered meta-movement in which the world’s people come together, guided by a valid eco-nomics, in a unifying commitment to creating a world that works for all life on Earth.

Cambridge Recurring Income for Success (RISE) was an 18-month guaranteed-income program that offered 130 single caregivers $500 cash payments from September 2021 to February 2023. Participants—96% of whom were women and 62% of whom were African American—had to have an income below 80% of the area’s median income to be eligible. Cambridge is just outside of Boston and home to Harvard University. 

Participants’ ability to cover $400 emergencies increased from 33.8% at the start of the program to 41.5% six months after the program, though it declined to 30% by the program’s ending. Savings improved for participants between the 12- and 18-month marks, though most said their savings were stable throughout the program.

Mean housing cost burden, or the percentage of one’s income that goes towards housing needs, decreased for the RISE recipients from 50.5% to 41.8% by the end of the program. Full-time employment for participants increased from 36% at the baseline to 40% by the 12-month mark. 

The pilot’s success validates supporters’ belief that guaranteed-income programs help families and don’t encourage people to rely solely on the payments.

“Quite consistently, we see across all of these programs that people spend the money to support their families. No one’s going to quit working for $500 a month,” said Stacia West, an associate professor at the University of Tennessee College of Social Work and the director and co-founder of the Center for Guaranteed Income Research.

“I think one of the major highlights out of Cambridge is this ability to save. Having $500 in your bank account can mean the difference between being able to get that tire fixed or not being able to make it to work, and that’s huge for so many American families,” West said.

Another important assessment of the program was on guaranteed income’s impact on participants’ sense of self, she said.

“When we introduce a guaranteed income, does that free up a little bit of mental space, or emotional, or even spiritual space that you can actualize as a human and not have all of your time completely spent on day-to-day survival?” West said. “Whenever you’re on the margins, and you’re dealing and negotiating a lower income, you just have less time and space to think about yourself and your own dreams and your own goals and your own agency.”

Results from Cambridge RISE show the extra money created time and space that participants spent with their children, and the children of RISE recipients had higher grades than their peers whose parents and caregivers were in a control group that did not receive funding, the report said.

At the start of the program, 59% of participants reported being able to help their children with hands-on learning activities such as building projects. That figure peaked at 78% by the program’s six-month mark and concluded at 71%. Fifty-two percent reported being able to do arts and crafts with their kids. That figure peaked at 74% by the program’s six-month mark and held steady at 64% for the 12- and 18-month marks. 

This freed-up time allowed one recipient, identified in the study only as Veronica, to make arts and crafts and have Sunday dinner with her daughter.

“If I was not in my situation [with RISE], any way of trying to get extra money, I would be most likely working, which would then take my time away from my daughter and myself,” Veronica said. “This is not just benefiting me, it’s benefiting my daughter. … I get to show her things and that betters her.” 

The results showing increased time and space for parenting stood out to former Cambridge mayor and current City Council member Sumbul Siddiqui, who initiated Cambridge RISE during her time as mayor.

“I just think about my mom and dad [who] were just constantly working multiple jobs and how hard that was,” Siddiqui said. “Quality time is so important.”

Siddiqui, who became the first Muslim mayor in Massachusetts when elected in January 2020, looked deeper into direct cash payments once she saw how much Cambridge residents remained in need even after she launched the city’s over-$5 million COVID-19 disaster relief fund.

That’s when she learned about the network organization Mayors for Guaranteed Income and their $500,000 grant for mayors to launch these programs in their cities if they could match the donation. Siddiqui, in partnership with Cambridge Community Foundation, Cambridge Economic Opportunity Committee, Cambridge Housing Authority, and community organizations Just-A-Start and Up Together, raised $1.6 million to launch Cambridge RISE. It’s been rewarding, she said, to see the impact the program has had on people and the way they view government officials.

“I was walking down the street the other day, and literally, at a cross section, a woman got out of her car just to say, ‘Thank you for everything. The RISE program has helped me so much.’ And literally the light was about to turn green, but she quickly did that. That was so meaningful to me,” Siddiqui recalled. “They just really appreciate that City Hall is looking out for them in this way. And I think it’s pretty gratifying to kind of see how people are viewing government as a result.”

Mayors for Guaranteed Income, a network of local leaders, was founded in 2020 by Michael Tubbs, the former mayor of Stockton, California. Tubbs launched the country’s first mayor-led guaranteed-income program. The organization has grown to nearly 150 mayors, expanded to Counties for Guaranteed Income with about 40 elected county leaders and launched a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization called United for a Guaranteed Action. The group has also launched over 60 pilots, including Cambridge RISE, Director Sukhi Samra said.

“In addition to funding, we also provided robust technical assistance in terms of pilot design and also in terms of communications,” said Samra. She said her team helped the Cambridge RISE group “communicate about your pilot in a way that’s responsive to your community, in a way that meets your community’s needs.” 

Samra said their work has been able to shift public opinion to be more favorable towards $500 to $1,000 monthly guaranteed income, but there is still some pushback. 

“We’ve gone from the radical to the mainstream, but I think a lot of the opposition that we’re experiencing is still the same. It’s really rooted in these racist and sexist tropes about what poor people do when they’re given money, who is poor, and why they’re poor in the first place,” Samra said.

Opponents of guaranteed-income programs worry giving people cash payments with no strings attached will discourage them from working. West said studies prove otherwise. Still, guaranteed-income programs have been outlawed in Arkansas and Iowa, and similar legislation has been proposed in Arizona and South Dakota. 

In spite of this, experts say the movement for guaranteed income is still picking up steam across the country. California was the first to launch state-funded guaranteed-income programs in November, and recently proposed legislation seeks to establish a council to study guaranteed-income programs. Legislation is advancing through the Minnesota state House that would give residents living below 300% of the federal poverty level $500 per month.

Harris County, Texas, is launching its first guaranteed-income pilot this spring. And, last fall, Cambridge was able to expand its pilot to create the Cambridge Rise Up Program using American Rescue Plan funds. The new program is offering $500 per month for 18 months to all families who have children and income under 250% of the federal poverty level. It’s the first guaranteed-income program with no lottery system and currently has nearly 2,000 participating households. 

“I think that municipalities and states are seeing the benefits and the return on investment that it may have and are ready to scale it up at the state level and make some investments,” West said.

This story was originally published by The 19th and is republished here with permission.

The DOJ lawsuit is seeking to challenge Ticketmaster’s monopoly power over artist performances, venues, and concert-goers. Emily Peterson-Cassin, director of corporate power at Demand Progress, spoke with YES! Senior Editor Sonali Kolhatkar on YES! Presents: Rising Up With Sonali about what a fair resolution of the lawsuit could look like.

Many young people today are breaking the trance and challenging the system—supporting positive alternatives, like worker cooperatives, public ownership of water and electricity, B Corporations, impact investments, community loan funds, co-housing, community land trusts, and other models of a democratic economy. 

Despite the growing movement for such alternatives, the depressing fact is we’re losing ground faster than we’re gaining it. We can see this in the ways in which the “gig economy” is replacing the once-stable employee relationship; in the high cost of living that is miring families in debt as they try to pay for housing, college, and retirement; and in our crumbling health care system, which is increasingly becoming a tool for private equity to suck wealth out of the the hands of ordinary people and into those of the already wealthy.

The economy is simply not working for the majority. A May 2023 Harris poll found, half of Americans—across generations and races—believe capitalism is headed in the wrong direction. This suggests we are at an important moment, one where capitalism’s legitimacy is beginning to be open for debate. 

This moment provides an important opportunity to challenge our economic system, one that goes beyond building alternatives that capitalism promptly absorbs or marginalizes. We need to help each other recognize how our own mindset helps hold the system in place, and thus how a change of our collective mind could itself be the foundation of deep change. My point is this: We begin to change the system when we change our minds. How can this be?

We Can Change the System by Denying Its Legitimacy

First, consider the fact that we will never win against extractive capitalism if it’s a matter of raw power. But we the people wield a more subtle power—in the end, the ultimate power—which is legitimacy. When we withdraw legitimacy, we fatally weaken the system, turning its cultural foundation to sand. Why did apartheid fall? Because it lost moral legitimacy when people around the world denounced it as white supremacist, illegitimately favoring white people over people of color.

Second, recall the admonition of systems theorist Donella Meadows, who advised that the single most effective place to intervene in any system is at the level of mindset: the mind out of which the system arises, in other words, the paradigm. 

What constitutes a paradigm, wrote Meadows, is society’s deepest set of beliefs about how the world works, the shared idea in our minds: “the great big unstated assumptions—unstated because [they are] unnecessary to state; everyone already knows them.”

We often point to “corporate power,” “inequality,” and “greed” as the problem. But pointing these out doesn’t help us get to the root of the system’s dysfunction. We need to challenge the system paradigm, which I call wealth supremacy—the bias that institutionalizes infinite extraction of wealth for the wealthy, even as it means stagnation or losses for the rest of us. Personal greed is certainly operating. But the system problem is how greed is mandated, rewarded, normalized, and institutionalized in the practices and institutions of the system. 

It’s mandated in how investments are managed, how corporations are governed; the aim of both is maximum income to capital. In operation, wealth supremacy takes the form of capital bias—the way only capital votes in corporations, for example, while workers are disenfranchised and dispossessed. We see it in how a rising stock market is equated with a successful economy, even as the rising profits that drive stock prices often come from mass layoffs that feed the bottom line. This in turn drives a disaffected working class into the arms of the hard right, damaging democracy. 

We see wealth supremacy and capital bias in the way that property rights are considered sacred and untouchable, while worker rights and environmental protections are constantly contested. We see it in the way Exxon Mobil’s stock price climbed 80 percent in 2022, as it followed the accepted norms of corporate governance (maximize gains to shareholders), even as those norms led to forests burning and cities flooding.

The very heart and soul of the system is the idea that our economy exists to serve the wealthy, to allow them to extract limitless, maximum amounts from the rest of us, and from the planet. Protecting and growing their financial wealth—called “capital”—is the aim of the whole system. As such, it is contrary to our democratic values. It means in a democratic society founded on the truth that all persons are created equal, we have permitted an economic system based on a directly contrary principle: that the wealthy matter more than the rest of us. 

Paradigms may seem harder to change than practices or processes in the physical world, Meadows wrote. “But there’s nothing physical or expensive or even slow in the process of paradigm change,” she continued. “In a single individual it can happen in a millisecond. All it takes is a click in the mind, a falling of scales from eyes, a new way of seeing.” 

A paradigm shift for our economy begins when we name and see the bias that lies at the heart of the capital-centric system. It begins when we see wealth supremacy clearly, in the same way that we’ve learned to name and see white supremacy and male supremacy. When we do so, we undercut capitalism’s legitimacy and challenge its standing as an acceptable cultural norm. 

Many grassroots organizations are already practicing such paradigmatic changes, educating their communities, naming the harms of extraction, and building alternatives: the Highlander Research and Education Center’s populist community education programs in Appalachia, Boston’s Ujima Project, Downtown Crenshaw in Los Angeles, and Cooperation Jackson of Mississippi, to name just a few.

Wealth Grows Through Extracting From the Rest of Us

The need to infinitely increase wealth is what is leading the system to its most destructive behavior, which is the extreme financial extraction we experience today. The subprime mortgage crisis of 2008 was triggered by bankers trying to squeeze as much as possible from families with the fewest resources. Today, the homes foreclosed a decade ago are being bought up by private equity companies who raise rents and skimp on maintenance to advance earnings for shareholders. As a result, housing is increasingly unaffordable and more and more families find themselves houseless. 

The bias of capital is built into the economic system at every level, yet its destructive force is hidden by language. We valorize so-called investing and the way it “creates wealth,” as if wealth can be created out of nothing. But much “investing” is really extraction; it’s a form of taking that undermines the resilience of families and communities. 

This is obscured by the way in which portfolio gains are reported, depicted as pure numbers rising, as though these gains just fall from the sky, pristine and unblemished. It’s rarely explained to us how these gains come from squeezing ordinary Americans: private equity bankrupting companies, polluted air and water undermining health, stagnant wages and lost jobs, families losing equity in their homes, students accumulating crushing debt. 

We’re not connecting the dots yet. When big tech firms’ share prices are lofty, we don’t conclude that this is linked to a post-truth society or the corruption of democracy. When we hear about the rising number of billionaires, we don’t think about the opioid crisis or local firms shut out by chains. We could, because these outcomes are the result of root causes found in the structures and practices of our capital-centric economy and in the power that this system creates for a wealthy elite.

This squeezing of ordinary people is what economists call “financialization.” It means financial wealth is so overblown, it’s come to dominate our economy, our culture, the natural world, even our ostensibly democratic politics. For decades, economists have been ringing alarm bells, telling us that financialization is destabilizing society. We need to see that the problem of too much financial wealth in too few hands is as much of an emergency as the climate crisis. Indeed, it is linked to the climate crisis.

Where Do We Begin?

Financialization is the logical, inevitable result of a system built on wealth supremacy. But it remains invisible. It’s time to start talking about it—about what it is, how it functions, how it’s driving or exacerbating the catastrophes people are experiencing in their daily lives: unrelenting storms, heat waves, and wildfires; insecure work; out-of-control health care costs; unaffordable housing.

When I was a kid in the 1950s, financial assets (stocks, bonds, debts of all kinds) were roughly equal to the national gross domestic product (GDP), which is the flow of income and spending in the real economy. Today, financial assets are five times the GDP. Yet the economic system’s goal is eternal growth of those assets. 

To continue operating our economy based on maximum growth of capital is madness. In addition to talking about the rising number of billionaires, let’s also talk about the underlying rules and structures that create that obscene wealth. Let’s help each other understand that financialization is more than a collection of obscure charts in academic papers. It’s a force in our society—an extractive force of unprecedented power and unimaginable size, creating devastating effects: precarity, monopolies, and the capture of democracy.  

Financialization and Wealth Supremacy Are Real

Deep change—that is, system change—can begin in earnest when society understands the problem of financialization and wealth supremacy and how it’s impacting our world. It is not an ideological shouting match. It’s a reality we need to face. Recognizing this is a prelude to the great task ahead: transferring wealth and power from the hands of the few to the control of the many, creating a democratic economy designed not to maximize financial wealth but to keep life flourishing.

To continue its dominance, capital extraction requires that we accept its normality, its technical necessity, its inevitability. 

Where we begin to transform this system is in our own minds. This is where we stop accepting it as legitimate. This is where the system begins to lose its grip. This is where we begin to win.

Adapted from Wealth Supremacy: How the Extractive Economy and the Biased Rules of Capitalism Drive Today’s Crises (Berrett-Koehler, 2023). 

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 3:23 p.m. PT on May 22, 2023, to correct a misstatement of Mark Fisher’s quote in the opening line of the piece. Fisher wrote “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” Read our corrections policy here.

What Nieuwjaer couldn’t eat right away, she preserved—as fig marmalade, apricot jam, pickles. Reaching into the depths of her refrigerator in September, past a jar of diced beets she’d preserved in vinegar, she tapped a container of chopped pineapple whose shelf life she’d extended with lemon juice: “It’ll last all month!” she exclaimed. Just a few inches away, two loaves of bread that a nearby school was going to get rid of lay in a glass baking dish, reconstituted as bread pudding. A third loaf was in a jar in the cupboard, transformed into bread crumbs that Nieuwjaer planned to sprinkle on a veggie casserole.

With everything she’d stocked up, Nieuwjaer was all set on groceries for the next few months. “I’m going to eat for free all winter,” she said, beaming.

Nieuwjaer is part of a worldwide movement known in French as zéro déchet, or zero waste. The central idea is simple: Stop generating so much garbage and reap the many intertwined social, economic, and environmental benefits. Rescuing trash-bound produce, for example, stops food waste that can release potent greenhouse gasses in a landfill. Making your own shampoo, deodorant, and other beauty products reduces the need for disposable plastic bottles—plus, it tends to use safer ingredients, meaning less danger for fish and other wildlife.

But Nieuwjaer didn’t just decide to join the movement one day; she was drawn into it as part of a local government experiment in waste management. In 2015, Roubaix launched a campaign to reduce litter by teaching 100 families—including Nieuwjaer’s—strategies for cutting their waste in half. Similar efforts may soon be repeated across France as cities and regions strive to meet (and exceed) the country’s ambitious waste-reduction goals. A fundamental question is at the heart of their efforts: How do you get citizens to change their behavior?

France is famous for its fine wines and cheese. However, among a more niche audience, the country is also known as a zero-waste leader. Besides producing one of the world’s most famous zero-waste influencers, Bea Johnson—the “priestess of waste-free living,” according to The New York Times—France has passed some of the developed world’s most ambitious waste-reduction policies. It was the first country in the world to ban supermarkets from throwing away unsold food and one of the first to enshrine “extended producer responsibility” into law, making big polluters financially responsible for the waste they create, even after their items are sold.

In 2020, France passed a landmark anti-waste law that laid out dozens of objectives for waste prevention, recycling, and repairability, including a national goal to eliminate single-use plastic by 2040. The law banned clothing companies from destroying unsold merchandise, required all public buildings to install water fountains, and proposed “repairability index” labels for certain electronic products. At the time, the law was praised as “groundbreaking,” and several of its provisions were hailed as the first of their kind. 

According to France’s waste-prevention action plan for 2021 to 2027, finalized in March by the administration of President Emmanuel Macron, cutting waste will yield a myriad of co-benefits, from boosting biodiversity and improving food systems to mitigating climate change. One estimate from the nonprofit Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives says that a comprehensive zero-waste strategy that includes better material sorting, more recycling, and source reduction—in essence, producing fewer unnecessary things—could reduce waste-sector greenhouse emissions by 84% globally. 

Achieving all these benefits, however, will require more than proclamations from Paris. According to France’s Ministry of Ecological Transition, the national anti-waste plan is meant to filter down through the levels of government before ultimately manifesting at the local level. The national plan requires regions to develop their own sub-plans and asks small-scale waste management authorities to “enable the implementation” of France’s bigger-picture waste agenda. 

However, the transformation France’s zero-waste advocates envisioned requires even more granular action—from boutiques, supermarkets, and restaurants. Keep peeling back the layers, and you end up with individual people like Nieuwjaer, who must be nudged, incentivized, or told to change their behavior to accommodate waste reduction—even if they’re not all as enthusiastic as she is. As the country’s 2021 to 2027 action plan says, “Reducing our waste requires everyone,” suggesting that an all-encompassing culture shift will be needed to achieve the national government’s goals. 

This is the task that many French cities and waste-collection authorities are now confronting—how to change individual people’s behavior so that it conforms with France’s vision for waste reduction. Some of the most ambitious places have become incubators, notably Roubaix, whose voluntary, education-based approach has drawn international attention. Last year, the European Commission named Roubaix as one of the top 12 places in the European Union with the greatest potential for “circularity,” a term referring to systems that conserve resources and minimize waste generation. 

There’s also the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region north of Bordeaux, where a regional waste-management authority called Smicval is experimenting with more structural interventions like moving garbage bins and charging people differently for waste collection. Pauline Debrabandere, a program manager for the nonprofit Zero Waste France, called Smicval one of the country’s “biggest pioneers.” 

The projects illustrate the need for complex behavior-change strategies that both educate people and alter the social and environmental contexts in which they make their decisions. And they hold lessons for communities across the globe looking to implement their waste-reduction programs. Debrabandere put it this way: While you need rules and incentives to “create the conditions” for waste reduction, you also need to convey its benefits and ensure widespread participation. “You have to raise awareness.” 

When Alexandre Garcin dreamed up Roubaix Zéro Déchet as a candidate for city councilor in 2014, it wasn’t so much sustainability that inspired his vision; it was cleanliness. Roubaix’s litter problem was top of mind for everyone that year, and Garcin’s big idea was to address it through waste reduction. Rather than cleaning up more and more trash off the city’s streets, why not produce less garbage in the first place?

This was easier said than done. Roubaix is a famously poor, postindustrial city that belongs to the Métropole de Lille, a network of communities organized around the major city of Lille in northern France. This superstructure coordinates infrastructure that crosses town lines, such as public transit and waste management. According to Garcin, the métropole wasn’t interested in funding and implementing his zero-waste initiatives. To cut down on waste generation, Roubaix would have to get creative—by asking residents to volunteer.

Once he was in office, Garcin mailed leaflets to Roubaix residents seeking 100 volunteers to participate in a free, yearlong pilot program that would teach them how to live waste free—or, at least, with less waste than usual. These familles zéro déchet would receive training and attend workshops on topics like making your own yogurt and cleaning with homemade products, to halve their waste by year’s end. Volunteers weren’t offered any direct financial incentives to participate—only the promise of helping solve the litter problem and protecting the environment. Using a luggage scale—a “really, really, really important” part of the program, according to Garcin—they would periodically weigh their weekly trash and report it back to the city.

The luggage scale forced people to recognize the impact, and literal weight, of their consumption choices, Garcin explained. “Physically, you have the sense of how heavy it is.” 

The program Garcin designed exemplified what behavioral scientists call an “information-based” approach to change, which builds understanding and awareness through unambiguous instructions, forums, meetings, training, and feedback. Philipe Bujold, behavioral science manager for the international environmental nonprofit Rare, described this as a “tell them” strategy, in contrast with other tactics to induce behavior change, including through incentives (“pay them”) or rules and prohibitions (“stop them”). Josh Wright, executive director of the behavioral science consulting firm Ideas42, also lauded Roubaix Zéro Déchet for creating an identity around zero waste and assigning families quantitative waste-reduction targets—strategies that have proven effective in other contexts. 

Much of what Roubaix told residents to do was actually pretty straightforward—for example, “Don’t buy more food than you can eat.” But that was the point. According to Garcin, it’s actually “not that difficult” to halve a household’s waste production. Composting alone is enough to get you most of the way there, since organic waste makes up about a third of the average French family’s municipal waste by weight. Another third is glass and metal, a significant chunk of which can likely be kept out of the landfill through recycling, and 10% is plastic, much of which can be avoided by finding reusable alternatives to plastic grocery bags, cutlery, packaging, and other single-use items. According to the United Nations Environment Programme, half of all the plastic produced worldwide is designed to be used just once and then thrown away.

“The idea was to help everyone change his consumption at the place where he’s ready,” Garcin explained, whether that meant eating fewer takeout meals or switching to homemade laundry detergent. Through these minor lifestyle changes, the earliest participants in Roubaix Zéro Déchet’s family program saved an average of 1,000 euros per year, according to Garcin. Seventy percent of them cut their waste generation by 50%, and one-quarter reduced it by more than 80%.

Of course, some participants embraced zero-waste more enthusiastically than others and therefore reaped even greater rewards. Nieuwjaer, for example, would eventually cut her landfill-bound waste by so much that nine months’ worth would fit on her kitchen scale. All told, Nieuwjaer says she saves about 3,000 euros a year because of her zero-waste habits. 

One drawback of an information-based strategy for behavior change, however, is that it tends to have limited reach while working very well on a small slice of the population—the “pioneers,” as Garcin called them, in this case referring to people who are exceptionally attentive to their health, environmental footprint, or personal finances. Since 2015, many of Roubaix Zéro Déchet’s most enthusiastic participants have been those who were already interested in wasting less, even before they heard about the program.

Amber Ogborn, for example—an American who moved to Roubaix with her family in 2012—said her decision to sign up as a famille zéro déchet in 2019 was influenced by a trip to a waste incinerator, where she saw garbage trucks unloading a “mountain of trash” to be burned. Ogborn is now all-in on zero waste, thanks in large part to the training she received from Roubaix Zéro Déchet. In addition to other new habits, she now maintains three separate composting systems, including one dedicated to the cat litter and dog droppings that she was tired of having to throw in the trash.

“It’s kind of gross,” Ogborn said. “But I thought, ‘You know what? This is one small thing that we could do.’”

Another die-hard participant is Liliane Otimi, who was already running a Roubaix-based environmental nonprofit called Lueur d’Espoir—“glimmer of hope,” in English—when she enrolled her 10-person household in the city program in 2018. Otimi was passionate about climate change and resource conservation and wanted to embody more of her values in her daily life—especially after a trip back to Togo, the West African country where she grew up. In Lomé, the capital, Otimi said she was “shocked” to see how quickly people went through plastic water bottles and littered them onto the street. Through Roubaix Zéro Déchet, Otimi learned how to buy cleaning products in bulk, how to do weekly meal prep, and how to plan her grocery shopping so she only buys as much food as her family will be able to use. 

“It’s beautiful to live in line with our values,” said Michaela Barnett, a behavioral scientist and founder of KnoxFill, a startup focused on reducing waste. She acknowledged Roubaix Zéro Déchet’s allure among a particular demographic.

However, it’s one thing to give “pioneers” like Otimi and Ogborn the tools to live their best zero-waste lives and quite another to bring all of Roubaix’s residents into the movement. Not everyone will value resource conservation—let alone act on those values—even if you tell them why they should. This is a key reason why behavioral scientists advocate for behavior-change strategies that are more complex than just “tell them” alone. “We generally think of education as a necessary but not sufficient type of intervention,” Wright said. (Incidentally, scientists used to think that an information deficit was the reason for climate inaction. Unfortunately, this has proven not to be the case.) 

The 800 families Roubaix has trained since 2015 likely represent the most easily convincible slice of the city’s population—an estimated 1.8% of its 100,000 residents, assuming an average family size of 2.3 people. It’s taken Roubaix nine years to reach this many people, and the rest of its residents will likely be harder to convert. 

To be sure, there is more to Roubaix Zéro Déchet than “tell them,” and the city is doing what it can to broaden its reach beyond those most inclined toward zero waste. For example, the program leans on social influences through advertisements, festivals, and community meetups, and spokespeople like Bea Johnson, the zero-waste social media influencer. (When she was invited to give a talk in Roubaix in 2015, the event was so popular that the city had to change locations three times in order to accommodate more attendees.) Roubaix also promotes the stories of its most successful familles zéro déchet in local, regional, and national media outlets—a strategy that has drawn so much positive press that the city’s communications director said in 2016 that zero waste had become “my Eiffel Tower.”

What’s more, City Hall has brought zero-waste practices and education into all of Roubaix’s public schools and is trying to nurture a network of zero-waste merchants—including restaurants, grocers, copy shops, and more—that adhere to a set of best practices for waste reduction. The municipal government is also expanding a voluntary community composting program independent from the métropole and is turning two buildings into zero-waste incubators—essentially, hubs for small and growing businesses that are focused on waste reduction. One of the buildings, a former textile factory, already hosts a company that saves bicycles from being sent to the landfill.

Debrabandere, with Zero-Waste France, said Roubaix is remarkable for what it has accomplished with such limited means. Despite its tight municipal budget and lack of control over waste-collection services, she said, the city seems to make every decision with zero-waste in mind. It has even helped launch copycat programs in 26 nearby communities that, altogether, offer more than 300 free zero-waste workshops each year. “Roubaix does things at a level we wouldn’t expect them to do,” Debrabandere told Grist.

Still, she wishes it had the authority to do more.

Some 500 miles south of Roubaix, in a small town called Saint-Denis-de-Pile in the French region of Nouvelle-Aquitaine, Clémentine Derot shimmies into a neon-pink construction vest. She’s about to begin a tour of the headquarters of Smicval, the waste-management company that serves 210,000 people across 137 municipalities north of Bordeaux.

Waste reduction is “in our DNA,” Derot says, pointing out industrial-sized piles of compost and a warehouse for sorting plastics into bales of recyclable material. There’s also a donation center where residents can drop off toys, dishes, furniture, electronics, and other items they no longer need and take home other people’s items for free. At one end of the facility, above a chute where dump trucks offload unrecoverable waste, is a massive billboard showing trash building up at the nearby Lapouyade Landfill. “Your trash doesn’t disappear, it’s buried 15 kilometers from here,” the billboard reads, apparently addressing Smicval’s workers since the chute isn’t public.

According to Derot, this reflects Smicval’s transformation from a company that simply picks up the trash to a more sophisticated waste-prevention and management service, in line with France’s 2021 to 2027 action plan. She describes the status quo waste-management model as “totally out of breath”—in need of a complete overhaul—due to escalating concerns over the environment, as well as France’s sharply increasing general tax on polluting activities. In 2019, it costs 18 euros to send a metric ton of waste to the landfill; in 2025, the cost will be 65 euros.

Like Roubaix Zéro Déchet, Smicval envisions a “drastic reduction” in waste generation. But as a regional waste-management authority and not a small municipality, Smicval has a very different toolbox at its disposal. Where Roubaix has largely asked residents to opt in to waste reduction, Smicval can experiment with more systemic means, like changing the way trash is collected or the way people are charged for disposal services.

The goal, according to Hélène Boisseau, who is overseeing the deployment of Smicval’s new waste-management strategies, is to create an environment that is conducive to waste reduction. “We don’t ask for people to become masters in zero waste,” she said. Rather, “We design the path” and then guide people along it.

In behavioral science, this is referred to as “contextual change,” where you alter the context in which people make decisions. Instead of merely asking people to do things differently, contextual changes make it easier or more convenient to perform the desired behavior—perhaps by presenting the existing options in a different, more strategic way. Take a middle school lunch line, for example. To get students to eat more vegetables and less pizza, you could either tell them all about the health benefits of broccoli and carrots—or you could move the vegetables to the front of the buffet, so they’re the first things hungry kids see. Many behavioral scientists prefer this type of strategy because it can change lots of people’s behavior all at once—rather than one by one. Plus, it’s better attuned to the unconscious nature of most decision-making. 

Smicval’s two biggest strategies revolve around the way waste is collected and how people pay for it. Last October, Smicval began a yearslong process of transitioning away from door-to-door waste collection to a model in which people travel to a centralized location, likely within a few blocks’ distance, to drop off their trash. Large bins for trash and recycling—one for every 150 residents—will be openable using a special key card. Community compost bins will be distributed at a rate of one per 80 residents.

According to Boisseau, this model will encourage people to reduce waste simply because it’s inconvenient to haul heavy trash bags down the block. But the longer-term objective is to use those key cards to implement a pay-as-you-throw scheme, in which people pay for waste disposal based on the amount of trash they want to dispose of. Rather than funding Smicval through taxes, families would directly pay the company for different tiers of service, represented by the number of times their key cards will allow them to open the garbage receptacles. The more openings, the more expensive the service, so that people no longer think of waste collection as a limitless public service.

Boisseau compared it to the way people get their electricity bills. Because they can see the charge fluctuating based on their consumption habits, they’ll be incentivized to waste less to pay less. “The best way of making sure that people are very concerned with what they put in a bin or a container is to pay for it individually instead of [through] taxes,” she said. Indeed, this principle has been put to use in thousands of towns worldwide, from Berkeley, California, to Austin, Texas, some of whose pay-as-you-throw policies have contributed to municipal solid waste reductions of 50% or more. Waste experts say these policies are some of local governments’ “most effective tools for reducing waste.”

Smicval is still sorting out the details of the new system, which is unlikely to be fully adopted until at least 2027 or 2028. In the meantime, Smicval expects to see significant cost savings from fewer and shorter garbage truck routes, which it will use to fund some of its other waste-reduction projects: things like a pilot program for reusable diapers, political advocacy for a bottle deposit bill, a 10,000-signature petition asking grocery stores to eliminate unnecessary plastic packaging, and a Roubaix-esque “zero-waste cities” program, in which Smicval distributes reusable cleaning products and informational pamphlets to the residents of participating municipalities.

Barnett, the behavioral scientist, applauded Smicval for using a broad range of strategies to encourage zero waste. “They are attacking this from different angles,” she said.

Still, she and the other behavioral scientists Grist spoke with noted the risk of backfire. Although small hassles can be “quite impactful” in catalyzing behavior change, Wright, with Ideas42, said they can also go too far and encourage noncompliance. For something like centralized waste collection or a pay-as-you-throw system, this could mean people dumping their waste illegally or finding a work-around to open the trash receptacles more often than what they’re paying for. Wright said the program’s success will hinge on specific design considerations, like how direct invoicing is presented to customers.

If Smicval’s waste-reduction policies are particularly unpopular, Boisseau said it’s even possible that a conservative slate of candidates could be elected to the organization’s board and walk back or weaken its environmental initiatives. Already, Smicval has gained critics who say that centralized waste collection is too onerous. These include the mayor of Libourne, the largest city in Smicval’s territory, who at a meeting last year predicted that the organization’s strategy would turn Libourne into “a trash can,” with people dumping garbage on the streets. If these critics were to mobilize the population against Smicval’s agenda, Boisseau said, “We know they would fight hard.”

A similar problem was unfolding on a national scale in December 2023, as France prepared to meet a January 1 deadline to equip all of its households with composting receptacles. Observers were afraid that the rollout would be a “nightmare,” and that “a lot of people wouldn’t want to take part.”

Smicval is aware of the obstacles it faces and has been proactive in its efforts to preempt or overcome them. As it slowly transitions to centralized waste collection, for example, the organization is going city by city and saving Libourne for last, hoping that a successful rollout in some of its more supportive municipalities will assuage fears in Libourne. To avoid backlash, it has also consulted with individual citizens to hear their concerns, act on their feedback, and—in some cases—design project proposals to be presented to Smicval’s board. 

We try to work with citizens, rather than for them, Derot said. “They know what they need.” 

Despite the many overlapping benefits of zero waste, the movement sometimes gets a bad rap because of its focus on consumers, rather than manufacturers. Why ask individuals to shop in the bulk aisle or pay more for trash disposal if the petrochemical industry is just going to more than triple plastic production by 2050 anyway?

“We are kind of tired of everyone saying it’s on the citizens’ part” to reduce waste, Debrabandere, with Zero Waste France, told Grist. She and other environmental advocates agree there’s an urgent need for waste-reduction policies that are even more aggressive than France’s current ones—for example, mandatory waste sorting in all restaurants, as well as more stringent requirements for the use of post-consumer recycled content and a faster phase-out of single-use plastics. 

But the zero-waste policies of advocates’ dreams will require even more intensive behavior shifts than those that Roubaix and Smicval are trying to navigate. For example, imagine a world where France—or any developed country, for that matter—bans products from being sold in disposable containers. This would require people to deal with new enforcement infrastructure at the local level and to shop at new businesses that can accommodate reusable and refillable product systems, and lug around their own jars, jugs, and bottles.

There are many, many other routine habits that consumers will have to dispense with or fundamentally alter to create a zero-waste economy, like buying plastic toothpaste tubes and getting takeout in throwaway packaging. The work that Roubaix and Smicval are doing in France is an early part of that process. By figuring out how best to engage their citizens in behavioral change, they are helping to create a smoother path toward the deeper, more radical changes that advocates hope are coming in the near future.

Barnett said there’s also value in the work Roubaix and Smicval are doing to understand zero-waste behavior in their respective regions. Behavioral scientists used to think humans could be characterized by a set of “universal truths,” Barnett said. But that’s less the case now: “We need to go in there and figure out more about the environmental context, the people that are there,” she explained. 

Meanwhile, as Roubaix and Smicval continue to try to win over new residents, they both have the benefit of an unusually enthusiastic army of supporters. Nieuwjaer isn’t the only zero-waste devotee who’s all too eager to proselytize about the simple joys of reducing waste. Chloé Audubert, who has spent the past two years working at one of Smicval’s sorting centers, said she loves helping people sort and limit their déchets enfouis—their waste destined for the landfill. And Otimi, the Roubaix resident who leads a family of 10, could barely find the words in English to express what Roubaix Zéro Déchet has meant to her. “This program changed my life,” she finally said.

This story was co-published with The Guardian and supported by The Heinrich Böll Foundation.

This story was originally published in Grist (United States) and is republished within the Human Journalism Network program, supported by the ICFJ, International Center for Journalists.

Unfortunately, right now 90% of these laborers fighting for union recognition will fail when faced with employer resistance. For the past half-century, union opponents have steadily chipped away at the rules protecting workers’ rights—in courts, in laws, and in our American culture. We’ve reached the point where there are many barriers to winning a union election. Even though the National Labor Relations Board changed a landmark rule to protect union rights in August 2023, organizing rights are not fully protected and can be changed on the whim of the administration in power. 

Rest assured, there’s a better way. It’s time for progressives to launch a push for something called card check elections. 

To understand both the problem and the solution, we first need a little union history. After the great age of union agitation in the 1920s and 1930s, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as part of his New Deal reforms, passed two urgently needed laws: the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) of 1935 and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which protected workers to a degree never previously seen. Among other safeguards, these laws outlined the rules for unionizing and bargaining with employers without fear of retaliation. These acts helped usher in a golden age of American unions. 

However, over the last 80 years, conservative movements like the Tea Party and groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) have—bit by bit, regulation by regulation, and court case by court case—managed to weaken or dismantle many of these protections.

That’s not to say collective bargaining doesn’t exist. It does, as we’ve seen with the recently announced labor deal with the United Auto Workers, which established substantial pay increases and improved working conditions. But as the right-leaning federal government (yes, even Democratic administrations have been less-than-friendly to unions for decades now) scorches our current path to unionizing, it is becoming easier for employers to legally block workers’ attempts to protect their rights. 

The $340 million anti-union industry is stomping all over our forgotten laborers. (Don’t forget that someone cut down the trees that provided shade for striking SAG-AFTRA workers in last summer’s heat.) According to MIT professor Thomas Kochan, less than 10% of workers’ efforts to unionize succeed when employers resist. 

In addition to the union process being extremely friendly to business, it is long and arduous. Right now, union organizers must get the support of 30% of a business’s employees just to file a petition asking to hold an election to unionize. Once that’s filed, the employer is notified and has the option to accept the union flat out, without waiting for the vote. (Once in a blue moon that does happen, such as in the case of Major League Baseball.) 

In most cases, the employer declines. If they make it to the voting stage, union organizers and employers negotiate to establish the rules of the union election—covering logistics such as the time and place of the election. Then, union organizers must persuade a majority of eligible workers to vote in favor of a union. To block unions, employers deploy aggressive tools like anti-union propaganda, threats of termination, increased employee monitoring, and reduced hours to remove benefits eligibility. All this makes it nearly impossible for workers to fight for and win unions—and often leaves employees in the crappy position they were in before.

But there’s another way. 

In 2008, Senator Ted Kennedy introduced the Employee Free Choice Act, which would have allowed the NLRB to certify a union without employer approval and an official election. Unfortunately, the Democratic Party did not make that bill a priority at the time. But it offers an opportunity we can organize around and pressure lawmakers into passing now: “card check” unionizing. 

The two-step card check process is simple and efficient, making it vastly easier for workers to unionize. First, more than 50% of employees would need to sign “authorization cards” in favor of a union. Once that happens, union organizers could file paperwork to establish the union. 

It’s that simple. No employer recognition would be required, and there would be less time and money spent on campaigning for the union, not to mention less red tape. This process would help everyone, from the Starbucks barista to the Amazon warehouse employee to the overworked graduate student. And that’s important. Workers don’t organize a union for fun; they know they’re risking their jobs and security, and do so only when they really need one—because of unsafe working conditions, unfair labor practices, and low wages and benefits. Card check would make organizing collectively far more achievable, and on a schedule that could actually deliver timely relief. 

It’s true, though, that with the card check method, employees’ votes would be public, which some worry would lead to more employer coercion and retaliation. It’s also possible that without highly regulated federal processes where the government facilitates the election, the burden of organizing will be placed on the employees—especially in large companies.

These are the kinds of objections that organizers and policymakers can figure out solutions to as they go. We needn’t remove the current union organizing process, which has worked for some groups. But if we want to empower all workers in all companies, the card check method is one new tool we can use to get past the conservative dismantling of employee protections. Indeed, the card check method is effective in promoting unionizing efforts across levels of government, both federally (as we see in Sweden) and at local levels (such as in Quebec and British Columbia). 

The card check method has made its way around the U.S. legislative branch, having been introduced in five different Congressional sessions. We can urge our representatives to re-introduce the bill in Congress and work with AFL-CIO to make the card check method a suitable reality for our laborers. 

So let’s learn from strikers; let’s organize. Progressives have forced the Democrats to champion such issues as student loan debt cancellation and universal health care. We can further organize around protecting the long-term health of our employees that looks beyond 2024. Let’s bring our union rates back up. Let’s protect employees. Let’s take the power back from corporate greed and show lawmakers who have the real power in this country: the everyday worker.

It was also the first time a foreign-owned auto manufacturing factory in the southern United States unionized. UAW’s next union vote will take place at two Mercedes plants near Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in mid-May.

Republican leaders in Southern states have taken a hard line against UAW’s organizing efforts. The governors of Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas signed on to a letter referring to UAW representatives as “special interests looking to come into our state and threaten our jobs and the values we live by.”

Labor expert Cedric de Leon, a professor of sociology and labor studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, spoke with YES! Senior Editor Sonali Kolhatkar on YES! Presents: Rising Up With Sonali, putting UAW’s Volkswagen victory into context.

Rather than simply requiring the auto industry to produce more electric vehicles (EVs), the federal government says car manufacturers have to comply with the new rules by ensuring that about 56% of all new car sales are EVs by the year 2032—a challenge for American car makers. Meanwhile, Chinese-manufactured EVs are flooding the global market and could help meet Biden’s climate goals. But the U.S. has imposed strict tariffs to keep out Chinese EVs and claimed that the smart cars are a national security threat. 

Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr., president and CEO of the Hip Hop Caucus and host of the award-winning climate and environmental justice podcast The Coolest Show, analyzed Biden’s new tailpipe emissions rule with YES! Senior Editor Sonali Kolhatkar on YES! Presents: Rising Up With Sonali.

Sarah Anderson, IPS’s global economy director and co-author of the report, discussed solutions to unfair corporate tax rates with YES! Senior Editor Sonali Kolhatkar on YES! Presents: Rising Up With Sonali.

That was the case for Duke Dalke. After spending six months behind bars, he tried to return to his previous line of work as a leader in the beverage industry in the greater Chicago area.

“After being released from prison I could not find a job,” Dalke says. “When it got to a background check, or just being honest and disclosing my history, they would close up the folder and say, ‘Thanks but no thanks,’” Dalke says. 

According to a 2023 report in the Journal of Labor and Employment Law, 60% of employers said they would not hire someone with a criminal record. According to the report, 87% of all employers said they do background checks prior to employment across all sectors. For clerical, service, and sales jobs it’s even higher, at 90%. As a result, 60 to 75% of people who were formerly incarcerated remain unemployed a year after leaving prison. 

Those circumstances are what brought Dalke to I Have a Bean—a coffee roaster in Wheaton, Illinois, just outside of Chicago—at the recommendation of someone else who was incarcerated. The roastery helps people like them in the uphill battle to find gainful employment. Dalke has been with I Have a Bean for eight years now and has since transitioned into a leadership role. He even interviews potential new employees—passing the baton of social mobility to candidates who were formerly incarcerated. 

Dalke is one of many around the country who have gotten a second chance at life with the help of the coffee business, be it in roasting, brewing, or being a barista.

Individual and Collective Success

In Washington state, Underground Ministries—an organization that helps the formerly incarcerated get re-acclimated to daily life outside of prison, has a similar program. Executive director Chris Hoke says the coffee business was born in 2016 because the ministry had a direct trade relationship with a farm in Honduras. 

“We started on our own, bringing big bags of coffee up,” he says.  

Underground Ministries then partnered with Fidalgo, a regional coffee brand. They launched Underground Coffee, which aims to help the previously incarcerated get gainful employment and build up a solid record that could help them progress in a new career path. 

Fidalgo Coffee CEO Darryl Miller says that in the eight years since the company launched, some of his best employees have been formerly incarcerated, including a current delivery driver. 

When people ask what the purpose of a business is, some people say it’s to turn a profit, Miller says. “For us it’s about making a difference in society.”

Burgeoning Baristas

New York City’s Department of Corrections teamed up with Procreate Coffee—a Brooklyn-based organization that offers a number of barista-training programs for the general public—to launch a training program for inmates. Procreate, which operates a brick and mortar location in Brooklyn, now has a training facility on Rikers Island—where the prison is located. The collaborative first launched the barista-training initiative at Rikers Island in 2017 and has expanded several times since then to be open to more inmates. They’re set to grow even more in the months to come.

The move comes despite massive budget cuts across New York City, which has led to Sunday closures of the New York Public Library, a 40% reduction in sidewalk trash collection from the Department of Sanitation, and even a reduction in other classes and programs at the Rikers Island prison. The barista program at Rikers, however, was spared. 

The program gives inmates who’ve been infraction-free for at least 30 days a crash course on everything from coffee roasting to latté creation to customer service.

The program stands out within the city’s criminal justice system, which has been plagued with a number of massive systemic problems. 

Rikers is historically one of the most overcrowded jails in the country. The jail faced numerous allegations of misconduct over the years, including the case of Kalif Browder, who spent three years in jail, despite never being convicted of a crime, before he ultimately took his own life. 

Now the Department of Corrections is also in the hot seat amid newly surfaced images that show inmates locked up in caged showers. 

The barista program is making a difference at Rikers.

Brew the Change

Starbucks, the world’s biggest coffee shop chain, endorsed the “Ban the Box” movement on its job applications in 2015 by omitting the mandatory criminal history box. The Seattle-based coffee shop chain joined other large retailers like Target and Walmart in doing so. 

The move largely proved to be successful. According to a report published in Iowa Law Review, by removing the box, people who were formerly incarcerated were 27% more likely to receive a callback than before the initiative took effect. 

There are dozens of independent coffee shops around the country that are specifically designed to help the formerly incarcerated get back to work, including The Fringe Coffee House in Hamilton, Ohio—about 20 miles north of Cincinnati. 

“My wife and I are both ex-felons. We both have been to prison, so for us this is a lived experience. When we came home there were not a lot of opportunities,” says co-owner Patrick Davis.

“We figured there’s got to be a better way. People deserve a second chance, and no one is going to hire us, so we created our own business,” Davis says.

Now in business for five years, The Fringe Coffee House employs 15 people.

“We started a business that, rather than discriminating against someone with a criminal record, we made that a requirement—kind of flipping it on its head,” says Davis.

Then, something miraculous happened. The United States government stepped in and began sending direct payments and expanded unemployment checks to Americans all over the country. Far from falling deeper into debt, many people actually paid off debts and found some measure of financial stability. That story holds many lessons, which Scott Fulford writes about in his new book The Pandemic Paradox: How the COVID Crisis Made Americans More Financially Secure. Fulford is a senior economist at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and has led the development of the bureau’s “Making Ends Meet” survey sent annually since 2019 that asks questions about real and perceived financial challenges facing ordinary American families. He spoke with YES! Senior Editor Sonali Kolhatkar on YES Presents: Rising Up With Sonali about his new book.

A new story by YES! Senior Editor Breanna Draxler shows that it’s possible to reverse this status quo by rebuilding systems from the soil up—literally—and redefining what prosperity means. Draxler spoke with fellow YES! Senior Editor Sonali Kolhatkar on YES Presents: Rising Up With Sonali about her story and the exclusive, four-part grant-funded series that it’s part of—“Redefining Prosperity.”

But if you walk 30 minutes, to the very end of Mauá Square, the Museum of Tomorrow, a science museum that was built in an attempt to revitalize the Port Zone, sits like a spaceship, and to its left, the Rio Museum of Art (MAR) towers over the sidewalk that leads visitors deeper into the city. These three buildings, as well as the installation of a tram system in the area, are part of an urbanization project that has ebbed and flowed since 2009—gaining steam when Rio hosted the Olympics in 2016 and the World Cup in 2018—to make the area into the city of the future.

Amid these investments, the Port Zone is filled with Black activists, researchers, and curators who are passionate about reckoning with the city’s past. The Port Zone, which spans the neighborhoods of Saúde, Gamboa, Santo Cristo, and Caju, was the biggest slave port in the Americas from the last few decades of the 18th century up until 1830, receiving an estimated 700,000 enslaved Africans, with some sources estimating the real number being closer to 1 million. After the abolition of slavery, free Black people used the area to build communities designed to preserve African religions and cultures within a society that increasingly wanted to erase any memory of slavery. 

Walking inland, past the graffitied warehouses and toward the neighborhood of Gamboa, the historical landmark of Cais do Valongo can be seen, protected by a few metal barriers. The site, where historians estimate at least one million enslaved people arrived in the 20 years it functioned in the 19th century, was nearly erased twice in Brazilian history: In 1843, it was remodeled to remove evidence that enslaved people were chained to be sold there, and in 1911, it was landfilled to build a square. 

Though Black researchers had known for decades that the site was hidden under the ground, it wasn’t officially rediscovered until 2011 when the city began doing construction for the 2016 Olympics. “This rediscovery marked a new era of Black memory in the city of Rio,” says Thais Matos, a Black geographer and researcher at Universidade Federal Fluminense. “It signified that Rio is an undeniably Black city, even though there are attempts at erasing this history.” Matos says Black activists and researchers, who’d already been working to preserve the territory, strategically used the Port Zone urbanization plans to argue for the preservation of the site, highlighting the violent history of slavery in the area and also emphasizing how the urbanization project was removing residents from the area. “The universities in the city would never have enough money to do this excavation.” 

But this strategic use came with a price. “The city understood that it wasn’t in the city’s interest to continue to erase that history anymore,” Matos explains. “They thought this history [could] be appealing for tourists coming to our city.” Hoping to capitalize on this discovery and not lose the momentum of construction, the city agreed to preserve the site, and UNESCO declared Cais do Valongo a World Heritage Site in 2017. 

White-Owned Opportunism

For community activist and photographer Maurício Hora, who has lived in Morro da Providência, the favela (working-class neighborhood) that towers over Gamboa, his whole life, the city’s begrudging preservation of Cais do Valongo wasn’t an attempt to honor Afro-Brazilian culture. Instead, it was about profit, allowing white-owned businesses to move into the area and edge out Black residents. As Tara Nelson details in a 2019 story for RioOnWatch, these white-owned businesses, including YouTube, have moved into the area. 

Hora mentions Largo da Prainha, a spot recently highlighted as one of the best spots in the city in a New York Times package about Rio. “Nothing on that square belongs to us. We don’t have animosity with anybody there,” he says. “The problem is that that area became a money-making space because of our culture. Our intentions in the area were never commercial.” 

In his studio in Gamboa, where large photos of his community are displayed on the wall, Hora says that the city’s projects in the Port Zone have brought opportunistic entrepreneurs to the area who haven’t hesitated to capitalize on his neighborhood’s Black history. “I call it afro-opportunism. This is an area that will stop being Black because of businesses that push Black people out.”

This money-making machinery came to a head in March 2022, after business owners in Largo São Francisco da Prainha—a historical square where Black women used to host and feed people who escaped slavery—had a disagreement with a local all-women samba band, Moça Prosa, that had been holding monthly shows in the public square for nearly 10 years. Newly opened bars in the areas disputed Moça Prosa’s right to perform in the square because the band sold their own drinks to cover the costs of their performance. While bar owners argued that this could cut into their profits, Moça Prosa refused to perform for free. 

After a number of meetings, the parties couldn’t reach a consensus, so Moça Prosa decided to move to a nearby property that was given to them by the city. YES! reached out to the city of Rio for comment, but received no response.

“We aren’t new here, we aren’t opportunistic,” Moça Prosa producer Ana Priscila da Silva told O Globo at the time. “We just want to come back to where we used to play after we were forced out because of the pandemic.”

Practically, Hora also says the projects have disrupted public transport in the area, particularly because of the tram system that was implemented to connect Rio’s city center to the Port Zone. Hora and other sources interviewed for this article say the system works well for people who come from the outside of the Port Zone, but the buses the local population depended on to reach other neighborhoods were removed to make space for the tram. “I used to be able to go anywhere in the city from here because of the buses,” Hora says. “Now we only have the tram.” 

Preserving Buried History

In 1996, civilians doing construction work in their home about 10 minutes away from Cais do Valongo discovered a cemetery where newly arrived Africans who died right after arriving in the port were buried. Merced Guimarães dos Anjos and Petruccio dos Anjos alerted the authorities about their discovery, but the state didn’t offer resources to preserve the site at the time. 

In 2005, the New Blacks Institute of Research and Memory (IPN) was founded, with private resources and funding. Today, the institution survives on ticket costs, private partnerships, grants, and a postgraduate degree offered by the institute’s educational branch. Upon the discovery of the cemetery, the state promised to research the findings, but Guimarães dos Anjos says that never happened, and she had to take preservation efforts into her own hands. In 2017, IPN almost closed due to lack of funding. 

“For 27 years, since the archeological discovery, the Institute never had effective help from public authorities,” says Alexandre Nadai, spokesperson for IPN. “We have to charge entry to the museum because we don’t have a sustainable way to keep the doors open otherwise.” While the Museum of Tomorrow receives financial support from the state that maintains its free entry, IPN has to charge entry to keep itself above water, receiving 41,000 visitors in 2022 alone. “We are educating people on racism, but we never have the guarantee that we will have enough money to be functioning tomorrow,” Nadai says.

The Port Zone is full of places like IPN, where residents and activists took it upon themselves to preserve Black history—places Black researchers know are significant but haven’t been deemed historically significant by the city. 

If you walk five minutes from IPN, you’ll come across a house where the belongings of Tia Ciata, one of the foremothers of samba itself, are shoved into a tiny, rectangular space that Matos says used to be a public bathroom. The space is managed by Ciata’s living descendants, but they don’t receive public funding for their work. The Morro da Providência, which Hora says is the first favela in the world, is not marked as such. In the old neighborhood of Santa Rita, another cemetery for enslaved people lies beneath the tracks of the tram system, but there isn’t a single plaque marking the significance of the location. The afroxé group Filhos de Gandhy, founded by port workers in 1951, is currently struggling to raise money for maintenance works in their venue.

“We have to preserve this memory, so [slavery] never happens again,” Nadai says. “But in a structurally racist country, things in Rio are only given value when someone will benefit from it financially. No political party fights for Black people, for the Black cause effectively. There aren’t many Black people in the government, and every 23 minutes, a young Black person is killed in Brazil.” 

For Hora, who co-wrote an op-ed for The New York Times in 2012 about the construction being done in the Port Zone at the time, the city’s interest in revitalizing the area doesn’t include the people who already live there. “They don’t think about the people who are from here,” Hora says. “That’s the big problem when a place is set to be transformed by public authorities.” 

When approached for comment, the city of Rio said there is a concern for preservation of Afro-Brazilian history in the Port Zone but did not provide a response to questions about the impacts of gentrification in the area. “The city has created the African Heritage Circuit in the Little Africa region, which includes Cais do Valongo, [and] coordinated the process to make it into a World Heritage Site by UNESCO,” the statement said. On the inclusivity of the Porto Maravalley project, the city said the hub will have diversity and inclusion policies “for Black people and LGBTQIA+ populations,” and that their education branch, Instituto de Matemática Pura e Aplicada, will have 100% of students funded by scholarships.

Bringing the Past Into the Future

In March 2023, Brazil’s first lady, Janja Silva, and the new Minister for Racial Equality, Anielle Franco, visited IPN. Nadai hopes the incoming federal administration, which has reestablished the Cais do Valongo management committee, will be favorable to the institute’s concerns and needs. However, the Port Zone has three branches of government that exercise their authority—municipal, city hall, and federal—which can complicate juridical processes of preservation.

“We understand that our cause is supra partisan,” Nadai says. “We have a good relationship with many branches of the government, and we use that dialogue to not let people from the outside of the neighborhood profit off Black culture.” Nadai and the staff at IPN hope that one day, governmental policies will enable the institute to stop charging, making their work more accessible to all. “Our wish is that there’s a state policy that gives us better sustainability and longevity,” Nadai says. Despite Porto Maravalley’s promise of inclusive policies, it’s difficult to understand why state funding isn’t directed to the institutions that already exist in the Port Zone of Rio. 

Until then, the people who live in and love the Port Zone of Rio will continue to do the preservation work that keeps Afro-Brazilian memory alive.

Allen was devastated by the news that they were losing a job that provided stable employment and a supportive community. The layoffs left them struggling financially—to get unemployment and to keep up with mounting bills. But Common Ground’s workers are a tight-knit group who became even closer as they weathered the challenges of seeing the profitable business through a pandemic. They weren’t ready to give up the shop.

The 20- and 30-something-year-olds relied on each other to endure the sudden job loss, raising thousands of dollars to help each other pay their rent, buy food, and support their families. The staff had already begun working to form a union to fight for better wages and rights in their workplace, and didn’t want another owner taking over. They believed they could reopen Common Ground in a way that gave the workers the power and ownership in the workplace that they felt they deserved.

“‘Making it’ is when we get to a point in our lives where we can take care of our friends,” says 30-year-old Common Ground barista Jacqueline Du.

Two days after the closing was announced, their lives upended, the workers shared that they were exploring the possibility of reopening Common Ground as a worker cooperative—a business owned and democratically operated by its workers. They found support from the loyal customer base built by the business in over 25 years as a fixture in the Hampden neighborhood.

Over the next two-and-a-half months, the former employees worked tirelessly to make the transition happen. Their journey provides lessons for community members who see worker-ownership as a potential tool to preserve and enhance their livelihoods as a flood of small business owners reach retirement age. Some 24 million United States workers could be affected by the coming “silver tsunami,” which refers to business owners of the baby boomer generation retiring without a succession plan for their businesses.

“The minute that I found out about [the closure] was also the minute we started to organize,” says Nic Koski, a Common Ground employee who emerged as a leader in the effort to turn the business into a worker-owned cooperative.

Community Support

Common Ground’s workers fought for a vision of prosperity at odds with the popular definition of success, in which entrepreneurs accumulate vast fortunes through others’ labor. At co-ops, workers decide how to run the business and keep the profits, which is shown to lead to better pay and working conditions, and increased productivity over traditional businesses. But like most working people, baristas typically lack access to the capital needed to buy a business or the resources and training required to manage it.

In response, a growing number of cities are recognizing the benefits of worker cooperatives by investing millions of dollars in their growth. Baltimore, though, has spent hundreds of millions of dollars subsidizing large corporations, but has yet to invest in supporting worker cooperatives through financing or training.

Instead, Common Ground’s workers found the embrace of Baltimore’s thriving cooperative ecosystem, which had grown significantly in recent years and was prepared to provide the resources the transition would require. For the past decade, Baltimore Roundtable for Economic Democracy (BRED), a local cooperative incubator, along with its national partner Seed Commons, has provided 100 cooperatives with technical assistance. Seed Commons has also loaned out more than $53 million dollars through its revolving loan fund, for which the incubator does not require personal collateral and asks for repayment solely from business profits.

BRED was born from the frustration of worker-owners at Red Emma’s coffee shop and bookstore, and the city’s oldest co-op, when trying to finance its expansion. The incubator has since become well known in Baltimore for growing the city’s worker cooperative ecosystem from a handful of cooperatives a decade ago to more than two dozen today. 

After the acclaimed Joe Squared pizzeria closed in March 2020 due to the pandemic, BRED provided the guidance that allowed the workers to reopen it as a worker co-op. This allowed the worker-owners to collectively make decisions like raising wages, equally distributing pay, and opening only for take-out dining when COVID-19 restrictions were lifted but transmission rates remained high. However, in November 2023, the worker-owners announced they would be closing their doors at the end of the year, citing a drastically altered post-pandemic restaurant landscape, lower turnout, and higher expenses. Co-ops are not fail-proof, but their benefits are real. 

When BRED learned that Common Ground’s workers wanted to buy the business, they quickly moved into action, using the lessons they had learned from previous transitions.

“BRED has been … the driving force behind how we were able to do this,” Du says. “They gave us the education and the resources to be able to achieve our goal.”

One of the first steps was to acquire financing to purchase the businesses assets from the previous owner. This alone can often seem like an insurmountable challenge for workers.

“We’ve literally had owners who wanted to sell to their workers, and the workers refused,” Kate Khatib, a worker-owner at BRED and Red Emma’s, says, “because they were too scared about what it would mean to take on that much debt.”

BRED gave Common Grounds employees access to financing through their revolving loan fund, and supporters donated more than $26,000 to a GoFundMe to support the conversion to worker ownership. The workers also brought critical assets to the table: They shared the trust needed to open a business together, and they were confident in their ability to manage the shop.

“The owner had very, very little involvement in the daily operations of the business,” says 32-year-old barista Shelby Munson, a full-time student at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. The job provided Munson the flexibility to pursue a math degree with a focus on finance—expertise BRED has helped her to harness at Common Ground. “BRED provided us with the structure for us to not have a boss but still make sure that everything gets done and everyone has a fair vote in the major decisions of the business.”

Examples Elsewhere

Even as Common Ground’s workers have found a path to restart their business as a co-op, the U.S. lags behind many wealthy countries in its number of worker cooperatives.

“I think the biggest challenge I have noticed is really structural obstacles to the transition to worker ownership,” Koski says. 

Small businesses that have been built up over decades have served as anchors in their communities, providing important services and stable employment. Some retiring business owners will sell to their children, but four out of five don’t have a plan for what will happen next.

The silver tsunami has brought renewed urgency to this work, as jurisdictions seek to preserve local businesses that have an outsize impact on local communities and economies. The number of worker cooperatives in the U.S. has increased rapidly in recent years, buoyed by mounting evidence that they can create good paying jobs and support community wealth-building.

Now, when business owners are ready to retire, cities are seeking to incentivize business owners to sell their business to their workers, instead of selling to private equity or simply closing them.

After investing more than $1 million annually to support worker ownership for the better part of a decade, New York City had 91 worker co-ops at the beginning of 2022, and that year reported spending $3.8 million dollars to provide capital and wide-ranging technical assistance to launch or convert nine more worker-owned businesses, with another nine in the pipeline.

New York’s success inspired Madison, Wisconsin, to invest $1 million annually in cooperative businesses, which by 2022 helped launch nine local co-ops, with a dozen more in the process of launching or transitioning to worker ownership.

Local foundations and anchor institutions in Cleveland helped launch Evergreen Cooperatives in 2008. The group now employs 110 worker-owners in traditionally low-wage sectors with the goal of providing wealth-building opportunities in historically excluded communities in the city. They sustain and grow their co-ops by securing major procurement contracts to provide energy solutions, fresh produce, and laundry services for the city’s hospitals and universities. Their Fund for Employee Ownership acquires local businesses, such as the regional coffee shop chain Phoenix Coffee, and transitions them to worker ownership.

These successes in the U.S., though notable, lag far behind Spain’s Mondragon Corporation, which employs 80,000 people across 90 autonomous worker co-ops. Each co-op has an executive whose pay is capped at six times its workers, and major decisions are made democratically. The collective of cooperatives was founded 70 years ago by a Spanish priest as an answer to the region’s extreme levels of poverty and inequality, and lack of social mobility.

Today Mondragon is a North Star for advocates of worker-ownership, who hope to replicate its success to help revitalize postindustrial cities also facing high levels of inequality and a lack of social mobility. In Cincinnati, that movement is laser-focused on raising awareness that it is possible for small business owners to sell to their workers.

“Mondragon has the lowest level of poverty and the lowest level of income inequality in Spain … and we would like to see that here in Cincinnati,” says Kristen Barker, co-founder and co-director of Co-op Cincy—a local cooperative incubator. Seeds Commons has supported Co-op Cincy’s multi-million-dollar Business Legacy Fund, which thus far has provided three business owners with the financing and support to sell to their workers, and supported a fourth business that did not require financing for its transition.

Veteran early childhood educator Trisha Hay had struggled to find a workplace that empowered teachers to address the needs of their students until she began working at Shine Nurture Center. When founder and owner Katie McGoron announced in 2022 that she was exiting the business, Hay was relieved to learn she would sell to the workers, with Co-op Cincy’s help.

Hay says worker-ownership has since strengthened the business. “We really listen to each other’s ideas and can come to each other with problems,” she says. “When you have a sole owner, you don’t have that capability.”

In April 2023, Co-op Cincy organized a trip to Mondragon as part of its plan to expand local worker-ownership by 80,000 people over the next 50 years. Forty people from Southwest Ohio, including 7 worker-owners, toured Mondragon’s large cooperative ecosystem and met with local leaders.

“It was really inspiring to see kind of an economic model that really worked for everyone there,” says Hays, after witnessing how deeply embedded the cooperative ethos was. “Everyone knew what cooperatives were, and it was just a normal part of life and model for their businesses.”

On her return, Hays lobbied local government officials, who she said were excited by the potential benefits of worker-ownership. Representatives from Mondragon then visited Cincinnati for the 2023 Union Co-op Symposium, which took place in Cincinnati in October, to raise awareness of the benefits of worker-ownership and what steps could be taken to increase democratic control of local economies. Attendees said the conference raised awareness of the benefits of expanding worker-ownership in Cincinnati.

“There’s more dialogue happening, especially post-COVID, and we’re talking about worker rights and worker exploitation—that there’s got to be more creative ways of thinking about how to empower the workforce,” says Cincinnati business owner Brandon Z. Hoff, who founded the Black apparel company Heritage Hill in 2019, and received the assistance of the Business Legacy Fund to transition the business into a co-op in 2022.

A Successful Transition

On Sept. 18, 2023, just 11 weeks after Common Ground closed down, dawn was breaking at the coffee shop. Allen and half a dozen co-workers, equal parts nervous and excited, came together and grasped the red handles of an oversize pair of scissors. In unison, they began counting down to open for the first time since the beloved café closed abruptly this summer. 

“Three, two, one, community!” they shouted as they cut a large red ribbon draped across the entrance to the shop, acknowledging that they could not have done it alone. They were met with cheers, hugs, and tears from supporters. A sign outside read, “We’re back baby. Your local fav, now as a co-op. Thank you for all your support!”

Customers lined up to order their favorite food and drinks, and to express gratitude the business reopened as a worker co-op.

“I don’t even drink coffee,” said one customer, who contributed to a GoFundMe to support the conversion to worker-ownership. “I want to support businesses that treat their workers well, and worker-ownership is a great way to do that.”

In the first six weeks of operation since the café’s reopening, Common Ground has raised wages for its 17 worker-owners by as much as 25%, and is seeking to expand its staff to keep up with demand.

To finally reopen as a co-op “was the best feeling in the world,” Allen says, “because we get to see our customers, we get to spend time with one another, and when we see issues, we can fix them the way we see fit.”

This story was funded by a grant from Kendeda Fund, as part of the YES! series “Redefining Prosperity.” While reporting and production of the series was funded by this grant, YES! maintained full editorial control of the content published herein. View our editorial independence policies here.

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 11:30 a.m. on December 8, 2023, to include Kate Khatib’s full name and title. Read our corrections policy here.

Chilton’s apartment building is located within the Los Angeles LGBT Center’s Anita May Rosenstein campus, which is designed to facilitate intergenerational interaction. The bustling 180,000-square-foot Rosenstein campus brings LGBTQ youth, seniors, and housing together in a unified setting. It opened in 2019 to much fanfare and is the only large-scale intergenerational campus in the United States to specifically provide housing, services, and programs for LGBTQ adults aged 50 and older with low incomes, and for LGBTQ youth—primarily aged 18 to 24—experiencing homelessness. [Disclosure: The author was a writer and editor for the L.A. LGBT Center’s quarterly magazine and blog through April 2022.]

“I look after them and they look after us,” says Chilton, who is a lesbian. “I live in a colorful building in a colorful neighborhood. We have every race, we have everyone across the sexual and gender continuum. It’s almost a microcosm of the world.”

The Campus also serves as the administrative headquarters for the 54-year-old Center, which is the largest LGBTQ organization in the world, with seven locations across the city. “Some of our seniors feel very isolated, and being able to interface with the youth, I think that’s pretty special,” explains Lisa Phillips, the Center’s director of youth services. “We had an intergenerational Thanksgiving event last year, and it was a line out the door. The seniors had a great time; the youth had a great time.”

In March, the Center hosted an opportunity fair for youth and seniors looking for employment; youth residents later performed a drag show during a senior dance hosted at the Ariadne Getty Foundation Senior Housing complex. Kiera Pollock, the Center’s director of senior services, says these facilitated intergenerational interactions help create intentional opportunities for connection between people who may be at vastly different points in their lives. “Our folks have different challenges in the community, and we have to kind of meet them where they are,” Pollock says. “I think many of our youth are trying to just figure out … how to survive, how to get back into school, how to stabilize their lives, how to get clean. So the way in which they interact with the older adults, we found, has to be kind of structured within a program that makes the most sense.”

On any given day, there are more than 4,000 youths (under age 24) living on the streets of Los Angeles, mostly in Hollywood, according to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority 2020 count. The percentage of unhoused youth who are LGBTQ can be as high as 40%, according to the Center. Before senior housing was available on the Rosenstein campus, the Center opened the doors of the Michaeljohn Horne & Thomas Eugene Jones Youth Housing building in 2021. The 25 apartments in the building are the first micro-units designed for LGBTQ youth experiencing homelessness in Los Angeles, according to the Center.

The campus also offers 92 beds available for youths—52 for the Transitional Living Project (TLP), where youths can stay for up to 24 months. Youths housed in the TLP work with Center staff to develop the skills they need to be able to live independently. The remaining 40 beds are for an emergency and crisis shelter. Youth residents have access to the Center’s full range of wraparound services and support, including case management, education, employment training and placement, health and mental health care, food and clothing assistance, counseling and support groups, and activities and events.

Carlos J. Mejia Vijil, 23, moved out of TLP in July, after living there for two years. He first arrived at the Center when he was just 19, after making a harrowing journey through Mexico from Honduras, where he feared for his life because he is gay. An immigrant-rights attorney connected him with the Center’s legal services department, which represents immigration and asylum clients from more than 70 countries—many of whom risk arrest or physical harm if they go back to their home countries because they are LGBTQ. “They helped me out with everything,” Mejia Vijil says of Center staff. “Everything I have, every opportunity is thanks to the Center.”

Mejia Vijil was initially placed in the Center’s emergency overnight shelter, then moved into TLP.  He made the most of his opportunities by completing an English as a second language program held at nearby Hollywood High School, then enrolled in the culinary arts program on campus. “The culinary classes are in English, and I was just learning English. I tried real hard,” he says. “The older people were co-workers, and we talked like friends. They really respected who I am.” Mejia Vijil now works as a line cook at Osteria La Buca on trendy Melrose Avenue, and lives in his own apartment in Hollywood.

Connecting Across Age 

The Center’s culinary arts and social services training programs are the most prominent examples of success in forging intergenerational connections in the classroom. The 100-hour social services vocational training program teaches younger and older students necessary skills to build a career in social services. Many graduates have since landed jobs at the Center, working in intake, street outreach, and peer support.

The 12-week, 300-hour culinary program focuses on developing basic culinary skills, producing 500 meals a day to be served to Center clients. Students also do a four-week internship at a local restaurant or hotel, and are then offered job placement assistance within the restaurant or hospitality sector. “I think what’s been pretty amazing [is] to be able to have youth and seniors enrolled in a culinary class together,” Phillips says. “Many of these young people have not had adults who are affirming of their identity. To see the seniors and a generation of older queer people, and to be able to support them and to share their experience from a different generation, has been really remarkable.”

Pollock says since the older students usually have career and employment experience, mentoring and an abundance of mutual support occur organically in the campus’s commercial kitchen, where classes and meal production take place. And despite the decades between them, the students’ experiences sometimes mirror each other when it comes to gender identity or sexual orientation.

“We had in our culinary program a youth who was transitioning and a senior who was transitioning,” Pollock recalls. “They just happen to both apply for the program at the same time. They were able to support each other and talk about some of the different issues around that together—how they were dressing and using different pronouns. And they talked together about how that transition is different for a younger person. That was amazing to watch.”

After a career in sales, 64-year-old Annetta Daniel, who is gay, hopes to work with food in a variety of ways, and so jumped at the opportunity to enroll in the culinary program. “They make you very aware that this is going to be the seniors and the youth mixed. I thought, that’s fantastic!” Daniel says. “I know I have a lot to bring to the table for them. I’ve been down the road that they’re headed down. And they’re going to bring a lot to the table for me.”

When Daniel first moved into the Getty building in 2021, “I had nothing but my clothes,” she says. Her partner of 23 years had died in 2017, leading to housing instability. She was diagnosed with breast cancer, which enabled her to secure temporary housing because she was high-risk due to her health, then she moved into her current home in the Getty building, where she has thrived. “I want to grow as tall as I can, I want to know as much as I can, and I want to go as many places as I can,” Daniel says. “I want to have as many friends as I can, and experiences, and this place offers that to me.”

The High Demand for Housing

The Center has a total of 202 units of affordable housing for seniors who are 62 or older. More than half of the units are in the Triangle Square Senior Apartments complex, located at the corner of Selma and Ivar in Hollywood—one mile away from the main campus. Of the estimated 65,000 LGBTQ seniors who call Los Angeles home, a majority (68%) live alone, as LGBTQ seniors nationwide are four times less likely to have children or grandchildren to care for them than their heterosexual counterparts, and are twice as likely to be single, notes Pollock. 

Before the doors of the Center’s affordable senior housing units had even opened in late summer 2021, more than 2,000 applications had been submitted. Most of the residents were chosen by a lottery system, but 25 of the units are designated as permanent supportive housing units for seniors experiencing homelessness, whose rents are funded by L.A. county and city grants.

The Triangle Square complex has an outdoor swimming pool and garden while the Getty building has amenities including a community room, communal kitchen, pool table, and a fitness center. Residents have direct access to the Center’s Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Senior Center and its services that include counseling and support groups, case management, home-delivered meals, in-home care, and benefits assistance. Residents can also be connected to health and mental health care, and HIV support.

For Chilton, moving into the building has been “life-changing.” “It is a personal miracle,” she says. “It’s about having my own sanctuary. You don’t really understand that until you don’t have one. I had 10 years without [my] own sanctuary, of couch surfing and trying to make myself small, to not get in the way. Everything in my life has fallen into place, with a constant state of contentment. I don’t know that I ever felt this good emotionally, spiritually, and physically.”

John Maragioglio, an 82-year-old Air Force veteran, has also found community since moving into the Getty building in October 2021. He worked at the Center as an accountant in the 1980s, during the worst days of the AIDS epidemic, and returned to the Center in 2021 when he needed a place to live. “I’ve met a lot of gay people in here,” says Maragioglio, who is also gay and attends a veterans social group every Wednesday. “There’s one guy who does a movie night twice a month downstairs. You go to lunch downstairs every day. It’s so nice to have that lunch.”

He has not connected with the youth the way Chilton and others have, but he’s usually happy to see them around. “I can see where some of them have a little attitude,” he says. “But you know, we have to realize all kids have attitudes. They’re just finding themselves.”

Together, Independently

Center leadership has been learning in real time how to best bring the seniors and youth together. Pollock says they’ve had to learn to manage their expectations and be mindful that youth who have recently experienced homelessness may also have suffered any number of traumas in their young lifetimes.

“I think their goals are different in intergenerational connection, and we had to learn that right away,” she says of the youth. “It’s really great that folks get to connect across our programs but can still go back home to live in their units, where maybe they’re hanging out with other 21-year-olds. Our [senior] folks are hanging out with other 70-year-olds, who maybe want it quiet after 9 p.m.”

But when the connections are made, they can be invaluable. “In the LGBT community, often people come out but they don’t have any members of their family who are queer,” Pollock says. “As a younger person, you don’t necessarily have another gay person in your direct life to mentor you. So the opportunity for some of our seniors to kind of mentor and support our youth, it’s really powerful in a community that doesn’t have that.” 

This story was funded by a grant from Kendeda Fund, as part of the YES! series “Redefining Prosperity.” While reporting and production of the series was funded by this grant, YES! maintained full editorial control of the content published herein.

“We foresee that a military response would not end the terror. Rather, it would spark a cycle of escalating violence, the loss of innocent lives, and new acts of terrorism. … Our best chance for preventing such devastating acts of terror is to act decisively and cooperatively as part of a community of nations within the framework of international law … and work for justice at home and abroad.”

Twenty-three years and more than two wars later, this statement reads as a tragic footnote to America’s Global War on Terror, which left an entire region of the planet immiserated. The war contributed to the direct and indirect deaths of close to 4.5 million people, while costing Americans almost $9 trillion and counting.

The situation is certainly different today. Still, over the last few weeks, those prophetic words, now 22 years old, have been haunting me, as the United States war machine kicks into ever higher gear following the horrific Hamas massacre of Israeli civilians and the brutal intensification of the decades-long Israeli siege of civilians in Gaza. Sadly, the words and actions of our nation’s leaders have revealed a staggering, even willful, historical amnesia about the disastrous repercussions of America’s 21st-century warmongering.

Case in point: Recently, the U.S. was the only nation to veto the U.N. Security Council resolution calling for “humanitarian pauses” to deliver life-saving aid to Palestinians in Gaza. Instead, all but a few members of Congress are lining up to support billions more in military aid for Israel and the further mobilization of our armed forces in the Middle East. These moves, experts say, may only accelerate wider regional conflict (something we are already seeing glimmers of vis-à-vis Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen) at a time of increasingly profound global instability. In the last few weeks, the U.S. Navy has “assembled one of the greatest concentrations of power in the Eastern Mediterranean in 40 years,” while the Department of Defense is readying thousands of troops for possible deployment. Meanwhile, college administrators are suggesting student reservists be prepared in case they get called up in the coming weeks.

Amid this frenzy of American bluster and brawn, the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees reports that Gaza is “fast becoming a hell hole,” riddled with death, disease, starvation, thirst, and displacement. Hundreds of scholars of international law and conflict studies have warned that the Israeli military may already have launched a “potential genocide” of Gazans. At the same time, within Israel, citizen militias, armed by the far-right minister of national security, have escalated violent attacks on Palestinians, only worsened by the acts of armed Israeli settlers on the West Bank protected by that very military.

Finally allowing a tiny amount of aid across the Egypt-Gaza border, after shutting down all food, water, and fuel for Gaza, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant made it clear just how much power the United States wields over this unfolding humanitarian crisis. “The Americans insisted,” he reported, “and we are not in a place where we can refuse them. We rely on them for planes and military equipment. What are we supposed to do? Tell them no?”

As Gallant implied, the U.S. could use its influence not only to demand far more aid for Gazans, but to compel quite a different course of action. There should, after all, be no contradiction between condemning Hamas for its heinous slaughter in the south of Israel and denouncing Israel for its decades-old dispossession and oppression of the Palestinian people and its now-indiscriminate killing and destruction in Gaza. There need be no contradiction between decrying terrorism and demanding diplomacy over violence. In truth, the Biden administration could use every nonmilitary tool at its disposal to pressure both Hamas and Israel to pursue an immediate ceasefire, the full release of all hostages, and whatever humanitarian assistance is now needed.

If only, rather than further militarizing the region or questioning the death toll in Gaza, the Biden administration were to focus on making this most recent and ever more ominous crisis a final turning point, not for yet more brutality, but for a long-term political solution focused on achieving real peace, human rights, and equality for everyone in the region. In this moment of grief and rage, when tensions are at a fever pitch and the wheel of history is turning around us, it’s time to demand peace above all else.

The Cruel Manipulation of the Poor

While the U.S. government refuses to use its considerable power as leverage for peace, ordinary Americans seem to know better. Unlike the days after 9/11, recent polls suggest that a majority of Americans oppose sending more weapons to Israel and support delivering humanitarian aid to Gaza, including a majority of people under the age of 44, as well as a majority of Democrats and independents and a significant minority of Republicans. While Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian-American in Congress, was made a pariah and is in the process of being censured by some of her colleagues after her plea for a ceasefire, she actually represents the popular will of a significant portion of the public.

And that, in turn, represents a generational shift from even a decade or two ago. In the wake of this country’s disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as dozens of other military conflicts globally, many Americans, especially Millennials and Gen Zers, see the U.S. military less as a defender of democracy than as a purveyor of death and chaos. Nearly second-by-second online coverage of the Israeli bombing campaign is offering Americans an unprecedented view into the collective punishment of more than two million Gazans, half of them 18 or younger. (Now, with limited Internet and communications, it’s unclear how word of what’s happening in Gaza will continue to get out.) Add to that the slow-burning pain that has marked life in the United States over the last 15 years—the Great Recession, the COVID-19 economic shock, the climate crisis, and the modern movement for racial justice—and the reasons for such a relatively widespread urge for peace become clearer.

Today, half of all Americans are either impoverished or one emergency away from economic ruin. As younger generations face what often feels like a dead-end future, there’s a growing sense among those I speak to (as well as older folks) that the government has abandoned them. At a moment when the Republicans (and some Democrats) argue that we can’t afford universal health care or genuine living wages, the military budget for 2023 is $858 billion and the Pentagon still maintains 750 military bases globally. Last week, without a touch of irony, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who claimed last year that student debt relief would hurt the economy, insisted that the U.S. can “certainly afford two wars.”

Millions of us tuned in to President Biden’s Oval Office speech on his return from Israel, only the second of his presidency. There, he asked Congress to earmark yet another $100 billion mainly for American military aid to Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan (a boon to the war-profiteering weapons makers whose CEOs will grow even richer thanks to those new contracts). Just a year after Congress killed the Expanded Child Tax Credit, which had cut official child poverty in half, Biden’s speech represented a further pivot away from socially beneficial policymaking and toward further strengthening of the ravenous engine of our war economy. After the speech, The Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuvel offered this compelling instant commentary: “Biden tonight rolled out a version of 21-century military Keynesianism. Let’s call his policy just that. No more Bidenomics. And it consigns the U.S. to endless militarization of foreign policy.”

A decision to organize our economy yet more around war will also mean the further militarization of domestic policy, with dire consequences for poor and low-income people. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once called such steps the “cruel manipulation of the poor,” a phrase he coined as part of his denunciation of the Vietnam War in the late 1960s. King was then thinking about the American soldiers fighting and dying in Vietnam “on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor.”

Today, a similar “cruel manipulation” is playing out. For years, our leaders have invoked the myth of scarcity to justify inaction when it comes to widespread poverty, growing debt, and rising inequality in the United States. Now, some of them are calling for the spending of billions of dollars to functionally fund the bombardment and occupation of impoverished Gaza and a violent Israeli clampdown in the West Bank, not to speak of the possibility of a wider set of Middle Eastern wars. However, polling numbers suggest that a surprising number of Americans have seen through the fog of war and are perhaps coming to believe that our nation’s abundance should be used not as a tool of death but as a lifeline for poor and struggling people at home and abroad.

Not in Our Name

In a time of stifling darkness, one bright light over the last weeks has been the eruption of nonviolent, pro-peace protests across the world. In Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Europe, hundreds of thousands of people have hit the streets to demand a ceasefire, including possibly half a million people in London. Here in the U.S., tens of thousands of Americans have followed suit in dozens of cities, from New York to Washington, D.C., Chicago to San Francisco. No less important, those protest marches have been both multiracial and multigenerational, much like the 2020 uprisings for Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and the countless other Black lives lost to police brutality.

Recently, close friends and colleagues sent me photos from a march in Washington, D.C., where Jewish protesters demanded a ceasefire and held up signs with heartrending slogans like “Not in My Name,” “Ceasefire Now,” and “My Grief Is Not Your Weapon.” Ultimately, close to 400 people, including numerous rabbis, were arrested as they peacefully sang and prayed in a congressional office building, while David Friedman, ambassador to Israel under President Trump, hatefully tweeted: “Any American Jew attending this rally is not a Jew—yes I said it!” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia ludicrously claimed that the protestors were leading an insurrection.

Two days later, my organization, the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice, co-sponsored a pro-peace march that drew a large crowd of Palestinians and Muslim-American families. At noon, about 500 protesters—a gorgeous, multicolored sea of humanity—participated in the Jumma call to prayer in front of the U.S. Capitol. The following week, folks co-organized a pray-in at New York Representative Hakeem Jeffries’s office, using the phrase “ceasefire is the moral choice.” Faith and movement leaders offered prayers from their various religious traditions and displayed the names of people killed so far.

On Oct. 27, as Israel expanded its ground invasion of Gaza, I joined thousands of people in Grand Central Station to call for a #CeasefireNow, one of the largest demonstrations in New York since this most recent conflict broke out. Protests continued all week. And on Nov. 4, there was a mass rally and march in Washington, D.C., to call for an end to war and to support the rights of Palestinians, with hundreds of organizations bridging a diversity of views and voices to plead for peace.

Those marches were an inspiring indication of the broad coalition of Americans who desperately want to prevent genocide in Gaza and dream of lasting peace and freedom in Israel/Palestine. At the lead are Palestinians and Jews who refuse to be used as pawns and prop-pieces by military hawks. Alongside them are many Americans all too aware that, though they might not be directly affected by the nightmarish events now unfolding in the Middle East, they are still implicated in the growing violence thanks to their tax dollars and the actions of our government. Together, we are collectively crying out: “Not in Our Name.”

Such marches undoubtedly represent the largest anti-war mobilization since the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and are weaving together diverse communities—young and old; Black, Brown, and White; Muslim, Jewish, and Christian; poor and working-class—in a way that should prove encouraging indeed for a growing peace movement. Right now there are new alliances and relationships being forged that will undoubtedly endure for years to come.

Yes, this remains a small victory in what’s likely to prove a terrifying global crisis, but it is a victory nonetheless.

Roses Dressed in Black

The last few weeks have resurrected traumatic memories for many Jews and Palestinians globally—of the Holocaust, the Nakba, and the long history of Islamophobia, anti-Arab hate, anti-Jewish violence, and antisemitism. For many of us who are not Palestinian or Jewish, the recent mass death and violence have also triggered our own painful reckonings with the past.

I’m a descendant of Armenian genocide survivors. When I was a child growing up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, I heard hushed tales of death marches, hunger, lack of water, barricaded roads, and harrowing escapes. Those stories remain etched into my consciousness, a mournful inheritance my dispossessed ancestors handed down.

My great-grandfather, Charles Ozun Artinian, fled his home in what is now Turkey’s Seyhan River valley after the 1909 Adana Massacre in which Ottoman militants killed 25,000 Armenian Christians. Part of his family escaped over the Caucasus Mountains into Western Europe. They then traveled halfway across the world to Argentina, because so many other nations, including the United States, had closed their borders to Armenian refugees and would only open them years later.

As he was fleeing Adana, Charles wrote a poem, one of the few surviving long-form poems from the region at the time. It begins:

In the Seyhan valley there rises a smoke

Roses dressed in black, month of April cried

Cries of sadness and mourning were heard everywhere

Broken hearted and sad, everybody cried…

My family taught my siblings and me that although the genocide against our people was carried out by the Ottoman Empire, it was made possible by the complicity and indifference of the international community, including the world’s richest and most powerful nations. Right now, the smoke rising over Gaza is suffocating, and every additional hour the U.S. enables more bombs to fall and tanks to rumble, more roses will be, as my great-grandfather put it, dressed in black. Not only that, but with the detonation of each new American-made bomb, the conditions for the long-term freedom and safety of both Israelis and Palestinians are blasted evermore into rubble.

Let us honor the memories of our ancestors and finally learn the lesson of their many stolen lives: “Not In Our Name!,” “Peace and Justice for All!” and the pleas from Gaza, including “Ceasefire Now!,” “End the Siege,” “Protect Medical Facilities,” and “Gaza is Home!”

This article was originally published by TomDispatch. It has been published here with permission. 

Black borrowers are disproportionately impacted by student debt, both in terms of need and the ability to pay off loans. President Joe Biden made student debt forgiveness a major campaign promise but the U.S. Supreme Court earlier this year blocked his plan after Republican lawmakers filed a lawsuit against it. 

Dr. Richelle Brooks, an organizer with the Debt Collective, and the founder of ReThink It, an organization dedicated to providing resources to mitigate the harm of systemic racism, spoke with YES! Racial Justice Editor Sonali Kolhatkar on YES Presents: Rising Up With Sonali about the Morehouse College debt cancelation and how it can be replicated on a wider scale.

Part of the union’s victory includes an agreement secured with GM in early October to bring electric car battery facilities under UAW’s national contract. Labor analyst Les Leopold sees this as critical to what climate justice organizers have for years been calling a “just transition” away from fossil fuels. Leopold is the executive director of the Labor Institute and author of the forthcoming book, Wall Street’s War on Workers: How Mass Layoffs and Greed Are Destroying the Working Class and What to Do About It. 

He spoke with YES! Racial Justice Editor Sonali Kolhatkar on YES Presents: Rising Up With Sonali about what UAW’s victory means for labor organizing and climate justice.

The storm also caused a massive loss of housing. In a state where developers were engaged in predatory behavior even before Ian, how have people been rebuilding in the intersection between climate change and disaster capitalism? Florida-based writer Elena Novak, who reported on post-hurricane rebuilding for YES!, answered that question in a conversation with YES! Racial Justice Editor Sonali Kolhatkar on YES! Presents: Rising Up With Sonali.

So far Israel has killed more than 4,000 people in Gaza, including more than 1,000 Palestinian children. Writing for the National Priorities Project where she is program director, Lindsay Koshgarian says, “In the face of massive suffering in Gaza and disregard for international law by the Israeli government, the U.S. must not provide additional military aid or weapons that would cause more deaths.”

Koshgarian spoke with YES! Racial Justice Editor Sonali Kolhatkar on YES! Presents: Rising Up With Sonali about why it’s past time to question U.S. military aid to Israel.

But applying a clarifying lens to the prevailing economic model reveals that we live under a system of what author Marjorie Kelly calls “wealth supremacy,” which is the title of her new book. Kelly is a distinguished senior fellow at the Democracy Collaborative, a nonprofit working to catalyze the creation of a democratic economy. She spoke with YES! Racial Justice Editor Sonali Kolhatkar on YES Presents: Rising Up With Sonali about her book and what it will take to realize a democratic economic system. 

Many in the hardest-hit region of Lee County continue to bear that cost, not just from the physical damage, but at the hands of property owners and developers.

One of those affected is Lorna Washington, a former Fort Myers resident who lived in her 4-bedroom, 3-bathroom rental for two years before she was forced to leave.

“After the storm, since there wasn’t any damage to the property, the owner decided he was going to put it up for sale because of the shortage of housing units from the storm,” she says. “He listed it at a very high price, feeling that people would be desperate and pay that price.”

The house, which she lived in with her two children and two grandchildren and was renting for $2,200, was purchased in 2014 for only $187,000. When it was put on the market in 2023, the asking price was $550,000, despite the fact that no repairs or upgrades had been made in years. The owner, Washington says, lived in New Jersey.

“First he told us we could stay until he sold it, then he changed his mind and told us we had to leave in four days,” she says. “That was the first time in my entire life that I had ever been without a place to stay, and I didn’t know where I was going to lay my head—not just me, but my family, my kids, and my grandkids.”

Rental rates were already on the rise before the storm, she says. According to a 2022 Shimberg Center for Housing Studies report, 28% of Lee County renters are low-income or paying at least 40% of their income on rent. Compounding that is the pandemic bump: From July 2020 to July 2022, 221,000 residents moved to Florida from other states, the largest gain of residents from within the U.S. since 2005. For many, arriving from notoriously expensive states like California or New York, more affordable homes were the driving factor.

“When they came here and saw these lower prices, they gobbled up the real estate and drove the prices up,” Washington says. “To them it’s a bargain, but to locals, we were priced out of the market. We were not accustomed to these prices.”

After the storm, rental rates skyrocketed even further. Though she had been approved for a smaller 3-bedroom, 2-bathroom rental, the landlord wanted $2,700 a month. Just two years prior, a similar property she rented cost only $1,300. After spending a week living between a hotel and an Airbnb, Washington finally found a rental home for $1,800 in Cape Coral.

Hers is one of many stories of how development is reshaping the Lee County landscape. My own parents, whose home in Cape Coral was flooded by record storm surge during the storm, were forced to relocate to St. Petersburg while they cleaned out their house and eventually put it on the market as-is. It sold to buyers from Miami whose primary residence is a 5-bedroom, 4-bathroom house worth over $1 million. Because of high interest rates, most buyers fit this profile: investors looking to flip for a profit.

For coastal areas that were totally wiped out, like Fort Myers Beach, developers are seizing the opportunity to drive up prices even further. Most of the post-Ian properties will cost $1 million or more, according to sources quoted by Business Observer; meanwhile, fewer than a third of the low- or middle-income residents who used to live there have been able to return.

If this sounds familiar, it is. After the fires in Maui that destroyed nearly 1,900 homes, developers started reaching out to residents and offering to buy their land, hoping they’d be desperate enough to sell after the long wait for government assistance and insurance payouts. According to residents interviewed by USA Today, many are holding their ground, resisting contributing to the affordable housing crisis the island had already been facing due to a rise in short-term rentals and vacation homes.

In Lee County, faced with similar pressure, locals are finding ways to fight back. Washington is a member of Mt. Hermon Church in Fort Myers, one of the founding members of Lee Interfaith for Empowerment (LIFE), an organization made up of 14 congregations across the county who hold public officials accountable for creating policies that address the community’s needs. For three years, LIFE fought to get the city of Fort Myers, where most of their members are located, to implement an affordable housing trust fund. In January of 2022, they finally won.

Though it took many subsequent months of follow-up to see movement with the trust fund, that accountability is starting to pay off. As of August 1, the fund had a balance of just over $3.7 million. About $520,000 of the total has been spent on developments, including units set aside for low- to moderate-income families. And, as of February 2023, $400,000 of the affordable housing trust fund is being set aside for a rental assistance program.

“Prior to the storm we had some pushback, and then after the hurricane we had less pushback because now the homelessness and the housing shortage is staring everybody in the face,” Washington says.

Families or individuals who apply can receive up to $600 in monthly assistance, depending on where their income falls, with the property owner or manager receiving a subsidy as incentive to participate in the program. But Washington feels it’s not enough.

While operating her cleaning and repair business that services rental properties, she’s heard a lot of stories of people who received the rental vouchers, but found that there were no rentals available or that landlords—knowing they could still ask for above-market rents—weren’t accepting the vouchers. Further, the requirements to rent even with a voucher are steep; would-be renters still need to make three times the rent and pay three-months’ rent up front—an often impossible ask for people needing assistance with rent to begin with.

“What we have been pushing for the city to do is to get the land and the developers to actually build those types of units, and that will alleviate some of the issues—to build more units that will take these types of renters,” Washington says.

In September 2023 LIFE showed up to a Fort Myers city council meeting to make their voice heard in a debate over the fate of a building that once housed the News-Press newspaper. Rather than sell the building to developers hoping to use the property to build luxury condos, the city chose Miami-based company Tre Bel Housing, whose proposal promised rent-restricted housing for essential workers.

Over 40 members from LIFE showed up to that meeting, with several speaking publicly to remind the council of the housing crisis. Councilwoman Teresa Watkins Brown, when declaring that she was going to vote for the affordable housing, said, “I’m listening to my community.”

Other organizations are taking matters into their own hands, rather than waiting on the government to do it. The Immokalee Fair Housing Alliance (IFHA) was formed to address the housing needs of farmworkers in Immokalee, an agricultural community in neighboring Collier County. The alliance is building 128 hurricane-resistant affordable rental units for farmworkers and low-income families, many of whom currently pay up to 70% of their income to live in 50-year-old trailers with limited access to toilets and infested with mice and mold. After Hurricane Irma in 2017, many of those trailers became uninhabitable due to severe wind damage.

According to Carleton Cleveland, board member of the IFHA, the groups who came together to form the coalition after Irma did so in order to create something longer lasting than disaster relief could provide. In addition to the rental units, IFHA is building a community center, athletic fields, and a community garden.

“For the most vulnerable communities, like ours here in Immokalee, we have to look for solutions together to protect against the effects of climate change,” says Lupe Gonzalo, a former farmworker and current staff member for the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), a member organization of the IFHA.

After Hurricane Ian, because the Immokalee community wasn’t as hard-hit as nearby Lee County, the CIW stepped in and became a resource distribution hub, also using their radio station to provide information to the community both during and after the hurricane.

“We have a history of organizing not only with workers but also with consumers and the public,” Gonzalo says. “We’ve created a really good connection to the community and a sense of trust in the community, and that’s what gives us the confidence to communicate with the community in times of crisis.”

The CIW has been organizing Immokalee workers for 30 years, winning protections like mandatory heat breaks to keep workers safe when doing outdoor work.

Housing security is another protection that can keep communities safe during a crisis. For some coastal communities, that might mean seeking government grants to relocate away from the coast. For others, it might mean giving the locals a fighting chance against developers seeking to profit off of devastating loss, like the moratorium on sales of damaged property proposed by the governor of Hawai‘i. Whatever this aid looks like, the problem is too big for one community to solve on its own.

“Humanity has borrowed a large debt from nature for decades of unsustainable exploitation, and the time to pay has come,” Gonzalo says. “At this point, we can’t let communities solve their problems alone, because climate change isn’t only affecting communities like ours, it’s a global problem. It’s a problem that governments should be responding to.”