A child of undocumented immigrants from Guatemala, Marroquin—who grew up in Los Angeles in the 1970s—worried that speaking to anyone in authority about her father’s physical and emotional abuse would put her family in danger of being separated, or get her parents deported. But she desperately wanted the abuse to stop.

“All I ever wanted as a child was somebody to talk to my abusive father and make him understand the harm he was causing,” says Marroquin, who is now 48. “I believe my father could have changed if he’d had the support he needed to believe his family when we told him he was hurting us.”

Her father never got that support, but Marroquin is now trying to help other people interrupt the types of abusive behaviors that made her own childhood difficult. Recently, she became the first California-based responder working for A Call for Change, a free and confidential helpline for people causing or considering causing harm to an intimate partner or other loved one. 

The helpline began in Massachusetts, but a coalition of California-based advocacy groups are promoting its use across the Golden State. Their goal is to make the helpline widely accessible to people across California and ultimately generate enough interest and funding to power a team of locally based helpline responders like Marroquin who can answer calls specifically from people in the region and offer relevant referrals when needed. 

The Alliance for Boys and Men of Color, a network of community and advocacy organizations focused on advancing racial and gender justice, is spearheading expansion of the helpline in California. For the past several years, the network has led a campaign to create new ways of addressing intimate partner violence that don’t involve the criminal or legal system. Network leaders and many other advocates believe alternative approaches are needed because, despite the prevalence of domestic violence—it affects approximately 1 in 3 women and 1 in 10 men. Many people don’t report incidents to the police because they fear it will make their situations worse. Their fears are not unfounded, surveys show.

Most domestic violence interventions focus on helping survivors, often requiring them and sometimes their children to upend their lives by seeking shelter and safety. Far fewer resources are dedicated to helping the people causing the harm to stop what they’re doing, says Jordan Thierry, a consultant for the Alliance for Boys and Men of Color. 

These people may realize they need help, he said. But the programs that exist, traditionally called “batterer intervention programs,” are usually court-mandated and not financially accessible or tailored to people who haven’t been convicted of a crime. Therapy is another option, but many people don’t have the health coverage or money to afford it, or struggle to find therapists they can relate to.

That’s the gap organizers believe A Call for Change can fill.

“We know there’s a demand and a need,” says Thierry. Other than the helpline “there’s no resource that’s available that’s confidential and anonymous for people who are causing harm who don’t want to submit themselves to the legal justice system and out themselves in their own community.”

A Call for Change launched in 2021 in rural Massachusetts in response to reports of growing domestic violence during the COVID-19 pandemic. It draws inspiration from similar helplines in the United Kingdom and Australia, and was designed with input from a 12-member advisory board of professionals and activists whose work involves addressing domestic violence. 

The helpline is funded by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health.​ But because people can call the helpline from anywhere, about half of the approximately 1,000 calls annually come from out of state, including California, said co-founder JAC Patrissi.

Callers to the helpline talk to a responder trained in trauma-informed and transformative justice principles. That means the responder doesn’t judge or shame the caller but has a respectful and compassionate conversation that aims to help them gain insight into their own beliefs and behaviors, and recognize patterns of control, manipulation, and violence that are harming their relationships. 

Callers are not absolved of their violence, Patrissi emphasized. Responders guide people causing harm to move beyond denial and blame so that they can understand the impact of their actions and take responsibility. Responders then help callers develop strategies for being a safer person for their loved ones to be around. Often, this occurs over several hours-long phone sessions, Patrissi said. Callers frequently call back multiple times.

Patrissi said part of the problem with criminal justice responses to people who engage in domestic violence is that they replicate the same patterns of dominance and control that they’re trying to stop. That’s why the helpline offers a different approach. “You can’t shame people into stopping shaming others, you can’t control people into stopping controlling others,” Patrissi said. “We have to find a way that interrupts sexual and domestic violence in a way that doesn’t replicate dominance.” 

The helpline may not be the right fit for everyone. People who are taking the time to call a helpline are generally already open to making some kind of change, even if they’re only in the beginning stages of that journey, she said. That’s why Patrissi believes no one has ever called the helpline in the middle of committing violence. Making the call is in itself a form of de-escalation and self-control.

All calls are anonymous. Because they’re routed through an operator, responders have no way of knowing who the caller is or where they’re calling from, unless the person chooses to disclose that information. This is important, said Patrissi, because most callers are very worried about being reported to the police and the impact that could have on their lives or their families. Without reassurance that their identity is protected, they won’t feel comfortable speaking freely and honestly with the responder, which would deprive them of the opportunity to get help, she explained. 

About half of the callers to the helpline are family members, friends, or professionals seeking assistance in dealing with a person engaged in intimate partner violence. Responders provide guidance on how they can talk to the person they’re concerned about and can also offer referrals to services.

The helpline is already open and available to callers from California, though most of the responders are in other parts of the U.S. Responders receive 40 hours of initial training followed by additional weekly training and debriefing sessions. Some responders are licensed therapists, but many are drawn to the work from other backgrounds. The positions are paid.

The Alliance for Boys and Men of Color, with collaboration from Patrissi’s organization, Growing a New Heart, have begun spreading the word about A Call for Change to men’s groups, local governments, youth organizations, and nonprofits working to address domestic violence, among others. Last fall, they hosted two online webinars and an in-person gathering in the Bay Area to inform people interested in the helpline and guide them on how to speak about it to those they think could benefit. 

In October, about 35 people from a variety of organizations gathered at the RYSE Center in Richmond, California, to hear presentations from Patrissi and others involved in running the helpline. They listened to a reenactment of a real call from a man seeking to understand why someone he went on a date with is accusing him of sexual assault. The responder encourages the man to look more closely at a moment during his interaction with his date in which he deliberately ignored her cues to stop. Gradually, the caller is able to identify an underlying belief that caused him to keep going, and to see the interaction from the woman’s point of view.

Attendees also practiced role-playing how to talk with people in their communities about the hotline and encourage those they think could benefit to call. Ruby Leanos, a project manager at the Contra Costa Crisis Center, which runs a crisis and suicide prevention line, said she planned to share information about A Call for Change with staff there so they could offer it as a resource to relevant callers.

“Just knowing something like this exists is great,” she says. “We have so many of these hotlines and warmlines and helplines, but really A Call for Change and the population it’s working with, I think that’s something that we don’t see enough of.”

Paméla Tate, co-executive director of Black Women Revolt Against Domestic Violence, which offers support to women and families affected by domestic violence, said survivors have long been asking for the type of intervention that A Call for Change offers. Many of her clients still love their partners and want to be with them, but they want their partners to get help to stop their harmful behavior. The helpline offers an opportunity for people being abusive to proactively get that help without reaching the point of causing their partner to flee or call the police.

“Batterers intervention programs are because you’ve already battered, you’ve already been found guilty of battering, they send you to a class,” Tate says. “This is, ‘I’m voluntarily calling … Maybe I can talk this out and figure out how to de-escalate and not cause harm, because I don’t want to harm my partner.’”

The question remaining for Tate is, will enough people who need the help actually call the helpline?

Ben Withers, who works for STAND! For Families Free of Violence, an organization in Contra Costa County, California, that runs a batterer’s intervention program, said he was already recommending the helpline to people in his program to call for extra support between classes. Withers said he hoped the helpline would steer other people who could benefit from anti-violence programs like his to enroll in classes voluntarily.

Currently only about 10 percent of people in the batterer’s intervention program are there because they want to be, he explained. “I’m excited for the people calling,” he says. The helpline “creates an avenue for people to enter services outside of the carceral system.” 

The Alliance for Boys and Men of Color plans to do additional trainings about the helpline and is fundraising to support expanding its hours and responder staff in California. Ultimately, organizers said they hoped to get state government support for the effort.

Meanwhile, for Marroquin, the abuse she experienced as a child pushed her to pursue a career working with and advocating for survivors of domestic violence. Although she said she never succeeded in persuading her father to change his ways, she’s hopeful her work as a responder for A Call for Change will break the cycle of abuse for other families and intimate partners.  

“To be able to do this for somebody else’s parent, somebody else’s partner is deeply healing for me too,” she says.

To reach A Call for Change, call 877-898-3411 or email Help@ACallForChangeHelpline.org The helpline is open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. PST every day of the year. It’s free, anonymous, and confidential. Language translation is available. After-hours callers can leave a voicemail and receive a call back within 24 hours. For more information visit acallforchangehelpline.org.

If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic violence, you can also contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233 for support and referrals, or text “START” to 88788. Information on local domestic violence programs can be found using this online tool.

For Native Americans and Alaska Natives, the StrongHearts Native Helpline at 1-844-7NATIVE (762-8483) provides 24/7 confidential and culturally appropriate support and advocacy for survivors of domestic and sexual violence. A chat option is available through their website.

This story was produced in collaboration with the California Health Report. 

More than a century before, Ford overcame the setbacks and complexities of the two strikes against her—her race and her gender—by opening a home medical practice in the heart of Denver’s Five Points neighborhood. Known as the Harlem of the West, this thriving African American neighborhood in downtown Denver dates back to the late 19th century. An economic and cultural center for the community, Five Points was filled with entrepreneurs, artists, musicians, and licensed educators, lawyers, and doctors. 

As part of the African American professional class, Ford intentionally used her knowledge and skills to meet the needs of African Americans, who experienced health disparities due to limited access to health care and financial resources to pay for medical services. By the time of her death in 1952, “the Lady Doctor,” as she was widely known, had delivered more than 7,000 babies. 

It was two of those “Ford babies,” Moses and Elizabeth Valdez, father and daughter, who catalyzed the memorial movement to save her home and practice nearly a century after it was built in 1890. 

After years of organizing and advocacy, in February 1984, the two-story house was removed from its foundation and transported 13 blocks on an oversize platform to 3091 California Street in downtown Denver. Since that time, it has remained the official site of the Black American West Museum. In this way, Ford, one of the most renowned medical professionals in Colorado’s history, has remained a beloved beacon of the African American community, in life and death.

The successful campaign to preserve and restore Ford’s home exists as part of a larger narrative of the evolution of African American women’s memorialization, or the process of commemoration. Its origins in the United States date back to the early 19th century, when free Black communities in the North organized festivals and parades to celebrate emancipation, promote abolitionism, and disseminate Black history. They used these public venues to also herald the contributions of Black women through commemorative oratory, trumpeting their legacies through speeches. 

After the Civil War, public festivals and parades spread to the South. African American clubwomen began creating named memorials—public memorials attached to a person’s legacy—for women like Phillis Wheatley. At the dawn of the clubwomen’s era, the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) was instrumental in establishing a nationwide infrastructure for named memorialization to expand in the 1890s, all while Jim Crow laws increasingly restricted the parameters of Black citizenship. At the same time, white organizations like the Daughters of the Confederacy began to erect public monuments that supported false narratives of the Civil War and conveyed dehumanizing myths about enslaved Black people. 

With limited to no control of the public landscape domain, African American communities employed named memorials as strategic resistance against the erasure and caricature that existed among white public history memorials, race pseudoscience, and published historical narratives. In the absence of statues, monuments, and museums, African American women sparked the era of named memorials, which spread across the United States and manifested in domestic and Pan-African organizations, public libraries, public housing, and even commercial ventures.

As the ruling power of Jim Crow laws began to lessen in the 1960s, the prominence of named memorials ebbed as the ability to erect traditional public history sites, such as museums and statues, increased. Integration decreased the visibility of named memorials as constituencies of public buildings and African American neighborhoods began to change.

In the midst of the civil rights, Black Power, and Black Studies movements, African American communities had more access and negotiating power with local and national bureaucracies to influence the public history landscape. They advocated to save buildings and create new spaces to celebrate Black heritage and culture, ushering in a new era of African American traditional memorials. Though urban renewal at times galvanized memorializers to save meaningful cultural places, it irrevocably restructured African American communities. 

Still, by developing public and private partnerships, a new generation of memorializers, African American preservationists, and public historians and organizations resisted erasure of their communities from the physical landscape when they established the first traditional public history sites.

In the 21st century, memorializers’ ability to create and sustain traditional memorials has only increased, with web-based technologies and social media platforms expanding memorials for African American women even further. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter/X posts, along with Google Doodles and digital humanities projects, have become integral to how Black history is disseminated to public audiences. The internet has provided a new public history terrain shaped by memorializers of all backgrounds. Community advocacy for more visible multicultural representation has broadened the scope of museums, statues, and historical markers in locales across the United States.

Despite all the national and regional representation, significant underrepresentation of African American women memorials still remains. With the addition of the Harriet Tubman National Historic Park in 2009, there are now three African American women represented in units of the National Park Service—less than 1% of all designations.

The silence of underrepresentation and unseen memorials has been countered by the national movement of African American public memory crafters to resist erasure and cultivate historical narratives that can withstand generations. Operating with unprecedented savvy, African American memorializers have been at the forefront of establishing a national public history landscape. The civil rights, Black Power, and Black Studies movements created a political and social landscape for African American communities to establish public history sites using public federal and state funding.

The legacies of Black women continue to be celebrated in named and traditional memorials, by generations of memorializers and public memory crafters, through a continuum of commemoration manifested in a vibrant public history landscape throughout the United States.

This excerpt, adapted from Black Women Legacies: Public History Sites Seen and Unseen by Alexandria Russell (University of Illinois Press, 2024), appears by permission of the publisher.

While navigating this unjust system, Flanagan felt out of her depth, so she began reaching out to other families who have experienced police violence. Those conversations inspired her to found the protest group Mothers Against Police Brutality (MAPB). “I just felt compelled,” Flanagan says. “[I wanted to] start a group where moms [who have lost a child to police violence] could meet. I remember feeling so isolated. I just couldn’t break through that grief.” 

Now, more than a decade after Allen’s death, MAPB focuses on advocating for better policy around police brutality—like eliminating qualified immunity for police officers—and training mothers to advocate within their local communities. 

On May 14, 2014, Johnatha de Oliveira Lima, 19, left his house in Manguinhos, a community in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to walk his girlfriend home and drop off dessert at his grandmother’s residence. While walking home, Lima encountered the police having a confrontation with residents of his community. Amid the chaos, policeman Alessandro Marcelino de Souza shot Lima in the back. By the time Lima’s mother, Ana Paula de Oliveira, arrived at the hospital, her son had died.

During Lima’s funeral, Oliveira met Fátima Pinho, whose son, Paulo Roberto, died in 2019 after being asphyxiated by a cop. During that conversation, Pinho invited Oliveira to fight for justice for both of their sons. “The only thing I was sure of was that I wanted to fight for my son’s memory and for the truth,” Oliveira says. “That’s how the Mães de Manguinhos movement emerged.”

That same year, Oliveira and Pinho founded Mães de Manguinhos (Mothers of Manguinhos), a collective that organizes protests against police brutality, helps mothers report their children’s state-sanctioned murders to the appropriate channels, and supports families in the aftermath of losing a relative to police violence.

“[Our] objective was to denounce police violence in Manguinhos, but we started moving away from Manguinhos [and] started meeting mothers from outside the community,” says Oliveira. “[That’s when] we noticed [many of] those families are also Black.”

Though they are separated by more than 5,000 miles, Oliveira and Flanagan are connected in myriad ways. They have both been left to pick up the pieces after the Black men they birthed were brutally murdered. Neither of them received support, monetary or otherwise, from their respective governments. And both have founded movements aimed at advocating for better policy around police brutality and teaching mothers who lost their children how to get justice.

Every year, law enforcement kills more than 600 people in the U.S., while Brazil registered more than 6,000 deaths due to police interventions in 2023 alone. In both countries, most of the victims are Black men and boys whose mothers are often forced to dispute the idea that their sons were disposable or responsible for their own deaths.

Both Mães de Manguinhos and MAPB aid mothers seeking accountability for the state’s violence against men and boys of color—a labor they are thrust into with little resources. After their children are murdered, these mothers can experience worsening mental health and economic hardship, and yet, these mothers still devote their lives to seeking justice for their children and others. But, as they fight for their children’s legacy, we must ask ourselves: Who takes care of these mothers?

Connected by Struggle

In Rio de Janeiro, the Mães de Manguinhos collective pressured the state to prosecute the officer who killed Lima. Oliveira gathered testimonies and evidence to prove her son wasn’t a drug trafficker, as the officer claimed. When the case went to trial in March 2024, Oliveira argued that her son was not a threat to police. Ultimately, the officer was convicted of manslaughter rather than murder, so Oliveira has appealed the verdict and requested a new trial. The second trial has not yet been scheduled.

“Most investigations into cases like this do not go anywhere because they are based on the character of the victim, investigating what the victim was doing at the time of the shooting,” explains Etyelle Pinheiro de Araujo, a sociologist at Unigranrio University in Rio de Janeiro who researches the narratives of mothers who lost their children to police violence. “When [these] mothers tell their stories in the public sphere, they are breaking with this narrative. They are combating these discourses and humanizing victims of police violence.”

Oliveira alchemized her grief into care for other mothers by providing them with a road map for pressuring authorities. “This project was born with the intention of denouncing police violence and the murders of our children,” Oliveira says. “But there’s also a need to welcome, embrace, and care for these mothers, to show them that we are also victims and that we won’t die despite the pain, that we manage to stay alive through the purpose of the struggle.” Finding similarity in their struggles, these mothers become stronger in numbers, even when they are separated by oceans. 

While fatal police violence is common in both countries, there are also no protections or aid—monetary or legal—for families who lose a loved one to state violence. 

That’s one of the reasons MAPB began running a two-year fellowship program in Dallas in 2021 where mothers who lost their children to police brutality are trained to be agents of change. Flanagan says the fellows learn how to organize for change; how to engage effectively with policymakers, district attorneys, law enforcement agencies, and media; and how to effectively collaborate with other organizations. 

Some of those fellows include Sheila Banks, whose son Corey Jones was fatally shot by Palm Beach Gardens police officer Nouman Raja in 2015. After a five-year battle, Raja was convicted of manslaughter by culpable negligence and attempted first-degree murder with a firearm in 2019 and sentenced to 25 years. Another MAPB fellow, Dalphine Robinson, founded Georgia Moms United, an organization that supports families affected by police brutality. 

“We have 20 powerful women who know who their representative is, who know legislation, and who know who their city officials are,” says Flanagan. “They are a force in their community, and I think that’s how we get the change collectively that we need.”

According to Flanagan, MAPB is also advocating for a change in policy in Texas that would make these families eligible for the state’s Victim’s Compensation Fund, which currently aids police officers involved in the killing and not the families of the victim. 

By leaning on each other and learning through their grief, these women have become change advocates. “Social movements teach the people that exist within them,” Pinheiro de Araujo says. “It’s the pedagogy of the streets. The mothers themselves say they become investigators, they go after evidence, [and] some of them go to law school. And they teach one another through solidarity.”

After a police operation in the community of Jacarezinho resulted in 28 deaths, a network of mothers in Rio who lost their children to police brutality, including Oliveira, created RAAVE. Since 2022, RAAVE has been providing mental health services to the families of victims and conducting research on the impacts of fatal police violence. This year, a partnership with the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro provided scholarships to mothers across the state to be trained as researchers and develop public policy proposals to combat police violence, including monetary aid to victims’ families and mental and physical health care for the mothers. 

The RAAVE project pays these mothers for their expertise and participation in the project to counteract the economic impact state violence has on families. Often, after the victim is killed, families experience a sudden loss of income either because the victim was the primary earner or the victim’s mother has to stop working due to grief. 

“Many of these mothers die without seeing justice for their kids’ murder, they die of depression or other illnesses,” says Pinheiro de Araujo. “There’s the financial question too. These women lose their jobs and end up in very vulnerable positions.”

As a result of this project, Oliviera will receive a degree in psychiatry while also influencing policy on how to care for families after the fact. Taking the project as instructive, Oliveira wants the state to provide general care and political education for the families of victims. “Our intention is that this project grows into other results and that our contributions become public policy,” Oliveira says. “We think it’s fundamental to care for the body and mind, but there’s also a need for political education.”

Demanding Care From the State

Since the right to raise children in a safe environment is a central tenet of reproductive justice, Oliveira argues that this also has to be addressed as a dimension of justice for police violence. The murder of Black boys and men by the police is the more extreme manifestation of this lack of rights, Oliveira said, but the state’s infringement on Black boys’ existence is everywhere, starting with low-quality education and lack of access to leisure. 

“We are denied access to many spaces like the cinema, the theater, which are spaces of culture, and we don’t see people having the right to these spaces [because of policing and racial profiling],” Oliveira says. 

While both Flanagan and Oliveira have dedicated their lives to filling a gap of care for other mothers, the question still remains: Who takes care of them? Oliveira says the women in Mães de Manguinhos take care of each other through companionship, cooking for each other, organizing and going to protests together, and helping each other find the right channels to get justice. If the state isn’t there for them, they are there for each other. 

Oliveira sees this work as a continuation of her care for her son, so the sacrifices feel worth it. “The struggle is a space where I can still care for my Johnatha,” Oliveira says. “Where I am still his mother. That’s something I agonized about. What’s it going to be like now? How will I speak about him? What will my relationship with my son be like?”

For Flanagan, who recently took a break from MAPB due to health issues, this question is more complicated. “I threw myself at the work, and the work just really helped me but also caused me a lot of health problems,” she says. “A lot of the moms in the movement have never been to therapy. You have to make it healthy for you at the same time, [while] honoring their space and pain.”

Across the world, grieving Black mothers have organized themselves to clamor for justice, to care for one another, and to advocate for their murdered children. Through their grief and pain, these mothers build support networks, help each other gather evidence, study legislation and advocate for better laws, and hold space for one another’s  loss—a model for how states around the world should approach the consequences of state violence with care, solidarity, and an integral concern for  those who survive.

Peltier’s freedom is priceless in its own right. But just as his wrongful imprisonment symbolized the systemic oppression of Indigenous peoples, his release embodies the liberation that’s possible through intergenerational organizing. It speaks to the possibilities of collective Indigenous power. 

Peltier’s entanglement with carceral systems began at the age of 9 when he was forcibly taken from his grandmother’s home and sent to a federally funded boarding school hundreds of miles away—a traumatic displacement that was part of a broader policy of cultural genocide against Indigenous peoples.

Decades later, while fighting on the front lines for Indigenous rights and land—and against federal agents trying to suppress the American Indian Movement—he was wrongfully convicted in the deaths of two of those agents. Peltier’s story is a microcosm of the systemic injustice Native people have endured—a reminder of the United States’ dedication to exploiting, incarcerating, and attempting to erase Indigenous peoples.

Yet, despite nearly half a century behind bars, Peltier never gave up. He maintained hope and fought for his freedom by staying connected to his spirituality, culture, and people. His resilience inspired generations to join the movement for Indigenous justice, underscoring the power of intergenerational activism grounded in ceremony and community.

The fight to free Peltier was long and arduous, fueled by grassroots organizing and high-level political advocacy, and ultimately kept alight by people who know and love him. Many doubted his release would ever be possible. But Indian Country proved them wrong by bridging the gap between frontline activism and decision-making at the highest levels of government.

A significant turning point in the campaign to free Peltier came when the U.S. government began to reckon with its role in the boarding school era. As more truths emerged about these institutions’ devastating impact on Indigenous peoples that fueled generations of trauma, Biden’s perspective began to shift. Learning that Peltier was a boarding school survivor deeply moved the former president, humanizing Peltier’s story and adding urgency to the clemency request.

The federal government’s formal acknowledgment of these historical injustices helped pave the way for Peltier’s release. In October 2024, Biden apologized for the government’s role in the boarding schools. This apology was the result of decades of unwavering advocacy by Indigenous peoples who insisted that the U.S. confront this dark chapter in its history and work to repair the harm caused.

While his apology itself was an important step, freeing Peltier was one meaningful action to address the ongoing impacts of the boarding schools policies. Yet the work is far from over, and continued efforts—such as passing the U.S. Truth & Healing Commission Bill—are needed to ensure large-scale reparative justice for the devastation caused by boarding schools. 

Peltier’s freedom is also a testament to the growing presence and influence of Native leaders in the U.S. government. Figures like former Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland have played a crucial role in amplifying Indigenous voices and bringing frontline issues to the attention of those in power, and her direct advocacy to former President Biden was invaluable in Peltier’s release. 

One critical piece of the collective efforts to free Peltier was countering the false narratives perpetuated by institutions like the FBI and Department of Justice, who were using Peltier as their own symbol—one of punishment to Indian Country for the 1975 shootout in which two FBI agents were killed. Though the other two American Indian Movement members charged for the same shooting were found not guilty due to self-defense, Peltier was used as an example, touted by law enforcement as a threat of what could happen if Indigenous people dared to resist. 

Getting clemency for Peltier took a long time and immeasurable effort. But through organizing, advocacy, and storytelling, we dismantled decades of misinformation and mobilized a powerful coalition of allies. Peltier’s story resonated with people across the world, awakening a shared sense of justice and humanity that transcended political and cultural boundaries.

The fight for justice in Peltier’s case is tragically echoed in more recent struggles, such as the murder of queer and nonbinary Indigenous forest defender Tortuguita by police in Atlanta. Tortuguita was defending forest land against the construction of “Cop City,” a proposed police training facility on Muscogee forest land, when they were shot and killed by 57 police bullets. Their death highlights the ongoing violence and criminalization faced by those who put their bodies on the line to protect sacred lands. 

Like Peltier, Tortuguita was accused of shooting at officers, though zero evidence of this has been found. Like Peltier, Tortuguita’s story illustrates the lengths to which state power will go to suppress dissent and silence defenders of justice. 

Unlike Peltier, Tortuguita is not alive to tell their story. 

As we celebrate Peltier’s release, we must honor the memory of activists like Tortuguita by continuing to fight for justice—from fighting the current assaults on the LGBTQ community to making sure peoples’ basic needs aren’t stripped away overnight to refusing to let our school curriculums be defined by racism, queerphobia, and fear. No matter who is in office, Indigenous peoples will continue to protect our lands, cultures, and ways of life against the forces that seek to destroy them. Peltier’s freedom is not just a symbol but a call to action—a reminder that even in the face of insurmountable odds, we have the power to create change.

Now, as the Trump administration aggressively pushes forward with drilling and oil extraction plans, withdraws from the Paris Agreement, and freezes Inflation Reduction Act funding critical for combating the climate crisis, the need for mass mobilization has never been clearer. 

Since the U.S. government will no longer be contributing its share of the UN climate body’s budget, Michael Bloomberg announced that his philanthropies will cover the cost. While this is not an ideal or complete solution to new climate threats, it does represent incremental progress toward the wealth redistribution and action needed to protect our shared planet. Other philanthropists must follow Bloomberg’s precedent by directing substantial funding and resources into frontline climate justice organizations immediately. Indigenous-led movements are at the forefront of defending our planet, and they need robust support to succeed.

From the American Indian Movement of the 1970s to the land and water defense movements of today, Indigenous organizing and power-building has remained steadfast against all odds. Peltier’s release shows us what is possible when we stay rooted in our values, connected to one another’s humanity, and committed to organizing for the liberation of all people. We will continue to expand our power and mobilize for our collective future—the next four years and beyond demand nothing less.

I am writing with an exciting update about this column. Since we launched “Murmurations” in 2021, we have collectively survived, witnessed, and lost loved ones, species, and land to floods, drought, fires, tornadoes, hurricanes, pandemics, genocide, a rise in fascism, and so many variations of cancer and disease.

We’re also enduring the ongoing violence of late-stage capitalism that shows up as institutional violence—denied health care, trigger-happy police, identity-based violence, and increasing economic disparity and insecurity. As all of these crises unfold around our precious globe, we are learning to persist in the work of living. We can simultaneously feel the end of the world as we’ve known it and the beginning of what will be shaped by us.

Though it’s looking dire, I am constantly reminded by friends, comrades, Octavia Butler, and historians that these are the conditions from which we have to make our way to lives worth living. We are at the beginning. Right now, I mostly feel a sense of devastating loss, but as the smoke clears, I know we will learn what is lost and where there are opportunities to survive. 

I began this column because I was feeling overwhelmed by what the pandemic had unveiled to us, about how hard it was to protect each other, and about how much we need each other. I wanted to call on the wisdom of murmuration: moving together, with adequate space and proximity, avoiding predation by being in right relationship. For humans to be in right relationship, we must practice accountability—being intentional about how we take up space and resources, attending to our role in the world and our impact on others, shaping what we can touch, and being able to repair and set boundaries, especially as conditions change.

After a year of exploring these themes in this column (also collected in Loving Corrections), I opened Murmurations up to other emergent strategists who are thinking about and practicing how we relate, change, grow, and hold each other through changing conditions. Those columns have been abundant and divergent, representing a healthy ecosystem of ideas and practices.

Emergent strategy is the only thing that makes sense to me right now. The Earth awaits our partnership, and we have to decentralize but move together to avoid the predation of this moment. We feel smaller and we may be smaller, but we—the workers, the makers, the parents, the birthing bodies, and the Earthlings who want a future on Earth—are still the majority. We need a place to keep learning how to flock together.

So, for our third iteration of the column, we are partnering with Movement Generation (MG), a group I worship. MG is shepherding a set of ideas that blow my mind every time I encounter them. I reference the organization often in conversation and interviews, and I included their “Shocks, Slides and Shifts” framework in Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. To me, MG feels like emergent strategy in action, and the thinkers who founded the organization were teachers in the soil of my own “ahas” about how the world works, what matters, and what we must do.

MG taught me that eco– comes from the Greek word oikos, which means home, and that home is what we always want to center, protect, and grow. That takes multiple forms: Ecosystem is all the relationships in our home. Ecology is what we know and understand about home. Economy is not money or markets, but how we manage the resources of our home. And ecological justice—a state of balance between human communities and healthy ecosystems—is rooted in and flows from home. 

MG also taught me about “the lag effect.” Without realizing it, I had developed a short-term way of thinking about the impact of humans on Earth, but the “lag effect” framing helped me understand the cumulative effect of human behavior on our planet. Did you know it takes between 40 and 50 years to fully feel the effect of burning fossil fuels? Our Earth is experiencing the effect of the fossil fuels humans were burning in the 1980s. Consider how much fossil fuel has burned in the decades since then, a climate impact that will shape our next half century. Understanding this can give us a clearer picture of what is to come and how to take the right action. 

MG taught me that everything is precious. One of their beloved founders, Gopal Dayaneni, often tells the story about how he and his daughter would brush their teeth together so he could simultaneously teach her about the preciousness of every drop of water. I took that practice into my own life. 

MG helped me understand the true web of our interconnectedness. Our Earth isn’t organized by the borders we have set on top of it. Instead, Earth is a single living system operating as a spider’s web, where all of us are connected and impact each other, and core webbing ties it all together. There is fragility and strength in all of this connection. 

Learning interconnectedness helped me understand there is no “over there.” There is no climate catastrophe that can actually be contained. If we hope to survive, then we have to think about how we cause impact and are impacted by others and how we can protect the meta systems—air, water, soil, and energy—that hold us all. 

MG’s “Three Circles” strategy helped me understand strategy in a way I could quickly use and apply. In this exercise, the three overlapping circles represent what we need, what’s politically possible, and what are false solutions. So often, our political system will hear us articulate what we need and return with a false solution, claiming it is the only option that is politically possible. MG helped me understand that our work is never to settle for the false solutions, but to instead organize, exert pressure, and educate ourselves to make what we need politically possible. This has saved me so much time and helped me determine where to expend my own precious life force. 

This is just a taste of MG’s incredible thinking and experimentation. The organization has also liberated land in the Bay Miwok territory of the San Francisco Bay Area and is building a Justice and Ecology Center for communities to gather, deepen, and learn in part of a larger shift to return land to Indigenous hands and those who will love and steward it. 

As we keep watching our government devolve, I am calling on MG to helm Murmurations in 2025 and offer a guide for how we can foster a just transition, even against the odds. Movement Generation is going to use this column to provide current ideas, frameworks, and practices that can help us navigate this storm. 

I am so excited to be their student again, and I am grateful for YES! Media letting us continue to iterate to make the best offer we can. We invite you to learn with us, grow with us, and change with us. 

Lupe and Manuel, who requested the use of anonymity because of the personal information they shared, were participating in a restorative justice circle, the final stage of their work with The Collective Healing and Transformation (CHAT) Project. Housed in the Family Justice Center in Richmond, California, Lupe and Manuel met with facilitators for months in a series of sessions aimed at healing their family and helping them find a way forward from the pain they’ve endured, both individually and together. The CHAT Project’s restorative justice model served as a beacon of hope, one that gave them the tools they each needed to co-parent effectively while mending their own relationship.

Restorative justice, according to The CHAT Project, is a community-based, nonpunitive approach to harm that encourages accountability, healing, and repair. The work emphasizes healing, not punishment, and asks participants what they need in order to move forward. Rooted in Indigenous practices, restorative justice invites in communities and builds and strengthens relationships.

Lupe and Manuel are two of nearly 100 people whom The CHAT Project has served in Contra Costa County. The program’s participants are 84 percent people of color and 49 percent Spanish-speaking, and all of their services are free.

Lupe reached out to The CHAT Project in fall 2023, after struggling to find a way forward in her relationship with Manuel. The two share a young son, and they’d practically grown up as a couple. Lupe and Manuel met in their early 20s, working at the same restaurant in San Francisco. They didn’t typically work the same shifts, but one day, Lupe covered for a coworker. That night, she met Manuel and was instantly captivated by his smile. She wanted to get to know him, and they took a walk around Bernal Heights. They bonded immediately, and two years later, their son was born. The problems in their relationship started soon after.

The couple started arguing regularly; sometimes Manuel would leave, sometimes it would be Lupe. Their relationship was in turmoil. And even though Manuel never did anything to make her feel in danger, Lupe was afraid for her son and the environment their relationship was creating.

“I wanted to be that parent, that adult that I wish I had when I was little,” Lupe said. 

Over the next five years, the couple’s relationship fluctuated between the occasional happy period and periods of immense stress. They struggled in family court to determine a custody schedule for their son. Manuel desperately wanted to change his ways and be there for his family, but he was always drawn back to old, unhealthy patterns. Then, in the summer of 2023, things escalated. In a moment the two describe as an “extreme invasion of privacy,” Manuel crossed a line with Lupe, and they both knew it was time to try a different approach.

At first, Lupe felt like an imposter seeking help at the Family Justice Center. She knew that her relationship was unhealthy, but she wasn’t sure she was ready to classify her experiences as domestic violence. But after reading about The CHAT Project’s mission to “help families and communities connect with each other and to learn (or relearn) practices for moving through conflict, reducing violence, and strengthening connections,” she was excited to try.

“I went in with zero expectations,” said Lupe. “I had never heard of restorative justice.”

The first part of working with The CHAT Project is an initial assessment to make sure that both the family and the project are a good fit. The CHAT Project Co-Director Camila Robayo Durán explained that in this first step, she wants participants to think clearly about their goals. After hearing what the program can offer, some potential participants “have the wisdom on their own” to know it’s not what they’re looking for, said Robayo Durán.

“It’s not a crisis-intervention type of service,” said Robayo Durán. “It’s something that you do for your healing and to strengthen relationships.”

Lupe and Manuel agreed that their shared goal was to learn how to coparent effectively; they weren’t necessarily looking to mend their own romantic relationship, but they were open to it. After the initial evaluation, both Lupe and Manuel started on their individual journeys. They worked with therapists and their CHAT Project facilitator, Alejandra Escobedo, to address some of the root causes of the problems in their family. It became clear quickly that they both were being triggered by childhood sexual abuse, something that Manuel had never shared with anyone before.

“The first time that I saw my therapist, it was very, very difficult for the words to flow,” said Manuel. “I was afraid of feeling judged.”

Manuel explained that throughout his relationship with Lupe, she had struggled with his inability to express himself and his feelings. “All my life, I was used to ‘Listen and shut up,’” said Manuel. Lupe agreed: “I would communicate when something was upsetting or when he hurt me in any way, and he just shut down.”

But, Manuel said, therapy was starting to give him new tools to address not just his past trauma but his present-day struggles. At the same time, Lupe’s therapy experience was giving her the tools she needed to have more empathy and understanding for Manuel’s incredibly different upbringing. As a couple, they were able to bring these skills together and begin communicating more openly and freely than they ever had, getting to know each other on a deeper level and sympathizing with each other’s experiences.

For Robayo Durán, Lupe and Manuel’s experience with this element of The CHAT Project is a great example of how the court system often stops short of helping families move forward. Lupe and Manuel had been working out some of their childcare logistics in family court, but nothing there was preparing them to ever co-parent effectively again, let alone heal their own relationship.

“What is interesting is that systems tend to label people in a certain way,” Robayo Durán said. But at The CHAT Project, said Robayo Durán, “We don’t label people ‘the survivor’ [or] ‘the person causing harm’ right away. We try to explore with people ‘What is your role, what was the situation, what was your past life, how did you come to this situation?’”

On top of participating in therapy individually, a key element of The CHAT Project’s work is accountability. And in the case of Lupe and Manuel, that meant realizing, for both of them, that Manuel wasn’t the only one who needed to be held accountable, even though it was his actions that brought them to the program.

“Something that CHAT did for me was help me realize that I wasn’t just a victim, right? That I also had a part in everything that was happening in my relationship, which is also very hard to do because I definitely went in with a 100 percent victim mentality, and that wasn’t 100 percent accurate,” said Lupe. She began to see that healing her own past traumas could help her show up more fairly and compassionately in her relationship.

Lupe and Manuel met individually with their facilitator for several sessions before deciding they were ready for what The CHAT Project calls a restorative justice circle. Lupe and Manuel were told to clear their schedules for a whole day of a “soup of emotions,” said Lupe.

Joined by people close to them, Lupe and Manuel’s circle was a time to bring all the work they’d been doing individually, together. They shared, listened, and cried, learning about themselves and each other. They agreed to ways they would work together moving forward, and by the end of the hours-long session, they knew things had changed. “When we left the circle that day, we left with a clear idea of what we were wanting to continue to work on,” said Lupe.

Communication, Lupe said, was at the top of the list. The CHAT Project facilitators helped them develop tools for communicating more clearly and respectively, and in the months since their restorative justice circle, they’ve cemented these practices into their everyday lives in ways that have completely changed their relationship. They’ve been able to manage their anger and impulsivity better, and they’ve both continued in their personal therapy practices.  ”We work on ourselves to be able to bring the best version of ourselves to the relationship,” said Lupe.

“We have many ways to measure success,” said Robayo Durán, “and our priority, most of all, is safety.” Success looks different for all their participants; for some, taking the first step to ask for help is a success in itself. Not everyone who contacts them is ready for a dialogue with their partners like Lupe and Manuel were, but there are still services The CHAT Project can offer them. “Having a circle is not always the goal, but to be able to provide the support they need to make a change in their life,” Escobedo said.

For Lupe and Manuel, the change was felt immediately. They’ve surpassed their goals, and in addition to finding healthy ways to co-parent, they’ve also restored their own romantic relationship. They’re living together, rebuilding relationships with their families, and using the tools they gained through the program every day. 

“I  honestly do feel like we wouldn’t be where we are as a family without having received that resource when we did,” Lupe said.

Domestic Violence Support

To find your nearest family justice center, visit the Family Justice Center Alliance.

If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic violence, you can also contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233 for support and referrals, or text “START” to 88788. Information on local domestic violence programs can be found using this online tool.

For Native Americans and Alaska Natives, the StrongHearts Native Helpline at 1-844-7NATIVE (762-8483) provides 24/7 confidential and culturally appropriate support and advocacy for survivors of domestic and sexual violence. A chat option is available through their website.

This story was produced in collaboration with the California Health Report.

“They’re not trying to impose dictatorship from a position of strength, they’re trying to impose it from a position of weakness and fear.” —Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin

“In the midst of discontent, talk, theoretical discussions, an individual or collective act of revolt supervenes, symbolizing the dominant aspirations.” —Peter Kropotkin

The start of 2025 has been unsurprisingly chaotic. As a surge of wildfires engulfed the Los Angeles area, stealing people’s homes and livelihoods, the news broke that the world’s lands and oceans recorded the hottest year on record in 2024. 

Even before his inauguration this week, President Donald Trump floated invading Greenland, retaking the Panama Canal, and making Canada the 51st state. While pointing his “America First” policies toward expansionism and imperialist ends, he threatened the entire “Middle East,” justifying Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. He also sought a public health justification for shuttering the southern border, much like the racist U.S. gassing policies that once inspired the Nazis. 

Since being sworn in, Trump acted on many of his statements immediately and signed a flurry of executive orders redefining birthright citizenship and gender as well as reversing climate regulations, among other terrible things. These issues alone paint just a portion of the picture of what’s coming to those of us who plan to fight back. 

The truth of these moments and many others is that if we plan to defy the order of the day, we must decide between what’s worth fighting about and what’s not the best use of our time. 

Often, the fights we choose to take up may not reflect the urgency other issues demand. Those emergencies can become so great that they choose us when we can no longer deny the need for our full participation. Now is the time to commit ourselves rather than wait to be forced into action by circumstances; this is the difference between proactively planning instead of waiting to see what happens and reacting to it. 

Resistance based on reaction may operate from the point of disadvantage if it usually requires an antagonism or a spark to mobilize a response. So we’re forced to admit that we have priorities if we understand this and then decide what to do about them. 

Some fights are over issues that concern life and death, while others may be about much more trivial things. Internalizing awareness here will provide needed wisdom and precision about what makes the best use of our time during compounding crises. The nonstop news cycle, personal conflict, and the weight of survival make it hard to figure out where to focus our energy. However, as recent years have shown, it’s of the utmost importance to figure this out so that we don’t exhaust ourselves from pointless ventures. 

The political moment we’re in, where fascism is wearing us down, demands intentionality that should disrupt nonsense. Therefore, if we find ourselves amid unserious squabbles, it’s a testament to the unseriousness of the parties who choose to remain entangled. It’s not that we cannot multitask and focus on multiple issues simultaneously or that we should use dismissiveness to avoid accountability by labeling it a “distraction.” It’s that an unending circus of self-centeredness, celebrity drama, and political theater disrupts our focus and degrades our perspective. 

Unimportant fights are disagreements like those that center the famous and influencers as representatives people attach themselves to. They’re the conflicts that become inundated with pitfalls of disempowering political representation. That’s how the public ends up arguing for politicians who don’t care about them and stars who don’t share their class interests.  

This means that people must overcome the draw to participate in celebrity worship, symbolic issues, and other quarrels like the “petty ideological struggles” Black anarchist Martin Sostre once spoke about. He said we have to “look at the substance,” and that’s what’s always missing from so much of the messiness capitalist culture inundates us with. If more of us had genuine, deep relationships, too, many of the insignificant spats among us might subside. We can have our differences and even dislike one another while recognizing the gravity of this time we’re trying to survive. 

The oft-quoted psalm of revolutionary and author George Jackson to “settle your quarrels, come together, understand the reality of our situation, understand that fascism is already here” rings hollow among much of today’s “left.” Anti-intellectualism, conservatism, and egos, among other things, make disputes a feature and not a flaw of bickering denominations. Siloed, powerless people fighting over who gets the most influence while those with actual power pummel them all is undoubtedly a goofy scene. 

This reality may overshadow another one of Jackson’s statements: “Each popular struggle must be analyzed historically to discover new ideas.” Accepting dogma and making movements past into prescriptive guides regurgitates old tactics, offering us new defeat. Bitter unity isn’t the answer; it’s often disastrous, too, but we have to answer something. Who is fed, housed, given health care, safety, and security by what we’re fighting about? Does the fight we’re in lead to a change that can alter people’s lives for the better or advance us toward a revolutionary shift? 

What are the most important fights, then? That may depend on where you’re at and what the conditions say at a given moment. Someone fighting an actual fire knows that putting out the flames around them supersedes everything else at that time.

The beauty of the Black Panther Party’s intercommunalist proclamation “survival pending revolution” is that it recognizes that we have to sustain ourselves to have any struggle whatsoever. It’s what led them to strategically confront problems about health care, housing, food, environment, and state violence. And while the Party was certainly not free from petty drama and avoidable conflicts, the model they established still matters today. 

Nonsensical, repetitive debates on social media and posturing keep tiring us out. We need as much energy as possible to challenge the dominant status quo of capitalism. It’s one of the main reasons we have to be able to differentiate between disputes that happen for dispute’s sake or because people or entities around us want to create problems.

Our efforts should abandon self-aggrandizing optics, clout chasing, and content creation that doesn’t constitute a counterforce against oppression. The way we wage confrontation should be a threat to whomever or whatever is putting our lives at risk. Threats have to become kept promises too. 

When Black Power–era theorist and former member of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers Kimathi Mohammed reflected on the successes and failures of that time, he arrived at a conclusion that’s important now. Mohammed stated that we needed to “reorganize our thinking.” That reorganization “of our political thinking,” he said, “is necessary because it has become too narrow, limited, and elitist. Unless we immediately begin to expand our vision, we will constantly find ourselves submerged in cynicism, pessimism, and despair.”

He continued, “a feeling of hopelessness and powerlessness has already begun to surface. … But that particular feeling can easily be overcome. … Not only must our analyses show our accomplishments, they must also show our failures and mistakes. If such analyses are properly done, we will have the type of transmission fuel needed to transcend feelings of hopelessness and powerlessness.” One of the main mistakes generations have made in recent years is the sort of radical tourism and spreading of ourselves too thin. Focus is necessary to beat back everything that needs to be destroyed enough to gain new ground. 

Our enemies and the oppressive elements we know all too well may not be as strong as we imagine. Teen hackers have made breaching federal authorities into child’s play. We saw this tyrannical president hide in a bunker when we rose against state violence in response to the killing of George Floyd. Even now, we’ve seen that a lone gunman with something to prove has sent shockwaves throughout the ruling elite. These aren’t distant memories; these things all tell us a lot about what’s possible in today’s world. 

A call to focus and concentrate our efforts is not necessarily a plea for centralization. Instead, it’s about being led by what the world around us is showing us our primary concerns should be. Sometimes, the stakes are so high it’s not even a question or a debate; it’s an immediate action that happens without question. You’re supposed to duck when someone throws a punch, but if you’re too preoccupied, the blow will hurt that much worse. We can look around and see who’s hitting us and who wants to knock us out of the frame completely. Instead of waiting for them to swing on us again, let’s evolve and hit them first.

This story was originally published in Prism.

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 4:55 p.m. PT on Jan. 27, 2025, to change the term “rejecting dogma” to “accepting dogma.” Read our corrections policy here. 

I don’t think anyone really knew when I was sentenced in 1992 what “life without parole” meant. There was a lot of speculation. The courts said I would probably do 30 years before I went up for some sort of review. That time has passed.

I remember not being able to grow a beard when I first came in. I was so naïve, ignorant, and undereducated. As I was growing up in prison, some of my mentors told me, “Hey, get comfortable. You’re gonna be here for a while.” They were right. We, as a society, sentence people like me when we’re really young to die in prison because we are seen as incorrigible. 

When you are sentenced to life without parole, there is a loss of autonomy. You are constantly being controlled. You are surrounded by violence. There is no hope. Either you become resilient and continue to grow and push yourself or you can view life with a fatalistic perspective and be destructive. And I’ve chosen—and most of the people I know who are serving this sentence have chosen—to better ourselves. The rebellious part of us says, “We’re not incorrigible, so we’re gonna do well, and we’re gonna show the system that we are not the worst things that we’ve ever done.”

I was raised in a house with domestic violence and verbal abuse. My dad called me “stupid” and “dumb” for doing childhood things that are pretty normal, so I grew up not having a lot of self-esteem. I gravitated toward materialism to feel like I was worth something.

When I was sent to prison, I was encouraged by people who saw my natural talents and said, “Hey, you have some really good critical-thinking skills.” My attorneys told me the same thing during trial, including, “You could have been an attorney.” I wasn’t exposed to that on the outside. I wasn’t exposed to some of the professions I know I could do today, so I gravitated to the underground economy. 

In prison, once I was mentored and encouraged to do better, my first accomplishment was a few years after I had been sentenced: I earned my first paralegal certificate and got pretty good grades. I continued to get encouragement from people around me—teachers and sometimes some of the correctional officers. And as the opportunities arose, I continued to take advantage of them. 

I have learned I can do so many different things. I have good analytical skills and a great ability to synthesize different topics. I’m good at helping people heal. I’m very good at business. There’s a number of things I could have been had I had the opportunities others have had. Nevertheless, I do take responsibility for responding in a negative way to my environment. 

It was pivotal for me to recognize my worth and my potential. It sparked the idea that if I can do this, what else can I do? I have since earned four Associate of Arts degrees, a doctorate in ministries, and a Bachelor of Arts in Communication Studies from Cal State University in Los Angeles. 

I was fortunate enough to start a program at Lancaster State Prison when I was held there. The facility was called the Progressive Programming Facility, and the administrators were open enough to allow us to create our own program. Most of us—about 600—had sentences of life without parole. We agreed nobody could join the program who had a gang membership or used drugs. 

For nearly 18 years while I was there, we ran classes, and sometimes we ran a group called Men for Honor. We had 19 different classes at the height of our group, and we had guys cycling in and out, about 150 guys a month. We were just training each other to be better people. It was almost like a college campus, other than the physical layout, and that helped us a lot.

I was selected to teach creative writing, and our group decided to publish an anthology of our stories, of how we came to prison. We thought it would be a good way to give back to society and give kids an admonishment of how we came to prison, either through rebelliousness, not listening to our parents, or listening to older homies who were guiding us in the wrong direction. 

Our book was called Horrors From the Hood for Kids to Beware. It’s part of the bigger picture of us trying to show we are redeemable and we’re not the worst decision we ever made. 

It’s been phenomenal to contribute to other people’s growth, to watch each other grow in here, because we’re basically growing up together. Even with a life without parole sentence, having an education has kept us out of trouble, kept us productively busy. 

I think accountability is really important, because we’re being punished and there’s an aspect of revenge to that. But our punishment does nothing for the people who we’ve harmed. I know victims and survivors want to understand what happened to them. They want to have questions answered, such as: Why did it happen? Why were they chosen? Will it happen again? Do we realize the impact and chaos we’ve created in their life, the losses we’ve caused them to suffer? Are we remorseful? 

Those of us with LWOP aren’t allowed to go before parole boards. And because of that, we can’t be examined and have experts tell us where we stand or give us some kind of feedback on our rehabilitative efforts. Our victims don’t get to have accountability. 

Therefore, before I even talk about me getting out of prison, I want to acknowledge that accountability is really important for us and our growth. It’s a measuring stick, and it’s a motivation to do better. But it’s also important for people who’ve been harmed. 

One of the things I study is trauma. We have a lot of systems that are well meaning, and they might have worked well in the 14th or 15th century because we didn’t understand trauma. But today we understand it, and what I see is we just keep harming one another. 

We’ve come a long way with recognizing trauma in the legal system. For youth offenders and anybody who doesn’t have LWOP, trauma is considered a mitigating factor. People consider the fact that trauma survivors don’t have great impulse control or don’t think through consequences. But people with LWOP are excluded from such considerations. Had I not had that sentence, I would have been given a chance to go to the parole board and make my case.

I’m almost 60 years old now, and there’s also a consideration for elderly parole, which is another mitigating factor. Behaviorists have said our chances of recidivism are much lower. But, again, people who are sentenced to LWOP are excluded from that. 

If I could design a better system, I would want us to at least be heard so we’re not constantly and eternally invisible, which is a kind of trauma in and of itself. We’re existing but not existing. 

I hope that if I am able to earn my freedom, I can help my family through a current crisis. I have a 13-year-old nephew who is going in the same direction I was going in. He is curious about street life and hustling. I talk to him over the phone and I write him letters and do the best I can to steer him in the right direction. He’s really phenomenal, a smart kid with a lot of potential. But too often I feel like it comes off as me preaching to him. 

In here, we model good behavior to one another, and that really works well because situational learning is key. You can tell someone in abstract terms all day long about different philosophies of living, but when you can actually show it and model it, I think that’s what makes the difference. And I can’t do that for my nephew while I’m in prison. 

I think that that’s one of the reasons why we have a generational problem of people coming to prison and making bad decisions. There is a “brain drain.” People who are educated and affluent move out of neighborhoods and don’t come back. So I didn’t have the mentors I needed. And then there are people who educate themselves and transform themselves while in prison, but then we’re stuck in here and can’t give back to our community and be models and mentors in our communities. 

My family is harmed with me being in prison all this time, even though they consider me rehabilitated. My nephew is suffering. So you have this continual cycle. I wish we could be more oriented toward helping people heal.

I wish we could design our systems to be more restorative justice oriented and to focus on healing, because it is possible. They say “hurt people hurt people,” and a lot of that is because of traumatic reenactment. But “healed people can heal people.” And that’s what I try to do in prison, that’s what I do through the phone with people in the community. 

I hope one day society will open its mind to the possibilities of such a world instead of the philosophy of punishment and revenge. 

What could my life have been had I lived in such a world? Throughout history Black people have always had to prove they’re human. Remember the placards from the ’60s that said “I am a man”? We need to live in a world where there’s more compassion, where there’s more empathy, and where we all see each other as human beings.

As told to Sonali Kolhatkar

The impetus for this protest came two days earlier, when NYPD officers confronted 37-year-old Derell Mickles for hopping a turnstile at the Sutter Avenue station. Mickles allegedly “charged” at officers with a knife, which police say led them to fire their guns in self-defense—though body cam footage shows Mickles “standing still, his arms by his side.”

Officers shot Mickles, a fellow officer, and two bystanders. Mayor Eric Adams, a former transit officer himself, defended the NYPD’s response by citing Mickles’ arrest record and the necessity of fare enforcement. “If lawmakers want to make the subways and buses free, then fine,” Adams said. “But as long as there are rules, we’re going to follow those rules.”

Incidents such as these reflect a long history of dangerous, and even fatal, interactions between NYPD and “fare evaders.” Authorities have long conflated fare evasion with dangerous criminal behavior—using race- and class-based assumptions that minor infractions create an environment for violent crime (sometimes referred to as “broken windows” policing). Demands to reform fare enforcement have been a frequent part of the discourse around improving New York’s transit system. But some abolitionist groups go further in calling for free fares as a step toward removing police from public transit entirely.

Militant protest against fare enforcement is part of an abolitionist struggle that often goes unnoticed and highlights how transit safety has shaped the look of modern policing. 

Fare Boxes and Broken Windows

New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) is in the midst of two connected crises: long-running fears about crime, and a massive budget deficit. MTA’s budget woes have a number of causes, such as declining tax revenue and a controversial pause on congestion pricing, but the agency has long portrayed fare evasion as an “existential challenge.” Fare box revenue represents 26 percent of MTA’s budget. According to recent MTA data, as much as 48 percent of bus riders and 14 percent of subway riders board without paying, leading to hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue each year. 

MTA has tried a number of strategies to reduce fare evasion, including redesigned infrastructure and aggressive messaging. But over the past five years, increased policing has become a catchall solution to stop fare evaders—and to make transit feel safer in the process. In 2023, NYPD issued more than 100,000 fare evasion tickets, and arrests have “more than doubled” during Adams’ administration. Meanwhile, police raids have become increasingly common. In March 2024, NYPD announced an 800-officer surge at subway stations (dubbed “Operation Fare Play”), while MTA has used multiple surges of its “Eagle Team” (with assistance from NYPD) to check bus fares in the past two years.

In 2019, a group of riders founded Unfare NYC, a community network that uses social media to crowdsource alerts about police presence on public transit. Inspired by grassroots campaigns against fare enforcement in Montreal and Chile, Unfare’s work reduces contact between officers and riders to promote a vision of “a ride without fares and a world with no police.” Unfare member Daria says transit is an obvious place for abolitionist struggle: “It’s a site where the city’s working class is forced into contact with a police presence that keeps getting bigger and bigger.” (Unfare members are using pseudonyms to protect their identities.)

Another group, Swipe It Forward, has been offering “a grassroots community response to broken windows policing” since 2016. They encourage riders to share fare cards.

For decades, New York’s transit police have used turnstile hopping as a marker of dangerous or undesirable populations. Teams of officers began regularly sweeping subway stations in the 1990s, sometimes posing as civilians in “decoy operations.” Former transit police chief Bill Bratton who served from 1990 to 1992, outfitted the force with new patrol cars, “commando sweaters,” and, controversially, semi-automatic handguns. Bratton later served two non-consecutive terms as commissioner of the NYPD. As though foreshadowing the Sutter Avenue shooting, critics argued in 1990 that rapid-firing guns in crowded subways “would not only increase the risk of bystanders being shot but also of police officers wounding themselves or fellow officers.”

“Law and Order” at the Turnstiles

In 1982, criminologists George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson proposed that visible signs of neighborhood disorder (such as graffiti, public intoxication, and vagrancy) could embolden criminals to commit more serious offenses and cause community members to retreat from public spaces. This so-called “broken windows” theory has become one of the most important frameworks of modern policing, especially in New York City. “Fare evasion has been the most common thing that someone gets arrested for in New York, I believe, for [more than] 20 years,” says Eric Goldwyn, Ph.D., program director at New York University’s Marron Institute of Urban Management.

Elected officials, police leaders, and pundits—conservative and liberal alike—continue to use “broken windows” rhetoric to justify greater fare enforcement. Manhattan Institute senior fellow Nicole Gelinas recently wrote in the New York Post that “the only thing that will change people’s minds is if they know that a penalty will be swift, certain and actually collected.” New York Times columnist Pamela Paul argued that “many progressives are still loath to admit that broken windows policing works,” while suggesting that police abolition reflects “an elitist attitude that betrays a lack of experience with crime-ridden environments.” 

Who does fare enforcement benefit? Studies by the Community Service Society and the John Jay Research and Evaluation Center have found that fare enforcement occurs more frequently in low-income and majority-Black and Latinx neighborhoods. In 2023, nonwhite New Yorkers represented 82 percent of tickets and 92 percent of arrests, and criminal justice reformers have consistently pointed to wider racial disparities in Bratton’s legacy.

In response to these critiques, community groups, politicians, and consultants have proposed reforms aimed at reducing race and class disparities in fare enforcement. In 2022, the Riders Alliance, a grassroots organization of MTA users, published “A Riders Plan for Public Safety,” which recommends unarmed civilian personnel to check fares and expanded eligibility for fare discounts. A Blue-Ribbon Report commissioned by MTA leadership calls for “precision policing” that uses data to identify fare evasion hotspots and a “warnings-first approach to summonses for first-time evaders.” 

It’s not clear whether punitive enforcement tactics actually reduce fare evasion. In a recent proposal for a behavioral consultant, MTA acknowledged that “these costly and sometimes controversial methods have had limited success in reversing the upward trend in riders who do not pay.” What such tactics are effective at is sending large numbers of vulnerable people through the criminal justice system each year. They can trap people in dangerous and dysfunctional jail facilities, even putting them at risk of deportation. 

Increases in transit policing have, in turn, energized abolitionist calls to remove police from MTA. When former Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced 500 new transit officers in 2019, groups like Swipe It Forward and Decolonize This Place, an anti-imperialist protest coalition, mobilized protesters to the subways. Anonymous activists called for fare-free, cop-free subways and put up dozens of mock ads that read “Don’t snitch. Swipe.”

Abolitionists have often grounded their critiques in the history of American policing, which is intertwined with chattel slavery and settler colonialism. A Swipe It Forward organizer recently told the press that “the NYPD … are fixated on slave patrolling and quotas, and they use the transit system as one of their main iterations to do so.” Writers Against the War on Gaza, a Palestinian solidarity coalition, echoed this language in a writeup of the Sept. 17 protest: “The NYPD protects property and capital, it funnels black and immigrant populations into endless cycles of immiseration and poverty and modern enslavement.”

From Affordable Transit to Free Transit

There is precedent for free transit. MTA suspended bus fare collection for months in 2020 as a COVID-19 mitigation tactic and recently ended an 11-month pilot program suspending fare on five bus routes. According to MTA, that pilot led to “a 30 percent increase in ridership on weekdays and 38 percent on weekends.” But the idea has yet to catch on as a permanent solution. 

While transit agencies across the country have experimented with free fares in recent years to reduce congestion, encourage higher ridership, and address economic inequality, MTA increased fares by 15 cents in 2023. “The idea of fare free transit is worth debating, and the more experiments the better,” says Kafui Attoh, Ph.D., associate professor of Urban Studies at the City University of New York. “At the same time, we [shouldn’t] gloss over the potential drawbacks, in terms of funding and ridership.”

Perhaps the biggest hurdle to a fare-free MTA is replacing fare box revenue in its budget and finding political support to do so. Research on fare-free transit tends to focus on smaller cities with lower ridership that don’t rely heavily on fare box revenue. “There’s something of a paradox here,” says Attoh. “Where it is feasible, its impact will be limited, and where its impact would be the greatest, its feasibility is the most questionable.” Goldwyn adds that without substantively addressing the budget gap, a move toward free fares could lead to service cuts, creating “even less frequency and worse reliability” for those who rely on transit. 

In other words, if cities such as New York want to invest in making public transit free and accessible—in the same way that libraries and public schools are—they need to make it a priority in their budgets. Abolitionist groups advocate reductions in police funding to do so. MTA’s “fiscal cliff” suggests a fundamental imbalance between expanding police and fully funding public services. Indeed, New York’s fare crisis reflects a broader debate about the basic function of police in a city where nearly 20 percent of residents live below the poverty line. 

The website 8 to Abolition, a resource of “non-reformist reforms” compiled in 2020, cast free public transit with investments in health care, education, and community-based food providers as two sides of the same coin. It is a way to “invest in care, not cops.” No New Jails NYC, a former grassroots campaign to close the Rikers Island jail complex, echoes this, calling for removing all NYPD officers from the MTA and decriminalizing fare evasion to “pay the annual fares of all New Yorkers who cannot afford [it].”

Last year, when Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mayor Adams’ “Cops, Cameras, and Care” initiative sent more than 1,000 extra officers to patrol subways, NYPD overtime pay increased by $155 million—and the state reimbursed the city for less than half that amount. Meanwhile, Adams’ administration proposed extensive budget cuts to libraries, parks, early childhood education, and more, many of which were reversed after public outcry. Unfare member Lou argues that fare evasion’s outsized role in MTA’s budget crisis reflects a “long history of stripping funding for these services and shifting the blame to ‘crime’ and the poor.”

In fall 2024, the Sutter Avenue shooting sparked a new wave of spontaneous fare strikes, teach-ins, and “liberated train rides.” As abolitionists scrutinize NYPD for student repression, corruption, and plans for a “Cop City” in Queens, they are using transit issues to advocate for a transformative vision of community safety—with a fare-free MTA at the center. A city without fares is “deeply connected to our collective freedom of movement more broadly,” says Lou. “Being free to move through our city together means being free from police harassment and violence, from fines and incarceration.”

By removing a key incentive to police subways and buses, transit agencies could meet the demand surging through New York’s subways and realize the abolitionist call to “Live free, ride free.”

As an outspoken abolitionist, Abdullah has championed defunding the police using a concrete, practical, and deeply democratic method of participatory budgeting in which city residents decide how their tax dollars should be spent.

In a conversation in January 2024, Abdullah pointed out how BLMLA was poised to prove that defunding and abolishing police were not impossible. BLMLA’s People’s Budget survey, conducted prior to the May 2020 police killing of George Floyd, revealed that, when given the opportunity to allocate city funds, most people choose public well-being, health, and safety, rather than law enforcement and punitive measures.

Sonali Kolhatkar: Where did the idea of participatory budgeting come from, and was it always a pathway toward reimagining public safety?

Melina Abdullah: Some people think that Black Lives Matter came up with participatory budgeting, that it’s some new thing that was developed in order to defund the police. We do want participatory budgeting to be used to defund the police, but the concept goes back many, many decades. It’s very deeply rooted in the concept of democracy.

When you talk about participatory budgeting, you’re talking about people having an investment in how their tax dollars are spent. And so, rather than having policymakers or elected officials determine without any public input where the dollars go, people actually have a say-so and a voice in where their dollars go.

We know that without the voice of the people, special interests tend to influence local, state, and federal budgets to spend an exorbitant amount—often the lion’s share of the budget—on policing and militarism. By special interests, I mean lobby groups like police associations, which are not unions but which wield tremendous power, as well as defense contractors.

Kolhatkar: How have participatory budgeting processes been applied toward defunding police in Los Angeles specifically?

Abdullah: In 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic first hit Los Angeles, we started looking around and asked why they were still spending upward of 50 percent of the city’s general fund on police. Nobody was even outdoors. What we needed were resources for people staying in their homes and mental health support. We’re still in the midst of the worst public health crisis in global history and need resources to address it. That’s where our funds should be going, but upward of 50 percent of the city’s general fund is spent on police. We should be spending money on services, not police.

We convened a meeting with virtually every Black organization in greater Los Angeles, and we all agreed that we wanted to fund services, not police. If we as organizers felt that way, what did Black Los Angeles feel? To answer that question, we launched the People’s Budget survey. What came back was that people’s top two funding priorities are mental health and housing. The top two things they wanted to cut funding to were police and traffic enforcement.

Those priorities intensified in May 2020 when there was a worldwide uproar following the state-sanctioned lynching of George Floyd. People started asking: What would police abolition look like? What would new systems of public safety look like? We had collected two to three months of data before Floyd’s murder, and then after May 2020, people wanted to defund the police even further. That’s what the People’s Budget sought to amplify.

Since 2020, we’ve done that survey every single year. We’ve organized town hall meetings, workshops, work groups, and focus groups to figure out how we can get to where most people want to be. Black women most intensely want to move away from oppressive models of policing and toward this resource-rich, community-focused, system of public safety.

Kolhatkar: How has the People’s Budget been received by elected officials, such as the mayor and city councilmembers?

Abdullah: Former L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti refused to receive the People’s Budget presentation. We were able to present it to the L.A. City Council because then City Council President Herb Wesson invited us to do so. One of the things that we believe cost Wesson his reelection in 2020 was a complete turn in how he viewed public safety.

One of his most famous quotes from that time was, “I won’t always be an elected official, but I’ll always be a Black man, a Black father, and a Black grandfather.”

As he ran for his next seat, he actually rejected the endorsement of the Police Protective League and the Association for Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs. He sent the endorsement back saying, “I don’t want it anymore.” And we think that probably cost him that seat.

After Floyd was lynched, there was a Black Lives Matter uprising and a period of racial reckoning. In order to kind of appease that movement, many elected officials were willing to hear us out. That year we gave our presentation inside city council chambers, and it was particularly compelling. By 2021, a backlash had begun, and we weren’t invited back by the full city council. We had to push Herb Wesson’s successor, Nury Martinez, who we later found out was not a fan of Black people, to allow us into that space to give a presentation.

By 2022, very few elected officials or city councilmembers would hear our presentation. So, city councilmembers who see themselves as allies like Mike Bonin and Marqueece Harris-Dawson were eager to receive that information. When Karen Bass was elected mayor in 2023, we were able to give the People’s Budget presentation to the mayor.

The mayor of Los Angeles didn’t invite us to City Hall. Instead, she came to our ’hood and our home: the Center for Black Power in Africatown, which some people call Leimert Park, the birthplace of Black Lives Matter. She came there and, before a packed room of hundreds of mostly Black Angelenos, we gave the People’s Budget presentation to her.

Unfortunately, when we gave that presentation, it was toward the end of the budget process. So even though she received the information, she’d already gone along with what many advisors told her to do and had, in fact, increased the police budget.

In 2024, we’ve been invited to present her the results of the survey and the results of the entire People’s Budget process earlier in the budget process. We hope that it’s considered as she builds the new budget. Hopefully, she’ll consider us as deeply as she considers police interests.

Kolhatkar: Can you put the Los Angeles effort around participatory budgeting into a national context? Is L.A. further along than other cities? In addition to Minneapolis, we’ve seen flashpoints in cities like Detroit, Oakland, and Seattle, where there’ve been efforts to defund the police.

Abdullah: Sure. Since 2020, we’ve been convening with groups located everywhere from Santa Clara, California, to Des Moines, Iowa, to discuss a People’s Budget process. There are now between 30 and 50 cities replicating this process. And there are some groups whose participatory budgeting work predates our own.

It’s gaining traction. People, no matter what their political stance, believe in the concept of democracy. They say, “Taxes are our money. We should have a say in how they are spent.” We’re able to get lots of folks on board around that.

In fact, what we see also is that, regardless of political persuasion, people tend to lean toward defunding the police. They may not like that term “defunding” anymore, but when they see a simple pie chart presented to neighborhood councils in Los Angeles, they see in red that 54 percent of the city’s general fund goes to police. Everybody—from the Howard Jarvis tax people to Black folks in South Central Los Angeles and Watts—knows that’s too much money for police.

That’s true in Los Angeles, and it’s true in Oakland, where I know people like Cat Brooks and the Anti Police-Terror Project are also working toward defunding police. It’s also true in Minneapolis, where the organization Black Visions is working on issues like this. These are just a few of the 30 to 50 municipalities that have been part of these People’s Budget calls.

Kolhatkar: When we look at the results of the People’s Budget surveys, people were happy to designate a mere 1.64 percent of the entire city’s budget to police, which is quite remarkable. As an abolitionist, do you want to see something on that order or zero percent?

Abdullah: I say zero! There are very few Black people who feel safer when a police cruiser pulls up behind them in traffic. So, when we think about that, we know intuitively as Black people that police don’t keep us safe. Police rarely prevent crime. They might respond to a crime after it’s happened, but they are only successful in solving the most egregious crimes less than 2 percent of the time.

We have to do a better job talking about alternative models, particularly ones that have already proven to be successful. Newark, New Jersey, for example, has invested deeply in community safety programs. Phenomenal work is also being done by people like Aqeela Sherrills—cofounder of the Community Based Public Safety Collective in Watts. These efforts have been much, much more successful in making communities safer than policing.

The most brilliant economist that I know, Dr. Julianne Malveaux, says that budgets are moral and ethical documents. If we spend almost $4 billion on police in the city of Los Angeles, that’s $4 billion that could have provided housing, health care, and mental health care for all. We have to be willing to take funding from oppressive forces and invest in the things that actually make us safe.

So, yes, my position is let’s completely abolish police and use those funds to invest in forms of public safety and wellness that are rooted in community.

Kolhatkar: What will it take to spread this idea of participatory budgeting in cities around the country? It’s one thing for it to work on a local level. It’s another thing to realize that vision nationally. And even though cities like Minneapolis and Oakland are working on defunding, the U.S. is a huge country. Are you hopeful that this idea of deciding budgets in a participatory way is catching on?

Abdullah: Yes. People like it, and it’s going to catch on. Participatory budgeting is not abolition, but it is one way of pulling masses of people into a process and engaging them in ways that empower communities to radically re-envision and reimagine the world and work toward the world of our greatest hopes and dreams.

This excerpt, adapted from Talking About Abolition: A Police-Free World Is Possible by Sonali Kolhatkar (Seven Stories Press, 2025), appears by permission of the publisher.

The market is one component of the group’s food sovereignty work, which also includes cultivating mushrooms and caring for a bison herd. Siċaŋġu Co is also working on housing, education, and programs that support physical and spiritual wellness. But food came first. “We started with food because it’s so universal. Not just as a need but as a grounding cultural and family force,” says Michael Prate, who spearheaded the program in its initial stages. “It’s where people come together to build relationships.”

The food inequities that Siċaŋġu Co is working to address can be traced back to the eradication of bison herds by white settlers during the 1800s. For many Lakota, bison are akin to family and play an integral part in both their physical and spiritual lives. Millions of bison used to roam these plains, but when colonizers pushed West, they slaughtered the animals en masse, both to make room for the cattle herds they brought with them and to disrupt the Lakota way of life and force them onto reservations.

Mushrooms for Health and Sustenance

At the market, Siċaŋġu Co member Frederick Fast Horse shows off the mushrooms that he has foraged and raised to passersby. According to an important story passed down in Lakota history, the Lakota were once cave dwellers, and mushrooms were key to their survival, Fast Horse tells Sentient. These critical fungi are more than just calories though, as Fast Horse believes mushrooms are part of what helped Lakota stay so healthy for centuries, until the effects of colonization, which shifted the Nation’s diet to a heavy reliance on dairy and processed meats. “Every single mushroom actually coincides and targets a specific organ inside of your body,” he tells me.

In addition to being a skilled mycologist and forager, Fast Horse is also the chef at the nonprofit’s school, where he is reintroducing culturally significant ingredients to the students. Fast Horse makes breakfast and lunch for around 70 students and staff each day. The typical fare is pretty simple, he says: dishes made of just a handful of ingredients, plus a broth and spices.

In collaboration with school leadership, Fast Horse is developing dietary guidelines that reflect more traditional foods and agricultural practices. This way of eating amounts to “living off of the land.” It means eating “all the foods that are already around us, everything that you grow and very simplistic methods of preparing food and eating it,” says Fast Horse.

The diet they’re launching at the school isn’t just culturally important, it’s also better for the students’ health, according to Fast Horse who is very critical of the modern, industrialized food system. When discussing the FDA, he says “They don’t care about your health. They’re only caring about mass production.”

A diet that leans more on mushrooms and plants also happens to be more climate-friendly than the typical U.S. diet, in which beef is consumed four times more than the global average. In the big picture of global greenhouse gas emissions, somewhere between 12 and 20 percent of all emissions comes from meat and dairy farms. While the goal of Siċaŋġu Co isn’t explicitly to eat less meat, it does aim to boost access to traditional foods. This includes both low-emissions plants and mushrooms that are locally harvested and bison raised on a very small scale, treated as “kin,” in a way that looks nothing like a factory farm.

Native-Owned Bison Are Family

Rosebud Reservation is home to the largest Native-owned bison herd, with over a thousand animals roaming 28,000 acres. Bison are ruminants, like cattle, which means they too belch methane, but bison offer a variety of ecosystem benefits thanks to the way they live on the land.

While herds of cattle also graze nearby, the differences are stark. Cattle are destructive to everything, says Siċaŋġu Nation member Karen Moore. Moore, who manages the food sovereignty initiative and lives on the reservation, describes how grazing cows tend to concentrate together, sometimes feasting on a single type of plant until it’s depleted. Bison are more likely to cover more ground when they graze, eating a variety of plants, which has a gentler impact on the ecosystem.

Last year, two animals from the Nation’s herd were donated to the school. With that meat, Fast Horse says he has been able to replace 75 percent of the red meat the school would have otherwise procured.

Getting the students to eat more culturally significant foods is not without its challenges, however. If one popular student decides they don’t like a particular dish, then all the other kids follow suit, says Fast Horse. He avoids the problem by trying to make foods more palatable. For example, by grinding mushrooms into small pieces. “They get the flavor, but they don’t see the actual mushroom,” he says.

Another Siċaŋġu Co member, Mayce Low Dog, teaches community cooking classes that instruct participants how to use traditional ingredients in their dishes.

The work is paying off. “It seems like more people are into trying weirder foods, not necessarily like your tomatoes and cucumbers,” says Moore. “It’s been really, really exciting to see.” Her coworkers raved about her stinging nettle pesto, made from plants she foraged.

Harvesting local plants is also a critical part of the group’s work. The Nation has “been in crisis for hundreds of years,” says Moore, but harvesting their own food is part of “getting back to being self-reliant.”

On a brisk morning during my visit, Moore and Low Dog invite me to join them to harvest local plants that they’ll dry and turn into herbal teas, both for the farmers market and a community-supported agriculture program that subsidizes food shares for some residents. The teas are a way residents can reconnect with traditional foods even if they’re not skilled foragers themselves.

Gravel crunches under the tires as we pull off of the main road and slowly roll along the banks of a pond. Along the way, Moore and Low Dog keep their eyes peeled for useful plants for tea. For both Moore and Low Dog, foraging is a newer skill. As we walk, they consult each other about different plants, making sure they’re selecting the correct ones and that everything is ready for harvest. It’s a skill they’re intentionally learning from each other and their elders.

Moore reaches down to gather some Ceyeka, or wild mint, for the teas. She’s sure to leave behind about half of the plant to ensure the plant continues to grow on the banks so there’s more when they come back again on a later day.

Forging Connection and Community

Victoria Contreras was introduced to the food sovereignty initiative as a high school volunteer. Now, two years later, Contreras, who manages the Siċaŋġu Harvest Market, has learned to be more intentional about incorporating Indigenous ingredients in her meals, she tells Sentient. “I’m actively looking for something that I can swap out, or a recipe that I can try,” she says, fondly recalling a stinging nettle ice cream one of her coworkers made.

In addition to expanding community knowledge of traditional ingredients, the Harvest Market and other programs have also brought community residents together. The market helps create new friendships and revive old connections, says Sharon LaPointe who helps her daughter, Sadie, with her stand selling flavored lemonades, homemade pickles, and bread. It’s a sentiment shared by many of the vendors there that Wednesday.

Michael Prate, who helped get the group off the ground, remembers some Nation members weren’t so sure of the group in the early days. “I think people have a skepticism that things are gonna go away,” he says, “because that’s the trend,” as many programs that pop up on the reservation tend to be temporary. There are challenges, including growing crops under the harsh weather conditions in South Dakota, conditions that will become even more severe in a changing climate.

The many shifting challenges facing the Siċaŋġu Nation is why food sovereignty is so critical. “They’re here to teach us how to be food sovereign because someday food is gonna get too expensive for our people,” says Brandi Charging Eagle. “The prices of food are going up, but our wages aren’t,” adds Charging Eagle, who is part of the Siċaŋġu nonprofit, but also follows its mission in her own home, where she is teaching her children how to grow their own food.

The Siċaŋġu Nation’s nonprofit will have to stay nimble in order to survive. “There’s always going to be something else that the community is going to be weathering and adapting to,” Prate says. “That’s just reality.”

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.

According to Cherry, a PPFA worker who requested a pseudonym out of fear of retaliation, unionized PPFA workers were “really upset” by their employer’s public and internal statements on Israel’s aggression on Gaza. A Signal group was created to work on an open letter that circulated later that month. 

The Dec. 5 statement was PPFA’s first public comment about Gaza, but Cherry says, “[PPFA] had sent a couple of internal all-staff emails before that one that very much deprioritized the historical context and experience of Palestinians over the last nearly a century.” Cherry adds, “As workers, we wanted to demonstrate that the PPFA statement does not necessarily reflect those of us in the national office.”

The collectively written open letter was drafted by both unionized and non-unionized PPFA workers, as well as workers from PPFA affiliates. Letter writers urged for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza and unequivocally called Israel’s aggression on Gaza a genocide. Signed by more than 500 patients, volunteers, organizers, health care providers, donors, supporters, and workers, the letter also called out the hypocrisy of the organization’s stance.

“For PPFA to ignore the Israeli government’s war crimes against the Palestinian people stands antithetical to their purported mission to fight for the dignity, safety, and rights of all people,” the letter reads. “We urge PPFA’s leadership to follow the lead of other reproductive health, rights, and justice organizations in calling for a ceasefire and an end to the U.S. funding of the Israeli government’s occupation and genocide in Gaza.”

According to the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), 50 percent of pregnant Palestinian women who were displaced to shelters in Gaza suffered from thirst and malnutrition, and health care and vaccinations for newborns were scarce. Though PPFA is a member of the IPPF, the latter has no governance power over the former.

In July 2024, the Palestinian Family Planning and Protection Association estimated that miscarriages had risen at least 300 percent since October 2023. If PPFA leadership and its affiliates—independently incorporated local Planned Parenthood clinics supported by PPFA—refused to take a stance for a ceasefire, the letter signers wanted to make clear that not all workers and supporters of the organization were content to be silent in the face of a genocide. 

“The other thing that bothered me and made me want to write and sign the letter is that we’re a reproductive rights organization and we were completely out of step with the IPPF,” says Emma, a worker in the national Planned Parenthood office who also requested a pseudonym out of fear of retribution. Emma felt PPFA should be more supportive of the international organization, which called for a ceasefire in November 2023, citing the violation of women and girls specifically. 

“The IPPF is a global reproductive rights organization that has been very vocal about the maternal mortality rates [in Gaza], the lack of period sanitation products, [and] how people have to experience C-sections without anesthesia,” says Emma. “Just all these things the PPFA is supposed to be an advocate for and is just completely ignoring, and then when it stopped ignoring what’s going on, it chose to just spout propaganda.”

For some workers at PPFA and its affiliates across the U.S., the lack of reproductive health care in Gaza was difficult to ignore in day-to-day operations. The PPFA’s official statement on Gaza and the lack of internal discussion of the issue was what pushed Aseel Houmsse, research and clinical training coordinator at the Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts (PPLM), to organize with other workers, sign the open letter published last December, and send a letter to their affiliate’s equity department. 

Houmsse, a first-generation immigrant to the U.S. who is of Middle Eastern descent, says they expected conversations about Palestine to happen in Planned Parenthood employee affinity group meetings due to the organization’s commitment to diversity, equality, and inclusion. Houmsse expected those conversations to be “geared toward advancing equity and advancing the idea of health care for all,” but was surprised to encounter complete silence about the issue at their affiliate. “That’s when I decided to organize with others who were concerned about the silence,” Houmsse explains.

Houmsse and other workers wrote an internal letter to the equity division of PPLM that they say was “rejected immediately with no feedback.” Houmsse felt not only the organization-wide silence and its general chilling effect, but its particular impact on workers with roots in the Middle East and North Africa. Houmsse found PPFA’s response “incredibly disappointing,” before adding that it “goes against the idea of how we need to talk about the uncomfortable things.”

This continues a pattern Houmsse has witnessed all their life: a systemic refusal to discuss Palestine in left-wing and liberal spaces. “[T]hese… groups… are meant to tackle uncomfortable conversations in a way that’s functional.”

That is the reason Houmsse thought it important for unions and workers to come together and sign the open letter to PPFA leadership. “What I love about unions is that they provide, ideally, a sense of psychological safety,” Houmsse says. “I think especially when we work in areas that are highly stressful like an abortion clinic, for instance, I think it’s really nice to know that there is an entity out there that has your back, that is able to keep your security, safety, all these things in mind.” (Neither PPFA nor PPLM responded to YES! Media’s requests for comment.)

Autonomy and Cybersecurity

PPFA leadership ignored the first open letter. In May 2024, I wrote a Prism Reports feature breaking the news that PPFA had a cybersecurity contract with Raytheon, a notorious corporation that, according to the American Friends Service Committee, makes “missiles, bombs, components for fighter jets, and other weapon systems used by the Israeli military against Palestinian civilians.” 

The story raised questions about whether liberal nonprofit organizations defending human rights should work with a company that manufactures military weapons. In addition, PPFA workers were concerned about their lack of participation in the hiring of a company that handles data essential to the daily operations of reproductive health care. 

“Seeing [the connection between Planned Parenthood and Raytheon] laid out so directly was devastating,” says Casey, a unionized worker from an East Coast affiliate who requested a pseudonym. “I can speak for my fellow union members and workers [that], generally, we love this work. To know that our labor was, in this very direct way, going to this frankly evil company was just horrible. The next day in the clinic, we were all crying and were like, ‘Alright, what can we do?’” 

The collective despair motivated PPFA workers to send another letter to leadership in July, this time demanding PPFA’s divestment from Raytheon as well as “full transparency about its business dealings with cybersecurity companies.” Workers requested a say on the cybersecurity company hired to handle highly sensitive data that could, in some cases, further marginalize Planned Parenthood clients who are undocumented or could be criminalized for getting an abortion. The letter also charged the organization with “co-opting the language of freedom and self-determination while maintaining relationships with warmongers and military arms profiteers.” 

For Emma, PPFA’s contract with Raytheon exposed a gap of values between workers providing on-the-ground reproductive health care and PPFA leadership. “I won’t deny that Planned Parenthood affiliates provide so many health care services, but it’s the workers who … are on the ground doing that,” Emma says. “There definitely should be a distinction, but as a larger institution, I’m not even disappointed. I’m furious.”

The fractures over Gaza and the Raytheon contract made distinctions between leadership and workers clearer. While leadership seemed preoccupied with putting out neutral messaging on Israel’s siege on Gaza to protect the organization, workers were watching videos of children, men, and women being massacred and disabled by weapons closely related to their workplace’s choice of cybersecurity provider.

According to Casey, organizing with unionized and non-unionized workers, as well as Planned Parenthood supporters and donors, has offered PPFA workers opportunities to learn from each other and clarify how workers in the U.S. can show up in solidarity with Palestine. 

“It really gave us learning and growing opportunities to better understand the idea of solidarity and what unions do,” Casey says. For them, this movement was evidence that unions are more than an “insurance policy for workers—they exist to build our working-class power.” And it made them realize how workers have “so much power collectively, but we have to get to that place where we believe that and can mobilize it.”

This can be true for unions across the U.S. “We can [all] mobilize to make material changes for Palestinian liberation,” Casey says.

The Palestinian solidarity movement within Planned Parenthood is an example of how working-class power can be used to clarify connections between struggles, even when they seem to be disconnected from our own workplace, geographically or otherwise. Through organizing and community building, Planned Parenthood workers helped expose the nonprofit-industrial complex operating within the U.S. empire, demonstrating how diversity, equity and inclusion efforts fail when imperialism and colonialism aren’t tackled head on.

By reminding their employer of the organization’s own mission, organized workers and unions pushed for rights and justice outside U.S. borders. 

“No more lunch tickets,” he said to a woman standing in the hallway. 

When Walz held up the signed bill in the crowded school cafeteria, the room erupted into applause as children hugged the former coach’s neck. “As a former teacher, I know that providing free breakfast and lunch for our students is one of the best investments we can make to lower costs, support Minnesota’s working families, and care for our young learners and the future of our state,” Walz said in a press release on the legislation. “This bill puts us one step closer to making Minnesota the best state for kids to grow up, and I am grateful to all of the legislators and advocates for making it happen.”

The law reimbursed public school districts, charter schools, and non-public schools for meals purchased through the National School Lunch and the School Breakfast Programs. The state-funded Free School Meals for Kids program also provides reimbursement for meals served to students who do not qualify for free or reduced-price meals so all students receive the meals at no cost. The program is estimated to cost the state about $400 million over a two-year budget period.

“Based on the latest data from the Department of Education, lunch participation was up about 19 percent and breakfast participation was up 41 percent,” says Sophia Lenarz-Coy, executive director of the Food Group, which is focused on increasing access to healthy, locally grown food in Minnesota. “We can see that students are just better prepared. They’re better able to learn and focus.”

Minnesota could be setting the framework for adoption on the federal level. In 2023, Rep. Ilhan Omar, who also represents Minnesota, Rep. Adam Schiff, and Rep. Jahana Hayes introduced the Universal School Meals Program Act. The law would provide students with free breakfast, lunch, dinner, and a snack each day, without needing to prove eligibility.

It would also raise reimbursement rates, the amount of money the federal government provides to states for lunches, afterschool snacks, and breakfasts served to children participating in the National School Lunch and School Breakfast programs. The bill would also increase the national average payment for free lunch from $4.01 to $4.63 and include additional payments to schools using locally sourced food.

“Minnesota has a long history of good coalition work around food,” says Lenarz-Coy. “When we look at what got us to universal school meals in Minnesota, [the health sector] was involved, food producers were involved, public health was involved, education advocates were involved, and anti-hunger advocates were involved. It really was a coalition.”

It is going to require that level of coalition-building to bring Minnesota’s approach to universal school meals to the national level. But now, with a Republican president-elect and a Republican majority in the Senate and the House, Project 2025 is a real possibility.

With its implementation comes the removal of many protections provided to school children across the country, including calling for an end to the community eligibility program (CEP), which, beginning in the 2014-2015 school year, allowed high-needs schools to begin providing free lunch to all their students and receiving reimbursement based on the percentage of students eligible for those meals. Schools are designated as high needs if a significant percentage of its student population qualifies for free or reduced-price meals.

The Food Group notes Project 2025 and similar proposals do not acknowledge the connection between nutrition and learning or the need of many students who are above the CEP free or reduced-price eligibility threshold but are still unable to afford school meals. Since Barack Obama signed the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act into law in 2010, which aided the creation of the CEP, children in the U.S. have eaten 23 percent more fruit and 16 percent more vegetables at school, and breakfast participation has increased by nearly 25 percent.

While feeding all children in schools is an expensive endeavor, Lenarz-Coy says it’s an essential element of education that shouldn’t be overlooked. In July, Food Research and Action Center (FRAC) compiled studies showing the value of free school meals for all children, including improved physical and emotional health among students, increased attendance rates, improved test scores among marginalized student groups, and reduced discipline infractions.

“[In Minnesota], we’ve made sure to continue talking to school nutrition associations about how we can keep improving the quality of the lunch along with getting lunch to everybody,” says Lenarz-Coy. “It’s not an easy lift, so the key is to have champions. [You need] several stars to align. Having a champion in the governor’s office was really important to getting a policy this big over the line.”

Hunger Is a Health Problem

Healthy meals for the nation’s children is not a new concept.

In 1946, the National School Lunch Act began giving free school lunches to low-income students. The Child Nutrition Act of 1966 then condensed control of the school lunch program from several government agencies to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), established the School Breakfast Program, and authorized the Special Milk Program, which provides milk free of charge or at a reduced cost to children in schools who do not participate in other child nutrition programs.

The USDA piloted the Child Care Food Program and Summer Food Service Program (SFSP) in 1968 to provide food and resources for local sponsors who want to combine a feeding program with a summer activity program. In response to reports of hungry children, the Black Panther Party began running free breakfast programs out of churches and community centers, eventually expanding to 36 cities across the United States by 1971.

During the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, supplying school meals became an even more urgent priority. In 2020, Congress passed the Families First Coronavirus Response Act, which gave the USDA authority to issue nationwide waivers making meals free for all students in participating school districts. More than 5 million children were served during the summer of 2020, nearly double the number of children who received meals through the program in each of the five previous summers. The move led to a record drop in food insecurity among families with children, from nearly 12 million in 2020 to 9 million in 2021.

“It was a huge success,” says Crystal FitzSimons, interim president of the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC), an organization that aims to improve the nutrition, health, and well-being of people facing food insecurity in the United States. “Schools loved it, parents loved it, kids loved it.”

Though the program ended on June 30, 2022, when Congress failed to extend the waiver, at least eight states, including California, Colorado, Michigan, and New Mexico, have now passed legislation to provide free school meals to students.

Other bills such as the School Meals Expansion Act, the No Hungry Kids in School Act, and the Expanding Access to School Meals Act would expand free meals to students, an idea the majority of people in the U.S. support. A poll by FRAC found that 63 percent of voters nationwide support legislation that would provide free meals to students.

Free Food Without Shame

Despite this widespread support, Project 2025 suggests narrowing the scope of the USDA, which it refers to as a “major welfare agency” and removing references to “equity” and “climate smart” in the USDA’s mission statement. Besides the devastating overall effects of this move, conflating free meal programs with welfare discourages students from participating in free meal programs.

This framing continues the stigmatizing of free school meals as “welfare” that began during the “right to lunch” movement in the 1960s. In a 2023 interview on the Integrated Schools podcast, Jennifer Gaddis, Ph.D., an associate professor of civil society and community studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, said that before the pandemic, 30 million children participated in the school lunch program on a daily basis. However, about 20 million more had access to the program but chose not to participate, partially because of the stigma.

“I think shame [was a reason people didn’t participate],” Gaddis said. “And just the stigma of this being like a government handout versus something that you expect to be part of the school day.”

Universal school lunch eliminates the visibility of who is receiving assistance. Consequently, more students are likely to participate in the lunch program. When students feel comfortable participating, they are more likely to consume healthy nutritious meals, which can positively affect their health and academic performance. Eliminating the negative connotation associated with school lunch also fosters a more inclusive learning environment and a decrease in disciplinary actions, while also alleviating stress on families that may already be resource-strapped.

“Families are struggling with increased food costs and housing costs,” FitzSimons says. “[Universal school meals] reduce the household food budget and make it easier for families to make ends meet. It’s much easier when [parents] don’t have to worry about making sure their kids have lunch, and it helps ensure that students have access to the nutrition they need so that they don’t show up in class hungry or get hungry in the afternoon.”

When the School Doors Close

As the push for free healthy school meals increases, so does the discussion about how the U.S. can reduce child hunger once the last school bell rings. Since the Families First Coronavirus Response Act expired, the number of children living in hunger has increased. Today, 14 million children are facing hunger in the United States.

Some schools currently supplement school-day breakfast and lunch with weekend meals for students with an identified need, while other families are reliant on care food programs offered through local organizations. “If there is a weekend program, like at a rec center, a YMCA, or a Boys and Girls Club, they can serve meals through the child and adult care food program,” FitzSimons says. “They don’t reach as many kids, obviously, as school meals.”

But this isn’t a new problem, though there are old solutions: In 1995, a school nurse, who has remained unnamed, in Little Rock, Arkansas, observed that many of the students she treated for illness or fatigue were hungry because they did not have enough to eat at home. So she created a backpack meal program, where she partnered with a local food bank to provide bags with food for students to take home over the weekend.

Over time, programs such as Feeding America’s BackPack Program, Blessings in a Backpack, and Operation Backpack have cropped up in schools and districts all across the country. More than 800,000 children across the U.S. benefit from food backpack programs on any given weekend. 

The BackPack Program works with food banks and schools to provide healthy, easy-to-prepare food for weekends and school breaks. The program feeds more than 450,000 children each week by sending backpacks of groceries home with students. A study of the program in Urbana, Illinois, found that meals provided to families beyond the school day increased food security. Thirteen percent of families surveyed moved from “low food insecure” to “food secure” between October and December, and schools reported improved academic performance, school attendance, literacy and math test scores, and interest in school.

If we want to bring universal school meals to all children, regardless of income, it’s going to take a combination of imagination, tolerance for criticism, and a shift in how we consider this issue. “On test days, schools feed all kids well. Every day is a good day to do well in school,” she says. “We’re really trying to make the case that in the same way we cover books and other things about school, we should make sure all kids going to public schools are fed.”

Clearly, what happens in a child’s early years matters. But there are a number of barriers to early childhood development opportunities, including the exorbitant costs of childcare in the United States, miles-wide childcare deserts in rural areas, underpaid and burnt-out educators, and under-resourced facilities that can’t meet the overwhelming demand for their services.

Amid this already-uphill battle for early childcare, Project 2025—the 922-page brainchild of white nationalists, former Trump officials, and right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation—plans to make these barriers even higher.

Though Project 2025 aspires to overhaul nearly all aspects of the federal government under Donald Trump, its proposals around youth education and family care are particularly brazen. Not only does Project 2025 intend to strip reproductive rights through federal abortion bans and restrict family-planning options such as IVF and contraceptives, it would also eliminate Head Start, a federally funded childcare and early-development program for low-income kids, pregnant people, and families.

Launched in 1965, Head Start was designed to disrupt, and ultimately end, intergenerational poverty by providing free, wraparound early-development services to children from infancy to age 5. Head Start offers education, full-time childcare centers, medical support, and social services to families in need. Since its founding, Head Start has served nearly 40 million children.

Even those who may never access or qualify for Head Start benefit from it. In the South, for example, local Head Start programs became spaces for political mobilization during the civil rights movement. In the ’70s, Head Start influenced licensing guidelines for childcare centers and caregivers across the country and has since set the standard for innovative childcare methods and research. Head Start even funded the much-loved children’s TV show Sesame Street.

“Programs like Head Start serve majority-Black and Brown communities, and I think it’s just racist to defund these programs,” says Liz Bangura, a doula, social justice coordinator, and former educator at Jump Start, a national nonprofit partner program for Head Start. As a doula, Bangura works exclusively with Black and Brown mothers and says they’ve seen firsthand how Head Start changes families’ lives.

“Head Start plays a huge role in caring for the child after labor … when [families] are able to be in these programs, I visibly see the relief in [mothers] when they’re able to go to work and also drop their kid off somewhere where they know they’re being taught how to read, [where] they’re socializing with other students.”

Project 2025’s overt targeting of Head Start is about more than just early education and childcare centers. It’s about creating a country where generations of low-income children and families are left behind. But rather than fighting only for the preservation of Head Start, it’s equally important to understand its limitations and work toward a society where all families have access to the consistent, high-quality care they need—regardless of who sits in the White House.

Without Early Care, a Cascade of Harm

Head Start is a critical program, but it simply isn’t reaching all the families who need it. Access to Head Start is determined by (often arbitrary) federal poverty guidelines, and as a result many families are caught in the welfare gap: scraping by, living paycheck to paycheck, but still making too much to qualify for Head Start. A recent report from the National Institute of Early Education Research (NIEER) found that in the 2020-2021 school year, Head Start and its sister-program, Early Head Start, did not reach even half of all eligible children living in poverty.

Likewise, many families who don’t meet Head Start’s eligibility requirements are left to make do on their own.

For Ymani Blake, a lower-middle-class mother living in Chicago, accessing quality childcare for her 3-year-old has been a challenge from Day 1. Despite applying for funding and assistance multiple times, Blake has always been denied support “because we’re either making too much money or our schedules are not aligned [with the programs].”

Timing, too, is a challenge. Last year, Blake applied to a program that would give her daughter, who has a speech delay, access to occupational therapists, speech therapists, and other resources the family couldn’t otherwise afford. But by the time program coordinators got in touch, Blake’s daughter was only a month away from aging out of the program. “No services were rendered because she aged out,” Blake says. “It’s a lot of advocacy and labor that is falling back on parents to get quality education and childcare.”

With limited options, Blake put her daughter in a private daycare program—but pulled her out after less than a month due to the cost. According to data from the Center for American Progress, the average annual tuition in 2022 for a single infant attending a childcare center was more than $13,000. For two children under 4, that number jumps to more than $23,000.

Blake was then drawn to a sliding-scale Montessori school with a progressive approach to early-childhood education. “Unfortunately, there was a situation where they left the gate open, and my daughter got out and crossed the street on her own,” Blake says. “It was so hurtful because that was the only option that I could find … but then it’s not safe.” 

Caught between age and income restrictions, the high cost of private care, and a concern for her daughter’s safety, this lack of childcare support has led to a cascade of harm for Blake. Without assistance, the family can’t afford daycare or private speech therapists, so Blake is forced to stay home from work and look after her daughter, who loses out on critical social-emotional and development opportunities with kids her own age. And without two parents in the workforce, the family’s income is ultimately lowered even more. 

Everybody should have access to these programs like Head Start, Blake says. “Daycare should be free.”

It Takes a Village

Without accessible childcare, many families must instead rely on their own creativity, grit, and communities to ensure their children have the support they need.

After separating from her husband in late 2021, Hattie Assan, a mother living in Ohio with her two children, ages 5 and 7, began relying more and more on the support of friends—mostly other moms in the process of divorce. The following year, one friend, Rachel, mentioned her landlord was increasing her rent, and Assan offered to share her own home. By August of 2022, Rachel and her three children moved into Assan’s three-bedroom house, forming a new household with two adults and five kids. 

“[Shared living] has always been a seed, and it really only started blossoming after my marriage ended,” says Assan. “I felt more free to just live the way that feels more compatible and sustainable and supportive to the realities of living in late-stage capitalism. I think we’re probably all designed to be more interdependent than an individualist society sets us up to believe.”

Eventually, Rachel moved directly across the street from Assan. This past fall, Assan welcomed in another single mom, Carli, and her three kids. (Rachel and Carli both requested their last names be withheld to protect their privacy.) In each situation, Assan and her housemates worked out equitable house payments and utility costs, and shared in the labor of cooking, babysitting, and running a household.

Assan opens her home to her wider community as well. Twice a month, Assan hosts “spaghetti nights” in her front yard, a free meal and welcoming space for families and kids of all ages. After Assan’s mother had a stroke in 2022 and was no longer able to help with babysitting, Assan says spaghetti night attendees banded together and raised $9,000 in less than 24 hours—enough to cover childcare costs for more than six months.

Blake, too, is finding success through mutual aid. Using her background as a doula and birth worker, Blake is working twice a week at a local play- and nature-based daycare in exchange for her daughter’s enrollment. “I do not get paid a lot for this position, but [my daughter] will have access. And that’s because me and the owner are centering community care,” says Blake. “I love being there because it also gives me the tools that I need to help parent my child.”

Still, no matter how important or inventive an individual workaround is, both Blake and Assan believe wider, systemic changes are needed to ensure all children and families have access to childcare and early-development resources. These solutions require not only defending Head Start, but also investing in programs not dependent on income.

Some politicians are already answering this call. In 2014, former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio established universal pre-K for all 4-year-olds, and then launched 3-K for All in 2017 to provide free childcare and education for all 3-year-olds. In 2023, New York City Council members proposed legislation that would provide universal childcare for all children aged 6 weeks to 5 years old—a dramatic expansion of early-childhood programming for all families in the city, regardless of location, income, or citizenship. (This legislation is especially important as the city’s current mayor, Eric Adams, has rolled back the 3-K program.)

Other countries, too, have long recognized universal childcare as a key strategy to support families, address inequality, and simply raise healthy, happy young people. Portugal, for example, has championed free childcare in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, and many Nordic countries are well known for their generous parental leave policies and well-run national childcare systems. Both at home and abroad, these initiatives provide a working model for the United States—and prove that universal childcare programs, at both the state and federal level, are attainable.

Given the GOP’s overt embrace of Project 2025, federal solutions to the country’s childcare struggles are unlikely under the incoming Trump administration. While states and cities can implement smaller-scale solutions, the reality is that many families will need to follow the community-care models embraced by Assan and Blake: fortify and expand existing networks, lean on their neighbors, and get creative when it comes to housing, childcare, and early-learning opportunities. 

Amid ecological collapse, rising authoritarianism, genocide, and widening inequality, the urgent need for these stories and tools is clear. The challenges we face often feel overwhelming, but we are not starting from scratch. Across history and geography, people have responded to injustice and hardship with ingenuity, laying the groundwork for solidarity economies and imagining new systems that can work for all of us. 

The stories that follow illustrate how community-driven approaches can challenge entrenched institutions, foster collective well-being, and create tangible solutions to pressing global challenges. Conflict Kitchen served the cuisine and culture of nations in conflict with the United States, sparking meaningful dialogue across political and geographic divides. The Carolina Textile District transformed its cooperative network during COVID-19 to produce essential medical supplies, proving that mutual aid and collective ownership can outpace traditional business models. Meanwhile, the push for publicly owned pharmaceutical systems demonstrates how prioritizing health over profit can lower costs, reduce shortages, and ensure equitable access to life-saving medications. 

These stories are part of a larger collection we call Beautiful Solutions: A Toolbox for Liberation (OR Books, 2024), a rallying cry for those ready to resist repression, reimagine thriving in our current conditions, and keep building a better world. The future we deserve isn’t a distant dream; it’s in the seeds already being sown in our communities. This collection inspires us to nurture that future, together. Written collaboratively by more than 70 contributors, and born from the lived experiences of grassroots organizers, solidarity economy practitioners, and communities on the front lines of climate and economic crisis, Beautiful Solutions demonstrates that a more just and democratic world is not only possible—it’s actively under construction.

Conflict Kitchen

Written by Sydney Arndt

Believing that the quickest way to a person’s heart is through their stomach, Conflict Kitchen sought to promote peace and build cross-cultural understanding by introducing people to the food and culture of places with which their government is in conflict. Based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and the brainchild of artist-activists Jon Rubin and Dawn Weleski, Conflict Kitchen used a simple takeout window framed by a colorful facade to serve up the cuisine, and celebrate the culture of a succession of countries, including Iran, Afghanistan, Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela, Palestine, and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.

The takeout window functioned as a platform for public dialogue, and the food line became a space for hungry Pittsburghers to engage with people and places the media consistently distorts and misrepresents. The takeout counter was staffed by chefs and public artists trained to facilitate conversations about the featured country. Each food wrapper was printed with personal profiles of people who live in the country being celebrated, as well as articles on the country’s food, art, religion, culture, and government.

To extend the experience beyond the takeout line and further encourage cross-cultural dialogue, Conflict Kitchen also organized public events that centered around food. Pittsburgh locals and Iranians in Tehran shared a meal via webcam in a virtual, city-to-city dinner party. Both groups made the same Persian recipes, then sat down to eat together. Other events have included informal lunch-hour discussions on food and politics, dinners with invited speakers, and live cooking lessons through Skype. 

In November 2014, a series of death threats forced Conflict Kitchen to close down for nearly a week. In response to the threats and allegations of being anti-Israel, the directors of Conflict Kitchen emphasized that their purpose is to hold a loudspeaker to the voices and historical experiences of people from across the world—Palestinians and Palestinian Americans included. The backlash they received is proof that this type of work is necessary. 

Conflict Kitchen offered the public many points of entry, from the taste of a new dish, to interactions with employees or fellow customers, to the interviews printed on the food wrappers, and the intimate meals with people far away. Cultural exchange was central to the project; the organizers prioritized facilitating a space for locals and people overseas to express their respective points of view.

The webcam meals between Pittsburgh and abroad provided a temporary glimpse of what it can mean to share cultures, politics, and, of course, food. By creating a zone of open dialogue and cross-cultural understanding for at least one meal, Conflict Kitchen made a world where we listen to each other and draw our own conclusions seem possible. It used food as a vehicle for cross-cultural understanding—and also provided delicious takeout.

Carolina Textile District and COVID-19

Guided by Marciela Lopez

Written by the Industrial Commons Team

Western North Carolina has long been a center for manufacturing, especially of textiles and furniture. Despite free-trade agreements, which stripped jobs from communities on both sides of the U.S.–Mexico border, one in four people in North Carolina’s Western Piedmont region still work in manufacturing. Many Guatemalan Mayan immigrants have settled in the area to work in textiles and furniture production. Over the years, they have shaped the region by campaigning for dignified workplaces. Organizer Molly Hemstreet witnessed their struggle to unionize a production facility in Morganton, North Carolina, and began to wonder: Could workers own and operate their own companies?

In 2008, Hemstreet and leaders from the Mayan community co-founded a sewing cooperative, Opportunity Threads. They drew on inspiration from Frank Adams, an early architect of the Highlander Folk School (now the Highlander Research and Education Center). Opportunity Threads has become one of the largest immigrant-led sewing co-ops in the United States, with more than 50 workers as of 2020.

Aiming to expand cooperativism across the textile industry and strengthen local supply chains, Hemstreet collaborated with the area’s economic development association and a textile research and development center to establish the Carolina Textile District (CTD). Fueled by its mantra, “Be big by being small together,” CTD is a network that brings together over 30 small manufacturers, including Opportunity Threads, and is led by nine partners, representing 1,500 workers in total. Members cooperatively govern, train new workers, share contracts and contacts, develop strong ethical standards for the industry, and share their struggles and joys.

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck the United States in early 2020, CTD was well-positioned to produce personal protective equipment and cloth face masks. Pivoting its textile and furniture member-companies to manufacture medical supplies was a challenge with many moving parts. It required consulting with doctors and public-health professionals, navigating ever-changing federal guidelines, prototyping masks and gowns, sourcing medical-grade materials, organizing the cohorts of manufacturers, connecting with markets and sponsors, developing a cohesive warehousing and distribution center, upscaling production, and overseeing quality control. As factories in Western North Carolina were shuttering, CTD was not only safely keeping open their plants, but hiring as well. The pandemic underscored the need for CTD and accelerated the network’s growth.

Opportunity Threads was the hub for CTD’s sewn goods during the pandemic. Worker-owners responded quickly, putting their technical skills to use in developing market-ready goods. Other CTD members came on board to help. Since CTD members had several years of “coopetition” under their belts, the network rapidly developed new products and increased production. At one point, they were producing 50,000 units per week, which kept more than 60 mills humming. “We have achieved so many things that we probably would not have been able to accomplish in a company owned by one person,” says Maricela Lopez, a worker-owner at Opportunity Threads. 

Through this project, CTD supplied 190,000 sanitary gowns to North Carolina’s Department of Health and Human Services and more than 500,000 face masks and other personal protective equipment to frontline workers. Additionally, it generated $2 million in revenue for its textile and furniture manufacturers. According to Sara Chester, CTD co-founder and Industrial Commons co-executive director, “When weekly mask production hit 40,000 units, [we] realized something tremendous was being achieved.” 

Instead of communities having to wait for companies to come in and to solve economic, health, and social problems, cooperative industry networks can solve critical problems quickly and creatively. This model is one replicable example of how rural communities can actively build an industry ecosystem where workers own a secure supply chain, collaborate in mutually beneficial ways, and solve their communities’ most pressing problems.

Public Pharmaceuticals

Written by Dana Brown

The global medicines market is dominated by large private drug companies responsible for a decline in meaningful innovation as well as skyrocketing prices, recurring shortages, troubling safety issues, and corruption in the institutions that are supposed to regulate them. These trends are harmful to our health, economies, and democracies—and they are inevitable outcomes of an industry driven by profit maximization.

So-called “Big Pharma” companies spend less than one-fifth of their revenue on research and development, but half of their revenue on marketing. Many also regularly distribute more than 100 percent of profits to shareholders by selling off assets, taking on more debt, and downsizing production—inefficient and extractive practices in an industry we depend on for our health and well-being.

To get different outcomes, we need a different design. Democratic, public ownership of pharmaceutical institutions at scale would remove the profit motive and help reclaim medicine for the common good. Public ownership of pharmaceuticals can exist at any or all points in the supply chain, from research for new medications to manufacturing and distribution services. Since they are not beholden to shareholders and have some insulation from market pressures, they can focus on goals other than maximizing profits—like contributions to public health, scientific advancement, and local economies.

From Massachusetts to the U.K., Thailand, India, and beyond, there are many existing examples of states turning to public ownership of pharmaceutical companies in efforts to combat high prices, medicine shortages, and political interference by multinational corporations. 

Since 1960, Cuba’s entire pharmaceutical sector has been public. It produces both low-cost generic drugs and first-in-class discoveries, while providing thousands of good jobs and educational opportunities in the national economy. Known principally for its innovations—like the world’s first lung cancer and meningitis B vaccines—the industry also manufactures most of the domestic supply of medicine and shares its technology with numerous low- and middle-income countries, lessening those countries’ reliance on Big Pharma to meet health care needs.

When properly resourced, Public Pharma can lower drug prices, reduce inefficiencies, and ensure broad, equitable access to new drugs. Public control of manufacturing, wholesale distribution, or retail pharmacies can serve as the basis for large-scale investments in public health, creating educational opportunities and decent jobs and increasing resilience in supply chains. South Korea, for instance, supports small and medium pharmaceutical companies with publicly owned manufacturing facilities, which generate local jobs and purchasing power that broadly benefit the economy.

Public Pharma can also assure that medications most essential to public health are prioritized for development. State-owned pharmaceutical companies in both Cuba and Brazil operate with explicit mandates to develop medications ignored by the market, like those for neglected tropical diseases, while Big Pharma companies prioritize medications that generate the most profit—often copies of existing products.

Public Pharma can contribute to the creation of a biomedical commons in which life-saving technologies, and the information needed to produce and improve upon them, are treated as collective resources for all of humanity. Large-scale public ownership and control of the benefits of pharmaceutical innovation, for instance, could help facilitate programs in which the wealth created by the industry could prioritize serving historically marginalized communities, rather than perpetuating neglect in the name of business imperatives. Public Pharma is a vital tool for reorienting the purpose of health care from profits to human needs.

Successful examples from around the world can inform the design and development of a robust Public Pharma sector for any country. Sweden’s state-owned Apotek Produktion & Laboratorier AB has found a niche in specialty pharmaceutical manufacturing, selling products to dozens of countries, and directing any profits it earns to its only shareholder: the Swedish state. China’s and India’s state-owned drug companies have long produced a significant portion of the world’s supply of active pharmaceutical ingredients. Brazil’s state-owned labs produce more than 100 essential medications that allow its national health service to offer free and reduced-price medications to low-income patients.

Around the world—even in the United States—public-sector labs were historically responsible for the development of most vaccines. Insulin as a treatment for diabetes was developed in a public lab in Canada and the subsequent sale of the rights to produce insulin to private United States manufacturers remains a powerful cautionary tale about the harm that can happen when privatizing public goods. Despite being a century-old drug, insulin prices in the U.S. have skyrocketed in recent years as the three companies that control virtually the entire insulin market make small tweaks on their products in order to take out new patents and continually raise prices. This trend has produced a uniquely American epidemic of cost-related deaths because of people rationing insulin.

Because of the U.S.’s outsized role in global trade talks and the utter dominance of its Big Pharma firms in the global medicines market, developing a public pharmaceutical industry in the U.S. in particular would be decisive in global efforts to roll back Big Pharma monopolies and reclaim medicine as a public good. It would reduce regulatory capture and shrink corporate lobbying, opening up political space for much broader input into the priorities and outputs of this critical industry. With democratic, public-sector institutions innovating and producing medications at scale, Big Pharma’s interests would no longer dominate, and public institutions would have incentives to cooperate instead of competing in times of public health crises.

“The situation in the mountains, where our community lives, is even worse,” she says. More floods as well as long periods of drought have made the perennial water sources in the upper mountains run dry.

Thousands of kilometers from Gurung’s community in the mountains, the United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP29, was just held in Baku, Azerbaijan. At this annual global convening, professionals, stakeholders, and politicians spent weeks deliberating situations like that of the Tamang and the nearly 500 million Indigenous people around the world. 

Gurung attended COP29 as program officer for the Center for Indigenous Peoples’ Research and Development, based in Kathmandu, Nepal. And her demands were clear: “We want $5 trillion—not as a loan, but as a grant,” she says. 

This target aims to address the urgent needs of developing countries for transitioning to clean energy and adapting to climate change. But COP29 ended on Nov. 24 with a pledge from developed nations to contribute just $300 billion annually to support adaptation. It has not been decided whether this will take the form of a grant or a loan.

Gurung was certainly disappointed. The Inuit Circumpolar Council described the outcome as “unacceptable.” And climate envoy Juan Carlos Monterrey Gómez, the chief negotiator for Panama, called it a “spit in the face.” 

Despite Indigenous peoples’ crucial and outsized role in climate action, their demands for financial support have again gone unheeded.

COP’s History of Exclusion

Indigenous peoples have always been shortchanged by the agreements that have come out of COP negotiations. 

In 2021, at COP26 in Glasgow, a pledge of $1.7 billion was made to support land rights and forest tenure for Indigenous peoples and local communities. And while countries are on track to meet that goal, only about 2.1 percent of this funding reached Indigenous communities directly.

Much of the funding that comes out of these global agreements is funneled through institutional banks including the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. These entities have been criticized for their approach to climate finance, particularly in relation to Indigenous peoples. By providing a significant portion of the climate finance in the form of loans rather than grants, for example, they increase the debt burden on those communities. 

Also, the process to access these funds is often complex and bureaucratic, making it difficult for Indigenous communities to benefit directly. Funds are often channeled through national governments or large organizations, which may not prioritize or effectively address the specific needs of Indigenous communities. There even have been instances where projects funded by these institutions have led to human rights abuses and displacement.

So besides a bigger “fair share,” of climate funding for Indigenous communities, Gurung wants direct access to these grants “without an international finance institution in between, like the World Bank or the IMF.” She emphasizes that Indigenous peoples are rightly afraid that those international institutions could demand economic reforms or policy changes that may not align with the priorities or needs of those communities.

“It’s important that Indigenous peoples obtain direct access and control without bureaucratic delays and mandates about how the funds are allocated and spent,” Gurung says. 

Investing in Indigenous Women and Youth

While there is much discussion about Indigenous communities, Indigenous voices aren’t heard enough at COP gatherings, Gurung says: “A lot of negotiations are not open for us.”

Many Indigenous representatives and civil society observers criticized the exclusion and lack of transparency in the negotiation process. Indigenous leaders publicly expressed their frustration with the process’s inadequate consultation of Indigenous communities. For instance, Alessandra Korap Munduruku, an Indigenous rights campaigner from Brazil, criticized the carbon-credit mechanisms being discussed, highlighting how they often lead to land grabs and displacement of Indigenous communities.

Indigenous delegates also reported limited access to negotiation rooms and decision-making processes to the Institute of Development Studies. This exclusion was highlighted by various human rights groups and Indigenous organizations, who noted that their voices were not adequately represented in the final agreements. 

As a kind of protest against this exclusion, Gurung organized a side event about Indigenous women. Along with two colleagues, she shared her experience and how climate change affects Tamang women more than men. She also highlighted the resilience and the knowledge of Indigenous women in her community and Indigenous communities more broadly: “We have more knowledge about natural medicines, about seed banks, food storage, and agricultural practices. We know the surroundings, the environment, and to work as leaders.”

Gurung argues that Indigenous female knowledge is not only richer than that of non-natives, but also superior to that of Indigenous men. She says that for men in her community, it’s more acceptable to find a job in the city, so “men are often migrating from the community.” 

Therefore, in order to make the most meaningful investments in climate solutions, the focus should be on women and youth. “For they need to gain the knowledge and they need to take leadership in the future,” Gurung says. 

The Challenge of the Maasai

The climate realities faced by the Tamang are not unlike those of the Maasai in East Africa. Pastoralist Isaac Nemuta says the effects of climate change have held him and his peers in an iron grip for decades. 

The Maasai are known as a people who hold on to their traditional way of herding—having persisted through centuries of persecution by British colonial rule and Christian missionaries—but they are now being forced to change. In the past 30 years, periods of drought have become more frequent and intense, with rising temperatures and unpredictable rainfalls. 

“In recent years, the situation has worsened,” he says. The past five consecutive rainy seasons all brought way too little water, leading to severe drought conditions. Since the end of 2020, hardly a drop of rain has fallen, which has led to the death of more than 2.5 million cattle.

With millions of pastoralists in East Africa adrift, Nemuta teamed up with colleagues to start an NGO called Climate Smart Pastoralists Limited. They help pastoralists adapt to the new climate conditions and mitigate the impacts of drought through sustainable practices such as rotational grazing, water conservation techniques, and grassland restoration. 

The NGO also engages in community education and capacity building. Their school for pastoralists, launched in 2007, serves not only Maasai in Kenya and Tanzania, but all pastoral peoples. “Even Turkana from the far north of the country attend our school,” Nemuta says.

Most of the funding for Climate Smart Pastoralists Limited comes from small and medium NGOs like Heifer International and German Agro Action (Welt Hunger Hilfe). They also receive funding through the Savory Institute and the Africa Wildlife Foundation.

Nemuta says he has tried to gain access to international climate finance money, like that coming from COP, but without results. The different funding streams for climate adaptation, mitigation, and even the loss and damage funds discussed at COP29 are simply out of reach. The application process for the climate funds that are collected on a global scale is inscrutable for small, Indigenous communities like his.

Making COP Money Accessible

Many Indigenous peoples face significant challenges in accessing the large amounts of money that come out of global conferences like the one in Baku.

The application procedures for UN funds can be highly complex and bureaucratic. Indigenous communities often lack the technical expertise and resources needed to navigate these processes effectively, according to a report from the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. 

Applications and related documents are often in languages that Indigenous peoples may not be fluent in, making it difficult for them to understand and complete the necessary paperwork. And like Nemuta’s Maasai community, many Indigenous communities are not aware of the available funding opportunities or do not have access to the necessary information to apply. 

But solutions to overcome these barriers exist. The UN itself, through the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (which organizes COP29), describes an alternative approach for Indigenous peoples to access climate funding without the bureaucratic hurdles typically associated with UN climate money. The mechanisms are built by and for Indigenous people and local communities, and they can operate in different sociocultural regions and contexts.

These Indigenous Led Funds (ILFs) provide a mechanism for resources to reach Indigenous communities directly, bypassing complex bureaucratic processes, with culturally appropriate grantmaking. They use approaches that align with Indigenous knowledge, priorities, and worldviews.

Some ILFs work internationally across several countries, while others focus on national or community-based initiatives, allowing for flexible and context-specific support. 

At the end of the day, all different forms of ILFs strengthen Indigenous peoples’ ability to make decisions about resource allocation and project implementation. And they act as intermediaries between Indigenous communities and external resources, facilitating partnerships and knowledge exchange. In short: ILFs streamline climate solutions. 

Gurung is clear that for climate solutions to get traction, climate funding needs to be available through an easy and accessible process without too much delay. In short, she says, “It needs to be Indigenous friendly.”

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.”

Ofelia, then 25, had just moved into her new home in the northern Mexico town of San Pedro de las Colonias when she vanished in 2007. A shootout between law enforcement and the Los Zetas drug cartel occurred that night, but no one knows what happened to Ofelia. Though 17 years have passed, this is the first time Martínez dared to protest her daughter’s disappearance. “I waited two years to report it,” says Martínez. “People were being murdered in San Pedro every day. If you dared to file a report, you risked being shot.”

Around 9 a.m. the following morning, a group of about 40 mothers began marching through San Pedro de las Colonias, chanting “Alive you took them! Alive we want them!”

Since the Mexican government declared war on drug cartels in December 2006 and deployed thousands of troops, widespread violence has ensued, leading to a surge in homicides, extortion, forced displacement, femicides, and disappearances. Since 2006, there have been more than 470,000 homicides and more than 116,000 disappearances in Mexico. Men between the ages of 20 and 35 are disproportionately likely to be disappeared, though there are regions where a significant number of women have disappeared.

San Pedro de las Colonias, an agricultural town in the Coahuila desert, has officially recorded 106 disappearances between 2007 and 2013 during the conflict between the Los Zetas and the Sinaloa cartels for control of the La Laguna region, a key part of a drugs and arms trafficking route between Mexico and the United States. However, the actual number of missing persons remains unknown.

Relatives of these thousands of victims, especially mothers of the disappeared, often called madres buscadoras, or searching mothers, have spearheaded a movement advocating for strategies, laws, and actions to locate their loved ones, seek justice, and prevent future disappearances. 

Although levels of violence have significantly decreased due to the collaborative efforts of the local government, civil society, and businessmen, families continue to fear reporting disappearances due to threats and persecution. In many cases, they have been coerced into accepting the loss of their loved ones.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., the idea of attacking Mexico to combat drug cartels has gained popularity, particularly among the Republican elite. Although Donald Trump has repeatedly denied supporting Project 2025, this 900-page policy urges the next U.S. administration to adopt a “creative and aggressive approach” to addressing drug cartels at the U.S.–Mexico border, which echoes some of Trump’s promises to send “kill teams” into Mexico to assassinate drug kingpins. 

However, such an intervention could lead to a continued battle against Mexico’s most vulnerable without guaranteeing significant impacts on organized crime enterprises or drug trafficking.

The Legacy of U.S.-Funded Militarization in Mexico

When then Mexican President Felipe Calderón declared war on organized crime, he received more than $1.5 billion in U.S. military aid through the Mérida Initiative. During Calderón’s six-year term, the Mexican military, with U.S. assistance, arrested or killed 25 of Mexico’s 37 high-level drug lords. 

While Mexican authorities have declared the “kingpin strategy” mostly a success, it has also fueled intra-cartel violence, leading to the fragmentation of the cartels. According to the International Crisis Group, at least 543 armed groups operated in Mexico between mid-2009 and the end of 2020. Fragmentation has also escalated local violence and put citizens, journalists, and human rights defenders at risk as criminal groups diversify their illicit activities, including human trafficking, poaching, extortion, illegal logging, and more.

Even searching for the disappeared is a dangerous endeavor: Since 2010, 21 people have lost their lives while searching for their relatives. One mother, Lorenza Cano, has been missing since Jan. 15, 2024. And yet, despite the danger, Martin Villalobos, a spokesperson for Movimiento por Nuestros Desaparecidos en México, a movement uniting more than 60 collectives of families of the disappeared, says these families are still best positioned to understand the operations of criminal groups and facilitate searches for their loved ones.

“We’ve been saying that we families, across the country, know the territory,” says Villalobos. “How does organized crime operate? Not based on the result of a police investigation, but rather from our own experience. This knowledge has cost some of our compañeras their lives.”

Despite the risks, these families have often exposed varying degrees of collusion between state agents and organized crime that make their work even more dangerous. In 2020, General Salvador Cienfuegos, who was head of Mexico’s army from 2012 to 2018 and once the country’s secretary of national defense, was arrested by U.S. authorities in Los Angeles on charges of participating in an international drug trafficking and money laundering network. After being pressured by Mexican authorities, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration dropped the charges and released Cienfuegos, who was then bestowed an honorary military decoration in 2023.

This level of collusion places madres buscadoras in greater jeopardy. As drug cartels continue to infiltrate the Mexican state, from local officials to high-level government, “silence zones” emerge, where reporting human rights abuses and seeking justice becomes too dangerous.

Despite the challenging conditions families of the disappeared face, hundreds of collectives continue to lead searches across the country. In Culiacán, Sinaloa, Sabuesos Guerreras, a group of nearly 2,000 relatives of the disappeared, has located more than 650 bodies in clandestine graves. “We have found more than 18,950 charred fragments in water wells and rivers,” María Isabel Cruz Bernal, founder of the collective, adds. 

Cruz is the mother of Yosimar García Cruz, a police officer who disappeared in 2017 in Culiacán. She believes the only thing authorities are doing is “betting on our deaths” to end the search for the disappeared. Through their investigations, Sabuesos Guerreras have identified high-ranking officials colluding with criminal groups. They have urged the government to purge corrupt institutions and authorities as a first step toward increasing trust and transparency, but their demands have been ignored.  “There is no security strategy that protects us,” she adds.

A Civilian-Led Path Forward

In September, Mexico’s Chamber of Deputies approved a constitutional-reform initiative that would place the civilian-led National Guard under the control of the armed forces. Fundar, a center for analysis and research on democracy-related issues, warned that the concentration of power in the state and armed forces has resulted in grave human-rights violations that “disproportionately affect marginalized groups, exacerbating their precariousness and intersecting with gender and ethnic vulnerabilities.” 

While a direct connection between the surge in disappearances and the country’s militarization is difficult to establish, Alejandra Ramírez, a researcher at Fundar, said it’s concerning that public security remains entrusted to military forces that often operate with impunity. “Instead of continuing to bet on the much-emphasized strengthening of state and municipal police forces, prosecutors’ offices, and other institutions, it appears that these entities [the military] are being given primary responsibility,” Ramírez says. “History shows that they have a track record of committing crimes that go unpunished and unsolved.”

In Culiacán, for instance, videos obtained by the influential daily Reforma show military and National Guard forces shooting at and detaining a man on Oct. 7. The footage suggests they planned to kill him but abandoned the attempt when they realized they were being filmed.  

In early October, Mexico’s new government unveiled its strategy to combat violence and crime. Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s first female president, said she would not engage in a new war against Mexico’s powerful drug cartels. “The war on drugs will not return,” she said after taking office. “We are not looking for extrajudicial executions, which is what was happening before. What are we going to use? Prevention, attention to the causes, intelligence, and presence [of authorities].”

Instead of deploying assassination squads to capture drug kingpins (as Trump suggested), the Mexican government wants to strengthen the National Guard and enhance intelligence gathering, similar to the work families have been doing for years. 

While both countries continue to rely on military efforts to counterattack drug cartels, families are demanding technical and financial assistance to accelerate the search of the missing and the identification of the more than 70,000 bodies that remain in the forensic backlog. As a first step, they seek to initiate a national dialogue, with the support of the international community, to advocate for their demands against the Mexican government and amplify the urgency of their struggle.  

Meanwhile, they continue searching for their loved ones, gathering information on criminal modus operandi, demanding preventive measures, and calling for the implementation of real actions. During the march to commemorate the International Day of the Disappeared, dozens of families walked through the quiet streets of San Pedro de las Colonias, breaking a decade-long silence. Many onlookers stood in stunned disbelief, watching the procession. 

Martínez walked in the middle holding the tarp featuring Ofelia’s face. For two hours, Martínez and the other mothers marched, chanting, “Where are they, where are they?”

Now, more than one year since the world started watching the genocide in Gaza—a reality Palestinian journalists have been trying to broadcast for generations—the general public is finally sharing in the Palestinian resistance. People around the globe have blocked highways, chained themselves to weapons carriers, rallied despite violent assaults by police, and orchestrated legal campaigns to call for the liberation of Palestine. “Israel can no longer coast on this idea of being this beacon of democracy in the Middle East,” Elal says. “People understand intuitively [that] this is a colonial situation.” 

But as solidarity with Palestinians grows, so too does repression. In the United States, lawmakers have tried charging protesters with domestic terrorism, while university administrators have made “Zionist” a protected class, fired professors who’ve advocated for Palestine, and banned protest encampments. Mainstream media outlets publish inaccuracies dehumanizing Palestinians, while politicians maintain the claim that Israel has a “right to exist” and “defend itself.” 

Yet as those in power continue to attempt to crush the Free Palestine Movement, artists, writers, and other cultural workers are using creative practices to resist. They’ve organized to fight censorship, exposed the propagandist nature of mainstream media, and asserted Palestinians’ rights to their land and lives. They’ve refused to accept genocide and colonialism as normal. “That, I think, is actually what preserves your humanity and your sanity,” Elal says. “The fate of Palestinians is bound up in your own, whether you like it or not.” 

Narrative Resistance

Since Israel’s inception 76 years ago, government and media institutions have continuously worked to control the public’s collective memory of Palestine. In 1969, Israel’s prime minister denied that Palestinians existed before their land was violently colonized. After Hamas carried out Operation Al-Aqsa Flood in October 2023, tearing down walls that helped make Gaza an open-air prison, media outlets described the attack as “unprovoked.” When Israel’s defense minister announced its food and water blockade on Gaza days later, he called it a fight against “human animals,” further dehumanizing Palestinians and their resistance against occupation. 

“Narratives are used to justify systems of domination,” Elal says. “Palestinians want liberation, freedom, the right to live in their homes and return to their homes, just like any other people. It requires this enormous apparatus of narrative to dehumanize and delegitimize Palestinian claims to the right of return, sovereignty, living free from violence, on a land where they aren’t second-class citizens subjected to genocide.” 

According to the Gaza Health Ministry, Israel has killed nearly 44,000 Palestinians since Oct. 7, 2023. However, scholars estimate that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have died from starvation, infection, and disease caused by Israel’s food and water blockades and destruction of Gaza’s hospitals. The death toll continues to rise, and attempts to rationalize the Israeli government’s murderous impulse are proving ineffective.

Polls across the West show that an increasing number of people disapprove of their governments sending weapons to Israel, and young people in the U.S. are more likely to sympathize with Palestinians than older generations are. “This didn’t start last October,” says Elal. “The roots of what we’re seeing now with this genocide are structural, historical, and political.” 

Since 2021, Elal has worked as the information designer for Visualizing Palestine, an organization founded in 2012 that uses data imagery to communicate the experiences of Palestinians and disrupt colonial narratives. The organization’s infographics, interactive visuals, and posters have been circulated all over the world, published by major media outlets, posted on subway billboards, and translated into multiple languages. 

“We see our role in the movement in terms of how we can intervene in narrative and media discourse around Palestine,” says Elal. “Especially since the start of the genocide, we’ve seen how rampant this dehumanization is, how distorted the Palestinian narrative is, how there’s not a lot of grappling with the deep history of the legacy of colonialism in Palestine.” 

Visualizing Palestine works with partner organizations, including some in Palestine, to turn research reports into accessible visual resources. For instance, its “Ongoing Expulsion” infographic presents side-by-side images from the 1948 Nakba and the current genocide in Gaza to show how the latter is an extension of the previous catastrophe. Another project called “Stop Killer AI” demonstrates how Israel uses artificial intelligence programs to surveil and kill Palestinians. 

Other visuals aim to expand the documentation of Israel’s brutality beyond statistics, including its impact on those who survive. “Four Wars Old” takes the form of a child development chart that illustrates how children born in Gaza in 2007 have lived through four wars before turning 18, suffering compounded trauma. “74 Elders” memorializes Palestinians who survived the 1948 Nakba to later be killed by Israel in 2023. “These people are older than the state that is killing them,” Elal explains. “[Palestinians] aren’t numbers. Each one of these people who has been killed [is] an entire world.” 

The collective’s new book, Visualizing Palestine: A Chronicle of Colonialism and the Struggle for Liberation, spotlights more than 200 visuals created in the past decade, alongside essays on humanizing data and provoking narrative change. Elal believes putting this resource in people’s hands can help organizers, advocates, and educators “build the kind of people power we need.” 

The Role of the Artist

When Israel began bombing Gaza in October 2023, Hannah Priscilla Craig was among the group of artists who decided to launch Artists Against Apartheid, a movement using art and culture as “tools of liberation in the struggle for sovereignty, dignity, and self-determination.” They released a solidarity statement, which received more than 8,000 signatures in the first few days. Soon after, Artists Against Apartheid transformed into a network that encourages artists to embed themselves in organizing and activism. “It’s not just we as individuals [who] are dedicating ourselves to Palestine,” Craig explains. “It’s actually a recognition of the practice of the artwork as part of the overall strategy toward liberation.” 

Craig, who serves as the director of arts, culture, and communications for the People’s Forum—the community space in New York City where Artists Against Apartheid originated—sees how integral cultural production is to raising awareness about the plight of Palestinians. “People are consuming culture almost every moment of every day … whether we consciously realize it or not,” she says. “It’s important for us, on the side of justice [and] liberation, to take up that tool—and take it more seriously than our enemies.” 

Artists Against Apartheid offers six toolkits to help artists create banner drops, public art installations, film screenings, street theater, and more to bring the Palestinian liberation movement into their communities. Artists have performed the Gaza Monologues (theatrical testimonies written by Palestinian youth), created protest puppets of President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the annual March on Washington, and developed more than 6,000 poster designs. Craig says the posters have been pasted around Barcelona, Spain; exhibited in galleries in Arizona; and made into stickers circulated throughout the U.S. 

People are consuming culture almost every moment of every day. … It’s important for us, on the side of justice [and] liberation, to take up that tool—and take it more seriously than our enemies.” —Hannah Priscilla Craig

Artists Against Apartheid draws inspiration from the Medu Art Ensemble, a group of cultural workers who organized against apartheid in South Africa in the 1970s and later inspired an international boycott that helped undo apartheid policies. Craig also highlights the John Reed Clubs, which were first formed in 1929 by artists, writers, and journalists to advocate for better working conditions during the Great Depression. 

“Those histories are often ignored, forgotten, and left out of the history books because they are so dangerous to the ruling class,” Craig says. Artists Against Apartheid works to “reinvigorate and bring back to the forefront the way that artists and cultural workers are part of political [and liberation] movements.” 

The number of signatories on Artists Against Apartheid’s statement has nearly doubled in the year since it was released, with prominent musicians including Kehlani, Macklemore, and Noname signing on and using their art to raise money for Palestinian organizations. “Musicians are ready to take on the charge and the task of speaking clearly and with conviction about the need to take seriously the political situation in the world,” Craig says. “It’s really showing that these cultural spaces, these social spaces, are also spaces of political struggle.” 

Ultimately, Artists Against Apartheid calls on artists of all media to use creative intervention as a strategy for mobilization. “The reality is that struggle happens everywhere,” she explains. “We have to fight back in all of the spaces that are available to us.” 

Do Not Consent

While artists continue to envision an end to the U.S.-backed genocide, Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG) are disrupting the media apparatus that defends it. After releasing an open letter in October 2023, the coalition of media, cultural, and academic workers has engaged in a series of actions to call out national media outlets over their coverage of Israel and Palestine, including The New York Times. 

“[The Times] is considered the paper of record in the U.S. [and] in the West,” says Nour, a writer and member of WAWOG. (Nour requested to be identified by first name only and emphasized that the coalition acts as a collective.) But The Times has been “manufacturing consent for a genocide.” 

Some writers resigned from their positions at The Times after it cracked down on its own journalists for publicly supporting Palestine. Others, including Nour, occupied the lobby of the outlet’s New York headquarters in November 2023 to protest its coverage, carrying agitprop newspapers titled The New York War Crimes. “The Times is equivalent to an arms manufacturer, but in the cultural space,” says Naib, a journalist and writer who is also part of WAWOG and has asked to be identified by first name only out of concern for retaliation. The paper represents, in theory, “both objectivity [and] the high-minded, liberal elite of America.” 

Following the protest, the coalition evolved the agitprop into a digital and print movement newspaper, debunking the false notion of objectivity and critiquing and analyzing The Times’ coverage of Israel. In the article “There’s a Word for That,” the paper provides a style guide demonstrating how The Times’ word choice, syntax, and passive voice push the narrative that Israel is fighting a “just war.” Another New York War Crimes article revealed that The Times quoted Israeli and American sources following Oct. 7, 2023, more than three times as often as Palestinian sources, and U.S. officials more than all of its Palestinian sources combined. The New York Times did not respond to a request for comment. 

Naib says mainstream reporters use other rhetorical tools to “create empathy amongst American audiences for Israel and not for Palestine.” For example, when a story describes occupational violence against Palestinians, it doesn’t specify that it was done by Israel or the Israeli military. “It’s ‘a strike killed Palestinians,’ not ‘an Israeli strike,’” he explains, referencing coverage of the ongoing air strikes. “In almost all media, any discussion of Palestine will always come with, ‘These events started on October 7.’ … We always have to acknowledge what happened on October 7, [but never what happened] before October 7.” 

WAWOG is also committed to shining a light on the humanity of Palestinians. Through more than a dozen issues of The New York War Crimes, the coalition has published the words of Palestinian writers and organizations; spotlighted Black, Kashmiri, and queer solidarity; and uplifted the voices of those participating in the student intifada (uprising). They’ve also inspired the birth of similar publications such as The Harvard Crimeson. 

The coalition also encourages audiences to collectively hold establishment media accountable. “We think so much about what is happening in the writing itself, but being an observer, a reader, [or] in the audience is not a passive activity,” Naib says. “You are actively legitimizing the organization by consuming what they’re producing.” 

Nour adds that audiences can “refuse to be part of the New York Times narrative” by boycotting publications complicit in their coverage of Palestine, while motivating media workers to organize within their workplaces. “If we refuse to write the way they want us to write, we can actually do something,” she says. 

The network’s plan to build a “cultural front for a free Palestine” also includes a course syllabus that covers organizing history in both Palestine and the U.S., touching on the Black Panther Party as well as movements formed during the Vietnam War and the AIDS crisis. “Culture is oftentimes the strongest tool in maintaining the status quo,” Naib says. “Our role as cultural workers isn’t only to produce culture; it’s to take action.” 

A Dance for Palestine

“It is the right of children in Gaza to be joyful,” says Bashar Al-Bilbisi, a 24-year-old Palestinian dancer, theater artist, pharmacist, and head of the Al-Fursan Arts Ensemble. Since 2016, the troupe of young people has performed and trained others throughout Gaza in dabke, a traditional and Indigenous Palestinian dance. 

When Al-Fursan first launched, Al-Bilbisi used dance to address issues such as COVID-19, gender-based violence, and youth emigration. The group performed at the Palestine International Festival and toured around France. Their performances even contributed to the registering of dabke as “intangible heritage” to be protected under UNESCO guidelines. 

But everything changed when Israel began relentlessly bombing Gaza and destroying theaters and cultural spaces. Now, Al-Bilbisi and his fellow dancers mainly teach dabke to children in displacement camps across the region. “We face lots of trauma, lots of wars, and we need a tool such as dance to get that out,” says Al-Bilbisi, whose responses have been translated from Arabic to English. 

Sometimes that means encouraging children to “forget about the external world and to enjoy themselves” during training. Other times, it’s leaving space for them to grieve. During one exercise, a young girl suddenly began to cry. Her two brothers had been taken by Israeli forces, and she no longer knew where they were or if they were alive. “I left her alone to cry as much as she wanted,” Al-Bilbisi says. Afterward, she began talking more openly about her brothers’ capture and became more involved with the group. “That’s why I would work on the training of dabke. It helps them express themselves,” he adds. “It’s not just about movement or choreography; it’s what’s beyond the performance.” 

Al-Fursan trainers are located throughout the Gaza Strip, including in heated war zones where, Al-Bilbisi says, “the only thing between them and death is a coincidence.” Two trainers were bombed by Israel at the Church of Saint Porphyrius; another in North Gaza trained children whose parents were killed in yet another Israeli bombing, Al-Bilbisi says. “Whenever we go to train children, there is always somebody targeted and killed as we go.” 

At the time of this writing, Al-Bilbisi is based in a supposed safe zone. He plans to continue the work, saying, “The risks are enormous … but we believe in a mission and a vision, and we would like to fulfill it.” 

Though the genocide has yet to end, he is firm in the role the ensemble will play in rebuilding Gaza and all of Palestine. “If houses are demolished, they can be rebuilt,” he says. “What’s more difficult is to rebuild people psychologically and to rebuild humanity.” 

That’s why the ensemble also works to deepen the world’s understanding and awareness of what it’s like to be a Palestinian in Gaza. In 2023 the group released Trying to Survive, an award-winning film directed by Al-Bilbisi that focuses on how artists’ lives changed throughout the last year of occupation. It has been shown at film festivals across the world. “The message—as a group, as an ensemble, as trainers, as artists, as children whom we work with, and as a community in Gaza—is that we would like war to stop and that we love life,” Al-Bilbisi says. 

Underneath it all, he believes it is his duty to create not only artists, but human beings who belong to their land. “When we are in one line, holding each other’s hands, it gives the sense of solidarity, that we are all together,” he continues. “It also shows how rooted we are, touching the land or the floor. We’re there, strongly. We’re there.” 

After the Dull Knife Battle in November 1876, a society of Cheyenne men sat down and documented their account of the events on a buffalo hide or robe—the traditional medium on which my ancestors told stories and kept records. The buffalo hide is where they memorialized important moments in the Tribe’s history, as well as their own personal achievements. And they did so using pigments they created from their environment with ingredients like ash, soils, berries, and plants.

The Dull Knife hide was kept in a camp at the foothills of the Bighorn Mountains. But this camp was a major target for the United States Cavalry, which was still in search of those tribes involved in the Battle of the Little Bighorn, which had taken place in June 1876 and left the U.S. military sorely defeated.

After scouts reported the camp’s whereabouts, the cavalry ambushed it. The Cheyennes put up a good fight but eventually fled deeper into the Bighorn Mountains in freezing conditions. As the cavalry raided the now-empty camp, a soldier stole the painted buffalo hide out of a tipi. And thus the beloved hide, and the story it told, began its journey away from its people.

Heartbreakingly, this kind of theft was all too common for us. It was part of the settler-colonialist effort to erase us from our homelands—and erase us altogether. Oftentimes when sacred objects were taken from camps, they were locked in private collections with no way to track or find them. Many were never seen again, and the Cheyennes had mourned the loss of this buffalo hide and accepted its fate to be gone forever. But after more than 100 years, this hide was once again seen by the descendants of the people from which it came.

On the 146th anniversary of the battle, the unveiling and honoring of this historical object took place at the Brinton Museum in northern Wyoming. Tribal Members and the Northern Cheyenne Tribal Historic Preservation Office were invited to view it. Many eyes filled with tears as our traditional honor songs filled the room. The sacred objects that surrounded us, caged in glass, hummed in their display cases. They, too, were excited to be a part of this honoring; it’s not everyday we as Indigenous people get to practice our ceremonies for pieces put into institutions. This was a raw and powerful experience for everyone and everything involved.

At this moment, in the presence of it all, I felt the importance of keeping our hide-painting tradition alive. I understood the impact this form of storytelling has on my own culture and on those who experience it from near and far. Although this painted retelling of the Dull Knife Battle now hangs in another non-Indigenous collection, it is closer to home than it’s ever been, and relatives are able to view it freely.

And so, in the winter of 2023, I began my renaissance of buffalo hide paintings, not far from where the Dull Knife robe was painted nearly 150 years earlier.

As a storyteller and an artist, I have painted with many different media before, on canvas, ledger paper, felt cowboy hats, and more. I had never painted on something like a tanned buffalo hide, though. Plastic paints like acrylics simply didn’t stick to the surface. Oil paints bled and left dark spots. This required me to use trial and error, as well as asking elders, scouring the internet, and reading historical books to figure out the best way to use modern materials for such a traditional technique.

To practice, I started with a vintage elk hide, which I hoped would behave similarly to buffalo, but was much easier to source. Black, white, blue, red, and yellow pigments sat in small vibrant piles of powder on my palette. While I wasn’t able to source everything the way my ancestors had, I gathered materials from far and wide to bring these pieces to life. Slowly, I began to add water and buffalo fat, mixing them with the powders until the consistency was smooth and even. The thinner the paint was, I found, the easier it was to push it across the surface of the hide.

I hung the elk hide from the wall, tacked along the top and pulled taut by gravity. I sprayed a layer of water and watched as the hide went from a bright off-white to a dark tan. Spraying the hide opens the skin’s pores and makes the painting process much easier. After a deep breath to steady my hand, I began with my first paint stroke. The nerves, the worry, and all other thoughts in my head went silent. I could feel my ancestors guiding my hands as I worked the earth pigments into the tanned hide. Almost like being in a trance, I brought paint to hide without feeling the passage of time, and the portrait of a woman appeared in front of me. She was an Arapaho/Cheyenne woman warrior who gave me the confidence that the vision I was seeing in my head was achievable in real life.

After I finished the elk hide, I was ready to move on to the much larger buffalo hide that was patiently waiting its turn to become a part of my story, the story of a modern Indigenous artist. I already knew who I wanted to paint next: I could see in my mind’s eye the contrasts of bright red and electric blue against neutral black and white, and the tan of the unpainted skin of the hide.

I chose to paint an Apsáalooke (Crow) medicine woman by the name of Pretty Shield. A strong matriarch revered for her knowledge of medicinal plants, Pretty Shield had influence that reached far beyond her own tribe. I chose to render her in black-and-white natural pigments, representing a time when reservations were fresh and photographers were documenting the foreign feelings throughout Indian Country in black and white.

Rising above her is a halo of medicinal plants. I chose to represent this aspect of her work in contemporary color to show its continued relevance and vitality in modern times.

Each aspect of the hide represents a different generation of storytelling and art. The first generation is the hide itself, the traditional material. The second generation is the black-and-white photography that captured the first accounts of reservation life. The third generation is the contemporary style of bright colors and stylized plants.

My own love for medicinal plants comes from another matriarchal figure in my life: my mother. Bringing wellness back to the reservation through healers, medicinal plants, and creative outlets, she provided opportunities for people to help themselves, much like Pretty Shield. These two women reflect each other’s energy and inspire me to see the medicine women of today.

Pretty Shield is the first in a collection of women I plan to pay tribute to with my paint. Each of them has impacted their Plains Tribe communities with their inspiring accomplishments and gifts. I want to honor our shared stories by continuing to push the boundaries of traditional materials and contemporary ideas. I want to uplift the generations surrounding me to live in their medicine, to live out their dreams, and to live how our ancestors dreamed for us.

My name is Shawnee Real Bird, and I am Apsáalooke (Crow). Five years ago, I held a first-edition Edward Curtis portfolio in my hands for the first time. Curtis’ life’s work revolved around preserving his outsider view of lifestyles that existed before the United States of America did—before we were ever called “Indians.”

He spent the first three decades of the 20th century photographing more than 80 tribes across the continent, including mine. The published result, The North American Indian, is a 20-volume set that captures a pivotal time in Native American history. Curtis recorded my Apsáalooke people in 1908, as they began their transition from nomadic freedom on the plains to isolation on reservations.

Among the thousands of sepia-toned images Curtis took is one of my great-great-grandfather, Richard Wallace, known to our people as Eyes Taken Out, as well as one of his brother, John. Today these visual remembrances aid the oral histories of my people. Born in 1998, I am part of a generation of Native Americans who know the stories of life on the plains but whose upbringings reflect reservation life. For us, The North American Indian has become a sort of Rosetta stone, helping us connect our ancestral memories with our modern lives.

In the spirit of his great-grandfather, whom the Northern Plains people affectionately referred to as Shadow Catcher, Graybill and his wife, Coleen, are working to capture shadows of today’s realities. Their “Descendants Project” aims to amplify the voices of Native Peoples whose ancestors were photographed by Curtis.

I am one of those descendants.

Five generations after Curtis’ visit to the Northern Plains Tribes, Graybill journeyed to the Crow Reservation to capture my story on a dry plate glass negative. I chose to bring him to the Wolf Teeth Mountains, where my mother rode horses with me in her belly and where I now chase wild horses on foot. It is also the only place I’ve ever seen my dad, a lifelong Indian-Cowboy, connect to himself, and only then on the back of a horse. It’s a place his ancestral DNA understands better than anywhere else. Among the sagebrush, my father and the horse become one spirit.

I began riding horses with my parents when I was 3. It was then that I witnessed my dad’s ability to create a connection to our First Maker and integrate that spiritual relationship into his modern existence. As a young person, I wondered what I would connect with that could become a portal to the old way of life I longed for.

Growing up on the reservation, I heard oral histories from my elders and often questioned where I belonged. Those who existed before me thrived in the harsh mountains of Montana. They survived wars with enemy tribes, followed by genocide and boarding schools, then reservation life, always striving to preserve what makes our Apsáalooke hearts strong.

In today’s fast-paced world, filled with isolating technologies, the way of life that my Apsáalooke elders taught me felt out of place. It wasn’t until I learned to fly that I was able to merge my modern identity with my ancestral roots. In 2019, I became the first Apsáalooke airplane pilot. In the cockpit of a Cessna 172, I find solace with the sky beings who populate my tribal histories. When the plane’s altimeter reads 10,000 feet—the same altitude at which my Apsáalooke people once sought visions atop mountains—I honor the ability to connect, to have finally found my place among the clouds.

As Graybill sets up the vintage camera, I close my eyes (for all great things are felt most fully with your eyes closed). I am full of adrenaline, surrounded by 15 wild horses from the herd of my grandfather, Timber Leader. I know the feeling well. It bounces between the palms of my hands and gathers as sweat along my lips. I trust the horses with the entirety of my being. I take a deep breath and imagine my light expanding beyond me. All the generations of cowboys and medicine women that make up my “blood quantum” stand behind me. I put my spirit in that moment to be captured by exposure and alchemy.

From behind the camera I hear Graybill say, “Got it,” and we all breathe again. The feeling from my hands disappears. It now lives within that dry plate image. More than 100 years separate my image from those captured by Curtis. Looking at my photograph next to those of my ancestors, I am unrecognizable to them, and one day I will be unrecognizable to the generations that follow. Only the contents of our hearts will reveal our creation stories to be the same.

While enslaved people were intentionally kept illiterate, the abolitionist movement still treated these pamphlets—and antislavery newspapers—as signposts, signaling that even amid their suffering, enslaved people were being fought for. Their human condition wasn’t being disregarded in favor of profit; instead, there was a growing movement advocating for their freedom and for their right to lead a self-determined life. 

In her new book, We Will Rest!: The Art of Escape, Tricia Hersey calls upon some of these same abolitionist tools, including pamphlets, hymnals, poetry, and imagery, to convey a similarly urgent message: If we do not take rest seriously and divorce ourselves from capitalism, we will die much sooner than we should. While that might feel alarmist, it’s a message Hersey has been conveying for years as the shepherd of the Nap Ministry. The “Nap Bishop” uses her own life as a model for how we can collectively escape “grind culture” and embrace rest as a spiritual practice. 

“I thought I would die,” Hersey writes in We Will Rest!, an unconventional manifesto and meditation about how she learned to care for herself in a world that doesn’t allow us to slow down. “I thought the exhaustion of capitalism would crush me. Rest saved my life.” As Hersey often reminds us: Rest is a matter of life and death. 

Rest is essential to our long-term survival as individuals and a collective. Birthing a creative renaissance requires rest that isn’t reliant on productivity. Hersey’s book calls upon our ancestors, including Harriet Tubman, the Underground Railroad conductor who helped people escape enslavement, to become escape artists ourselves—to help unchain our imaginations from the bounds of capitalism and embrace new possibilities. “Anyone in this culture who believes and feels they are enough right now has begun the escape artist transformation,” Hersey writes. “To know in the deepest parts of your soul that your birth grants you divinity, rest, care, and power is a seed planted in fertile ground.” 

Much like those abolitionist pamphlets, We Will Rest! serves as a guidepost for those who seek rest but are unsure if it’s available to them. The book begins with a thought-provoking question: “How do you find rest in a capitalist, white supremacist, patriarchal, ableist system?” This system teaches us that rest must be earned through work, and received with humble gratitude. But Hersey offers an alternative: If we become “escape artists” or “tricksters” who defy systems that discourage us from rest, then we can prioritize our needs. 

For Black people, in particular, Hersey accurately argues that rest is our ancestral inheritance and must be protected at all costs. “The first step for morphing into an escape artist is belief,” she writes. “You must believe you have the power to refuse. You must believe you have been gifted with everything necessary. You must be a trickster. No matter what, you must not show fear. We are abundant.” 

Once we believe we’re entitled to rest and our ancestors have paved the way for us to claim this birthright, then we must imagine the life we desire for ourselves. “Create community,” Hersey writes. “Be community. Community care can seem impossible when you are exhausted. It is possible.” It is only through crafting this community— day by day, moment by moment, and person to person—that change can come. 

It’s not as complicated as we might make it out to be. The world we imagine will come to us through silence, through daydreaming, and through unwavering belief. “Every day, morning or night, or whenever you can steal away, find silence,” she writes. “Even if for only a few minutes.” 

We don’t need to have it all figured out to begin this personal and collective rest revolution. “Capitalism has a choke hold over our lives right now,” Hersey writes. “The next second, the next minute, the next hour, is ours to refuse the grind. We can craft and build temporary spaces of joy and freedom here now.” 

Like those abolitionist pamphlets, We Will Rest! offers encouragement in times of uncertainty—a reminder of our fundamental humanity, and affirms the truth that rest is ours for the taking. And we’ve already done all we need to do to “deserve” the freedom it brings. 

The shout came from a group of Proud Boys, a far-right street gang, while they approached a picket line organized by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in September 2018. While the IWW, a radical labor union that unionized a fast-food chain in Portland, Oregon, and Washington State, is certainly anti-fascist, this was a union action—not an “antifa” protest. But those facts mattered little to the right-wing agitators who had made Portland a flash point in political violence. As the Proud Boys sought to instigate, one IWW member, Sinead Steiner, remembers union activists pivoting in an attempt to de-escalate. 

IWW members engaged the Proud Boys in mundane discussions about labor law while other demonstrators began using silly chants to lower the emotional temperature. The method was effective, no one faced harm, and the union action continued. This was not the first time the far right had threatened the IWW, so members knew they needed to walk into any protest with a nimble plan that included employing some form of community self-defense. 

As Donald Trump ascended to power in 2016, there was dramatic growth in hate crimes as well as far-right and racist groups such as the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and militias, and other neo-Nazi formations. They stormed U.S. cities, often holding rallies intended to provoke counterprotesters whom they could attack. As a result, there was a rise in left-wing formations, including the John Brown Gun Club and the Socialist Rifle Association, that say armed community self-defense may be a necessary component of safety, which in this case means protecting activists from racist militants. 

The threats that the far right presented to Portland’s left—along with the historical repression of unions by racist foot soldiers—are why unionists were prepared in Portland that afternoon. In the 1910s and ’20s, IWW members, who were called “Wobblies,” invited coal miners and others to join “industrial unions” to win power by organizing as many workers as possible. Meanwhile, mine owners hired “Pinkertons,” private security contractors whose job was to disrupt strikes with force in the 19th and early 20th century. 

The Ku Klux Klan, which, like later fascist groups, despised the anti-capitalist and multiracial implications of the IWW, also showed up to crush labor. In June 1924, members of the Ku Klux Klan attacked IWW members in San Pedro, California, injuring 300 members while kidnapping, tarring, and feathering others. To be a unionist, and a leftist, was to be a target. 

Amid this rise in brutality and repression, some IWW members created the IWW General Defense Committee (GDC) in 1917 as a separate organization to support activists facing reprisals. Nearly a century later, IWW members in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota—some of whom had been involved in anti-fascist organizing across the 1980s and ’90s—re-engaged the GDC as an anti-fascist auxiliary to the IWW. GDC chapters then popped up around the country, including in Portland, to fight the fascist insurgency and to defend communities against a rash of street violence. 

These kinds of threats were nothing new. Historically, wherever working-class social movements grow, fascists see them as distinct threats both because of their politics and the marginalized communities they represent. To guard against this, self-defense projects—organized efforts where people from these communities are trained, and often armed—are formed to ward off these outside threats. Whether the appearance of self-defense squads is enough to scare off fascist attacks or if actual force is necessary to fight far-right militants back, these kinds of formations have been a reasonably common feature of how communities maintain their autonomy during escalating right-wing violence. 

At the same time, the police—ostensibly defenders of peace and order—often have links to far-right organizations and rarely keep activists safe from right-wing assaults. For abolitionists who prefer transformative justice to incarceration, police are not the answer to community safety. “To me, community self-defense can be … an alternative to the police and courts, but it would depend on the situation—and for that matter the community,” says Daryle Lamont Jenkins, founder of the anti-fascist One People’s Project and its news website, Idavox. “It means you do as much as you can to handle a situation as a community when one arises.” 

Community self-defense has become central to contemporary social movements. Just as their predecessors did, activists today seek a safety model that understands the threats they face and doesn’t reproduce the problems of the justice system. 

Deep Roots

Social movements have historically had a self-defense component. Many earlier left-wing political parties or organizations had a militant wing, in which members were trained as a defensive force that could keep their growing membership safe from violent right-wing counterefforts. 

In the early 20th century, the Jewish Labour Bund, a Jewish socialist movement involved in organizing labor unions and Yiddish schools around Eastern Europe and Russia, created self-defense squads to protect Jewish communities from racist attacks, known as “pogroms,” which were escalating during that time. 

By 1905 there were Jewish self-defense groups in 42 cities, and they were often a collaborative offshoot from various leftist groups. Because many left-wing revolutionaries saw both modern nation states and reactionary political movements as their enemies, they believed they had to take measures to keep themselves safe from both entities. 

Much of the postwar left emerged directly out of the need for community safety. Take, for instance, the Black Power movement, which formed in the 1960s and ’70s and considered resilience and empowerment to be central to their work. “I have asserted the right of Negroes to meet the violence of the Ku Klux Klan by armed self-defense—and have acted on it,” wrote Robert F. Williams in 1962. Williams was an organizer who took control of the Monroe, North Carolina, chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, grew it by hundreds, and chartered it with the National Rifle Association to teach members how to defend themselves against Klan terror. 

In 1966 the Black Panther Party was founded first and foremost as an organization to monitor and intervene on police violence, a project the party eventually saw as part of a “united front against fascism.” That slogan became the name for the Panthers’ 1969 conference that convened a range of other radical groups, including Students for a Democratic Society, the Young Patriots Organization, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. 

In 1966, Panthers began armed patrols of Oakland neighborhoods as a message to local police not to threaten the rights and safety of Black residents. They held rallies when police refused to investigate police killings, such as the 1967 killing of construction worker Denzil Dowell. The Panthers used these opportunities to teach community members how to build armed self-defense squads as both an alternative to the police and a deterrent against police violence. The Panthers inspired other self-defense efforts, including the Lavender Panthers (sometimes known as Purple Panthers), an armed defense group formed by the Gay Activist Alliance in 1973 to defend San Francisco’s LGBTQ community against homophobic attacks. 

“Something that the Black radical tradition tells us … is that we can’t organize in just one mode,” says Jeanelle Hope, Ph.D., an associate professor of African American Studies at Prairie View A&M University who studies Black anti-fascist movements. Along with legal pathways, self-defense, and more radical anarchist tactics, Hope points to the myriad mutual aid programs the Black Panther Party organized to meet people’s daily needs, including offering free breakfast to children and running the Black People’s Free Store. 

This history creates what Ejeris Dixon described as a movement lineage, whereby she and others come from a tradition of radicals “who have dedicated our lives to our community safety.” This communal resiliency inspired Dixon to co-write “Get in Formation,” a community safety tool kit she created alongside the anti-racist organization Vision Change Win. The guide offers a number of ideas, including how to create effective protest formations. 

When people on the right talk about security, it often simply means firearms. But for those on the political left, community self-defense is a much bigger idea. “The most important part of how you frame community defense is to acknowledge that you provide something the state cannot … when you build a culture of community defense around you … you have a lot more protection from violence,” says Lucas Hubbard, communications director for Socialist Rifle Association, which does not advocate for forming militias but does support working-class people learning firearm skills and developing mutual aid networks. 

But as Hubbard notes, self-defense projects are only an alternative to the status quo if they match the community’s expressed desires. “First thing you do in providing community defense … is to ask what that means to them,” says Hubbard, pointing to issues like food insecurity and housing access as frontline threats. Community defense could mean developing strong bonds between affected people to better address their needs, employing armed security at queer youth events, or securing resources for those facing eviction, but it is just as likely to involve getting people the resources they need during a COVID-19 spike. 

“If you want to help a community, they have to trust you,” says Snow, a founding member of the Asian American self-defense group Yellow Peril Tactical (YPT) who goes by one name. The organization works to demystify community self-defense, including gun ownership and mutual aid organizing, in part by creating an alternative media infrastructure to shift perception about who owns firearms and why. 

“In moments where I have seen [community defense], it’s always been something that has been asked for explicitly,” says Snow. YPT formed in 2020 amid a slew of anti-Asian hate crimes. Organizers from around the U.S. met through activist networks and began supporting each other not just in learning self-defense and firearms skills but also in creating more visible networks of care and connecting their ideas about community empowerment to international struggles such as supporting anarchists fighting Russian aggression in Ukraine. 

YPT helped create educational programs around responsible firearm ownership and started a podcast, Tiger Bloc, that demystifies disaster preparedness and community defense in terms that avoid adventurism and right-wing cynicism. As Snow points out, firearms themselves are often less important to community safety than, for example, “good digital hygiene” (using security protocols in digital communication and taking measures to remove personal information from the internet), locating good de-escalators to intervene in tense protest interactions, and ensuring demonstrations have trained street medics who can save lives if needed. 

Community self-defense is directly intertwined with other social movements because all political causes—and their solutions—are tied with intersecting issues of race and class. Effective safety plans bring together a community’s struggles, identify what creates cracks in safety, and consider all movements to be potential tools for repair. 

A True Safety Plan

Because many potential harms and threats are distinct, a complete plan for community safety has to be broad enough to address everything from racist violence to incursions with the police. An expansive vision of community safety does not stop at the most immediate threats but offers some vision of an alternative to existing carceral options. 

Vision Change Win’s guide says a comprehensive vision of community safety includes “security, office and organizational safety, verbal de-escalation, physical de-escalation, personal safety, transformative justice processes, community safety neighborhood strategies, bystander intervention, and cop watch.” It helps to outline the different questions you need to ask about events you are holding, what roles are necessary to keep attendees safe, and how to align every security choice with the community’s values. 

While police often play similar social roles in repressing movements, they have different legal leeway and require different responses. This is why Vision Change Win’s training focuses on a range of situations, including what to do when police attempt to enter activist spaces and how to de-escalate nonpolice threats. 

An example is Vision Change Win’s section on dealing with Rebellion Containment Agents—“less lethal” weapons such as chemical gas or pepper spray that are used by police against protest crowds. While often presented by law enforcement as relatively safe, these containment agents were tied to major injuries during the 2020 racial justice uprisings. The guide instructs demonstrators on how to deal with incoming projectiles, how to care for someone who has been exposed to caustic chemicals, and how street medics and those providing on-site care can make medical remedies from common materials. 

In addition to responding to police arrests and ensuring people know their legal rights, community defense also includes strategies to mitigate COVID and other pandemics. Good safety plans take into account both a community’s values and COVID transmission so as not to replicate many of the harms activists are hoping to mitigate. 

“I think having vulnerable relationships with people … where if there is somebody in your life you can talk [to] about both survivorship and harm, I think that makes us safer,” says Dixon. This also points to what are often called transformative justice programs designed to, as Dixon describes, “prevent and intervene in violence, and repair and heal from harm without the use of prisons.” 

These can take the form of “accountability processes” that combat harm by addressing the behavior, demanding change and the admission of culpability, and supporting both the survivor and the perpetrator in their journey. This kind of vulnerability can exist in many kinds of communities, but especially those that are bonded. “Transformative justice is relying on the relationships … to leverage them into better behavior and accountability,” says Dixon. 

These are big, radical ideas—and that is part of the point: Community self-defense is not a singular solution but part of an ongoing project that seeks to address the fundamental unsafety of the society we currently inhabit. Through overlapping systems of inequality and oppression, many people feel isolated, targeted, and forced to face huge hurdles alone. But when members of a community see their struggles as interconnected and their issues as systemic, then modest responses become insufficient. 

Community self-defense is a piece of the larger work of building an equitable society, but it will only be truly realized if a larger mass movement confronts the entire system of structural inequity. “You have to believe in something bigger,” says Dixon. “You have to believe in transformation.” 

The two of us have spent the past year protesting the Israeli military’s assault on Gaza, which is funded by the United States government. The day after the storm, as we surveyed the destruction all around us wrought by Hurricane Helene, we thought of the people of Gaza, whom the Israeli government has relentlessly bombed for the past year, destroying their homes, schools, markets, hospitals, places of worship, as well as crucial components of their water and food systems. 

We have always opposed the Israeli military’s destruction of Gaza—one that began long before Oct. 7, 2023—but in observing the destruction in our own backyards and neighborhoods that day, we felt more committed than ever before to ensuring that our government stops sending the bombs that destroy life, land, and infrastructure in Palestine. In our grief, we committed to working toward the restoration of life from Asheville to Gaza. 

Since Oct. 7, 2023, the U.S. government has sent $17.9 billion in military aid to Israel, including $3.8 billion from a supplemental appropriations act in April 2024. Meanwhile, a request from FEMA for an additional $9 billion for disaster relief efforts in the U.S. did not make it into the most recent funding bill, a shortfall that limits recovery efforts in Western North Carolina and other areas hit by Hurricane Helene. The numbers tell the story: The U.S. government invests in death while neglecting the lives of people and our planet.

As Western North Carolina University professor Robert Clines wrote in a recent op-ed in Mondoweiss: “The devastation from Hurricane Helene and Israel’s escalation in the Middle East may not seem connected. But they are linked through the United States’s commitment to mass militarization, imperial arrogance, exacerbation of climate change, and refusal to work toward a just global future.”

We and other Appalachian Jews are speaking up from the depths of climate devastation, demanding collective liberation now. Anti-Zionist Jews like us live in every corner of the United States and are essential activists and organizers in Southern struggles for environmental justice and collective liberation. Promoting Jewish safety means investing in life rather than death. It looks like fighting real antisemitism in communities that we love and protect, even when we’re cast out by pro-Zionist institutions, including our own religious congregations.

And that is why, on Oct. 6, 2024, we made the decision to still hold a tashlich action that we had been planning for months. Tashlich is a ritual that is part of the Jewish high holiday season and centers on atonement and repair. Out of necessity, we shifted the location from a riverfront park—as the riverbank was washed out and much of the surrounding area was coated in toxin-laden mud—to a bridge overlooking the French Broad River, a waterway so inundated by Hurricane Helene that its currents smashed buildings; carried away people, animals, and vehicles; and spread rocks and mud and trees on its banks for many miles. 

The two of us stood on the Haywood Road bridge together and talked of teshuvah—repentance—contemplating how our country’s unwavering support for the Israeli apartheid regime makes all Americans complicit in the genocide of Palestinians. Rather than toss pebbles into the water, as is customary, we opted not to add to the debris lining the riverbed; instead, we placed them on the railing of the bridge, a choice that we later realized was reminiscent of the Jewish tradition of placing stones at gravesites to mark the occasion of visiting the deceased. 

In Asheville, we have begun the process of rebuilding from the hurricane. Gazans, on the other hand, cannot, because the Israeli military has not stopped dropping thousand-pound bombs on their land. Human Rights Watch has reported that the Israeli military is even targeting aid workers—those who are instrumental to the process of survival. Between October and May, the Israeli military targeted at least eight convoys of aid workers. This is a horrid violation of international law and a devastating act of inhumanity. 

In mid-October, Israeli forces killed four water engineers who were on their way to conduct repairs to Gaza’s water infrastructure, which is itself being destroyed by Israeli air strikes. Receiving news of such killings is always heartbreaking, but after spending the past three weeks contributing to water-crisis response efforts here in Western North Carolina (along with other community-led efforts being coordinated by the Rural Organizing and Resilience and Holler Harm Reduction networks), a story like this hits even harder, as we imagine the horror of doing this already-challenging work of delivering aid and humanitarian efforts while under constant threat of state violence.

As we continue to rebuild and heal here in Western North Carolina, we recognize that the destruction we face is a fraction of what the people of Gaza endure daily. While we recover from a single storm, Gazans endure an unrelenting succession of human-made storms being driven by a genocidal war campaign, even as the people working toward recovery and crisis response are themselves being targeted as enemies in this war. 

We will continue to demand that our government stop funding the Israeli military, and to instead spend our tax dollars on repairing harms in Gaza, Asheville, and everywhere there is human suffering. 

As support for immigration has waned, Donald Trump, in his most tried and true political move, has stoked a moral panic over rising “migrant crime,” fearmongering and pitting communities of color against each other to gain votes. Meanwhile, President Joe Biden has not only gone along with the narrative, but his administration has gutted the asylum system and outsourced immigration enforcement to Mexico, exacerbating the U.S.-manufactured crisis at the border and leading to more senseless deaths and precarity in the borderlands and beyond. Vice President Kamala Harris has followed the lead of the president she hopes to succeed.

I have organized around immigration for over two decades, during which Democrats repeatedly succumbed to their opponents’ playbook and positioned the issue as a national security and public safety issue. Yet even in this climate, there is no escaping how surreal this moment is. In Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition, I write about how moral panics and so-called “tough on crime” policies have facilitated the expansion of immigrant detention. The Democrats’ play on immigration feels akin to the Clinton era in the ’90s, when Republicans took hold of Congress for the first time in decades. The 1994 crime bill, along with immigration laws passed by Congress in 1996, solidified the merger of the criminal legal and immigration enforcement systems, doubling the capacity of the immigrant detention apparatus.

Later during President Barack Obama’s tenure, his administration expanded collaborations with local police and ramped up border enforcement to make the case for comprehensive immigration reform and a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. As a result, deportations skyrocketed, earning him the moniker “deporter in chief.” But as I write in the book, years of accepting border militarization and criminalization as a strategy to bring relief to “innocent” immigrants in the United States have only resulted in more dehumanization of migrants in general, thus creating more barriers to securing legalization for the 11 million undocumented people living here. Despite this lesson, many organizations are falling back into the “good immigrant versus bad immigrant” frame—or in this case, the old immigrant versus the new immigrant, making the case for some at the expense of others.

It all feels incredibly bleak. But I try to remind myself that there have been numerous moments when anti-immigrant sentiment has ruled the political discourse only to retreat as movements fought back: California in the ’90s after the passage of the harsh ballot measure Proposition 187; the 2006 immigrant rights marches that brought millions to the streets in response to the post-9/11 immigration crackdown; and more recently the boycotts of the state of Arizona protesting SB 1070, the “show me your papers” law that gave the state unconstitutional immigration enforcement authority. In some of our most dire political moments, immigrant communities, organizers, advocates, and ordinary people have stepped up to fight back, opening space for crucial movement victories.

After the gut punch that was the 2016 election result, organizers and advocates have more seriously engaged in scenario planning. Sometimes these sessions only serve to cause more anxiety. But they have also been critical spaces to figure out how our movements can prepare. It is important to recognize that we have lost ground since the 2020 onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the near-simultaneous mass uprising for Black lives, which produced significant leftward shifts on mass incarceration, policing, and immigration enforcement. Since then, the backlash has been building, and opportunities for major victories are now out of reach. In many ways, the current conditions require us to return to the basics of organizing and movement building. There are no easy solutions, and broadening the base of support is our best bet for combating the harmful narratives about immigrants and immigration.

Since the release of Project 2025, much has been written about what a second Trump term would look like on immigration. His administration would strip status from millions of undocumented people who benefit from programs such as Temporary Protected Status, which allows them to live and work in the United States. This would make them even more vulnerable to deportation. Along with local, state, and federal police forces, a second Trump administration plans to deploy the National Guard to round up immigrants already residing in the United States and warehouse them in detention camps across the country. The proposals conjure up images from World War II, when Japanese Americans were labeled “enemies of the state” and incarcerated in “relocation centers.” In addition to the full-on attack of immigrants currently living in the country, the plans include a more robust Muslim and African ban and other efforts to shut down the border to people seeking refuge. Other proposals that have been floated, such as ending birthright citizenship, are more outlandish and difficult to accomplish, but the intent is clear. Right-wing politicians have embraced the racist “great replacement” theory, and the goal is to end immigration as we know it.

In the case of a Trump election win, demanding that the Biden administration dismantle the detention and deportation systems and rescind harsh border policies will be imperative. So far Biden has received a pass from liberals and even some immigration advocates on his ramping up of enforcement, but the short period of time between the election and inauguration will require a united front to make Stephen Miller’s dark agenda that much harder to implement. Once Trump is in office, there will no doubt be a relentless onslaught of executive orders requiring rapid response. Many will turn to litigation, but there are obvious limitations given the makeup of the courts. And if we want to build for the long-term, it is critical that we invest in organizing and base building.

It may seem difficult to imagine a Trump administration being affected by mass mobilization, but in 2018, after widespread public outrage, he ended the zero-tolerance policy separating families at the border. Separations continued, but not at the same scale. As immigrant communities are targeted, going local in our strategies will also take center stage to mitigate the harm of his administration. Creating spaces for sanctuary and community defense networks, limiting collaboration between police and ICE, and waging campaigns to prevent detention expansion will be essential to throwing a wrench in their plans. We must also create on-ramps for those newly engaged or returning to the fight, fortifying the movement to protect communities now and build for the future when there may be openings.

As for Harris, her recent trip to the border made clear that she is positioning herself as tough on immigration and will continue to campaign around what both parties like to call “border security.” Depending on the makeup of the House and Senate, an immigration bill could move in Congress in 2025. The bipartisan Senate border bill proposed earlier this year, and scuttled by Trump, created a new floor for how much Democrats are willing to trade off to get something passed. Before this point, legalization for a large portion of undocumented immigrants was always on the table, but in this instance the tradeoff was more funding for military aid to Ukraine and Israel, and nonpunitive reforms to the system were minimal.

The border panic has divided the movement, but it’s imperative for us to understand that anti-immigrant sentiment is driven in part by rampant and widening social inequality. Solidarity across movements for racial and economic justice and against U.S. militarism will be essential as we tackle the rightward lurch on immigration. Now is the time to offer an alternative approach, one grounded in a vision of a world without cages that embraces the freedom of movement—one in which all our communities can thrive.

In addition to border policy, we should anticipate a Harris administration to follow Biden’s approach to interior enforcement. Despite Biden proclaiming a hundred days into his presidency that there should be “no private prisons, period,” his administration is still contracting with private prison companies and expanding their use. As of this summer, ICE has put out feelers for at least seven new detention centers in the Chicago, El Paso, Harlingen, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, and Seattle jurisdictions. Much as if Trump were to win, similar strategies of ending ICE–police collaborations and preventing detention expansion would be paramount.

Already sanctuary policies are being attacked, as a moral panic is stoked over “migrant crime.” In an attempt to debunk these claims, many organizations have emphasized data showing that immigrants commit fewer crimes than do citizens. But this only serves to accept public safety as a metric for immigration and ends up throwing those with criminal records under the bus, effectively pitting working-class communities against each other. A better understanding of the criminal legal system and its intersections with immigration enforcement has helped the movement limit deportations. Given the backlash moment we’re in, we must continue to challenge the whole system and not fall into the moral panic over crime.

Just as concerning is how conservative states have acted under Biden, which we can expect to continue under a Harris administration. From Texas to Florida, states across the country are enacting some of the harshest anti-immigrant legislation we’ve ever seen. Through these efforts, such as Operation Lone Star and SB 4 in Texas, states are commandeering state-level criminal legal systems to target and prosecute migrants as well as people providing aid to migrants. SB 4, for example, includes a 10-year minimum sentence for “human smuggling” or “harboring” undocumented immigrants. Governor Greg Abbott and Texas officials are essentially dictating immigration policy for the whole country. By filing lawsuits against forms of administrative relief such as DACA, deploying its own deportation force, and busing migrants to sanctuary cities, Texas has gone on a rampage, and Biden has done very little to intervene. If Harris wins, the question remains whether, given her history as a state attorney general, she will be more likely to push back on Texas and other states. But based on her recent comments on immigration, it is clear that she will need to be pushed, and we need to prioritize building up grassroots capacity to protect immigrant communities and fight back in these states.

The coming months will undoubtedly bring more heartache and confusion for immigrant communities. Regardless of who is president, educating people about their rights and expanding our base will be essential to building power toward longer-term change. Across the country, organizers and advocates are already planning for either outcome, hoping to be more prepared than we were in 2016. Dozens of organizations have gathered in multiple forums, such as Democracy 2025 and the Immigrant Movement Visioning Process, to develop strategies for preventing mass deportations if the worst were to happen. In this environment, abolition is a helpful tool for analysis and guidance. We must reject the reduction of immigrant lives to “public safety” and “national security” frameworks, and we must instead put forth a narrative of belonging and collectivity that helps bridge our struggles for racial and migrant justice. In this moment of political fervor, now is the time to start planting the seeds for a more grounded and accountable movement.

This article was originally published by Inquest. It has been republished here with permission. This essay was written in the author’s personal capacity. The views expressed are her own and and do not necessarily represent the views of Detention Watch Network. 

Wearing a dark blue suit and a broad smile, he walked out of his naturalization ceremony holding a small U.S. flag and his citizenship certificate. The timing was no coincidence; he aimed to become eligible to vote before the Nov. 5 presidential election. 

“I am very excited that I will be able to vote,” says Garcia, 57. “We can express our voice and, more than anything, we can make ourselves count.”

In swing states such as Arizona, Nevada, and Pennsylvania, and large states such as California, the influence of Latino voters like Garcia could be key to choosing the next president in the race between former President Donald J. Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. Newly naturalized citizens and an influx of young Latinos reaching the voting age of 18 boosted the estimated number of eligible Latino voters to 36.2 million in 2024, up from 32.3 million in 2020.

A poll released in mid-October by Phoenix-based advocacy group Living United for Change in Arizona (LUCHA) and Data for Social Good shows that a majority of 1,028 registered Arizona voters surveyed between April and May are highly motivated to cast a ballot. While immigration remains important for many Latinos, the poll found they are also deeply concerned about the economy, health care access, and affordable housing. The findings track with results from national polls examining the issues Latino voters are thinking about less than a month before the election.

The shifting demographics of Latino voters reflect the nuanced distinctions within an evolving population often characterized as a monolithic voting bloc. “We’re a diverse community with a wide range of political views, experience, and priorities,” says Alejandra Gomez, executive director of LUCHA.

Canvassers have been knocking on doors all over the state since March to encourage voters—Latinos in particular—to cast a ballot and hopes are high that they will turn out en masse, says Stephanie Maldonado, managing director at LUCHA. “I definitely do see our community showing up and showing up big this November 5th,” she adds.

Garcia says he’s looking forward to making his vote count. For years after coming to the U.S. from Mexico, he worked in construction. In the 1990s, he started his own landscaping business, which he still operates. These days he worries about inflation because his earnings don’t go as far as they used to when buying necessities. “Prices have gone way up, for food and gasoline and other items,” he says.

Garcia is hopeful the next president will take on issues related to the economy, but he also would like the future commander-in-chief to push for immigration reforms. What’s needed, he says, is an orderly, speedier process that gives eligible people already in the country or waiting to apply for U.S. asylum south of the border an opportunity to live here legally. “People come here to improve their lives and to achieve the American dream, as I did,” he says. 

Dustin Corella, who was born in Tucson, is among a generation of young Latinos coming of age in 2024. Soon after turning 18 in June, he registered to vote and is eager to cast a ballot. “It feels like a big responsibility,” he says.

The issues motivating Corella to vote include his desire to elect politicians who ensure appropriate funding for public education as well as after-school programs and other resources aimed at youth in the community. And he says there’s a need for elected officials who can better address the impact of climate change, adding, “Those are the things that I care about, and I’m looking for leaders who can tackle them and create opportunities for the next generation.”

Corella is one of 1.3 million eligible Latino voters in Arizona. The state, along with California, Texas, Florida, and New York, is home to about two-thirds, or 65%, of all Latino eligible voters in the country, according to the Pew Research Center.

For Latinos and immigrant communities across the country, the stakes are high this election, says Nicole Melaku, executive director of the National Partnership for New Americans. The coalition of immigrant and refugee rights organizations is working to encourage the nation’s naturalized citizens to vote, especially in the face of anti-immigrant attacks. For example, a slew of Republican campaign ads focuses negatively on immigrants.

“With the likes of Project 2025 looming about in the background, of family separation and of attacks to our democracy, I think it was important for us to make sure that our communities, and naturalized voters especially, are aware of the power that their vote and their voice has to shape the outcome of the election,” Melaku says.

Project 2025 is a policy agenda of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that aims to radically restructure the federal government in a conservative administration. Experts caution that the project threatens voting rights and promotes a litany of anti-immigrant measures with far-reaching implications.

Trump has distanced himself from the project, but he has made immigration a key part of the race. In one campaign stop after another, Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric against immigrants punctuates his speeches. Should he win, he promises to quickly launch a mass deportation of immigrants living in the country without legal status—and even some with legal status.

Instead of countering him with pro-immigrant rhetoric, Harris has responded by taking a tougher stance on the issue, including a proposal to toughen asylum restrictions implemented by the Biden administration. She has also endorsed comprehensive immigration reforms. Trump blames Harris for a record number of migrants—many of them asylum seekers—entering the U.S. from Mexico, even as entries have declined sharply in 2024 amid policy changes on both sides of the border. 

In the border state of Arizona, the immigration debate is ever present. On Nov. 5, voters will reject or approve Proposition 314, which would give the state authority to enforce federal immigration policies. The initiative, Maldonado says, “specifically targets immigrant communities and continues to push racial profiling, which we know is a top concern among the Latino community. And I think that this election for us is pushing back against policies that continue to criminalize our families and communities.”

Immigration hits close to home for Maldonado, who comes from a mixed-status family. She and her two siblings are U.S.-born citizens and her father is a legal resident. However, her mother is undocumented, says Maldonado, and returned to Mexico some time ago. Her mother’s departure was the catalyst for Maldonado to become more involved in electoral and civic matters. “We need a permanent solution on immigration, not just for my family, but millions of families across the country and many diverse families that are living in these complexities of being separated,” she explains. 

The Latino vote in the upcoming election could mean a shift in the usual narrative about the nation’s second-largest group of voters, Maldonado says. “If we didn’t have this much power, there wouldn’t be so many attempts at trying to strip away our rights.” She adds, “We just need to come together and make it happen even greater this year.” 

Each year, those who live near the Atlantic Ocean, particularly those near the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean, brace themselves for the return of hurricane season. As the water temperatures increase and mix with warm, humid air, tropical thunderstorms form and gather speed. Once a storm’s winds reach 74 miles per hour, the storm is officially classed as a hurricane—and people on land begin paying much closer attention. Between June and the end of November, the looming threat of high-speed winds, heavy rainfall, and coastal flooding hangs in the air; those who live closest to the water make emergency plans, keep an eye on their vulnerable neighbors, coordinate mutual aid efforts, and hold onto hope that, this year, they’ll be safe.

If a hurricane does make landfall, many in the area of impact will have the option to drive, fly, or run away from the danger and ensure their families are warm, dry, and far from danger. Some will choose to stay behind in spite of the risks, but thousands of others will be left with no choice at all. Prisons and jails are often the last places to be evacuated when natural disasters hit. While people on the outside are given ample warning, the incarcerated are at the mercy of prison staff, government officials, and state politicians.

On Sept. 26, 2024, Hurricane Helene smashed into northwestern Florida and quickly made its way toward Tennessee, Georgia, and North Carolina. When it made landfall, its winds whipped the air at 140 miles per hour, causing massive flooding and destruction across all four states. Authorities were well aware Helene was on its way, with each state declaring a state of emergency ahead of the storm. “There will be no place for you to go if things get bad,” officials with Cedar Key Fire Rescue on Florida’s Gulf Coast warned. “This is going to be a life-threatening surge. It is nothing to take lightly.”

Yet, even as the hurricane barrelled down, people incarcerated in prisons and jails in multiple states were not allowed to evacuate. Instead, they were moved to higher floors or, as was the case in Florida, to “hardened dorms built to withstand high winds.” In other cases, they were simply locked in their regular dorms. 

Less than two weeks later, Hurricane Milton hit Florida again, knocking out power for millions, throwing up 38 tornadoes, and causing widespread flooding. The lead-up to the storm was grim, and photos of fleeing residents stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic only added to the alarm. Tampa Mayor Jane Castor went on television to tell Floridians, “If you choose to stay in one of those evacuation areas, you are going to die.”

For the second time, though, thousands of the state’s incarcerated people—including more than 21,000 located in mandatory evacuation areas—were left with no option but to ride out the storm behind bars. The Florida Department of Corrections stated it had “successfully relocated” 5,950 people ahead of the storm—out of 28,000 who lay in the hurricane’s path. As Jordan Martinez, an organizer with watchdog Fight Toxic Prisons, told Democracy Now, the number of evacuees only made up a small percentage of the individuals in harm’s way and some of the evacuations barely qualified as such.

The majority of those evacuated came from work camps, halfway houses, and work release centers, and in many instances they were “evacuated” to theoretically stronger facilities nearby. For example, women at Lowell Work Camp, a section of the Lowell Correctional Institution in Marion County, Florida, were evacuated just a few dozen yards away … to another part of the same prison complex.

“The fact that they are unable to evacuate people in mandatory evacuation zones goes to show the complete lack of prioritization of the lives of incarcerated people during hurricanes,” Martinez said. “If we are prioritizing the safety of our communities, those communities must include the incarcerated people inside that are themselves organizing on the inside to fight for better conditions, and quite often being forced during hurricanes to prepare to protect their communities via forced slave labor with sandbags or in cleanup in the aftermath.”

As Martinez noted, the trouble does not end once the wind stops blowing, either. Hurricane damage can disrupt incarcerated peoples’ access to light, clean water, food, and medical supplies, leaving them cold, hungry, thirsty, or sick for days or weeks at a time. Power outages can cut them off from communicating with their loved ones and the rest of the world, which also hamstrings their ability to report unsanitary or dangerous conditions inside their facilities. It also leaves them unable to check in on their own communities, or to find out whether their own families are safe.

When Helene slammed into western North Carolina, prisoners in multiple facilities outside Asheville told The Intercept about losing access to running water—and having to relieve themselves in plastic bags. As one woman’s husband told her, “We thought we were going to die there. We didn’t think anybody was going to come back for us.”

Elsewhere, Jailhouse Lawyers Speak, a nationwide collective of incarcerated individuals who provide support and legal resources to other prisoners, were able to share a report from inside a maximum security prison in Florida as Milton tore through the state: “Power’s out in here, and the COs are hiding in their offices while we’re left in the dark. We’re shouting for meds and updates, but no one’s listening. Just trying to hold on and hope this storm doesn’t swallow us whole…”

Another message illustrated the inhumane conditions inside as the storm raged, mirroring the hellish conditions stirred up by Helene: “Toilets backing up, feces running over. We’ve been told we’ll have to lay in it. No movement allowed.”

While incarcerated people can be denied the most basic level of hygiene inside their dorms, they are also often the first to be drafted to clean up after a climate disaster. As The Appeal reported, both Florida and South Carolina have called on incarcerated workers to clear roads and haul debris after Helene and Milton. During a press conference, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis cheerfully framed this forced labor as “utilizing” the state’s “resources.” “They do prison labor anyways,” he said. “The good thing about that is you can use that on private property, not just on public.” He also noted the cleanup “would cost us way more money if you had to do that through some of these private contractors.”

Unsurprisingly, Florida and South Carolina are two of seven states in which incarcerated workers are paid nothing for nearly all prison jobs.

As the climate crisis worsens, incarcerated people and those who love them will continue to worry that every new weather emergency may mean a death sentence unless real, concrete action is taken and laws are put into place to ensure state and local county officials are prepared in advance to evacuate everyone who may be under threat, regardless of their address or legal status.

Amid this ever-growing threat, incarcerated people, their loved ones, and organizers are on the front lines, advocating for themselves and their co-prisoners. “We urge the public to understand our plight as people in jails and prisons,” a member of Jailhouse Lawyers Speak told Democracy Now. “We suffer during natural disasters and lock our dark cells, not knowing if we will survive or not.”

Publications such as The Appeal, The Marshall Project, and The Intercept are also closely following the impact of the climate crisis on prisoners and amplifying the stories of incarcerated individuals who have been subjected to dire conditions or left behind during catastrophes. Every letter, every social media post, and every phone call counts. The louder the public outcry about this cruel practice becomes, the less likely officials will give a repeat performance the next time a deadly storm starts brewing.

“This is not just a logistical failure, it’s a profound moral failing,” the member of Jailhouse Lawyers Speak emphasized. “While entire towns are evacuated and communities band together to seek safety, we remain locked within these walls, treated as less than human. It is heartbreaking to think that while the world preps for survival during a pending natural disaster such as Hurricane Milton, we are still treated as if we don’t matter, as if our lives can be tossed aside in the name of protocol. We must end this normalized routine. We beg the public to pay attention and have a heart of compassion.”

At first, getting in this much of a tizzy over what to wear to an abortion might seem silly or frivolous. But as Bracey Sherman talked to more people about their abortion experiences, she found that worrying about what to wear was quite common. It is the manifestation of uncertainty that stems from near-constant abortion stigma and lack of knowledge and expectations.

“I wish I had known” is a common refrain. Despite abortion being a near-universal experience, it can be hard to find advice that resonates. That’s the reason we believe a critical part of sharing our abortion stories and changing the narrative is sharing abortion wisdom.

Somatics coach, artist, and abortion storyteller Nik Zaleski taught Bracey Sherman about abortion wisdom—the advice that those of us who’ve had abortions impart to one another to try to make the path forward a little easier for those coming after us. These are the little tips and tricks we’ve learned from experience or that someone passed along to us—the little touches of care that we know to provide when showing up for one another, because we’ve been there, too.

We hope you can create an abortion experience that’s meaningful for you based on the advice of those of us who’ve been there. Although we can’t pick out your appointment outfit for you, we hope you’ll pick out clothes you feel confident in as you begin this next chapter of life.

Confirm What You’ve Suspected

There are a lot of reproductive conditions that mimic pregnancy symptoms, so first and foremost, confirm your pregnancy with a test. Pregnancies can be confirmed through a blood test at a clinic or hospital or by using a urine sample with an over-the-counter pregnancy test at least one week after missing an anticipated period.

Also, despite what the marketing suggests, the cheap pregnancy tests from the dollar store work just as well as the expensive ones at the pharmacy or grocery store, so grab whatever feels right for you and your budget. You may want to pick up more than one in case you don’t believe the positive result of the first one, which is quite common, or in case you take the test too early after your missed period and you need to test again in a few days.

We suggest picking up at least two—one to confirm the pregnancy now and another to confirm you are no longer pregnant a month or so after your abortion. But if you don’t believe the first positive test, get as many as you want. They’ll all say the same thing: It might be time to schedule an abortion.

You should be wary of free pregnancy tests. Anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers love to advertise free pregnancy tests to entice you to stop in, only to use the opportunity to proselytize, slut-shame, and misinform you. A lot of really wonderful community organizations, clinics, and abortion funds give out free pregnancy tests because they know tests are expensive—so free isn’t always bad. But if you’re looking for a free test, be mindful about who is giving it out.

Cover Your Tracks

Depending on whom you live with, where you live, and a whole host of other factors, you should be careful about whom you text with, what you search on the internet, and what information about your condition and decision you share.

As Texas-based organizer and We Testify storyteller Nancy Cárdenas Peña explained, it’s often the people who are closest to us who put us at deeper risk. She knows this from experience: “I wish I could have had more time to disclose my abortion story in the manner I felt comfortable with just as anyone should be able to share their story on their own terms.”

Surveillance is a reality of life now and can lead to criminalization for people seeking abortions. Even if you end up not having an abortion, you should be careful about your digital footprint throughout your process.

Talk to people on the phone or in person rather than in writing. Try to use messaging apps with encrypted or disappearing messages or those that don’t allow screenshots. Delete your call log history. Clear the browser history of the search engine you use, or use a private browser that doesn’t save or track your history. Use a lock on your phone and computer so that others can’t look at your messages or browser history when you’re not watching. Protecting your communications can help keep you safe.

Get Your Money Right

One of the most challenging aspects of obtaining an abortion is paying for it. The cost of an abortion (depending on how far along you are and the method) can range from $150 to well over $15,000. If you’re seeking a first-trimester appointment at a clinic in the United States, the average cost is $500. On top of that, you may have to pay for short- or long-distance transportation to and from the clinic, a multi-night hotel stay, meals, childcare, and pain medications. Some state and federal policies ban private and public health insurance from covering abortions. If you are going to a clinic, ask if they accept insurance—some do not.

Prepare for Your Abortion

It’s common to feel scared or embarrassed about asking questions during a medical appointment, even when it’s not an abortion. But the answers to your questions can put you at ease, so muster your courage and ask questions so you can feel as comfortable and informed as possible.

Travel Planning

If you’re traveling for your abortion, save all important phone numbers, including the numbers for the clinic, abortion fund case manager, practical support volunteer, or any other emergency contacts. Download maps to your phone so you can access them offline if cell service is slow or unavailable. Familiarize yourself with directions to and from the airport or train station so you know where you’ll need to go to catch your ride smoothly.

Getting to Your Appointment

Arranging a ride to your abortion can be complicated, because you have to trust someone else with your experience, and they may need to travel across state lines with you. If you trust a friend enough, this is a good opportunity for a bestie road trip. If you have the cash, you can always take a cab or use an app service to book a car, but remember there may be a digital history of your ride to the clinic. If you need to enter a destination digitally, instead of using the clinic’s address, try choosing a spot nearby.

Local abortion funds and practical support organizations can arrange volunteers to drive you from your home, work, airport, or train station—truly wherever!—to your appointment and back.

Be vigilant for police outside of the clinic or Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, who set up traps on thoroughfares and near clinics, schools, and hospitals to detain and arrest Black and Brown people, undocumented immigrants, and other marginalized groups. This step is critical if you’re crossing checkpoints or borders or if you live in or near heavily policed communities. The morning of your appointment, you might want to check with your community and trusted immigration organizations that document ICE checkpoints.

When you arrive for your appointment, double-check to make sure the place you’re headed to is indeed the clinic. Anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers often set up next door to abortion clinics, or an anti-abortion clinic may have a name similar to the name of the exact clinic you’re trying to get to. There are often anti-abortion protesters outside of clinics who scream and yell at anyone walking near the abortion clinic, in hopes of scaring people out of going inside or disorienting them so they walk into the wrong place.

Call “Your Person”

In the first season of Grey’s Anatomy, Dr. Cristina Yang (Sandra Oh) sits at a bar with Dr. Meredith Grey (Ellen Pompeo) as they grieve their failing love lives over snacks. Cristina is pregnant and has an abortion scheduled, but according to clinic policy, she needed to designate an emergency contact on her form, so she wrote down Meredith’s name. “That’s why I told you I’m pregnant,” Cristina tells Meredith. “You’re my person.” Meredith hugs her friend, who receives the hug reluctantly. “Shut up. I’m your person,” Meredith replies.

This short scene in the iconic long-running television show created a beloved shorthand for best friends who promise to show up for one another, no matter what. That it grew out of a supportive abortion decision is just the icing on the cake for us. 

Like Cristina, you may want to identify “your person” to check in on you, hold your hand in the waiting room, or sit with you as you pass the pregnancy while binge-watching Grey’s Anatomy. Ask your clinic whether you can bring a friend or loved one with you. 

You might be a little dizzy after the sedation or cramping a bit if you have an in-clinic procedure, so we recommend having someone else drive you home. We Testify abortion storyteller Cazembe Murphy Jackson suggests finding someone who can attend the procedure with you and be with you in the days following. “Maybe plan out some restful activities that you really like to do or that will keep you happy—shows you want to watch, stuff like that. I think that would have been really helpful for me,” he explained.

If you’re having your abortion at home, you may want to call on someone from your community to sit with you through the process. They can help you get to and from the toilet, clean up, make food, and dote on you as you deserve.

Ask for What You Need

As wonderful as abortion providers are, some are still learning how to better care for patients with disabilities, those who are fat, survivors, or nonbinary or trans people, to name a few identities. Be ready to tell your provider what you need in order to have an abortion experience that is right for you. If your body doesn’t move in a particular way or you do not like body parts to be touched or referred to in a certain way, tell your providers during the counseling conversation.

You may also want to remind them your body requires a different dosage of pain medication compared with other patients. Good providers will be accommodating of your needs. While it is unfortunate you may have to be the one to initiate, you deserve an abortion experience that centers you.

Adapted excerpt from Liberating Abortion: Claiming Our History, Sharing Our Stories, and Building the Reproductive Future We Deserve. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollins. Copyright © 2024 by Renee Bracey Sherman and Regina Mahone.

That the United States incarcerates people at a higher rate than most countries in the world is, by now, a truism.

But that’s not the only way in which the country is an outlier. The vast majority of people locked up in prisons throughout America cannot vote. In many democratic nations, including Canada and most of the European Union, voting rights for incarcerated citizens are not revoked. Imprisonment itself is seen as sufficient punishment. 

The exclusion does not stop at the prison walls. There are over 2 million other Americans who have served their time but remain barred from voting because of a felony conviction. 

In total, 4.6 million people are locked out of the democratic process in the United States. Nearly half of them are Black and Latino. That’s a fundamental flaw in this experiment called democracy. 

Restoring our right to vote would make society safer. It would give incarcerated people a means of pushing back against a system that controls our lives. And it would help America realize a truer, more inclusive version of itself. 

People in this country have a long history of fearing the other. I wonder what people might fear about currently and formerly incarcerated people voting? Is it that we might vote against the interests of fellow Americans? 

Maybe some of us would vote in humane policymakers who mandate air conditioning in prisons, or who challenge forced prison labor like picking cotton, the major cash crop of U.S. slavery. Others might mark their ballots for lawmakers committed to creating more green spaces and reducing food deserts in under-resourced communities.

Or maybe that wouldn’t happen. We are not a monolithic, single-issue voting bloc. In fact, inside I have noticed that it’s the working class, across all demographics, who overwhelmingly support Donald Trump. Those with more formal education tend to support Kamala Harris.  

We probably care a lot about what you care about. We want our kids to grow up healthy and safe. We want fair politicians reelected and corrupt ones voted out. We want to fund and strengthen our communities, but not waste money.

For me? I would throw my support behind school board members who would allow my daughter to read The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, one of Texas’ most frequently banned books. I would advocate for safe and clean drinking water in rural towns, where prisons are often located. And I would rally behind leaders who protect a broad range of reproductive rights because I don’t believe my daughters should have fewer reproductive rights than their grandmother. 

Meanwhile, by letting us have a say in politics, you are helping us become reinvested in our communities, where most of us will someday return. The Sentencing Project released a report last year that argued restoring voting rights for people with felony convictions can improve public safety. The right to vote and the act of voting are linked to reduced recidivism for Americans who have been involved with the criminal legal system, according to the report. 

Instead of getting involved in our communities, we’re forced to sit on the sidelines and let the state do with us what it pleases.

A few years ago, Texas began digitizing all incoming mail. Before then, I was able to hold letters from my loved ones. I remember tracing the pink crayon-heart indentations of my daughter’s script, and taking in the signature scent of my mother’s perfume, which she sprayed on the page. Now, that simple but profound moment of physical connection is gone, and I can’t do anything about it.

Larger, attacks on our rights and dignity are also occurring while we cry out into the abyss, hoping someone will hear us. Failed forms of three-strikes laws continue to extend sentences for convictions, no matter how old. Marijuana possession is still criminalized in many states, including Texas, a fact responsible for countless ruined lives. And elderly folks with dementia, who in some cases can’t even recall their convictions, are routinely denied compassionate release. Shouldn’t those of us most impacted by these policies have an opportunity to influence them?

Some people think “no.” Supporters of felony disenfranchisement laws tend to argue that incarcerated people gave up their privilege to vote when they chose to break the law. But this view ignores the fact that our legal system treats the poor differently than the rich. 

Consider the financial crisis of 2008. None of its bank CEO architects, who ruined millions of lives and cost the country an estimated $23 trillion, went to jail or prison. Same for members of the infamous Sackler family, whose company Purdue Pharma created Oxycontin and marketed the fatally addictive drug under false pretenses, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths nationwide. Neither the bank CEOs nor the Sacklers lost their privilege to vote, despite breaking the law. 

Meanwhile, former President Donald Trump, who was found guilty on 34 felony counts earlier this year, continues his run for re-election to the highest office in the land.

But my neighbors incarcerated for bouncing grocery checks at Walmart are left without the right to have a voice in our government? 

More than anything, restoring our right to vote would honor the spirit of our democracy. It would signal to everyone inside and out that all voices matter, no matter what.

That would be a novel but no less essential development in the history of America. Since the end of the Civil War, the United States has found ways to disenfranchise Black voters. It started with literacy tests and poll taxes and threats of racist violence. Now, it’s through voter suppression laws and mass incarceration. 

“We the People” includes we the incarcerated. It’s long past time to allow all voting-age Americans the freedom to vote.

A court of teenagers, by teenagers, and for teenagers, Teen Court is exactly what it sounds like: a program giving a new name to justice and serving young people across Texas. The court offers a voluntary alternative from the traditional court system for teens under 17 who commit Class C misdemeanors. Students can avoid a fine and instead receive their penalty in constructive ways such as community service and jury terms in the Teen Court. Once completed, the charge is completely removed from their record.

The program allows young people to plead guilty in front of a student jury that empathizes with their situation and asks them questions about circumstances—their background, home situation, economic status, and what led them to commit the offense. Rather than face a punitive system, teens can avoid unpleasant experiences with law enforcement and move through an alternative criminal justice system that values them. 

Student attorney Alex Gonzalez, who is from El Paso, says the program is a way to avoid pigeonholing teens. “The program shifts the focus from labeling students as ‘offenders’ or ‘juveniles’ in a negative light to seeing them as people who made a mistake and are now learning from it,” she says.

The goal of the court and the student jury is to set teens up for success by making sure the penalty is feasible for each person. In Teen Court, what counts as community service isn’t strictly limited to volunteering; it’s any self-improvement action, such as going to counseling, achieving a higher grade in a class, or joining an extracurricular class. 

Sophia Garza, the juvenile case manager and director of El Paso’s Teen Court program explains how community service is defined broadly to accommodate all students. “I have kids that live on the other side, in Mexico, but they attend school in El Paso. … But as long as they’re doing anything that betters themselves or betters their community, I will take it as community service,” she says.

Sherry Maximoff, Williamson County attorney and Teen Court supervisor, says the volunteer hours also work as constructive punishment for teens because it encourages them to take care of a community they have served. “If you are taught to give back to your community and to volunteer, it gives you a sense of ownership and responsibility over your community. This is my community, and I’m going to clean up those streets, then why would I commit criminal mischief or litter?” she says.

In recent years, Texas has increased criminalization and policing of teens, especially those of color. The state has intensified the number of law enforcement officers on K–12 campuses with larger populations of Latinx and Black students. This has resulted in Black students in particular being overrepresented in arrests, court referrals, and use-of-force incidents. With students of color across the state saying they fear the increasing number of officers on campuses, Teen Court allows them to avoid traumatizing experiences with law enforcement and have their stories heard without judgment from people within the system.

“[Students are] not dealing with anyone who they identify as law enforcement. That’s the whole point of positive peer pressure, that it is their peers who stand in judgment of them, not law enforcement, not the system,” explains Morales about how the program is a part of the justice system that veers heavily away from criminalizing students of color. 

Garza also says that she notices teens feeling more comfortable once they see other teens on the jury. “When I sit with the youth I can see some are being very cautious. I do see the youth open up more, share a little bit more with their peers, maybe because they feel like if they’re going to be judged, their peers are going to understand their situation a little bit better,” she explains.

As a state that eschews gun regulation, Texas has also used the overpolicing of schools as a temporary “solution” for gun violence. At a time when students are being criminalized at such a high rate, Teen Court programs allow students from marginalized communities to have their stories heard. This is especially important because students going through the system are often dealing with issues far too serious for their age bracket and sometimes beyond their control.

Williamson County Teen Court volunteer Audrey Seigman talks about a case in which a teen was involved in an accident while driving their siblings to school. “This person was put in a very difficult position. Their parents made them drive their siblings because they were busy with jobs. The accident wasn’t their fault, but the police found out they weren’t qualified to be driving and cited them,” she says.

Other student attorneys say that they’ve seen similar cases with teens who struggle with issues beyond their control because they come from first-generation families. “[There was] a case involving a student who didn’t speak English. He was charged with theft, but it became clear that he didn’t fully understand what was happening or how the legal system worked. His family had recently immigrated and there was a huge language barrier,” says Gargi Singh, a student attorney with the Williamson Teen Court program.

Gonzalez says that declining mental health is common among teens who enter the program. “Cases involve students dealing with emotional or psychological issues such as depression, anxiety, or trauma. A student might engage in risky behavior as a coping mechanism for their mental health struggles.”

In recent years, there has been a resurgence in “tough on crime” approaches to the justice system, including proposed legislation and harsh political commentary from the right. The conservative federal policy agenda Project 2025 seeks to increase criminalization and policing by eliminating training for federal law enforcement. Former President Donald Trump has promised he would increase the militarization of police and expand incarceration and the death penalty if elected. In such a context, Teen Court programs are more important than ever,  offering a crucial opportunity for teens to bypass the school-to-prison pipeline. Students are more likely to avoid entering the system later in their lives because Teen Court embodies a form of restorative justice that doesn’t use law enforcement or incarceration for discipline. 

“At the very lowest level, where the consequences are least impactful, we give them a positive experience with the criminal justice system. You interrupt that pipeline there, both with the way the child begins to define themselves and by actually physically dismissing the ticket,” says Morales about how Teen Court directly curbs the school-to-prison pipeline. “We have defendants who have gone through the program and have had such a positive experience at the end that they have chosen to become volunteers,” she adds.

Judge Elaine Marshall from Houston, Texas, talks about her Teen Court program and how it has discouraged recidivism among teens in her community. “I started my Teen Court in 2000. From those years I have had no repeat offenders. It says a lot that we’ve had students who come through as offenders wanting to join the program.” 

For student volunteers, the program is also a unique way to learn about the legal system and restorative justice. Especially in a state like Texas, which censors students from learning about historical injustices, Teen Court gives students a hands-on opportunity to learn about nuances within the criminal justice system.

“[The program] is not about branding students as ‘criminals’ but about showing them that they’re capable of growth. It has shown me how crucial empathy and understanding are in fostering real change,” says Singh.

Teen Court is creating a generation of students who know that reform in the criminal justice system is both necessary and possible. The program bridges gaps between teens and builds community and empathy, giving students the confidence to fight for change.

I was incarcerated for more than eight years in Florida. I’ve been free for 18 months and just recently got the bug to vote again. Problem was, I didn’t know if I was eligible to register. I wasn’t debriefed on the matter when I left prison, and I’d heard different things from different people. Some said: “Felons can’t vote in Florida. Ever.” While others claimed: “You can vote as long as you’re done with your sentence.”      

I needed guidance. And clearly I wasn’t the only one.  

A new proposal by the Florida Division of Elections seeks to end confusion around restoration of voting rights. If passed, the update to its existing advisory opinion process would provide people with felony convictions the chance to request a formal opinion stating definitively whether their voting rights have been restored. In so doing, it will clarify a complicated state statute that governs the process of reinstating voting rights for formerly incarcerated people. 

“We wanted to figure out a simple question: Whose job is it to determine voter eligibility?” Desmond Meade, executive director of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, told Spectrum News 13 in August in support of the proposal. 

Confusion Over the Law

The state statute in question, SS 98.0751, dictates that for all crimes other than murder or sex offenses, restoration of voting rights is contingent upon sentence completion, including parole or probation and the satisfaction of all court-ordered fines and fees. People convicted of murder or sex offenses must seek additional permission in the form of clemency from a state-appointed board.

But this alone doesn’t definitively answer the question of eligibility. Many people are not even aware of all the fines they owe post-incarceration, let alone the offense-specific guidelines laid out in the statute.   

Meade said the proposed process, including a special form, would affirmatively address these issues. He added, “The other thing, which I think is huge, is that it provides protection for people against” being arrested for voter fraud. 

Forty-one formerly incarcerated people were arrested in 2022 and 2023 for voter fraud in Florida, according to Southern Poverty Law Center. At least some of them had attempted to vote based on honest misunderstandings of the state statute—yet their prosecutions proceeded. 

In response, some critics charged that Gov. Ron DeSantis and state Republicans were deliberately suppressing the voting rights of felons. 

“Instead of fulfilling its role to enable Floridians to vote, the state has made it more difficult, which is anti-democratic,” said Courtney O’Donnell, a senior staff attorney for voting rights with the Southern Poverty Law Center, in an article posted on the group’s site.

Florida does indeed make it hard for felons to vote. A 2023 fact sheet by The Sentencing Project states that Florida disenfranchises nearly 1.5 million people with felony convictions, more than any other state in the nation.

A History of Controversy

The latest saga in the battle over felony disenfranchisement in Florida began heating up in 2018. 

That’s the year voters in the state approved Amendment 4, which automatically restored voting rights to anyone with felony convictions—minus those convicted of murder or sex offenses—upon release from prison. DeSantis opposed the measure. Not even a year later, thanks to legislative support by his fellow Republicans, DeSantis signed SS 98.0751 into law.   

Legal battles ensued. Opponents of the bill, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), said it effectively instituted a “poll tax,” whereby only those who could pay could vote, echoing similar attempts from the Jim Crow era. 

DeSantis said the measure was a safeguard against giving “violent felons” certain societal benefits “without regard to the wishes of the victims.”  

Ultimately, the fight reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 2020 decided against intervening in a lower-court ruling that upheld the new law. In a dissent joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the law “prevents thousands of otherwise eligible voters from participating in Florida’s primary election simply because they are poor.”

Moving Forward

SS 98.0751 is the law of the land for the foreseeable future. In my case, once I did my homework, the registration process ultimately went smoothly. However, I credit this to my relative privilege in being resourceful enough to conduct such research and pay my fines, coupled with my not being convicted of murder or a sex crime.  Sadly, many others aren’t so lucky.   

The special opinion process proposed by the Florida Department of Elections is not expected to go into effect before the Oct. 7 deadline to register to vote in the fall election, according to CBS News Miami. 

For more information on voting in Florida, visit the website of the supervisor of elections in your county or myfloridaelections.com. You can also review this fact sheet from the ACLU of Florida.