The Palmer Memorial Institute opened in the small town of Sedalia, NC, at the turn of the twentieth century. Now, the historic school that once served Black youth but fell into disrepair after closing in 1971 is on a path toward much-needed rehabilitation, preservation, and adaptive reuse. Community members, alums, and professional preservationists and architects collaborated to develop a bold new vision for the site, thanks to support from the National Trust for Historic Preservation (NTHP). Now, they’re fundraising to make that vision a reality.

Charlotte Hawkins Brown, a Black teacher educated in Cambridge, MA, opened the Palmer Memorial Institute in 1902, when another local school closed, leaving an entire community of Black children with no access to formal education. Brown was only 19 at the time and just beginning a career that would see her become a major leader in the movement for Black education in the Jim Crow-era South. She named her school for Alice Freeman Palmer, who had been an activist in the nineteenth-century movement for women’s education and a mentor to Brown.

Over the next almost 70 years, until a fire forced the school to close in 1971, it grew from its humble beginnings in an old blacksmith’s shed to fourteen buildings across a 300-acre campus. It became a nationally recognized preparatory school, and about 2,000 students passed through its classrooms and dormitories.

Brown, who served as the school’s president for 50 years, was known for her community-first approach. As part of their education, Palmer Memorial Institute students volunteered on the school farm, contributed to the construction of new campus buildings or worked in the school’s cafeteria and bookstore. Brown also valued the arts, and some Palmer Memorial Institute graduates and staff went on to become successful painters or performers.

“The whole reason that this partnership exists is because there are so many sites out there in this country like the Charlotte Hawkins Brown Museum and the Palmer Memorial Institute—these sites of incredibly important and overlooked women’s history that are in considerable need.”

But the school’s storied past has faded as the campus fell into disrepair since its closure. Though a 35-acre portion of the campus with 12 remaining buildings was designated a North Carolina state historic site in 1987 and remains the only Black women’s history site recognized as such in the state, a lack of funding and competing priorities at the state level made maintenance and rehabilitation of many of the buildings almost impossible.

While the site is in desperate need of support, it has nonetheless continued to serve some community functions. The cottage where Brown lived during the decades she served as the school’s president has been restored and now operates as the Charlotte Hawkins Brown Museum, a historic house museum. The school’s old dining hall is also used as an early voting location and rented for events, such as weddings and reunions. Every year, the city hosts a gathering there to honor the town’s elders and Brown’s legacy. A youth group from the local YMCA also maintains a small community garden on site.

The Future of the Institute

A grander vision for the site’s future began to come into focus when it was named to National Trust for Historic Preservation’s list of 11 Most Endangered Historic Places in 2022. That listing noted that the site’s most at-risk buildings were the three main dormitories, whose ceilings and walls had begun to crumble and whose roofs were threatening to collapse from water and fire damage and deferred maintenance.

The listing also attracted the attention of NTHP’s Where Women Made History initiative, whose team recognized the site as a perfect candidate for a partner program it operates with Robert A.M. Stern Architects, or RAMSA, a national firm headquartered in New York. That program offers grants of design, planning, and technical services to endangered women’s history sites.

“The whole reason that this partnership exists is because there are so many sites out there in this country like the Charlotte Hawkins Brown Museum and the Palmer Memorial Institute—these sites of incredibly important and overlooked women’s history that are in considerable need,” said Christina Morris, manager of WWMH.

But because rehabilitating the site had been little more than a faraway dream for so long, the Charlotte Hawkins Brown Museum team had no concrete plans for where to start. To move forward, it launched a collaborative, community-based visioning and planning process to develop goals to inform RAMSA’s work at the site.

“The main goal was to transform this site into this cultural hub, a space for resources, a space for rejuvenation, and learning, and education.”

“When we first started working with the site, they had an enormous amount of need,” Morris recalls. “There was also an enormous amount of interest and philosophical and spiritual support, but not the financial support that they really needed.”

The first listening session with alums and members of the Sedalia community was held in March 2023. “We definitely wanted to make sure that the history isn’t forgotten,” said Cam Dungee, who, as Sedalia’s town manager, was involved in discussions about the future of the historic campus. “We’re trying to make sure that Charlotte Hawkins Brown’s legacy is still in the forefront because that has always been a really important part of Sedalia.”

The entire process took about three years, unfolding through constant collaboration among Sedalia locals, Palmer Memorial Institute alums, the Charlotte Hawkins Brown Museum’s team, and the preservationists, architects, and other professionals at NTHP and RAMSA.

“The main goal was to transform this site into this cultural hub, a space for resources, a space for rejuvenation, and learning, and education,” said Tanesha Anthony, the museum’s site manager.

Ultimately, RAMSA developed an ambitious adaptive reuse plan for the site and marketing materials to support the Charlotte Hawkins Brown Museum as it fundraises to bring the plan to life. Cheryl Lu Xu, an associate at RAMSA, said the years-long collaborative process helped ensure the finished plan would meet the site’s needs and honor Brown’s legacy.

“Successful campus plans are shaped not only by institutional goals, but also by the perspectives of the people who use and experience the campus every day,” she said.

The completed adaptive reuse plan was shared for the first time in February 2026 and later celebrated at an event at RAMSA’s New York City offices in May. The plan organizes the sprawling campus into program-specific zones, each addressing a pillar of the museum’s new strategic vision that emerged from the community visioning process. Those pillars are economic development, education, community, and leadership.

Organizing the campus into zones also allows for phased implementation—vital because the Charlotte Hawkins Brown Museum is still fundraising to bring the plan to life. To support this work, in 2024, NTHP’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund awarded the museum $75,000 for the long-term planning, preservation, and education work. This will help establish an endowment and its own nonprofit organization, giving it greater financial and decision-making independence from the state of North Carolina.

A new nonprofit will be responsible for securing the fundraising needed to move the project forward. Its first goal will be restoring the school’s old science building in the center of campus and reopening it as the site’s new visitor center and gift shop. Later, cottages will be restored as artist and scholar-in-residence housing and maker spaces. The campus plan also boasts new outdoor infrastructure, including walking and bicycling trails and a community garden inspired by Brown’s appreciation of wellness and nature.

Rehabilitation and preservation work at the Charlotte Hawkins Brown Museum site is far from over. But the positive impact of the community visioning process is already clear. Morris said it resulted in an adaptive reuse plan designed not only “for the benefit of the physical place, but for the benefit of the people—and here, this is an entire town—and also those descendants, and the legacy of the site.”

Food Coupons juxtaposes a contemporary US food assistance coupon with Indigenous agricultural knowledge, highlighting the contrast between dependence and abundance. The work reflects my own experience growing up on food stamps and the complicated relationship many Native communities have with food access today.

While federal assistance programs have helped families survive, the processed and nutrient-poor foods they often make accessible have also contributed to disproportionately high rates of obesity, diabetes, and other health disparities in Indigenous communities.

This work also speaks to Kevin Beltran (Zuni and El Salvadoran), who works with Pueblo youth reviving ancestral agriculture, and also inspired this painting. Positioned against the coupon are symbols of traditional foodways are: Kevin’s corn harvested by three generations of his family and his family’s pottery given to him as a high school graduation gift, reminders of sophisticated Indigenous systems of agriculture, trade, stewardship, and nutrition that sustained Native nations for generations before colonization. These food networks were deeply connected to land, culture, and community.

The work asks viewers to consider what has been lost and what remains. Rather than presenting Indigenous people solely through narratives of scarcity, Food Coupons acknowledges a legacy of innovation, resilience, and knowledge. It is both a critique of contemporary food systems and a recognition that Indigenous communities continue to reclaim and revitalize traditional relationships with food, health, and the land.

How nonprofits talk about the communities they serve shapes more than messaging. Their language affects trust, public perception, and how those communities are treated by the media, politicians, and the public.

This is becoming increasingly important as the Trump administration continues to pressure organizations to move away from language associated with diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). For nonprofits that rely on federal grants or corporate philanthropy, changing language may seem like a practical way to protect funding. But those words help determine who is visible and which disparities are named.

Avenues for Justice (AFJ), which provides alternatives to incarceration and support services for young people in New York City, has heard from funders asking it to describe the young people it serves as “justice involved” or “justice impacted,” rather than using words like Black and Brown.

“Language isn’t neutral. It shapes perception, policy, and power.”

But this language doesn’t explain why those young people are justice impacted—or what systems and disparities shaped their experiences. For Liz Frederick, executive director of AFJ, this isn’t just a change in terminology. It erases part of the story.

Other nonprofit leaders who spoke to NPQ agree that language is more than word choice. It can restore dignity, or it can reinforce the same stereotypes and systems their organizations are working to dismantle.

Dexter R. Hall, interim executive director of the Providence Foundation of San Francisco, which offers supportive services for children, families, seniors, and people experiencing homelessness in Bayview Hunters Point, explained why: “Because language isn’t neutral. It shapes perception, policy, and power.”

How Federal Pressure Reaches Nonprofits

In July 2025, the Department of Justice issued guidance framing some DEI programs as potentially discriminatory under federal civil rights law. The guidance warned of legal risks and the potential loss of federal funding, leaving nonprofits that serve communities facing systemic barriers at risk because their programs could fall under the broad “DEI” category.

Even before that guidance was released, DOGE employees used ChatGPT and keyword searches—including terms like “immigrants” and “equality”—to target grants. A federal judge ruled those actions unconstitutional in May 2026, but by then, more than 1,400 grants worth over $100 million had already been canceled, disrupting the organizations and projects that depended on that funding.

Early in the second Trump administration, Jill Habig, founder and CEO of Public Rights Project (PRP), warned that the uncertainty itself was part of the pressure.

“Even though it feels overwhelming, this effort is about getting people to comply in advance, so the administration doesn’t have to defend these actions in court,” Habig told NPQ. “Everyone should remember that.”

Frederick said that the way these decisions are made is part of the problem, with those making policy often failing to talk to the people doing the work. The response, as she explained, should involve the communities affected and the boots-on-the-ground organizations.

She added, “Regardless of the administration, regardless of what the police commissioners are saying, regardless of how the criminal justice system, the court systems are reacting to our participants, we’re here for them.”

Language Can Feed Existing Bias

Changing a few words may look like a small concession to protect funding. But the effects reach far beyond a grant application.

“How are we talking about these young people? And why is there a difference in language when we talk about Black and Brown youth compared to their white counterparts?” asked Frederick.

“We can’t just remove a whole demographic for funding. It boils down to, as an organization, how much of your narrative do you want to change to chase that grant, and is it worth it?”

Frederick continued: “And it starts with an understanding of empathy, where you’re going to be more empathetic if you hear there was a teenager who jumped the turnstile who was white than if there was a teenager who jumped the turnstile who was Black.”

That language doesn’t create the bias. It feeds the unconscious stereotypes already shaping public perception, especially when it is repeated by the media, politicians, or nonprofit leaders.

A similar issue appears in how society talks about age.

Katherine Martinez, president and CEO of Neighborhood SHOPP, an organization that supports older adults, caregivers, families, and the wider community, says stereotypes about older people shape how they are treated and can even affect whether aging services are considered a priority.

“We’re always trying to engage in that type of conversation with our elected officials,” she told NPQ, “so that they know that services to older adults should be at the top of their priority list.”

Frederick also stressed the importance of taking an individualized approach to language. AFJ never refers to the young people it serves as “clients.” Instead, the organization calls them Participants, with a capital “P.”

The distinction is intentional. It recognizes that the young people coming through AFJ’s doors have different circumstances and need individualized support—not a cookie-cutter approach.

Dexter Hall of the Providence Foundation of San Francisco says broad labels can cause harm, too.

“Too often, we hear terms like ‘at-risk,’ ‘vulnerable,’ or ‘low-income’ tossed around by media outlets, politicians, and even well-meaning community members,” said Hall. “These words flatten complexity. They imply deficiency. They frame people by what they lack, not by what they carry.”

Make Language Review Part of the Work

A commonality among the nonprofit leaders who spoke to NPQ was that language is constantly evolving and so reviewing it cannot be a one-time communications exercise. It has to become part of how the organization operates.

At Neighborhood SHOPP, Martinez said that process included bringing together staff members from each program to discuss how they viewed the people they served, as well as how they interpreted the organization’s mission statement.

Those conversations showed that SHOPP needed to reframe its language and led the organization to invest in training through LiveOn NY, a membership organization for nonprofit aging service providers.

Frederick reinforced the same point. She said the process starts with talking to the people who work directly with the community, as well as community members themselves, about how the organization’s language affects them.

This includes being especially careful with labels like “at risk.”

“We try to be very careful in terms of when we’re saying at risk,” said Martinez. “Yes, they may be at risk, but we’re trying not to use language that excludes people and be more inclusive. We are mindful that our language really reflects individuals and provides dignity.”

Don’t Erase Who You Serve to Win Funding

The words nonprofits choose become the stories society hears about the people they serve.

In the short term, altering language may appear to be a reasonable way to preserve a grant or attract corporate support. But changing how an organization describes its community can also change the narrative it presents to the public.

Hall explained how those stories can affect public understanding and policy: “When the media uses deficit-based language, it distorts public understanding. When politicians echo it, it shapes policy that manages poverty instead of ending it. And when nonprofits adopt it, even unintentionally, we risk reinforcing the very systems we’re trying to dismantle.”

Sometimes the problem is the language that gets added. Other times, it’s what nonprofits are asked to leave out.

When funders ask AFJ to replace references to Black and Brown Participants with “justice involved” or “justice impacted,” the new language removes the racial disparities central to understanding why many of those young people encounter the criminal legal system in the first place.

Naming those racial disparities doesn’t exclude other communities. It makes the inequity visible.

“We can’t just remove a whole demographic for funding,” Frederick stated emphatically. “So, it boils down to, as an organization, how much of your narrative do you want to change to chase that grant, and is it worth it? And in changing your language, are you really changing who you are as an organization and what you represent?”

Rather than changing how AFJ describes the young people it serves, Frederick and her staff are pivoting to other funding sources with realistic benchmarks that don’t compromise the integrity of their work.

After the Rent Guidelines Board approved the measure, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani succeeded in freezing rents on one million rent‑controlled apartments, suspending increases for one and two‑year leases. The regulation, which covers 40 percent of all apartments across the city’s five boroughs, will apply beginning October 1, 2026.

It is the first time such a freeze has been extended to leases of one and two years, and the vote was met with celebration from tenant advocacy groups who had long demanded relief as rents continued to rise in one of the world’s most expensive cities. In the public hearings held before the vote, tenants demanded a suspension of rent increases, arguing that their incomes had not risen at the same pace as inflation and the growing cost of utility bills.

Mamdani’s plan includes the legal recognition of tenant unions, giving residents the ability to schedule inspections in their own buildings, imposing tougher penalties on repeat-offender landlords, and providing individualized attention to complaints such as lack of heating or elevator breakdowns.

It also targets critical issues like mold, pests, and leaks, all within the framework of the “Block by Block” housing initiative, which aims to build and preserve 400,000 affordable homes.

This growing focus across all levels of government has created momentum and an opportunity for change.

Andrea Shapiro, director of program and advocacy at Metropolitan Council on Housing, said in an interview with NPQ: “I think I have to be optimistic. We’re using the rent freeze and all our current victories as a foundation for more. We want universal rent control, we want to expand who is covered by rent stabilization. We came close this year with the REST Act upstate, and now we want to expand further in New York City.”

Tenant organizers stress that pushing for federal housing reforms is extremely difficult in a country as large and divided as the United States. They note that local groups in New York have little influence over national decisions, and that the Fair Cloth Amendment severely restricts the expansion of public housing by limiting federal funding.

At the local level, Shapiro argued that resources are also insufficient to meet the scale of the housing crisis. Still, organizers remain determined to fight for stronger protections.

Impacting Low-Income Renters

“There are many different types of protections that can be passed both over the short term, like rent freezes, or over the long term, like rent stabilization, which limits how much and how quickly rent can rise each year,” Nada Hussein, a research analyst at National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC), explained to NPQ.

Beyond these, housing advocates point to measures such as right‑to‑counsel policies that ensure tenants have legal representation in eviction cases, and civil rights protections like source‑of‑income rules that prevent landlords from rejecting housing vouchers. Other safeguards include “just cause” requirements, obliging landlords to provide valid reasons for eviction, such as non‑payment or lease violations, Hussein said.

Many of these protections already exist in New York, while others have been adopted in different states and localities. Since the COVID‑19 pandemic, additional protections have emerged, including relocation assistance when rent spikes without proper notice, and “pay‑to‑stay” provisions allowing tenants to settle arrears before eviction orders are finalized.

“There should be a national landlord‑tenant law that is uniform across the country, that sets a standard of habitability, that holds landlords accountable.”

Genesis Aquino, executive director of Tenants & Neighbors, described to NPQ the severe distress many tenants face in New York housing: collapsing ceilings, lack of water in winter, and infestations of roaches and mice that have become “normal” because landlords neglect repairs while continuing to raise rents.

“Without regulation, market‑rate tenants are left vulnerable to unchecked increases, often forced to share overcrowded apartments or leave the city altogether. This dynamic has contributed to the displacement of hundreds of thousands of working‑class families, particularly Black families, over the past decade,” she said.

A Pew Charitable Trust analysis shows that housing shortages are hitting low‑income renters the hardest. Between 2017 and 2024, rents in the lowest‑income ZIP codes rose by as much as 10.3 percent while areas that expanded their housing supply saw slower rent growth. The study found that a 10 percent increase in housing stock correlated with a 1.4 percent reduction in rent growth compared with areas that did not add new units.

Cities with restrictive zoning face sharper rent hikes, leaving vulnerable tenants with few options, whereas metros that boosted housing supply—such as Austin, Denver, San Antonio, Raleigh, and Dallas—recorded declines in average rents for low‑income renters. New York City, by contrast, increased its housing stock only four percent from 2010 to 2023, despite a 22 percent surge in jobs, contributing to displacement and rising homelessness. The report concludes that expanding housing supply, even through market‑rate developments, improves affordability overall and benefits low‑income renters most.

Resistance to Tenant Protections

It is difficult to imagine this measure being replicated across different states since it has already drawn sharp criticism. For example, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis dismissed New York City Mayor Mamdani’s recent “Rental Ripoff” event as a “theater of the absurd.”

The backlash came after a tenant‑union speaker described eviction as a form of violence—a statement that Republicans quickly seized upon to attack Mamdani’s broader housing agenda. The strong partisan response underscores the challenges of exporting such policies beyond New York’s political climate.

But the issue of housing rights has firmly entered the national agenda. The US-wide problem is the lack of affordable housing for extremely low‑income and very low‑income renters. But because affordability has become an issue affecting so many families today, it is now on the national political scene more than it has been in the past.

Andrew Aurand, Senior Vice President for Research at NLIHC, explained to NPQ that “there has been significant attention at the local level on land use, zoning, and ordinances that affect housing, as well as at the state level on policies, and of course at the federal level, particularly during the midterms.” He emphasized that this growing focus across all levels of government has created momentum and an opportunity for change, adding: “We’ve always said you need a combination of solutions to fix the problem, because it is a complex problem.”

In several states, advocates argue for the need to establish tenant laws that fully protect renters’ rights and guarantee access to dignified housing. Alabama illustrates the challenge; its landlord‑tenant law was only introduced around 2006, and before that there was no standard of habitability—meaning landlords could rent out unsafe units without any consequence.

Over time, even those initial provisions have been weakened, shifting the balance in favor of landlords and leaving tenants vulnerable. Housing specialists insist that stronger measures are needed at both the state and federal levels. As Teresa Fox Bettis, executive director at Center for Fair Housing, Inc. told NPQ: “There should be a national landlord‑tenant law that is uniform across the country, that sets a standard of habitability, that holds landlords accountable, but also the tenants. If the air conditioning is out, and you know it’s 100 degrees outside, you need to fix that.”

Resistance to rent‑freeze initiatives and broader tenant protections is inevitable, particularly as landlords and political opponents argue that such measures undermine property values or discourage investment. As a reaction to the measures taken by the New York City mayor, landlords filed a lawsuit seeking to overturn the decision. In their complaint, they argue that the mayor exerted undue influence over the Rent Guidelines Board, manipulating data to downplay landlords’ costs and exaggerate their revenues.

It is common for mayors to appoint members to the Rent Guidelines Board, and the panel has often reflected City Hall’s leanings. This year, the board’s data showed that landlords’ costs rose by 5.3 percent, but it also revised figures indicating that landlords’ revenues increased by 6.2 percent.

Arpit Gupta, the sole member of the Rent Guidelines Board who voted against the rent freeze and was appointed by former Mayor Eric Adams, dismissed the notion of political interference and defended both the independence of the board and the quality of its technical work. However, he cautioned in an interview with NPQ that the measure could undermine landlords’ financial health and, consequently, the physical upkeep of stabilized buildings, emphasizing that the interpretation of the board’s mandate is ultimately a matter of discretion for its members rather than external imposition.

Yet despite the pushback, advocates insist that the benefits—greater housing stability, protection against displacement, and the chance to rebalance power between tenants and landlords—far outweigh the risks. In a city where affordability has become a crisis, taking on this resistance is a risk worth embracing.

The Myth of Heroic Leadership interrogates the nonprofit sector’s reliance on “heroic” executive leadership as a structural failure disguised as virtue. It challenges the deeply embedded belief that resilience lives in individual grit, arguing instead that overreliance on executive directors concentrates power, masks institutional weakness, and reproduces inequity—particularly for women and leaders of color. Through a systems and justice lens, the column examines how boards, funders, and organizational norms reinforce this model, and why sustainability depends on redistributing authority, accountability, and care across institutions rather than extracting more from a single leader.

In the nonprofit sector, we have learned to trust the wrong signs.

Visible strength and structural fragility are not always opposites. Sometimes, they are the same condition viewed from different distances.

When we see capable staff, impactful programs, renewed grants, and full calendars, we call an organization strong. But those signals can also hide a far more dangerous reality: an organization that may be on the verge of collapse from one funding freeze, leadership crisis, or critical staff departure.

There’s one trap at the center of all of this: we mistake motion for health.

When programs are running, and payroll is being met, and the staff is “busy, but good,” we take these as good signals and we exhale.

But those signals do not tell us whether an organization is healthy. They tell us only that the pressure is being absorbed somewhere. They do not tell us where it is landing or what it costs. They do not tell us whether the person absorbing it is sleeping, recovering, documenting, delegating, or silently becoming the infrastructure.

Most organizations have no way to measure that kind of hidden compensation.

There is no quarterly metric for “the database is clean because one person fixes it by hand every Friday,” and no line in the work plan for “this only works because Maya answers Slack at 10:47 p.m.” There’s no board report that reads, “the strategy looks coherent because someone resolves every contradiction before it reaches you.”

What looks like stability may actually be dependency. What looks like organizational maturity may be a single nervous system intercepting failure before anyone else has to feel it. And the better the gap is covered, the more invisible it becomes.

And that is a harder problem to fix than a crisis, because no one is looking for it.

That is one of the most pernicious costs of the heroic leadership model, which builds institutions whose strength is often a camouflage: a polished surface stretched over infrastructure that was never actually built.

In this model, the leader holds the work together so completely, and for so long, that everyone mistakes the leader’s endurance for organizational health.

By appearance, we call that a strong organization, when in reality, it’s a fragile organization with a strong person holding it together.

This is why organizational resilience is not just a leadership question or a management concern. It is about building sustainable infrastructure where staff, families, neighborhoods, and movements are not subject to absorbing the consequences of an organizational collapse that they did not create.

And that distinction is a justice issue.

The Impact of Heroic Leadership on Leaders, Staff, and Communities

This is where the need to repair organizational fragility converges with the demands of justice.

The heroic leadership model consumes the leaders most committed to the mission—and does it unequally, falling hardest on the women and BIPOC leaders. And the same model that burns out those leaders also builds the organizations most likely to fail the communities being served. It’s a double harm along one fault line.

Visible strength and structural fragility are not always opposites. Sometimes, they are the same condition viewed from different distances.

When an organization strains, stalls, or breaks the damage does not stop at the office door. This is especially true for nonprofits delivering critical community resources.

The damage is absorbed by the people who were counting on the work to continue.

A parent loses the childcare slot that made work possible. A tenant loses the advocate who knew their case. A neighborhood loses a food pantry, a clinic partner, a legal aid referral, or the one staff member who knew which door to knock on next. A movement loses momentum at the exact moment momentum matters most.

The very people the sector exists to serve are asked, once again, to absorb the cost of systems that were never designed to be durable.

If we expect communities to trust these organizations, we owe them organizations built to endure beyond any one person’s strength, stamina, or sacrifice.

The Test Comes Whether You’re Ready or Not

Every organization eventually gets stress-tested, and almost never on a schedule it chooses.

The nonprofit sector is all too familiar with these scenarios: a funder changes priorities; a state budget stalls; individual giving drops; a partner walks away and takes half a program with them; a key contract is delayed for months. These are not rare events. They are the weather patterns of nonprofit life, and in a moment defined by political volatility and financial precarity, the weather is getting rougher.

For much of the sector, the test has already arrived.

In early 2025 alone, roughly one in three community-serving nonprofits had government funding cut, frozen, or delayed, according to the Urban Institute. For the organizations that got hit, government dollars made up about 42 percent of their revenue—far above the sector norm.

Any one of these shocks becomes a test for an organization to either pass or fail. What’s hard is that the result is usually decided before the test begins.

A resilient organization bends when it is tested. It absorbs the hit, leans on reserves and distributed capacity, and keeps the mission moving. A brittle organization breaks because the shock lands on a structure with no slack, no redundancy, and no second point of support to take the weight when the first one buckles.

On an ordinary day, the brittle organization and the resilient one can look almost identical. The difference is often invisible from the outside because it lives in how the organization was built. Some organizations face the same downturn, the same delayed payment, the same funder shift, and survive while others break—and the ones that broke were often already built to do so. The hit simply found the fault line that had been there for years.

This is why the sector’s favorite explanations for collapse—bad luck, bad timing, a crisis no one saw coming—so rarely hold up. The crisis may be real, but it is not always the cause.

And the fault line is not random. The organizations that shatter are often the ones that have been running on heroic leadership: individual absorption in place of built capacity. The heroic leadership model does not just overwork the leader. It quietly substitutes the leader for the structure. And an organization that has swapped a person for its systems has no systems to fall back on when that person can no longer absorb the blow.

What Brittleness Actually Looks Like When It’s Tested

Brittleness is easy to name and hard to see.

In [the heroic leadership] model, the leader holds the work together so completely, and for so long, that everyone mistakes the leader’s endurance for organizational health.

It stays abstract until you know its shape. So here is the shape: a set of structural conditions that tend to travel together. Each one marks a place where the organization has quietly become dependent on something it cannot afford to lose.

What links them is a single mechanism. Something that should have been built into the institution—distributed decisions, documented process, diversified funding, shared relationships—has been absorbed by a person instead.

Heroic leadership fills the space where structure should be; here’s how:

1. Revenue success masks financial fragility. In a brittle organization, money may be coming in while the organization is still running at the edge. The budget balances only if every grant renews. Payroll clears only if a reimbursement arrives on time. The program survives only because one funder still trusts one person enough to keep writing the check.

On paper, the revenue looks institutional; In practice, it has been borrowed from individual loyalty.

The first article in the NPQ series, The Myth of Heroic Leadership, noted the Nonprofit Finance Fund’s 2025 survey findings that 36 percent of nonprofits ended 2024 in operating deficit—the highest rate in a decade. Further, more than half were holding three months or less of cash.

That is not resilience. That is a balance sheet standing on tiptoe.

2. Decisions can’t move without the leader. In a brittle organization, the executive director is not merely the final decision-maker on matters that truly require executive judgment. Instead, the role has become the necessary passageway for an astonishing range of ordinary choices:

Which vendor should we hire? Can we change the program schedule? How should we frame the donor email? Can this partner commitment be adjusted? Who needs to be looped in before we move?

Often this absorption of wide-ranging responsibility that is not limited to executive function occurs because no one else was given the context, authority, or standing to decide. The result: when the leader is out, decisions simply pile up, and the organization stops at the place where authority bottlenecked.

3. The relationships belong to people, not the institution. Key relationships may appear to belong to the organization, but many of them are personal assets on loan. And the person holding them isn’t always the ED — a development lead, a founder, a long-tenured program director, a board chair, or a trusted community liaison can each carry relationships the organization has never truly secured for itself.

The major funder trusts a person, not the organization. The signature donor takes one particular staff member’s call. The coalition partner shows up because of someone’s history in the work, not because the institution itself has earned that depth of trust.

This is where financial and relational brittleness turn out to be the same fault line. The revenue is fragile because the relationships are personal. When those people leave, the relationships often go with them. And the money is rarely far behind.

4. The structure for shared work was never built. Underneath all of this sits the deeper condition: the organization lacks the basic architecture that lets a team carry weight together. Critical structural elements like decision rights and accountability are undefined, and process lives in habit rather than documentation. Institutional knowledge is held in individual memory instead of shared systems.

None of this means the people failed. Usually, it means the opposite: capable people are working around the absence of structure with memory, improvisation, and trust. But improvisation is not infrastructure. Without scaffolding, the organization can’t distribute weight. It can only route pressure toward whoever is willing, available, or expected to hold it.

The Consequences are Not Hypothetical

In 2015, the Federation Employment and Guidance Service, an 80-year-old New York human-services agency, collapsed into bankruptcy almost overnight. From the outside, FEGS looked like one of the sector’s sturdier institutions: a $250 million budget, roughly 350 sites, and about 120,000 people served each year. Underneath, it was running on thin cash, underfunded government contracts, and finance leadership instability, with three chief financial officers cycling through in two years.

When the gap finally surfaced, there was no reserve and no slack to absorb it. Nearly 1,900 people lost their jobs, and 120,000 New Yorkers had to be handed off to other providers.

That is the danger of brittleness. It does not always look weak while everything is holding. It can look like strength: a decisive leader, a well-funded organization, a loyal donor base, a smooth-running staff.

There is one question that turns all of this from a diagnosis into something a board can test on itself: if this leader stepped away tomorrow, does the roof still stand?

In a healthy institution, the leader is the architect. They design the beams, specify the load paths, and build systems that bear weight whether or not she is in the room. In a brittle institution, the leader is not the architect—they are the structure.

The building stands because the leader is standing inside it, holding up the roof with their own arms.

What looks like shelter is a person under strain.

So, this question of “whether the roof still stands” in the absence of the leader is not about the leader at all—it is about getting to the bottom of the brittleness trap. It asks whether the organization has a strong enough existence independent of the leader’s strength. And in a startling number of organizations that look healthy, the honest answer is no.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

The alternative is real: an organization can be built so the roof stands on its own beams, and when it is, a leader’s departure is a transition rather than a collapse.

For example, when Kemi Ilesanmi, who led The Laundromat Project in NYC for more than a decade, handed the CEO role to Ayesha Williams in 2022, the transition was planned far in advance and the organization simply kept running. The two planned together and made joint appearances before donors and partners to make the point that the institution, not the founder, was what held.

No One Chose This. But It Can Be Fixed.

None of this is a natural fact about nonprofits, and none of it is the product of bad intentions. It’s something the sector built without ever deciding to: the accumulated result of thousands of small, reasonable choices made by people running as hard as they could at work that matters.

Fund the program the community needs now instead of the reserve. Renew the grant for one year because next year’s budget is uncertain. Trust the capable leader who always seems to have it under control. Keep the report focused on outputs because the program numbers are what the funder asked for.

Each choice can make sense on its own.

What almost no one did—because the work was always urgent and there was never time—was step back and add up what all those sensible decisions were producing together.

No board set out to hollow out its own organization. No funder designed a grant to burn out a leader. No executive director chose to become the backup system for every missing system. But that is what happened in too many places.

Boards take part mostly by being reassured by the wrong things.

A leader who never brings a crisis to solve, who makes the work look effortless, is easy to trust. And that trust, entirely well-meant, can quietly reward the compensation that is hollowing the organization out.

The fix isn’t to trust leaders less. The fix requires us to get more curious when everything looks seamless: What is making this look easy? What is not reaching the board? Who is catching the work before it breaks? What would happen if that person stopped catching it?

The answer is a different kind of attention.

You cannot build institutions for justice on a design that hands its deepest risks to the people with the least capacity to carry them.

In that light, resilience is not organizational housekeeping. It is a promise-keeping practice. It is what allows an organization to keep faith with the people its mission claims to serve.

It can’t be built without the people with the most leverage over what an organization rewards and what it can afford: its boards and its funders.

The correction starts with measuring the right thing. Not whether the leader is holding everything together, but whether the organization could hold together without any single person. Not the smoothness of the surface, but the soundness of what is underneath.

That is harder to see than a program count. Harder to fund than a direct service line. Harder to put in a board dashboard than the number of meals served, clients housed, students tutored, or cases closed.

That is probably part of why the sector does not measure it well.

But it is the only version of strength that survives a bad year.

Which is the question this series turns to next: how.

How organizations distribute the authority, relationships, knowledge, and capacity that brittleness concentrates. How boards can govern for resilience instead of being reassured by performance. How funders can support institutional strength instead of unintentionally rewarding heroic compensation.

Naming the fragility is the first move.

Building the alternative is the next.

As the country marked 250 years last month, on June 30th, we gathered 125 organizers, artists, donors, and community leaders from 21 states at the foot of Heart Mountain in Powell, Wyoming. We made this pilgrimage to the one of 10 incarceration camps for Japanese Americans to remember a chapter in US history that the current administration would prefer to forget. We named the gathering for words that say plainly what carried our communities through exclusion acts, incarceration, and every attempt to push them to the margins: “We were here before. We will be here after.”

Credit: Ming Lai/@humanistfilms

Under Executive Order 9066, Heart Mountain was one of 10 long-term confinement sites where more than 120,000 Japanese Americans living in California and parts of Arizona, Oregon, and Washington State were incarcerated during World War II—without charge, without trial, without cause.

We did not come to stand apart from the anniversary of the United States. We came to observe it in full. Among us were descendants of the Japanese Americans incarcerated at Heart Mountain, where nearly 15,000 Japanese Americans—14,025 to be exact—were held.

Lisa Hasegawa, co-author of this essay, had a father who was held here as a child between the ages of two and five. This was her second time visiting, and the weight of the history—and the people who were there with her—made her weep. The ground had not changed, but the group that came to reflect and learn about one of the United States’ darkest periods against its own citizens meant that she didn’t have to bear witness to her family’s history alone.

A country turning 250 faces a choice about how to tell its story. Heart Mountain stands as an emblem of the story we choose to tell—the fuller and more complicated story that speaks to the founding promises, the betrayals of those promises, and the generations who refused to let those betrayals stand.

“A nation that can hold Heart Mountain inside its founding narrative is harder to deceive, harder to divide, and harder to break.”

Beyond this history of pain, confinement and subjugation, Heart Mountain offers lessons for us as a community—lessons of resistance and defiance, of survival, of organizing, and of caring for one another. This history belongs to a longer arc that includes the dispossession of Indigenous peoples and the enslavement of Black Americans, interwoven expressions of the same logic that has long determined who is protected by this country’s laws and who is targeted by them. A nation that can hold Heart Mountain inside its founding narrative is harder to deceive, harder to divide, and harder to break.

We started at the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center, built to resemble a row of tar-paper-covered barracks, its exhibits tracing the history of incarceration and showing what daily life in the camp looked like. From there, we walked inside an original barracks that once housed multiple families, then followed a trail past the camp’s remaining structures, to the hospital and a reconstructed guard tower. Together, we listened to Johnny Tim, an Indigenous docent, recount that the land was once inhabited by the Crow, Blackfeet, and Shoshone before the federal government seized it, a reminder that dispossession did not begin with EO 9066.

Against the hot sun, we found cool relief at the base of the root cellar built by the incarcerated Japanese Americans to store familiar vegetables, such as daikon radishes, in the dry Wyoming desert. On the Honor Roll monument, we read the names of Japanese Americans who served in the segregated 442nd Regimental Combat Team, one of the most decorated units in U.S. military history, for the country that had imprisoned them.

Credit: Ming Lai/@humanistfilms

At the museum, we scanned photographs depicting the faces of 63 Japanese American draft resisters sitting in court in the largest mass trial in Wyoming history. These Americans were sentenced in 1944 to three years in federal prison for refusing to serve a country that had questioned their very loyalty.

Lisa’s family lived this paradox. Her grandfather’s older brother enlisted in the 442nd and instructed his younger brother to remain with their elderly parents, who they feared would be deported as non-citizens. While one brother fought for the United States, the US government branded the other as “disloyal” and incarcerated him in a federal penitentiary for trying to keep his family together.

The incarceration of Japanese Americans was not an aberration born of wartime panic. After Pearl Harbor, political opportunists singled out Japanese Americans for mass incarceration solely because of their race, even after the Justice Department concluded the foreign enemy threat had been contained. The POWs and foreign nationals held at sites like Fort Lincoln in Bismarck, North Dakota were treated more humanely than U.S. citizens of Japanese descent.

“The communities that carry its hardest chapters are the ones who know best how to keep its promises.”

We do not draw a straight line between 1942 and 2026. History does not repeat itself so neatly, and the people who survived the camps deserve better than a convenient analogy. But the patterns are legible to communities who have lived them before.

The people held at Heart Mountain would recognize the strategy: declare a community a threat, strip protections, and dare the institutions to object. They would also recognize the answer, because they lived it: care for one another, dissent and organize, and stand with every neighbor. That is what the community did.

It took decades for the Japanese American community members to rebuild and win redress. Today, they have mobilized against the Muslim Ban, and mobilized in protection of communities impacted by ICE raids and in support of the campaign for Black Reparations. They are doing the long, arduous work of forcing the country back toward its promises.

Credit: AAPI Civic Engagement Fund

Like many funders, the AAPI Civic Engagement Fund has brought local organizers and leaders together each year and those gatherings have served typical functions: organizers sharing lessons from the field, honing skills, and cultivating collaborations. But over time, as our relationships with our grantees deepened, we wanted our gatherings to do more. Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are more than a census category, and we exercise our convening power to create experiential opportunities that bring organizers to places of meaning, so they can feel history rather than simply study it.

In 2023, we went to the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, which documents the history of racial injustice in the U.S from the transatlantic slave trade to the mass incarceration we see today. This year we came to Heart Mountain. In our minds, each step led to the other. We could not come here until we went there.

We chose this site, and in this year marking the 250th anniversary of US independence, deliberately. As we witness the undermining of the rule of law, civic life, and the basic tenets of a democracy, we wanted to remind ourselves of the dangerous path our nation is headed if we do not reverse course.

It is also a time for our communities to act. We needed to bring AAPI communities to Heart Mountain so that this chapter stops being Japanese American history and becomes our collective history, part of the story the country tells itself at 250. We recognize that we cannot build the cross-constituency alliances that this moment urgently demands until we are first united among ourselves.

The 250th anniversary asks something of all of us, including the 26 million Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders who call this country home. Not whether to celebrate this country, but whether we are willing to acknowledge and remember all of it.

A cage fight on the South Lawn is one answer to the question of what the United States is at 250. A reckoning with Heart Mountain is another. The fuller account is the stronger one, and the communities that carry its hardest chapters are the ones who know best how to keep its promises.

Power of the People portrays Kamijo Whiteclay (Crow Tribe of Montana), an IAIA student, cultural advocate, and emerging Indigenous leader whose work is rooted in the protection and continuation of Crow culture. Standing with a raised fist, Kamijo embodies the strength of a generation committed to carrying traditional knowledge forward while confronting contemporary social and political challenges facing Native communities.

The painting addresses the complicated relationship between commercial tobacco and Indigenous peoples. While tobacco holds deep cultural and spiritual significance within many Native traditions, tobacco companies have historically targeted Native communities through misleading branding, aggressive marketing, and economic exploitation. Kamijo’s presence within the composition serves as both a challenge to these practices and a reminder of the distinction between sacred tobacco and commercial tobacco products.

Drawing upon the visual language of protest, portraiture, and Indigenous identity, the work celebrates Native resilience and self-determination. Kamijo’s unwavering gaze and confident stance communicate a commitment to education, cultural preservation, and community empowerment.

Rather than presenting Indigenous people as relics of the past, Power of the People centers a contemporary Crow woman actively shaping the future of her community. The painting honors the power of Indigenous youth, cultural knowledge, and collective action to inspire meaningful change across generations.

Nonprofit leaders view themselves as stewards of the organizations they serve. It is a word used constantly in the sector—in board orientations, in donor communications, in strategic planning retreats. But stewardship is not as well-defined as we tend to assume. In practice, it is often interpreted as preservation: the responsibility to protect existing programs, traditions, structures, and institutional identity. To keep what has been built intact.

That interpretation is understandable. It is also, in many cases, the thing quietly preventing organizations from fulfilling the mission they were built to serve.

To illustrate, let’s consider one of the most common nonprofits in the sector: the community theater. Community theaters exist in nearly every corner of the country, presenting everything from Shakespeare to improv to musicals. They are almost entirely driven by volunteer energy and deep community loyalty. Take one such hypothetical theater, embedded in its community for decades, offering a place for adults and kids to come together and play. Since its founding, this theater has built its season around four productions: a musical, a comedy, a drama, and a children’s show, a common lineup that worked well for years.

But what happens when the community changes? When the programming that once filled seats no longer draws patrons or volunteer actors? When the data makes clear that the community needs something different, does the organization listen? Or does it keep doing what once made it successful, even when that is no longer the case?

When the data makes clear that the community needs something different, does the organization listen? Or does it keep doing what once made it successful, even when that is no longer the case?

Every nonprofit begins with a mission. A strategy is created to fulfill that mission. When that strategy works, it becomes tradition. When it becomes tradition, it becomes identity. By the time an organization needs to change course, the strategy and the mission have become so intertwined that shifting one feels like abandoning the other. Changing how we deliver the mission starts to feel like changing the mission itself. That is the moment stewardship and preservation begin to look like the same thing.

Returning to the community theater illustrates how quickly this can happen. The season lineup is in the organization’s DNA—it is who they have always been. But the participation data tells a different story. Audiences are shrinking. Volunteer actors are harder to recruit. And the data points clearly toward one area of growing community interest: youth programming.

From the staff’s perspective, the path forward may seem obvious. Shift the lineup to focus more on children’s productions. Staying the course means turning away from what the community is asking for, therefore shrinking earned income and missing opportunities for contributed revenue. Expanding children’s theater aligns with the mission. But it doesn’t match the organization’s identity. This contrast between what the community is asking for and the pull of the status quo often creates conflict and resistance in the boardroom. The shift feels like changing the mission. It feels like compromising the heart and soul of the organization. But is it? Or is it simply adjusting the programming to better fulfill the mission?

The question isn’t really about programming. It’s about what the board is actually trying to protect. Is staying the course a genuine act of mission stewardship? Or is it about preserving the version of the organization everyone has grown comfortable with?

One of the reasons this happens is that organizations slowly stop distinguishing between their mission and the ways they have chosen to pursue it. The mission remains, but over years of successful work, programs, traditions, and operating assumptions become layered onto it until they feel inseparable. Eventually, people stop asking what the mission requires and start assuming they already know because “this is how we’ve always done it.”

Good stewardship requires returning to the mission itself—not the assumptions built around it, not the programs that once fulfilled it, and not the traditions that grew out of earlier success. It requires asking a deceptively simple question: What promise did we make to our community? Once that answer is clear, the next question follows naturally: Is the way we are fulfilling that promise still the best one for the community we serve today?

This pattern—of commitment to continuity becoming an obstacle to mission—shows up across the sector in recognizable ways. A food bank that has always distributed through a fixed network of partner agencies resists moving to direct distribution, even when the data shows significant gaps in who they are actually reaching. A workforce development nonprofit continues offering the same certification programs it has offered for years, even as the local job market has shifted and employer demand has moved elsewhere. A social services organization maintains a geographic footprint built around the neighborhood where its founders lived, long after the population it was built to serve has moved to a different part of the city. In each case, the organization is working hard. In each case, the mission is being honored, but the method has quietly become the obstacle.

When an organization’s community changes and its current programming no longer meets those needs, the real question isn’t whether to change. It’s whether leadership is ready to change.

Is staying the course a genuine act of mission stewardship? Or is it about preserving the version of the organization everyone has grown comfortable with?

Somewhere along the way, stewardship quietly becomes synonymous with holding on. With keeping things as they are. With protecting the organization from the forces that would change it. That is not stewardship. That is comfort dressed up in responsible language.

None of this suggests that continuity lacks value. In fact, many of the qualities that make nonprofits trusted institutions—long-standing programs, stable leadership, institutional memory, and traditions that connect generations of volunteers and supporters—are built through continuity. Those qualities should not be discarded simply because something new is available. The question is whether they still strengthen the organization’s ability to fulfill its mission. Continuity is a tremendous asset when it strengthens an organization’s ability to fulfill its mission. It becomes a liability only when preserving continuity becomes more important than serving the community.

True stewardship is the ongoing commitment to ensure that the organization is delivering on the promise it made to its community, whatever form that delivery needs to take. The method is a tool. The mission is the point. And when the tool stops working, a good steward picks up a different one.

This distinction matters because the language of stewardship gives resistance to change a kind of moral authority it has not earned. When a board member says “we have a responsibility to protect what this organization has always stood for,” they are not wrong about the responsibility. They are wrong about what it requires. Protecting what the organization stands for means protecting the mission: the why, the who, and the promise. It does not mean protecting the programs, the traditions, or the season lineup.

It is worth pausing here to name something directly: the people who resist change in these moments are not the villains of the story. More often than not, they are the people who built the organization, the ones who showed up when no one else would and who gave years, sometimes decades, of their lives to something they believed in deeply. Their resistance is not obstruction. It is love. And love deserves to be recognized before it is challenged.

The problem is when love becomes a filter that keeps leadership from seeing clearly. When the emotional investment in what the organization has been makes it impossible to honestly assess what it needs to become.

So what does true stewardship look like when an organization sees the need for a change?

It starts with a clear-eyed separation of the mission and the method. The mission is the promise the organization made to its community. The method is how the organization has chosen to fulfill that promise. Stewardship means holding the promise sacred—not the method used to keep it.

This requires leadership to ask a different question than “what have we always done?” The question is “what does fulfilling this mission actually require right now?” Not at founding. Not in the organization’s best year. Right now, for the community that exists today, with the needs that are present today. When that question is asked honestly and regularly, the answer will sometimes be uncomfortable. It will sometimes point toward change that feels enormous. That discomfort is not a reason to turn away. It is a sign that the question is working.

True stewardship of mission delivery also means being honest about what the data is saying. Declining participation, shrinking donor base, volunteer pipelines that are drying up—these are not problems to manage around. They are the community telling the organization something important. A steward listens. A steward asks what the mission requires in response, and then leads the organization toward that response, even when it means letting go of the version of the mission everyone has grown accustomed to.

The community theater may or may not make the change. Some organizations in that position do. They look honestly at the data, separate the mission from the method, and find the courage to deliver on their promise in a new way. Their audiences grow. Their volunteer base deepens. The community they were always meant to serve shows back up—because the organization finally showed up for them.

Others don’t take this path. They tell themselves they are being faithful stewards of something important, and in a way they are right. They are being faithful to something, just not to the mission. And slowly, quietly, the gap between what the organization is offering and what the community needs grows wide enough that it cannot be closed. The theater goes dark. The building sits empty. And the community loses something it needed, not because the mission was no longer relevant, but because the people charged with stewarding it confused preservation with purpose.

Stewardship is not holding on. It is the ongoing, honest, sometimes uncomfortable work of asking whether the mission is still reaching the people it was made for—and being willing to change everything except that commitment.

The mission belongs to the community. It always has. Beneath the governance mechanics, financial oversight, and strategic planning, that is the board’s most important stewardship responsibility.

Throughout American history, charitable foundations and nonprofits have played an important role in shaping civic life. These institutions support work that strengthens the places we call home, help communities respond to challenges, and build toward the future. As we mark the milestone of 250^th year of the United States, it is a critical time for philanthropy to meaningfully and boldly consider how narrative power operates.

Our history is a collection of stories that shape who we are. Stories have the power to change how we see ourselves individually and collectively. Stories can create community and bridge divides. The best stories demonstrate how we can take something unique and specific and make it universal. Stories help us imagine who we want to be.

I am reminded of a persuasive case from one of the world’s best visual and sonic storytellers: Beyoncé. She opened her Cowboy Carter concert with stunning iconography of an American flag and a sign that read: “Never seek permission for something that already belongs to you.”

What was beautiful about the Soldier Field concert I attended in Chicago was that Beyoncé created space for everyone to belong. It was a brilliant, unapologetic declaration of humanity’s right to exist and to come as you are, in your cowboy boots and hats, rhinestone bedazzled jeans, prairie dresses, and fringe vests. I have been to a lot of Beyoncé concerts over 20 plus years—going back to the Houston Rodeo. She has always catered to a largely Black and brown audience, with people of color of all shapes, sizes, and genders showing up to pay tribute to their Queen Bey. What felt different about this concertgoing crowd was it attracted families in several formations. I know dads who brought their daughters to the show, both as first-time Beyoncé concertgoers, and parents of transgender kids, with and without their children. It was the largest contingent of aunties, grandmas, and White folks I’ve ever seen at a Beyoncé concert. All were welcome.

I want to practice philanthropy the way Beyoncé puts on a show: with courage and boldness, with unbridled joy, and by creating spaces where everyone sees themselves reflected, all while continuing to transform and adapt over the decades.

It was a powerful vision of the United States. That is the beauty of art, concerts, public gatherings, and convenings: they allow strangers to come together for a shared experience. We gathered as Beyoncé brought her album to life and reflected on what it feels like to be a Black woman, a Black person, living in the United States today.

She opened with “American Requiem.” It’s a song that begins with the lyrics: “Nothin’ really ends. For things to stay the same, they have to change again.” It ends with these lyrics: “Goodbye to what has been. Pretty house that we never settled in. A funeral for fair-weather friends. I am the one to cleanse me of my Father’s sins. American Requiem. Them big ideas are buried here. Amen.”

Amen and amen. Preach, Beyoncé.

I want to practice philanthropy the way Beyoncé puts on a show: with courage and boldness, with unbridled joy, and by creating spaces where everyone sees themselves reflected, all while continuing to transform and adapt over the decades. As we collectively consider who gets to shape the United States, philanthropy has a responsibility to ensure people see themselves represented, in stories where their history is preserved and where they feel like they belong.

At the MacArthur Foundation, where I work, we practice inclusive communications. We are focused on whose voices we lift up, whose stories we share, and whose wisdom and experiences we center. When we communicate, our aim is to be in right relationship with the communities we seek to serve.

We use asset-based language as a tool for framing conversations for collective action and to help reshape narratives and reimagine systems. We emphasize solutions and assets over problems and deficits. When we talk about communities with whom we work, we emphasize their personhood, dignity, and agency, rather than their challenges and disenfranchisement.

None of this is intended to ignore historical inequities. However, we will not define people by the challenges they face. We highlight their strengths, aspirations, and contributions to society. We will also demonstrate how inequitable systems, rather than individual actions, created the current conditions that exist.

Language conveys values. Language can be used to either support or challenge the systems we seek to dismantle. We want people to see themselves in the language we use—in our work, at our events, in our grantmaking, and even in our website copy.

That starts when you walk through the doors of our building. MacArthur’s Chicago headquarters, the Marquette Building, is situated on the lands of the Potawatomi people. But the architecture of the Marquette Building perpetuates a harmful, stereotypical narrative about the Native people. A recent intervention, informed and led by Native leaders, asserts the continued presence, resilience, and vibrancy of Native peoples in Chicago and the Midwest. The title of the intervention is in Potawatomi language and English translation: “Nwi Yathmomen, We will tell our story.”

In the same way that Beyoncé evolves over the years, while staying true to her Houston roots, philanthropy must do the same. We must pivot, adapt, and respond to the moment, while remaining true to our missions.

This is only one way that we have been called to respond as a foundation. More broadly, this moment calls on us to use our institutional and individual voices to be defenders of the truth and to never seek permission for something that already belongs to us—whether it is the American flag or fundamental freedoms, like our Constitutional rights.

Beyoncé reclaimed American symbolism—a bold statement, especially amid an increasingly isolated and polarized country. It was a stark reminder that our sector must also maintain an unwavering commitment to what we all know to be true: the United States belongs to the roughly 343 million people who live here and call it home. It belongs to the people who were born here and the people who migrated here to make a better life for themselves. It belongs to Indigenous and Native people who were stewards of this land and lived, loved, and cared for it until forced out by non-Native settlers. And it belongs to the descendants of those who came on the Mayflower seeking religious freedom and those who were sold and forcibly removed from Africa—enduring the trip aboard floating coffins. It belongs to the descendants of skilled immigrants from China who laid the final 700 miles of the Transcontinental Railroad driving the settlement of the American West. It belongs to the essential workers and small business owners from the Global South who keep our economy running today.

Our country is built on the premise that everyone has a right to express themselves, even when others don’t agree with or like what they say. Any attempt to silence speech—or limit our freedom to give to the causes and communities we care about—weakens our democracy and endangers the very fabric of civic life.

In the same way that Beyoncé evolves over the years, while staying true to her Houston roots, philanthropy must do the same. We must pivot, adapt, and respond to the moment, while remaining true to our missions. Charitable foundations exist to bring people together across backgrounds, geographies, ideologies, and identities.

That is the work of philanthropy—ancestor and descendant work. It is about what we are leaving behind for the next generation. It is about the dreams, visions, and futures we build together. It is about the stories we tell, the space we create, and doing it joyfully. Because making time to seek joy allows you to find lightness when the world feels heavy. It can keep you courageous for the times ahead.

As we continue to celebrate our country’s founding, long after the fireworks and patriotic displays of the Fourth of July, the MacArthur Foundation is committed to unearthing the complexity, the contradictions, and the experiences that make our story whole. In Chicago, we are supporting a range of 250^th storytelling on inclusive narratives at a time when the rough edges of our country’s history are being flattened, removed, or erased. Some of these initiatives are as follows:

• Segundo Ruiz Belvis is inviting participants to reinterpret freedom, rights, and belonging through an Afro–Caribbean lens—asking whose histories are centered, whose are erased, and how cultural memory expands the story of the United States.
• The Stories of Us, a national civic organization whose mission is to inspire belonging and connection through storytelling experiences, is transforming public spaces into civic commons for reflection, dialogue, and imagination. Traveling Drums, a large-scale public art exhibition, will illuminate stories about the country’s founding ideals and honor creativity, expression, and traditions of all communities.
• Illinois Humanities is offering a range of ways for people to get involved in America 250 programs and initiatives, including educational resources related to civics and democracy, focused on Chicago and Illinois history. Illinois Voices 250, developed in partnership with the Illinois America 250 Commission and StoryCorps, is inviting Illinoisians to share personal experiences, family histories, and community perspectives exploring themes of democracy, belonging, service, and the future of Illinois.

I invite you to consider: what will the next 250 years look like? What story do we want to tell?

This three-part series, “Searching Mothers: The Untold Story of Latin American Resistance,” focuses on Latin American maternal activism and highlights its transformative potential at both the social and individual levels, even in repressive or authoritarian environments. The first part is set in Colombia during the early 2000s and uses this context to analyze how motherhood—an identity rooted in the domestic and private sphere—transforms into an identification with a collective forged around public political action.

The second part draws a parallel between the case of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo and the Mothers of Soacha, exploring common issues in their experiences of activism across different contexts: the phenomenon of denialism, stigmatization, and social mobilization through symbolic, bodily, and unconventional practices.

This third and final installment aims primarily to challenge the reductionist and colonizing narrative of Colombia held at the international level. We highlight how collective organization—even when originating from the margins—is capable of destabilizing the dominant discourse.

View Spanish Translation Below / Leer en Español Abajo

When Colombia comes up in conversation, someone unfamiliar with the country will probably mention that it is overrun with crime and drug trafficking. Alternately, someone who has visited might say that it has both beautiful destinations as well as dangerous and unsightly areas. Yet we as Colombians—as those who truly understand the immensity and depth of our territory—are likely to speak to you instead of Colombian berraquera: our relentless struggle against the stigma of narcotics, and above all, our enduring fight to emerge from internal armed conflict, lay down arms, and achieve a land of lasting peace.

For decades, international media and global advisories have constructed a reductionist, deeply sensationalized narrative around Colombia, framing it as an inherently hazardous territory dominated by terrorism, street crime, kidnappings, and homicides. While these surface-level warnings paint a picture of generalized chaos, they obscure a far harsher and more complex reality that cannot be understood through superficial statistics. By reducing the country’s crisis to a mere matter of common delinquency and depoliticized violence, these narratives ultimately transform a population that is itself a victim of internal armed conflict into the sole bearer of blame for a reality they have tirelessly fought to overcome.

This distortion occurs precisely because those with the power and platform of amplification often choose the easy path: simplifying complex structural dynamics and denying systemic atrocities by stigmatizing an entire society. Therefore, it is imperative to shift the perspective entirely. We must cease evaluating a country—and a continent—solely through the lens of its violence, and instead recognize it through its persistent struggle to break free from it.

It is from these historically neglected territories that the true spirit of berraquera emerges: an extraordinary capacity for grassroots activism, communal solidarity, and non-violent resistance.

It is for this very reason that our work does not focus merely on documenting state crimes. Instead, it centers on what truly defines us: the berraquera of mothers who rose against an entire state’s apparatus to declare their truth, undeterred by reprisals, social stigma, or systemic violence. These are the stories and voices that demand our collective attention—not because they represent power, but because they emanate from individuals, whom those in power have historically dismissed as insignificant.

This shift in narrative does not mean denying the reality of insecurity, violence, or deeply rooted social fractures. Rather, it demands that we refuse to settle for a single story or reductionist stigma. After all, the very territory that external advisories caution against visiting is populated by millions of individuals who wake up every single day driven by the enduring hope of building a peaceful nation.

To execute this necessary shift, a humanist paradigm is required—one that redefines Colombia’s transnational identity by genuinely centering its margins. The true hallmark that our country offers the world is neither its trauma nor the sensationalism of its violence, but the radical resilience cultivated in its peripheries.

It is from these historically neglected territories that the true spirit of berraquera emerges: an extraordinary capacity for grassroots activism, communal solidarity, and non-violent resistance. Exporting this legacy means asserting that Colombia’s greatest contribution to global consciousness is not the memory of its oppressors, but the formidable social labor of its communities reclaiming life, dignity, and historical truth from the ashes of conflict.

In a 2025 interview with Ana Páez, the searching mothers of Soacha clarified that the painful victories they have achieved have been the result of tireless, courageous, and resilient work:

“We didn’t achieve anything without working for it. We achieved it because we worked for it, because we fought for it. We’re old women, but look at us, brave and standing tall, truly. It has been painful for us but seeing that the JEP and the Commission practically clarified the facts of what was committed, and seeing their confession that yes, they killed innocent people, well, for us it was a joy, because we truly cleared the names of our children, which is what we wanted, to clear the names of our sons. Now we want the truth, but a truth with dignity”

This activism is reflected in the already reviewed embodied, peaceful, and supportive practices that mothers use as mobilization strategies. The example of the mothers of Plaza de Mayo wearing their children’s diapers as headscarves, the t-shirts with photos of disappeared loved ones, the intervention of boots outside Congress by the mothers of Soacha, or the photographic series that consisted of burying their own bodies, are just some examples of deeply symbolic and non-violent practices that can imbue mobilization with meaning and center victims’ voices in the discourse.

What these practices reflect is that maternal activism’s methodological and human lessons offer a universal model of civil resistance, as these strategies can adapt to different regimes, contexts, and macro-criminal patterns. The mothers’ logic of affection combined with their courage and berraquera can be understood as a true expression of Colombian identity, but also as a shared legacy of Latin-American resistance.

As NPQ’s #WeTheCivic initiative proposes, to truly understand the civic health of a society, global attention must shift from the official discourses of power to the marginalized voices that institutional structures attempt to erase from history through systematic amnesia and legal impunity.

Another key aspect of the methodological lessons learned from maternal activism is that these are groups shaped by deeply rooted and multi-sectoral experiences of violence. Because of this, the group’s intersectional component, born from geographic and economic marginalization, can give its participants the strength and rootedness to continue the struggle and social transformation, even as these individuals endure constant cycles of systematic violence. The very structures of violence that force them to withstand new forms of revictimization also provide the necessary fuel for victims to devise new forms of activism that challenge the system—not only for personal purposes, but for collective benefit. Gradually, this process creates a favorable context for social and discursive transformation.

As NPQ’s #WeTheCivic initiative proposes, to truly understand the civic health of a society, global attention must shift from the official discourses of power to the marginalized voices that institutional structures attempt to erase from history through systematic amnesia and legal impunity. The case of Searching Mothers allows us to closely examine the obstacles to democratic participation, but it also shows us important transformations rooted in activism.

Colombia now knows the Mothers are right, acknowledged with the slogan “Las Cuchas tienen razón.”  Theirs has been a relentless, years-long struggle whose truth is today recognized by civil society and state institutions. Therefore, if there is a paramount lesson that Colombia can offer the world, it is radical resilience: the unyielding fight for official recognition of responsibility and for a historical memory that actively combats denialism. Today, these mothers demonstrate that grassroots mobilization possesses the power to break down any wall built upon deceptive and authoritarian narratives.

If anyone around the world ever wishes to truly understand Colombia and grasp the essence of our culture, they should know that the ultimate hallmark of this land is berraquera. May they learn from it to embrace an unquenchable thirst to fight for their own rights. This means understanding that in any context and under any circumstance, raising one’s voice will always be necessary and worth it.

If anyone around the world ever wishes to truly understand Colombia and grasp the essence of our culture, they should know that the ultimate hallmark of this land is berraquera. May they learn from it to embrace an unquenchable thirst to fight for their own rights.

These are the voices we seek to amplify, and the narratives truly worth committing to memory. These mothers represent a society that can stand tall before any citizen of the world to teach them that the logic of affection serves as an immense force; one that dispels fear and grants the courage to act against any regime. This Colombian history, which shares profound historical ties with the Argentine experience, reveals a fundamental truth: since its inception, our continent has continually overcome violence and authoritarianism, turning historical struggle into its ultimate lifeline. Yet, from the outside, we are often still viewed as diminished, reduced to superficial narratives of danger and corruption.

This year is a crucial moment to learn from the history of Latin America as one of tireless struggles and resistance, not a land of crime and drug trafficking. Thus, by recentering narratives from the margins, we reclaim the true spirit of this series—Searching Mothers: The Untold Story of Latin American Resistance—by proving that the dignity of our people can never be eclipsed by stigma or state violence.

Las Cuchas Tienen Razón: La Lección Colombiana de Resiliencia Radical

 Esta serie de tres partes, titulada “Madres Buscadoras: La Historia no Contada de la Resistencia Latinoamericana,” se centra en el activismo maternal en América Latina y destaca su potencial transformador tanto a nivel social como individual, incluso en entornos represivos o autoritarios. La primera entrega se encuentra enfocada en la Colombia de principios de la década de los 2000 y utiliza este contexto para analizar cómo la maternidad—una identidad arraigada en el ámbito doméstico y privado—se transforma en una identificación colectiva forjada en torno a la acción política pública.

La segunda entrega traza un paralelo entre el caso de las Madres de Plaza de Mayo y las Madres de Soacha, explorando puntos comunes en sus experiencias de activismo a través de contextos diferentes: el negacionismo, la estigmatización y la movilización social mediante prácticas simbólicas, corporales y no convencionales.

Esta tercera y última entrega de esta serie tiene como objetivo principal cuestionar la narrativa reduccionista y colonizadora que se tiene de Colombia a nivel internacional. Se destaca cómo la acción colectiva—incluso cuando se origina desde sectores históricamente marginalizados—es capaz de desestabilizar el discurso dominante.

Cuando surge el tema de Colombia en una conversación, alguien que no conoce el país probablemente mencione que está dominado por el crimen y el tráfico de drogas. En cambio, alguien que lo ha visitado podría decir que cuenta con destinos hermosos, pero también con zonas peligrosas y poco atractivas. Sin embargo, nosotros, como colombianos—los que realmente entendemos la inmensidad y la riqueza de nuestro territorio—te hablaremos de la berraquera colombiana: de nuestra incansable lucha por superar el estigma del narcotráfico y, sobre todo, de nuestro esfuerzo constante por dejar atrás el conflicto armado interno, dejar las armas y construir una tierra de paz duradera.

Durante décadas, los medios de comunicación internacionales y las advertencias de viaje emitidas a nivel global han construido una narrativa reduccionista y profundamente sensacionalista sobre Colombia, presentándola como un territorio inherentemente peligroso, dominado por el terrorismo, la delincuencia común, los secuestros y los homicidios. Si bien estas advertencias superficiales proyectan la imagen de un caos generalizado, también ocultan una realidad mucho más dura y compleja, imposible de comprender a partir de estadísticas aisladas o de percepciones simplificadas. Al reducir la crisis del país a una mera cuestión de delincuencia común y a una violencia despolitizada, estas narrativas terminan responsabilizando a una población que es en sí misma víctima del conflicto armado interno y, que ha luchado incansablemente por superar estas realidades.

Dicha distorsión ocurre precisamente porque quienes tienen el poder y las plataformas de amplificación de estos relatos suelen optar por el camino más fácil: simplificar dinámicas estructurales complejas y negar atrocidades sistémicas mediante la estigmatización de toda una sociedad. Por ello, resulta imprescindible transformar por completo esta perspectiva. Debemos dejar de evaluar a un país—y a todo un continente—exclusivamente a través de la violencia y comenzar a reconocerlo por su persistente lucha por liberarse de ella.

Es precisamente por esto que nuestro trabajo no se enfoca en documentar crímenes de estado. En cambio, se enfoca en lo que realmente nos define: la berraquera de las madres que se alzan en contra de todo el aparato estatal para declarar su verdad, sin dejarse intimidar por las represalias, el estigma social ni la violencia sistémica. Estas son las historias y las voces que exigen nuestra atención colectiva, no porque representen el poder, sino porque provienen de personas a quienes los que tienen el poder han relegado históricamente a la invisibilidad y la insignificancia.

Este cambio de perspectiva no implica negar la realidad de la inseguridad, la violencia o las profundas fracturas sociales que tenemos. Más bien, exige que rechacemos la idea de una sola versión o un estigma reduccionista. Al fin y al cabo, el mismo territorio que las autoridades desaconsejan visitar está habitado por millones de personas que se levantan cada día impulsadas por la esperanza de construir una nación pacífica.

Para llevar a cabo este cambio necesario, se requiere un paradigma humanista que redefina la identidad transnacional de Colombia, centrando genuinamente la atención en sus márgenes. El verdadero sello distintivo que nuestro país ofrece al mundo no reside ni en su trauma ni en el sensacionalismo de su violencia, sino en la resiliencia radical cultivada en sus periferias.

Es de estos territorios históricamente olvidados de donde emerge el verdadero espíritu de la berraquera: una extraordinaria capacidad para el activismo de base, la solidaridad comunitaria y la resistencia no violenta. Exportar este legado significa afirmar que la mayor contribución de Colombia a la conciencia global no es la memoria de sus opresores, sino el formidable trabajo social de sus comunidades que recuperan la vida, la dignidad y la verdad histórica de las cenizas del conflicto.

En una entrevista de 2025 con Ana Páez, las madres buscadoras de Soacha aclararon que las dolorosas victorias que han logrado han sido el resultado de un trabajo incansable, valiente y resiliente:

“Nosotros no nos hemos conseguido algo si no lo hemos trabajado, nos lo hemos conseguido porque lo hemos trabajado, porque lo hemos luchado, viejitas como estamos, pero vea valientes y paradas con las botas bien puestas, de verdad. Ha sido doloroso para nosotros, pero al ver que la JEP y la Comisión, prácticamente nos aclararon los hechos de lo que ha sido cometido y al haber visto esa confesión de ellos de decir sí, nosotros matamos a inocentes pues para nosotras fue una alegría, porque de verdad limpiamos el nombre de nuestros hijos, que era lo que queríamos, limpiar el nombre de nuestros hijos. Ahora queremos una verdad, pero una verdad con dignidad”

Este activismo se refleja en las prácticas corporales, pacíficas y solidarias que las madres utilizan como estrategias de movilización ya analizadas. El ejemplo de las madres de Plaza de Mayo usando los pañales de sus hijos como pañuelos para la cabeza, las camisetas con fotos de sus seres queridos desaparecidos, la intervención con botas frente al Congreso por parte de las madres de Soacha, o la serie fotográfica que consistió en enterrar sus propios cuerpos, son solo algunos ejemplos de prácticas profundamente simbólicas y no violentas que pueden dotar de significado a la movilización y centrar el discurso en las voces de las víctimas.

Estas prácticas reflejan que las lecciones metodológicas y humanas del activismo maternal ofrecen un modelo universal de resistencia civil, ya que estas estrategias pueden adaptarse a diferentes regímenes, contextos y patrones macrocriminales. La lógica del afecto de las madres, combinada con su valentía y espíritu de berraquera, puede entenderse como una auténtica expresión de la identidad colombiana, pero también como un legado compartido de la resistencia latinoamericana.

Otro aspecto clave de las lecciones metodológicas aprendidas del activismo materno es que estos grupos están marcados por experiencias de violencia profundamente arraigadas y multisectoriales. Por ello, el componente interseccional del grupo, derivado de la marginación geográfica y económica, puede brindar a sus participantes la fuerza y el ahínco necesarios para continuar la lucha y la transformación social, incluso cuando estas personas sufren ciclos constantes de violencia sistemática. Las mismas estructuras de violencia que las obligan a soportar nuevas formas de revictimización, también les proporcionan el impulso necesario para idear nuevas formas de activismo que desafíen al sistema, no solo con fines personales, sino también para el beneficio colectivo. Gradualmente, este proceso crea un contexto favorable para la transformación social y discursiva.

Como propone la iniciativa #WeTheCivic de NPQ, para comprender verdaderamente la salud cívica de una sociedad, la atención mundial debe desplazarse de los discursos oficiales del poder a las voces marginalizadas que las estructuras institucionales intentan borrar de la historia mediante la amnesia sistemática y la impunidad legal. El caso de las madres buscadoras nos permite examinar de cerca los obstáculos a la participación democrática, pero también nos muestra importantes transformaciones que tienen su origen en el activismo.

Colombia ahora sabe que las Madres tienen razón, como lo demuestra el lema “Las Cuchas tienen razón”. La suya ha sido una lucha incansable que se ha extendido durante años y cuya verdad hoy es reconocida por la sociedad civil y las instituciones estatales. Por lo tanto, si hay una lección fundamental que Colombia puede ofrecer al mundo, es la resiliencia radical: la lucha inquebrantable por el reconocimiento oficial de la responsabilidad y por una memoria histórica que combata activamente la negación. Hoy, estas madres demuestran que la movilización popular tiene el poder de derribar cualquier muro construido sobre narrativas engañosas y autoritarias.

Si alguien en el mundo desea comprender verdaderamente a Colombia y captar la esencia de nuestra cultura, debe saber que el símbolo por excelencia de esta tierra es la berraquera. Que aprendan de ella a cultivar una sed insaciable de luchar por sus derechos. Esto significa comprender que, en cualquier contexto y bajo cualquier circunstancia, alzar la voz siempre será necesario y valdrá la pena.

Estas son las voces que buscamos amplificar, y las historias que realmente merecen ser grabadas en la memoria. Estas madres representan una sociedad que puede presentarse ante cualquier ciudadano del mundo para enseñarle que la lógica del afecto constituye una fuerza inmensa; una que disipa el miedo y otorga el valor para actuar contra cualquier régimen. Esta historia colombiana, que comparte profundos lazos históricos con la experiencia argentina, revela una verdad fundamental: desde sus inicios, nuestro continente ha superado continuamente la violencia y el autoritarismo, convirtiendo la lucha histórica en su último sustento. Sin embargo, desde fuera, a menudo se nos sigue viendo como seres debilitados, reducidos a relatos superficiales de peligro y corrupción.

Este año es un momento crucial para asociar a la historia de Latinoamérica con un legado de luchas y resistencias incansables, y no con una tierra de crimen y narcotráfico. Así, al recuperar las narrativas marginalizadas, reivindicamos el verdadero espíritu de esta serie—Madres Buscadoras: La Historia No Contada de la Resistencia Latinoamericana—al demostrar que la dignidad de nuestro pueblo jamás podrá ser eclipsada por el estigma o la violencia estatal.

Nonprofit Quarterly (NPQ) has partnered with Counterstream Media to co-publish Peace & Riot’s latest issue—a collection of more than 20 voices exploring climate leadership on the frontlines, in communities, and in the culture. Read the full Peace & Riot issue here.

Oʻahu is an island of lava and water. Neither can exist without the other. The land’s riches have attracted people for centuries; in fact, it was the first of the Hawaiian islands that colonizers set their eyes on in the 18th century. These days, it’s home to the state’s largest number of Native Hawaiians outside the mainland. These are their ancestral lands—lifeways that foreigners continue to desecrate. 

Five years ago, the U.S. military contaminated the island’s waterways when underground storage tanks spilled over 180,000 gallons of toxic petroleum into the groundwater. People got sick and rose up to demand accountability. After public pressure, the U.S. government shut down the facility and removed most of the fuel from the site. In June, the U.S. Department of Justice finally reached a $17 million settlement with 3,600 people. 

Mai Hall, a Native Hawaiian and military spouse whose family got sick from the water, is relieved to receive some material support to manage her children’s lifelong impacts—but money can never repair the harm to the land. Hall has been on the frontlines of fighting for her people and their water. Without her community’s voice, who knows where the crisis would be today. 

Their efforts, however, are not over. Since the U.S. settler colonial project began 250 years ago, Indigenous lifeways have fissured, but resistance to empire is growing. As Hall says, “They took the land, they poisoned our water, and they’re not facing the consequences of their actions.” It’s past time that the U.S. government does. The water deserves more—in Hawai’i and beyond. 

This interview has been lightly condensed and edited for clarity.

Yessenia Funes: I wanted to first ask you if you could ground us in where you are and describe the lands that helped shape you and your advocacy. 

Mai Hall: What I’m hearing is a ho’olauna, or an introduction.

ʻO wau o Mai Kapuaoʻihilani Mei Lin. Noho au i ʻĀliapaʻakai, aka, hanau ʻia o Kalihi, ma kona o Oʻahu, ma Hawaiʻi. Which means aloha, my name is Mai, and I live in Salt Lake, which is called ʻĀliapaʻakai, but I was actually born in the ahupuaʻa of Kalihi in the district of Kona, on the island of Oʻahu.

I am Native Hawaiian by birth. And to us Hawaiians, where we come from is very important. The ahupuaʻa, or the land division where we were born, helps to shape our identity and who we are. So telling people the ahupuaʻa where we’re from is very innate within us. We know the sands of our birth, or our kuʻu one hānau. And that place where we come from has its own winds and rains that fall upon the ʻāina, the land that nurtures us. We work on the land, the ʻāina that nurtures us, and we raise food from the land, which in turn nourishes our bodies. 

We have this saying in Hawaiian, ʻōlelo noʻeau: he aliʻi ka ʻāina, he kauwā ke kanaka. The land is the chief, the man is its servant. We have this very reciprocal relationship with the land, very humble, gentle, well-regarded. 

Yessenia Funes: How did the reciprocal relationship that you share with the land, with the ‘āina, lead you to the Red Hill fight as a water protector? 

Mai Hall: The Red Hill fuel spill happened in November of 2021. The fuel tanks started leaking decades ago, but nobody really knew. What we do know from this recent case is that 19,000 gallons of jet fuel started leaking from these old tanks that were sitting just 100 feet above a freshwater aquifer and sickened nearly 100,000 people. 

The spill mostly affected the thousands of people who lived in housing that was linked to the Navy. The military has its own water line and its own tanks to store the water. And in this way, the military poisoned its own people. They knew that the water was tainted, and they knowingly poisoned their own people. 

“I’m a Hawaiian first, and I’m going to do what I’ve always done and protect Hawaiian land rights, the environment, and my people, my lāhui.”

My husband is an active duty Air Force. He joined later in life. We already had a family, our children, and then he decided to join the military. So I walk this very thin line being a Kanaka Maoli, a Hawaiian, and a military spouse. And that line gets blurred the more I protest the military and protect sacred lands for Hawaiʻi. I told my husband I didn’t want him to join. But when he did join, I told him, I’m a Hawaiian first, and I’m going to do what I’ve always done and protect Hawaiian land rights, the environment, and my people, my lāhui. 

Yessenia Funes: I imagine there must be a lot of tension between wanting to protect your land and culture, but also wanting to support your husband. How do you balance those tensions? Especially because it’s a line that many people have to figure out how to hold. 

Mai Hall: The tensions in our dynamic stem from a much longer history. 

The relationship between Native Hawaiians and the military is rooted in centuries of colonization and, in particular, the illegal annexation of Hawaiʻi. In 1893, the so-called “Committee of Safety”—a group of sugar businessmen and descendants of missionaries—conspired with American warships to stage a coup. They pointed their warships directly at the Hawaii State Capitol from the harbor and threatened our Queen Liliʻuokalani to sign over the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi to America or else we will shoot you and kill the Hawaiian people. The loss of life would’ve been immeasurable. We didn’t have many guns. 

We were recognized as the Native Hawaiian Kingdom, as an independent sovereign nation. So to have America come in and say, We want to own your kingdom, our Queen was like, What, for real? You’re threatening me? No, no, no, we’ll make this happen diplomatically. Because that is the nature of our Queen. That was her ʻano. She knew that America—that this was just a small group of people doing a very hewa thing, a very wrong thing. She thought that America would right that wrong and make it pono again. Pono is our word for righting wrongs, for letting justice prevail. She thought it would be pono if she wrote a letter to the current president saying, look what your white guys are doing on our land. They’re acting awful. How about you fix whatever they’re doing? She thought the President would do the right thing, but then McKinley got elected president and the Spanish-American War happened, and he needed a military base in the middle of the Pacific.

All to say, a lot of things happening in America during the 1890s triggered the overthrow and the annexation of Hawai’i—which never got ratified by Congress, by the way. Which is why we Hawaiians say it is an illegal annexation. Because it is illegal. It never got held up by Congress, never got signed. They imprisoned our queen. Our queen kept fighting for independence, saying, what America did was wrong, but Hawaiians, don’t give up hope. Someone will fix this. Nobody ever fixed it. So that’s why so many Native Hawaiians do not trust America. 

Because of what happened, our land got taken away, our language almost died. My grandmother was beaten in school for speaking Hawaiian. So she told all her children, don’t speak Hawaiian, don’t marry Hawaiian. They’re pīlau, they’re dirty. There’s a lot of historical trauma that our people have had to deal with just to survive the genocide of our culture by America. 

Yessenia Funes: How do you hold that history, that trauma, alongside the love and support for the folks in your life, whether that’s your husband, friends, family members, who are still serving in the military?

Mai Hall: I have a lot of family members who serve in the military. There was one point in fact when the proportion of Native Hawaiians serving in the military was one of the highest proportions of any other ethnicity by race. 

When that data was first published, a lot of Hawaiians were like, I thought you guys never liked America. Why are you serving in the U.S. military? I had those same questions growing up. I would ask my auntie, Auntie, why are you serving in the military? Cousin, why are you joining? I didn’t understand. 

“So when I protest the military, when I show up holding signs, I’m not trying to be anti-American. I’m just saying I am a Kanaka living in this land, and I support my Hawaiian kingdom.”

But I get it now as a military spouse. There’s a sense of service before self that is within military culture. And the family I’ve talked to has always said, I can be a Native Hawaiian, and I can still serve in the American military because I am not anti-American. I’m just pro-Hawaiian. So when I protest the military, when I show up holding signs, I’m not trying to be anti-American. I’m just saying I am a Kanaka living in this land, and I support my Hawaiian kingdom. And yet I can still show aloha and love toward the military. I can still hope that they do the right thing, that they become good people, that we can raise our children and take care of our land together on this land.

Yessenia Funes: This message—I’m not anti-American, I am pro-Hawaiian—resonates so deeply. For me, hearing you say that as a child of immigrants, it made me think, I’m not anti-American, I’m just pro-immigrant, right? 

This issue of Counterstream is focused on 250 years of the empire’s existence, and the Red Hill water crisis is one part of that long legacy of American settler colonialism. What does resistance look like given America’s ongoing occupation?

Mai Hall: Resistance in the face of occupation means learning my language, continuing to learn ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi. It means taking my children to loʻi, kalo fields, so they can put their feet in the mud, in the dirt, in our ʻāina, and work the field and sweat under the Hawaiian sun and plant our ancestors’ food that has been growing for centuries in our land. It means feeling the lepo, mud, between your fingers and working in the ʻāina. That is what resistance looks like. Sorry, I didn’t think I would be this emotional.

Yessenia Funes: Take your time.

Mai Hall: It means keeping our traditions alive in the face of land loss. I don’t own my own house. I’m in my 40s, and I do not own property in my homeland. My mother just turned 71 years old, and she still does not own a home. She’s on this Native Hawaiian list, a homestead list, to get a piece of property—and she’s still waiting for her turn to have a piece of land in Hawaiʻi. 

Resistance is hoping that we can own land in our own homeland someday. Resistance is continuing to try. 

Yessenia Funes: You describe resistance as reconnection with cultural traditions, with ancestral lifeways. How do you see the Red Hill water crisis and specifically the victories y’all have had in terms of getting the facility shut down—how do you see this effort as part of that journey of making resistance really come to life? 

Mai Hall: Water, wai, is an important topic to Hawaiians. Wai is connected to our ancient akua, our gods. So because water is a gift from our gods, it is precious to us. Water brings life. 

We also have this ʻōlelo noʻeau that says Uē ka lani, ola ka honua. When the heavens weep, the earth grows. We see rain as a source of life. We see our freshwater streams, our aquifers, as our source of life-bringing ola, life. When the military poisoned it and made us sick, it was such a foreign concept to us. 

Red Hill traumatized thousands of us because we were told not to trust the water coming out of our tap. So of course we had to fight to fix this wrong. We gathered, we mobilized communities and got locals—Natives and non-Natives alike—to show up to hearings. 

We did a lot of Western practices. We crafted legislation and testified in support of bills that would close the aquifer and created regulations as to how to properly shut them down. We showed up at open houses that the military was hosting and asked questions, demanded answers. We formed a Community Representative Initiative—a CRI—to hold the Navy accountable to what the community wanted. 

But we also did cultural protocols. We did the kūʻē thing and showed up at Pacific Fleet headquarters and held signs, made offerings. We learned oli, chants, Ka Wai a Kāne. We learned hula. We learned mele, songs about water. We did a lot of cultural practice to connect us to a wide range of people to come together for the protection of this precious resource. 

Yessenia Funes: And all that effort resulted in a recent settlement, too. I’m assuming, however, that that victory is not enough, right? No amount of money could replace the water that has been lost or the impact on your health. 

Mai Hall: It is a victory that the fuel tanks got shut down, right? It is a good thing that the Navy is working on filtration systems to make the water safe again and has worked with the Environmental Protection Agency to ensure that what they’re doing is correct.

That said, I don’t really trust that the Navy is doing everything they’re supposed to be doing. And there’s no amount of money, like you said, that can ever heal what needs to be healed. My children now have lifelong neurological disorders, and I totally believe it’s because of the water, especially for my son. My son was fine before 2021, and now he’s got different disabilities, including Tourette’s syndrome, which is a neurological disorder with tics and impulsiveness, and is worse than the ADHD that he had previously. The poisoned water worsened some of his symptoms, and he’s now going to have to live with ongoing vocal tics and motor tics for the rest of his life. 

Sure, we can use the money from these settlements for supplements and seeing nutritionists and neuropathic doctors to help alleviate some of the symptoms. But in the end, these symptoms are never ever going to go away. So while we won the lawsuit, my children’s health will always be affected. That to me is still a loss. We are still negatively affected by this fuel spill. 

Yessenia Funes: There’s also a need to lean into community in these moments, for people to support one another. Talk to me about the role of your community in helping to confront these issues. 

Mai Hall: There are a couple of support groups specifically for communities navigating the fallout from this water crisis. People are telling their individual stories, learning from each other, which is how I found out that fuel could affect your nervous system.

But at the end of the day, we just don’t know. We’re all part of this study with the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, the Red Hill Registry. And years down the line, maybe we’ll have some type of data. But for now, we are the control group for this study. They’re studying us, which sucks. 

My family’s been super supportive. I remember going to my mom’s apartment and showering in the early days, when they told us not to use the water to cook, bathe, or clean with. I’m lucky as well that my family believed me. When I was crying for a new diagnosis for my son, they didn’t call me crazy. I thought I was losing my mind. But learning that a lot of other mothers out there were making the connection between the fuel spill and this surge in symptoms made me feel a little less crazy. It wasn’t just me. It was all of us. 

Yessenia Funes: We are looking at 250 years of this empire. How do you see the Red Hill battle as part of this larger effort to claim Indigenous sovereignty and combat the U.S. imperial machine? 

Mai Hall: So this is my opinion, but the military usually comes in, breaks people’s stuff, and leaves. And they feel like they can do that because of individualism.

Hawai’i is collectivist. We think about the whole. But America is very individualistic. The attitude is, What is best for me, myself, and I? I’ve met many Americans and many military Americans who think with that mindset. 

I was raised to think about the other, to be collectivist. So when the Navy poisoned its own people, they think, It’s only water; you can get more. It’s only an island; you have other islands. And we’re like, Water is important. Water is sacred. Our island is important. Our land is sacred. 

“But I want to be clear: I am not angry at the military. I’m not angry at individual people. I’m angry at the system that they represent, at this attitude of, I don’t care what I do on your land. I can do whatever I want.” 

I think the military sees our water and land as a means to an end. I think they see Hawaiʻi as expendable.

But I want to be clear: I am not angry at the military. I’m not angry at individual people. I’m angry at the system that they represent, at this attitude of, I don’t care what I do on your land. I can do whatever I want. 

Yessenia Funes: It also speaks to American culture, and the way that we are raised in this country to be very individualistic. But I hear what you’re saying, that it’s not the individual people who are serving the military so much as it is this imperialistic machine. 

Mai Hall: And I want to return again to this idea of he aliʻi ka ʻāina, he kauwā ke kanaka: the land is chief, man is its servant. We are inherently tied to our ʻāina, to our land, and it is tied to us. America stole our land and gave it to the military to live on. They made Hawaiians homeless. It’s hewa, it’s bad, it’s traumatizing. They took the land, they poisoned our water, and they’re not facing the consequences of their actions.

But all we want is for them to learn to live with us in harmony and protect what needs to be protected. Give the land back. Learn how to be a good steward. Let me show you how.

In September of 1982, a two-lane road in Warren County, North Carolina, filled with bodies. Men, women, and children lay down in front of dump trucks carrying soil laced with toxic chemicals, knowing the trucks might not stop for them and the state troopers sent that day were there to clear the road rather than protect anyone on it. Over five hundred people were arrested over the course of six weeks. The landfill got built anyway. By most measures, that should have been the end of the story. Instead, Warren County was the catalyst that sparked a national—and eventually international—conversation surrounding systemic environmental harm.

Dollie Burwell, Charles Lee, and Rev. Dr. Benjamin Chavis, Jr. were each present for different founding moments of the Environmental Justice Movement. This piece traces the lessons they’ve learned as movement leaders on the interplay between environmental justice, social justice, and American democracy. In each of their tellings, offered independently of one another, one claim reverberates: environmental justice and democracy are not independent. Voting, representation, and narrative serve as persistent movement mechanisms regardless of place or time. 

The Power of Civic Protest: Dollie Burwell & Warren County

The story of Warren County, North Carolina’s ascension as a shining example of the interplay of democratic and environmental organizing does not actually start in 1982 with the PCB protests that launched the Environmental Justice Movement. It began four years earlier with the now (grand)mother of the movement, Dollie Burwell, and her friend Hattie Rudd, going door to door registering Black voters in a county that was majority Black and had never, in its history, elected a representative government. Before she galvanized her small community around a basic understanding of their inherent right to clean water, soil, and self-determination, Burwell built her foundations in the organizing traditions of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and 70s. She was raised in a segregated school system, marred by false “school choice” policies designed to circumvent the Brown v. Board of Education ruling in the U.S. South; she was accustomed to receiving the torn, outdated, and marked-up hand-me-downs of white schools. Guided at every turn by faith in hers and her community’s worthiness in the face of cumulative harms, she turned to the power of electoral politics as a strategy for change. By the time the state announced it would site a PCB landfill in Warren County, Burwell and Rudd had already registered thousands of new voters, their actions establishing critical infrastructure for the next few years of movement-building. 

Burwell remembers the day she learned Warren County had been chosen to host the state’s new toxic dump as “a very emotional time.” Her first response was not resolve but despair. “I was very disappointed, and almost in the sense of feeling hopeless,” she said. What ultimately moved her forward was a calling beyond herself, the voice of her ancestors telling her she already had what she needed—the church relationships, the board seats, and the years spent organizing—to fight this new threat just as she’d been pushing against the tide of institutional racism all her life. 

“What ultimately moved her forward was a calling beyond herself, the voice of her ancestors telling her she already had what she needed—the church relationships, the board seats, and the years spent organizing—to fight this new threat just as she’d been pushing against the tide of institutional racism all her life.”

The imagery from the PCB protests, though visually iconic, represents a very small portion of the unglamorous daily activities that characterized the success of Warren County. Most days were consumed by crafting flyers and writing letters to public officials from a sympathetic attorney’s office; facilitating community meetings and educational sessions at Coley Springs Baptist Church; and sharing information via landline telephone and word of mouth because that was what it meant to organize before the age of social media. And underneath the five hundred people who eventually laid their bodies in the road in front of potentially hostile waste truck drivers, was a second, uncredited labor force: people making coffee, watching children while people got arrested, praying, and placing yet more phone calls. For Burwell, organizing work of all kinds is grounded in the labor and heart of the community, “Big Mama.” “Big Mama didn’t come to meetings, but Big Mama knew everything that was going on,” Burwell said. When young organizers today ask her how to build that kind of network, Burwell explains that although the tools have changed, the practice hasn’t: “Your generation may have to go from Big Mama to TikTok, but Big Mama still works,” she said. 

The results of all of Burwell’s organizing and the six continuous weeks of marching and arrests are well-documented: although the landfill was ultimately placed in Warren County, it became a one-time dump site rather than a constant rotation of toxic waste and truck traffic. And for the first time, the struggle of Black and brown communities of all kinds across the United States was thrust into national attention and given a name: Environmental racism—a term coined in a Warren County jail cell by the eventual head of the United Church of Christ’s Commission for Racial Justice, Rev. Dr. Benjamin Chavis, Jr. 

“It was a violation against our civil rights, and that’s why the Washington Post dubbed the PCB protest movement to be the largest and greatest civil rights movement since the 1960s.”

“It was a violation against our civil rights, and that’s why the Washington Post dubbed the PCB protest movement to be the largest and greatest civil rights movement since the 1960s,” Burwell said. Indeed, Burwell’s fight in Warren County was the precursor to every other significant milestone in the establishment of environmental justice as an international movement. But the payoff that is not so often cited extends beyond the birth of a movement; as a direct result of all of that organizing, in 1982, Warren County elected its first Black majority on the county commission, its first Black sheriff, and its first Black member of the state house of representatives. A predominantly Black community not only reclaimed its voice, but also leveraged it into the kind of electoral representation that has been critical to subsequent environmental decisions made by the county and community, namely to the eventual remediation of the toxic waste landfill in 2003. 

“We elected, for the first time in the history of Warren County, a representative government … people understood that connection between voting and the political and racial decision that was made to put that dump in Warren County,” Burwell said.

Movement Building as Democratic Process: Charles Lee & Toxic Wastes and Race

Charles Lee was at the Warren County protests to show solidarity, and was heavily inspired by what transpired on the ground there. He quickly realized that he was a witness to history. By his own account, what he saw in Warren County convinced him of the transformative potential of civil rights and environmentalism when taken together to support self-determination for communities. 

After the PCB protests, Lee got in touch with central organizers Rev. Leon White and Ken and Deborah Ferruccio to do a listening tour up and down the East Coast. As a result, the United Church of Christ’s Commission for Racial Justice asked him to direct a national project on toxics and injustice. He traveled around the country and met with communities whose hazardous living conditions were similar to those of Warren County. Lee was approached by individuals like Hazel M. Johnson in Chicago, who told him she wanted to attend just one environmental meeting that had more than one or two other people of color in the room; and Richard Moore in Albuquerque, who was energized that someone had finally put a name—environmental racism—to what he had been organizing around for years. 

Lee’s own research highlighted numerous examples across the country: stories of uranium mining on Native lands out West, farmworkers weathering the fallout from pesticide exposure, lead poisoning in city neighborhoods, and underserved rural communities living above solid waste landfills. The case that struck him hardest was Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, where several hundred workers, most of them Black, died of silicosis in the 1930s while digging a tunnel. The individuals, laid in unmarked graves and forgotten, represent one of the more graphic examples of environmental racism in American labor history. 

The First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in 1991.
Left: Charles Lee, at podium, with Rev. Dr. Benjamin Chavis, Jr. to his immediate right.
Right: Charles Lee, left, stands with the Rev. Syngman Rhee, former president of the National Council of Churches.

Having uncovered numerous examples of environmental racism, Lee felt compelled to bring this issue to national attention. He decided that replicating a 1983 GAO study, requested by Congressman Walter Fauntroy, which found that three of four hazardous waste landfills in the Southeast sat in predominantly Black communities, would put the issue of environmental racism on the map. The Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States report of 1987 brought so many contemporary examples like that of Gauley Bridge to the public discourse. 

Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States was a landmark study of the American condition, grounded in growing sophistication in the use of Census data and new national environmental databases made possible by the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. The report, which examined the demographics surrounding commercial hazardous waste facilities and uncontrolled toxic waste sites nationwide, gave communities, as Lee put it, a way to “see these issues from a larger systemic perspective” rather than as isolated, disconnected incidents. Its release was a galvanizing event, stating clearly that race rather than income was the strongest predictor of where hazardous waste was sited in America, with African-Americans and Latinos representing three out of five of the communities living with abandoned hazardous waste sites on the federal Superfund list. 

“Toxic Wastes and Race is perhaps the most influential report in the history of environmental justice. But it was a report that was not done by a big university or government agency with lots of resources, but a small civil rights advocacy organization,” Lee said.

It took five years for the EPA to establish its Office of Environmental Equity on the heels of Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States, and another two years before President Bill Clinton signed the first executive order on environmental justice and codified the concept in federal policy. In just over a decade, what started as a small and independent endeavor had become a practice acknowledged at the highest level of U.S. government. All because organizers across the country decided it was about time they gathered, shared knowledge, and connected dots that had never been connected at scale. 

Codifying the Principles of Environmental Justice: Rev. Dr. Benjamin Chavis, Jr. and the First Environmental Justice Summit

Rev. Dr. Benjamin Chavis, Jr. was present for many of the central milestones of the Environmental Justice Movement, from the 1982 PCB protests with Dollie Burwell to the crafting of Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States with Charles Lee, to the 1991 First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit where all three of them contributed to the crafting of the movement’s most core organizing principles in Washington D.C. But his road to this work was initiated not by his arrest in Warren County; instead, it was launched by his unjust arrest a decade prior. As a member of the Wilmington Ten, Chavis spent years in a North Carolina prison for organizing around school desegregation; released only a couple of years before Warren County happened, he was called home to protest for a different kind of Civil Rights struggle. 

His first day on the ground in Warren County, Chavis was arrested, coining the term environmental racism to give a name to a lived reality for many underserved communities through U.S. history. By 1991, that same instinct toward the deliberate, public naming of systems and harms would shape a conference much bigger than any that had taken place in U.S. history. 

The First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit was a convening built over the course of a year, developed to ensure no single ethnic constituency’s concerns would outweigh another’s: Chavis emphasized the role of individuals like Richard Moore in bringing forward Latino organizers, Charles Lee in helping bring forward an Asian and Pacific Islander delegation, as well as the critical representation of Indigenous leadership, advocates and royalty from Hawai’i, as well as those from Alaska and the Marshall Islands. “Everybody went to the leadership summit knowing that we were going to come out with some infrastructure,” Chavis said. “That we were going to come out with principles that we can all agree upon.” It was the embodiment of a representative democracy at work. 

“What made this summit different was also its intentional uplift of historically disinvested voices; the first two days were closed to white attendees entirely, a choice Chavis admitted was controversial even within the confines of the United Church of Christ.”

What made this summit different was also its intentional uplift of historically disinvested voices; the first two days were closed to white attendees entirely, a choice Chavis admitted was controversial even within the confines of the United Church of Christ. Only on the third and fourth day were mainstream environmental groups—the Sierra Club, the Audubon Society, and the Natural Resources Defense Council—brought in. Those closed-door days set the tone for the program; it was a chance for communities of color to finally meet as leaders and constituencies rather than as an interested minority in the room (just the convening that Hazel M. Johnson had called for years earlier). Chavis recalled that Rev. Jesse Jackson, who spoke at the gathering, told him privately that the summit was the real version of the Rainbow Coalition he’d spent years trying to build. 

“We knew we were living in history-making and we did not want to undervalue the historical significance of it.”

Often missing from the retelling of the summit narrative was the representation with an already racially diverse room; every delegation brought its own youth leaders, making the summit intergenerational by design, and across nearly every caucus, the majority of delegates were women, a group that is often undercredited across movement spaces despite standing as the backbone for many grassroots activations. 

The First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit was the landmark convening that produced the 17 Principles of Environmental Justice that continue to serve as the foundations for the Environmental Justice Movement. Every moment of the gathering was recorded on video and in transcript, a deliberate act of documentation at a moment when, as Chavis pointed out, nobody outside a newsroom was thinking about recording anything for its own sake. “We knew we were living in history-making and we did not want to undervalue the historical significance of it,” he said.

America at 250: Collective Reflection on Movements and Democracy

When asked about the present moment, Burwell, Lee, and Chavis collectively return to the same year: 1982. Burwell described how the same despair she felt in discovering Warren County was selected for the PCB landfill resurfaced after the 2024 election; she also described the same recovery and push toward resistance gathered through her faith and seeing the same “fire in the belly” she felt then in younger organizers now. “Young people continue to inspire me and continue to keep me in the fight,” she said. “I was on the shoulders of Ella Baker and Dorothy Cotton, Eva Clayton, and many others. I feel like my shoulders are heavy and strong enough to carry you guys, and I’ll be right in the fight with you.”

Lee named the structural attacks on democracy as something that makes environmental injustice harder to solve, because the two problems are and have always been inseparable; his push was to continue to elevate the data and the science, even in the face of anti-intellectualism. As Lee noted, our community experiences and narratives have the power to affect change, just as took place in the crafting of Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States. “The Environmental Justice Movement is not going anywhere,” he said. “It is something that is born out of people and communities, and that it is not predicated on the existence or non-existence of an executive order.”

And Chavis tied current redistricting and Voting Rights struggles back to Warren County’s founding lesson: that representation is a critical mechanism for freedom and that a country that forgets its own history becomes apolitical and susceptible to tyranny. That’s why documentation itself is a civic act and not simply a record of one. “Most Americans are ahistorical, and when you are ahistorical, you become apolitical. That’s why the Environmental Justice Movement is a movement to educate,” he said.

In speaking to these three organizers, each one had their own answer for why Warren County catalyzed the Environmental Justice Movement: faith, organizing infrastructure, the power of narrative—but the pervading thought was one of hope. As the U.S. marks 250 years since it established American democracy, the question Warren County first forced into national view—of whose land, whose health, and whose history is prioritized—remains the same question at the heart of every community still organizing against the long afterlives of land and labor exploitation propagated by imperialist systems. Burwell, Lee, and Chavis each built a strong set of tools for that fight—voter rolls, datasets, and a set of founding principles—but all three also understood documentation and representation as critical for the formation of a sound movement. Nearly 45 years after Warren County birthed a movement, their work reads less like a founding story to look back on and more like a living blueprint communities are still building from, proof that a small, determined group standing in the road can still change the course of a country.

“As long as there’s life in us, I think we have a reason to know that we can fight on,” said Burwell.