Since June 11, all eyes have been on the field for the 2026 Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) World Cup. The United States has hosted the majority of the matches, with over 1 million travelers pouring into 16 host cities. As fans focus on the game, a troubling reality persists across the country—human trafficking.

Human trafficking is a form of modern-day slavery and a violation of human rights, generating an estimated $245 billion dollars a year globally. It occurs when force, fraud, or coercion is used to control another person for commercial sex or labor against their will.

For the first time in World Cup history, each host city in the United States was required to publish a Human Rights Action Plan. This requirement was put in place due to widespread criticism of human rights violations during the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.

The purpose of the action plans is to ensure host cities have tactics in place to protect vulnerable communities during the event. Human trafficking is addressed in the action plans, featuring strategies for prevention and resources for survivors.

According to the National Human Trafficking Hotline, sex trafficking accounts for the most reported cases in the United States.

​Major sporting events have often prompted an uptick in sex trafficking awareness campaigns and investigations, with media highlighting the results of mass arrests.

However, nonprofit leaders are pushing back on the narrative that these events are the driving force behind sex trafficking

“ We’ve heard people talk about how the Super Bowl is the biggest trafficking event, and it’s not necessarily a fact that trafficking increases or decreases,” Yazmen Vafa, executive director of Rights4Girls, told NPQ in an interview.

​While major sporting events may not cause sex trafficking, they offer a timely moment to examine the social and economic forces that drive this underground economy.

California: The Eye of the Storm

California has the most reported cases of human trafficking in the country. Since 2007, the state has reported 16,780 cases and identified 31,764 victims. The majority of the reported cases are sex trafficking incidents involving women as the victims, though trafficking impacts people from all backgrounds.

This year, the Bay Area has implemented anti-trafficking measures in light of multiple major sporting events, including the Super Bowl and the World Cup.

During a pre-Super Bowl FBI sting operation in San Jose, 11 arrests were made, including a middle school assistant principal for allegedly attempting to pay for sex from someone he believed was a 13-year-old boy.

Jennifer Lyle is the executive director of MISSSEY, an Oakland-based nonprofit addressing the sexual exploitation of youth. Lyle discusses how the San Jose case challenges the myth that traffickers are merely coming from outside of the country to commit these crimes.

“They really try to frame the traffickers as illegal aliens. What we know is it’s Jeffrey Epstein, it’s families and next-door neighbors,” Lyle told NPQ.

This reality calls for communities to take a closer look at an industry that is hiding in plain sight.

Director of the South Bay Coalition to End Human Trafficking (SBCEHT), Sharan Dhanoa, told NPQ, “The reality is that no city has the capacity to respond to safety issues with only a law enforcement approach. So when we talk about safety, it’s a community safety approach.”

While targeted arrests make headlines during major sporting seasons, the pervasive nature and close proximity of human trafficking remain in the fine print.

Beyond the Headlines: Economic and Social Disparities

Major news coverage tends to highlight isolated events of human trafficking in a specific area. However, anti-trafficking experts speak to a more complex reality.

“Policies that impact eating, survival, and housing—that’s where we see the changes. The Super Bowl, not so much.”

“Sporting events don’t cause trafficking, but economics drives exploitation,” Sharan Dhanoa, director of the SBCEHT, told NPQ.

Nonprofit leaders like Lyle point to social and economic disparities that can cause a rise in human trafficking. She reflects on the 2025 federal cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits.

“That’s when we saw a significant increase in need. Policies that impact eating, survival, and housing—that’s where we see the changes,” Lyle explained. “The Super Bowl, not so much.”

Economic and social disparities create power dynamics that enable the exploitation of people. Yet misconceptions of the trafficking market can deflect from these dynamics.

Misclassifications and Criminal Consequences

One of the key factors that can cause misconceptions about sex trafficking is language. Language shapes public perception of who is considered a criminal versus a victim. This can influence the reporting of cases, data collection, and human trafficking policies.

For example, when the terms “sex trafficking” and “prostitution” are used interchangeably, it can distort the lines between being a victim and being criminalized under the law. The usage of “child prostitute” speaks to this point since, by definition, there is no such thing as a child prostitute. If a minor is involved in commercial sex, it is automatically considered sex trafficking.

​When victims of sex trafficking are misclassified as prostitutes, they can face greater risks of being criminalized and excluded from receiving resources as survivors. The Rights4Girls Criminalized Survivors Report refers to this discrepancy as the “Abuse to Prison Pipeline.”

“Although these are legally distinct concepts [sex trafficking and prostitution], the line between the two is very blurry, and their clinical needs are identical,” Vafa with Rights4Girls said.​

The Survivors Report further explains that victims can face a “catch-22”—whether they choose to act in self-defense to escape their abuser or comply with them out of fear, either decision can lead to criminal charges.

When discourse about survivors of abuse centers on criminalization rather than support, it can distract from the economic and social disparities that create conditions for human exploitation. Further, it deflects from spotlighting the people upholding the system of abuse.

The Hidden Side of the Market

Mainstream discussions about human trafficking tend to focus on the relationship between the trafficker and the victim. This allows a key driver of the market to remain in the shadows and unaccountable to the public: the buyers.

As Vafa noted, “It is very important to shine a spotlight on the role that [the buyers] play, especially in light of this cultural reckoning we’re having with the Epstein case.”

“We’re seeing survivor programs closing down. We’ve seen organizations reduced to a small capacity, which means survivors will not be served with critical support like housing, case management, therapy, and legal services.”

For the World Cup, Rights4Girls launched a national billboard campaign to “put sex buyers on notice.” The organization put up billboards across six major host cities, including Atlanta, Dallas, Kansas City, Boston, Seattle, and the NYC-NJ region.

“I’ve been doing this for almost 20 years and have met hundreds of survivors. The vast majority of survivors are Black and Indigenous, and the majority of their sex buyers are White men,” Vafa told NPQ.

Vafa’s experiences are supported by a report published by Rights4Girls, Buyers Unmasked. The report unpacks how women and girls tend to face greater criminal charges than buyers, and that arrests disproportionately impact Black survivors.

Nonprofit leaders are advocating to expose buyers, hold them legally accountable, and shift power dynamics that maintain structures of exploitation.

While major sporting events trigger law enforcement to ramp up sting operations and arrests, if adequate legal consequences and policies are not permanently put in place, buyers can continue to cause harm with impunity.

Lyle from MISSSEY also notes how those in positions of power have not been held accountable to the law, further weakening the threat of legal consequences for sex crimes.

“I’m skeptical if any john or pimp is going to take threats of legal retribution seriously when we see at the highest levels of government that there’s nothing done about sex exploitation.”

Temporary Response Versus Permanent Infrastructure

The prevalence of exploitation and human trafficking in the United States calls for a national paradigm shift.

Federal funding cuts to essential resources and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives speak to this point, as support for survivors and anti-trafficking advocates plummets.

As Karen Romero, co-executive director of the Freedom Network USA (FNUSA), told NPQ, “ We’re seeing survivor programs closing down. We’ve seen organizations reduced to a small capacity, which means survivors will not be served with critical support like housing, case management, therapy, and legal services.”

The World Cup may have prompted agencies to develop Human Rights Action Plans and increase trafficking investigations, but survivors need more.

“They see the endgame as arrests. Catch this bad guy and get this girl off of the streets, right? That’s not the endgame,” Lyle from MISSSEY told NPQ.

For survivors, Lyle says, “The end game  is ‘I am thriving in life, I feel good about being in the world, and I get to participate in the world.’”

Even though the World Cup is coming to an end this week, there is an opportunity for the public to rally behind survivors and anti-trafficking advocacy work. A long-term communal investment will be essential to sustain social and economic change.

Since the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in 2022, the anti-abortion movement has intensified efforts to restrict abortion access at the state level through legislation, litigation, and criminal investigations targeting patients, their families and friends, and their health providers.

This devastating reversal of longstanding precedent reminds us that the fight for bodily autonomy has never been a straight line of progress. Thus, we have much to learn from those who resisted state intrusion over the past 250 years, as we work to restore our rights in the years ahead.

Here, we place the current moment in historical context by examining the origins of midwifery in Native and enslaved Black communities in early America, alongside the efforts of anti-abortion advocates and the judiciary to erode reproductive rights in response to these practices. In doing so, we provide an overview of the broader implications of those efforts and their recent revival by modern conservatives. Finally, we draw lessons from the experiences of midwives and healthcare activists—who risked criminalization to care for their communities—as we consider how best to support our own communities today.

The Fight We Face Today

We have much to learn from those who resisted state intrusion over the past 250 years as we work to restore our rights in the years ahead.

Present efforts to control our bodies by controlling our access to healthcare is part of a well-funded, coordinated strategy to curtail abortion access not only in states that ban or restrict abortion, but also in states that protect reproductive rights via shield laws, which prevent out-of-state legal actions from affecting those who provide legal healthcare.

Anti-abortion advocates have sought to: (1) pressure the Donald Trump administration to further restrict access to the abortion medication mifepristone, including its distribution through telehealth; (2) enact legislation targeting health providers, as well as the family members and friends of people seeking abortion care; (3) pursue civil and criminal actions against providers operating in states under shield laws; and (4) revive a “zombie law” (in the books since 1873 but not enforced) known as the Comstock Act, which could be used to criminalize not only the mailing of abortion medication but also a broad range of medical equipment used in reproductive and obstetrical care—even in states where abortion is legal and protected.

These contemporary attacks on abortion access, and the criminalization of patients and providers, represent the latest chapter in a long history of efforts to regulate, restrict, and criminalize reproductive healthcare.

In many respects, these efforts are gaining traction. The Food and Drug Administration is currently reviewing the safety record of mifepristone, a medication used in more than half of all abortions in the United States, following bogus claims advanced by anti-abortion advocates who are increasingly frustrated that abortion care continues to be accessed by people located in anti-abortion states. At the same time, health providers face increasing threats to their professional licenses, as well as growing civil and criminal liability for providing care to patients in states where abortion is banned.

Rates of pregnancy-related criminalization have also risen since Dobbs. States such as Louisiana and Texas have brought criminal and civil actions against providers in shield-law states for their role in providing abortion care to individuals in ban states and are seeking judicial rulings that could undermine the constitutionality of shield laws. Meanwhile, anti-abortion advocates continue to press for enforcement of the Comstock Act, a 19th-century anti-vice law that prohibits the mailing of “obscene matter.” Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas recently signaled support for that position, writing in a dissent that he agreed with anti-abortion states arguing that Comstock remains enforceable and referring to shield law providers’ actions as a “criminal enterprise.”

These contemporary attacks on abortion access, and the criminalization of patients and providers, represent the latest chapter in a long history of efforts to regulate, restrict, and criminalize our bodies.

The Origins of Anti-Abortion and Anti-Contraception Laws

Reproductive healthcare has long been deeply embedded in many African and Indigenous cultural traditions.

Indigenous midwives and healers in states like New Mexico played a vital role in providing community-based care, sharing knowledge about contraception, pregnancy, childbirth, and reproductive wellness across generations. Before European colonization, Indigenous peoples throughout North America used plants such as black cohosh, stone seed, false hellebore, thistles, and Castilleja linariifolia to manage fertility, prevent pregnancy, and induce abortion. After European arrival, Indigenous birth workers and healers shared family-planning practices with the settlers, many of whom came from countries where herbal contraceptives, abortifacients, and other forms of reproductive healthcare were widely restricted or stigmatized.

Reproductive healthcare has long been deeply embedded in many African and Indigenous cultural traditions.

Likewise, enslaved Africans brought extensive botanical and reproductive knowledge to the Americas and used contraceptives such as cotton root and alum water to prevent or terminate pregnancies. Research suggests that enslaved people in southern United States used chili, yam, papaya, lime, and the roots and barks of cotton trees to limit their fertility and were provided with abortifacients—that is substances to induce abortions—like tansy, catnip, thyme, horse mint, rue, pennyroyal, and cedar berries by granny midwives.

These practices among enslaved Africans were acts of resistance to undermine the plantation regime, which depended on the forced reproduction of enslaved people for economic profit. Plantation doctors frequently disparaged these practices and sought to replace them with what they considered superior medical techniques developed through forced experimentation on enslaved Black women.

After slavery ended, skilled Black midwives became strong competitors to White male  gynecologists who launched a smear campaign to delegitimize midwifery practices. In addition to falsely portraying Black midwives as incompetent and midwifery practices as unscientific, White male gynecologists also leveraged their professional and political influence to push state authorities to regulate, control, and criminalize Black and Native midwifery practices and the knowledge associated with them.

In addition to the increased regulation of Native and Black birth workers, which pushed midwives out of the profession, states also began to criminalize birth control and abortion. White male gynecologists viewed abortion as contrary to what they believed was women’s proper role in society and were concerned about the growing number of White women choosing to end their pregnancies. These male physicians played an instrumental role in restricting access to and criminalizing contraception and abortion.

This wave of criminalizing legislation was advanced through anti-obscenity laws, including the Comstock Act of 1873, which modern anti-abortion activists argue should apply to the mailing of mifepristone—a safe, effective and widely used option for medication abortion.

The Legal Battle for Reproductive Autonomy

Armed with the Comstock Act, the federal government has aggressively targeted the distribution of reproductive healthcare information and those who sought to expand access to it. One of its most prominent targets was Margaret Sanger, a nurse and activist who opened the first birth control clinic in New York and challenged laws restricting contraception. In 1914, the New York City postmaster banned Sanger’s journal, The Woman Rebel, because it provided information about when and why women might seek to avoid pregnancy. She was later arrested and charged with four criminal counts for violating the Comstock Act for her publication, though these charges were eventually dropped. The New York police raided the clinic and confiscated the clinic’s contraceptive supplies.

However, the state continued to criminalize birth control activists and their efforts to care for their communities. In 1916 and 1917, at least 20 activists—including Sanger and anarchist Emma Goldman—were arrested for discussing and distributing information about birth control.

These charges and raids sent a clear message to reproductive rights activists: if you help people maintain control over their own bodies, you risk facing state repression.

Despite centuries of disembodiment, genocide, hostility, and criminalization, Indigenous and Black midwives, doulas, and birth workers resisted capitalistic exploitation of their bodies and wombs by providing women with autonomy.

In addition to the federal Comstock Act, many states enacted their own “little Comstock” laws to regulate what they considered obscene materials and practices within their borders. By the early 1960s, 47 states had enacted anti-obscenity statutes and 31 of them explicitly included contraception among the materials classified as obscene. These restrictions remained in place until the Supreme Court’s decision in Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965, which held that married couples had a constitutional right to use contraception. However, unmarried couples and minors did not gain comparable access until the 1970s.

Unfortunately, many marginalized communities continued to face barriers to reproductive healthcare even after Supreme Court rulings expanded access to contraception and abortion care in Roe v. Wade. Black and Native communities faced forced sterilization campaigns, experienced widespread healthcare discrimination leading to high infant and maternal mortality rates, and obstacles to contraception access and abortion care. While research shows that community-based models of care, such as midwifery, improve maternal and infant health outcomes, the availability of such care remains limited due to widespread licensing and regulatory requirements.

However, despite the increasing risks of criminal punishment, Black and Native birth workers, midwives, and healers continue to provide care to their communities, fight for our collective survival, and build the pregnancy and birth justice movements that sustain all communities.

Birth Justice and Collective Remembering

Despite centuries of disembodiment, genocide, hostility, and criminalization, Native and Black midwives, doulas, and birth workers resisted capitalistic exploitation of their bodies and wombs by providing women with autonomy. This labor plays an important role in helping us remember that we are embodied, interdependent, whole, autonomous, and dignified human beings—not objects to be governed. A reminder that the fertility cycle can be understood as a metaphor for the shedding of societal impositions of identity, listening to our bodies and giving ourselves grace to confront issues larger than us and greater than we can intellectually grasp. These values are reflected in the Birth Justice Framework, a human rights-centered framework developed and maintained by the Southern Birth Justice Network (SBJN) and sustained by the Black Mamas Matter Alliance, Ancient Song Doula Network, the National Black Midwives Alliance, SisterSong, and Birth Center Equity—organizations that were birthed in communities and committed to conversation, organization, and resistance.

To note, SBJN was founded by Jamarah Amani in 2008, initially for her to be a “mobile midwife” who sought to fill massive care gaps in the Black community of Overtown in Miami, Florida.  Since then, SBJN has become a national movement that trains the next generation of Black and Brown midwives and doulas, defends Black and Brown lives, and continues building on its landmark Birth Justice Framework.

The Birth Justice Framework is rooted in the recognition that LGBTQ+ and marginalized communities of color have survived a history of trauma and oppression around decisions to have or to not have children.  The framework asserts that mothers and parents have fundamental rights related to birth, including to choose whether or not to carry a pregnancy, and to choose when, where, how, and with whom to birth—including access to traditional and Native healers, such as midwives and other birth workers, and the right to breastfeeding support.

It concludes: “We know that when we, as mothers and parents, are empowered, our community is transformed.” It is therefore not simply a framework about birth but about the structures and systems that underlie a healthy society.

Although these are the very rights that anti-abortion activists have successfully curtailed over the past 40 years, Birth Justice organizers remind us that these rights are inherently already ours.

Lawfare and Our Future

While we hold these core rights as the very self-evident truths assumed in our country’s Bill of Rights, we cannot deny that many of us have never had the opportunity to enjoy them. Those who have had the least chance to enjoy these rights are now most vulnerable to their disappearance, having their rights curtailed again, as our systems of law and governance are weaponized to entrench inequality and bigotry.

In Texas, our most trusted and treasured organizational partners are under attack, and many cannot survive state aggression. Latine, Native, Black and LGBTQ+ communities have long worked to defend Birth Justice in Texas, under seemingly impossible conditions. After 18 years of working to decriminalize Black bodies, support people with HIV, and fight for birth and reproductive justice in the state, the only Black-owned reproductive justice center in North Texas, the Afiya Center has closed due to relentless pressure by state and federal actors.

Though devastating, such closures can hardly be a surprise when Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton have collaborated with the Department of Justice to enforce state bounty hunter laws HB 7 and SB 8 across state borders. As “bounty hunter” laws, HB 7 and SB 8 largely rely on private citizens to report assumed violations of the law, leading to overcompliance and turning private citizens into agents of the state whose fears and prejudices have already been twisted into criminalization of care.

Simultaneously, a growing number of rural communities lack any maternal care providers at all. Since 2020, 139 rural hospital labor and delivery units have stopped delivering babies or have announced they will cease care before the end of 2026, a 13 percent reduction over five years, averaging two closures per month. Now only 41 percent of states have rural obstetric units and in six states, over a quarter of the rural maternity hospitals have stopped delivering babies. Many of these closures are in communities with large Black, Brown, and Native populations, further exacerbating our nation’s highly racialized maternal health crisis. All of this while providers are being told they must ignore racial disparities or lose federal funding entirely.

This highlights the urgent demand for supportive, culturally responsive care—and organizers are stepping up to deliver. Southern Birth Justice Center has partnered with Magnolia Birth House to build a birthing center in North Miami, where Black people are over five times as likely to die during childbirth. The center is called Olamina House after the heroine of Octavia Butler’s Parable series, with Olamina being the Yoruba word for “Wealth.” Fittingly for a place where lives are valued as the true wealth of our society, its founders sought inspiration from Afrofuturist literature, which helps us envision how to take the tapestry of human experiences, systems and practices, unwind the tangled strands, and build something strong and beautiful for the future.

Like the vision that inspired Olamina birth center, 250 years of resistance by Native healers, Black midwives, birth workers, and reproductive justice organizers reminds us that collective care is one of our most powerful tools for building a future rooted in dignity, autonomy, and liberation beyond systems that seek to control our bodies.

Throughout my experience connecting fundraisers across 100 countries for over a decade, I’ve realized that the conversations that truly matter take place after the main event. In hotel lobbies and hallways, once panels and keynotes have ended, people finally talk to each other, off script and away from the stage. It was in exactly this context that I heard how an organization in Uganda built a membership base of thousands without ever buying a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, and how a digital rights organization in India learned to raise emergency funds from a community that already knew what was at risk. In those hallways, I learned—casually and in passing—the answer to a problem that the sector has spent years and considerable money failing to solve.

Organizations based in the Global North have spent considerable resources trying to build the same recurring donor models and trust-based relationships described in those hallway conversations. Ultimately, the models they produced were more expensive, more complicated, and less resilient than what practitioners in the Global South had already built. The knowledge has been sitting in those rooms for years. The sector decided, quietly and systematically, to file it away.

Recently, the scale of the gap between Global North and South funding models became fully visible. In the months since the Trump administration clawed back almost nine billion dollars from humanitarian organizations, the US nonprofit sector found itself urgently looking for resilient models. The CIVICUS Monitor’s 2025 People Power Under Attack report confirmed what practitioners from those conversations already knew: civil society is under severe attack in 122 of 198 countries, with just seven percent of the global population living under open civic conditions. For the first time, the United States was itself downgraded that year. The operating conditions that produced community funding models across the Global South are now imminently relevant to the Global North.

Dependency Looks Different Without Stability

When more than 5,000 USAID projects were terminated in early 2025, the US nonprofit sector discovered the limits of the financial architecture it had built. The models supporting that work were designed for a world in which large institutional funding continued indefinitely, a world that turned out to be more fragile than anyone had accounted for.

The community built what it needed, owned it completely, and used that ownership as the platform from which to demand more from institutions.

Kenya’s giving data in the 2025 World Giving Report from the Charities Aid Foundation tells a different story: 86 percent of Kenyans gave money in 2024, surpassing both the global average and the continental average, with a fifth of donors giving twelve or more times that year. This reflects the Kenyan principle of harambee, the collective pooling of community resources for shared needs, a practice that predates any formal civil society infrastructure.

Across the Global South, individual giving accounts for the largest share of generosity—surpassing governments, corporations, and foundations combined—that largely moves through diaspora networks and remittances which dwarf official development assistance. This giving is largely invisible in sector datasets built to measure formal flows. “It’s not faceless fundraising,” says Sarah Pacutho, a civil society practitioner based in Uganda, in an interview with NPQ. “It has a face, people know who each other are. Someone of their own is speaking for them and the work.”

In Eastern Uganda, Pacutho describes a community that built its own health space when neither government nor NGO donors would fund one: a room donated by one person, a fridge by another, a nurse’s time by a third. “From there it is very easy for them to agitate for a better health center,” she notes. “This is what we have done, now you do better.” The community built what it needed, owned it completely, and used that ownership as the platform from which to demand more from institutions. Community first, infrastructure second: the sequence that most external funding models are designed to skip over.

In India, a decade of building retail fundraising and individual giving models for grassroots organizations produced the same lesson through a different route. The 2013 Companies Act required Indian corporations to spend two percent of profits on corporate social responsibility, but it flowed almost entirely toward safe, visible causes—excluding human rights, gender justice, and digital rights work whose political exposure made it untouchable for foreign donors and Indian corporations alike. Community funding stepped into that gap, bringing something institutional grants are unable to offer: unrestricted money that arrives without designated verticals or reporting categories built around a funder’s priorities. Because both their financial resilience and their political independence came from the same source, organizations that built community-funded models gained the freedom to sustain politically sensitive causes through periods when institutional funding was unavailable.

Constraint Creates Organizational Intelligence 

The Internet Freedom Foundation in India was doing public interest legal work on internet shutdowns, surveillance, and the constitutional validity of laws restricting speech online. Given active FCRA restrictions, accepting international funding was both politically complicated and strategically risky. The decision to be wholly funded by Indian citizens maintained full independence over what the organization pursued and how. The model that emerged had no heavy CRM systems, no complex donor segmentation, no expensive campaigns; it had only consistent communication, clarity about what the money was doing, and a direct relationship with people who cared about the issue. People gave small amounts, the equivalent of a few dollars a month, and what resulted was a funding model that was leaner, more transparent, and more politically honest than anything the organization could have built through institutional grants.

It was a system for converting understanding into sustained participation, and that distinction is what made it resilient.

The work of building it fell to a small team inside the organization, operating within constraints that most received wisdom about nonprofit fundraising had no language for. A senior fundraising expert warned them frankly that recurring models had struggled even for organizations with far more resources. They heard the advice and kept going because the alternatives had run out. The challenge, it turned out, was one of public understanding before fundraising mechanics. Digital rights occupied a kind of abstraction in most people’s minds, the sort of cause they held in principle but had never personally been called to defend. Before asking people to give, the organization invested in helping them understand why these issues mattered in their own lives. Supreme Court briefs became plain-language explainers. Internet shutdowns were framed around what actually happened when the connection went down: families unable to reach each other, students unable to study, livelihoods disrupted overnight.

Only once people felt they genuinely grasped what was at stake, were they asked to contribute: small recurring amounts, honestly described, connected directly to what the work cost. People gave steadily, with the loyalty that understanding produces over time. When the Reserve Bank of India introduced new regulations for recurring digital mandates in October 2021, a significant portion of IFF’s membership dropped away overnight. An organization dependent on institutional grants would have had nothing comparable to reach for. IFF launched an emergency fundraiser and raised Rs. 21 lakhs—roughly $25,000—in three weeks, through a community built to understand the work and choose to sustain it through disruption. It was a system for converting understanding into sustained participation, and that distinction is what made it resilient.

These models emerge wherever organizations are required to operate without stable institutional resources—and that requirement is now a global one.

The pattern held well beyond India. In Pakistan, Abdul Sattar Edhi began moving injured people to hospitals in Karachi in 1948 using a converted van and community donations. By the time he died in 2016, the Edhi Foundation operated the world’s largest volunteer ambulance network, with over 1,800 vehicles, 24 hospitals, and 300 welfare centers—all while having never accepted a single dollar from any government or donor agency. In Latin America, TECHO has mobilized over a million volunteers across 19 countries since 1997, building housing in informal settlements through community participation and small donations, operating at continental scale without institutional dependency. Across the OPEN network, a global association of nearly twenty digital campaigning organizations spanning Australia, Britain, Germany, Sweden, and India, the same architecture proved workable. Organizations that built community support before they built infrastructure developed a form of resilience that those built on institutional dependency consistently lacked.

A common response to examples like these treats them as products of culture alone, assuming practices like harambee in Kenya or community giving traditions in India are specific to their contexts and cannot travel. Yet, this explanation does not hold once the full range of contexts is examined.

Organizations operating under very different cultural, political, and historical conditions from East Africa to Southeast Asia to Latin America have independently arrived at the same funding principles: small distributed contributions, recurring participation, and direct alignment between the work and the people sustaining it. They arrived at the same structure without coordinating and without sharing a model because they were responding to the same underlying condition. The consistency of the design across such different contexts points to structural logic. These models emerge wherever organizations are required to operate without stable institutional resources—and that requirement is now a global one.

Some causes start with an advantage IFF did not have to manufacture: an immediate, visceral stake that needs no real explaining. Internet shutdowns interrupted family calls and disrupted exams the same week they happened which made the cost easy to feel. Causes with a more diffuse or distant impact, long-term environmental policy, structural reform work, face a more difficult version of the same task, and the model will likely take longer to build for them. That does not make the approach wrong. It makes patience the real cost of entry.

Fragility Dressed as Stability

Three compounding failures produced the crisis of 2025. The sector built for a world that no longer exists, measured the wrong indicators of resilience, and looked for expertise in the wrong places.

The overreliance on institutional funding created fragility dressed as stability. A large endowment, a diverse institutional portfolio, a sophisticated donor management system: these looked like resilience because they looked like resources. When a single institutional decision shifted in 2025, the organizations with scale had the most to lose. The organizations with community had the floor.

Alongside that overreliance ran a tendency to over-engineer solutions that organizations working under real pressure had already solved more efficiently. In recent years, many US and European organizations invested significantly in building grassroots donor bases and community funding models. The result was often over-engineered, over-branded, and still fundamentally dependent on major donors at the core, a community funding aesthetic layered over the same institutional dependency. GivingTuesday’s 2025 GivingPulse report found that half of Americans were not asked to give at all that year, and among those who were, 87 percent gave. The lean, direct models for reaching that generosity had already been built and tested under far more demanding conditions.

Underneath both sits the deeper problem of how the sector categorizes knowledge. Organizations building community funded models in Kenya, India, Pakistan, and across East Africa and Latin America were positioned as contexts where knowledge from the Global North was applied. Practitioners from the Global South were valued for what they demonstrated and rarely consulted for what they knew.

Even funders inside the system have admitted as much, with a 2021 study by Kamal Munir and Clare Woodcraft at Cambridge quoting a senior figure at one major US foundation saying that Global South philanthropy needs space to develop on its own terms. This knowledge circulates actively across practitioner networks, including the Resource Alliance, spanning more than a hundred countries, but rarely reaches the institutions that most need it.

Knowledge produced under constraint gets read as local adaptation. Knowledge produced in well-resourced environments travels as expertise. Changing that distinction is the work that remains.

The Model Is Already Built

Building community-funded models is harder and slower than most organizations expect, and the organizations that get through the difficult early period do so by accepting that communication has to work before fundraising can. Communities need to understand why the cause matters, in the language of daily life and specific consequence, before they can be asked to sustain it. Building this kind of model takes years of patient, honest communication, time that organizations under financial pressure find genuinely difficult to protect.

A useful starting point is to take your current funding model and ask honestly what would survive if fifty percent of funding disappeared in the next six months. Use that answer to redesign at least one part of the work to function under pressure, and start building one funding stream that can exist independently of institutional approval, beginning with the people who already understand why the work matters. The IFF model began with a single message: what the organization did, what it cost to keep doing it each month, and an invitation to contribute a small recurring amount. Everything else grew from that one message.

IFF is still in court, still fighting internet shutdowns and surveillance in India, still funded entirely by Indian citizens, still running on a model a senior expert told us would struggle. Kenyan communities are giving twelve or more times a year at rates most US nonprofits are still working toward. Across East Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America, organizations are sustaining consequential work on distributed trust and recurring small contributions, having built funding architectures that hold on their own terms.

The organizations the sector is now scrambling to understand built around persistence and trust, sustaining the long continuity of communities that had always known the formal systems would fail them first. The Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe has written that for many human cultures, the world simply does not end. The practitioners I sat with after those sessions had always known this. They built for the long after.

Abdul Sattar Edhi picked up a van in Karachi in 1948. The foundation he built has outlasted every foreign aid architecture the sector has constructed since. The sector spent 2025 asking where the resilient models were. They were already there, doing the work, waiting to be recognized as something more than local adaptation.

As a way to prevent potential abuses that could occur during the World Cup, Amnesty International in March of this year published a report titled “Humanity Must Win,” warning that the travel restrictions imposed by the United States and its immigration policies were tarnishing the beauty of the game.

“ICE and other agencies constitute a chilling threat to those living in the United States, to those traveling there to attend a match, and to the players themselves,” the report read.

One of the most significant episodes, widely denounced as an act of discrimination, occurred just as the World Cup started and involved Somali referee Omar Abdulkadir Artan. Selected from among about 50 referees on the official roster of the tournament, he was detained by US authorities, interrogated, and taken to a holding cell.

He had traveled from Turkey to Miami and, as he later recounted in an interview with The New York Times, was deported back to his country. Just a year earlier, he had been recognized as Men’s Referee of the Year in Africa by the regional football confederation. “My documentation was in order,” he insisted, explaining that he only sought to fulfill his dream of officiating at a World Cup.

As CJ García, organizing co-director at Fair Work Center, said in conversation with NPQ: “We all saw what happened to the Somali referee, who was shamefully denied entrance. We are also witnessing what is happening to the Iranian delegation and the soccer federation. Certain groups are being welcomed, while others are simply dismissed.”

Although constrained by war, Iran decided to participate in the World Cup, but its delegation had to be based in Mexico due to US immigration restrictions, which meant that some members could only enter US territory on the day of the match.

García explained that these incidents reveal a troubling pattern of exclusion, undermining equal treatment and dignity at a global event.

Concerns Beyond Detentions

In their role leading initiatives to protect labor rights, ensure fair wages, and fight for immigrant protections in Seattle, García stressed that such discrimination cannot be normalized.

The Somali community in the US is often in the president’s crosshairs. In February of this year, Trump declared on television that “Somalia is not even a country” and that “they don’t have anything resembling a country.” For the US president, the African nation was “considered practically the worst in the world,” which he described as a “terrible place.” In the same speech, he disparaged Somalis, attributing as their only virtue “piracy of large ships at sea” and claiming that “there are many people with very low IQs.”

That discriminatory tone was accompanied by institutional decisions. In January 2026, the Department of Homeland Security announced the termination of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Somalia, which since 1991 had allowed thousands of Somalis to live and work legally in the United States. Although a court order provisionally suspended the measure, the withdrawal of this humanitarian protection exposes the Somali community to greater risk of deportation and precariousness.

The World Cup also exposes workers to unsafe and exploitative labor conditions.

Organizations representing the US Islamic community also expressed discontent with Artan’s expulsion. “Our nation should not bar anyone simply because of their race or ethnicity. That is especially true in the case of a coach, a referee, or any other person coming to participate in the World Cup,” Edward Ahmed Mitchell, deputy director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), told Al Jazeera.

He further argued that Somali visitors undergo the same verification process as any other visitor and that, once that control is passed, there is no reason to deny them entry solely on the basis of nationality, since doing so constitutes an offense to values and to the law.

The incidents faced by these delegations fit into a broader pattern consistent with what was highlighted in CAIR’s Civil Rights Report 2026, which warned that the Trump administration’s immigration policies produce a scheme of racial and religious profiling that disproportionately impacts Muslim communities.

Nonprofit organizations have stressed that their concerns about migrant communities extend far beyond the risk of detentions. They emphasize that the World Cup also exposes workers to unsafe and exploitative labor conditions, making labor protections a central part of their advocacy.

As the organizer of the World Cup, FIFA carries a fundamental responsibility to ensure that human rights are respected throughout the tournament.

Lizeth Chacón, executive director of Workers Defense Action Fund, told NPQ: “We decided to get involved as an organization to ensure that we were pushing FIFA and city officials to guarantee strong worker protections. For us, that meant making several demands of FIFA representatives to ensure those protections were in place.”

She added that, in response to these fears of possible detentions within migrant communities, her organization has worked to provide risk-awareness guidance. This included advising workers to carry proper documentation, to keep an attorney’s number available, and to ensure that a trusted family member knows their plans—for example, confirming safe return after attending a game or finishing a shift.

Human Rights Standards

As the organizer of the World Cup, FIFA carries a fundamental responsibility to ensure that human rights are respected throughout the tournament. This obligation goes beyond the spectacle of the game, requiring the institution to safeguard the dignity of players, workers, and communities affected by the event. By embedding human rights standards into its governance and demanding compliance from host countries, FIFA is expected to set the tone for accountability.

Faced with the migration incidents affecting players and referees, Gianni Infantino, FIFA president since 2016, sought to downplay them. He explained that the organization had negotiated with US authorities for some flexibility in visas and that costs had been reduced to facilitate the entry of delegations. He acknowledged, however, that FIFA cannot impose itself on governments or control every situation, and regarding Artan’s case, he argued that the best thing was “to relax and trust FIFA.”

Andrea Florence, executive director of the Sport & Rights Alliance, stated in conversation with NPQ: “It’s very worrying that FIFA did not step up to ensure that the rights they are supposed to respect are actually fulfilled by the host country, because this is the first World Cup that had human rights from the bidding phase until the implementation.”

Florence explained that civil society organizations had fought for many years to ensure FIFA included human rights in its statutes—a milestone achieved in 2016. She noted that when the US, Mexico, and Canada won the bid in 2018 to host this year’s World Cup, it marked the first time human rights were embedded from the very beginning of the process.

She also said that this context makes FIFA’s lack of enforcement particularly troubling, since the inclusion of human rights was meant to be a landmark achievement in the organization’s governance. Florence stressed that the credibility of those commitments is now at stake.

Troubling Legacies Left Behind

While pressing FIFA to uphold its human rights commitments is essential, advocates emphasize that this effort must be complemented by demands directed at local and state authorities. Global pressure ensures accountability at the top, but lasting legacies are shaped by host cities and communities, where policies on labor protections, immigration enforcement, and public safety directly affect residents.

“I think it’s really helpful for international human rights organizations to exert their pressure on FIFA from the top down. But really, if you’re looking at long-term legacies, in America it’s about how we can implement pressure from the bottom up. FIFA will leave in a few months’ time, distracted by the next tournament, but the host cities and their residents are the ones holding the receipts. They don’t see FIFA as the target as much as they see their own elected officials,” Jennifer Li, coordinator of Dignity 2026 and director of the Center for Community Health Innovation at Georgetown Law, said to NPQ in an interview.

She added that mega sporting events often leave behind troubling legacies. As an example, she pointed to Atlanta during the 1996 Olympics, where the city built a jail in the center to house more than 9,000 homeless Black men—a legacy that residents still remember. Li stressed that communities must remain cautious about how human rights are respected so that everyone benefits, or at least is not harmed, as happened in Atlanta or Vancouver during the 2010 Olympics.

Advocates highlight that true protection begins with prevention and close collaboration with communities. By engaging directly with residents, nonprofits can anticipate risks, and provide the tools needed to safeguard both migrant families and workers.

Haddy Gassama, senior policy counsel at the ACLU, told NPQ the ACLU has distributed “know your rights” materials for people attending stadiums, in case ICE shows up. Gassama also emphasized that this World Cup is taking place amid high-stakes immigration cases before the US Supreme Court — including decisions on TPS and DACA—which has heightened fear and vigilance among immigrant communities.

“There’s a sense of fear in a lot of communities. There’s apprehension about going out, even though this is a sport everybody loves. Even if you can’t afford a ticket, you might want to go to a local bar or gathering place to watch,” she said. “But immigrant communities are vigilant about being out or gathering where there might be heavy police or ICE presence, and that has changed the energy around the game.”

For More on this Topic:

As Surveillance of Immigrant Communities Expands, How Can Nonprofits Respond?

On the Heels of ICE Raids, Minnesota Also Fights to Save a Wilderness

Immigrant Support Networks Step Up as ICE Enforcement Rises and Fear Grips Communities

Buck is an oshibana piece created from dried flowers and preserved plant material arranged into the silhouette of a deer. Through the practice of botanical preservation, I am interested in how memory changes form without disappearing. Flowers wilt, seasons shift, and bodies transform, yet traces remain.

Buck invites viewers to consider what we choose to preserve, what we carry forward, and how belonging is shaped through connection rather than ownership.

The deer emerged for me as a symbol of tenderness, alertness, and relationship. It moves through landscapes shaped by both beauty and disruption, adapting to changing conditions while remaining connected to the ecosystems that sustain it. Constructing the piece from preserved plants felt important because the materials themselves carry histories of growth, loss, care, and return.

For me, the story of “America” is also a story about our relationships to land, memory, and one another. It is a story that existed long before national borders and continues beyond them. Buck invites viewers to consider what we choose to preserve, what we carry forward, and how belonging is shaped through connection rather than ownership.

This piece honors transformation as an ongoing process. It reminds me that even after a bloom has passed, something of its beauty, memory, and possibility remains.

Today, with American democracy wavering, federal funding for programs evaporating, and power imbalances surging across the United States, it is more vital than ever for those of us who are most affected by social issues to influence decisions that affect our lives. This is especially true in housing where top-down initiatives often fail to reflect or adequately address the challenges that we see every day on the ground.

More robust solutions to housing affordability and homelessness require a more intentional, respectful, and non-extractive process that aligns our communities’ priorities with those of philanthropic partners that remain committed to addressing these pressing challenges of our time.

A growing number of Americans are priced out of a safe place to call home, yet drastic cuts in public funding for affordable housing have decimated many of the very institutions and organizations trying to fix the problem, large and small alike. Yet, an increasing number of private funders have pulled away from initiatives that seek to level the playing field or change the narrative, fearful of putting their own funding streams at risk. Their hesitation comes at the very moment when communities most need supporters to step up quickly. Those of us on the front lines are having to rebuild our capacities and regain momentum, while trying to move forward. In the worst cases, some community organizations have stopped working on housing entirely. The bottom line is that the housing justice field is at a pivotal point.

More robust solutions to housing affordability and homelessness require a more intentional, respectful, and non-extractive process that aligns our communities’ priorities with those of philanthropic partners that remain committed to addressing these pressing challenges of our time.

As housing organizers, advocates, and practitioners, we each have been invited at different points in our work to speak about our experiences. These invitations can come with real curiosity and even urgency. We’re asked to share our stories and help funders understand what’s happening. What the invitations don’t always come with is a say in what happens next. It’s not that philanthropy lacks interest in community voices. It’s just that, too often, that is where the exchange stops.

Over the past year, six of us who work on the front lines of housing justice in communities across the country have been in closer conversation with philanthropy, through a Community Advisors Program at the Fund for Housing and Opportunity (FHO), a grantmaking collaborative working to protect renters and solve homelessness. Through this program, we learned how philanthropic staff make decisions, set priorities, and structure their relationships with communities. We also looked at what encourages power sharing, what gets in the way, and what begins to change when funders try to do things differently. As part of this initiative, we were invited to share community perspectives with FHO and other funders.

Drawing from our learnings with FHO’s program and our lived experience, here, we share a summary of what we want philanthropic funders to know so we can all move closer to shared power and meeting our missions.

Funders Can Respectfully Interact with Community in Mutually Beneficial and Non-extractive Ways

Advancing opportunity for all—particularly communities disproportionately impacted by systemic challenges—requires translating shared values into practice by engaging communities in more intentional, respectful, and non-extractive ways. The following recommendations offer practical steps funders can take, starting now.

1. Consider visiting communities to see what’s happening firsthand. Nothing shows respect and gains our trust quite like visiting communities in person. Come see the “boots on the ground” with your own eyes and authentically connect community members whose lived experiences and leadership are shaping local solutions. At the same time, approach visits with care. Coordinate closely with grantee partners so your visits are thoughtful, welcomed, and do not create additional burdens for the communities you seek to support. Avoid unannounced visits and be mindful of the power dynamics at play so that people feel comfortable and respected rather than scrutinized.

As you do this, leverage your grantee networks to find people who are deeply embedded in the community—not self-proclaimed representatives. Find people who have their ear to the ground and be discerning by relying on community partners and advocates to understand who’s doing good effective, trusted work—and who isn’t.

2. Be transparent about your funding strategy. Be clear about what you are and are not willing to fund—and explain why. That information helps us, as potential grant recipients, to understand that when you choose to support something other than our project, you’re doing so with vision and intentionality.

3. Work in partnership with us. Recognize and value the expertise, lived experience, and relational connections that community leaders bring to this work and treat their knowledge as essential to identifying and shaping effective solutions.

View us as colleagues and extend an invitation—not a directive—to play a role in the projects you fund. Directing our involvement, as community partners, keeps uneven power dynamics intact that can undermine authentic collaboration.

Find and create opportunities for us to share our knowledge. These could include peer exchanges between organizations or cities; workshops that involve case studies of our communities’ work; participation in grantmaking decisions where we do not have to recuse ourselves due to conflicts of interest; and training on practical topics, such as how to pursue sizeable grants or how to persuade funders to invest in the physical construction of housing.

4. Commit to more frequent, meaningful communication that prioritizes relationships over transactions. Reach out frequently to ask for ideas or suggestions. Listen to the people most closely connected to the community and trust our perspectives. When working in places where philanthropic language and reporting requirements are unfamiliar, reduce the emphasis on metrics and monitoring so grantees can devote their time and energy to doing the work. When reporting requirements outpace organizational capacity, they can become a barrier to impact rather than a tool for learning and accountability.

We’re tired of being contacted only when a funder wants the story of our hardship. Many of us have been in situations where we felt exploited while serving as a community advisor. Before asking us for favors, please ask yourself: Is your request really necessary? Or is it an antiquated philanthropic practice that you’re continuing out of habit rather than purpose? Does this request advance the work underway or is it characterized as a barrier by movement leaders?

5. Use respectful language. If you’re planning to interact with community members, refrain from using dehumanizing language. This is especially true for communities most impacted by systemic challenges. Understand that community representatives pay an emotional toll every time they are asked to explain what it means to be poor or homeless.
6. Pay your community advisors for their expertise and time, just as you would any other consultant. Compensation shows that you respect our knowledge and value our input, and it can make a real difference for community leaders who work long hours or who incur expenses when they take time off work or secure childcare so they can participate.
7. Support learning, collaboration, and professional growth among your community partners. Use your convening power to connect grantees and funders so we can learn from one another and exchange insights. Being in a group with other people—whether structured as a peer exchange, network, or joint leadership opportunity—exposes us to new perspectives and encourages us to test ideas, share strategies, reflect on situations, and offer mutual support. Meeting in person is especially useful because it allows time to build the genuine connections and trust that is needed to share power.

Individual professional development on self-identified topics is equally important. It offers us a deeper dive and more reflection on our strengths and gaps as community leaders and it can help us avoid burnout.

8. Act on what you learn from us as community partners. We don’t just want to be heard; we want our input to have impact. We know our insights strengthen your outcomes, so we want to see it reflected in both your strategies and practices—and to see those contributions explicitly acknowledged rather than marginalized.

Practices That Undermine Trust Between Funders and Communities  

1. Avoid grantmaking practices that seems more performative than strategic. It’s fine to invest in a project because it is led by people of color, if that is your priority, but we still want you to care about how the work turns out, its impact, and the people behind it—not just the optics of the moment. Similarly, try to avoid funding applicants who write impressive proposals but haven’t demonstrated their work to build genuine community trust.
2. Don’t sacrifice long-term results in your quest for quick wins. A grassroots program might have to run a campaign several times over a decade before getting a win, and it needs support the whole time. Oftentimes, philanthropy’s eagerness for rapid success leaves behind important long-term projects.

For instance, we see this dynamic play out with cooperative and social housing. These models treat housing as a shared community resource instead of a speculative investment and they can create permanently affordable housing that reflects what residents want for their neighborhoods. Despite their value, these projects struggle to secure early funding and financing needed to grow and compete in a market-driven housing system.

It is also especially hard for those of us who work on federal policy to communicate the value of our work to funders looking for a quick win. We need you to stay in it for the long haul.

3. Try not to restrict your funding so much that it prevents us from meeting our communities’ needs. Give us the financial flexibility to respond quickly to arising needs and opportunities. Examples include providing unrestricted grants, earmarking a portion of funds for rapid response, and streamlining grant application and reporting processes.

Sharing Power Transforms Relationships Between Funders and Communities 

As community leaders, we draw hope for housing justice from the level of passion and preparedness we see in communities. We need philanthropy’s help, however, to nurture and advance local efforts.

1. Meaningful relationships with funders creates opportunities for many of us to better understand how philanthropy works: how funders perceive their missions, manage budgets, review proposals, select grantees, and set funding guidelines. That knowledge makes us more confident and increases our capacity to attract funding. It also helps us understand that philanthropy extends beyond financial support; it can also serve as a vector for relationship building, network weaving, communication, and learning.
2. Direct contact between funders and community leaders opens the door to deeper sharing about what’s happening in communities. Instead of having to convey the complexity of our work through a single annual report, we welcome opportunities for more expansive and ongoing conversations that helps funders better understand and respond to the realities of the ever-changing circumstances on the ground.
3. Some of us are adopting new behaviors and ways of working—and philanthropy can support and sustain these shifts. After learning more about collaborative decision-making in the context of housing justice, for example, one member of our group is helping her organization find ways to center both staff and client perspectives and facilitate smoother communication. Another advisor is more willing to lead community meetings or speak up in public. Philanthropy can create collaborative spaces and inclusive practices that can support and help sustain these shifts by being responsive, flexible, and willing to evolve alongside your community partners.

Looking Forward

As community leaders, we draw hope for housing justice from the level of passion and preparedness we see in communities. We need philanthropy’s help, however, to nurture and advance local efforts.

It is more crucial than ever for funders to share power with community leaders and invest in solutions that make housing more affordable and accessible so our communities can flourish. And the recommendations we’ve outlined are transferable approaches that can be applied to addressing other social challenges of our time. A group in which funders and community advisors share their knowledge, is a powerful way to cultivate that dialogue and align perspectives around effective solutions. It may be the best way to ensure that the grantmaking strategies are informed by the people most affected by them. It may also be the easiest way to underscore that housing justice is not just a concept. It’s about real people and real impact.

Flowers in the Bones emerged from reflections on grief, illness, love, and the communities that sustain us through uncertainty. Created through oshibana, the Japanese art of pressed flowers, the piece holds the tension between fragility and endurance. The preserved flowers become a record of what has been carried, lost, and loved.

Flowers in the Bones honors the people who have carried me, the people I carry in return, and the possibility that love itself can be a civic practice.

What remains when systems, credentials, and promises fail to hold us? Again and again, I return to the same answer: people. Village. Care. The quiet acts of devotion that help us survive.

For me, this work highlights a version of “America” that is often overlooked. It is the story of mutual aid, chosen family, disability community, friendship, and interdependence. It is the story of people finding ways to care for one another despite grief, isolation, violence, and uncertainty.

The flowers represent those relationships. Tender, imperfect, and resilient. They remind me that survival is rarely an individual achievement. We bloom because others help keep us alive. Flowers in the Bones honors the people who have carried me, the people I carry in return, and the possibility that love itself can be a civic practice.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Lee Ann Rawlins Williams, University of North Dakota

Flash flooding has been tearing up communities across the U.S., with heavy downpours sending creeks and rivers rushing over their banks from Texas to Kentucky, across the Midwest and into the Mid-Atlantic states and the Northeast. In Missouri, floodwater swept away a home, and National Guard helicopters had to rescue and evacuate dozens of people from a summer camp.

If this feels like déjà vu after two summers of flash flooding across America, imagine being a community that has had to live through flooding like this again and again.

Residents in Cocke County, Tennessee, were still recovering from the effects of Hurricane Helene’s deadly 2024 rush of mountain floodwater when a new storm turned creeks into raging rivers in June 2026. Officials in Tioga County, Pennsylvania, had been lobbying the state to dredge flood-prone streams when flash flooding in early July 2026 hit the same communities flooded by Hurricane Debby’s remnants two years earlier.

As storms intensify in our warming world, recovery no longer feels permanent in places at risk of disasters. Instead, it’s too often a temporary reprieve before the next disaster hits. Communities are also spending down their savings to rebuild, and they’re finding bank accounts thin when disaster strikes again.

This state of repeated disasters is known as disaster fatigue. As a researcher who works on disaster planning and recovery, I’ve seen how this problem has grown for residents and communities at risk of fires, floods, hurricanes or other natural disasters.

When recovery never really ends

The traditional disaster response model assumes a sequence of preparedness, response, recovery and, eventually, a return to stability.

However, a full recovery from major flooding or a hurricane takes years. Increasingly, communities might not have completed repairs before another damaging storm arrives. At the same time, families rebuilding after a hurricane may confront a housing shortage. Insurance and reconstruction costs rise. Businesses and their workers face economic uncertainty about how soon they can reopen. Farmers recovering from drought may face another season of extreme weather before their livelihoods are restored.

The same pattern can be seen beyond weather-related disasters. In Venezuela, powerful earthquakes in 2026, followed by aftershocks, occurred within a broader context of economic and humanitarian challenges, making recovery even more complex.

In many places, recovery is no longer a destination. It has become an ongoing and seemingly unending process.

Emergency management scholar Victoria Ingham and colleagues define community disaster fatigue as the deterioration of the community’s ability to function, its well-being and its capacity to recover when disasters repeatedly disrupt daily life and overwhelm the community’s resources. Research examining communities exposed to repeated disasters has found evidence of fraying social networks and growing strain on the government and community systems essential for recovery.

Related research on resilience fatigue among residents suggests that repeated exposure to hazards can produce physical and emotional exhaustion, anxiety about future disasters and frustration associated with the constant effort required to return to normal.

Compounding disasters

Part of the challenge is that disasters increasingly do not occur in isolation.

Researchers and emergency managers often talk about these risks as cascading and compounding disasters. A flood doesn’t just damage roads; it also disrupts healthcare access, interrupts supply chains and creates long-term economic hardship. At the same time, communities may be dealing with extreme heat and housing shortages.

Climate change is contributing to many of these patterns. Heavy precipitation, extreme heat, drought and other weather-related hazards are occurring more frequently in many regions.

For communities already trying to manage a recovery, each new event adds another layer of disruption and costs.

Hidden costs of repeated recovery

One of the most important consequences of repeated disasters is the strain on social cohesion – the relationships and networks that help communities share information, coordinate resources and support one another during difficult times. Volunteers who repeatedly respond to emergencies may experience burnout.

Research examining disaster fatigue among community leaders found that people reported feeling exhausted and overwhelmed by the many decisions, lack of resources and other challenges associated with managing repeated emergencies over time.

Residents, too, can become exhausted by repeated evacuations and rebuilding cycles. Research on mental health after disasters shows that prolonged recovery demands, housing instability and uncertainty about the future can contribute to anxiety, depression and trauma-related symptoms.

Disaster fatigue does not mean weakness or failure. Communities can retain their ability to bounce back while simultaneously experiencing exhaustion. In fact, some of the most resilient communities got that way because they have had to recover from damage repeatedly.

Rethinking recovery

Repeated disasters expose weaknesses in the systems that provide aid and help with recovery, which will still be needed long after the headlines fade.

Communities often receive an immediate outpouring of support, but it can be disconnected from residents’ actual needs. Following major disasters, donations of clothing and toiletries may arrive in large quantities, yet critical needs such as housing assistance, debris removal and long-term recovery support such as childcare services or healthcare and social service support may go unmet.

Effective recovery depends not only on the generosity of the donations, but also on strategic approaches that can get the type of aid needed to the people who need it. Long-term recovery planning and coordinated recovery efforts – combining the strengths of government agencies, nonprofits, faith-based organizations and community groups – can help tap into the funding and types of assistance most needed and help communities quickly determine where the need will be greatest.

Recognizing community disaster fatigue is an important step toward building recovery systems that are as enduring as the challenges communities increasingly face.

These systems require sustained investments in people, institutions and communities. As disasters become more frequent and recovery efforts increasingly overlap with new floods, storms, heat waves, droughts and other disruptions, strengthening these systems will be crucial for successful, resilient recoveries.

Lee Ann Rawlins Williams, Clinical Assistant Professor of Education, Health and Behavior Studies, University of North Dakota

Sarcoidosis is a rare but serious inflammatory disease….It disproportionately affects Black Americans, particularly Black women, who experience some of the highest rates of the disease.

When the Milken Institute and the Ann Theodore Foundation launched a grant program to fund a clinical trial for a promising therapeutic in sarcoidosis, the team learned that coordinating such a trial would be challenging for two reasons: the complexity of the disease and the underlying systemic inequities that shape access, participation, and care.

Sarcoidosis is a rare but serious inflammatory disease of unknown origin, affecting approximately 150,000 to 200,000 people in the United States. It disproportionately affects Black Americans, particularly Black women, who experience some of the highest rates of the disease. It can cause pain, fatigue, aching joints, and brain fog. Depending on the organs affected, it can cause chest tightness, blurred vision, skin scarring, or heart rhythm disturbances. It looks very different from person to person. While it might go away on its own with few to no symptoms, for some, it may come and go intermittently, or even impact vital organs, causing irreversible damage or death.

Due to historically underfunded research on the disease, scientists and clinicians have a limited understanding of sarcoidosis. That, in turn, leaves many people misdiagnosed, dismissed, or untreated. Generalized symptoms associated with the disease, such as fatigue, can lead many people with sarcoidosis to endure a journey over several years before reaching a diagnosis. Once diagnosed, only a few treatment options are available—and those available merely mitigate symptoms rather than reverse the disease. Such treatments like corticosteroids and chemotherapeutics come with significant side effects, necessitating the development of safer, more effective options for patients.

What makes the research gap especially troubling is who bears the burden. Black Americans live with sarcoidosis 2.2 to 5.6 times more frequently than White, Hispanic, and Asian Americans. Black women have the highest prevalence of any group, double that of Black men, and three to six times that of White, Asian, and Hispanic women. Black Americans also tend to experience more severe cases. Yet despite this disproportionate impact, Black people make up as little as 5 percent of clinical trial participants across interstitial lung diseases, which refer to diseases that can cause inflammation and scarring in the lungs, including sarcoidosis.

Closing that gap is not only a matter of equity. It is a matter of getting the science right. And while philanthropy can help facilitate change by accelerating groundbreaking research, it can be even more effective if systemic change happens alongside it.

Systemic Inequities Shaping Sarcoidosis Research, Diagnosis, and Care

When the Foundation for Sarcoidosis Research surveyed Black patients to better understand the barriers that contribute to underrepresentation in clinical trial participation, the answers were painfully familiar. Surveyed individuals shared that they weren’t told about trial opportunities, there was understandable distrust that the opportunities would be safe, and the logistical costs such as missed work, childcare, and transportation were prohibitive.

These barriers are symptoms of structural failures that pervade the entire biomedical ecosystem, with roots that stretch back decades. Past and present discriminatory practices have led to broad health disparities between Black and other Americans. Black children are 60 percent more likely than the general population to develop asthma. Black women are 54 percent more likely than the general population to be diagnosed with stomach cancer. Black adults are 26 percent more likely to be diagnosed with hypertension. Black people are more likely to experience understandable reluctance to receive medical care due to historical malpractice against and racist beliefs about Black people.

This is where philanthropy can intervene in ways that government funding, bound by bureaucracy and political headwinds, often cannot.

Moreover, Black Americans are excluded from the biomedical ecosystem as professionals, not only as patients. As of 2018, only 5 percent of all practicing physicians in the United States were Black, and this proportion has remained largely unchanged in recent years, with Black physicians representing 5.3 percent of active physicians nationwide. These structural inequities limit our ability to improve health outcomes for all.

Building trust in the biomedical system will demand philanthropic and structural change in who funds the research, who builds career pipelines for Black physicians, and who invests in the community health infrastructure that might actually close these gaps. Without representation in the biomedical research and medical enterprise, the conditions that most affect Black communities remain understudied, underfunded, and undertreated.

This is where philanthropy can intervene in ways that government funding, bound by bureaucracy and political headwinds, often cannot.

A Promising Leverage Point: Investing in HBCUs

Historically, Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) offer one of the most promising leverage points. HBCUs provide disproportionate and enduring contributions to diversifying the healthcare workforce. Representing just 2.3 percent of US medical schools, they’ve produced nearly 10 percent of all Black physicians in 2019. And according to a report by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, HBCUs have historically educated nearly 70 percent of Black physicians and dentists in the US—an extraordinary return from institutions that represent only a small fraction of institutions of higher education.

HBCUs are also geographically and culturally closest to the communities most affected by diseases like sarcoidosis and their graduates overwhelmingly choose to practice in communities that lack healthcare. Yet, they are chronically underfunded. All HBCUs combined receive less than one-fifth of the research funding that Johns Hopkins alone received in 2023. Sixteen states have underfunded their HBCUs for decades, resulting in over $12 billion in withheld resources. Only one HBCU, Howard University, has achieved R1 research status, the designation for institutions with the highest levels of research activity.

Historically, Black Colleges and Universities offer one of the most promising leverage points.

The infrastructure gap is real, and it has consequences for how many Black researchers enter the pipeline and how many conditions affecting Black communities get the scientific attention they deserve. The Association of HBCU Research Institutions, recently formed to help institutions overcome these barriers, offering a powerful platform for advancing discovery, innovation, health equity—and increasing funding stability—but there is still much work to be done.

The Milken Institute’s work with the Ann Theodore Foundation points toward what targeted philanthropic investment can accomplish. Their collaboration will direct over half a million dollars toward a clinical study on a promising therapeutic—one that is FDA-approved for other inflammatory diseases but additional data is needed for sarcoidosis approval. These efforts provide a model for designing the kinds of specific, flexible, fast-moving investments that philanthropy is uniquely positioned to make. Federal research funding, particularly through the National Institutes of Health, faces significant structural and political constraints; any meaningful reform will take years to materialize. Philanthropy can move now.

But the Milken-ATF partnership also points to the limits of what any single funding source can accomplish in the absence of broader systems change. Transforming systemic inequity requires coordinated investment in HBCU research infrastructure, sustained advocacy for equitable federal funding, and a medical establishment willing to reckon with the trust it has spent generations eroding.

Whether you are a funder, an advocate, or a nonprofit leader, the lesson from sarcoidosis is transferable: when research excludes the communities most affected by a disease, it produces incomplete science and inadequate solutions. Addressing a longstanding lack of funding for sarcoidosis research—or any disease for that matter—requires contending with deeper structural challenges and inequities while investing in promising leverage opportunities, such as HBCUs, that can build a more inclusive research ecosystem and accelerate breakthroughs for all patients.

Walk through many US cities, and Vietnamese American life is visible in certain ways. You can find us in restaurants, markets, nail salons, temples, churches, community centers, festival banners, and small business corridors. We share this with many refugee communities––from Cambodian, Lao, and Hmong families displaced by wars in Southeast Asia––to Somali, Afghan, Iraqi, Haitian, Bosnian, and other communities who have rebuilt homes after rupture. Our labor, food, rituals, languages, and family histories are woven into the everyday life of neighborhoods, even when our stories of displacement and survival remain harder to encounter in public memory.

Compared with the scale of public memorials dedicated to war, military service, and other established civic narratives, Vietnamese American refugee stories remain much harder to encounter, particularly in the Northeastern states. Public art matters because it gives displaced communities a visible place to remember, and it gives the wider public a way to encounter histories of war, refuge, survival and belonging.

That absence matters.

The Vietnam War is one of the most publicly remembered wars in the United States, and Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., remains one of the most recognized public artworks of that memory. Its history also reminds us that memorials are never simple. Even this now-beloved landmark was once highly controversial, revealing how difficult it can be for a nation to decide how grief, responsibility, service, and loss should be held in public. US veterans’ losses deserve honor, yet at the same time, if public memory of the war stops with American military loss, the story remains unfinished.

The war also produced mass displacement, family separation, reeducation camps, dangerous sea journeys, refugee camps, resettlement, silence, grief, and rebuilding across generations. Vietnamese Americans carry these histories not only as trauma but also as wisdom about survival, mutual aid, civic courage––and what it means to rebuild a life after upheaval.

A Permanent Installation to Remember Vietnamese Refugee Communities in Boston

I write this as a 1.5–generation Vietnamese American artist and cultural organizer, the daughter of a Vietnamese refugee mother and a South Vietnamese veteran. My family arrived in Boston in 1992 through the U.S. Humanitarian Operation Program, which resettled former South Vietnamese military personnel, including my father, and others who had been detained in post-1975 reeducation camps, often for three years or more. We first resettled in Dorchester and eventually made our way to Fields Corner, the heart of Boston’s Vietnamese community, which was officially designated as the Boston Little Saigon Cultural District by the Massachusetts Cultural Council in 2021. Its cultural events and community programs are run by a nonprofit organization.

As the lead artist and project director of “1975: A Vietnamese Diaspora Memorial”—an intergenerational public art installation at the Boston Little Saigon Cultural District—I have been thinking deeply about what public land holds. The project began not as a traditional commission, but as part of an intentional grassroots community effort to mark 50 years since the end of the Vietnam War and the beginning of mass Vietnamese displacement, refugee resettlement, and diaspora life, without centering military narratives or militaristic figures. We wanted to shift the focus from the war itself to its lasting impact and legacy on families and communities.

For over three years, the 1975 Memorial team and I have built partnerships, shaped the artistic vision, and advocated for more public resources and civic space in Boston. Our temporary installation, “Journey of Light: A 1975 Memory Field” in Town Field Park in 2025 was a first public step toward a permanent Vietnamese diaspora memorial in Dorchester’s Little Saigon.

With illuminated nón lá (a traditional Vietnamese hat), lanterns, projections, bilingual storytelling, and community gathering, the artwork remembered those changed by April 30, 1975: refugees, reeducation camp survivors, separated families, veterans, elders, and later generations carrying inherited memory.

It was temporary because long-term public artwork requires a longer civic process, including securing funding, site approval, design review, maintenance, and shared political will, which is why we launched a call to action to give it a permanent home. Visitors shared that they had never seen Vietnamese refugee histories held so visibly in Boston public space.

Beyond Boston: Public Art for Vietnamese Americans

This question of who gets remembered in public space and whose histories are allowed to shape civic memory, extends far beyond Boston.

In Clarendon, VA, the need for public memory is clear. Former residents of Little Saigon remembered their community not only as a business district but as a place where refugees learned how to survive, find one another, and feel at home again. One former community member described it as a place where people exchanged advice on “how to survive in America” and “how to learn to be American.” Another remembered Vietnamese coffee, music, and food as making him feel “back in Saigon again.” Khánh H. Lê’s “Voices from Little Saigon of Clarendon” responded to that layered memory by bringing oral histories, tiny building structures to resemble past businesses, photographs, a sculptural apricot blossom tree, and folded paper boats into public view. The work mattered because it marked a community whose presence had shaped Clarendon, even after redevelopment and rising rents made much of that presence disappear. Public art cannot undo the loss of being priced out of your community, but it can say: We were here, we built here, we loved here, we made meaning here.

The Vietnamese refugee story is part of the country’s civil inheritance.

Santa Clara County, in California, offers similar important examples. At the nonprofit Vietnamese American Service Center, the public artwork “Home” by Kyungmi Shin draws from Vietnamese landscapes, including Hạ Long Bay and terraced rice fields, to welcome community members into a space designed around culturally competent care. Nearby, San Jose’s Vietnamese Heritage Garden has become a vital public site for Vietnamese elders, veterans, families, and community ceremonies. The site includes community garden plots, flag-raising gatherings, and “Thank You America,” a public monument by Tuan Nguyen depicting an American soldier and a South Vietnamese soldier standing side-by-side. More than a garden, it functions as a place where refugee memory, cultural survival, gratitude, grief, and civic belonging are made visible in a public space.

In East San Jose, a recent mural on Alum Rock Avenue, painted by artists who came together through the 1Culture Collective, honors Vietnamese American history, migration, cultural dress, and the beauty of Vietnam. The mural shows how public art can make refugee history visible not only as trauma, but as culture, resilience, and home.

A Space for Public Memory

The Vietnamese refugee story is part of the country’s civil inheritance. About 125,000 Vietnamese people were evacuated to the United States in 1975, and more refugees followed in later waves. Today, about 2.2 million people in the United States identify as Vietnamese alone or in combination with other backgrounds. More than 1.3 million Vietnamese American adults are eligible to vote.

The work before us is not only to add Vietnamese American stories to civic landscapes—it is to ask who gets space, who shapes it, and who gets to reframe public memory.

When Vietnamese American refugee stories are not given lasting, visible space in public art, the public loses more than one community’s history. It loses a fuller understanding of what war does to families, what refuge makes possible, and how displaced people help rebuild the civic life of this country.

This is why I continue to build “1975: A Vietnamese Diaspora Memorial” in Dorchester’s Little Saigon. Vietnamese refugee histories belong not only in private memory, but also in the public spaces where a city tells the stories of the immigrant communities that helped shape it. We are currently advocating for public land access, civic partnership, and financial support to make the memorial a reality.

Public art matters. It is not decoration. It is one of the ways democracy learns to see itself more honestly.

When Vietnamese American refugee stories are not given lasting, visible space in public art, the public loses more than one community’s history. It loses a fuller understanding of what war does to families, what refuge makes possible, and how displaced people help rebuild the civic life of this country.

A democracy worthy of its name must make room for the communities that have kept memory alive even when public institutions did not. Public art can help make that visible. It can help our communities share past and present knowledge and experiences in that public space. And when we do it with care, trust, and community leadership, it can help make that room and public space truly last for all.

In this column with NPQ, LandBack for the People, NDN Collective builds on their podcast of the same name, sharing stories from Turtle Island and beyond about Indigenous people organizing in community, advocating for social justice, and fighting for the return of Indigenous lands.

While the Donald Trump administration, billionaires, oil executives, and Elon Musk are busy finding new ways to extract from the Earth and exploit communities of color even quicker, Indigenous Peoples continue resisting assimilation and colonization, holding keys and solutions and building alternatives to the status quo.

One of those alternatives is the LANDBACK Action Network (LAN), an Indigenous-led network of Indigenous people, organizations, grassroots groups, Tribal Nations, multiracial movement organizations, community members, organizers, and accomplices working together to strengthen the LANDBACK movement and towards the collective liberation for all people and Mother Earth. And we hope to grow the network to include Indigenous peoples across the Canada, United States, and Mexico.

On April 20, NDN Collective’s LANDBACK for the People podcast released an episode about the launch of the LAN. As the director of membership for LAN at NDN Collective, a major portion of my role is dedicated to expanding the network, so I was honored to be a guest on that show.

With my fellow guests, Cy Wagoner and Eva Cardenas, and our host Nick Tilsen, I shared what I learned about mutual aid and organizing as a child growing up along the border of the United States and Mexico. I learned by watching how the community took care of each other out of necessity—and how we do have the power to change things when we mobilize strategically.

This is a common way people find themselves in organizing spaces—through necessity, through the need to survive, in solidarity, and with community. Cy shared how his start to organizing came through water. He grew up having to haul water in the absence of plumbing at his home on the Navajo Nation and found himself organizing in his home community because of this fundamental basic human right.

Eva also found herself organizing at a young age, through the lens of her parents being immigrants and having to take on a huge amount of responsibility at a young age. She joined the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights, her first political home, as ICE and Homeland Security were just being started during the George W. Bush administration.

One of the things Eva said that really struck me, as we talked about the need for humility in this work, is that “sometimes with that disconnection that’s driven by ego, we tend to think that somehow we, as ‘two-leggeds’, know everything and have the answers for everything—when in reality we are part of something larger that must be respected and must be defended. And so, I think LANDBACK is a larger call. It’s a bigger framework. It shifts sort of how people are positioning themselves in this current situation, and it gives people the opportunity for hope to continue to light that fire for struggle.”

A common theme throughout our conversation was about how LANDBACK is an Indigenous call, yet it includes everyone. It includes Black reparations. It means protected resources for all. It means that our national parks and public lands would be better stewarded, if they were under Indigenous Peoples care and jurisdiction. It means the end to colonial borders that cause unimaginable death and the destruction of communities. It means reclaiming all that colonization took from us.

And as for LAN, it’s important to emphasize that it’s not a new organization. It is a political formation of human beings, organizations, and Tribal Nations all connected with one another to build our collective power. It’s a way to break down siloes and isolation between our people, organizations, and movements. It’s an alternative to the Instagrams and Facebooks of the world that have not benefitted us, have not provided the framework we need to continue building power on a large scale, and in fact have harmed our movements in many ways.

To apply to become a member or follow along for LANDBACK updates, stories, victories, strategies, and more, on landback.org.

For the past several years, I have worked with intergenerational organizers and community leaders on the mission to repair America. As co-director of the Repair America Collective, a reparations-based organization rooted in Boston, I have had the distinct opportunity to not only learn from older generations but to be part of the kind of intergenerational exchange that repair demands.

The question that animates everyone who organizes in this space is deceptively simple: where did we break? Who was hurt, and how? The pain is palpable, found in stories of police brutality, of discrimination at the bank, of the school segregation that persists in Boston today. And yet I find myself searching for something more foundational. As the United States celebrates its 250th anniversary, millennials and Gen Z, my generation, find themselves uniquely positioned to recognize that the break is structural, the harm is documented, and the repair is ours to demand.

We did not design the racial and economic fault lines that run beneath this country. But we have arrived at the crossroads, and the burden of repair—the overwhelming weight of fixing something you did not break—has been placed at our feet.

In my travels to Washington, D.C., I found myself in the halls of the Library of Congress, staring blankly at ornate ceiling murals of Greco-Roman figures until something clicked. The same iconography embedded in the founding architecture of this democracy are etched into the very granite and marble. Minerva. Atlas. Hercules. There is an old myth from this pantheon about a titan condemned to hold the weight of the world on his shoulders neither of his own free will nor virtue, but because he lost. And there is another about a hero who wandered for a decade, battered by gods and sea, before finally finding his way home. Both of these myths lend themselves to explain and inspire our own legend. Atlas, because the burden of a broken nation seeks the strength of the righteous and courageous to shoulder the weight often finding its symbiote in the wreckage of repair. Odysseus, because repair is never a straight line; it is a long, disorienting path back to something that should have been yours all along no matter how long the journey until the hero returns. The US has long looked to these myths to tell the story of its own ambitions and aspirations.

I want to use them to tell a different story: not one of conquest and oppression, but the story of what happens when the hero arrives at Atlas, shackled and straining under the weight of the world, and is asked to take that burden for themselves. Gen Z and millennials are that hero, bold, technologically savvy, and unwavering in their demand for something greater than what is given. We did not break these systems. We did not design the racial and economic fault lines that run beneath this country. But we have arrived at the crossroads, and the burden of repair, the overwhelming weight of fixing something you did not break, has been placed at our feet. Unlike previous generations, who were denied the language, the platform, or the political conditions to demand acknowledgment, we have all three. We have the tools to reckon with history, the will to name harm, and increasingly, the coalitions to hold power accountable.

The burden of repair was distributed across the room and at each juncture a hero was arriving steadfast and ready to shoulder that responsibility, whether they knew it or not.

Liberation Ventures offers a framework that I find clarifying: reckoning, acknowledgment, accountability, and redress. Reckoning asks us to understand the deep harm caused by chattel slavery and its legacies. Acknowledgment asks us to name it aloud, to validate what communities already know to be true. Accountability demands that we take ownership, not abstractly, but behaviorally, institutionally, with a commitment to non-recurrence. Redress is the concrete work: restitution, rehabilitation, and the embedding of racial justice into the systems that govern our lives. These are not sequential steps. They are a continuous, intergenerational practice. And they require participants from every generation.

In Boston, we are building that practice. At the African American Heritage Museum’s Juneteenth Parade, the Repair America Collective hosted Freedom Soul, an activation inviting participants to put their feelings about freedom onto canvas, to sit with both the celebration and the unfinished business of liberation. People wrote, painted, and named aloud the ways racism and mass incarceration still shape their daily lives. It was reckoning and acknowledgment made visceral. Inspired by the soul classics that defined an era of resistance and joy, our greatest expressions of freedom often are found in the celebration of dismantled systems of oppression. That same intergenerational spirit carried through our Heritage Hub activation, a multi-day event held in January that brought together healers, historians, artists, and young people for fireside chats, breathwork, community meals, and open mic. Children had their own dedicated corner. Elders held court. The burden of repair was distributed across the room and at each juncture a hero was arriving steadfast and ready to shoulder that responsibility, whether they knew it or not.

What my fellow community organizers and I put in motion was not simply a community event or performance. It is the testament to a generational shift to reject the old burden, the passive inheritance of a broken worldview, and shoulder something more difficult and more honest: the active work of repair. Gen Z and millennials are educating themselves.

We are opting out of ignorance and choosing accountability rooted in coalition. We are not waiting for older institutions to lead. We are building the power blocks and bearing witness to the weight of unrealized repair required to traverse this odyssey and like Odysseus, we know the journey itself is the transformation. The hero does not return the same. Neither will we.

The laws of nature tell us that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transferred. The burden of repair does not disappear if we refuse to carry it. It accumulates. It compounds. What this generation is choosing, increasingly, is to pick it up, not alone, and not by collapsing under it, but by distributing that weight across communities, across generations, and across a nation finally being asked to reckon with what it owes.

Odysseus wandered so he could find his way home. Atlas held the world on his shoulders as punishment. We are choosing repair as our purpose. That is a different weight entirely and the beginning of a new mythology, one where the hero does not arrive alone, and the face of stoicism reflects the nation young and old.