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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How the Power Got Built

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tensions That Could Make or Break This Model

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Open Question for Funders

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

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

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

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

“Created equal.”

“Unalienable rights.”

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

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

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

Reparations as Remedies for Recognized Harm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reparations Are Already Here

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Uncovering Florida’s Painful Past

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

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

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

Using Social Media to Shine a Light on Injustice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Building Community Through Difference

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

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

Fighting for Future Generations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Beginnings of Black Yard Farm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Are We Owed?

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Test Case at the Southern Poverty Law Center

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

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

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

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

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

Mission Work and Its Costs

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

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

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

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

Pew, Carnegie, and a Widening Pattern

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

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

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

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

What Collaboration Can Look Like

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

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

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

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

Winning a Contract Versus Enforcing One

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

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

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

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

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

Applying the Mission Inward

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Human Expression and Need

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

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

Asset and Resource

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

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

Volunteer and Orchestration

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Designing for Human Motivation

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

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

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

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

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

The Future of Social Design

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Apathy Is a Convenient Lie

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

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

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

A Tale of Two Districts

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

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

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

Why This Doesn’t Happen Everywhere

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Black voters know they are the backbone of American democracy. They have delivered elections, sustained movements, and kept the promise and possibility of this country’s stated ideals alive through every era that tried to bury both the ideals and Black people. What they are still waiting for—what they have always been waiting for—is to be respected not as a voting bloc to be managed, but as a power base with the capacity to lead.

You cannot frighten people into action by describing a bottom they have already lived and overcome. What moves Black voters is hope, joy, and evidence that the needle is actually moving.

The gap between what Black voters have given this democracy and what this democracy has given them back is not a messaging problem. It is not an enthusiasm gap. It is a rational conclusion drawn from centuries of evidence. I have facilitated enough focus groups, conducted enough voter interviews, and analyzed enough data to share with confidence: Black voters by and large are not low information. They are not apathetic, in the traditional sense of the word. They are making a very clear-eyed assessment of whether their material conditions will change, and too often, the honest answer is that they will not. Not enough. Not fast enough. Whether they show up to the polls or choose to opt out is rarely accidental. It is a verdict.

What I have also learned is this: Fear and negativity alone do not move Black voters. This is not because the threats aren’t real. It is because Black communities have never had the luxury of believing things couldn’t get worse, and have built survival, solidarity, and forward motion anyway. You cannot frighten people into action by describing a bottom they have already lived and overcome. What moves Black voters is hope, joy, and evidence that the needle is actually moving. That is not a vulnerability. That is wisdom earned through generations of watching this country make and break its promises in the same breath.

The Playbook Is Old

Now, 250 years after its inception, we know that what is happening to Black political power in America is not unprecedented. It is not a glitch. It is a pattern that is well-documented, named, and old enough to have grandchildren. My team at Georgia Alliance for Progress has built a Reconstruction Parallels framework that makes this plain: slide by slide, decade by decade. What is clear is that the tactics repeat with eerie precision. For those of us working in the nonprofit sector, especially organizations led by and for Black communities, understanding that pattern is not just intellectually interesting. It is operationally essential.

Someone has to explain why life feels this hard and who is responsible. That makes narrative itself a form of political power.

In 1847, Southern states passed anti-literacy laws to prevent formerly enslaved people from learning to read. In 2021, conservatives passed legislation banning the teaching of Critical Race Theory in K-8 schools, a policy that, in practice, outlawed honest instruction about racial discrimination by the US government. The tools changed. The goal didn’t.

In 1866, former Confederate generals manufactured the “Lost Cause” mythology to reframe a war fought to preserve slavery as a noble struggle against Northern aggression. It was disseminated through books, films, and public school curricula for over a century. Today, a right-wing nonprofit called PragerU partners with states to teach a version of American history where White identity is framed as under existential threat. Different century. Same architecture.

In 1868, White supremacy was deliberately weaponized to prevent poor White people from recognizing their shared economic interests with formerly enslaved Black people. By falsely attributing the hardships of Reconstruction to Black political power, wealthy White Southerners ensured that poor White people voted along racial lines rather than economic ones. Today, the Republican Party runs that same play, using immigration and race to fracture the multiracial working-class coalition that might otherwise challenge concentrated wealth. The script hasn’t changed. They’ve just updated the casting.

Our research with Georgia voters of all races, ethnicities, ages, and areas of the state suggests why that strategy remains potent. Across focus groups and statewide surveys, people consistently return to the same material pressures: the cost of housing, groceries, healthcare, wages, and simply making it from one month to the next. However, economic anxiety does not arrive with its own political interpretation. Someone has to explain why life feels this hard and who is responsible. That makes narrative itself a form of political power. When people experiencing the same economic precarity are taught to see one another as the source of the problem rather than potential partners in solving it, coalition becomes nearly impossible. Reconstruction teaches us that this fracture is not incidental to the strategy. It is the strategy.

Disinformation Is Not New 

In 1898, White supremacists used newspapers to spread fabrications about Black men: most prevalently the myth that Black men were sexually assaulting White women. One incident laid the groundwork for a White mob to overthrow a Black-majority government in Wilmington, North Carolina. It was not a riot. It was a coup, seeded by lies.

In 2021, Republicans used social media to amplify disinformation about voter fraud in a free and fair election. That campaign seeded an insurrection.

The medium evolved. The mechanism of using manufactured fear of Black power to radicalize White voters toward violence did not.

At Georgia Alliance, we have seen just how persistent that architecture is. In tracking disinformation targeting Georgia voters, we have repeatedly encountered narratives that exploit racial anxieties, stereotypes, and existing divisions to shape how people understand everything from elections and public policy to who belongs and who can be trusted. That work led us to launch The Grapevine, a monthly narrative intelligence product that tracks emerging disinformation and, importantly, examines the narratives underneath it: who is being targeted, what existing fears or grievances are being activated, and what organizations as well as individuals can do to shift the narrative. The particulars change. The underlying strategy of using information to manufacture threat, deepen division, and constrain Black political power is remarkably durable.

We’ve also drawn on research showing that 75 percent of Georgians trust their family members more than any other messengers. People believe people they love. Our We the People intergenerational civic engagement series is built on that understanding. We are not fact-checking people into truth. We are helping communities build the relational trust that makes truth-telling possible in the first place. Combating disinformation is less about winning arguments and more about staying connected long enough to tell each other the truth with love.

Black Votes Have Always Been the Target 

During Reconstruction, more than 1,500 Black men held public office across the South. Mississippi sent two Black men to the U.S. Senate. Georgia sent Black men to Congress. Then federal troops withdrew in 1877, and states methodically dismantled what Black voters had built through poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, KKK violence, rewritten state constitutions.

Mississippi has never sent another Black senator to Washington since Blanche Bruce left office in 1881. Georgia didn’t send another until Raphael Warnock won in 2021, 140 years later. That gap is the point, not a footnote.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA) was the most direct federal answer to nearly a century of that suppression. It worked. Because it worked, it became a target. The Supreme Court gutted preclearance in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013. Georgia passed SB 202 within hours of that decision’s logic taking hold, cutting drop boxes, reducing voting hours, criminalizing handing water to voters standing in lines that were longest in majority-Black precincts.

Now the court has diluted Section 2 of the VRA, and Southern states are chomping at the bit. A wave of mid-decade gerrymandering is already underway in Texas, North Carolina, Missouri, and Florida, specifically engineered to eliminate majority-Black districts and erase Black representation before the 2028 cycle. Georgia and Mississippi are next in line. Texas is 40 percent White, but White voters control more than 73 percent of its congressional seats. This is not partisan politics. This is the post-Reconstruction playbook, running on schedule.

If the historical project has been to limit Black political power, then our counterstrategy cannot merely be maximizing Black voter participation. Participation and power are not the same thing.

In our research, I watch Black voters navigate this with a clarity that rarely makes it into mainstream political analysis. Fatigue routinely sits beside hope. People can believe deeply that voting matters and simultaneously question whether their vote translates into meaningful power. They can understand exactly what is at stake and still be exhausted by a political system that becomes intensely interested in their votes every two or four years and considerably less interested in their agency, input, or leadership afterward. What they are deciding—rationally, not apathetically—is whether the system can be trusted enough to be worth engaging.

That is not political ignorance. It is an assessment of return on investment.

Some of the voters our field is quickest to describe as “disengaged” are actually asking some of democracy’s most sophisticated questions: What happens after I vote? Who follows through? Who represents me as expected? Who reports back? Who helps me understand what the person I elected actually did? Where do I go if I want to influence that decision? How does my vote become power?

Civic engagement infrastructure still too often treats casting a ballot as the culmination of engagement rather than one point along a much longer continuum of civic and political power. We have invested far less in what comes next: how voters deepen their engagement, influence governance, hold elected officials accountable, and build power beyond Election Day. If the historical project has been to limit Black political power, then our counterstrategy cannot merely be maximizing Black voter participation. Participation and power are not the same thing.

That is the question our civic engagement work must answer honestly—not with false optimism or another transactional appeal to save democracy, but with evidence, relationships, pathways to power, and a commitment that outlasts any single election cycle.

Black Institutions Have Always Filled the Gap 

When federal protection collapsed during Reconstruction, Black institutions stepped in. Black churches organized. Black fraternal orders established mutual aid networks. Black women’s clubs built schools, hospitals, and civic infrastructure. Black political organizations from local Union Leagues to statewide conventions to student groups registered voters, trained candidates, and built the kind of grassroots infrastructure that turned constitutional amendments into actual governing power. The state had abandoned them, so they built their own.

This is still true. It is both a testament to Black community resilience and an indictment of every era that made that resilience necessary.

In 1865, Black Christian ministers organized the Convention of the Colored People of Virginia to demand voting rights. In 2025, Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) have become organizing anchors that mobilize students around voting rights, produce the next generation of Black political leadership, and hold institutional memory that mainstream universities are actively trying to erase. Black institutions endure against all odds. The mission endures within continued assaults. What keeps shifting is how much energy Black communities are expected to spend rebuilding what should never have been dismantled in the first place.

For Black-led, Black-serving organizations, this is not just historical context. It is an organizational genealogy. The organizations doing this work today are, in many cases, the direct descendants of those Reconstruction-era institutions, carrying their methods, their urgency, and their exhaustion across generations.

That lineage is not nostalgia. It is organizational identity, and it is precisely what makes these organizations irreplaceable. Philanthropic institutions largely do not share that genealogy. They arrive and depart according to funding cycles, strategic pivots, and the political temperature of their donor base.

Black-led organizations don’t get to leave when the moment gets hard because the moment is their community. How philanthropy resources and sustains Black-led institutions over the long arc, not just during crisis cycles, is not a diversity question. It is a movement infrastructure question.

Our research reinforces why this institutional continuity matters. Black voters repeatedly tell us that trust is built through relationships, consistency, and presence across political cycles, not election-season outreach that disappears in November. Our intergenerational work also shows how differently experiences with power, progress, and political disappointment can shape political engagement within Black communities. Black institutions create spaces where those differences can be navigated, relationships sustained, and political memory carried forward.

The Ending Is Not Written 

The pattern that opened this piece does not end with Reconstruction. On Christmas Day 1868, President Andrew Johnson issued a sweeping pardon to former Confederate insurrectionists, including Jefferson Davis, the man who led a war against the US  government to preserve slavery. Reconstruction, the closest this country has ever come to multiracial democracy, was already dying.

On January 20, 2025, Donald Trump granted clemency to more than 1,500 people convicted in connection with the January 6 Capitol attack. Then his Department of Justice announced a nearly $1.8 billion fund to compensate those same insurrectionists for their alleged suffering. Meanwhile, Congress has never passed HR 40, the bill that would simply study reparations for the descendants of people who built this country for free.

The opposition is not reacting to our failure. They are reacting to our potential.

Our job as researchers, organizers, and nonprofit leaders is not to shame people for a rational response to generations of broken promises. It is to create the conditions where something different becomes possible, where hope is not naive but earned, where joy is not distraction but strategy, and where Black voters are treated not as a transaction but as the leaders they have always been.

Reconstruction was dismantled violently, systematically, and with great deliberateness because it was working. What this teaches us is that the demand for freedom must be sustained through coalition, institution building, disinformation resistance, and the kind of intergenerational truth-telling that helps communities understand not just what is happening, but why, and what it has looked like before.

We have been here. We have built through it before. The work ahead is not to avoid the parallels. It is to learn from them well enough to write a different ending.

The Supreme Court’s recent decision to block a new Postal Service rule affecting mail-in ballots is about far more than election administration. At its core, the dispute reflects a broader struggle over who controls election rules in the United States, and how much authority the federal government should have over a process that has traditionally been administered by the states

The most controversial aspect of Trump’s executive order did not ban mail voting outright, but it would have significantly expanded the federal government’s role in the administration of mail ballots. Under the order, states would have been required to provide the US Postal Service (USPS) with detailed information about voters eligible to receive mail-in or absentee ballots. USPS would then have implemented a new verification and tracking system requiring ballots to be mailed in specially designated “Official Election Mail” envelopes equipped with unique barcodes.

Most significantly, the order envisioned that the USPS would deliver ballots only to voters included on state-approved mail voting lists. States that failed to comply with the new requirements risked having their ballots delayed or outright rejected by the Postal Service.

The Trump administration argued that these measures were necessary to strengthen election integrity, improve ballot tracking, and prevent ineligible individuals from receiving mail ballots. Democracy advocates, however, contended that the proposal would have transformed the USPS from a neutral mail carrier into a federal gatekeeper of mail voting.

The Prospect of Widespread Disruption

“The facts speak for themselves. By imposing these kinds of restrictions, you are threatening the disenfranchisement of millions of people and injecting chaos and uncertainty into the democratic process. When you do that, you threaten democracy,” Karen Dolan, director of the Criminalization of Race and Poverty Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, told NPQ.

She argued that the Supreme Court was right to block the rule from taking effect before the midterm elections because there was not enough time to implement it without creating disruption. However, she noted that the Court stopped short of declaring the measure illegal or unconstitutional.

In some cases, a single barcode error could have resulted in entire batches of ballots being rejected.

Instead, the Court focused largely on the timing and practical consequences of implementing the rule before an election. This distinction has generated concern among voting-rights advocates because it leaves open the possibility that similar measures could be pursued in the future through new litigation or legislative action.

“In fact, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, in his concurring opinion, suggested that the executive branch might have the authority to take such action, leaving the door open to that possibility,” Dolan said.

The main argument before the Supreme Court was that the new requirements would fundamentally alter the way states administer absentee voting, and could disenfranchise large numbers of eligible voters. Those concerns were reinforced by a whistleblower report that raised alarms about the Postal Service’s implementation plan. According to the report, technical flaws in a yet-to-be-operational ballot tracking portal could have prevented millions of mail ballots from being sent. In some cases, a single barcode error could have resulted in entire batches of ballots being rejected.

Court filings also highlighted the practical consequences for election administration. Several states, plaintiffs argued, lacked the infrastructure and resources needed to quickly abandon or scale back mail voting and return to predominantly in-person voting, raising the prospect of widespread disruption ahead of the elections.

Instead of functioning solely as a mail carrier, the USPS would have been required to verify certain voter eligibility requirements based on information provided by states before processing or delivering some election-related mail. Advocates contend that these measures are rooted in unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud and risk undermining public confidence in democracy while making voting more difficult for citizens.

“This administration is afraid of accountability,” said Maryam Jazini Dorcheh, vice president of litigation at Common Cause, in conversation with NPQ. She added that  mail ballots are safe and secure, and have been used by the president himself, so that attempts to undermine confidence in the process are intended to create confusion ahead of the upcoming elections.

In her view, that uncertainty could later be used to cast doubt on the results and discourage voters from easily participating in the selection of their elected officials.

The Battle Over Mail Ballots

The administration’s proposal was consistent with a longstanding narrative promoted by the president and his allies that US elections are vulnerable to fraud, particularly through mail voting. However, election experts, civil society organizations, and numerous studies have repeatedly concluded that voter fraud in the United States is exceedingly rare and not significant enough to affect election outcomes.

These measures are rooted in unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud and risk undermining public confidence in democracy.

“It comes as no surprise that courts have blocked [the proposal] from going into effect. The administration is trying to push the envelope to see just how far it can go and to set election rules,” Anna Baldwin, director of voting rights litigation at Campaign Legal Center, said to NPQ. Baldwin explained that even when the administration loses, it’s a win for them because it causes confusion and chaos, which furthers a goal of undermining confidence in elections and allowing misinformation to spread.

“What is more troubling is the president’s effort to upend election rules and spread misinformation about voter fraud, which is, in reality, an exceedingly rare phenomenon,” she added.

Baldwin stressed that US voters will continue to have free and fair elections and encouraged voters not to be distracted by the surrounding political noise. While acknowledging that core democratic institutions and the rule of law are under pressure and have suffered real damage, she noted that the challenged rule was unlawful and should never have been proposed. The Supreme Court ultimately affirmed what had long been understood: the Postal Service’s role is to deliver mail, not to serve as a gatekeeper in the electoral process.

In addition, multiple federal courts blocked the policy before it could take effect. When the case reached the Supreme Court, the justices declined to allow the rule to be implemented before the upcoming midterm elections. The Court concluded that introducing such substantial changes so close to an election would risk confusion and disruption for voters and election officials.

For critics of the administration, the proposal represented another attempt to expand federal influence over election administration, an area that the Constitution largely places under the authority of states and Congress. They argue that allowing a federal agency such as the Postal Service to play a gatekeeping role in the delivery of ballots would fundamentally alter the balance of power established by the Constitution.

A Warning for Democracy

The broader significance of the dispute extends beyond mail voting. Since the 2020 election, Trump and his allies have supported a series of measures aimed at election procedures. These include proposals requiring stricter proof-of-citizenship documentation for voter registration, efforts to collect and analyze large amounts of voter data through federal databases, and broader initiatives designed to increase scrutiny of voter eligibility. Supporters describe these efforts as necessary safeguards; opponents argue that they disproportionately burden legitimate voters while addressing problems that have not been shown to exist on any meaningful scale.

“Nonprofits play a significant role in civil society, and even more so now, increasingly, as some of the institutions that were meant to ensure free and fair access to the ballot are being toppled,” according to Jazini Dorcheh. She explained that the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice had traditionally served as the primary enforcer against discrimination and last-minute provisions that could disenfranchise voters. Now, however, it is no longer fulfilling that role; instead, in her view, it is aiding those seeking to create mass surveillance of voters.

All the organizations interviewed agreed that this pattern has emerged across the country, leaving nonprofits to fill a gap once addressed by public institutions.

Voting-rights organizations also maintain that these measures contribute to confusion and distrust, arguing that repeated public claims questioning election integrity can weaken confidence in democratic institutions even when those claims lack supporting evidence.

As a result, many nonprofit organizations have expanded voter education campaigns, legal advocacy efforts, and litigation strategies designed to protect voting access and reassure voters that elections remain secure.

For many civil society groups, the dispute is about much more than mail ballots, but part of a wider debate over voting rights, democratic participation, and public trust in elections. A healthy democracy relies on making it easier, not harder, for eligible citizens to vote.

“Unfortunately, when the president uses the power of the bully pulpit to express a lack of confidence in our election infrastructure, it inevitably affects public confidence in our elections,” said Marcia Johnson, chief of activation and justice at the League of Women Voters of the United States (LWV) speaking to NPQ.

She explained that, to counter misinformation, her organization helps people register to vote, find their polling place, review sample ballots, and compare candidates’ positions on key issues. The goal, she added, is to provide voters with reliable information so they can participate in the electoral process with confidence and trust that their ballots will be counted.

“What we’re seeing now isn’t isolated. It’s been a rhetoric that has been happening for quite a while. And that’s why it’s really important for organizations to also be as vigilant in pushing back against that,” she said.

Underlying this dispute is a broader debate over the limits of federal authority in the administration of elections. What began as a controversy over mail ballots has evolved into a larger discussion about the balance of power between states and the federal government, and about the safeguards needed to protect democratic institutions. For many civil society organizations, this debate has become a central issue in the effort to preserve US democracy.

As the country moves toward the 2028 presidential election, questions about voting rights, election administration, and democratic participation are likely to gain even greater prominence, making this one of the defining political and constitutional debates of the coming years. And it is within this context that the nonprofit sector’s role is taking on growing importance.

The Silicon Valley African Film Festival (SVAFF) has spent close to two decades building an audience and relationships across Silicon Valley while constantly struggling to afford the people needed to sustain them.

SVAFF returns to San Jose for its 17^th edition from Oct. 8-11 and will feature 76 films from 33 countries. Audiences at the Historic Hoover Theatre will experience filmmakers from Africa and its diaspora, with an African market and live performances extending the celebration beyond the screenings.

The festival’s specific location in California also gives visiting filmmakers access to some of the companies whose products they use to make and distribute their work. For the nonprofit behind the festival, however, proximity to technology wealth has brought no guarantee of financial security.

An Invitation to the Real Africa

Jocelyn Dubin is one of five co-chairs of the Black Leadership Kitchen Cabinet of Silicon Valley (BLKC), an all-volunteer coalition whose members meet monthly to address concerns impacting Black residents of Santa Clara County, including housing and health. She has volunteered at the festival and seen the work behind it. Events like SVAFF, she told NPQ, “really are put on because of love and a lot of commitment and not necessarily a large budget.”

SVAFF’s founding director Chike C. Nwoffiah was born in Nigeria and came to Silicon Valley as a graduate student 36 years ago. He worked in the biotech industry before returning to the theatre and film work he had loved since childhood. Along the way, he met Americans surprised that he spoke English, or asking him to speak “African,” displaying their ignorance of the continent’s geography or plethora of languages.

Nwoffiah began teaching African history at a local college, and brought short films by African filmmakers into class. One film, about young women playing a Valentine’s Day prank on a boyfriend, left a student astonished that it had been shot in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Women her age were driving cars and going to nightclubs, a version of life that did not fit her understanding of the country.

Nwoffiah wanted to share that experience with the greater community. He recalled his first aim as modest: “Let me curate a Saturday morning.” He selected roughly 10 short films and invited people to watch and discuss them. Afterward, audience members wanted to know when they could return to see and learn more. Several gatherings later, Nwoffiah began formalizing the event.

“We are grateful for every form of support, but there is a difference between corporate engagement and corporate investment.”

SVAFF spent its early years based at the Community School of Music and Arts in Mountain View, CA before relocating to San Jose in 2017. Nwoffiah had long envisioned the move, drawn by the city’s large African immigrant population and greater opportunities for partnerships. An international airport and hotels added to the benefits of the San Jose location.

The festival’s mission is that African filmmakers should decide which stories to tell. Its selection process starts with an open call. Programmers arrange the chosen films into screenings, making connections among them. This year, according to Nwoffiah, nearly 1,000 submissions competed for 76 places. Funding and staffing limit how many films the festival can show.

The opening-night feature, David Mboussou’s Afrotōpia, follows an aspiring filmmaker drawn into his family’s logging business in the Congo Basin, where a plan threatens a sacred forest and an Indigenous community. Another film in the festival, local Bay Area filmmaker Kenan Moos’s Diagnosing Healthcare, examines medical injustice experienced by Black Americans.

Nwoffiah also reaches out to local immigrant communities when the program includes films from their countries. For African immigrants, he said, the festival offers an opportunity to “bask in the glory of their ancestry.” Families arrive dressed for the occasion, grandparents join their children, and people walk the red carpet seeing their cultures celebrated.

The Cost of a Silicon Valley Address

The connections that bring filmmakers into tech offices began through community events. Over time, Nwoffiah has reached employee groups including Adobe’s Black Employee Network, Black@YouTube, and Africans@Google.

SVAFF has brought screenings and cultural programs into hard-to-reach corporate spaces. In return, those ties have generated group ticket purchases and volunteers, along with product donations and hospitality for visiting filmmakers.

Nwoffiah described Adobe visits where filmmakers have seen demonstrations of editing technology and offered feedback to the people developing it. At YouTube, Black employees have hosted filmmakers for lunch and discussions about algorithms. This year’s festival begins with a reception for filmmakers and VIP guests at Adobe’s San Jose headquarters, hosted by its Black Employee Network.

Dubin appreciated the welcome that visiting filmmakers receive from the local community. Although the Black population in San Jose is smaller than in Oakland, CA, she told NPQ, “it’s also a really dedicated Black population.”

That community involvement has helped SVAFF put on the festival, but Nwoffiah said it has generally fallen short of sustained, substantial corporate funding. “We are grateful for every form of support, but there is a difference between corporate engagement and corporate investment,” he said.

He said SVAFF operates on less than $200,000, with no permanent paid staff. Seasonal workers come aboard before the festival and leave after their contracts end. Nwoffiah receives no salary and estimated that he puts in 80 hours a week. His perseverance speaks volumes about his care for his community and this work.

Some artists and vendors assume a Silicon Valley address means the nonprofit festival is flush with funding, which can make affordable rates harder to negotiate.

The festival’s support includes grants from the City of San Jose and the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, according to Nwoffiah. Still, SVAFF has to assemble its funding again each year while paying Silicon Valley prices for space and production services.

The cost of living in Silicon Valley, which is much higher than in the rest of the country, also affects who can keep doing the work. Nwoffiah has lost seasonal staff and volunteers who could no longer afford to remain in the region, taking experience with them that the organization must rebuild. Meanwhile, some artists and vendors assume a Silicon Valley address means the nonprofit festival is flush with funding, which can make affordable rates harder to negotiate.

The losses are part of a broader concern for Dubin, who worried whether Black residents can continue to make a life in Santa Clara County. She pointed to Dying to Stay Here, economist and BLKC member Chuck Cantrell’s documentary project about the economic and health disparities confronting the region’s Black residents.

A 2024 analysis by Gabriel Frank-McPheter in connection with the housing nonprofit SV@Home found that, between 1990 and 2000, neighborhoods with higher Black poverty rates were more likely to lose Black residents. The study also found losses in 171 census tracts from 2010 to 2020, even as the county’s Black population, including multiracial residents, grew overall.

A Silicon Valley Institute for Regional Studies analysis of 2019–2023 census data puts homeownership among non-Hispanic Black adults in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties at about 34 percent, compared with 60 percent for non-Hispanic white adults.

SV@Home recommends pairing affordable housing with support for Black-owned businesses and nonprofits, giving residents more influence over the future of their neighborhoods. For Dubin, the festival helps residents celebrate African ancestry and connect with Black artists, including those living locally. But the gathering’s continuation depends on whether its organizers can afford to stay.

Nwoffiah shared with NPQ that he hopes the companies that welcome filmmakers will invest more deeply in SVAFF as a local cultural institution, with the staffing to allow them to operate year-round.

Films That Meet the Community

Education has remained part of SVAFF’s work as the festival has grown, mirroring the founder’s core passions. Through Africa in the Classroom, schools can draw on a library of more than 500 African films. Nwoffiah said the academic team assesses films for age and subject suitability, helping teachers find material for their classrooms.

SVAFF also brings that educational work into the actual festival, welcoming middle school students through its partnership with the Santa Clara County Alliance of Black Educators. Students arrive on school buses Friday morning for selected films and discussion before the staff resets the space for the evening’s red carpet.

The African Cinema Café series takes screenings into smaller community settings throughout the year. An organization might ask for films addressing men’s issues or mental health; SVAFF works with groups to choose relevant titles and brings the screenings to meetings or events.

The same approach has been instrumental in developing the festival’s programming. Nwoffiah recalled a block of four short films exploring mental health and wellness, including schizophrenia and grief. Organizers invited health care professionals to attend. After the filmmakers’ discussion, the house lights came up, and those professionals began standing to offer advice and resources.

“We are using films as a pathway to courageous conversations,” Nwoffiah said.

That cross-field collaboration matters to Dubin and her coalition. BLKC members volunteer at the festival, and this year the coalition is funding 11 tickets for those who could not otherwise afford to go.

“We really wanted to be able to offer it to people who’ve been dedicated to the Black Leadership Kitchen Cabinet, but don’t have the means to attend,” she said.

Calling on Each Other

The partnership also brings Nwoffiah’s experience into BLKC’s work. Dubin said Nwoffiah’s production skills and artist contacts have helped organize Black Family Day, the coalition’s annual event with the county public health department.

Nwoffiah serves on BLKC’s planning committee and hosts a meeting each year, purchasing lunch from a Black-owned restaurant. His input helps influence the agenda, and he introduces the coalition to people who can host or speak at future gatherings.

For other nonprofits, this relationship can offer a practical example of support built through regular participation. BLKC helps people get to the festival; Nwoffiah contributes skills and connections that align with its members’ existing work.

Dubin believes potential supporters could look for places where their missions overlap. A health organization, she suggested, might sponsor a health information booth at the film festival, while an arts funder could provide a creative activity for children at Black Family Day. “I think too often we’re siloed, and we don’t call on each other,” she said.

For SVAFF, years of building trust have brought an audience and people willing to help. The unresolved question is how to secure reliable funding without exhausting those who have kept it going.

At last year’s festival, a group of kindergartners settled onto cushions on the floor to watch animated films. After the fifth film, when it was time to leave, the children refused. They wanted more, even as their parents tried to get them moving. “We had to run to the hard drive and start pulling more films,” Nwoffiah said.

He also remembered a newly arrived Ghanaian grandmother embracing him after an event, crying as she thanked him for creating a place where she could feel at home. Such moments matter to him as much as attendance or box-office figures. “When people believe that your organization belongs to them too,” he said, “they will fight to keep it alive.”

Historically, Latine communities have supported Democrats over Republicans. But come November, we might see a surge of voters fed up with the current administration’s anti-immigrant agenda and economic strains. Nonprofits led by Latine advocates are betting that anger will win over the Republicans’ fear tactics.

But First, Some Historical Voting Trends

Founded by the Federation for American Immigration Reform in 1985, the conservative think tank the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) released a much-talked-about report in 2001 about the losing Republican hope of ever winning the Hispanic vote. Latine communities (except for Cubans in Florida) were staunch Democrats, and CIS analysts doubted “whether the GOP attempt to woo Hispanics is worth the enormous effort that it would take to make solid gains.”

Nevertheless, after eight years of Bill Clinton’s sexual scandals, free trade agreements, and support for neoliberal governments that caused economic havoc all over Latin America, George W. Bush would win the elections against Al Gore with 35 percent of the Hispanic vote. That number would rise a not-shy 5 percent in 2004, driven by concerns about national security and moral values, aided no less by two critical wedge issues: 9/11 and the same-sex marriage debate.

Republicans thought they were onto something—perhaps wooing Catholic swing voters was paying off? It wasn’t enough.

In 2008, when polls showed that an overwhelming 67 percent of Hispanics had voted for Barack Obama, Republicans were back at the table. States like Colorado, Florida, Nevada, and New Mexico went over to the Democrats, likely due to Republicans’ anti-immigrant rhetoric with “racial overtones,” specifically aimed at Muslims and Hispanics.

Ironically, the Bush administration tried and failed to provide a legalization path for the 12 million undocumented immigrants (the majority of which were Hispanics), after it met staunch resistance from the far right. And the now-infamous US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE, created under the Homeland Security Act in March of 2003) was becoming increasingly active all over the country. A table by the CATO Institute clearly shows how deportations more than doubled under Bush.

Side by side, [Obama’s] stand on the issue of immigration reform does not look very different from the Republican candidate, John McCain—who, in fact, cosponsored the original version of the DREAM Act.

Obama ran on hopeful promises toward immigration reform, including a path to legalization, and support for the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act. But he also made it very clear that he was against open borders and amnesty. Side by side, his stand on the issue of immigration reform does not look very different from the Republican candidate, John McCain—who, in fact, cosponsored the original version of the DREAM Act.

The Obama administration showed early signs of immigration enforcement when Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Janet Napolitano announced in 2009 that their first priority was securing the border and the removal of undocumented immigrants. By 2011, advocates expressed “a deep sense of betrayal and disappointment” towards Obama’s administration and continued to mobilize. The newly established United We Dream Network was the most active, using the presidential election year to march, rally, and protest demanding a DACA solution and family reunifications. On June 15, 2012, Napolitano announced a new DACA policy, overstepping Congress, which analysts argue granted Obama 71 percent of the Hispanic vote that election year.

The amnesty didn’t last, however, as the deportation campaign at the end of the year continued. The language of ICE going after the “worst of the worst” was also actually first coined by Obama (he liked to say “gang bangers”) when, in reality, 69 percent of people deported under his administration were non-criminals or low offenders.

By 2014, advocates were begging for “more humane deportations”; by 2015, Know-Your-Rights pamphlets started circulating for people to know what to do if ICE came knocking on your door. But things kept getting worse, as documented by human rights organizations on deaths in ICE detention and the blatant lack of legal representation for people (including children) seeking asylum.

Deportations under Obama, in fact, increased and exceeded Bush’s efforts (by 1 million people), and he was eventually dubbed the “deporter-in-chief” by advocacy groups. By then, ICE had already become a bit of an unstoppable force, endorsing for the first time a presidential candidate in 2016—Donald J. Trump.

Not surprisingly, the Latine support for Hillary Clinton dropped to 67 percent, then dropped again for Joe Biden to 61 percent, and down again to 57 percent for Kamala Harris. A bit more than half of Latine voters in the 2016 election said they were really voting against Trump than for Harris and listed immigration reform fourth on their list of concerns.

Although Biden created humanitarian pathways toward more naturalizations, the surge of migrants fleeing the post-COVID pandemic economic global crisis drove the Biden administration to continue Title 42 expulsions (including immigrants requesting asylum), expelling more people at the border than any other president since 2016. The administration also expanded ICE border detentions and private prison capacity from 25,000 to 40,000 people, and increased deportation charter flights by 55 percent, according to the CATO Institute. Although ICE activity inside the country decreased overall, groups like the ACLU warned that leaving ICE policies in place—such as partnerships with local law enforcement and with companies that ran for-profit prisons—would embolden the deportation machine for the next president.

Regardless, it is a false narrative to claim that the Hispanic vote won Trump the 2024 election—rather it was the Democrats that lost the Hispanic vote. In the case of Trump, though, it was White men under 50 that shifted from Biden by 10 points, winning him the election.

Demobilizing the Non-White Vote

Of course, the Hispanic vote is not a monolith. Many Latine people see the economy and health care as more crucial issues than immigration reform, but the strength of 36 million Latine eligible voters has the power to move the needle. Some of these voters, no doubt, overlap with the 30 million Black eligible voters, who vote Democrat in greater numbers than any other group. White voters, meanwhile, make up 61 percent of all eligible voters in 2026, out of which around 40 percent tend to vote Democrat.

[T]he Hispanic vote is not a monolith. Many Latine people see the economy and health care as more crucial issues than immigration reform, but the strength of 36 million Latine eligible voters has the power to move the needle.

These trends do make the right-wing nervous, so nervous that they rather attack and cheat than woo non-White voters. Gerrymandering is one tool on their belt, disrupting mail voting is another, but a finer tool is voter intimidation. Trump’s threats of sending the National Guard and ICE to polling locations are nothing less than direct threats to US citizens who have been racially profiled, mistakenly detained, and hurt in multiple states by unhinged armed immigration officers. Such blatant intimidation is illegal, but so have been so many other things…

Crying wolf, or in this case, crying voter fraud is another desperate measure. So desperate, in fact, that the Trump administration is resorting to potentially illegal tactics like the “Unlawful Voter Initiative,” where, according to a whistleblower, DHS officers use people’s personal voting information to verify on public websites whether they are eligible to vote or not. These sites, of course, often lack the most recent information, including people who have become naturalized citizens since the data was last updated.

Moreover, the Supreme Court conservative majority approved on September 25 DHS’ use of the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, database to verify voters’ eligibility. The SAVE program was created in 1986 under the Immigration Reform and Control Act to check federal benefits eligibility, and some states like Arizona, Colorado, and Florida have used it past elections. But the system has been known to wrongly flag citizens—the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit ruled in 2014 that Florida’s purge of voters using this system was illegal.

Mobilizing for the Midterms and the 2028 Election

Recent news headlines like “Republican jitters grow as unpopular Trump fuels midterm ‘bloodbath’ fears,” clearly show that things are not going well. Trump’s approval numbers just dropped to 29 percent, according to the American Research Group poll. That is why Latine nonprofits are betting on the Hispanic voting power this year and into the next presidential election.

Groups like the LatinoJustice PRLDEF are taking every legal measure possible to safeguard November’s and future elections. They are part of a civil rights coalition with nine nonprofits and six other legal counsel organizations that filed a federal lawsuit on September 18 to challenge voter interference through armed agents like ICE.

The National Immigration Law Center, which is also part of the above coalition, filed another lawsuit against the DHS on September 21, to stop the agency from compiling voter lists and conducting “in-person interviews at people’s homes.” As reported by CNN, DHS’ “voter fraud” investigation would focus specifically on recently naturalized citizens in states lie Washington, Wisconsin, Missouri, Georgia, California, Pennsylvania, Nevada, New York and Connecticut.

The Voto Latino Foundation has been tracking the growing Latine voting bloc for years and promises a direct impact on the ground, with a force of 28,475 volunteers on the ground, plus coalitions with other get-out-the-vote groups. Their El Brief news cultural hub is focused specifically on the million young Latine voters who become eligible to vote each year.

With offices in key states like Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, and Texas, Mi Familia Vota 501c4/Mi Familia En Acción 501c3 expanded the Latine power by working all year on mobilizing people, instead of just during election years. By recognizing the intersection between issues that are important to their communities (reproductive rights, worker’s rights, gun control, environmental justice, immigration, affordable healthcare, among others) and voting, they have created “a 365-day, year-round engagement approach has positioned us to make a meaningful impact where it is most critical,” according to their 2024 annual report.

In states like Texas, organizations like La Unión del Pueblo Entero (LUPE) in Rio Grande Valley have been organizing people’s assemblies, based on the urgency to mobilize around immigration reform. Know-your-rights campaigns like “Valle Fuerte, Valle Libre” have become exemplary in the state, driving people to register folks to vote in droves and become involved in other issues such as the economy, LGBTQ rights, and education rights.

Candidates know Latine citizens can flip elections; as UnidosUS makes it clear in a press release, “Any elected leader or candidate who ignores the surging sentiment of the Latino electorate, the nation’s second-largest voting-age population, does so at their own peril.” In May they conducted a bipartisan poll of 3,000 Latine voters that showed that 76 percent plan to vote in November, while 68 percent said that the country is headed in the wrong direction. Those surveyed also said immigration is a priority for Latine people, who said their communities have been harassed by ICE and that raids and detentions have a direct impact on the local economy.

Republicans started sounding the alarm back in 2024, after governorship defeats in New Jersey and Virginia, of a quick erosion of the pro-Republican Hispanic vote. Right-wing groups like the Latino Action Alliance warned that the Trump administration “just went too far on immigration enforcement,” as reported by The Hill.

Progressive candidates taking over school boards in Florida to fight book bans could also be a sign, driven largely by students who have been able to turn the debate from attacks against critical race theory to censorship in schools and defending the First Amendment. The Sarasota Next Gen Dems grew from the battle, led by young voters, driving voting registration and training leaders for the midterm elections and beyond.

Desperate, Republicans are resorting once again to an anti-communist message that is running dry, even in Florida. When Democratic socialist Angie Nixon won the primary for a Senate seat against a retired army intelligence officer, it came as a surprise to both parties. Yet, according to a survey conducted in March by the Latino Public Opinion Forum (LPOF), 67 percent said they felt “the country is on the wrong track,” and cited the economy and ICE tactics as their two main concerns.

And although of those surveyed by LPOF, Cubans living in Florida showed the highest support for Trump, the younger Cuban American generation is just not buying it. Andres Plasencia put it very plainly in an opinion article for the Miami Herald, “When communism has taken everything from you, you vote to make sure it never follows you here. Many Cuban Americans like me didn’t grow up fleeing anything. As time passes, we’ve become more Americanized and less Cuban in ideology. In school, the talk among young Cubans isn’t about Cuba policy but about college tuition, the job market, what this country will look like when it’s ours to run.”

Come November, we’ll see if eligible Hispanic voters can turn the tables, even in states like Florida.