Unfortunately, right now . For the past half-century, union opponents have steadily chipped away at the rules protecting workers’ rights—in courts, in laws, and in our American culture. We’ve reached the point where there are to winning a union election. Even though the in August 2023, organizing rights are not fully protected and can be changed on the whim of the administration in power. 

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

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

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

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

The is stomping all over our forgotten laborers. (Don’t forget that someone that provided shade for striking SAG-AFTRA workers in last summer’s heat.) According to MIT professor Thomas Kochan, when employers resist. 

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

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

But there’s another way. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Individual and Collective Success

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

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

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

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

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

Burgeoning Baristas

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

The move comes despite massive budget cuts across New York City, which has led to , a from the Department of Sanitation, and even a in other classes and programs at the Rikers Island prison. The barista program at Rikers, however, was spared. 

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

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

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

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

The barista program is making a difference at Rikers.

Brew the Change

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Community Support

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Examples Elsewhere

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Successful Transition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Though Black researchers had known for decades that the site was hidden under the ground, when the city began doing construction for the 2016 Olympics. “This rediscovery marked a new era of Black memory in the city of Rio,” says Thais Matos, a Black geographer and researcher at Universidade Federal Fluminense. “It signified that Rio is an undeniably Black city, even though there are attempts at erasing this history.” Matos says Black activists and researchers, who’d already been working to preserve the territory, strategically used the Port Zone urbanization plans to argue for , highlighting the violent history of slavery in the area and also emphasizing how the urbanization project was . “The universities in the city would never have enough money to do this excavation.”&�Բ�����;

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

White-Owned Opportunism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Preserving Buried History

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bringing the Past Into the Future

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

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

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

This colonial, white supremacist definition of prosperity has been framed as an inherently individual pursuit; we are in competition to have more than those around us, and winning, we are led to believe, will bring us happiness. But as rampant inequality in wealth, health, education, and nearly every other measure of well-being is amplified by the climate crisis (itself a result of the ecological devastation wrought by runaway capitalism), there is a growing movement to question this conception of prosperity. 

Communities historically excluded from this limited definition of prosperity have long known there are other ways to build prosperity. Black, Brown, Indigenous, immigrant, and low-income communities around the country have proven time and time again that shared prosperity is not only more effective at building communal wealth and well-being, but also at building resilient, responsive systems that can adapt to ever-changing environments, be they physical, social, political, or economic. 

In this four-part reported series, YES! explores the ways that individuals, movements, and communities are redefining prosperity—shifting from a narrow focus on economic growth to a more holistic approach that considers social, environmental, and cultural factors in achieving well-being for individuals and communities. 

By highlighting both innovations and longstanding models of shared prosperity, this series explores how we arrived at this narrow, exclusionary, and exploitative understanding of prosperity—and also illuminates a path toward a future where the well-being of the people, the planet, and our societies drives our collective action.

A People’s Prosperity

Capitalism’s endless economic growth prioritizes the individual over community and creates extreme inequality. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
By Anoa Changa & Ericka Taylor

Cooperative Ways to Weather the Silver Tsunami

As baby boomer business owners retire, their employees are taking ownership of their own futures.

By Jaisal Noor

Soil Builds Prosperity From the Ground Up

Respecting the humanity and history of soil can help us grow a more resilient future for all.

By Breanna Draxler

The Rainbow Connection

Intergenerational housing for LGBTQ elders and youth can relieve isolation and housing instability for both groups.

By Greg Hernandez

This series is underwritten by a grant from the . While reporting and production of the series was funded by this grant, YES! maintains full editorial control of the content published herein. Read our editorial policies and standards here.

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

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

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

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

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

Rental rates were already on the rise before the storm, she says. According to a 2022 Shimberg Center for Housing Studies report, . Compounding that is the pandemic bump: From July 2020 to July 2022, , the largest gain of residents from within the U.S. since 2005. For many, arriving from notoriously expensive states like California or New York, more affordable homes were the driving factor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Economy Week will have plenty going on offline as well.

The answer, it turns out, is up for debate. Even among the thinkers and organizers most invested in the term “new economy”—Gar Alperovitz and Chuck Collins come to mind—vigorous debates and conversations are going on all the time about what it is, where it should focus, and how to make it spread.

To focus that discussion, the New Economy Coalition, a nonprofit organization that supports more than 100 member groups, has set next week aside as the second annual “.”

Monday through Friday, the days will be packed with online panels, local events, and writings. The coalition has picked five juicy questions about new economy issues and sent them to its members to see what they think. We’ll be curating their responses each day from Monday to Friday. You can find links to all five days here (we’ll be updating the page with articles and links daily).

And New Economy Week will have plenty going on offline as well. The activities range from multi-day conferences such as “Who Owns Vermont?”—which will explore alternative ownership models in that state—to more intimate gatherings like happy hours celebrating October—our “national cooperative month”—in San Francisco and Philadelphia.

Meanwhile, several hundred inventors, entrepreneurs, activists, and organizers will gather in Detroit for the “” conference to discuss topics like the financing of community-owned projects, the way cooperatives are portrayed in the media, and the role of local food production.

“We’re hoping that people will become inspired and empowered,” said Mike Sandmel, the New Economy Coalition’s manager of coalition engagement, “not just to oppose our unjust and unsustainable economy, but to take part in building something better.”

Owned by the for-profit education company Corinthian Colleges, Inc., Everest commercials are known to target low-income people, promising a flexible education and, through it, jobs that earn more than minimum wage. They’re often aggressive, the actors calling viewers out for being lazy and then daring them to live up to their full potential. Hornes was an easy target.

“The first commercial I saw was the girl and she’s like ‘Oh, you’ve got to get off the couch,’” he said. “You can go to work, go to school, everything like that.”

Hornes, who had dropped out of high school to pursue a career in music, had just turned 20 and thought getting a degree sounded like a good idea. Plus, the woman in the ad promised, he could work around his current gigs. So he called Everest.

After that first informational call, Hornes said Everest representatives phoned him constantly, sometimes up to four times a day. They told him he needed to enroll for classes in order to graduate as soon as possible. They promised that a “network of employers” would be waiting after he graduated, and they would help him find a job. So Hornes signed up for a degree in business management, and at Everest’s suggestion he took out loans to pay for it.

“I used to always tell people I went to Everest,” he said of the early days, when he was proud of being a college student. But now, he said, “I don’t even like telling people I went to this school.”

At the time he enrolled, Hornes didn’t know how to evaluate a school’s accreditation or what to expect from college classes. Sometimes teachers didn’t even show up, and much of what they did teach felt like common sense. He said he didn’t even really have homework.

When he started to look for work after graduation, Hornes quickly realized his options were not as abundant as Everest had led him to believe. Job leads from the career center were sometimes forwarded from Craigslist. He hadn’t realized that many other colleges and employers don’t take degrees from for-profit colleges seriously.

“Employers find it laughable,” he said. “I’ve literally taken it off my resume. That’s how embarrassing it is.”

Now 24, Hornes shares a Los Angeles studio apartment with his aunt. He often works 16 hours a day at two part-time jobs, one of them at a Carl’s Jr. restaurant in the airport.

And that degree from Everest? He owes $56,000 for it.

A Rolling Jubilee for student debt

The abysmal quality of Hornes’ academic experience may be extreme, but the debt—and the way it will constrain his life, possibly for decades—is not. Hornes and millions of other former students and their families are part of a student debt crisis of tremendous proportions: Americans—some of them senior citizens—together owe more than $1 trillion in student loan debt, the figure steadily rising as states and the federal government cut funding for higher eduction. Even credit card debt is not as large.

That’s why Strike Debt, an organization that emerged out of Occupy Wall Street to protect debtors’ rights, announced today it has purchased—and abolished—more than $4 million in student debt. It’s a first for the organization, which until now has only canceled medical debt.

The organization’s Rolling Jubilee project used $100,000 of raised capital to buy the privately owned debt of more than 2,700 Everest College students. They did this by purchasing private student loans from secondary markets for pennies on the dollar—just the way collection agencies do. And then, they simply canceled it.

The idea arose from conversations three years ago at Occupy Wall Street. There, and at smaller gatherings focused specifically on the issue of debt, people who held student loans or medical debts often stood in a circle and encouraged each other to shake off their feelings of guilt. Sometimes they brought their bills or other paperwork and set them on fire. Meanwhile, members were constantly studying the mechanisms through which banks, collection agencies, and other organizations traded and profited from debt.

They took what they learned and turned it into Rolling Jubilee.

The project kicked off in November 2012—on the one-year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street’s eviction from New York’s Zuccotti Park—and organizers raised more than $250,000. Because Strike Debt was paying only about $5 for $100 of debt, that amount allowed them to purchase millions of dollars worth of other peoples’ unpaid medical obligations.

In the nearly two years since then, organizers this week told YES! that Rolling Jubilee has canceled more than $15 million in medical debt.

But unlike hospital bills, federal student loans are guaranteed by the government and are mostly unavailable for purchase on secondary markets. This is where debt collectors usually hunt for it. However, because Everest College encourages students to privately borrow a percentage of their tuition to supplement money available through federal student loans, this for-profit school created a unique pool of student debt ripe for the raiding.

“We started with medical debt because there is a clear moral argument,” said Laura Hanna, a Strike Debt organizer. “People shouldn’t be forced into debt because they get sick.”

Hanna said education was a natural next step, from an ethical point of view: “With education, people are trying to work to improve their lives. To make something better for themselves. Instead, most people fall into a debt trap. And there is no escape … not even through bankruptcy.”

Predatory Lending U

Yesterday, the national Consumer Financial Protection Bureau sued Corinthian Colleges, Inc., for defrauding tens of thousands of students. The CFPB accused Corinthian of running a “predatory lending scheme,” enrolling students in an overpriced education that would never help them get a job.

Corinthian is charged with lying to prospective students about job placement statistics. Ben Lopez, a former Everest student, told us he was hired as a librarian’s assistant in January when he finished his program, but after his graduation ceremony a few months later, he was laid off. Part of the company’s schtick is to hire recent grads to inflate career placement numbers, classifying one or two days’ employment as a career.

When 20-year-old Hornes first talked to Everest on the phone, the numbers they fed him were based on this and similar practices.

, from July 2011 to March 2014, Corinthian issued 130,000 private loans to pay its own exorbitant fees. The outstanding loans total more than $568 million.

And what kinds of students did they target? that according to Corinthian’s own internal documents, they sought out people with “low self-esteem” and “[f]ew people in their lives who care about them”; “isolated” people who felt “stuck, unable to see and plan well for future.” They intentionally marketed to people with little-to-no financial literacy or credit history.

Everest recruits through daytime television advertisements like this one, which Hornes says he saw.

������Ƶover, the school misled students to believe it had no financial interest in the private loans they were pushing, known as “Genesis” loans. But because the law prevented Everest schools from receiving all of their funding from federal loans, they were incentivized to convince students to take private ones, which then allowed the school to receive more public money. As the Bureau put it, “Every Genesis loan dollar that Corinthian induced its students to borrow, in effect, allowed Corinthian to receive up to an additional nine dollars in Title IV aid.”

Corinthian has been under fire for a long time. It’s been accused of fraud by more than one federal agency and (For more on Corinthian’s sad backstory, check out John Oliver below).

If won, the CFPB’s case will secure more than $500 million, which will be used to cancel existing private student loans. That would be great for former students like Hornes. But it could also take years, while many who owe the company money slog away at minimum wage, trying to pay down their Genesis loan.

When asked whether he might consider going to college somewhere else in the meantime, Hornes says he is interested, but wary. Going to school almost anywhere else would, for him, mean more debt.

A debtors union

As effective as Rolling Jubilee has been in calling attention to debt issues, $4 million hardly makes a dent in a trillion-dollar picture—not to mention the billions of dollars tied up in medical and other debts.

“Rolling Jubilee is a fantastic way to punch through the illusion that you actually owe what the 1 percent thinks you owe,” said Thomas Gokey, a Rolling Jubilee co-founder who’s eager to take things to the next level. “It’s not going to be possible to buy all the debt out there and get rid of it, so we’re going to need other tactics to win … it’s going to be a coordinated, large-scale effort.”

Alongside today’s $4 million abolition announcement, Strike Debt is also unveiling plans for a new project: Debt Collective. Gokey, who’s forthright about his personal investment in the effort (“My student debt today is significantly more than the last time I talked to YES!” he told us—and that was just two years ago), calls Debt Collective an “on ramp” to bigger changes and more aggressive tactics when it comes to abolishing debt. “There’s never been something like a debtors union before.”

Gokey envisions a movement where debtors are empowered to “renegotiate, resist, and refuse unfair debts” in the same way labor unions collectively leverage better pay, safer work environments, and time off. And to beat down the enormous pile of debt in general, they’ll advocate for free education and universal health care.

Hanna compares Debt Collective to “the factory floor of the past,” when labor organizers, gathered in the same physical space, came up with tactics like slowdowns, walkouts, and strikes. As debtors, Hanna said, “We might engage in collective bargaining or more robust refusal campaigns down the line … with an aim to transform the way we fund and access social goods.”

As for this round of jubilee, Strike Debt has been sending letters to the thousands of debtors from Everest, delivering the news of a lifetime. Unfortunately, Hornes will not be one of them (debts are purchased anonymously, and Strike Debt only finds out debtors’ identities afterward). Still, he’s not giving in to the prospect of a lifetime of interest payments while working minimum wage jobs.

Back in Los Angeles, Hornes is now a key organizer with the Everest Avengers, a group of nearly 200 current and former Everest College students who feel they were duped into believing they were paying for a good education and are now burdened with crippling debt because of it. And within the Avengers, the Corinthian Collective was formed.

Made up of about 40 former students from the for-profit school system, the Corinthian Collective has been working directly with Strike Debt to strategize around freeing students from unfair and fraudulent loans. On the table, Hornes hopes, will be options like legal action and working to convince the Department of Education to discharge outstanding debts for Everest students across the country.

He may have missed out on the high-quality education in business management he aspired to. Instead, though, Hornes has gotten a crash course in leadership and organizing. Today, he’ll be facilitating national conversations uniting Everest students, publicizing the facts behind his fraudulent debt, and fielding questions from the media.

Finishing up his short shift break before heading back to Carl’s Jr. last night, he said he now sees himself as a “buffer” who helps demoralized classmates understand that the education they received at Everest College will likely never lead to the jobs they were promised. Instead, it has brought them together.

Post offices are built like banks.

And that’s just one reason why postal banking, a hot idea in economic policy debates, is viable. Physical and operational structures already exist that could help USPS offer basic financial services: prepaid debit cards, mobile transactions, new check cashing services, savings accounts, and even simple, small-dollar loans.

“There’s a post office every five blocks in Manhattan—there’s accessibility in every zip code,” explained Frankie Wright, 32, a USPS Supervisor of Customer Services in East Harlem. “On an operational level, we’re already capable.”

The idea, popularized by journalist�� and law professor , would create��a public option for credit and help insulate Main Street in the likely event of another financial crisis.

For example, a borrower without access to a commercial bank might typically accept a small loan at an unreasonably high interest rate from a payday lender. If a postal banking system were in place, that customer could instead walk into the local USPS branch and take out a simple loan as a government-provided public service. Due to the restricted nature of postal banking, customers’ access to funds would be comparatively safe from vultures and the whirlwinds of the broader, deeper financial system.

Although the idea seems new here and now, a successful U.S. Postal Saving System already existed from 1911-1967, and similar schemes operate overseas today, including in Germany, Japan, Switzerland, and the UK.

Though the proposal is not without its critics, there are surprisingly few legal and political hurdles to implementation. Senator Elizabeth Warren recently penned a in earnest support, and just three weeks ago, she joined the Pew Charitable Trusts for a conference in Washington, D.C., where speakers debated common concerns: Postal banking advocates deplored the struggles of the financially insecure, while opponents expressed skepticism regarding the operational capacity of USPS to offer financial services, and questioned the effects of those new services on the federal budget.

It’s expensive to be poor

In the U.S, 38 percent of the population—88 million people—either have no bank accounts (the “unbanked”) or are at least partially dependent upon high-cost services like payday lending (the “underbanked”). These households pay dearly for basics.

In 2012, the income for the average underbanked household was about $25,500, but it spent an average of nearly $2,500 solely on interest and fees for alternative financial services (AFS) like payday lending. That’s almost 10 percent of their annual income—about as much as they spent on food.

Unbanked and underbanked people are a mix of working and middle-class families, students, the unemployed, and others living paycheck-to-paycheck. Yet financial exclusion is disproportionately rampant among people of color and immigrants, and especially women within those groups. According to the , published in September 2012, more than half of African-American households were either unbanked or underbanked, with similar numbers for Hispanic and unmarried, female-led households.

There are many reasons for this maldistribution—most of them structural and . Regardless, the disparate impact of financial insecurity is unacceptable. Former Harlem resident and public banking advocate Alexander Hamilton such an exclusive system. Providing broad access to money and credit is why the government charters, insures, and regulates financial institutions .

The brick-and-mortar network

“People have faith in the post office,” said Wright. “USPS is a structured, silent organization. We operate discreetly. Every stamp, every dollar is accounted for. People know this.”

Wright, who started as a letter carrier at 20 and now works in management, has expertise in distribution, delivery, and labor relations—and he’s overwhelmingly supportive of postal banking and confident USPS can make the transition. “We’ve handled the invention of email and the shift from letters to parcels. We can handle this.”

USPS is the country’s most federal agency and one of the institutions of any kind when it comes to privacy. As Wright mentioned, much of USPS management, as well as its lawyers and regulators, insist the country’s second-largest employer can and should provide basic financial services.

Indeed, the USPS Inspector General has written a white paper detailing steps for implementation. The American Postal Workers Union (AFL-CIO) is also supportive. At the Pew conference, representative Phil Tabbita argued USPS is well-suited to the task. USPS employees are already trained to handle simple financial transactions in the form of money orders and remittances. Conservatives like Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) might that the workforce—a quarter of whom are military veterans—will suddenly become utterly incompetent if saddled with an expanded job description. But these cries often stem from a poorly disguised—and poorly informed—anti-labor ideology.

Deficit hysteria

There is rampant misunderstanding regarding the laws and accounting that would govern postal banking.��Opponents claim that new financial services would financially tank USPS and subsequently create an unsustainable fiscal burden for the federal government.

But these concerns don’t add up. First of all, the post office is not directly funded by tax revenues. The Postal Reorganization Act of 1970 has legally forced USPS to become self-sufficient, to generate its revenue from its own services, whatever draconian cuts Congress has since imposed. Furthermore, the analysis by the Inspector General suggests USPS itself is likely to turn a profit off of new financial services through modest fees and interest.

If preventing Main Street from falling into the flames along with Wall Street is indeed a national concern, then a stable postal banking system could be our best defense.

Even so, regardless of the post office’s own financial situation, the federal government’s balance sheet does not include USPS assets and liabilities. Indeed, the separation is so complete that there’s a mandating USPS set aside money today for all future retiree health benefits—without subsidy from the Treasury. This unique burden, which is , is the chief cause of USPS’ financial woes.

Even if USPS finances were included in the broader federal budget—as they arguably should be—Deficit Hawk policies like the pre-funding requirement would make even less sense. As , like former Deputy Treasury Secretary Frank Newman, , asking a federal agency directly funded by the U.S. government to save for a far distant future, is like forcing us to wear sweaters in July so we can store warmth for January. Uncle Sam can always create money out of thin air, subject only to inflationary constraints; .

Of all the services USPS could offer, small-dollar loans have come under the most scrutiny. Yet they deserve the least concern from the perspective of U.S. government fiscal sustainability. Opponents like Issa have whipped up public skepticism by conjuring an image of hard-working taxpayers “subsidizing” lending for the poor. In this scenario, postal goblins would hoard tax revenues in a vault and dish it out to poor people, who would presumably never pay it back, sending the country hurtling toward the apocalypse.

Issa’s statements at the Pew conference reveal ignorance about how bank lending works in the modern era. When you go to a bank and ask for a loan, the banker does not check the bank’s deposits or reserves before she lends you money.

As have observed for decades and the Bank of England , financial institutions do not lend pre-existing funds at all, but instead create “money” out of thin air as they lend. When you receive a loan, the bank also places your funds in an account, simultaneously expanding both the asset and liability sides of its own balance sheet. That’s how banking works.

As such, as long as postal banks are granted the same legal license as private banks—notably access to the federal discount window and interbank lending—the financial stability of postal lending would not depend on some hoarded of taxpayer money.

The fire next time

When the next financial crisis hits, a postal bank might need a bailout—but it’s less horrifying than your typical private bank bailout.

During the last crisis, arguments were made that Wall Street firms had to be rescued in order to save Main Street. If preventing Main Street from falling into the flames along with Wall Street is indeed a national concern, then a stable postal banking system—a safe place for most people’s money—could be our best defense.

Although some advocate for a public-private partnership with existing commercial banks, postal banks could instead become an integral piece of a new financial architecture insulating the public and Main Street businesses from the storms of high finance.

For example, imagine the economy busts and people start to lose their jobs. The Federal Reserve could directly credit post office accounts, either with flat transfers, or preferably wages for . This policy would inject money into Main Street and stabilize prices and wages.

And if you don’t like that idea, as even conservative commentator Reihan Salam at The National Review has recognized, a strong postal banking system could eliminate the need for federal deposit insurance and create more room for the private financial sector to innovate as it pleases. As a corollary, if trauma to Main Street could be avoided via the postal banking system, the case for bailing out Wall Street would lose steam.

To put it bluntly, there’s a strong case for the more affluent clients of commercial banks and the broader public to go their separate ways.

Fighting for basic security

Some progressives and populists might prefer a policy more cooperative or decentralized, but this is the immediately viable alternative to the status quo. The U.S. Conference of Mayors just endorsed the idea and Rep. Cedric Richmond (D–La.) just in the House of Representatives. Although Postmaster General Donahoe is against postal banking, many of his workers, managers, union leaders, regulators, and lawyers support it.

And soon the Postmaster’s endorsement won’t matter. President Obama is on the USPS Board of Governors: There are now 4 Democrats and 4 Republicans and the remaining seat will likely go to a Democrat—at which point the Board can override the Postmaster General.

There might be a confrontation in the courts, but under the Supreme Court ruling in Chevron v. NRDC, agencies are granted wide latitude to interpret their governing statutes. So USPS would likely survive a challenge to providing basic financial services.

Postal banking should be part of every social justice rallying cry. According to the Pew survey results, 31 percent of the unbanked said they would open an account at their local branch. Eighty-one percent of the underbanked said they would use USPS to cash checks, 79 percent percent to pay bills, and 71 percent would choose postal loans over payday loans. That’s 71 percent who could pay for food, childcare, and transportation instead of exorbitant fees on small loans.

These numbers are monumental and they reveal a widespread desire for a public option for basic financial services.

USPS has a duty of public service and can at least be held more accountable than potential servicers like , which has been moving into the AFS market. Instead of bringing megastores and megabanks to communities lacking credit, we could be asking the federal government to do its job and provide economic security and opportunity.

It’s time to push the envelope.

“This is my first full-time interaction with little bitty ones, and having two is much more tiring than having just one,” he says.��

Juanita Mason, who lives in the same rural North Carolina county as Grimm, at 61 is caring for three children with health challenges resulting from their mother’s drug addiction. What started as a temporary arrangement to take over while her daughter was incarcerated has drastically altered her life plan. Instead of “sittin’ on the porch sipping coffee,” as she says, she spends her days dealing with courts and meeting with social workers in two different counties to complete paperwork and other requirements that will eventually allow her to adopt the children. This past year, she spent three months driving to a specialist more than 200 miles away so that one of them, six-year-old Makinley, could participate in a clinical trial that would get her the medication she needed. “I’m not 20 years old myself anymore,” she says. “I mean, it’s a blessing, but it’s also a shuffle. A shuffle every day.”&�Բ�����;

Like , Grimm and Mason celebrated Grandparents Day in September as they do every day: by providing the regular child care that enables the millennial generation to go to work. With the Oct. 1, 2023, cutoff of the American Rescue Plan funding that stabilized the child care sector in 2021—what has been deemed “”—even more families are now likely to turn to grandparents, or other family, friends, or neighbors (“FFNs” in child care parlance) for child care. ������Ƶ than 70,000 child care programs have been projected to close in the year following the cutoff, leaving millions of working parents in the lurch. 

What’s more, there’s that the reduction in the child tax credit for 2022 has already tipped about 3 million children back into poverty. A recent report from The Century Foundation estimates that lost productivity and taxes resulting from the demise of federal funding for child care will result in as parents leave the workforce or cut back their hours to stay home with their kids, and because early educators lose their jobs due to program closures. 

Grandparents are likely going to pick up much of the slack for this lapse in public investment and federal support of the hidden economy supporting America’s worker-parents. And today’s grandparents already feel . 

Already, grandparents and other FFNs represent the , according to the National Survey of Early Care and Education, especially among . Many grandparents, like Grimm and Mason, volunteer to take on the lion’s share of child care duties to prop up their adult children’s household finances, or stand in for parents struggling with addiction, mental health crises, incarceration, and poverty, or who just have unreliable transportation. Even in difficult circumstances, kinship care often protects children from further trauma and stokes their resilience with a sense of belonging. “I wouldn’t have it any other way,” concedes Mason, “but I sure could use more help.”&�Բ�����;

Mason’s statement reveals what’s deeply flawed at the heart of America’s broken child care policy. Families are expected to bear the full cost of care and early childhood education, but that cost is out of reach for many. As Treasury Secretary has said, “It does not work for the caregivers. It does not work for the parents. It does not work for the kids. And because it does not work for them, it does not work for the country.”&�Բ�����;

“Child care is not just a private family problem,” says Natalie Renew, executive director of , a national initiative that works with home-based child care providers around the country. “We must recognize it as a public good, care that nurtures young children’s development, enables parents to work and go to school, and that supports local employers and the community as a whole. And we should fund it as a public good, through programs that strengthen the infrastructure for child care, who are taking care of their children’s children.”

Federal Investment Could Change the Calculus of Child Care 

Grimm’s son-in-law works for a wholesale greenhouse, and his daughter works for , a hub that provides information and support groups for parents and families. Together the two make enough to pay their monthly bills, but not enough to also pay Grimm for the time and effort he puts into caring for his grandchildren. 

Grimm’s wife also still works full time as a high school principal. For elders without ample retirement income or good health, and for working parents without nearby family, the child care problem is even more fraught. The cost of child care averages in the United States, and . 

Transylvania County, North Carolina, where both Grimm and Mason live, sprawls across 381 square miles, with a population of about 35,000. There are only two licensed home-based child care providers in the county, plus a handful of part-time, church-based programs, and four full-day child care centers for children age 5 and under. These programs typically have long waiting lists for few openings. When the , the number of child care centers is likely to drop precipitously and through their labor or their pocketbooks.

������Ƶover, grandparents often take on the duty of care for grandchildren in the midst of their own financial, health, or other challenges. Mason used to work full time at a local grocery store. “I was planning to work until 65,” she explains, “but I had to quit because the day care shut down during COVID and there was no one to care for the youngest.”&�Բ�����;

Since losing her health care benefits and income, Mason has scrambled to get herself and the kids back on Medicaid and food stamps. With no child support from the children’s biological parents, she’s grateful for the gift certificates she gets as an incentive for participating in a , money she puts toward modest Christmas gifts for the kids. Meanwhile, she rides a roller coaster of daily child care demands. 

“The day care [center] isn’t open on Friday,” she says. “I have to enroll the toddler to get some days and keep him eligible for summer care, but the hours are not really enough. I pick up the older one from school, then go get the toddler, then wrestle the youngest one’s booster seat into the car, and sometimes I have to take all three to the doctor’s office and then wait an hour and a half. It’s hard!”

Mason shares her story with other parents, plus more than a handful of , gathered in a circle of plastic chairs at The Family Place. provide crucial moral support for caregivers. “Taking care of children can be a thankless task,” says Chelsea Stewart, who facilitates the group. “We want [caregivers] to feel seen and valued and empowered, because they are nurturing human beings, preparing children to be successful at school and eventually in our community. That’s an important contribution not just to their own families but also to society.”&�Բ�����;

But recognition and appreciation don’t go far enough. What’s really needed is for home-based child care. The care grandparents and other FFNs provide enables millions of earners to power the economic engine of our economy. Those who provide care without pay save their grandchildren’s families more than $10,000 per year, and many sacrifice their in the bargain. Broad-based federal programs like the Child Tax Credit, which in 2021 provided up to $3,600 per child that could be used to pay for child care and other expenses, had a demonstrated positive impact on child and family well-being, to its lowest level in 50 years. 

Reinstating, expanding, or establishing new programs to buttress the child care sector promises similar gains, says Renew. Some states have taken measures to find a path along, but not over, the cliff. have passed some form of an expanded (and sometimes refundable) child tax credit. Some states choose to use federal child care funds to compensate grandparents and other relative caregivers; New York’s subsidizes legally exempt home-based caregivers, including grandparents. Colorado’s philanthropically funded pilot of the gives FFNs a no-strings-attached income boost for up to 18 months. paves the way for families of all backgrounds to afford child care, including care provided by grandparents or other FFNs. are also stepping up, extending parental leave to grandparents who take time off to care for grandchildren. 

Still, these private- and state-level initiatives are no substitute for federal action and relief for FFNs of all incomes and in all zip codes, Renew says. to allocate $16 billion for emergency child care funding; along with these funds, they want the Biden Administration to clarify to states that these funds can and should be used to support relative and neighbor child care providers, including grandparents. Proposed legislation like the would permanently reinstate the refundable Child Tax Credit established in 2021, giving families more flexible funding to support their informal child care arrangements. by sustaining the grandparents who are already bringing up baby gives families more viable and affordable choices. It’s the break—and the paycheck—grandparents who are raising young children have earned.

Support for this project was provided by at New America.

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 8:05 a.m. PDT on Oct. 3, 2023 to correct the ages of William Grimm’s grandchildren. Read our corrections policy here.

brought together , including the housing justice group and local chapters of , , , and , among others. Thanks to their work, the Philadelphia City Council placed an on the townhomes in March 2022. After a brief legal fight, in April 2023, the property’s owners and developers to the City of Philadelphia to be developed as 74 units of affordable housing. out of the settlement. Some of those residents have said they plan to return and live in the new affordable units once they are built. 

The struggle to save the UC Townhomes revealed to many something marginalized urbanites already know too well—today, cities are being planned and developed to serve the interests of elites and big corporations rather than the communities that call them home.

“Planners are, ideally, meant to serve the public and the public good,” says Anna Kramer, a professor of urban planning at McGill University in Montreal. “But, in reality, planning is incredibly compromised. It’s subject to neoliberal pressures to increase profits and continue capital accumulation, and planners struggle with these contradictions in practice.”

There was nothing in Philadelphia’s zoning ordinance to prevent the transformation of the UC Townhomes from an island haven of affordable housing for Black families into a or a new research complex. Quite the opposite, the move is just the latest in a long series that has remade a into today’s University City—a gentrified zone known for its moneyed academic and medical institutions, including the University of Pennsylvania, Drexel University, and the University City Science Center.

These institutions spurred the redevelopment of Black Bottom in the mid-20th century as part of a nationwide government-backed process dubbed “urban renewal.” Beginning with the , the federal government provided funds for cities to raze “blighted” or “slum” neighborhoods. While the ostensible goal was improving housing (and the Housing Act provided funds for constructing new low-rent public housing, too), local governments and planning agencies in many cities seized properties through eminent domain, cleared existing homes, and then handed over the lots to private developers to stimulate commercial and industrial growth.

In 1960s Philadelphia, to make way for University City redevelopment projects; about two-thirds of those uprooted were families of color. Officials of the City Planning Council argued redevelopment would create needed jobs and raise living standards. Reporters for The Daily Pennsylvanian captured a different feeling among residents in a January 1967 article: “To … the , urban renewal means that giant, impersonal institutions like the University of Pennsylvania are devouring small homeowners, spreading segregation and prolonging social inequities.” During this period, the writer the phrase “” to describe urban renewal schemes. ������Ƶ recently, ongoing for-profit development in University City has earned itself another telling nickname—“”

The fact that the adverse outcomes of planning and design decisions are shouldered disproportionately by already marginalized groups, including poor communities and communities of color, is not an unintended side effect, says Álvaro Sevilla-Buitrago, a professor of planning history and theory at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid in Spain. “This is not the dark side of planning,” he says. “This is planning. This is how planning has been practiced for a long, long time.”&�Բ�����;

When Sevilla-Buitrago says this has been happening for a long time, he means for more than two centuries, which is how far back his book, , traces the phenomenon of profit-driven planning meant to disrupt marginalized and working-class communities. Sevilla-Buitrago writes that those communities are not just points on a map but also spaces that produce and foster unique cultural practices, knowledge, and social values that help them sustain themselves. When authorities plan in ways that are hostile to the development or maintenance of working-class spaces, they disrupt those powerful grassroots social relations.

Since the era of slum clearance and urban renewal schemes, urban planning and design have developed subtler tactics to disrupt communities and the relationships fostered in shared spaces. One example is “defensive urban design,” a practice that uses elements of the built environment to guide the behavior of people using the space. Cara Chellew, a researcher at McGill University, founded to map defensive design elements across Toronto. Typical examples include in the middle that make lying on them impossible and to prevent loitering or skateboarding. Other times, defensive design means , like , shade structures, or picnic tables from a park to prevent people from gathering.

Defensive design, part of what’s known as the “, is supposed to make cities safer. But as with earlier planning interventions, it has a hard time shaking or other discrimination. “It targets people who use public space the most … and anyone who is a nonconsuming member of the public,” says Chellew. This includes unhoused folks, young people, and those with disabilities—or gig workers, like rideshare drivers, who are more likely to need access to amenities like seating or bathrooms when in public. Ultimately, Chellew says, “making spaces more hostile or more unpleasant for some groups makes public space more hostile for all.”&�Բ�����;

While urban design and planning have long histories of targeting vulnerable groups and exacerbating social inequalities to serve the interests of those at the top, Sevilla-Buitrago argues there’s another way forward for the planning profession and the people it is meant to serve. “We should not think of planning as an institution that is petrified and not going to change,” he says. “It is a battlefield, urbanization is a battlefield—it’s a crucial site of struggle because a lot of important resources for the organization of everyday life revolve around space.”&�Բ�����;

Campaigns like the one to save the UC Townhomes in West Philadelphia are hard-fought but offer a glimpse into an alternative world where cities are planned to serve those who inhabit them. An earlier campaign of and in Philadelphia also resulted in a 2020 agreement that the Philadelphia Housing Authority (PHA) would to the Philadelphia Community Land Trust (PCLT), founded for the purpose. , who led the and founded PCLT, framed it as a tool to “ and combat the displacement caused by market rate development and gentrification.” Families in December 2021. 

Organizers in Oakland had a similar win in 2020 when a campaign led by succeeded in an empty home to the after four moms and their kids illegally occupied it and deputies from the county sheriff’s office violently evicted them. The real estate firm also agreed to give the land trust first right to purchase future Oakland properties the firm buys, creating a pipeline to new homes for the trust, whose mission is to expand and preserve housing and economic development opportunities for communities of color.

In Philadelphia, Sterling Johnson, an organizer with Philadelphia Housing Action, says the PLCT will be led in part by “people who have experienced housing insecurity and homelessness or have experienced violence.” Both Johnson and Sevilla-Buitrago emphasize these communities have intrinsic knowledge needed to plan their cities. “They are planners,” says Sevilla-Buitrago. “They may lack the technical knowledge, but they have the most important knowledge and the capacity to make their communities flourish.”

“Especially when it comes to mothers and children,” says Johnson, “they are constantly thinking about things like ‘How far away are we from the nearest places to get food or meet with other families? Where is a cool place for hot days, and where is a warm place for cool days? Where is the school, and is everybody getting along at school? Where are kids supposed to play together so they stay out of trouble?’ These things are all theories around public space—they’re urban planning decisions.”

Professional planners still have a vital role to play in reorienting urban space to better serve the people. “There is a lot of scope within the job to connect to populations that are marginalized, bring their voices into planning, bring their demands, keep pressing the city to be accountable to everyone, and resist the pressure of developers, landowners, and homeowners who are trying to control how cities are planned,” says Kramer.

Johnson says these are the connections and momentum they are building in Philadelphia. “With disruptions like ours, we always hope that they are inspirational for others to start their own,” they say. “Thinking long-term, it’s about building infrastructure.”

The strike will force General Motors, Ford and Stellantis—the global company that builds Chrysler, Jeep, Ram and Dodge vehicles in North America—to halt some of their operations. “Tonight for the first time in our history we will strike all three of the Big Three at once,”  announced about two hours before the negotiation deadline passed without a contract. The union is seeking higher pay, better benefits and assurances that large numbers of its members will work in the automakers’ .

asked , a sociologist who studies the automotive industry and its workers, to discuss the UAW’s strategy and explain why this strike is significant.

1. How important is it that this strike is affecting all three Detroit automakers?

Until now, the UAW had always gone on strike against one of the companies at a time. And in recent years, all workers employed by that automaker had walked off the job. That’s what happened in the previous UAW strike. In 2019,  for 40 days. The UAW used this same tactic in .

While holding a strike against a few key plants breaks with recent UAW practices, it’s a strategy deeply rooted in the union’s history.  the 1936-37 action known as the , when workers targeted what they referred to as General Motors’ “.”

Workers took over the plants by sitting down at their work stations at the end of the day and refusing to leave. By the time the strike was over, GM had agreed to sign a contract for the first time with the UAW. The union gained hundreds of thousands of new members, and  in the months that followed.

The  that strategically targeting a few factories can maximize the pressure put on companies, while minimizing both the number of workers affected and length of time affected workers must remain idle.

The UAW’s use of a similar approach now will reduce the risk of the union exhausting its , from which it must pay $500 per week to every UAW member who walks off the job.

Fain is calling the new approach a “.”

“This strategy will keep the companies guessing,”  shortly before the strike officially began. “It will give our national negotiators maximum leverage and flexibility in bargaining.”

Although the strike is starting at just a few plants, the union may halt all production later on. “If we need to go all out, we will,” . “Everything is on the table.”

About 13,000 UAW workers at three sites—a GM assembly plant in Wentzville, Missouri; a Stellantis assembly plant in Toledo, Ohio, and —are the first to participate in this strike.

2. How would you define success or failure for the UAW’s new strategy?

To understand why the union chose this strategy over a full-out work stoppage, it’s important to understand the nature of strikes and what makes them successful.

In the book , sociologist Michael Schwartz and I analyzed the history of labor relations and production systems in the U.S. and Japanese auto industries to better understand the decline of Detroit’s Big Three automakers. In the process, we learned what determined the level of success of previous auto strikes.

A strike is essentially a  between workers and management. Workers threaten the company’s viability by withholding their labor, going without paychecks to halt production. Companies protect themselves from strikes by stockpiling inventory so they can keep sales going. Workers protect themselves via their strike funds.

Generally,  when they hurt a company’s bottom line so much that executives decide it makes financial sense to give in to the workers’ demands.

Strikes fail when workers can’t create enough disruption to pressure the company to give in before strike funds run out. They also fail when workers give in before securing a contract in line with their demands,  than if they had never walked off the job.

, and the rest of his new leadership team seem to recognize the importance of surprising management and picking strategic targets in a way that many of the union’s . I believe that the UAW is likely to ultimately have more success with this strike than it has had in decades.

3. Is this strike likely to be historically significant?

No doubt about it. No . Chrysler workers, who are now employed by Stellantis, . And U.S. autoworkers are targeting GM, Ford and Stellantis simultaneously for the first time in the union’s .

But it’s not yet clear how historically significant it will be.

If the UAW’s “stand-up” strike strategy succeeds, I think it’s likely that other labor organizers will embrace it too—potentially improving the leverage other workers have in their contract negotiations and strikes.

This article was originally published by . It has been published here under a Creative Commons license.

The holiday’s founders in the late 1800s from what the day has become. The founders were looking for two things: a means of unifying union workers and a reduction in work time.

History of Labor Day

The first Labor Day occurred in 1882 in New York City under the direction of that city’s .

In the 1800s, unions covered only a small fraction of workers and were and relatively weak. The goal of organizations like the Central Labor Union and more modern-day counterparts like the was to bring many small unions together to achieve a critical mass and power. The organizers of the first Labor Day were interested in creating an event that brought different types of workers together to meet each other and recognize their common interests.

However, the organizers had a large problem: No government or company recognized the first Monday in September as a day off of work. The issue was solved temporarily by . All striking workers were expected to march in a parade and then eat and drink at a giant picnic afterwards.

The felt the entire day was like one long political barbecue, with “rather dull speeches.”

Why Was Labor Day Invented?

Labor Day came about because workers felt they were spending too many hours and days on the job.

In the 1830s, were putting in 70-hour weeks on average. Sixty years later, in 1890, hours of work had dropped, although the average manufacturing worker still toiled in a factory 60 hours a week.

These long working hours caused many union organizers to focus on winning a shorter . They also focused on getting workers more days off, such as the Labor Day holiday, and reducing the .

These early organizers clearly won since the most recent data show that the average person working in manufacturing is and most people work only five days a week.

Surprisingly, many . That’s because workers who had no free time were not able to spend their wages on traveling, entertainment, or dining out.

As the expanded beyond farming and basic manufacturing in the late 1800s and early 1900s, it became important for to find consumers interested in buying the products and services being produced in ever greater amounts. Shortening the workweek was one way of turning the working class into the consuming class.

Common Misconceptions

The common misconception is that since Labor Day is a national holiday, everyone gets the day off. Nothing could be further from the truth.

While the first Labor Day was created by striking, the idea of a special holiday for workers was easy for politicians to support. It was easy because proclaiming a holiday, like , costs legislators nothing and benefits them by currying favor with voters. , Oregon, Colorado, Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey all declared a special legal holiday in September to celebrate workers.

Within 12 years, half the states in the country recognized Labor Day as a holiday. It became a national holiday in June 1894 when the Labor Day bill into law. While most people interpreted this as recognizing the day as a national vacation, covers only federal employees. It is up to each state to declare its own legal holidays.

������Ƶover, proclaiming any day an official holiday means little, as an official holiday does not require private employers and even some government agencies to give their workers the day off. on Labor Day. Essential government services in protection and transportation continue to function, and even less essential programs like national parks are open. Because not everyone is given time off on Labor Day, union workers as recently as the 1930s to stage one-day strikes if their employer refused to give them the day off.

In the president’s last year, Obama encouraged Americans “to observe this day with appropriate programs, ceremonies, and activities that honor the contributions and resilience of working Americans.”

The proclamation, however, does not officially declare that anyone gets time off.

Controversy: Militants and Founders

Today most people in the U.S. think of Labor Day as a noncontroversial holiday.

There are no , no like at Christmas. However, 100 years ago there was controversy.

The first controversy that people fought over was how militant workers should act on a day designed to honor workers. Communist, Marxist, and socialist members of the trade union movement supported of demonstrations, street protests, and even , which .

������Ƶ moderate trade union members, however, advocated for a September Labor Day of parades and picnics. In the U.S., picnics, instead of street protests, won the day.

There is also a dispute over who suggested the idea. The earliest history from the mid-1930s credits Peter J. McGuire, in 1881, with suggesting a date that would fall “nearly midway between the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving” that “would publicly show the strength and esprit de corps of the trade and labor organizations.”

makes an excellent case that Matthew Maguire, a representative from the Machinists Union, actually was the founder of Labor Day. However, because Matthew Maguire was seen as too radical, the more moderate Peter McGuire was given the credit.

Who actually came up with the idea will likely never be known, but you can vote to express your view.

Have We Lost the Spirit of Labor Day?

Today Labor Day is no longer about trade unionists marching down the street with banners and their tools of trade. Instead, it is a confused holiday with no associated rituals.

The original holiday was meant to handle a problem of long working hours and no time off. Although the battle over these issues would seem to have been won long ago, this issue is starting to come back with a vengeance, not for manufacturing workers but for highly skilled white-collar workers, many of whom are constantly connected to work.

If and never really take a vacation, start a new ritual that honors the original spirit of Labor Day. Give yourself the day off. Don’t go in to work. Shut off your phone, computer, and other electronic devices connecting you to your daily grind. Then go to a , like the original participants did over a century ago, and celebrate having at least one day off from work during the year!

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

There are numerous lessons to be learned from what has transpired between the Teamsters and UPS during this year’s .

First, and most important: Unions work, and not just for the workers being represented, but for all workers. Despite the UPS Teamsters’  under Jimmy Hoffa’s leadership, UPS’s delivery drivers today have  than their counterparts at competitors like FedEx and Amazon. This is consistent with what unions in general do for wages. According to the , “non-union workers earn just 85 percent of what unionized workers earn.” Additionally, “when more workers have unions, wages rise for union and non-union workers.” There is an upward pressure on wages for all when groups of unionized workers win wage benefits for themselves.

Second, one of the most powerful responses to corporate monopolies is large unions. UPS is the  package delivery service and is the most dominant delivery company in the U.S., handling  in a nation increasingly dependent on mail-order service. The majority of its workers are represented by a single union. This means that if the UPS Teamsters go on strike, it can utterly cripple the company. Indeed, media coverage has focused on this fact, as well as the  to the entire U.S. economy in the event of a strike.

That kind of power is rare in our splintered labor movement. Take the entertainment industry. Film, television, and theater production intersects with , among them , , , , and the two currently on strike:  and . In late 2021, film and television crew workers agreed to a  and . Earlier this year, unionized Hollywood directors  with the major production studios and signed a contract, at the same time writers whose scripts they bring to life were striking. Then,  also went on strike.

Now, a significant number of Hollywood workers remain on strike while others are working. The major studios are hoping to simply  until their resolve withers. Meanwhile, workers creating unscripted television—known colloquially as reality TV—are  about continuing to work while their colleagues are on strike.

While the workers are fractured, their bosses are united. The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) is a single entity representing all the major studios such as Netflix, Apple, Amazon, and Disney. This single powerful entity boasts on its  that it “negotiates 58 industry-wide collective bargaining agreements.” If the majority of Hollywood’s workers were organized into a single union, they would have the kind of power that UPS Teamsters wields.

A third lesson from the UPS agreement is that labor militancy works. In September 2022,  that the UPS Teamsters launched a major public campaign for a fair contract a full year before their existing contract was set to expire, highlighting the dangerous summer conditions under which many UPS drivers were forced to work. The Teamsters’ new president, Sean O’Brien, did not mince words when he threatened, “We’re not going to be afraid to pull that trigger [on a strike] if necessary.”

Then, this summer the union enacted “,” saying, “The most powerful tool we have as Teamsters to win a historic contract at UPS is a credible strike threat.” This clever approach had an equally clever tagline: “Just practicing for a just contract.” The display of power was an intimidation tactic and a turning of the tables against corporate America, which has relied on armies of union-busting lawyers to quash labor movements.

A fourth lesson is that solidarity is critical. Although UPS accepted a majority of what the Teamsters demanded by early July 2023, the company  on increasing wages for those part-time workers who had been hired a few years ago at lower starting salaries. Instead of giving in, UPS Teamsters  and began their practice strikes, likely betting that the company would cave. The company soon issued a  saying, “We are prepared to increase our industry-leading pay and benefits, but need to work quickly to finalize a fair deal that provides certainty for our customers, our employees[,] and businesses across the country.” Instead of throwing their part-timers under the bus, the union held out for a better deal and won , up from $16.20 an hour.

A fifth lesson is that although unions help to boost wages and working conditions, they are not yet strong enough to undo the damage of unfettered capitalism. Wages continue to . As worker productivity has risen, . The UPS Teamsters had initially demanded a  for its part-time workers, who are nearly half of all the company’s workers. Although $21 an hour is progress, some workers are unhappy. One UPS warehouse worker told , “W�ǰ���ing this job, it feels like the good parts of life—like going out to dinner and taking a vacation—aren’t meant for us.”

He added, “I’m prepared to vote no,” and who could blame him? Throughout the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, UPS delivery drivers risked their lives to bring us essential products. They braved heat waves, long hours, and heavy loads.

Today, they are continuing to offer a public service: showing the rest of the U.S. workforce how workers can find power in numbers, be militant, stand up for one another, stare down corporate greed, and demand our full suite of labor rights.

This article was produced by , a project of the . It is reprinted here with permission.

At the heart of the unions’ conflict with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), which represents all the major entertainment media corporations, are the of royalty payments—known as residuals—and the use of artificial intelligence (AI). The former is an urgent matter of financial sustainability for artists between projects. The latter is an existential matter involving the dystopian prospect of robot-generated scripts in place of writers and digital replicas in place of actors. 

I outside Disney’s headquarters on July 26, to hear directly from those striking what they believe they’re fighting for. “We’re here to get fair pay, and respect for what we do,” says TV star , holding a picket sign as she marches alongside other actors and writers. “I never thought I’d have to say this, but I’m an actual human being.”

Many writers and actors feel they’ve been pushed too far and are fighting for the survival of their careers and craft, and have taken to social media to rant against their corporate overlords—and I am here for this display of narrative power. The question is, how far will they go?

Well-known actor John Cusack posted a lengthy on July 14, the first day of the SAG-AFTRA strike, saying there was “one set of rules for elites—and another for workers,” which he said effectively means “socialism for the .oooo1 %” and “savage predatory capitalism for everyone else.” As of this writing, Cusack’s tweet has been viewed by more than 4.6 million people. 

Others are skewering Disney CEO Bob Iger, who that the union members are making demands that are “just not realistic” and that “they are adding to the set of the challenges that this business is already facing that is, quite frankly, very disruptive.” Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Saverio Guerra a photo of Iger sunbathing with the caption, “Oh look, it’s Bob Iger being unrealistic and disruptive on his yacht!”

Indeed, many industry creatives are seeing their plight through the lens of a predatory capitalist system. According to actor , who picketed outside Disney, “The 1% is just getting fatter and fatter while the rest of us do not thrive.”

“I think it’s no accident that all of this is coming when it’s the dawn of television for people of color, for underrepresented communities,” says , an actor picketing Disney’s headquarters. “It’s a tale as old as time: Let’s underpay these Black and Brown people, these LGBTQ [people].” It’s a strong accusation and constitutes just one part of the collective wrath aimed at the industry’s greed, which is exerting downward pressure on worker compensation at the same time that Hollywood’s doors are finally being pushed open to greater racial diversity. 

People of color like de Lara are disproportionately more familiar with capitalism’s cruelty than whites. Black, Indigenous, and Latino workers, on average, than white workers—whether in Hollywood or beyond. Now, the fields of filmmaking and television are collectively experiencing the brutality of the corporate bottom line. While the highest-profile actors and writers make bank, the . 

Will this nascent intimacy with corporate greed influence Hollywood’s future storylines?

As I pointed out recently in an op-ed about the hit television show Succession, the industry has had a fraught relationship with on-screen wealth. And although there are increasingly more projects that are critical of capitalism, many still tend to play it safe. Writing in , culture writer Patrick Sproull critiqued many of the “eat the rich” tropes that have started to emerge on-screen, calling them “performative and shallow in their criticisms.”&�Բ�����;

Boots Riley’s new series for Amazon, , is an excellent illustration of how Hollywood’s creators can push the envelope in critiquing the crushing economic system under which we all live. Lucy Mangan’s review of the series in calls it “not just a sweet coming-of-age story for the isolated boy-man [Cootie, played by Jharrel Jerome], but interrogations of race relations, capitalism, and the cracks rapidly opening into abysses between the haves and have-nots.”

Riley, who doesn’t shy away from being intentional in his on-screen projects—his first foray into Hollywood was the exceptional anti-capitalist satire — to the Hollywood Reporter, “The contradictions of capitalism—how it works—are going to echo through almost everything we do.”

Hollywood’s rank and file are striking at the height of 2023’s , a phenomenon that includes in Southern California. Writers and actors find themselves literally with unions like UNITE HERE Local 11, experiencing firsthand the power of labor solidarity across industries and gathering fodder (we can only hope) for future plotlines focused on the hand-to-mouth struggles of ordinary Americans. 

“We’ve become less and less of a union country over the last 40 to 50 years, and that has weakened our rights as individuals and as workers so significantly,” says , who has both written scripts and acted in various television shows. “It’s, to me, working exactly the way the businesses want it to work.”

Given this insight, would Manugian incorporate this critique of American capitalism into future scripts? “I think we should do everything we possibly can for that,” he replies. “The trick is to do it in a way that’s still, hopefully, super entertaining.”&�Բ�����;Hollywood’s greatest power is its ability to normalize ideas, infusing our culture with tropes that we internalize over time. It has done so for ill, as in the case of , and for good, as with . As rank-and-file creative workers dig their heels in for a protracted fight for their survival, it would benefit all workers if the rage they are feeling makes a direct leap from their pithy Twitter posts into the pages of their screenplays.

Director Cashmere Jasmine (Oreo, Project CC for Disney’s Launchpad Collection) was disappointed, especially to see Davis walk away without any awards. “There was both relief and a deep, deep sadness when I heard Viola Davis speaking on The Breakfast Club [podcast] about just getting people to do hair and makeup, and that it was always going to be a fight, and that you’ll always have to push, no matter who you are or how high you go.”&�Բ�����;

Jasmine was one of many panelists in a recent . The event was organized by RespectAbility, a group focused on fighting stigmas and providing guidance for creators with disabilities in the entertainment industry, policymaking, leadership positions, and faith communities. Jasmine is a Black woman who is disabled, and she says the barriers to entry in the entertainment industry are real, and they become apparent early in the process—even at the point of pitching a film. 

Those barriers are formidable: ������Ƶ than a quarter of the U.S. population lives with disabilities, including . Furthermore, the disabled and Black communities . However, an overwhelming 95% of characters on-screen are not disabled. That majority is still overwhelmingly white and male. Only 4.1% of the programs on-screen feature disability themes. 

Jasmine says the studios and executives don’t trust someone who looks like her when she walks in the door. “They have a formula that they know has quote-unquote ‘worked for them,’ and it’s often somewhat exclusionary, or often may be overly conservative.” She explains that the struggle is to compromise enough to make the studio executives see the vision without losing that “lightning in the bottle” uniqueness that makes the story hers. Just to get her project green-lit, she has to prove “this was not only beautiful and profitable, but unique, and really reached not just the audience you’re used to reaching, but an audience that’s even broader than that.”

Hers is a real story about the barriers a disabled Black woman has to break in order to get her film project considered by a company like Disney. Being disabled actually adds further complication to the barriers Blackness brings to filmmakers trying to break into the industry. 

Barrier Busting

RespectAbility, the organization that hosted the webinar, is in the business of telling the industry how to step up for creatives with disabilities. In fact, each of the panelists on its most recent webinar was an alumnus of RespectAbility’s Entertainment Lab.

Lauren Appelbaum, RespectAbility’s senior vice president of communications, says the original target of the organization’s mission was politics, but the entertainment industry has become a large focus. Appelbaum has worked to build a community where both the creatives and the people seeking to employ them can connect and educate themselves on the needs of the disabled.

Writer Diane J. Wright, who moderated the Black Excellence webinar, asked the panelists about their inspiration to join the industry. Immediately, the conversation turned to representation—the connection between seeing themselves represented in the industry and having actual access.

Writer and director Juliet Romeo offers a different perspective on the representation conversation. “What the industry can do is—could have done [is]—to help us create representation,” she said. “Because I feel like if I saw myself or I saw that there were writers and directors growing up that looked like me, then I would have believed it. I would have been, ‘Yes, this is what I want to do.’” Instead, Romeo describes a very circuitous route to her current filmmaking career. And she wasn’t alone.

Actor, writer, and producer Erika Ellis also didn’t see Black women filmmakers like herself and thought the only way into Hollywood was to buy her way in by financing her own film. “I had it in my head that [if] I get into finance, then I can finance films, and then I can put myself in a film. But I didn’t know a direct route. … I found my way, the long way, I should say.”

Ellis went on to describe how the lack of representation translated into barriers to access to the industry for her. “But growing up, I still didn’t know how to get there. And I think when I finally did, I got in through another, you know, organization, a diversity hire, basically, in a program.”&�Բ�����;

Romeo adds that the barriers to access for aspiring creatives are only compounded when you are a first-generation immigrant, Black, and disabled.

Romeo says her family was supportive of her desire to become a filmmaker, but they never saw what she did as work. She comes from a Caribbean family who believes success was only found in manual labor or the professions, and definitely not in creative fields. “The safe jobs are, you know, in the medical field. So become a nurse. Become a doctor, right?” Romeo became a nurse, and only later began making her first documentary about a friend’s health journey.

Representation also provides a model for disabled creatives to follow after they begin working in the industry. Entertainment Lab alumnus Angel Williams, currently producer and writer for Truce ������Ƶ, says the Lab workshops taught her how to speak up for herself and her needs as a creative with non-apparent disabilities.

During her own workshop in September 2022, alumni of previous Entertainment Labs talked about advocating for themselves in the industry.

Williams says she loved to hear the former students “telling their stories of how they learn to advocate for themselves and to request the accommodations they need.” She explains “listening to how they talk about pushing forward, advocacy for the self and others around them.” Williams says that now she is working on advocating for her own work breaks (which she needs for her disability, fibromyalgia, a condition that causes chronic fatigue and chronic pain) and accommodations. She is also open at Truce ������Ƶ about being disabled. 

Industry Rising to Meet “Us”

Wright’s second request to the panel started another important conversation within the inclusion debate. She asked the panel of Black women creatives about “some of the specific ways the industry could have risen to meet us.”

“We’re always asked about our identities and barriers and how we overcome them, right? As if who we are is the hurdle.”

This is the question we asked the other part of the RespectAbility community—the executive partners who employ the Entertainment Lab alumni and consultants. They were eager to share the ways in which RespectAbility has pushed industry executives and their companies to do better.

Stacie de Armas, the vice president of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) at Nielsen, the media ratings and research company, says the RespectAbility relationship with her company began with a desire to “do better.”

De Armas explains that a few years before, she wanted to make a contribution using a budgetary surplus. “I said we want to make a contribution to your work. And then we’d love to also chat about your work and see how we can work together,” she says. Today, Nielsen hires alumni of the Entertainment Labs, and it regularly engages RespectAbility consultants to help inform projects where the company is measuring demographics for its new metrics systems, like GraceNote. 

But de Armas and Nielsen also learned about “the work” aspect early on when she brought RespectAbility in to measure inclusion in the industry. They were looking for a metric to look at disability inclusion on-screen and off-screen. But, according to de Armas, “that’s not how RespectAbility works.” The RespectAbility team explained to her that there were several aspects of disability to be considered, and commenced giving a master class in disabilities to the Nielsen team.

De Armas and her team at Nielsen were impressed. “We knew at that point, too, we’ve got the right partner here because they’re challenging us. They want more than we even think we’re capable of, and they’re explaining to us why. And so with their support, we actually did do all of that.” Nielsen released data in a

Grace Moss, vice president of DEI at Warner Discovery, also says that over the past few years, she has worked with RespectAbility to discover the barriers her company still maintains to disability inclusion, through consulting on scripts and helping ensure the sets of new shows are inclusive to not only the actors, but also the crew, creators, and anyone who visits a set. Companies learn that making sets wheelchair-accessible is more than adding ramps. Inclusive sets include quiet spaces for the neurodivergent, for example.

Moss even shared how a RespectAbility Lab alum helped her team realize that video submissions are much easier for people with disabilities connected to writing difficulty. This includes neurodivergent creators who express themselves better with visual tools. Moss says, “Now, the application to our Directors Lab is open, and they have a video submission option.” That component is available on the application to the .

Shifting the Burden

Applebaum and her team are moving the heavy lifting of inclusion and access onto the broad shoulders of companies like Nielsen and Warner Bros Discovery. As they do so, one of the biggest barriers to inclusion—representation—is being lifted. 

As a result, RespectAbility is seeding the industry with disabled people, especially Black creators with disabilities who are creating content for the screen and beyond. This includes policymakers, measurers (working with companies like Nielsen), and even journalists. Williams reiterates the importance of seeing other disabled people who work in the industry advocate for themselves and remain in their jobs. “It’s just how hard they go for making sure that we’re all included,” Williams says. “I’ve never had an issue where it’s like, ‘Hey, I need help with something!’ And they’re like, ‘Oh, we just can’t help you. We don’t even know where to tell you to go.’ Even if it’s something that they don’t do, they know what organization they partner with to ask.” Williams says RespectAbility empowers her to advocate and educate at Truce ������Ƶ.

So, while the Oscars are still struggling to show the representation of people with disabilities, especially disabled Black women like those on the Black Excellence panel, RespectAbility and its alumni are seeding the industry with information, access, and representation needed to ensure that diversity and inclusion continues to grow. Ensuring that the next Wright, Romeo, and Ellis see themselves in front of and behind a camera. And that they have access to the direct route to those careers.

“It is very concerning,” says Reid Maki, director of child labor issues and coordinator at the (CLC). Having worked on child labor protections for decades, Maki says he has seen the negative impacts of labor on childhood health and development, academic success, and socialization. “There are so many reasons that kids should not be allowed to work,” he says.

The International Labor Organization (ILO) as work that deprives children of their childhood, potential, and dignity; is harmful to their physical and mental development; and interferes with their schooling. Using similar definitions, organizations including the CLC and Human Rights Watch, in the U.S. and called on Congress to strengthen protections. Instead, the issue is intensifying. The U.S. Department of Labor’s wage and hour division recorded a in the number of minors employed in violation of federal law from 2021 to 2022. 

Current restrictions on child labor in the U.S. are outlined in the (FLSA), which contains significant loopholes allowing children as young as 10 years old to be hired as farmworkers, even on commercial farms. This means that in addition to children laboring in violation of federal law, hundreds of thousands more work legally in jobs that experts say are . Unlike the ILO, the U.S. labor department as “work below the minimum age for work, as established in national legislation,” thus shifting the focus away from child well-being and excluding child farmworkers in the U.S. , there are anywhere between 300,000 and 800,000 minor farmworkers in the U.S. today, including an unknown number employed in violation of the law.

The COVID-19 pandemic has . One ongoing study based on interviews with Latinx farmworker families in North Carolina has found that many children worked more during the pandemic to support their families, or even because they felt disengaged from school or bored and isolated at home. Several children have reported experiencing periods during which their families could not afford groceries, which increased the pressure they felt to work. “The pandemic made things worse for these families that already experienced many challenges,” says Taylor Arnold, a Ph.D. candidate studying public health education at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and the lead researcher on the study. The pandemic has had other widespread effects on the U.S. workforce, and claims of labor shortages are in growing numbers.

Rather than supporting families and protecting children from being forced onto the labor market, the recent Republican-led push would weaken protections in several states. According to the Minnesota Reformer, have either passed or introduced laws to roll back child labor protections.

Arnold says that interventions to combat this assault on child labor protections should focus on the root causes of child labor, including structural vulnerability and low wages. He also says that funding programs to support vulnerable populations, such as the , could mitigate some of the harms that child workers face. 

While there aren’t exact numbers, experts agree that in the U.S. are migrants or from migrant families. A recent revealed a “shadow work force” of migrant children working across industries in every state, many in hours-long shifts, sometimes overnight, with hazardous equipment and potent chemicals.

“These children are vulnerable to exploitation because they are on the margins, their families are on the margins, and they have very little access to public benefits or protections—legally or sustenance-wise,” says Mary Miller Flowers, director of policy and legislative affairs at the . 

Miller Flowers says ensuring respect for the best interests of migrant children begins with . “That starts at the border with our immigration policy, because whenever you exclude adults from seeking protection, you further vulnerabilize their children,” she says. The Young Center also supports expanding community-based and peer-led newcomer or that help migrant children and families access economic, social, and civic support without increasing surveillance or placing additional administrative burdens on families.

Ultimately, though, researchers, advocates, and other experts agree that bolstering federal legislation on child labor is the best way to prevent children from being forced into the workforce. It is also the surest way to protect kids in the face of Republican-led efforts to weaken restrictions on child labor in some states, because employers nationwide must follow federal employment law. 

A bill that would amend the FLSA to close loopholes allowing children employed in agriculture to work longer hours, at younger ages, and in more hazardous conditions than those in other industries has already been introduced in Congress multiple times, but each time has failed to reach a floor vote. The bill is called the Children’s Act for Responsible Employment and Farm Safety, or , and Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard, a California Democrat, has introduced it 10 times during her two-decade career.

Maki says the bill has failed to move forward because child labor is a stubborn partisan issue. “It is popular with progressive legislators, but it is not bipartisan.” Of the 10 bills’ cumulative 365 co-sponsors, only one has been a Republican. The bill in 2009, during the first year of the Obama administration. In 2011, the administration also proposed new rules that would have required children under age 16 to take a training course before operating most power-driven farm equipment, and would have banned those under 18 from working in feedlots, grain bins, and stockyards. But the proposal from right-wing lawmakers and agricultural lobbyists, and in the lead-up to the 2012 election. 

“Part of the challenge is that farmers have always had a wholesome image,” says Maki. “But the reality is that these are dangerous work environments.” According to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, for work-related child fatalities. From 2003 to 2016, 52 percent of work-related deaths recorded among minors in the U.S. occurred in agriculture.

Sara Quandt and Thomas Arcury, professors of family and community medicine at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, have been researching child workers for years. Arcury says the image of the small all-American family farm is little more than a myth. Most farmworkers labor on commercial farms. The pair have also studied that sell directly to consumers. “There is a lot of risk for them, and the injuries are notable,” says Quandt. 

Nonetheless, the idea of the wholesome family farm is potent and shapes federal legislation. Historian Betsy Wood, author of , says the family farm has been coming up in debates about child labor in the U.S. for more than a century. Beginning in the 1920s, while Northern reformers were intent on , Southern opponents were able to gain allies who were more concerned about government interference in family life. 

“The new battle broke down largely along urban-rural lines,” says Wood, as farm families across the rural U.S. bought into the fear that the planned amendment “was a surreptitious effort to interfere with parental rights.”

If that sounds familiar, it’s because the issue continues to break down along similar lines today, and opposition figures employ similar rhetoric. For example, recent legislation passed in Arkansas eliminating requirements for children to secure work permits before employment promises to “.”&�Բ�����;

To push the nation toward policy change, many organizations raise awareness within communities where these talking points hold sway. Julie Taylor is the executive director of the , a faith-based organization that supports farmworker organizing. One aspect of the group’s work is outreach, and Taylor says the issue of parental rights often arises. When talking about restrictions on child labor, she finds that many imagine children working a few hours after school in a safe environment rather than performing grueling agricultural labor. “We challenge those ideas and illustrate the realities that we hear through our farmworker partners,” she explains.

While current debates about child labor rehash century-old talking points, Wood says she also recognizes an alarming new trend. “Instead of just trying to prevent new regulations, these efforts are going on the offense to overturn existing protections,” she says. “It indicates a new confidence and ambition in deregulation efforts that we haven’t seen in many years.”

Those working to improve child labor protections agree the current situation is worrying, but they also hope that renewed attention to the issue could push the needle toward change. “We’re hoping that all of this attention will focus enough energy into the area that we will be able to enact protections,” says Maki. “There has been very little positive change in the last 20 years, and it’s long past time for protections to be enacted.”

Many climate justice activists are refusing to be limited by the “jobs or the environment” dichotomy.

“I grew up traveling 20 miles to gather water,” Alex continues. “That’s not fair, that my community is being sacrificed to power the valley here.”

In 1970, the Peabody Coal Company began mining on the reservation. Although tribal members were initially enthusiastic about the jobs the mine would provide, over time the relationship grew rocky. The company built a coal slurry pipeline that cut straight through the reservation and pumped billions of gallons of water from the Navajo Aquifer. Peabody mixed the water with coal and pumped the fluid mixture to a power plant in Nevada where the coal was burned to generate electricity for the nearby cities of Phoenix and Tucson, as well as other parts of the Southwest. But local people like Alex were left without access to water.

It’s a story echoed around the country: From the East Bay in California to the mountains of Appalachia, fossil fuel companies have drilled, burned, and mined their way into towns, cities, and rural areas—especially communities of color, as well as indigenous and low-income ones—disrupting the lives of people and damaging the environment.

But local residents have fought back. In 2001, Navajo and Hopi youth created the Black Mesa Water Coalition to stop the depletion of the Navajo Aquifer. They educated their peers and neighbors about the problem, and eventually persuaded the Navajo Tribal Council to cut off Peabody Coal’s access to the aquifer. That work, combined with a lawsuit that charged Peabody with violation of the Clean Air Act, helped to force the shutdown of the Black Mesa coal mine in 2005.

The problem with that outcome was that it left many residents of the reservation without jobs. About 300 Navajo and Hopi people had worked for Peabody, . Efforts by the Black Mesa Water Coalition and its allies to create green jobs through traditional livelihoods, like wool-making and farming, have made only a small dent in the unemployment rate, which hovers around 50 percent. Furthermore, the land where the coal mine had been is not suitable for living or farming.

“Our economic system is fundamentally opposed to a livable future.”

The story of Black Mesa illustrates a realization that is sweeping through the network of organizations, individuals, and coalitions working to fight global warming: While the burning of fossil fuels causes climate change, simply shutting down these industries leaves workers and their families behind, and often result in a familiar conflict over “jobs versus the environment.” That in turn prevents many workers and low-income groups from joining the fight against climate change—something movement leaders say they cannot afford.

The late Tony Mazzocchi, a labor leader with roots in the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers International Union, advocated the rejection of this dichotomy and called on environmentalists to lobby for what he deemed a “just transition” in situations when environmental policies eliminate jobs. As the Institute for Policy Studies’ Chuck Collins recently wrote in YES!, a just transition “would offer benefits far beyond the pitiful job retraining programs included in trade agreements like NAFTA.”

Now, many climate justice activists are picking up on Mazzocchi’s idea and refusing to be limited by the “jobs or the environment” dichotomy. Among them is Michelle Mascarenhas-Swan, co-director of the Movement Generation Justice & Ecology Project and co-chair of the Climate Justice Alliance. The alliance is a network of 35 organizations working at the intersection of job creation and environmental protection in places like Black Mesa, where residents have been resisting oil rigs, gas wells, and coal plants, in some cases for decades. These organizations create projects that provide stable livelihoods, protect fragile environments, and, ultimately, help speed the transition away from fossil fuels.

“The central solutions to address the climate crisis are not actually going to come from looking up and counting carbon in the atmosphere,” Mascarenhas-Swan said. “They are going to come from remaking the economy, which is the root of this struggle.”

“We need an economy that restores the health of our people and the health of our land.”

Few have thought more about just how to go about doing that than the 130 member organizations in the New Economy Coalition, which are a part of some would call the “new economy movement.” For many years, these groups have been buildingworker-owned cooperatives, land trusts, and community financial institutions, all designed to keep wealth local and provide good jobs. Eli Feghali, the coalition’s director of communications and online organizing, says that his members are starting to converge on the same vision as climate justice organizers.

“Folks have been imagining alternatives to capitalism for centuries,” Feghali said. “But a new context is emerging, the center of which is the climate crisis. Our economic system is fundamentally opposed to a livable future.”

Feghali says new economy groups can contribute to the push for a just transition by helping groups like the Black Mesa Water Coalition start worker-owned cooperatives and by lobbying for policies that support cooperative economies.

The new economy movement has some work to do in the way of diversity and representation of people of color and those from low-income areas, Feghali acknowledges. But, he says, “the good news is that these groups are already building alternatives and providing leadership.”

That leadership can been seen back in Arizona, where the Black Mesa Water Coalition is moving forward on a 1- to 5-megawatt solar power plant proposed for the site of the abandoned coal mine. And here’s where new economy ideas come in: The coalition hopes the facility will be owned and controlled by the Navajo people and will provide reliable jobs.

“We were once the battery for the Southwest [with our coal production],” said Roberto Nutlouis, the Black Mesa Water Coalition’s green economy coordinator. “Why not convert these reclaimed lands into something more sustainable and healthy for our community?”

The proposed project would use the money made from the utility-scale solar plant to create local reinvestment funds that would then support wool production and food sovereignty projects, whereas Peabody’s profits mostly benefitted faraway shareholders.

“There’s a deeper way of valuing things, beyond a capitalist way,” Nutlouis said. “We need an economy that restores the health of our people and the health of our land.”

If efforts like this work in Black Mesa, they could help to blaze a trail out of the climate crisis that workers can get behind.

Why don’t we have better images to tell the story of the new economy?

Both of our organizations tell stories about the new economy all the time. But key movement concepts like localism, shared wealth, and cooperation are hard to visualize. We found ourselves falling back on images of windmills, farmers markets, and community gardens.

Beautiful as those images can be—and as important as it is to tell those stories in their own right—none of them captured the incredible diversity of people and activities gathered under the umbrella of the new economy: Californians collaborating to take back their energy grids from corporate monopolies, employees becoming owners of the companies they work for, racial justice organizers building power to make #BlackLivesMatter in city budgets, and so much more.

We felt that the new economy deserved better art. It needed the color, characters, and style that have enriched grassroots struggles from Occupy to the immigrant-rights movement. Someone needed to pull out a pen brush (or stylus and mouse) and bring the new economy to life on paper or in pixels.

So in the lead-up to last fall’s “New Economy Week 2015: From Austerity to Prosperity,” we asked NEC’s members, YES! readers, and anyone else who was interested to describe in words what the new economy movement looked like to them. ������Ƶ than 80 ideas arrived, written by everyone from self-described “birth activists” to biofuels entrepreneurs.

To translate the words into images, we enlisted two artists. YES! Lead Designer Jennifer Luxton had already blazed a trail in illustrating the new economy with her art for Keith Harrington’s “Checkerboard Revolutionaries” series. And we’d both wanted for years to collaborate with Bay Area-based artist and cultural organizer Favianna Rodriguez after seeing her work illustrate and energize some of the 21st century’s most important movements.

After sifting through your concepts, here’s what we came up with:

Jennifer Luxton’s “Together We Thrive” combines two concepts. One came from self-described “cancer survivor, creative, and contextual learner” Karen Tomlonson, who riffed on the idea that “We are all one; what hurts or damages one hurts and damages all.” The other came from Deyanira Del Rio, co-director of the New York City-based New Economy Project. Del Rio wanted an image “conveying that the new economy is not about ‘projects’ existing alongside the current unjust system—but about working toward transformative change for all.”

Download the PDF (2.1 MB)

Favianna Rodriguez illustrated seminary student and radical librarian Pamela Kittredge’s vision of “caring for one another by sharing—ourselves [and] our resources.” Rodriguez worked from the prompt using images inspired by indigenous Latin American and African art. The tools, money, and musical instruments carried by the main character represent the new economy idea of opportunity for all.

On May 18, 2023, the National Labor Relations Board announced that balloted employees at the topless bar had  of joining the .

It makes Star Garden the first unionized strip club since the now-defunct . That 1996 union campaign was later the subject of the . 

Lusty Lady shut its doors in Seattle in 2010, and three years later in San Francisco, making Star Garden if not the first then at present the only unionized strip club. But given the high-profile nature of the campaign—and the impact of union drives among young staff elsewhere— that there is a high chance that Star Garden won’t be the last strip joint to unionize.

Rusty Nails and Broken Glass

Star Garden is the latest in a string of organizing breakthroughs. In 2022, 2,510 petitions for union representation were filed with National Labor Relations Board elections—a . And petitions for union elections have continued to increase in 2023. 

Just as at Star Garden, many of the recent union victories have occurred in workplaces that previously seemed resistant to labor drives. Starbucks, Amazon, Trader Joe’s, Apple retail stores, REI, Ben & Jerry’s, Chipotle, and Barnes & Noble are among the big-name companies that have seen staff unionize for the first time since workers voted to unionize at Starbucks in Buffalo in December 2021. And evidence suggests that a successful union drive leads to more. Workers at  have now voted to unionize, and their efforts have inspired young workers throughout the low-wage service sector. 

But in other crucial ways their campaign chimes with that of the other new union drives than have occurred recently in the United States. Star Garden employs the same kind of young, self-assured workers that have contributed to the dynamism of union campaigns at Starbucks, Trader Joe’s, and others. Most of the dancers are in their 20s and 30s, and they have proved assured spokespeople for the union during  in traditional and social media.

Youth-driven Campaigns

In contrast to past generations of union drives, it is young employees that are spearheading the new push for unions. And they are doing so independently, with . The Star Garden workers self-organized and repeatedly pressured management to act on their concerns before .

������Ƶover, the issues cited by Star Garden workers as evidence of a need for union protection—sexual harassment by customers, unresponsive management, and an unsafe working environment—are in many respects just more extreme versions  that have driven many retail and food-service-sector workers to mobilize.

Anti-union Tactics

In common with workers at Starbucks, REI, and Trader Joe’s, the Star Garden dancers concluded that having a union and collective bargaining was the surest way to remedy such problems. 

And like many of those other workforces, the Star Garden strippers faced a long battle against management to achieve that goal.

The organizing campaign  as a result of company’s efforts to fight worker organizing and then prevent a union vote. 

Workers voted in a National Labor Relations Board election in November 2022, but management opposition prevented the labor board from counting the ballots until last week. Among other tactics, the owners of Star Garden are  against workers for protesting an unsafe working environment, and claimed that the workers were independent contractors, not employees. Employers also —an act that can void a union contract.

But the anti-union tactics failed. When the ballots were eventually counted, they showed that workers had voted unanimously for union recognition. In common with campaigns at Starbucks and elsewhere, the success at Star Garden suggests that traditional  may be . 

There is another common theme in the rash of union breakthroughs in recent years: They have generated headlines.

Star Garden may not have the big-name appeal to media outlets of, say, Starbucks or Amazon. But the nature of the business involved lends itself to widespread media and social coverage. In short, “strippers’ unionize”    .

The high profile of this and other drives is an important part of the story. Widespread social media and traditional news coverage can  among other young workforces. It conveys to employees that organizing is something they can do, not just something they read about.

Time for a New Corporate Strategy?

There is also a takeaway from union drives by Star Garden strippers and other workers for corporations: The public may be tiring of old-style anti-union tactics, and it may be in their interests to work with employees seeking to unionize.

As Lilith, one of the Star Garden dancers, : “A union strip club is going to be a novelty in the United States. It will have customers from all over. … I think if both parties come to negotiate in good faith, we can create a really successful business together.”

From my perspective, it does prompt the question of whether it is time for company bosses to embrace unions. With —and a much higher proportion of young workers—companies like Star Garden, Starbucks, and REI could potentially benefit from marketing themselves as “good employers” who respect their workers’ right to choose a union. 

Vermont-based Ben & Jerry’s is one such company seemingly taking that approach. In January, it became the  the Starbucks Workers United-initiated “Fair Election Principles,” which would guarantee workers a free and fair choice to unionize. The union recognition process at Ben & Jerry’s is . 

Star Garden may be the country’s only unionized topless bar. But it is part of a wider trend that is influencing attitudes toward mobilizing in young workforces across the country—from servers to ice-cream scoopers and now strippers.

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

“I like the puzzle-solving and being able to look back at the end of the day and see the physical result of your hard work,” she says.

This made it easier to bear some of the indignities—“subtle challenges,” she calls them—of working in an overwhelmingly male field. “Little stuff, like people walking by you to find the boss on the job”—not realizing she was the boss—or having tools and ladders taken out of her hands by pushy colleagues. “I call it roostering,” she says. 

Saxton, who now works at the California nonprofit GRID Alternatives, thinks she had it pretty easy compared to other women in her field. She’s heard horror stories about threatening notes left in lockers, tools being stolen and destroyed—“even people getting their hard hats peed in,” she says.

The trades in general and electrical work specifically are . Only 2% of electricians are women, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). It’s also a sector facing a as the country looks to transition away from fossil fuels and toward electrifying cars and buildings. 

According to Rewiring America, an electrification nonprofit, the United States will need to make updates like installing solar panels, heat pumps, and electric-vehicle charging stations to help the country meet its . 

Getting more women working as electricians would help resolve a crucial labor shortage, but it could also help close the gender wage gap.

That is a lot of job opportunities for something so badly needed. As author and journalist Bill McKibben put it in an with the New York Times: “If you know a young person who wants to do something that’s going to help the world and wants to make a good living at the same time, tell them to go become an electrician.”

Getting more women working as electricians would help resolve a crucial labor shortage, but it could also help close the . In 2021 the median annual pay for an electrician was just over $60,000, compared to around $45,000 for all occupations, . But some master electricians six-figure salaries.

“There are 80,000 openings for electricians each year on average over the next decade just to replace workers who either retire or transition to different jobs,” says Sam Calisch, Rewiring America’s head of research. “That is all before the IRA”—the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden’s signature climate bill, which is expected to increase demand for electricians by creating incentives for Americans to electrify their homes and buy electric vehicles. 

Experts point to a lack of investment in technical schools and a culture that emphasizes four-year college degrees as the main path to a successful career as a couple of reasons there aren’t enough electricians to meet demand. “We don’t do a good job marketing ourselves as an industry in general, but particularly with women,” says Allie Perez, a plumber and founder of Texas Women in Trades.

Perez, who has an eight-year-old daughter, founded Texas Women in Trades in 2013 because she was tired of being the only “young, Brown woman” in most professional settings. She also wanted to help connect more young women like herself with well-paid jobs that they might not have envisioned for themselves. “We don’t share [enough] stories of women in the trades to show that they are also moms, daughters, friends, and cousins and that they are able to support their families on this kind of work.”

Barriers to more women in the industry include widespread , lack of visibility, exclusionary unions, childcare, and a lack of support for caregivers.

“That relationship-based, white male network—hiring, retaining and training people and keeping people on the core crew from project to project—is the culture at most construction companies,” says Connie Ashbrook, a retired construction worker and co-chair of the National Taskforce on Tradeswomen’s Issues. “If you’re not friends with the boss, or if you’re not friends with significant numbers of your co-workers, then you don’t get to hear about the jobs.”

In 2009, Ashbrook was part of a successful effort to convince state officials to invest $2 million in diversifying its highway-construction workforce. Funds went toward pre-apprenticeship programs and supportive services, like childcare and human resources. Though gains in hiring more women were modest, a 2022 report on the initiative . 

“This is the highest-paid blue-collar work you can get without a college degree,” Ashbrook says. “Not having access to these careers keeps women in poverty.”

Nontraditional Employment for Women (NEW), an organization in New York that trains and places women, transgender, and nonbinary people in the skilled construction, utility, and maintenance trades, offers wraparound services as a way to retain recruits.

“Most childcare is set up to be very nine-to-five supportive,” says Kate Krug, the organization’s executive vice president “If you have to be out the door by 5 a.m., you have to pay someone to sit with your kids until it’s time to go to school.”

At NEW, students have program managers who make sure, among other things, they’re ready for job interviews. “[That means asking], do you have childcare? Do you need childcare? Do you have a backup to your childcare? Do you have backup to the backup of your childcare?” she says.

Tonya Hicks, who grew up in public housing in Mississippi, had to overcome discrimination on the basis of her gender and race—she is Black—in her quest to become an electrician. (Only about 7% of electricians are Black, according to BLS data). 

“Women and minorities have been of the unions,” she says. “It began as racism, and then just as time goes on, you know, people hire who they know.”&�Բ�����;

As an apprentice, Hicks was often relegated to cleaning the on-site office trailers. When she struggled to find work locally, she drove from her home in Meridian, Mississippi, to sites in Jackson and Birmingham, leaving her young son with her mother for stretches at a time.

Her endurance paid off: In 2000, at age 28, she started her own firm, Power Solutions, in Atlanta. Today she has a staff of nine that specialize in renewable energy projects and home retrofits, and starting last year began manufacturing electric vehicle chargers. She also runs Women Do Everything, a networking group for women in the STEM fields and blue-collar, male-dominated industries like hers.

GRID Alternatives, where Saxton works, recruits and offers women-only trainings. “That may encourage people who would otherwise perhaps be intimidated or just scared to try it,” Saxton says. “At the same time, we need men to be mentors and to support women.”

The Biden administration has a commitment to getting more women into the trades; in November, plans were announced to the number of women working in the construction industry over the next 10 years. 

The IRA climate legislation offers tax incentives for contractors to hire apprentices—something experts say could help reduce women’s higher from apprenticeship programs—and Biden administration officials have “signaled that projects that include efforts to provide good jobs to workers, diversify their workforces, and provide training will score higher in evaluations,” making it more likely that they will be awarded contracts, says Marina Zhavoronkova, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

“As government agencies, you have strings, you can pull it in a way that you don’t when it’s a fully private-sector project,” Zhavoronkova says.

In February, the program office connected to the —legislation designed to boost the semiconductor industry in the U.S.—released its , which stipulates that all applicants hoping to receive more than $150 million dollars must submit a plan to provide access to childcare for workers.

Hicks, the founder of Power Solutions, compared the task of transitioning the economy away from fossil fuels to the labor shortages during World War II, when millions of women took jobs in factories. Of course, after the war, many women returned to their homes. “The only difference now is that we’re not going back,” she says.

This story originally appeared in , an editorially independent, nonprofit news service covering climate change. Follow .

Six years ago, the global economy nearly collapsed. Now big corporations and the wealthy are recovering well. But that’s not the case for the vast majority of Americans: according to , the richest 7 percent gained $5.6 trillion net assets from 2009 to 2011, while the remaining 93 percent lost a combined total of $669 billion.

Americans are not content with this state of affairs. According to a (pdf), 62 percent believe the dominant economic system favors the powerful, while 78 percent believe too much power is concentrated in the hands of a few large companies.

This enormous economic divide is just one reason people are losing patience with the corporate economy—and why many are turning to initiatives that build a new economy. Grassroots groups, local entrepreneurs and broad-based coalitions are building the foundations of an economy that distributes economic benefits widely and minimizes damage to the environment.

Here are six big shifts:

1. Local food grows everywhere

Local food, once a tiny niche market, has gone mainstream. The growing, processing, and marketing of local foods is booming—not just on the crunchy west coast, but also in in the eastern U.S.; in , Michigan; and towns and cities throughout the country.

Via farmers markets and direct purchases from growers, the food travels quickly from farm to table, keeping it fresh and nutritious.

Avoiding red meat and dairy may be a more important way to avoid contributing to the climate crisis than eating local, and . Still, a local diet does , support local jobs, and connect people to their neighbors and local environment.

2. ������Ƶ workers own their jobs

Worker-owned co-ops have been spreading, particularly since the recession. While , they also can help keep good jobs stable and keep money in the community.

In the Bronx in New York City, the 2,300 employees who work at get better pay, more job security, and more training for career advancement than their counterparts at competing firms. ������Ƶ than 1,000 of them are owners in the company, and 90 percent are women of color.

In Chicago, workers at a manufacturing plant who were laid off when the plant was shut down bought out the factory and now operate it as .

The most famous example of worker ownership, however, is the in the Basque region of Spain, which has more than 70,000 worker-owners in more than 200 enterprises. Labor unions and community activists in the United States are beginning to emulate Mondragon’s success, especially in hard-hit rust belt regions.

3. The economy goes DIY

Maker, DIY, and sharing culture is blossoming. Young people especially are repurposing old clothes into fashionable art, making art bicycles, building tiny houses and writing open source software.

While some peer-to-peer platforms, such as and Airbnb, have raised controversy, some people are truly sharing—not for money. Online platforms like�� let people share their homes with travelers. Others have started where you pay not for your own meal, but for the person behind you in the line.

An ethic of reuse and no waste, a bias for local and small-scale, and a preference for generosity make this a particularly creative space in the emerging new economy.

4. Money grows more responsible

Shortly after the recession, millions of people shifted their accounts from too-big-to-fail banks to community banks and credit unions. Now some are going further. Campaigners in 22 states aim to open government-owned banks at the state, county or municipal level to finance local economies and keep profits nearby.

The latest trend, in light of the threat of climate disruption, is to divest from holdings in coal, oil, and gas companies. To date, more than 800 global investors have pledged to divest over $50 billion. Redirecting assets from big corporations and Wall Street to sustainable local enterprises is providing investment capital needed to fuel the new economy.

5. Some homes stay affordable

In the wake of the financial meltdown and the collapse of the housing bubble, millions of Americans lost their number-one asset: their homes. Low-income people and communities of color were particularly hard hit.

But the small percentage of people living in had a very different experience. Their homes are affordable by design and foreclosure rates were one-tenth of the national level. This success is causing cities and advocates for the poor elsewhere to look at this as a model of permanently affordable housing.

Keeping basic necessities, like our homes, out of the speculative market helps stabilize the economy and averts the disruption and impoverishment that results from predatory real estate and lending practices.

6. Innovation emerges to protect our resources

Some of our society’s most precious resources belong to all of us. These common assets include fresh water, the Internet, green spaces in our cities, and the storehouse of knowledge we inherit from previous generations.

The new economy draws on the wealth of these and other commons, but does so in a way that neither depletes them nor excludes others. That means protecting water quality, keeping the Internet open, protecting the stability of the climate, and ensuring access to a good education—for ourselves and for those not yet born.

The new economy emerging from these initiatives is not a new ideology or a utopian mirage. It’s built on grassroots-led, pragmatic actions that people around the U.S. and around the world are taking to create widely shared, sustainable prosperity.

Television has been experiencing a boom in the United States, the likes of which has never been seen before. Just before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, there were  that were broadcast or streamed the year before—an all-time high. In 2022, there were . In fact, according to FX Network Research, since 2012 there has been a  in the number of scripted shows, except for a small dip due to the lockdown-related production halt in 2020.

These new heights in television production can be attributed largely to streaming services such as —a company that has been offering tantalizing on-screen fiction for the past decade, since House of Cards first debuted as an exclusively streaming show on the platform. But the primacy of streaming is also the  why TV writers are now threatening to go on strike. For years, streaming services have slashed residual payments, which writers rely on, prompting the  to vote to strike.

The turnout for the WGA vote strike, which took place on April 17, broke records, with nearly 80% of the union’s members casting ballots. Of that number, nearly 98% voted to strike. These numbers are , the last time WGA members voted to strike and actually carried out their threat (). The union, which represents more than 11,000 writers, has the potential to bring the TV industry to a  if negotiations with media companies, represented by the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), break down by May 1, the last day of WGA’s current contract.

Three major unions dominate Hollywood’s television industry, representing writers, directors, and actors: the WGA, the  (DGA), and the , respectively. Both  and  will also start negotiations shortly with the AMPTP, ahead of their contracts ending on June 30. There is potential for multiple overlapping strikes in the coming months, leaving Hollywood’s television industry on edge, even as most of the nation enjoys the fruits of its work, blissfully unaware of the tensions brewing between creators and corporate producers.

The stakes are high. Already  is boasting that it can rely on foreign labor to weather a potential WGA strike. The company’s co-CEO Ted Sarandos said a day after the strike authorization vote that if writers went on strike, Netflix had “a large base of upcoming shows and films from around the world,” adding, “We could probably serve our members better than most.” Networks are also  in preparation for a potential writers’ strike.

TV producers hold massive financial power in an industry whose cultural influence sweeps across the world. While writers, directors, and actors are the ones whose creativity powers the direction of new, innovative content, their bosses—executives at Netflix, Hulu, HBO Max, and Disney—have driven down the costs of labor to maximize profits.

Residuals, which are extra payments made to creative workers each time their shows re-air, used to provide stable incomes for TV workers in between jobs. Streaming services negotiated  years ago when they were minor players within the TV landscape. Now, although they dominate the scene, streaming producers are continuing to pay their workers insultingly low residuals. Worse, many creators are finding that platforms will  in order to get a tax write-off and avoid having to pay them.

TV producers are also cutting costs by canceling shows abruptly—a move that could disproportionately impact diversity on-screen. Television is one of the world’s most powerful narrative-setting industries, influencing culture in ways that can determine day-to-day policies. According to , “For many Americans, it was television shows that gave them their first images of same-sex couples, and a chance to recognize the commonalities with their own lives.” This in turn helped lay the foundation for the legalization of same-sex marriage within years.

Television has the potential to do the same for racial justice issues. According to the latest , “people of color have made tremendous advances among broadcast, cable, and digital leads in recent years,” and “Black and multiracial persons exceeded proportionate representation among leads in 2020–21 for cable and digital scripted shows.” Still, the report concludes that there is not enough parity overall.

Now, in search of profits, TV producers are cutting costs by canceling already greenlighted projects. “[T]he streaming explosion has lost steam,” declared . TV networks and streaming platforms ordered  in the second half of last year compared to the year before. John Landgraf, chairman of FX Networks, who is credited with coining the term “Peak TV,”  that cost cutting will impact the representation of racially diverse communities.

It appears as though, in addition to using foreign-sourced projects and stockpiling scripts as leverage, TV’s corporate executives plan to approach union negotiations by touting the notion that television output is peaking, and therefore costs such as baseline pay and residuals cannot be increased.

Yet media companies have enough money to buy one another, spending billions on mergers and acquisitions. A year ago,  for $8.5 billion; and Warner Brothers, which owned HBO Max,  to the tune of $43 billion. Earlier this year, Showtime announced a  with Paramount+. Predictably, these companies are announcing  to their workforce to pay for such consolidations.

But workers still have leverage. David Slack, a WGA union member and a writer and consulting producer on Magnum P.I., told the , “The power to withhold our labor is the only tool we have to get the studios to pay us what’s fair.” He added, “Our products are the foundation for all the billions of dollars of revenue that these entertainment companies generate, and we need to be compensated for that.”&�Բ�����;Los Angeles Times columnist  distilled the dynamic succinctly: “If studios and platforms want to be in the original scripted content business, they need to make that business work for the people writing those scripts. It’s that simple.”

The , it lasted a whopping 100 days and cost the economy of Los Angeles more than $2 billion. If writers go on a prolonged strike, there will be a ripple effect, putting actors and directors out of work as well. There can be no scripted television if no one is writing the scripts.

This article was produced by , a project of the Independent ������Ƶ Institute.Categories

We’re putting forward five pressing challenges that stand between us and tomorrow’s economy and inviting New Economy Coalition member organizations, community leaders, researchers—and you!—to respond to them.

Each day, we’ll publish original content—from interviews and stories in traditional publications to Twitter chats and live YouTube panels. Find some of it here, and more at . We’ll also bring you online events that grapple with these issues and highlight work being done to build the new economy in communities across the world.

Day 1:

Our work is a fundamental part of who we are and what we hope to achieve. Whether performed for a wage, for a salary, as a small business, or in direct support of loved ones, work takes up a majority of our adult lives. However, corporate power, austerity, and other factors have made well-paid work difficult to come by and left many unemployed or in unstable jobs with less control over their own lives.

Working people have fought back in a wide variety of ways—from the #FightFor15 to global campaigns for a universal basic income—but they still face a deteriorating situation.

��On this day we ask: “What are the strategies and policies to create an economy that guarantees good work and meaningful opportunity for all?”

What If We Owned the Internet Together? It’s Time to Bring the Co-op Revolution to the Web
The flourishing of farmers markets and credit unions demonstrates a longing for business that serves the common good. Can it infiltrate the Amazon-dominated, Uberized Internet?��

Day 2:

The economy we know today is founded on the theft of indigenous lands and lives, slavery, and colonialism.

This legacy lives with us in many ways including an entrenched racial wealth gap that leaves black and brown communities without basic economic security and a growing prison economy that profits off the misery of those same communities. In this moment of visionary leadership and resistance from communities of color, we ask:

“What are the economic tools and strategies that will dismantle systemic racism and move us closer to collective liberation?”

Baltimore After the Uprising: 3 Trends Building a Fairer, Safer, Stronger Economy
Because structural problems need structural solutions.

��

What Would Reparations for African-Americans Actually Look Like?

Ta-Nehisi Coates focused national attention on the reparations debate, but the discussion has since focused largely on police violence. Organizer Ed Whitfield on what comes next.

After Ferguson Uprising, Should St. Louis Spend $1 Billion on a Football Stadium?

Just a year and a half after the St. Louis area became internationally known for racism, the city is considering building a billion-dollar stadium. If justice was our priority, says organizer Julia Ho, those tax dollars would be spent very differently.

Day 3:

confirms what most of us in the US already knew: Congress overwhelmingly makes decisions with no regard for the preferences of the American People, especially when those preferences clash with the interests of wealthy elites.

The financial crisis of 2008 exposed this failure of leadership on a global scale, and led many into the streets to reclaim their democratic voice. In recent years we’ve seen waves of popular uprisings from Wisconsin and Wall Street to Greece, Spain, and beyond.

These revolts are increasingly impossible to ignore–even by the 1 percent and the politicians they bankroll. The resurgence of populist politics, calls for electoral reform, the growth of worker-owned cooperatives, and other efforts at bottom-up democracy are all changing the face of politics in 2015.

On this day we ask: “How can we advance democracy and self-determination on the issues that impact our lives?”

7 Paths to Development That Bring Neighborhoods Wealth, Not Gentrification
The plan to build better, more connected, flourishing communities is here—and it won’t require putting a Starbucks on every block.

Borrow, Save, Share: 3 Ways Seeds Can Democratize Our Food SystemJust six companies control 63 percent of the commercial seed market. But seed libraries offer us an opportunity to reclaim the seed commons and create our own community food systems.

Acts of Collective Imagination: Notes From the Chief Policy Wonk at America’s Department of Arts and Culture

What if we gave everyone a universal basic income, and studied the adverse impacts of development before razing neighborhoods? The policy agenda of a national network you didn’t know existed.

Day 4:

Over the past several decades, it has become increasingly clear that our grow-or-die, corporate economy is a root cause of the climate crisis.

While our political leaders delay taking meaningful action on climate, people’s movements have sprung up around the world. Many have promoted community-led solutions and rallied around demands for climate justice, based on the understanding that climate change is disproportionately caused by elites and disproportionately threatens those of us who are already economically vulnerable.

On this day we ask, “What are the policies, campaigns, and grassroots initiatives that can address the magnitude of the climate crisis while building shared prosperity?”

3 Ways the TPP Will Hurt the Climate—If We Let It Pass

The next big trade deal is poised for a congressional vote in 2016. Here’s what that means for the planet.

��

Energy Democracy: Inside Californians’ Game-Changing Plan for Community-Owned Power

Large utility companies control about 75 percent of the electricity market in California. A hybrid between a public agency and private utility, the new Community Choice program is a model for communities that want greener, cheaper energy.

��

Day 5:

Health care, access to education, (healthy) food, water, a stable and safe home, time to spend with our families and friends—these are some of the basic needs that we all share, and that are increasingly falling out of reach for the majority of working people.

While organized elites try to convince us that we’re broke and that privatization is the only solution, we know better. We know that even on our finite planet there’s more than enough to go around if we change our priorities and demand a different economy for ourselves and our children.

On this day we ask “How can we claim access and control over what we need to live full and prosperous lives?”

After Decades in a Food Desert, These Neighbors Are Building a $2 Million Co-op—And They Own It

For 20 years, the residents of this mostly African-American Greensboro community had nowhere to shop for food. They tried to attract a big-box grocery store; when that didn’t work, they started their own.

]]> /economy/2023/05/01/uninsured-rate-pandemic Mon, 01 May 2023 17:36:29 +0000 /?post_type=article&p=109339 The rate of people without health insurance reached an all-time low of 8% in early 2022 as the American Rescue Plan provided subsidies that lowered premiums and created an easier path for enrollment in Medicaid.

This infographic is part of a special report.��.

His experimentation made it to the menu.

And like his burgers, Lontoc is the first of a kind in a different sense. Thank Que Grill is one of the inaugural vendors at the Ashland Market and Cafe, a community-based, 2,100-square-foot food hall in the San Francisco Bay Area that had its grand opening in March 2019.

“I’ve been waiting for this for four years,” Lontoc said, as he moved patties from the fire onto a rack inside the grill.

Lontoc had the idea for his business after he was injured on the job while working as an instructor for the American Red Cross. He couldn’t return to work but he “started thinking on ‘how am I going to provide for my family?’ and this came about.”

He used recipes from his late grandmother as foundation for his menu and enlisted help from his aunts, who’d learned to cook from their mother. Before being chosen as a vendor at the Ashland Market and Cafe, he catered for events at a local university and cooked out of a commercial kitchen down the street from Thank Que Grill’s new home.

The market-cafe hybrid, at the intersection of East 14th Street and 164th Avenue, is an effort to build both health and monetary wealth in Ashland, an unincorporated section of Alameda County. In Ashland, the ��from 2013 to 2017 was $50,966 and the unemployment rate was 9.4 percent, according to Census data. Fresh produce and other healthy food options also are harder to obtain than they are in wealthier neighborhoods.

“I just want to be a strong provider for the community,” said Latoya Bryant, co-owner of Jacquelynn’s Heart and Soul, another vendor in the new market. “In this community in Ashland, we’re in need of a lot of things, such as good food that you don’t have to go far out for.”

The food hall doubles as an incubator for the businesses. The current vendors have one-year leases with the option to extend, but the hope is that each one is “so successful that they need their own brick and mortar, that the kiosk spaces are not big enough for what they’re wanting to do,” said Mariela Cedeño, interim executive director at Mandela Partners, a nonprofit that was pivotal in bringing the market to fruition.

There were plans to open the market ,��but construction and budget delays pushed back the date. Cedeño said this gave Mandela Partners and its partner organizations such as Resources for Community Development, an affordable housing developer, and the Alameda County Economic Development Agency time to get more input from Ashland residents about the market’s eventual form.

Originally, the space was going to be more like a grocery store, but once local residents voiced concerns over competition with an existing grocer across the street, plans changed. People wanted more access to healthy food, and they also wanted economic opportunity. The idea for a food business incubator garnered the most interest and support.

From there, a 12-member community advisory committee, made up of Ashland residents, started choosing the vendors. There were 13 initial vendor candidates presenting their plans to the group. The committee chose four.

Between then and the grand opening, the newly selected vendors attended workshops on business planning and menu development, and received one-on-one advising from Mandela Partners. The vendors also tested and refined their products at locations across the Bay Area, such as the Oakland Jack London Square Farmer’s Market, which is run by the Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture.

The Ashland Market and Cafe was the dream of Dana Harvey, Mandela Partners’ founder, who died just days before the grand opening. A framed photo of her hangs on a wall in the new market.

Mandela Partners has incubated successful businesses before. Down the street from the nonprofit’s office, there’s Mandela Grocery, which started a decade ago and is now a fully independent worker-owner store that is planning to launch its own food incubator this year.

Like the worker-owners at Mandela Grocery, each of the Ashland vendors were already embedded in the community. At the grand opening, Bryant pointed behind her.

“I live about three blocks from here,” she said. “I live very close. Very, very close.”

And fellow vendor LaShawn Raybon, owner of the anchor I AM Cafe, lives about 3 miles away. Raybon first sold her food at the Bay Area Black Market and eventually started to cater under the company name Cakes by the Pound.

She says when we first learned about the opportunity with the Ashland Market and Cafe, she put her hat in the ring because someone encouraged her to, but she wasn’t sure if anything would come of it.

Now, Raybon has the largest space in the market. She says that she eventually wants to extend this opportunity by hiring other community members, namely mothers who are returning home after being incarcerated.

And she’s working hard to achieve that goal—and others—a reality without taking out any loans for the business, instead working two other jobs to fund her space, tools, and ingredients. Before the grand opening, she worked a graveyard shift.

“I’m working hard now so I can play hard later,” she said.

Updated April 22, 2019: The name of the Oakland Jack London Square Farmer’s Market was corrected.

“I wasn’t able to show up as my complete self,” Fenall said, referring to her struggle to integrate into the workforce. “And I made an assumption that other people were probably encountering the same thing, of having all of these different identities that make up a whole person but not being able to show up as that whole person because of embarrassment or judgment.”

Fenall realized she had the potential to become a business owner and to hire others struggling to secure steady work. But she lacked the capital necessary to get started. The San Francisco Bay Area has the ��of all large metropolitan areas in the U.S. The ��of a single-family home in San Francisco sits at nearly $1.6 million, while the ��is $3,500—the highest in the world.

But this year, Fenall launched her delivery service, Piikup, with the assistance of a loan from the Runway Project Oakland, a nonprofit incubator that provides funding and a support network for Black entrepreneurs looking to launch and sustain successful businesses.

The Runway Project offers small business owners five-year, collateral-free loans of up to $25,000. For the first 18 to 24 months, depending on the size of the loan, repayments are interest-only at 4 percent. This is so that borrowers can build a steady stream of revenue during the initial startup period. Payments increase to include the principal afterward, when a company would be generating more revenue. There are no penalties for paying off loans early.

Runway Project founder Jessica Norwood describes the initiative as a response to generations of racist policies, such as redlining and housing discrimination, that has deprived Black communities of the wealth collectively maintained by White people.

In the 2017 researchers from the Institute for Policy Studies predicted that if the racial wealth divide remains unaddressed, Black household wealth—defined as the sum of one’s financial assets rather than income—will fall to zero by 2053, while White household wealth is projected to rise to $137,000 by that same year. The current median net worth of White families is more than 12 times higher than that of Black families, and that disparity widens by nearly 69 times when durable goods such as electronics, cars, and furniture are removed from the picture.

“When you see those numbers, you realize in short order that [Black people] don’t have the kind of friends and family that can put capital into their businesses,” Norwood said. “It starts to create this narrative that Black businesses aren’t as strong competitively as other businesses and that the entrepreneurs aren’t prepared enough.”

Business owners typically lean on a network of family and friends for startup capital.

One essential detail often left out of the entrepreneurial narrative, Norwood says, is that business owners typically lean on a network of family and friends for startup capital. That financial support system isn’t as readily available to Black entrepreneurs as it is to groups with more collective wealth.

The Runway Project, which was founded in 2016, has now loaned to a dozen business owners—ranging from chefs to web designers—for its pilot program. The project spent its first year raising philanthropic donations and investments, many of which were made in the form of $500-minimum certificates of deposit opened with Self-Help Federal Credit Union, a community development financial institution.

CDFIs are private financial institutions that provide affordable lending to underserved and low-wealth communities. Self-Help’s client base is 75 percent people of color with a significant portion living below the poverty line, according to investment associate Annie McShiras. CDs for the Runway Project mature after five years, earning between 1.8 and 2.6 percent interest. The deposits’ principal goes toward the Runway Project’s loans for business owners.

Though the lending protocol for the Runway Project outwardly mirrors that of applying for a standard bank loan, borrowers’ credit ratings have no bearing on their eligibility for a loan. Defaulted loans are not reported to the credit bureaus and all losses are recovered from Runway’s collateral fund. This way, Runway’s borrowers don’t have to put up their own assets as collateral.

“That allows for an entrepreneur to be the great entrepreneur that they can be without that being involved in all of this,” Norwood explained. “There’s already a lot of trauma inside of not being able to repay something in general, and it isn’t the way we’d like to be in community with folks.”

About 80 percent of Black business owners��reported a lack of financial resources as the number one challenge to successfully launching and operating a business.

Kate Poole, a 31-year-old investment adviser and early Runway Project donor, got into local investing work a decade ago after inheriting wealth. She, along with a , is aiming to redistribute the top 1 percent of wealth by putting��capital into organizations working toward economic justice.

“At first, I was just divesting from mining companies or Exxon and these other extractive industries,” she said. “I thought I had it figured out that I was going to move my money off of Wall Street and onto Main Street.” But then, after she attended a Resource Generation conference,��Poole said,��she “started thinking about the history of wealth accumulation with a reparations lens and what might be owed to communities that wealth has been extracted from.”

Poole and her business partner recently opened Chordata Capital, an investment advisory firm that works with people who want to explicitly invest in racially and economically conscious enterprises. The enthusiasm to start such investment portfolios exists, Poole said, but many wealthy people need guidance regarding how and where to make the biggest impact. For her, supporting initiatives that place capital directly into the hands of those who need it is pivotal.

About 80 percent of ��by Guidant Financial in 2017 reported a lack of financial resources as the No. 1 challenge to successfully launching and operating a business. Runway Project organizers are looking to expand the program into four more markets within the next year, while continuing to fund Oakland: Chicago, the Washington, D.C., metro area, Atlanta, and Memphis.

After being denied loans by four banks, Ariana Marbley, 33, almost gave up on her dream of opening Esscents of Flowers, a mobile floral retailer.

“It felt like the business was going to fail,” Marbley said. “I got into a little bit of a funk and just felt like maybe it’s not meant to work.”

“The fact that I’m Black and doing business in a predominately White neighborhood, I feel that. It’s just a part of being there.”

Before the Runway Project, Marbley and several other Runway participants worked on business plans and marketing strategies with Uptima Business Bootcamp, an Oakland based mentorship network for up-and-coming entrepreneurs. Though it was clear that she had a good shot at finally getting the support she needed, the prospect of actually becoming a business owner was intimidating.

“It took me until the deadline of the application to turn it in because I was afraid that it could actually work—like this could actually become a thing,” Marbley said. “As an entrepreneur, you feel like you’re alone a lot of times. You’re faced with making all of the big decisions with your business, and they’re just there to remind you that you don’t have to do it by yourself.”

But while the Runway Project has cultivated a strong sense of camaraderie and support within its network, entrepreneur and Runway Project borrower Vicktor Stevenson says there are still some outside challenges. Mere days after opening his craft lemonade stand Gourmonade in San Francisco in the summer of 2018, ��as he tended to the store’s security system. Someone in the neighborhood had erroneously reported a burglary.

“The fact that I’m Black and doing business in a predominately White neighborhood, I feel that. It’s just a part of being there,” Stevenson said. “There are a ton of people that don’t like the fact that I’m there but that’s just going to have to be their problem.”

He also added that he knows other Black entrepreneurs who avoid publicly associating themselves with their businesses, lest they alienate clients. Furthermore, Stevenson frequently contends with purportedly would-be customers criticizing his prices.

“The same people that walk on by my $8 lemonade stand will go down the street and pay $20 for a salad,” Stevenson said. “So the money’s not the issue—it’s whatever they believe in.”

But notwithstanding the naysayers, Stevenson has remained focused on building Gourmonade up to its full potential. Now that the logistics to getting started are out of the way, he’s looking into ways to maximize the business’s social impact on the surrounding community.

“You know how people are like, ‘Oh, let’s raise money for the dolphins?’ I want to raise money for kids in the neighborhood. Especially the children of families that have been affected by police brutality.”

Mabry, the city’s historic preservation officer from 2007 to 2017, saw urban sprawl take over the city in the first 20 years he lived in Tucson. In the last 10 years, however, that trend has slowed down, and the focus has shifted to the revitalization of the city’s downtown rather than the expansion of its suburban areas.

Tucson used to be a casualty of those midcentury trends of downtown abandonment and blight. Vacant storefronts and shabby buildings lined Congress Street, the hub for most of the city’s downtown activity. There were only a few restaurants and bars, and those buildings in active use consisted predominately of offices.

“At 5 o’clock when all the office workers went home, our downtown became a ghost town,” Mabry said.

The real transformation of downtown Tucson began with the development of a modern streetcar, the Sun Link, in 2014. The 3 1/2 mile route connects the downtown area to the University of Arizona, a crucial element of Tucson’s urban fabric, Mabry said.

The Sun Link sparked a movement to redevelop downtown buildings and helped bridge the physical divide created by Interstate 10 in the 1960s, which split the city in half.

What used to be a ghost town come the end of the workday has now turned into a bustling entertainment hub for Tucson residents. Restored historic theaters bookend Congress Street, and the downtown has become an epicenter for Tucson’s food scene. Mabry said there are more than 60 restaurants downtown, two-thirds of which are locally owned. In 2015 it was designated as the first U.S. “Creative City of Gastronomy” by UNESCO.

Downtown Tucson’s revitalization is part of a larger movement the National Trust for Historic Preservation defines as “reurbanism.” Proponents of reurbanism advocate for the redevelopment of old buildings not only to create a more economically and environmentally sustainable city, but to establish a strong sense of community for its residents.

“If you visit a city where all of the buildings are built within a short frame of time fairly recently, you don’t get the sense that the community has deep roots,” Mabry said.

Cities like Los Angeles and Phoenix have embraced reurbanism in the form of adaptive reuse programs, initiatives that make it easier for the developers or business owners to repurpose old spaces.

Mabry was an integral figure in getting the information that convinced Tucson to adopt an adaptive reuse program of their own.

The National Trust’s Research & Policy Lab (formerly the Preservation Green Lab) published their initial , “Older, Smaller, Better,” in 2014. When Mabry attended a presentation on the study held by Mike Powe, head researcher at Preservation Green Lab, Mabry was inspired.

The initial report focused on Seattle, San Francisco, and Washington D.C. It found that cities that had a mix of older and smaller buildings had strong local economies, provided more affordable places for startups, housed a more diverse mix of age groups, and were more walkable than cities mostly composed of newer, larger buildings.

The Research & Policy Lab released its report on the in 2016, which found many similarities with the cities in the original study.

“A lot of cities are growing rapidly. We should have ways of including new development alongside the old in a way that leans on the strength of buildings and affords additional housing supply,” Powe said.

In the early 20th century, cities consisted mostly of local businesses and small buildings, Powe said. The development of the interstate highway system prompted a reimagining of the idea of the city—one that included high-rises, convention centers, and sports stadiums.

Reurbanism takes new and old iterations of city life and aims to make them work cohesively. It’s about “trying to make the old fabric integrate with the new development in a way that functions well for 21st-century cities,” Powe said.

This means building mass transit so that a city is less reliant on the automobile and parking-dependent development.

Adaptive reuse programs put these ideas of reurbanism into action.

In 1999, Los Angeles adopted its Adaptive Reuse Ordinance as to repurpose old buildings into residences. The ordinance expedited the approval process and ensured that the buildings wouldn’t be subject to the same zoning and code requirements as new developments.

Phoenix’s adaptive reuse pilot program launched in April 2008 to ease the financial burden on developers and small businesses by providing financial incentives to repurpose older buildings. The city sets aside money to cover costs like permitting or architectural fees.

In Tucson, the adaptive reuse of existing buildings provided an economic lifeline to the construction industry during the Great Recession. The projects created more jobs because more technical expertise was required.

The Research & Policy Lab’s study of Tucson found that new commercial development costs about $92 per square foot, compared to $37 per square foot when rehabilitating an older building.

With numbers like these, historic preservation often gets branded as “anti-new development,” Powe said. However, at the end of the day, preserving historic buildings means focusing more on the roots of the community itself.

“Historic preservation is more focused on the people that use those spaces, the uses of the spaces themselves, the culture and the identity of the city,” Powe said.

James Rojas, an urban planner from Los Angeles, believes this attention to community is the most important part in developing a city.

Rojas founded Place It!, an organization that offers workshops for urban planners, architects, or municipal staff that encourages them to look at urban planning through emotional and physical connections to places.

“[People] build a community through social connections,” Rojas said. “I want people to understand how they belong to places.”

Rojas believes adaptive reuse programs preserve “a diverse building stock and with it are the narratives of place that created them.” He said that planning codes and regulations often take a one-size-fits-all approach, which doesn’t consider the connections people make through their communities.

“As humans, we all belong somewhere,” Rojas said.

However, it’s a balancing act between preserving the culture associated with old buildings and leaving room for new development as more people move into town.

If done poorly, reurbanism can exacerbate gentrification, Powe said. If new development doesn’t accompany the old, then those historic buildings get more expensive, eventually forcing residents to move to more affordable housing farther outside the urban core.

A lot of it has to do with the way a building is used, he said.��Historical preservation has focused on affordability explicitly rather than just using old buildings for new luxury development.

However, when the balance is struck, Mabry said, civic engagement goes up and more people want to engage with their community and help make it better.

“If you can repurpose an existing older building and give it new life, then that helps sustain this sense of place—this visual continuity of a community,” Mabry said.

The article was funded in part by a grant from the Surdna Foundation.��

The debt overhang crippling economies

The “bank money” composing most of the money in circulation is created only when someone borrows, and today businesses and consumers are burdened with debts that are higher than ever before. In 2018, credit card debt alone exceeded $1 trillion, student debt exceeded $1.5 trillion, auto loan debt exceeded $1.1 trillion, and nonfinancial corporate debt hit $5.7 trillion. When businesses and individuals pay down old loans rather than taking out new loans, the money supply shrinks, causing a “balance sheet recession.” In that situation, the central bank, rather than removing money from the economy (as the Fed is doing now), needs to add money to fill the gap between debt and the spendable income available to repay it. Debt always grows faster than the money available to repay it. One problem is the interest, which is not created along with the principal, so more money is always owed back than was created in the original loan. Beyond that, some of the money created as debt is ��and investors who place it elsewhere, making it unavailable to companies selling their wares and the wage earners they employ. The result is a debt bubble that continues to grow until it is not sustainable and the system collapses, in the familiar death spiral euphemistically called the “business cycle.” As economist Michael Hudson shows in his 2018 book , this inevitable debt overhang was corrected historically with periodic “debt jubilees”—debt forgiveness—something he argues we need to do again today. For governments, ��by allowing the central bank to buy government securities and hold them on its books. For individuals, one way to do it fairly across the board would be with a universal basic income.

Why a universal basic income need not be inflationary

In a 2018 book called , political economist Derryl Hermanutz proposes a central-bank-issued basic income of $1,000 per month, credited directly to people’s bank accounts. Assuming this payment went to all U.S. residents over 18, or about 241 million people, the outlay would be close to $3 trillion annually. For people with overdue debt, Hermanutz proposes that it automatically go to pay down those debts. Since money is created as loans and extinguished when they are repaid, that portion of a basic income disbursement would be extinguished along with the debt. People who were current on their debts could choose whether or not to pay them down, but many would also no doubt go for that option. Hermanutz estimates that roughly half of a basic income payout could be extinguished in this way through mandatory and voluntary loan repayments. That money would not increase the money supply or demand. It would just allow debtors to spend on necessities with debt-free money rather than hocking their futures with unrepayable debt. He estimates that another third of a basic income disbursement would go to “savers” who did not need the money for expenditures. This money, too, would not be likely to drive up consumer prices, because it would go into investment and savings vehicles rather than circulating in the consumer economy. That leaves only about a sixth of payouts, or $500 billion, that would actually be competing for goods and services; and that sum could easily be absorbed by the “output gap” between actual and forecasted productivity. According to a July 2017 paper from the Roosevelt Institute called, “”: “GDP remains well below both the long-run trend and the level predicted by forecasters a decade ago. In 2016, real per capita GDP was 10 percent below the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) 2006 forecast, and shows no signs of returning to the predicted level.” The report showed that the most likely explanation for this lackluster growth was inadequate demand. Wages have remained stagnant; and before producers will produce, they need customers knocking on their doors. In 2017, the U.S. Gross Domestic Product was $19.4 trillion. If the economy is running at 10 percent below full capacity, $2 trillion could be injected into the economy every year without creating price inflation. It would just generate the demand needed to stimulate an added $2 trillion in GDP. In fact, a basic income might pay for itself, just as the ��from increased productivity after World War II.

The evidence of China

That new money can be injected year after year without triggering price inflation is evident from a look at China. In the last 20 years, its M2 money supply has grown from just over 10 trillion yuan to 80 trillion yuan ($11.6T), a nearly 800 percent increase. Yet the inflation rate of its Consumer Price Index remains .

Why has all that excess money not driven prices up? The answer is that China’s Gross Domestic Product has grown at the same fast clip as its money supply. When supply (GDP) and demand (money) increase together, prices remain stable.

Whether or not the Chinese government would approve of a universal basic income, ��that to stimulate productivity, the money must get out there first; and since the government owns 80 percent of China’s banks, it is in a position to borrow money into existence as needed. For “self-funding” loans—those that generate income (fees for rail travel and electricity, rents for real estate)—repayment extinguishes the debt along with the money it created, leaving the net money supply unchanged. When loans are not repaid, the money they created is not extinguished; but if it goes to consumers and businesses that then buy goods and services with it, demand will still stimulate the production of supply, so that supply and demand rise together and prices remain stable. Without demand, producers will not produce and workers will not get hired, leaving them without the funds to generate supply, in a vicious cycle that leads to recession and depression. And that cycle is what our own central bank is triggering now.

The fed tightens the screws

Rather than stimulating the economy with new demand, the Fed has been engaging in “quantitative tightening.” On December 19, 2018, it raised the fed funds rate for the ninth time in three years, despite a “brutal” stock market in which the Dow Jones Industrial Average had already lost 3,000 points in two and a half months. The Fed is still struggling to reach even its modest 2 percent inflation target, and GDP growth is trending down, with estimates at only 2 percent to 2.7 percent for 2019. So why did it again raise rates, ��of commentators including the president himself? For its barometer, the Fed looks at whether the economy has hit “full employment,” which it considers to be 4.7 percent unemployment, taking into account the “natural rate of unemployment” of people between jobs or voluntarily out of work. At full employment, workers are expected to demand more wages, causing prices to rise. But unemployment is now officially at 3.7 percent—beyond technical full employment—and neither wages nor consumer prices have shot up. There is obviously something wrong with the theory, as is evident from a , where prices have long refused to rise despite a serious lack of workers. The official unemployment figures are actually misleading. Including short-term discouraged workers, the rate of U.S. unemployed or underemployed workers as of May 2018 was 7.6 percent, . When long-term discouraged workers are included, . Beyond that large untapped pool of workers, there is the seemingly endless supply of cheap labor from abroad and the expanding labor potential of robots, computers, and machines. In fact the economy’s ability to generate supply in response to demand is far from reaching full capacity today. Our central bank is driving us into another recession based on bad economic theory. Adding money to the economy for productive, nonspeculative purposes will not drive up prices so long as materials and workers (human or mechanical) are available to create the supply necessary to meet demand; and they are available now. There will always be price increases in particular markets when there are shortages, bottlenecks, monopolies, or patents limiting competition, but these increases are not because of an economy awash with money. Housing, health care, education, and gas have all gone up, but it is not because people have too much money to spend. In fact, it is those necessary expenses that are driving people into unrepayable debt, and it is this massive debt overhang that is preventing economic growth. Without some form of debt jubilee, the debt bubble will continue to grow until it can again no longer be sustained. A basic income can help correct that problem without fear of “overheating” the economy, so long as the new money is limited to filling the gap between real and potential productivity and goes into generating jobs, building infrastructure and providing for the needs of the people, rather than being diverted into the speculative, parasitic economy that feeds off them. This article was originally published on . It has been published here with permission.

On January 29, the village officially opened, and its first residents settled in. Each house had cost about $10,000 to build, a fraction of what it would have cost to house the men in a new apartment building.

The project is part of a national movement of tiny-house villages, an alternative approach to housing the homeless that’s beginning to catch the interest of national advocates and government housing officials alike.

“It’s certainly something that we would encourage other communities to take a look at,” says Lee Jones at the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

For many years, it has been tough to find a way to house the homeless. ������Ƶ than , according to the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty. Shortages of low-income housing continue to be a major challenge. For every 100 households of renters in the United States that earn “extremely low income” (30 percent of the median or less), there are only 30 affordable apartments available, according to a 2013 from the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

But Second Wind is truly affordable, built by volunteers on seven acres of land donated by Carmen Guidi, the main coordinator of the project and a longtime friend of several of the men who now live there. The retail cost of the materials to build the first six houses was somewhere between $10,000 and $12,000 per house, says Guidi. But many of the building materials were donated, and all of the labor was done in a massive volunteer effort.

“We’ve raised nearly $100,000 in 100 days,” he says, and the number of volunteers has been “in the hundreds, maybe even thousands now.”

The village will ultimately include a common house, garden beds, a chicken coop, and 18 single-unit cottages.

“Camp Quixote” becomes a village

“The typical development for extremely low-income housing is trending up toward $200,000 per unit. That’s a lot of bills,” says Jill Severn, a board member at Panza, a nonprofit organization that sponsors another tiny-house project called Quixote Village. (The organization’s name is a play on Sancho Panza, Don Quixote’s sidekick in Miguel de Cervantes’ classic novel.)

Quixote Village opened in Olympia, Wash., right before Christmas. But it began in February 2007 as “Camp Quixote,” a protest held in a city-owned parking lot. A group of homeless people assembled there to oppose an Olympia ordinance that made it illegal to sit, lie down, or sell things within six feet of downtown buildings. When police evicted the campers eight days after the protest began, the Olympia Unitarian Universalist Congregation stepped in to help, offering temporary refuge on their land.

For five years, the camp’s location rotated, moving and reassembling every 90 days at one of several different local churches. Panza was formed by a corps of volunteers from the faith communities assisting the camp, and the organization worked with the city council to secure and rezone a parcel of county-owned industrial land near a community college and create a permanent site for the village. In December of 2013, the residents of Quixote Village settled into their new homes there.

Quixote Village has fostered a positive relationship between its residents and local government and police, says Severn. Despite this, the project was held up in court for a year by a local organization of businesses and landowners called the Industrial Zoning Preservation Association, which cited concerns over the potential impact on local businesses in a nearby industrial park.

Panza used the time to fundraise and build an outreach campaign to win over the public. They had the support of legions of volunteers, mostly from local churches, who had staffed the camp.

“Having hundreds of [residents] get to know people that were homeless made a huge difference in the success of getting this off the ground,” says Severn.

Today, the 30 structures that make up Quixote Village are home to 29 disabled adults, almost all of whom qualify as “chronically homeless,” by the standards of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Homelessness in Austin, Texas, costs taxpayers more than $10 million per year.

The residents also have a common space with shared showers, a laundry, garden space, and a kitchen. By sharing these amenities, the community was able to increase the affordability of the project and design a neighborhood they believed would fit their needs and make them more self-sufficient.

The shared space has also helped them create a supportive community. The residents, who are self-governed, have developed a rulebook that prohibits illegal drugs and alcohol on the grounds and requires that each member put in a certain number of service hours per week. They meet twice a week in the evenings to discuss problems or concerns and to share a common meal that they take turns cooking.

The main complaint right now, says Raul Salazar, the village’s program manager and only full-time staff member, is that the postal service still hasn’t started delivering mail.

The cost of units at Quixote Village is significantly higher than at Second Wind—about $88,000 per unit—but that’s still less than half the cost of the average public housing project, according to Nan Roman, president and CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness. Quixote has had access to state funding and local community grants, as well as private funding from individuals, businesses, and two Native American tribes. The project also received a Community Development Block Grant for $604,000 from the State of Washington Department of Commerce and a $1.5-million grant from the Washington State Legislature.

Two architecture and design firms, MSGS Architects and KMB Design Groups, also contributed design services pro bono, and the Thurston County Commission is leasing the land to Quixote for $1 per year.

Gaining acceptance

Many other tiny-house projects are just beginning to get of the ground, raise money, find land, and gain approval from local officials and members of the public. But the unorthodox nature of the small houses presents unique legal zoning limitations and barriers that limit where tiny houses can be stationed.

In Madison, Wisc., has been facing this very challenge, as the group forged ahead with plans for a tiny house village.

Each home will be about 99 square feet if you include the porch, and volunteers enjoy the joke: “We are the 99 square feet!”

In the spring of 2011, prior to the launch of the Occupy Wall Street movement, a series of protests at the Wisconsin State Capitol—focused on the state’s controversial anti-collective-bargaining bill—prompted additional legislation that prohibited groups from gathering without a permit. When the protests joined forces with Occupy in the fall of 2011, this created a unique opportunity for the voices of the many homeless people in Madison to be heard.

“There were some great moments throughout the Occupy movement where a lot of dialogue was going on between the people without homes and the people with homes,” says Allen Barkoff, one of the board members of Occupy Madison, Inc., a nonprofit formed in December 2012 to address the need for legal places where homeless people in Madison could congregate and stay safe. The organization first looked into buying an apartment building or a shared house for the homeless but ultimately settled on tiny houses as the most flexible and economical way to create homes for people.

In this case, the cost of building the tiny homes comes to around $5,000 each, funded by private donations and an online . The nonprofit also plans to apply for some city grants. Each home will come with a propane heater, a composting toilet, and an 80-watt solar panel array—and will be about 98 square feet in size, 99 if you include the porch. (The volunteers enjoy the joke: “We are the 99 square feet!”)

But the question of where the houses can legally be located is still up in the air. Volunteers are now building houses for six people. Because of a recent ordinance change, the houses are allowed to sit on church property in groups of three. City regulations also permit them to be placed on the side of the road, as long as they are relocated every 48 hours. But Madison’s snowy winter makes the houses hard to move, explains Barkoff.

Now Occupy Madison, Inc., is in the middle of a lengthy process to purchase a parcel of land on the east side of the city to accommodate 11 houses, along with a central building (a converted gas station) that can serve as a workshop for making more homes. This spring, they will continue to hold neighborhood meetings about the project, talk with police, and work with the Madison Planning and Development Department—and, eventually, the city council—to negotiate zoning issues for the village.

The real cost of homelessness

Efforts to break through the red tape and raise money to house the homeless almost always pay off for a community. Even the most expensive tiny-house projects—such as a new, ambitious $6-million campaign to build a 200-person tiny-house park this year in Austin, Texas—can’t rival the cost of homelessness to taxpayers, which was more than $10 million per year in Austin, for example, as .

“It’s a very important step in terms of the kinds of services we should be providing to people that need assistance.”

“Chronically homeless people—people who have disabilities and are homeless for long periods of time—can be very expensive to systems of public care,” explains Roman. In 2007, the National Alliance to End Homelessness compiled three studies showing that it costs the same or less money to provide permanent housing as it does to allow people to remain homeless. In Denver, Colo., a housing program for the homeless reduced the costs of public services (including medical services, temporary shelter, and costs associated with arrests and incarceration) by an estimated $15,773 per person per year,

Government officials and city planners are beginning to see the tiny-house village as one viable solution for addressing homelessness.

“It’s certainly something that we would encourage other communities to take a look at when it comes to creating solutions for housing the chronically homeless,” says Lee Jones, a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. “It’s a very important step in terms of the kinds of services we should be providing to people that need assistance.”

Currently, the various efforts to house the homeless in tiny-house villages comprise a small and pioneering movement: But each new project helps create lessons and a model for other communities.

For example, Quixote Village, as a recipient of state funding, is considered a “pilot” project: It is required to report its progress to the state legislature in five years. In the meantime, says Severn, the residents will be settling in, putting in garden beds, building a carpentry workshop, searching for jobs, and simply living their lives.

“One of our residents has been homeless for about 25 years,” Severn says. “He told me he’s excited to start a little rose garden. It really touched me to hear that.”

Ten years ago, Susan Dentzler of NPR was retained by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to investigate whether time banking (a system that lets people swap time and skill instead of money) was “a concept whose time was coming—or merely a fringe idea.” Her response:

“[T]ime dollars could be to long-term care what windmills and solar panels are to the nation’s energy supply: a small, unconventional, even noble way of serving the few, but nothing to be relied upon to meet the needs of the masses.”

Ten years later, though solar panels and windmills have moved far from the fringe, time banking has remained a relatively small-scale endeavor. But for a number of reasons, the idea may be poised to become more mainstream.

Why Time Banks?

Twenty-five years ago, we started the first experiments with a different kind of money that provided a new way to link untapped community capacity to unmet needs. Because the market fails to value or reward many types of critical work—the work of raising healthy children, building strong families, revitalizing neighborhoods, preserving the environment, advancing social justice and democracy—we felt there should be other ways than market price to place a value on people’s time. There had to be a way to honor, record, and reward that kind of work.

Long before the , the Time Bank movement represented a determination to take a stand for a more equitable, inclusive economic order. We wanted to demonstrate that a different kind of money could exist alongside the dollar, generating a different set of exchange transactions. We believed it could generate positive community-building efforts that might remedy or prevent the negative externalities created by the relentless pursuit of monetary profit.

Time banking refuses to grant money a monopoly on the definition of value, instead creating a new kind of money originally called “service credits.” That idea became known as Time Dollars, and later, as it spread beyond the United States, TimeBanks. The concept is simple: one hour of help of any kind given to another member earns one time credit, exchangeable for an hour of help in return. One equals one. That’s the math. The IRS has consistently ruled that time banks are not commercial barter organizations, so time credits earned are not treated as taxable income.

After 25 years of experimentation, learning, and expansion, the United States has 300 registered time banks. The smallest has 15 members; the largest, 3,000. At present, time banks have enrolled 30,000 members in the United States, 30,000 in the United Kingdom and an additional 100,000 scattered across 34 countries.

Why Now?

With the unemployment rate staying stubbornly high, many people simply don’t have access to traditional jobs or traditional (i.e. monetary) compensation right now—but that doesn’t mean their talent and time should go to waste. Especially as the programs that address our public needs, particularly those of the most vulnerable parts of our society, face cuts, there are plenty of ways to utilize these large reserves of untapped capacity. In the absence of money, a different kind of currency or exchange system—like time banks—just might fit the bill.

Given the current state of the economy, the question that everyone asks about time banking is: How can it help us get through this recession? ��In more ways than you might think. ��The responses fall into different categories:

One involves direct budget relief: People can get the things they need—like house repair, yard work, child care, elder care, haircuts, carpools, or moving services—directly from members of their community, without money having to enter the picture at all. And time banks offer continued access to many of the things cut first when money gets tight—for example, art, dance, or language classes.

Another is the use of time banking to help people build bridges back to the monetary economy. People use time dollars to get help with their job hunt—preparing resumes, practicing interview skills, learning computer skills, or getting support with transportation and childcare. Time dollars can also offer a less capital-intensive way to set up a new small business.

There’s also momentum building around an emerging use of time banking that’s less familiar. As governments cut services and programs for the most vulnerable Americans, time banking is moving beyond individuals: institutions are attempting to fill the gaps by enlisting their communities as partners in their work. Four examples reveal the breadth and magnitude of what TimeBank initiatives can do:

1. In 27 of the lowest performing elementary schools in Chicago, fifth and sixth graders tutored and mentored second and third graders in an afterschool program that generated improved attendance, higher test scores, and fewer instances of fighting and bullying. Research has long established that peer tutoring by older children consistently generates major gains. Using TimeBanks to sustain it and engage parents as well provides the data needed to prove outcomes.
2. In Washington D.C., for the past ten years, teenagers have earned time credits by serving as jurors in the Time Dollar Youth Court, which hears the cases of peers accused of nonviolent crimes.�� Offenders may be sentenced to community service, life skills classes, an apology, writing an essay, or duty on the jury. Recidivism rates are less than 10 percent; the Urban Institute estimates that the District saves $9,000 for every offender who goes to Youth Court instead of the traditional system.
3. The National Homecomers Academy enrolls people leaving prison as students on a journey of personal development, learning, and service. Community service includes, for example, helping youth get to school safely across gang or helping reduce violence by teenagers in a mixed ownership-tenant housing development. Nationally, recidivism for persons returning from prison is in the 60-70 percent range within three years. So far, at the National Homecomers Academy, it is zero after a year and one half.
4. In Montpelier, Vermont, the Administration on Aging has invested in a form of time banks called Carebanks. Seniors can get an assurance that informal care and support will be available if they or their families pay regular premiums—in time dollars earned helping build community or helping other seniors.��In effect, the program uses time banking to create a new form of extended family.�� It is too early to project cost savings. But a recent study reveals that, as home-based care gets cut by state governments,��hospital costs will likely rise as people are put off preventative care, or end up re-hospitalized due to the lack of transitional care.

Time banking is also getting a boost from new software that will make it easier to log, track, and share hours (the software documents engagement, reliability, punctuality, and trustworthiness). The open-source code is available to individual time banks so they can easily build customized websites. Over 200 separate time banks are now using this open source version. And by next year, it will be on smart phones and tablets, radically expanding access to one’s time bank family.

An Evolving Tool

Over the years, I’ve watched time banking go through phases—but it has always been about empowerment. The first phase was about neighbor-to-neighbor skill sharing. Too often, we live close together, but as strangers. We don’t know what our neighbors can do; we don’t know whom we can trust. Time banking provides the vehicle to discover the vast wealth of capacity that surrounds us—and it makes trust possible because every action creates a track record known to others.

TimeBanking then moved on to the even more catalytic phase of co-production. This has involved getting the nonprofit world and human service professionals to appreciate that they accomplish most when they enlist the clients and community they served as co-workers and partners who “co-produce” the needed outcomes. This can yield major institutional change in all kinds of areas: child development, elementary and secondary education, family support, professional training, juvenile justice, eldercare, violence reduction, returning veterans, re-entry from prison. That transformation is already underway in field after field; it could go viral, as we begin to understand the possibilities that exist beyond conventional money.

Now we are seeing a third phase emerge: Micro-enterprises are emerging to provide respite care, transportation, home repair. They bridge the economy of money and the economy of community.

Ultimately, time banking is about hope and possibility. Market price cannot be permitted to monopolize our definition of value. Nor can the availability of money��be permitted to define the range of the possible.

Stronger labor laws protecting workers could effectively tackle this exploitation, says Ditmore. But she finds that most lawmakers seem satisfied with lip service around ending human trafficking, while the policies they support maintain the status quo.

from on .

The issue of human trafficking began entering mainstream discourse just over a decade ago. In 2011, Barack Obama became the first U.S. president to . President Joe Biden has , publishing a recent proclamation that contends “agencies across the Federal Government are working to combat human trafficking.”

But Ditmore argues that this public focus is often too limited in scope, since “most coverage of human trafficking focuses on the sex industry and sexual servitude, or sex trafficking.”

“There was nothing looking at forced labor, uncompensated labor, forms of human trafficking through American history,” she says. “I wanted to fill that gap.” So she wrote Unbroken Chains.

In her book, Ditmore, who has worked as a consultant on trafficking for the United Nations, makes a direct link between historical forms of human trafficking—such as chattel slavery and forced Chinese contract labor—and contemporary forms of trafficked labor that presidents and pundits focus on today. She says the form of exploitation most prevalent in the present day is “indentured servitude in which people sign on, in some cases, to work to guarantee their future labor.”

But then, “sometimes people think they’ve got a good job and a good job offer and then they get somewhere and they realize the conditions are very different,” she explains.

Ditmore finds that domestic and agricultural workers are among the most likely to fall victim to this sort of bait and switch and end up in situations that can be defined as human trafficking. She profiled several trafficking survivors in her book, including , a Filipino domestic worker who accused her employer of abusing her and won a $825,000 settlement.

Women like Ruiz, especially from the Global South, often arrive in the U.S. for domestic work with a well-defined job description in mind. But then, Ditmore says, they find that “their jobs expanded to include every waking moment,” and sometimes beyond, with employers demanding that workers perform job duties in the middle of the night, or far outside agreed-upon working hours.

But modern human trafficking is not limited to women. Ditmore points to the example of brought in to clean up the damage from Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf Coast region. Those workers, predominantly South Asian men, were highly educated and skilled. “They were kept in segregated camps, segregated by national origin,” says Ditmore. “They were not fed enough, they were expected to work very long days in dangerous conditions without the protective gear.” Additionally, in 2005 allowed the private corporations hiring these workers to pay less than the average local wages. So in 2007, the workers , to call attention to their exploitation—only to find that the local trafficking task force “was concerned that they had not met the definition of trafficking,” as Ditmore describes.

Ditmore suggests that current political attention on human trafficking is performative rather than practical. In Unbroken Chains, she returns repeatedly to the fact that federal legislation specific to human trafficking has not actually helped victims of human trafficking. “We had laws against every aspect of trafficking before the Trafficking Victims Protection Act was passed in 2000,” she says. “There are laws against kidnapping. There are labor laws. There are laws against harming people. There are laws against threatening people.”

What is inadequate are the labor laws and regulations protecting people in agricultural and domestic work specifically, Ditmore says. Political will to change those labor laws also appears to be inadequate, as Ditmore discovered when she was working as part of a team advocating to strengthen such laws in Washington, D.C. When she met with legislators’ aides, she says she realized lawmakers were “not actually going to back anything to promote workers’ rights. But they were very eager to get their names on a bill about sex trafficking.”

“I found it very frustrating, but also a very good education,” says Ditmore. It was a reminder that “the exploitation of labor, and trying to get more than you have paid for … has always been part of business in the United States.”

Ditmore thinks a stronger labor movement can best address the trafficked labor on which the U.S. economy relies. She is encouraged by the growing strength and prevalence of worker-led unions in recent years. “The in Florida does a great job with agricultural workers, and they’re expanding around the country,” says Ditmore.

Ultimately, Ditmore believes “a stronger labor movement in the United States would lead to less exploitation overall—including less of the worst situations that we see, which meet the definition of trafficking.”

Imagine a pirate. The image that comes immediately to mind is a man, disabled in various ways, with a peg leg, a hook for a hand, a patch over one eye, and a parrot on his shoulder. He is rough, coarse, sometimes humorous, sometimes terrifying. From Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island to Hollywood films, such as Pirates of the Caribbean, this image of the pirate has for centuries now suffused an American, and increasingly global, popular culture.

The image is a myth, but it is no less powerful for that. Like all myths, it contains a small but essential element of truth. Pirates of the “Golden Age,” who marauded on the high seas from 1660 to 1730, were almost all common working sailors, poor men from the lowest social class, who crossed the line into illegal activity, most of them bearing the scars of a dangerous line of work. Naval warfare of the era featured cannonballs blowing up wooden ships, sending an explosion of splinters and chunks of wood that blinded and severed the arms and legs of mariners. Sailors fell from the rigging, suffered hernias while lifting heavy cargo, caught malaria and other debilitating diseases, and lost fingers to rolling casks. Many died, their bodies dumped into that vast gray-green graveyard called the Atlantic Ocean. Crippled mariners made up the majority of beggars to be found in the port cities of the Atlantic world.

The ravaged body of the pirate is a key to understanding the real history of those who sailed “under the banner of King Death,” the infamous black flag, the pirates’ Jolly Roger. Trapped in a deadly machine called the deep-sea sailing ship, sailors who turned pirate fought a furious battle for survival. Routinely maimed in the course of their work, bilked of their wages, fed rotten provisions, and beaten around the deck by captains with tyrannical powers, these seafaring men (and a few women) built a radically different life on a pirate ship.

A favorite phrase among pirates was “A merry life and a short one,” or, as one man put it, “Let us live while we can,” with freedom, dignity, and abundance, all of which had been denied to the common sailor. The merry life invented on the pirate ship enabled sailors to elect their captain and other officers, and this at a time when poor people had no democratic rights anywhere in the world. The merry life also involved a redistribution of resources—and life chances—that was stunningly egalitarian compared to the hierarchical practices of the merchant shipping industry or the royal navy. Pirates even created a rudimentary social welfare system by giving shares of booty to those unable to work because of poor health or injury.

The alternative social order of the pirate ship was all the more impressive because it had been created by the “villains of all nations,” workers of many races and ethnicities who, according to conventional wisdom, in their own day and in ours, were not supposed to cooperate. Any given pirate ship might have English, Irish, Greek, Dutch, French, or Native American crew members. African and African American seamen played an especially prominent role as they freely and subversively sailed Caribbean and North American waters near the coastal slave plantations from which many of them had escaped. The Atlantic maritime labor market and the experience of sailors had long been transnational. The social composition of the pirate ship proved the point, as did the parrot on the pirate’s shoulder. He had sailed with the motley crew to the exotic ends of the earth.

These outlaws knew that the gallows awaited them, but they were already risking their necks and dying young in their daily work. They made this clear through the Jolly Roger, which used the “death’s head,” a symbol of mortality, to strike fear into the captains of prize vessels and to encourage their quick surrender. (Most captains got the message and complied.) Yet the flag also bespoke the pirates’ own fear of being preyed upon in turn. They took the symbol of death from the captain, who drew it in his logbook when a sailor died. They frequently added to their flag a weapon piercing a human heart and an hourglass, emblems of violence and limited time, terrible truths about their own lives. They also sent a coded message to the rich, who knew that the verb “to roger” meant to copulate. The pirate flag said “Fuck you.” Rage and humor were key elements that characterized these outlaws of the seas: burning anger against the powerful, and the humor of men who chose freedom over servitude at any cost. 

Some will be disappointed that the pages of Under the Banner of King Death: Pirates of the Atlantic, a Graphic Novel contain no hunts for buried treasure, no ghost ships, no wronged aristocrats driven to sea, and no pirates in love with the governor’s beautiful daughter. But as it happens, the actual history of piracy is much more profound than the Hollywood myth. This is a story about the real common sailors who raised the black flag and created a system of democracy in action on the high seas, a traveling brotherhood of men doomed to a violent end, who wouldn’t have had it any other way.

In adapting my book Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age, David Lester has depicted the pirates’ “history from below” with great subtlety and visual power, illuminating in human terms the real reasons—the working conditions, the lash, the premature death—why people chose to become outlaws and what kind of society they built for themselves beyond the reach of the law. David brings these pirates to life, not only as workers who powered and then challenged global capitalism, but as thinkers and doers who saw that another world was possible. Perhaps most importantly, David shows us why we will always love pirates, as long as there are powerful people to be resisted and causes of social justice to be fought for.

This excerpt from Under the Banner of King Death: Pirates of the Atlantic, a Graphic Novel (Beacon Press, 2023) by David Lester (author and illustrator), Marcus Rediker (author), and Paul Buhle (editor) appears with permission of the publisher.

That’s why community-led efforts to protect and sustain culture are so important. In this original six-part series, YES! explores myriad ways communities are creating culturally sustaining economies that not only protect key aspects of a given culture, but also strengthen those cultural building blocks for future generations, empowering community members to grow, thrive, and deftly respond to challenges, threats, and opportunities.

As a series, “Building the Block” explores several unique approaches to addressing societal ills that often disproportionately impact historically marginalized communities, including Black, Brown, Indigenous, Asian, and other people of color, as well as immigrants and those living on a low income. From innovative, collective approaches to relieving the debt that can thwart the opportunities of a generation, to collaborative solutions combating the cultural destruction wrought by gentrification, to the rich history and ongoing efforts to restore land to Indigenous and Black people, to the quiet but essential role played by grocery stores that cater to specific immigrant and ethnic groups, “Building the Block” examines how communities are building cultural sustainability in their own neighborhoods and beyond.

Organizing to Cancel Debt Fuels Systemic Change

The elimination of student debt is just the first step in mitigating the pervasive effects of racial capitalism.
By Cinnamon Janzer
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Stolen Lands: A Black and Indigenous History of Land Exploitation 

Colonization through genocide, land theft, and the imposition of private property has dispossessed Indigenous and Black peoples of their homelands across the continents for generations.
By PennElys Droz
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Indigenous and Black Communities Are Finding Common Cause for Land Justice

Historically, Indigenous and Black folks have been turned against each other by colonizers and enslavers. Now, communities are learning from one another and finding solidarity in seeking to reclaim stolen lands.

By PennElys Droz

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The Fight for Housing Justice in Los Angeles

From the Los Angeles Tenants Union to Downtown Crenshaw, communities of color in L.A. are rewriting the rules of housing rights.
By Jaisal Noor
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A Taste of Home: How Ethnic Grocery Stores Create Community

Ethnic grocery stores have served as a cultural pillar of immigrant communities. Can they survive today’s economic challenges?

By Michelle Chen

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The Grassroots Fight for Housing Justice in Baltimore

Tired of waiting for the city to address housing justice, Baltimore’s constellation of grassroots activists and institutions are charging forward to keep residents in their homes and increase availability of affordable housing.

By Jaisal Noor

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Healing the Land and��Themselves

Indigenous, Black, and queer farmers are buying land with the aim to restore and nourish nature along with their cultures and��communities.

By Michaela Haas

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This series was funded by a grant from the Center for Cultural Innovation’s , which encourages the development of burgeoning alternative economies and fresh social contracts in ways that can help artists and cultural communities achieve financial freedom. Reporting and production of the series was funded by this grant, but YES! maintained full editorial control of the content published herein. Read our editorial independence policy.

The bank was financing solar panel installations with no upfront costs and fixed monthly lease payments. Once Curson’s panels were installed, her utility bills fell from about $150 a month to $74. “When I got my first bill, I said, ‘Oh my gosh!’” she remembered. “Economically, it’s been very beneficial.”

Expanding access to these kinds of upgrades will be necessary to meet U.S. climate goals, which include achieving a . One major barrier to low-income households like Curson’s is the cost of a solar installation, which, on average, runs . The program enabled by the CGB allows homeowners to benefit from rooftop solar energy savings without actually having to purchase the panels—instead leasing them at a fixed rate.

Founded in 2011, the Connecticut Green Bank is a quasi-public fund (chartered by the state but run by a board) created to  that traditional lenders might shy away from. It has financed more than $120 million in green updates—solar panel installation, weatherization, appliance replacements, and asbestos remediation—in 63,000 homes across the state, and it is one of 22 such funds across the country.

These funds are about to get a major windfall. The Inflation Reduction Act set aside $27 billion to create a , expanding access to funds like the CGB’s. 

A national green bank has the potential to transform America’s electrical grid—and do so in a way that makes green energy more accessible to lower-income households, said Adam Kent, a senior advisor at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). 

“This isn’t just loans; it’s technical assistance and capacity-building. It’s creating the workforce that can execute the projects we need: solar installers, contractors who know what they’re doing when they retrofit a house,” Kent said. 

Trying to figure out the true impact of $27 billion is a “brain-exploding” exercise, he said, arguing that the money is best thought of as a long-overdue downpayment. “[The fund] will catalyze far more than $27 billion in investment.”

The fund will be administered by the Environmental Protection Agency, which has until February to begin distributing dollars toward green energy projects. About $15 billion of the fund is set aside for low-income and disadvantaged communities and projects that traditional lenders generally deem too small or too risky to finance. A company purchasing , for instance, or the  on a school in a low-income area. 

“Among developers, there is an unconscious bias that low-income equals poor credit,” said Bryan Garcia, president and CEO of the CGB, “but that’s not true.”&�Բ�����;

Low-income communities and communities of color have higher energy burdens. According to a 2020 study, Black households  of their income on energy costs than white households; low-income households spend three times more of their income on energy costs than households earning twice the federal poverty line.

And yet they have more difficulty accessing loans that could help reduce those burdens. Black and Latino mortgage loan applicants are turned away at significantly higher rates than white applicants, according to a . (Many homeowners pay for energy upgrades through their mortgages.)

“Green banks can mobilize investments in areas where they’re not happening,” Garcia said. “In Connecticut, we want to see low-income communities become more efficient and reduce the burden of energy costs at the same time.”

The idea for a national green bank isn’t new; advocates have been pushing the idea in Congress since 2009. Japan, Australia, and South Africa already have national green banks. In the U.K., a green bank  that country’s offshore wind boom.

In the United States, local green banks have been quietly investing in green energy projects in their communities for more than a decade. 

Last summer, the  (MCGB) provided a direct loan of more than $900,000 to , an affordable housing complex in Silver Spring, Maryland. The project also allows nearby residents to buy a subscription to the Paddington Square solar array and receive credits on their energy bills. In nearby Rockville, the MCGB partnered with an area bank to lend the Melvin J. Berman Hebrew Academy $2.5 million to replace and . The campus now saves about $100,000 on its energy bills, more than enough to cover the payments on its loan. 

MCGB CEO Tom Deyo said green banks can help traditional financial institutions feel more confident to lend in a variety of ways, from co-lending to providing a third-party guarantee in case the borrower defaults. “We can take the risk because we have the equity,” he explained.

Deyo said the terminology around green banks, which are actually nonprofits, can be a little confusing. “We’re not a bank—none of us are. We’re financial intermediaries. We take public capital and multiply it by attracting private investment. Give us a dollar, and we turn it into three more.”

In the case of the MCGB, some of that capital comes in the form of $20 million from the county’s energy tax. The MCGB then “multiplies” those funds by finding grants, offering incentives to local contractors, or co-lending with local, private banks to facilitate small but impactful projects, like installing energy-efficient heat pumps in area homes, solar panels on community churches, or electric vehicle charging stations in condo parking lots. 

A national green bank would allow smaller banks like the MCGB to think more ambitiously, said Deyo, who is especially happy the fund includes money for technical assistance: hiring a workforce to go out into the community to talk with home and business owners about clean energy opportunities. “Obviously, we’re excited. You do your work based on what you have. This opens up a whole new resource to scale up and amplify,” he said.

In Connecticut, Garcia and his colleagues have already been thinking big. In 2013, the CGB issued the 3,000-seat  in Hartford a $384,000 loan to replace an ancient boiler system that workers had been maintaining by buying replacement parts on eBay. The  features a lower interest rate and longer repayment term than traditional financing and rolls payments into the building’s annual property tax bills, which gives private lenders more confidence the loan will be repaid. 

Garcia said green banks like his have paved the way for the new national green bank, which he thinks will be integral in helping municipalities, counties, and states make good on their pledges to reduce emissions. “Those pledges require a lot of capital,” Garcia argues. “Green banks can serve as intermediaries between that ambitious public policy and private markets and investors.”

Kent, of NRDC, said he believes both the scale of the problem and the amount of money promised by the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund will require the EPA to deploy money. He said the funds are not just to green banks, but to “use these dollars to shift existing financial institutions to do green work,” therefore compelling more traditional lenders to start investing in clean energy projects.

However the federal government figures out how and where to deploy this windfall of cash, Kent said he hopes existing green banks will be called upon to share the lessons and expertise they’ve learned over the past decade. 

Back in Connecticut, Curson is now working on converting friends and family to solar. “I’ve got my next-door neighbor and two girls at work installing solar panels on their house. I’m working on my son next,” she said, demonstrating the catalyzing potential of a national green bank. 

This article originally appeared in and and was made possible in part by a grant from the Open Society Foundations.  is an editorially independent, nonprofit news service covering climate change. Follow .

With and wave of strike actions sweeping the nation, organizers are beginning to engage these collections and think about preserving their work today to help write the labor histories of tomorrow. 

“As people become more engaged in social movements, I think they start to look around for examples of what came before,” says Tobias Higbie, professor of history and labor studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.

This was true for museum workers at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA), who in affiliation with the District Council 47 (AFSCME DC 47) in August 2020. After two years of failed negotiations, union members voted to authorize a strike, . 

Juliet Vinegra, project manager of the museum’s library and archives, says seeing images of former activists, artists, and museum workers involved in labor action was meaningful, even emotional, during the union’s strike. “It shows generations have been doing this work,” she says.

The strike lasted three weeks, until the union with the museum administration in mid-October. During that time, Vinegra and her colleagues began thinking about preserving their own history-making action. 

“After hearing many union members comment on the value of documenting and saving these moments in a sort of archive, Tim Tiebout [a museum photographer] suggested we start one and gather a committee to make it happen,” says Vinegra. 

Within a week of the contract agreement, the union’s executive board to preserve the history of the union and the strike. Vinegra co-chairs the committee of eight with Emily Rice, a collections assistant in the European Painting and Sculpture department.

At its first meeting, the archives committee tackled practical questions: Where will the archive be held? Who will access it, and how? What is the committee going to collect and preserve?

Organizing a union and going on strike generates a lot of documents, social media content, photographs, and other material items, like signs, stencils, and buttons, which archivists call “ephemera.” Deciding what to preserve and how to store it is essential to developing a valuable and accessible collection. 

Daniel Goldener, the archivist responsible for the American Federation of Teachers collection at the Reuther Library, says archivists make these difficult decisions in accordance with legal guidelines and by determining the historical value of items. “What we’re looking for is [items that show] how the union grew or didn’t grow, where it failed in organizing, or its accomplishments in organizing,” he says. 

Documents like press releases, planning documents, minutes of meetings, and collective bargaining agreements are preserved because they contain critical details about the inner workings of the union or organization. On the other hand, documents that serve an administrative purpose that wanes over time, like most financial records, are not usually preserved beyond their utility. 

The PMA Union archive, whose physical items will be stored at the headquarters of AFSCME DC 47 in Philadelphia, will hold the usual documents and unique ephemera collected during the historic strike. Vinegra says some of her favorite items are a collection of what she calls “love letters,” uplifting notes written by supporters on brightly colored index cards and distributed during the strike. Each morning, she would photograph one of the cards and send it around to strike captains. 

Rice says the archives committee has also discussed collecting oral histories, meaning recorded interviews with strike captains or other union members, which will detail their personal experiences of the events. “I think that those have the potential to be very interesting and important documentation, and I think we’ll learn a lot from them,” she says. 

In the short term, the PMA Union Archives Committee hopes its archive will be useful to other organizers. “This could help other people get started on unionizing,” says Vinegra. The committee is keeping this in mind as it decides how to organize its materials. “We want to do it in phases, almost like providing materials for a toolkit for people to use.”

Aliqae Geraci, director of the Reuther Library, says usefulness and accessibility are always priorities when processing an archival collection. There are several ways archivists make a collection legible to researchers, including adding labels and item descriptions, populating items in a searchable catalog, and developing a “finding aid,” a document that describes the collection and helps users navigate it.

But accessibility goes beyond just making a collection coherent to researchers. History can be inaccessible to those outside the historical profession, because most people don’t know where or how to look for it. Geraci says archives can also be intimidating. “That’s where the human touch and the role of the archivist in mediating access is so important,” she says.

The Reuther Library makes great efforts to engage with communities outside the historical profession and the boundaries of the university. The team tables at local events, including labor-related events, heritage festivals, summer fairs, and Motor City Pride.

The Reuther Library archivists also offer customized information sessions or courses for interested groups, host workshops for the general public, and lead personalized tours for union members interested in learning about their own union’s collection. “When we give tours, we tell them, ‘This is your history. We care for it, and we’re so proud to do that. But this belongs to you,’” says Geraci.

Because the Reuther Library team makes collections as accessible as possible, they get a diverse group of researchers, including organizers and activists, in the reading room. “The lessons of yesterday inform the campaigns of today,” says Geraci. “Whether it’s learning about techniques … or utilizing some of the records to build excitement, fervor, inspiration over the course of a campaign—there’s definitely a worker education element to maintaining historical records.”

Besides providing a toolkit and inspiration for today’s organizers, labor-related archival collections provide critical historical context about the labor movement. They help us understand and narrate stories about what the labor movement looked like at certain points in history, where it is now, and where it might be going. 

Higbie says archivists today cannot tailor collections for future historians, because there’s no way to know what future historians will be looking for and writing about. But archivists can help shape history by ensuring collections are diverse and reflect workers’ voices.

“There’s an old adage that the winners write the history,” says Higbie. “One of the reasons why the victors write the history is because they collect the archives.”&�Բ�����;

Sometimes, documents with historical value simply haven’t been preserved and may never be recovered. “Many of the participants in the grassroots movements of the ’60s and ’70s didn’t have the resources to preserve their own personal papers, and so the nuance of the archive is not necessarily collected,” explains Higbie.

Other times, labor historians can use unexpected collections to piece together labor histories. They often use corporate archives, for example. But the experiences of workers represented in those collections are limited, because corporate archives reflect the interests of the corporation. “As you can imagine, the employer doesn’t necessarily want to know, might not care, or might want to get rid of evidence of independent working-class organizing,” explains Higbie. 

To find the labor movement in these collections, historians must read against the grain, looking past dominant narratives about the growth or evolution of the corporation and instead scrutinizing silences or contradictions in the documents to reveal alternative histories. 

When organizers come together to preserve their documents and ephemera, they are doing what they can to give future historians a more nuanced view of the labor movement at this point in time. They are doing people’s history, and they know it. “This is necessary,” reads the PMA union’s statement on the creation of its Archives Committee. “We’ve seen how easily the wealthy and powerful rewrite history, glorify themselves and erase working people.”

Those working on archives, such as the one the PMA Union is building or those held at the Reuther Library, believe that, from these collections, today’s workers can learn practical organizing strategies and draw inspiration, and tomorrow’s historians can tell more nuanced, detailed, and diverse stories. 

Higbie says these collections and the stories they hold also have significant implications for the evolution of today’s re-emerging labor movement, as they help workers see themselves as historical actors and parts of a collective.��“Having these archives, telling these stories, on the one hand, just preserves something that was important from the past, a voice from the past that otherwise would be lost and deprive us of the richness of our society,” he says. “But it is also a resource for people to see themselves in the story of the past, present, and future.”

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 8:260 a.m. PST on Dec. 21, 2022 to correct the main photo caption, which misidentified the date and location of the image.��Read our corrections policy here.

Many people recognize nonprofit work as a , or to work with a team of people whose values align with their own. But the dramatic recent uptick in nonprofit union campaigns is evidence that there is a growing disconnect between the values of management and employees. Indeed, organizations pursuing social justice may be working at cross-purposes to their employees. That’s been my experience as a queer organizer about to leave my job organizing congregations. But what ultimately made me choose to leave wasn’t the faith community. It was organizational hypocrisy. 

Growing up, I wrestled to find a sense of belonging in the faith spaces that surrounded me. When I was 22, I came out not only as queer, but also as a non-Christian and a liberal—the unholy trinity. When I learned about congregation-based organizing from a professor in graduate school and went on to hear radical retellings of the biblical narratives I grew up with—narratives that emphasized Jesus’ fight to liberate his people from Roman occupation, instead of who was or wasn’t getting into heaven—I saw a path to potentially heal my broken relationship with the church. 

Over the past three years, I’ve worked alongside hundreds of faith leaders to turn out over 2,000 people to an annual action where those leaders publicly negotiated with local officials to win their commitments to solve community problems. I’ve personally facilitated a campaign that got our county to commit $9 million toward a system for coordinated access to mental health and addiction services, thanks to pressure from people in our congregations who had seen their own children institutionalized or lost to suicide, and who knew it wasn’t enough to just pray about it.

As a faith-based nonprofit network composed of 31 organizations employing more than 50 organizers across the country, each organizer works with between five and 15 congregations whose faith traditions range from Catholic to Presbyterian to Muslim to Jewish. In my affiliate organization in Florida, I was fighting so no one would ever know the feeling of erasure I felt when I left the church for failing to affirm my right to exist—until that erasure came from inside my workplace.

Working on serious community problems, like affordable housing, climate change, and gun violence, my colleagues and I frequently put in 50 hours or more a week building the community power necessary to take on those issues. We also did it while being woefully underpaid, understaffed, and overworked, and while trying our damnedest to improve the material conditions of our work such that we could access the same basic needs we wanted for our communities.

There’s a long legacy of organizing for a better workplace culture that predates my tenure in the network, but for me, the fight began when we started a queer caucus in June 2020. By coming together, we learned that queer organizers made up more than 30% of the network, and we were able to share the ways in which our queer identities were exploited or treated as expendable. Our unique struggle as queer people fighting for justice on the front lines of faith communities came at the cost of having to keep our identities a secret. We endured the constant re-traumatization of being forced back into the closet.

The reason, management would say, was so we wouldn’t risk alienating anyone in the congregations we organized. Better to sacrifice ourselves than to risk lessening the ranks of our people power. But what management failed—and still fails—to recognize is that our people power is more threatened by their failure to retain staff than by homophobic churches pulling out of our movement.

Since last February, our caucus has sat down with management at least three times in an attempt to make this point. Recently, for example, an affiliate organization in Kansas lost a major source of funding when the local Catholic bishop learned their lead organizer was in a same-sex partnership. This sent a ripple through the national network, leaving queer organizers elsewhere to wonder if they could also lose their funding or even their jobs.

But our management consistently chooses to trade empathy for effectiveness, neglecting to commit to explicitly supporting queer organizers and promising instead to offer trainings on making their organizations financially self-sufficient.

This doesn’t come as a surprise from a network of organizations that are predominately white-led and that, while fighting for a world free from white supremacy, still time and again fall susceptible to it. Internal research gained from exit interviews has already shown that the organizers most likely to quit are queer people and people of color. Of the 20 organizers who have made up the queer caucus over the past two years, eight have left. In December, I’ll make nine.

But we took away from this several key points that nonprofits need to take into account if they’re to build affirming cultures for all their staff.

1. Mechanisms of accountability need to exist within nonprofits that take power dynamics into account. For example, it should be clear to all staff what the organizational hierarchy looks like, and each staff member’s roles and responsibilities should be explicitly outlined. Vaguely defined roles ensure no one is held accountable, and staff should be able to report concerns to people they trust, which queer organizers have expressed is not always the person next highest in the chain. 
2. The only way nonprofits and their staff can survive is by moving toward sustainability practices, like higher salary, decreased hours, and decreased workloads.
3. Dismantling systems of historical oppression requires hiring people of different races, sexual and gender identities, mental and physical abilities, faith traditions, and educational and class backgrounds. That also means setting up systems that promote their health and well-being and don’t further exploit them.

Unfortunately, with high turnover and staff working in different cities across different states, we haven’t met all our goals yet. Our workplace culture isn’t completely transformed, nor have we organized a union campaign and won. Neither are we finished fighting.

As adrienne maree brown writes in her book Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, “We are in an imagination battle,” and we must engage our own imaginations in order to break free. As a queer person, I’ve had to imagine myself out of the heteropatriarchal script that was written for me in order to survive. As a queer organizer, along with my colleagues, I’ve imagined a world where management treats our labor and our identities with the dignity they deserve. If we’re going to transform our workplaces into models of the world as it should be, we’re going to have to get together and affirm our own right to exist—and organize that better world into existence.

Many of the activists and organizers at the forefront of today’s debt cancellation and forgiveness movement got their start at Occupy, either in that first New York demonstration or subsequent actions across the country. Natalia Abrams, who started Occupy Colleges, went on to found the . , an activist and social and cultural analysis professor at New York University, and , an economic anthropologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, went on to start , a nationwide debt resistance movement. From Strike Debt, the Debt Collective—a debtors union primarily focused on student debt, carceral debt, and tenant debt—was born. A decade later, their efforts saw a small but significant victory when the federal student loan forgiveness in August.

In the years following Occupy, Strike Debt and the Debt Collective’s efforts included producing and launching a that has bought from secondary markets and canceled it. “It’s a drop in the ocean, obviously,” Ross says. In the U.S., 45 million current and former students hold , which accounts for . “But it was a proof of concept that people could actually take relief for themselves through mutual aid.”

Canceling debt wasn’t all the jubilee did. It also highlighted the insidious nature of the debt market, the ready availability of solutions, and the depth of a problem that’s been centuries in the making.

The Advent of Student Debt

The cost of attending U.S. college and universities until the 1960s and ’70s. When Ronald Reagan became governor of California in 1967, he that the University of California system charge tuition for the first time, while also cutting state funding for the schools by 10%, signaling the beginning of the end of state support for universities. Across the U.S., state appropriations for public universities from their peak in 1988 to 2013. In 2018, overall state funding for two- and four-year public colleges was than it was in 2008.

Reagan came into office just as Black and Brown students began to higher education in the 1970s and ’80s. It’s then that the national education ethos seemed to pivot from viewing higher education as a public good to considering it a private investment. , an assistant professor at Villanova University who studies racism across institutions and markets, doesn’t think the timing was a coincidence. Instead, he calls the phenomenon “racial capitalism.”

Because communities of color “have been cut off from ever privately accumulating the wealth to pay for higher education,” Bishop says, those communities had to “rely on student loans in a way that communities who have always had access to privately accumulated wealth, through homeownership and businesses they’ve inherited, [did not need] to rely on student loans.” This lack of intergenerational wealth has led to entire families being saddled with student debt, in the form of , in order to finance their children’s higher education.

Those racial disparities are reflected in many forms of debt. Black and African American graduates owe than their white counterparts, according to the Education Data Initiative, and are most likely to struggle financially in repaying that debt. The National Consumer Law Center also reports that 27.9% of Black households carry medical debt, compared with 17.2% of white households. Americans as a whole hold at least

Because communities of color are disproportionately burdened by , , and , all of which are compounded by the , they stand to gain substantially from debt cancellation and forgiveness, not only financially, but psychologically, too.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, when student loan repayments were put on pause, Bishop set out to uncover the mental toll of looming debt that feels impossible to pay off. He found that Black borrowers across income levels were suffering psychologically. “They were feeling like they once again found themselves in a debt trap, shackled to some type of arrangement that they couldn’t escape and, to them, it really reflected other types of racial traps they had heard about in history. They felt like this was their subprime moment.”

Borrowing Everywhere

Thanks to the rise of both and , after the early 1970s, it became more profitable for banks to invest in consumer debt, rather than their focus on the steel and railroad industries of previous decades, for example. Today, consumers can borrow for just about everything, from made with credit cards to large, durable goods, like cars, homes, and associated maintenance programs, the sellers of which often offer their own financing.

Debt has become a central element of the U.S. criminal justice system, too, largely in the form of fines and fees that total an in carceral debt held by those currently and formerly incarcerated. “If you look at any one household, there are numerous kinds of debt—medical debt, housing debt, credit card debt, auto debt—flowing through the household. They’re all interdependent in a way,” Ross says, since the ability to pay one debt impacts the others. As the debt market grew, so did and predatory practices that it, including , like Corinthian College, which used deceptive marketing tactics and often left former students and graduates with worthless degrees and mountains of debt.

Corinthian students made up a significant portion of the Debt Collective’s first Rolling Jubilee in 2014. But single-handedly erasing debt isn’t Debt Collective’s goal, explains Hannah Appel, one of the Debt Collective’s founders. “We cannot crowdsource away everybody’s debt,” she says. “The endgame here is to put the potential power, the potential collective leverage of debt, into the hands of debtors to actually change the systems that indebted us in the first place.”

It’s through collective action, organizing, and legal pressure that the Debt Collective and other entities working in the debt cancellation and forgiveness space are questioning the very foundations of our society, culture, economy, and the racial capital system that underpins them—and they’re achieving victories. In the summer of 2022, the U.S. Department of Education $5.8 billion of debt owed by 560,000 Corinthian borrowers.

Technology is also playing a big role in debt cancellation efforts. The Debt Collective offers a suite of that help debtors navigate the often complex legal process of disputing debt. Rather than navigating complicated processes alone, the Defense to Repayment app, for example, has borrowers answer questions to create state-specific legal arguments for debt disputes. Appel says an estimated 75,000 people used the app in the first eight months after its launch in February 2014.

Bigger Goals

The Debt Collective is far from alone in striving to eliminate debt. Groups like the and are working to oppose and reform the cost of and the debt associated with them. There are also , , , , and more organizations that are all, at least in part, organizing to address debt.

Their efforts are strategically intended to contribute to systemic reforms and goals, like abolishing student, medical, and carceral debt, and reforming the primary sources of that debt. Those efforts include supporting a single-payer health care system and tuition-free higher education—objectives that are “a lot closer than you might think,” explains Andre Perry, a . “Community colleges in a lot of states are already there because Pell Grants generally cover their tuition,” he says.

Bishop agrees. “Money is being spent right now to uphold a student loan industry where it’s very clear that students don’t win … and it’s possible for us to reallocate that,” he says. “There is a need to ask questions around endowment sizes and our colleges being responsible with their funding.”

in Kentucky, for example, hasn’t charged tuition since 1892. Berea’s students are largely from the surrounding Appalachia area, but many also come from across the U.S., and even from other countries. The college has aligned its admissions process with the needs basis outlined in the Pell Grant program. All of the college’s students “bring some amount of the Pell Grant with them to help offset some of their costs,” explains , Berea’s associate vice president of admissions. “Sometimes it may be [put] toward tuition costs, but most often it’s toward covering some of their housing and meal expenses.”

As Berea’s provost notes, the college relies on student labor to supplement a lean staff. “Students work for the college on the grounds, as teaching assistants and in the financial aid office, the admissions office, the food service office,” he says. To meet the college’s annual operating expenses, returns from Berea’s endowment constitute 74% of its funding, while 17% comes from federal and state aid and 9% comes from annual donations from supporters.

When it comes to spending that money, Steele adds, “we’re focused on the things that we think are bringing real value to the college experience and the education of our students, but we would not consider ourselves extravagant.” Rather than building bigger and better stadiums and residence halls to attract tuition-paying students, Berea instead maintains the facilities it does have while funneling money toward services like its writing and student success centers.

“Not every college is willing to function that way or can function that way,” Hodson says, noting that other institutions spend a lot of money to attract and enroll students. “I think we’re starting to see that [cost] starting to outpace what the buyer, the student or family, are willing to really pay for.”

Steele often fields calls from other institutions interested in replicating Berea’s model, but he admits it’s a hard transition to make. “It’s very difficult to start from zero,” he says. “I think other institutions could do something similar if they had the startup costs [covered], but it’s really difficult to begin the model from scratch.”

From Organizing to Systemic Change

Just like Berea’s model can’t immediately be replicated elsewhere, neither can many of the initiatives like the Debt Collective’s , which is focused on California, where tenant rights and consumer protection laws are stronger than most elsewhere in the country. However, the Debt Collective is also working with student law interns to replicate its California-centric services elsewhere.

It’s fighting the law with the law on both a state-by-state and federal level that Eileen Connor, a lawyer and the , believes is key to securing systemic change. “The fact is that a good number of our clients have defaulted on their student loans,” she says. “They are having the law applied against them. They’re having their Earned Income Tax Credits seized, they’re having their wages garnished, and they’re having their credit ruined, all through legal means. … You have to meet the law where it is.”

The leap from organizing to systemic change is a long game, but in the meantime, incremental changes can point us in that direction. On the carceral debt front, Helen Ho, a research director at at Harvard’s Kennedy School, suggests instituting fines and fees that are proportional to income, as other countries do. “On lower levels, there’s things that individuals and nonprofits can do, which is setting up a clinic for ability-to-pay hearings. … And perhaps you can combine that with advocacy to build something bigger, like folks are doing with bail funds.”

Bishop and Perry advocate for the expansion of the Pell Grant program, which is currently included in in Congress. Connor agrees, adding that whatever the solutions are, some experimentation will be required. “There has to be tighter controls on which institutions even get access to that money,” she says. “I think there [could be] some partnership with states where there’s a system that’s closer to Medicare and Medicaid, where there’s federal money, but it’s administered by states. Maybe we should have a slightly different tax structure where, if there’s public investment in higher education, it comes back to the public in the form of taxation on individuals as they succeed because of that initial public investment.”

Ultimately, the debt cancellation movement is about grappling with questions of fairness and equality, both socioculturally and under the law, and mitigating some of the generational effects of racialized capitalism. Debt relief and the organizing behind it can also play a key role in recasting our modern conception of education and other forms of advancement as an individual endeavor.

As Connor puts it, “I think it’s under-theorized and under-quantified how there are benefits [to education and training] that are not individual, but collective”—how, when one person gets an education, it doesn’t just benefit them, but also the whole community around them. It’s this collective approach that gives Bishop “so much hope.” This, he says, is “because we have borrowers and everyday people and community members who are really leading a movement that, in real time, is rewriting national policy in a way that we don’t always get to see around key issues.”

This story is part of Building the Block, an original YES! series supported by a grant from the , which encourages the development of burgeoning alternative economies and fresh social contracts in ways that can help artists and cultural communities achieve financial freedom. Reporting and production of this story was funded by this grant, but YES! maintains full editorial control of the content published herein. Read our editorial independence policy.

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 9:50 a.m. PDT on Nov. 15, 2022 to correct Helen Ho’s position—she is one of two research directors at The People Lab—and correct her quote about “ability-to-pay” (not “participate”) hearings. Read our corrections policy here.

On a sunny morning in March 2014, Yenni Rivera picked up her infant and stepped outside her Long Beach home. She would not be going back. With the help of family members and her best friend, she loaded a few cardboard boxes into the back of her parents’ car. Inside the boxes was everything she now owned. In her arms was her reason for leaving and her hope for the future.

Luke Rivera was 1 year old. And he and Yenni Rivera were now homeless.

But homeless was better than captive in an abusive, violent home. Rivera knew it was the right decision—and a life-or-death decision—to leave. What she didn’t know was how long it would take to find a home again.

While their names lingered on waitlists for shelter and child care, Rivera and Luke slept on her parents’ couch. Five years passed. No affordable housing opened.

“I know that my son suffered,” Rivera said. “I was having PTSD and anxiety, and as I was feeling that, I started seeing the signs” that Luke was negatively impacted too, she added.

According to experts on child homelessness, almost all children who experience housing insecurity also experience trauma because of the stress and instability of their situation. California and the federal government recognize this and require schools to provide these children with additional support, such as free transportation, help remaining enrolled in the same school they’re accustomed to, tutoring, school supplies, and referrals to social services. But experts believe tens of thousands of California children experiencing homelessness fall through the cracks in the system and receive little to no additional help from their schools.

Some schools don’t do enough to help these students because staff are stretched thin, they lack funding to provide students with what they need, or they’re not aware that students are entitled to these resources. Because a disproportionate number of these students are children of color, this failure is likely perpetuating and even exacerbating academic achievement gaps between racial and socioeconomic groups.

“It’s cumulative disadvantage playing out in different ways,” said Joseph Bishop, director for the UCLA Center for the Transformation of Schools, explaining the disproportionate number of homeless students who are Black and Latino. “(Access to) jobs, health care, all these factors are fueling these issues. It’s structural, systemic racism playing out in different ways, and it manifests itself in the homelessness crisis.”

Advocates who work with children experiencing homelessness say there are a number of steps California can take to better help these families. For one, school administrators and county offices of education can better train teachers and staff to recognize signs that students may be homeless and to communicate sensitively with families, letting them know that the information they share is confidential. Schools should also reach out to their communities to make families aware of the resources available to students experiencing homelessness and create partnerships with social services, shelters, and community organizations to reach families in need and link them to additional support. And the federal and state governments should provide more dedicated funding to help schools assist students experiencing homelessness.

Families Squeezed by California’s Cost of Living

that children experiencing homelessness are twice as likely as their peers to get sick, have a learning disability, and go hungry, and three times as likely to suffer emotional and behavioral problems. They’re also more likely to drop out of school, repeat a grade, and not graduate from high school. In addition to the trauma of homelessness, many of these children have experienced other difficult life events, such as abuse, neglect, domestic violence, extreme poverty, or exposure to a family member with addiction or mental health problems. As a result, these children often need a variety of supports to help them succeed in school.

Yet according to research by the Center for Public Integrity, many school districts in California and across the nation are failing to identify all the students experiencing homelessness in their care. Experts on child homelessness say the percentage of children experiencing homelessness in any given school or district will typically amount to between 5% and 10% of children who qualify for free and reduced lunches—an indication of economic disadvantage. Yet in California, more than 400 school districts reported lower homeless enrollment than even the 5% benchmark during the 2018 to 2019 school year. That’s about two of every five districts in the state, according to an analysis of federal data by the Center for Public Integrity.

A of five school districts and one charter school released in 2019, meanwhile, found that four of the six had only identified 3% of economically disadvantaged students as homeless, and that none was adequately training staff on how to identify students experiencing homelessness or on schools’ legal requirements to assist them. The auditor concluded that the districts “could do more to identify and support these youth, and that [the California Department of Education] has provided inadequate oversight of the State’s homeless education program.”

The situation does not appear to have improved since then. California Department of Education numbers show that the number of students experiencing homelessness in public and charter schools in the state dropped by around 36,000 students during the first two years of the pandemic. Scott Roark, a spokesman for the California Department of Education, said some of this decline may reflect a drop in school enrollment in California overall between 2019 and 2022. But he and other experts agree the drop is likely also the result of greater difficulties schools had identifying and tracking students experiencing homelessness as families moved or lost housing and schools shifted to online learning.

“I don’t think anybody thinks homelessness actually decreased for students during the pandemic,” said Barbara Duffield, executive director of , a homeless advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C. “And, of course, things now are very, very concerning, particularly in California, in terms of cost of living and housing costs and all the things that go along with that, and other issues—domestic violence, for example, natural disasters, wildfires … immigration.”

School officials and advocates for homeless children said they are hopeful that a new California law requiring all districts to survey families to identify those experiencing homelessness using a standardized questionnaire will increase the rate of identification in the state. A historic influx of $100 million to California from the 2021 American Rescue Plan that’s now starting to reach school districts is also expected to significantly boost their ability to identify, enroll, and support the participation of children and youth experiencing homelessness. However, advocates worry this one-time funding won’t be enough to sustain improvements over the long term, and argue that policymakers, school officials, and local stakeholders must do more to ensure all students experiencing homelessness are identified and receive the help they need.

Undercounted, Underserved

California has the highest homeless population in the country. Almost one out of every five children experiencing homelessness in the United States resides in California. Students experiencing homelessness made up almost 4% of California’s kindergarten through 12th grade students during the 2020 to 2021 school year—more than 183,000 students total, according to the . Most experts believe that’s a significant undercount.

Latino and African American students are disproportionately represented among students experiencing homelessness, making up 74% and 7% of homeless students, respectively, compared with 55% and 5% of the general kindergarten through 12th grade population. White and Asian students are underrepresented. Researchers believe these differences in child homelessness rates and inequalities in housing, criminal justice, child welfare, and education. 

A federal law, known as the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, defines homelessness among school-age children more broadly than the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which counts homelessness in the general population. Under McKinney-Vento, children and youth are considered homeless if they sleep in a homeless shelter, motel or hotel, car, public space, abandoned building, or any other type of impermanent or substandard accommodation, and also if they are sharing housing with other people due to loss of housing or economic hardship. In California, most students experiencing homelessness fall into this last category. According to the most recent data, 85% live doubled up with other families or relatives.

For Luke and Yenni Rivera, living this way was traumatic. They slept on a couch in the living room of Rivera’s parents’ home, which meant they had no privacy or space of their own. It was cramped and uncomfortable, Rivera said. Luke grew up feeling different from other kids because he didn’t have his own home, bed, or room. Living in such close quarters also made it hard for Yenni Rivera to shield him from the emotional challenges she was facing.

“I was broken for a long time,” she said. “He would see a parent that would go to sleep crying.”

In preschool and kindergarten, Luke’s teachers noticed that he would become anxious in large groups. He wouldn’t answer questions or participate in classroom activities. At first, the teachers thought the problem might be a learning disability. But after an evaluation at his preschool, school officials determined that Luke had an anxiety disorder called selective mutism, which his pediatrician determined was most likely caused by the trauma he’d endured from experiencing homelessness and witnessing domestic violence.

Chynna Lloyd, 23, lived in a domestic violence shelter with her mother between the ages of 9 and 11 in Los Angeles. She said she had to move schools several times, which put her behind, and she felt left out around other children because she couldn’t tell anyone where her family lived for safety reasons and wasn’t allowed to have friends over to play. She also felt embarrassed because her family depended on hand-me-downs and her clothes and shoes didn’t fit her properly.

“It affected me a lot,” she said of experiencing homelessness. “It’s not a comfortable feeling.”

McKinney-Vento requires school districts, charter schools, and county offices of education to keep track of the number of students experiencing homelessness in their school or district and remove barriers that prevent these students from attending and succeeding in school. The supports can include providing free transportation to and from where the student is staying, allowing them to stay enrolled in the school they were at before they became homeless, providing tutoring and a safe place to do homework, offering school supplies, and referring families to outside services, such as counseling and housing assistance.

Even when students are identified as experiencing homelessness, some schools aren’t doing enough to help them, because staff in charge of coordinating services for them don’t have enough funding, time, or community connections to provide them with what they need, advocates said.

Overwhelmed Liaisons, Reticent Families

Before a school district can help a student experiencing homelessness, they need to know about them. Finding out can be challenging, said Duffield with SchoolHouse Connection. Some families and children don’t want to tell the school about their situation because of stigma, or because they fear it could lead to child protective services or immigration authorities getting involved. Others, such as those living with relatives or other families, may not realize they qualify as homeless or that their child has the right to receive support.

Duffield said it’s critical for schools to be discreet when asking families and students about homelessness and make it clear they are asking in order to offer services and support, not to report them to outside authorities. Federal law prohibits schools from asking students or their parents about immigration status, and even if a school does know that a student or parent is undocumented, they can only share that information with authorities under exceptional circumstances, such as a court order. Homelessness is also not considered, in and of itself, abuse and neglect, and therefore is not grounds for reporting a student or parent to CPS or law enforcement, Duffield said. 

Meanwhile, every public school district, county office of education, and charter school in California is required to have a homeless liaison, a person responsible for identifying students experiencing homelessness and coordinating support for them. But these liaisons frequently have many other responsibilities as well, such as supporting foster, migrant, and special-needs children, leaving them stretched thin, Duffield said.

Sinéad Chilton, chief development and marketing officer with School on Wheels, a nonprofit organization that trains volunteers to provide homework help to homeless children in Southern California, said another problem she’s encountered is that homeless liaisons as well as teachers often don’t speak Spanish, even in districts with large Spanish-speaking populations. That makes it hard for volunteers and the families they work with to communicate with school personnel and advocate for their children, she said.

Even when students are identified as homeless, many schools lack the resources needed to support them, Duffield said. Until recently, only about 100 local education agencies in the state received federal McKinney-Vento funds to identify and support students experiencing homelessness. An influx of funding under the American Rescue Plan will now provide 1,181 local education agencies with the funding. In the 2019 to 2020 fiscal year, California received $11.3 million in federal funds for this purpose. Under the American Rescue Plan, it’s set to receive almost $99 million.

Yenni Rivera said she told her son’s preschool and kindergarten that she and Luke were homeless. A school counselor worked with her to get him some extra support at school, but there were no standards for helping children with learning challenges related to homelessness, so they had to get creative. Luke was classified as an English learner so he would receive small-group instruction, which he found less intimidating, even though English is his first language. And a teacher aide recommended he repeat kindergarten so he could build his confidence, and because he wasn’t passing a standardized test. His mother found him a therapist herself through a local domestic violence crisis center.

Rivera said she’s frustrated that she had to do much of the legwork to make sure her son got the support he needed at school, even though she was dealing with trauma herself. She said she wishes schools had clear, standardized guidelines on how to support students experiencing homelessness, and that all teachers were trained to recognize signs of trauma.

“I’m thankful that I’m educated, that I saw those signs and I was able to push for treatment for my child,” she said. “But many families are not even aware they need that help.”

Language is also a barrier for many families, given that the largest population of students experiencing homelessness are Latino, yet school liaisons and teachers don’t always speak Spanish. A significant proportion of California’s Latino population also speaks Indigenous languages, which are even less likely to be spoken by school personnel.

Changes Rolling Out

In January, California began requiring school districts and county offices of education to distribute a standardized housing questionnaire annually to all families. Some districts previously did this, but it wasn’t mandated. The form asks families to identify the type of housing situation they are in, and informs them that the information will only be shared with relevant school staff and that students who are homeless have certain rights.

Susie Terry, coordinator of homeless education services at the San Diego Office of Education, said the change is already increasing the identification of students experiencing homelessness among the 43 school districts and over 100 charter schools that she supports.

Meanwhile, the American Rescue Plan funds have allowed her to expand outreach and support to students experiencing homelessness and their families. She was able to hire a project specialist to visit homeless and domestic violence shelters around the county and meet with the families of students to inform them of their rights and answer questions. She’s also established a hotel voucher program to help homeless families in need get a place to stay while they wait to secure more stable housing. Families are referred to the program daily, she said.

“This is money that we always needed, even before the pandemic,” she said. “Homeless education programs are underfunded in general. Having this funding has allowed me to expand my reach and my work in ways I’ve wanted to for a very long time.” She said she and other liaisons across the state are hoping that Congress will renew the funding after the American Rescue Plan dollars run out in 2025. 

Bishop at UCLA said liaisons can’t be expected to do all the work, however. All school staff could be trained to recognize signs that a student may be experiencing homelessness and understand the definition of homelessness for students, as could other government, health, and community officials who interact with families and children.

“The onus for [dealing with] this crisis cannot fall on one person,” he said, referring to homeless liaisons. “It’s an all-hands-on-deck approach.”

Schools should face greater consequences if they don’t adequately report homelessness numbers, Bishop added. Currently, the California Department of Education—which is supposed to ensure schools properly report homelessness numbers—can face compliance findings from the federal government for failing to adhere to McKinney-Vento Act provisions, which could put it at risk of losing federal funds. Additionally, families and youth can, and have, sued school districts for failing to identify them as experiencing homelessness.

For Luke Rivera, now 9, things are looking up. He and his mother now have their own apartment in South Los Angeles. Luke has his own bed and a desk where he can do his homework. He’s become more confident and less anxious. He’s no longer afraid to speak up in class. Recently, his mother learned from the school that her once painfully shy son stood up for himself against another student who was bullying him. It gave her hope, both for him and for other children who’ve experienced similar challenges.

“It took four or five years … but it’s such a change from the child I had to go defend to the child who defends himself,” she said. “It’s all connected to him having his own bed, his own space, building the confidence, having the extra support at school over the years.”

Yenni Rivera now advocates for other families experiencing homelessness in her role as a family system coordinator for the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority. She worries about other students experiencing homelessness like she and Luke did, but whose parents don’t have the ability to find help and push for interventions. That’s especially a concern as in Los Angeles County and in in the wake of the pandemic and the looms at the end of this year. The City of Los Angeles recently voted to end its eviction freeze starting Feb. 1, 2023. A statewide eviction moratorium .

“We’re going to see a huge jump in those children who had a home, who didn’t know what [homelessness] felt like, suddenly now feeling that,” she said. “Schools need to think ahead.”

Resources

Students and their families who are experiencing homelessness can contact their local school district or county homeless liaison coordinator (teachers and staff members should know who this person is, and the contact person is often listed on district and county office of education websites).

Yet, in spite of this, local governments put their assets—the collective wealth of communities collected through taxes—in the hands of these institutions. In New York City alone, is handled by private banks every year. While the city’s assets sit in the corporate coffers of these Wall Street staples, the banks are free to invest them at their discretion. Their sole goal: pump up their profits. The result is that public dollars may be invested in projects that act against the public good, such as speculative real estate, private prisons, and fossil fuels.

To address these and other overlapping injustices, New York City’s , a community-based organization dedicated to advancing economic justice, has coordinated the since 2018 with the end goal of investing city dollars in projects that would address community needs. Over four years, the coalition has come to comprise dozens of community organizations from across the city, working on projects as diverse as climate justice, affordable housing, and worker empowerment. Its primary focus is to advance city- and state-level legislation that will allow its visions to manifest.

“To do something as big and bold as a public bank, you really have to have a movement,” says Andy Morrison, associate director of the New Economy Project, “particularly in New York, where Wall Street lobbyists are numerous and powerful.”

Building that movement hasn’t been difficult. A public bank would offer benefits to justice-focused organizations of all shapes, sizes, missions, and visions. After all, as the argument is laid out in co-produced by the New Economy Project and , a policy think tank, public banking is a key step toward community self-determination in housing, investments, and land use. This would put a community’s fate at their fingertips and enable them to address compounding crises and injustices.

One of those ongoing injustices is the lack of access to banks and financial services for many New Yorkers.

Albert Scott, board president of the , which is a member of the Public Bank NYC coalition, says the organization joined the movement “to address the banking desert in Brownsville and East New York.” The lack of banking options puts the members of these neighborhoods at a severe disadvantage. These two communities have just nine bank branches between them, compared with 47 in the Upper West Side and Manhattan, says Hannah Anousheh, staff coordinator of the East New York Community Land Trust. A public bank would alleviate this inequity and others like it that stem from the economic logic of big banks.

To make a public bank a reality, the coalition is pushing to change the state’s finance, banking, and municipal laws through the . This act has been introduced to the State Assembly and Senate, but despite receiving 87 co-sponsors in both houses in 2021 and 94 in 2022, the legislation died in committee during both sessions. But Sen. James Sanders Jr., the prime sponsor, plans to reintroduce the bill in 2023. “We will keep on fighting until we establish public banks for everyone’s benefit,” the senator said in an email.

Once passed, this bill would allow local governments to “form and control public banks” to hold public funds, which could then be administered in support of the public good. One important point needs to be made clear: The public bank wouldn’t open its own retail branches. There’s nothing in the act that explicitly prohibits a public bank from going brick-and-mortar, but the coalition envisions something different.

A public bank would instead invest its holdings in credit unions and community development financial institutions (CDFIs), says Linda Levy, board member and former CEO of the , another coalition member. Such investment would increase their “capacity to grow and serve more communities.”

Which credit unions and CDFIs receive investments would ultimately be decided by the public bank based on its own policies. These would in turn be shaped by banking professionals hired under the direction of the bank’s board. Three of the board’s directors would be appointed by the mayor, two by the city council, and one by the city treasurer. Each of those officials would be required to nominate at least one independent director and one director with community banking experience—defined as having served in a leadership role at a credit union, CDFI, or similar institution.

The six directors who seed the board would then be responsible for selecting an additional three to five directors with the intention of maximizing board diversity, including with representation from community-based organizations and labor unions. In a large, diverse city like New York, the board, at its discretion, may ultimately have as many as 15 directors.

The board would then be responsible for shaping the governing documents and defining the priorities of the public bank. The Public Bank NYC coalition members hope the priorities will address the concerns of underserved and underbanked communities, which the coalition went to painstaking lengths to define and document through the distillation of community feedback collected across town halls and public forums. These priorities are codified in a set of four pillars: financial justice, housing justice, worker justice, and climate justice.

On the ground, that would look like strengthening community banks, investing in affordable and democratically structured housing models, bolstering worker-owned cooperatives, and supporting community-owned clean energy projects, among other initiatives. However, when the public bank is one day established, the coalition can’t simply stand by and hope the board follows through and enshrines these priorities in its governing documents. To get them reflected and ensure accountability to the public’s desires, “it’ll take continued organizing,” the New Economy Project’s Morrison says.

However, if the public bank follows through on these goals, it could spark a surge of solutions to an assortment of social problems. “This is economic legislation that can actually help us and benefit us,” Scott says. “They’ll be putting money in the CDFIs that have a track record of helping communities like ours and have a physical presence in the community.”

The Lower East Side People’s Federal Credit Union is one such institution. Levy makes it clear that a public bank would boost its ability to benefit its members and the surrounding community. “Right now, we are limited in our ability to open branches in more neighborhoods due to a lack of capital,” she says. “Investments would increase our capital, allowing us to accept more member deposits and serve additional communities.”

Expanding banking access for low-income communities, immigrant communities, and communities of color is one of the central objectives of the Public Bank NYC coalition. This is, presently, one of the only ways to address the banking deserts in places like East New York. But the public bank would do more than that. By putting the public funds in CDFIs and credit unions, the funds would likely be invested in efforts to address social problems, efforts that have struggled to secure funding from conventional banks.

“Traditional banks are reluctant to support alternative housing models like community land trusts,” says Anousheh. “They’re not providing the low interest loans that will allow us to get to the affordability levels we need. But if we had a public bank, it could provide loans for non-speculative housing, like community land trusts and mutual housing associations.”

But there’s no guarantee a public bank would function this way. The only operating public bank governed by a city or state government in the United States, the Bank of North Dakota, has a mixed history of supporting the public good.

While the Bank of North Dakota helped small-business owners secure more PPP loans than in any other state, the bank has also invested heavily in and even loaned almost $10 million to local law enforcement efforts to break up the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline at the Standing Rock reservation. Among the many structural oversights that made such investments possible is the lack of even a single Native American director on the bank’s board, despite the state having per capita Indigenous populations in the nation.

To avoid reproducing the toxic practices of traditional banking, there’s a panoply of provisions in the current New York bill that makes Morrison believe it to be “the strongest bill of its kind in the country.” The bank’s board would be intended to reflect the population of the chartering city with directors representing community organizations. Public banks in the state would be required to abide by the United Nations’ Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People and include representatives from Indigenous communities. An advisory committee would provide additional oversight. And the chartering municipality could choose to prohibit investments in fossil fuels, private prisons, and other industries detrimental to the public good.

Of course, with two consecutive years of death-in-committee for the legislation, it might be a while before it passes. But already there’s a good deal of support for the public bank outside the coalition. The New York City Council unanimously passed calling on the state legislature to pass the act, and 82 elected officials, including New York’s comptroller, with the same call.

With all this support, Morrison is confident progress will be made in the upcoming legislative session. Their biggest obstacle, he says, are leaders in the legislature who are influenced by Wall Street lobbying. But this blockage is just another part of what Morrison says has been a massive public policy failure on the part of elected officials to address a crisis in New York.

There is a solution, Morrison says, adding, “They just don’t want to rock the boat.”

Elected officials might not want to shake things up, but the Public Bank NYC coalition has no such qualms. They know what a public bank would mean for their communities. So, as Morrison puts it, they’re “going to go all in” to win.

Can enterprises be designed for something besides providing maximum gains to their owners and investors? Can we even imagine enterprises designed to keep the planet thriving?

Patagonia’s answer is just one alternative to the fate many well-meaning CEO-founders have faced when they sold to multinationals or took firms public, only to see their creations gutted and transformed. Among these are Smith & Hawken, Odwalla, Ben & Jerry’s, and many others.

Here’s the disturbing truth: Virtually all successful businesses end up in the maw of finance. The system design permits virtually no alternatives.

No founder lives forever. Once a founder retires or dies, most small businesses close. Only about one in seven pass their businesses on to family, and of those enterprises, a vanishingly small number make it to third-generation ownership. The rest are sold—often to competitors or private equity firms. The businesses become assets, often sold over and over, until the original life is snuffed out. Whatever impulse for human betterment motivated that founder, profit-maximizing devours it.

In the face of this, founders transitioning ownership in alternative ways are key architects of the next system. Here’s one story even more inspiring, and replicable, than Patagonia’s.

Coming to Our Senses

In 2005, Mandy Cabot, founder of Dansko shoe company, was on the verge of selling the company to Timberland for $100 million, but she stepped back at the last minute. She later turned the enterprise into a B Corporation and sold the company to its employees through an Employee Stock Ownership Plan. But that was just the start.

Cabot was born to a wealthy family, and she still made money on the sale of Dansko. But she remarked on how inefficient it was to amass wealth over a lifetime, and then give some of it away at the end. She wondered: Wouldn’t it be more efficient to use a business to do good?

In 2018, the Democracy Collaborative began a project on what we call the “next-generation enterprise.” We identified 50-plus companies that were, like Dansko, employee-owned benefit corporations—firms like Eileen Fisher, Clif Bar, King Arthur Flour, and Cooperative Home Care Associates. Cabot showed up at the April 2019 event we hosted for these firms. I’d known her from the days I’d been publisher of Business Ethics magazine, and when I asked what she was doing, she said with a laugh, “I bought a rainforest.”

Later, I reached out for an interview, finding Cabot at her current home in Belize. Cabot, now in her late 60s, and her husband, Peter Kjellerup, who was in his 70s, were looking for impact investments after the sale of Dansko. They were thinking of buying a little farm in the mountains of Belize, when a broker told them of a rainforest on the verge of being sold to a developer. “You better sit down, because it’s a big one,” the broker said.

The rainforest property turned out to be 27,500 acres, bordering three preserved areas, including a jaguar preserve. The parcel included an abandoned farm with a factory for making coconut oil. They fell in love. “It’s the mother of all impact investments,” Cabot said. They began rehabilitating the 10% of the land that had been previously farmed, using permaculture and regenerative agriculture. Much of the rest of the land they turned into the new Silk Grass Wildlife Preserve—a nonprofit that today owns 30% of the farm and factory, and one day will own it all.

Cabot’s aim is to make the farm and factory profitable enough to sustain the preserve in perpetuity. The boards of the preserve and the company will be controlled by Belizeans, and Cabot is insisting a majority be women. Together, that system could one day sustain about 200 good-paying jobs.

“We’re designing it all so it’s scalable,” Cabot said. She didn’t mean “scalable” as maximizing financial wealth, but as living depth and breadth: leaving the soil healthier, building biodiversity, supporting pollinators.

Cabot recalled meeting with Will Raap, founder of Gardener’s Supply, another employee-owned benefit corporation, who told her, “Young lady, I have one word for you: biochar. It really will save mankind.” Biochar is the result of a process that turns biowaste, such as coconut shells, citrus peels, and avocado pits, into briquets that sequester carbon for thousands of years and serve as beneficial soil amendments. Now, Cabot and Kjellerup are bringing biochar to their farm.

“There’s so much circularity in all this,” Cabot told me. “This really is the grand finale we’re so lucky to have.”

If Dansko, as both a B Corporation and an employee-owned firm, is an example of using business as a force for good, Silk Grass is a far more ambitious project. There, investment, profit, trust ownership, regenerative agriculture, and local governance are all working together as a system to create flourishing, ongoing, living wealth. Cabot is investing capital to feed the wealth of the rainforest.

Other entrepreneurs would say Cabot is leaving money on the table. “What would you say to them?” I asked. She replied, “How much more do you need than enough? Enough is enough.” She and Kjellerup left their children an inheritance. They have enough to live comfortably. But they’re sinking loads into Silk Grass—including years of their lives—building something they won’t own or profit from.

What she and her husband care about, she said, is “what gives you the deepest sense of joy in your life.” I saw a piece of that, as Cabot shared on Facebook a video of the dozens of baby sea turtles she’d worked with others to nurture, being released to the sea.

Like Yvon Chouinard, Cabot is building an alternative to the conveyor belt that feeds small companies into the jaws of big corporate finance. And since she didn’t give away all the wealth of Dansko, she’s modeling a more replicable approach for other founders.

Then, Cabot went on to something bigger. At Silk Grass (also a B Corporation, and the first one in Belize), ownership will be handed to a trust fed by the farm’s profits and governed by Belizeans. Investment is occurring. A business is making a profit. But capital and corporation are in service to life, not the other way around.

This microsystem helps us visualize the great task ahead—transferring wealth and power from the hands of the few to the control of the many. Creating systems to keep life flourishing, as their first aim.

Our culture may look back one day to find that the mania for maximizing profits was a mass delusion that ultimately lost its hold. Charles Mackay in Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds famously observed that people think in herds, and they go mad in herds, “while they only recover their senses more slowly, and one by one.”

Cabot and Yvon Chouinard have both left loads of money on the table. But a better way of putting it is, they put that money to the best possible use.

This is an excerpt from Wealth Supremacy, a new book forthcoming in September 2023 from Berrett-Koehler Publishers. It has been edited for YES! Magazine.

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 10:05 a.m. PDT on Oct. 28, 2022 to correctly identify Silk Grass’ governance structure—the board and company will be run by local Belizeans of many ethnicities, not solely Indigenous Belizeans.��Read our corrections policy here.

For nearly 25 years, Reverend Faith Fowler has led Detroit’s Cass Community United Methodist Church. In 1994, she founded��, an independent nonprofit organization that’s paving an innovative route to economic growth through homeownership, using low-income housing as a vehicle.��The same “person-centered philosophy” that has always guided her work is now literally laying foundations of accessibility and framing futures.

Cass Tiny Home Development, a program under the nonprofit, shares some elements with a “Housing First” model, a term applied to programs that provide stable housing before addressing issues like mental illness or drug addiction, which often accompany homelessness.

But the Cass program doesn’t remove all barriers. Applicants need to have a certain amount of stability in their lives before they get in, but “not so much that they could rent or buy property without our help,” Fowler says.

That means having an income between $7,000 and $12,000 per year, the ability to pay rent and electric bills, meet regularly with financial coaches, and volunteer at least eight hours a month in the community. Some residents may have criminal records, but the program focuses on inclusion of those unlikely to fall into recidivism.

After seven years, the tiny home and the land on which it rests are deeded to the resident, mortgage-free, and one more person has transitioned from a place of housing insecurity to place of housing equity. For many making that transition, it’s the first time they’ve ever owned a home.

“The program is promising,” says Claire Herbert, an assistant professor of sociology at Drexel University who studies housing and homelessness. “It creates an avenue for former prisoners to gain access to stable housing that they might not have the opportunity to do otherwise.”

As of June 2018, about 39,000 inmates were held in .��Transition from incarceration to parole has always been contingent on several factors, including the stability of an inmate’s intended housing arrangement once released, but Herbert says that, more and more, research is focusing on the process of prisoner re-entry, and support systems that reduce recidivism.

For example, a new ��to those considered at low risk to re-offend. But the law comes with a new challenge—increased responsibility to support this growing population in successful re-entry to society, and that success is centered on stable housing.

“The traditional model for getting the homeless back into stable housing is to have them jump through a series of hoops to demonstrate their preparedness for being housed,” Herbert says, “but what Cass is doing meets the needs of a particular community in a particular place.”

“This is a Housing First��model that says ‘everyone is ready to be stably housed,’” Herbert says.

Like many other organizations, Cass Social Services tested a variety of housing models in the past. “What we found is that many of our people could move on, but [eventually] they’d come back, like a boomerang,” Fowler says. Good people of limited means may end up with cars that break down or jobs that are eliminated, and they become homeless. Fowler wanted to help create a financial safety net—economic mobility for those without. In considering how the organization could offer housing security and a way for tenants to acquire assets to help them build wealth, “Tiny homes seemed to fit that bill,” she says.

Former inmates reintegrating into society make up a minority of the residents of Cass Tiny Homes. Other residents, including foster children aging out of care, can also find themselves without assets or even a stable foundation on which to enter adulthood.

“Nationally, about 20,000 young people age out of foster care each year, and about a third will go on to experience homelessness,” says Dawn Rains, a former foster parent and chief policy and strategy officer at Seattle’s , a nonprofit ��on behalf of youth in foster care. Through wraparound case management and a partnership , Treehouse helps connect youth to housing and life skills.

Still, in spite of these efforts and Washington state’s extension of foster care provisions to age 21, about 500 young people age out every year. In response to this, ��prohibits public systems from graduating anyone who would then become homeless.

“Whether exiting from the juvenile justice, foster care, corrections, or mental health system,” Rains says a workable plan for housing must exist. Right now, there simply isn’t adequate supply for the demand, but various state agencies are calculating the path to full implementation of the law.

An approach like Fowler’s through the tiny home program, she says, “is an absolutely innovative solution, and a really critical help for this population.”

Fowler’s parents taught public school. Her inspiration came from their examples of sacrifice and generosity, leadership styles that children observe and mimic when parents do it well. She also received an inheritance after the death of her mother, underscoring a privilege that starkly contrasted with the lives of those she served.

As of April 2019, Cass Tiny Home Development has built 13 houses in the Dexter-Linwood neighborhood of Detroit, and six more are under construction. The homes range from 250 to 400 square feet, and can accommodate up to two occupants each. In a short time, the tiny homes village has experienced a rebirth.��“Response has been extremely positive,” Fowler says.

Funding for the project has been donated by corporations, foundations, religious organizations, schools, and individuals. “People have been quite generous,” Fowler says.

The first contribution, from Ford Motor Company Fund, provided $400,000 for groundbreaking and structural development of the homes on land owned by the nonprofit. The organization has enough money to build 25 houses and is raising funds for 10 more, plus sidewalks and fencing, she says. The new homes will be large enough to accommodate families. A number of architects have been involved with the project, half of whom donated their services, and other costs are offset by residents’ rent.

The second phase of development in the tiny home project will include a commercial strip to provide services and jobs in the neighborhood. But Fowler says they’ll be careful about who can set up shop there.

“What we don’t want to do is build 35 houses, and then at the end of the block, have medical marijuana and payday advances and things like that,” Fowler says.

She plans to have a “one-cup” car wash on the site, a greener option that only uses one cup of water converted to steam, compared to 100 gallons used by a traditional car wash.

“This is the kind of innovation that ties in nicely with our emphasis on sustainability and the planet,” Fowler says, also noting this is a type of business that can employ people with fewer workplace skills.

The initiative also functions as an anti-poverty program. Unlike most any other low-income housing across the country, these homes represent a strategic wealth-building opportunity, and doesn’t penalize tenants when their annual incomes rise above $12,000. In fact, “the program encourages residents to make, and save, more money,” Fowler says.

Updated April 11, 2019: This story was corrected to reflect how long Faith Fowler has been a pastor at the church, the relationship between the church and Cass Community Social Services, and to clarify the housing program’s model and the population mix of its residents.��

Construction on U.S. Penitentiary Big Sandy finished in 2002, one of three federal prisons built in eastern Kentucky since 1992. Plans for another federal prison, in rural Letcher County, Kentucky, appear to have fallen through; in June, the U.S.  after an outcry from the community—and a federal lawsuit expressing concern both over the environmental issues of building the prison on a former coal mine site, and the fact that the public had not been able to weigh in.

In the scramble to “save” Appalachia as the coal industry collapsed, prisons—many housing incarcerated individuals transferred from distant states—have been presented as an antidote to the joblessness and poverty plaguing parts of the region, especially the more isolated rural areas. Prisons are big projects with hefty price tags, and they bring pledges of “jobs, jobs, jobs.” But more often, prisons do not deliver promised local employment, at least not initially, and carry with them a host of other issues.

, the town nearest Big Sandy, has a population of less than 900. Multiple storefronts on East Main Street are empty, one with large pane windows covered in flaking white paint. There’s a hardware store, a rural health clinic. The pawn shop at the edge of town has a row of ATVs parked out front, near a stack of tires and a few old wagon wheels. A sign says “We Buy Gold.” It’s unclear how many locals work at the prison. Despite Big Sandy’s promise of local jobs, the largest industry employing people in Inez is still oil and gas extraction, and less than a third of the town’s total population is employed anyplace at all.

Kentucky has 12 state prisons, plus five federal prisons. The Virginia state prison in Big Stone Gap is just across the state line. In March 2019, the number of people under the jurisdiction of the Kentucky Department of Corrections , though there were for all of them.

Kentucky has the  in the nation, so much so that Kentucky radio station WMMT began producing a radio show, “Calls from Home,” in the early 2000s. The program reaches into seven prisons, broadcasting messages from inmates’ families. WMMT is housed within Appalshop, Kentucky’s media, education, and arts center within Letcher County.

A prison is not like a factory. Its massive size doesn’t automatically mean jobs, especially not for a local workforce without the specialized training needed to be a corrections officer, or CO—and especially not in a federal prison, which has additional qualifications.  requires a college degree, or three years of work experience.

“Fifteen years in, you might be able to have more local folks because the people they start out with would have been trained up, [but] it’s not immediate work; it’s never been,” says Ada Smith of Appalshop and the Letcher Governance Project, a group that opposed the prison in Letcher County. People with military experience may have a greater chance of prison employment, says Smith, whose cousin works as a CO. When hiring for federal prison COs, the federal government looks for military experience, and as Smith says, “there’s a higher percentage of rural military people than anywhere else.”

Still, from 2014 to 2016, only , according to the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy; and just 2.4% of Kentuckians in rural areas overall worked in the fields.

Appalachian prisons have overwhelmingly been built in remote places, a fact that family members of incarcerated individuals lament in Up The Ridge, Appalshop’s 2006 , which focuses on the then-new Wallens Ridge State Prison in Big Stone Gap, Virginia. Lisa Richardson, traveling to Virginia from Connecticut to see an incarcerated loved one, asked, “Why would you build a prison so far up here and so secluded?”

Federal prisons house inmates from all over the country—often, inmates are transferred without warning—requiring family to make these costly and difficult journeys to visit their loved ones, if they can visit at all.

Some local government officials in McCreary County, Kentucky, tried to pitch the federal prison there as a generator of additional tourism dollars from families visiting incarcerated loved ones. The thought was that families would stay at hotels, eat in restaurants and take part in local recreational activities, including waterskiing. Smith characterized the pitch from officials, who suggested that traveling to the region for visitation as “going to feel like a vacation!” That did not happen, and the prison tourism dollars never came at the scale officials had hoped.

Near the Virginia state line, churches and other volunteer groups run ride-share programs where families are picked up, driven all night, fed breakfast, and taken to prisons for visitation. Families spend the night locally, but usually at inexpensive motels, where they receive a discount.

Even without many local jobs or tourism dollars, prisons can potentially contribute to a rural community in the form of infrastructure. Large prisons need a lot of water. They need roads and sewage systems. These structures aren’t always in place in rural, remote Appalachia. Kentucky, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania are among the states with the largest number of , according to the Appalachian Regional Commission.

Yet a , home of Big Sandy, for decades. In 2000, the collapse of a sediment pond, meant to hold the waste from a now-closed coal extractor company, turned several rivers black. The waste, which contained arsenic, lead, and mercury, among other toxins, poisoned the county water supply.

That was almost 20 years ago, and Martin County residents still struggle to obtain clean, safe water. Pipes don’t work. They don’t have pressure; the water that eventually drips out of them is sometimes neon blue and smells of diesel. Water bills have skyrocketed, and the Martin County Water District in 2018 conducted shut-offs to conserve water, with some residents reporting their .

In Letcher County, lack of basic infrastructure could have stopped the prison project before it began. Then the federal  for the building of a sewage plant near the rural site, and to install the needed 9.5 miles of water lines. These basic public works projects were imperative for a prison, but they were also sorely needed by the community at large. The prison project promised water and sewer service to 100 nearby households. The future of those services is uncertain now. 

On the small main street in Inez, Big Sandy feels distant, a phantom over the shoulder of the town, miles and a mountain away. But prisons cast a long shadow over the communities in which they rest.

The Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield, Ohio, my hometown a few hours north of Kentucky, was closed in 1990 as a result of a lawsuit over inhumane conditions and overcrowding. It was quickly replaced by a different, mixed-security state prison for men. But the Reformatory stayed standing. It was used for music videos and movies, including The Shawshank Redemption.

It’s strange to grow up in a small, rural town where one of the major industries, after the Westinghouse and General Motors factories closed, is prison tourism. One titled their review of the Reformatory “Locked Up & Lovin’ It!” Buying a ticket and wandering inside, people gawk and take pictures, laughing. Someone spray-painted “HELL” in the administration area. Paint flakes from the walls. The cell blocks are six tiers high, narrow as kennels and covered in rust. Solitary confinement looks scarier than any fiction that might have been filmed there: near-complete darkness in the damp, low-ceilinged belly of the basement.

Some of the community outcry against prisons is related to racial injustice: It’s and it’s mostly White men guarding them. According to a paper on the Kentucky Policy Blog, using data from the Department of Public Advocacy,  than White people in the state.

In Up the Ridge, an unnamed young White man hoping to land a job as a CO acknowledges the racism of the area, but says he’s “colorblind.” He says he understands “racism probably would come up, but that’s something that hopefully they would train you for.”

Prison employees receive training on diversity in , such as California, but the impact of these trainings is difficult to determine.

Also, prisons may eventually bring jobs to town, but

“I do not know anyone who dreams of being a prison guard,” Smith told The Appeal, an online newsletter focused on criminal justice. It’s difficult work with a culture of closed ranks, similar to the military, and there’s a high turnover rate among COs. There’s even a term coined for the specific : “corrections fatigue.”

As with any job, COs can bring the stress and anxiety of work home. But the stress of being a prison guard includes dealing with physical violence and emotional distress, along with the low-level anxiety of being constantly alert to potential danger. Hypervigilance can lead to , a condition for which 34% of corrections officers fit the criteria, at rate even higher than that of military veterans.

The connection between police officers and domestic violence is widely known, but prison guards have been less studied, which a 2012 paper in the Journal of Family Violence theorizes may be because COs do less visible work than public police officers. The work and stress of prison guards is hidden away in restricted buildings, behind barbed-wire fences, and away in the hills. Still, the data revealed that  perpetrated by COs.

In Up the Ridge, activist Sister Beth Davies described officers she had met in prison “day after day, becoming more violent and more racist, the hate—and so the domestic violence rate has gone up. The divorce rate. The drug and alcohol problems. It compounded so many of the social issues here.”

In 2019, two inmates at Big Sandy were convicted of assaulting another inmate with a weapon. Two other inmates pleaded guilty the month before for attempted murder of another incarcerated person. A prison staff member was burned with scalding water thrown by an inmate. In 2009, a prisoner at Big Sandy attacked a fellow inmate with a homemade ice pick before strangling him to death.

That leads to a high rate of burnout and turn-over even after a short period of employment. “People start working at prisons and don’t try to do it at year two,” Appalshop’s Smith says. “Then it’s just like …I can’t do this.’ … It is a very intense job, and all the things that come with being in that kind of environment for eight to 12 hours.”

Sometimes in Appalachia—including Appalachian Ohio, where I have lived for much of my adult life—there is a sense that this is all we are good for, and this is our lot in life. That sense can lead to the belief that we are destined to suck it up and do the difficult, unwanted work—work that changes people. It’s the inevitability of what Smith calls “shit jobs,” referring to “this masculinity idea that, ‘Yes, we’re trash, and yet we’re the ones willing to do it—we’re the hard workers.’”

She likens this legacy to coal jobs. “I have supplied the [country with] energy and now I’m proud that now I’m the one making sure these dangerous people are off the streets … ,” she says of the mindset of some COs and others working within the prison system in Appalachia. “[We have] these labor-intensive, physically exerting, basically dangerous jobs that most people won’t work in, or the people that do work them, it’s mostly immigrant labor. What has been said over and over again [is] White men won’t take these jobs anymore. But here they will.”

“When you’re hungry, honey, you’ll take a job,” said Chuck Miller of the Big Stone Gap Housing Authority in Up the Ridge.

The Appalachian willingness to work could translate to a host of other jobs, such as manufacturing in the factories currently sitting empty, or in health care, for which the region has a dire need. Joe DePriest, president of the Letcher County Chamber of Commerce, the county where he was born, says there is a Keebler factory, call centers, and mattress factories that are still open in Letcher County, home of the stalled prison project.

In September, Letcher County received a $3.5 million grant to build a sports resort, including a competitive shooting range. The county is also being considered for an airport project, which DePriest thinks would help with the accessibility of the area for potential developers: “If they say they’ll build you an airport, you should take it, you know?” Hemp and CBD oil extraction continue to flourish, sometimes on farms on reclaimed mine land.

Another much-needed industry in the region with the potential to bring jobs to Appalachia is substance abuse rehabilitation—the anti-prison, if you will. With the possible exception of rehab facilities, none of these industries have the big, sweeping allure of a federal prison. But when statistics show that , a prison seems more metaphor than strategy, the great ghost of a promise.

“They were putting an enormous amount of hope in that federal prison project,” DePriest says. “And nobody, even the smallest guy on the street, or the biggest guy there is, nobody presented the federal prison as a cure-all for Letcher County. Nobody looked at it that way, but everybody looked at it as a shot in the arm, or something that could help … But it shocked me how much [the prospect of the prison project] affected people’s thinking and logic and the hope. It really did, and right now it still does. It’s still right there.”&�Բ�����;

Up on the hill past the turnoff for Big Sandy prison is an office park. It winds through wild, grassy acres beside the prison. Most of the buildings sit empty, abandoned or never filled, weeds pushing through the parking lots. The prison didn’t really bring tenants to the park, just as it didn’t bring family tourists to the town.

Letcher County has an industrial park too, but because it was populated with companies primarily related to the oil and gas industry, most of those jobs were lost in the economic downturn 10 years ago. DePriest says a neighboring office park  has remained full of tenants, but he doesn’t know why or how to replicate its success. “Those are the same kind of people 30 miles down the road as here,” he says. “They have the same kind of benefits, and the same kind of problems and attributes as here. And if they can generate 20 companies … 30 miles north of here, we can do the same.”

It is no coincidence that Appalachia is considered a prime place for prisons, as it was for coal, fracking, and other industries that often exploit both land and people—it’s not simply a question of the terrain, but of industries no one else wants. Smith says that local officials have told her as much about the undesirability of the region, and how it is still passed over for more positive development: “If we could have got a pie factory, then we would have!” she recalls a member of the local planning commission saying. DePriest agrees that the abundance of extractive, exploitative industries in the region is no accident. “I think the thing with the whole general area—we’re talking about Letcher County, but really the whole area in general—is a loss of hope,” he says. “People need something to cling to, something to look forward to tomorrow.”

Perhaps for outlooks to change in Appalachia, the larger country’s opinion of the region needs to change, too—to view the region not only as a place to build an industry, but as a place to build a life. Smith says that highlights the importance of scaling back projects in the region to address the fundamentals. Clean water and repaired roads might not be as exciting as a prison, but the need for these services is dire and still unmet in some rural places. “If we could just get basic infrastructure for people that would be great,” Smith says.

DePriest says, “I think what we need to do, the leaders of the community, however we can, whatever needs to be done, is re-encourage people. To get their hope back.”

Otherwise, the promise of prisons may be like the promise of mines: largely empty, largely unjust.

This story was reported with support from the , which supports and amplifies stories of low-income families and the actions that make change possible. 

Additional support for YES! Magazine’s Appalachia coverage comes from the One Foundation. 

When the environment ministry announced the large “Cloud Forest” ecotourism project for the area in the late 1990s, the community mobilized. They had already seen the negative impacts of such projects. Mines were contaminating rivers. Hydroelectric projects, taking advantage of the abundant rains in the mountainous area, were destroying the local environment. There were 98 land concessions for such projects in the area.

Tosepan Titataniske, which means “together we shall overcome” in the local Nahuatl language, organized, taking advantage of a national law that allows communities to zone for different land uses. With a series of technical studies and community consultations that involved up to 5,000 people, they approved their “Ecological Land-Use Zoning for the Sierra Norte of Puebla.” The plan identified areas approved for conservation, restoration, sustainable use, and protection (including the main watersheds). Mining and most other megaprojects were defined as categorically incompatible with all four zones.

Getting the plan enforced was another matter, as the companies pushed back. Tosepan created its own Territorial Defense Committee to monitor company activities and led a class action suit to have its zoning plan recognized and enforced. They won their case in March 2015, but enforcement is still a problem. Still, Tosepan leader Enrique Fernández told us that they had successfully stopped four hydroelectric projects and a Walmart through a mixture of legal action, lobbying, and direct action to stop the bulldozers and backhoes.

Stopping Walmart and the national electric company got my attention. Was this another little David taking on a different set of Goliaths? Little wasn’t the word that came to mind as I learned more about Tosepan. The organization, which started in 1977, now has 410 cooperatives involving more than 30,000 families in 25 municipalities (similar to U.S. counties) across the remote region. Leonardo Durán Olguín, the young multilingual local who briefed our small group on the organization, said the goal of the group was yeknemilis in Nahuatl, buenvivir in Spanish, and of course we don’t really have a good phrase for such a lovely concept in English. Good living? No matter, they showed us what they meant. 

Their schools, which were in session, were a good place to start. Tosepan runs its own autonomous school system recognized by the government under a program for remote communities. They get no funds from the government, just some books. It’s supported like many other cooperatives in the community, with donations and a lot of volunteer labor. Their teachers, however, are trained on the Montessori model as bilingual Spanish-Nahuatl instructors. Indeed, in one fourth-grade class the teacher went back and forth between the two languages seamlessly. The goal is to have all children functionally bilingual by sixth grade. She said that younger children come in with stronger Nahuatl (or Tutunaku, the other indigenous language in the region) than Spanish. They want children to be able to function in the larger Spanish-speaking society, assigning books and book reports in Spanish. (“In a country where our president does not read books,” one teacher told us, “we want children who read.” Amen, I thought in 2015, and I didn’t even know what was coming back home.) They keep older children from losing their local language by involving them in cultural projects, including their own weekly radio show in Nahuatl, called Vida Digna in Spanish. (Again, our English isn’t up to the elegance: Dignified Life?) It includes high-schoolers interviewing their grandmothers or older community leaders in their native language. 

These were impressive kids, particularly the girls, so poised and articulate as they toured us around the school, showed us their school newspaper, explained how they make biological fertilizers as part of their practical work curriculum. No wonder. Their regular school day involves only two and a half hours of academic instruction. The rest is spent on farmwork, physical education, and arts and local crafts, with an hour for recess and lunch. The food is donated by community members and prepared by a student-staffed cafeteria. Everybody’s involved in community projects. The eco-lodge we stayed in, made entirely with bamboo from a Tosepan project that makes furniture and building materials, is run by a youth cooperative. Other students staff the community store, selling eggs and other farm produce. It is just part of the culture, with all community members participating in tequio, or community labor.

Economic projects center mainly on coffee, which grows on beautiful shaded hillsides that contain 150 different plant species. Their cooperative control of the process has boosted farmer income from coffee 200 percent. Cooperatives also have a successful organic bee/honey operation and the bamboo workshop producing furniture for the local market. We visited the large processing plant in town where they produce high-quality organic pepper for export to the Middle East and Europe. And of course they grow maize, usually inter-cropped with beans, squash, chiles, and other edible plants. Leonardo said the community is largely self-sufficient in basic foods.

It was easy to romanticize Tosepan as being “off the grid,” but as Leonardo made clear, they know that with megaprojects threatening them, they need to engage with the larger national and international economy. They just need to do so strategically, not letting the market decide their collective futures. Certainly Monsanto was not going to decide what they grow or eat in Tosepan.

Copyright © 2019 by Timothy A. Wise. This excerpt originally appeared in Eating Tomorrow: Agribusiness, Family Farmers, and the Battle for the Future of Food, published by The New Press and edited and reprinted here with permission. 


Graham, a former real estate developer who launched the faith-based social outreach ministry  (MLF) in 1998 to serve Austin’s homeless community, conceived of the neighborhood as a way to help people transition from chronic homelessness.

“I started developing pretty deep relationships with men and women out on the streets,” Graham says of his work. “In 2003, I started spending the night out on the streets. I’ve personally spent about 250 nights there.”

In that time, he learned about the work ethic of people living out on the streets, negating the stereotypes about laziness and homelessness that people harbor. The greatest cause of homelessness, he believes, is “a profound, catastrophic loss of family”—sometimes through suffering unthinkable abuses, including forced drug use and sex trafficking while living with parents and other so-called caretakers.

“I learned that the greatest yet most ineffective entrepreneurs on the planet are the panhandlers standing on the street corners, relegated to doing the only thing that we allow them to do now, which is the First Amendment free speech right to beg,” Graham says.

Nearly 350 individuals formerly experiencing homelessness reside in the village, which provides permanent housing and sits just outside Austin’s city limits (in Texas, MLF notes, there is no discretionary land use authority outside municipal boundaries, meaning the village faced no zoning issues). As of March, the village’s retention rate for residents is about 88%. Through a series of new investments, Community First plans to soon triple its footprint.

Graham started the village by helping set up one homeless man with an RV to live in. Then, he did the same for several others. By 2012, he secured 27 acres of land to build what became the neighborhood’s initial phase. It’s since grown to a community of about 350 occupied units, mostly single-occupancy, though there are some couples among the formerly homeless residents. About 50 people drawn to missionary work have also moved in and are volunteering in the neighborhood they’ve joined.

MLF bills Community First! Village as “the country’s only master-planned development designed specifically for men and women coming out of chronic homelessness,” but Graham and his wife call it something else: home.

They live in a modest Community First home among their formerly homeless neighbors—a stark contrast from the Westlake neighborhood where they lived for 34 years while Graham worked in real estate. Graham declares Community First to be the best neighborhood he’s ever lived in.

Community First launched as a primarily private venture, with Graham lining up angel investors to seed the vision and partnering with companies to create houses and provide needed materials for maintenance and upkeep.

A $36.6 million grant from the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, announced last December, will anchor MLF’s plans to create an additional 1,400 homes for the homeless through a $150 million capital campaign, calling it “a significant next step in delivering upon our broader Ten Year Plan to Mitigate Homelessness in Austin.”

The city of Austin is now stepping in with fee waivers totaling more than $4 million for the planned next phases of MLF’s community-building work, but even today, the upcoming phases will be largely donation-driven.

The community itself generated $1.2 million last year through the various micro-businesses MLF has established in the village, employing a number of its residents in the process.

Community First has an art studio—including two kilns for firing pottery and a jewelry-making station leading to a collaboration with famed Austin jewelry magnate Kendra Scott—that creates revenue for MLF and provides artists in the community a creative outlet.

The village also has what is essentially a tiny home hotel created near its entrance, serving as vacation rentals for people visiting Austin, with residents serving a range of roles to help operate it. There’s even an auto shop on-site where people can bring their cars in to be repaired or get annual state inspections required for vehicle registration.

Residents are expected to pay their way, though rent and utilities are scaled to enable homeless people to transition into life at Community First! Village—once they get through the three-step process to be admitted.

First, a prospective applicant goes through a coordinated assessment with one of several Austin-based homeless-serving agencies that MLF partners with, determining that the applicant is chronically homeless and living in Travis County for at least one year.

Community First residents average nine years on the streets before getting into their homes, and according to Graham’s estimate, anywhere from 70% to 80% are receiving either federal disability, social security, or veterans benefits. Community First doesn’t require residents to abstain from drugs and alcohol; Graham reasons that “the United States government, having spent trillions of dollars, can’t figure that deal out.”

Step two involves the prospective applicant touring the neighborhood to determine if they want to live there. Finally, if the person wants to apply, they fill out an application and join the waiting list. Each new house is furnished and is even decorated with the resident’s preferred color palette and tastes. And once a resident is in, that person can stay as long as they can maintain their rent and utility payments and live civilly among their new neighbors.

A manufactured tiny home, which would take an applicant about a year to get into, will cost a resident $440 a month; a micro-home, taking just a few months to become available, runs about $380 with utilities. Each micro-home has a bed, fridge, and microwave but not a kitchen or a bathroom; those residents use communal outdoor kitchens, as well as bathrooms and showers that individually lock, located in hubs near the micro-homes.

Graham advises those who are living in micro-homes to conceive of those as just the bedrooms of a larger house expanding out into those communal areas. With a health clinic and a small food store in the neighborhood, a new gathering space called The Living Room about to open, and a weekly farmers market where food grown in the neighborhood is distributed to residents, MLF is aiming to be as complete as it can for its residents.

Through a partnership with Austin’s famed Alamo Drafthouse Cinema chain, the village also boasts an  where residents and the general public can take in movie screenings (with concessions run by village residents).

Some even make Community First their eternal resting place. There’s a columbarium on-site where 24 residents were interred after their passing, and additional columbaria will be added to the memorial site soon.

“We’re instilling and putting back the basic building blocks of one being able to live,” says Thomas Aitchison, MLF’s director of communications, “so they are afforded the same access to essential and basic functions in life.”

And those building blocks include human relationships, enabled by the volunteers that come to the neighborhood to keep it functioning. Though the pandemic required a temporary stop to volunteers coming to Community First, they’re back now and giving the neighborhood additional vitality.

“We’ve created a destination for people to serve,” Graham says. “Prior to Community First! Village, if you have a heart for serving, if you have a heart for the homeless, your options are quite limited. We provide a destination, so it’s here now, and people come to us as they find out about it; it’s that proverbial snowball going down the hill. … We get to contrast between hopelessness and hopefulness.”

This story originally appeared in , a newsletter published by , which explores scalable solutions to make housing fairer. It is republished here as part of the SoJo Exchange from , a nonprofit organization dedicated to rigorous reporting about responses to social problems.

Now, however, we get near-daily reminders of the failure of our institutions to uphold that truth. Ignoring ubuntu, they pit us against each other in a deadly competition to dominate and exploit both the planet and our neighbors.

Our future depends on cooperating to create new institutions that support us in caring for and living within the means of a finite living Earth. But competition presents a terminal barrier to progress on two defining fronts: the growing number of billionaires, and the growing dominance of the world’s largest economies. The United States currently leads in both fronts. China is in second place but is positioned to soon take the lead.

Two current examples stand out in revealing the profound institutional failure that imperils our common future. Each underscores the need for the deep transformation we have only begun to envision.

1. The U.S. has long presented itself as the model of prosperity and democracy for other nations to emulate—a conceit that is fast losing its luster. In addition, between 2019 and 2021, life expectancy in the United States dropped from 79 years to 76 years—the sharpest two-year decline in a century.
2. The U.S. and China are confronting each other over many issues, most recently the status of Taiwan. If we are to move toward peace, equality, and a sustainable climate on which a viable human future depends, our two countries must join in common cause to create a world in which the very concept of a global superpower is a relic of history.

Alarming statistics on the come from a New York Times news story on a report by the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics. COVID-19 was the major driver.

Dr. Steven Woolf, director emeritus of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University, observed that while other high-income countries were also hard hit by COVID-19 in 2020, most had begun to recover by 2021. “None of them experienced a continuing fall in life expectancy like the U.S. did, and a good number of them saw life expectancy start inching back to normal,” Woolf told the Times. U.S. life expectancy is now the lowest it has been since 1995. Among the world’s high-income nations, the United States is leading—in the wrong direction.

According to Dr. Woolf, compared with other high-income countries, we in the U.S. are handicapped by a fragmented, profit-driven health care system, poor diet, lack of physical activity, smoking, widespread access to guns, and high levels of poverty and pollution. Break it down, and much of our loss traces to the failures of an economic system captive to the power of profit-maximizing corporations.

We bear the consequences not just in our health industry. We also bear them in our food and agriculture, gun, automobile, and other industries that put financial returns to their richest shareholders above the well-being of their own workers and the communities in which they do business.

If we evaluate these industries based on the flow of profits to the rich, they are exemplary. If, however, we evaluate them based on their contributions to the well-being of people and Earth, they are literally killing us—revealing the U.S. as a model the rest of the world best avoid at all costs. Here are basics of the billionaire problem:

that the wealth of the world’s 10 richest billionaires had doubled since the beginning of the pandemic. Incomes of 99% of the world’s people had fallen while corporate profits soared as those companies raised their prices faster than their costs rose—the .

In March 2022, Forbes identified a with a combined wealth of $12.7 trillion, up significantly from the 2,096 billionaires it had identified in 2020 before COVID became a global pandemic. The U.S. leads the world, with 735 billionaires holding a collective $4.7 trillion in financial assets. China is a close second, with 607 billionaires holding $2.3 trillion in assets. Together, the two countries account for 56% of the total assets of all the world’s billionaires.

The more inequality grows, the more power shifts to those the current system enriches, thus increasing their ability to further shape the system to their advantage. Those competing for the top spot on the Forbes billionaires list have chosen to ignore the obvious reality that there will be no winners on a dead Earth.

On the global superpower front, the U.S. and China compete for global economic and military dominance. The U.S. military budget dwarfs that of all other nations, but here, too, China is in second place and growing rapidly.

An obvious place to start in eliminating human environmental damage to Earth is with things that provide us with no real benefit. War is an obvious example. As Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently pointed out to Russian President Vladimir Putin, “this is not an era of war.”

So true. It is an era for eliminating war and moving forward a long overdue process of disarmament.

Achieving the well-being of both people and Earth will require a radical sharing of power to facilitate the cooperative learning and equitable resource sharing essential if humanity is to achieve the future most people seek. A key part of the process is transforming our society into an ecological civilization, which I outlined in my Club of Rome paper, “.”

The U.S. has presented itself as a model of democracy and prosperity for the world to emulate. China has led the world in reducing extreme poverty and has written a commitment to an ecological civilization into its constitution. Yet both nations stand out as the primary drivers of militarism, extreme inequality, and environmental devastation, pushing humanity toward social and environmental collapse. If our two countries continue competing to be the last global superpower on a dying Earth, we will fail to meet the that science tells us are essential to avoid triggering environmental tipping points from which there will be no recovery. This existential crisis presents an opportunity for unprecedented cooperation between China and the U.S., along with other nations everywhere, in which we apply our proven creative potential to build a world of peace, equality, and a thriving Earth.

Alyssa had tried contacting her sister’s employer to see what benefits, if any, their family was entitled to. “From Lyft, there was never any response,” she said. “To this day, nobody has ever tried to reach out to us to give us condolences or anything like that. There’s been previous articles where Lyft stated they tried to reach out to us, and that’s incorrect.”

Workers at app-based delivery companies and their families are often not compensated by their employers for injuries or deaths on the job. Several grassroots organizations and unions have been advocating for better safety measures for those workers and now, finally, are starting to see some improvements at local levels.

According to a , a grassroots organization advocating for better wages and working conditions, at least 50 employees who worked for gig companies have been killed on the job since 2017, and more than 63% of them were workers of color.

“Large tech corporations are making revenue and profiting off the backs of workers,” said one of the report’s contributors, Veronica Avila, a self-identified Mexican Latina who worked for Gig Workers Rising and was inspired to help write and research the report after witnessing the hardships her relatives in the service industry experienced. “They leave workers of color to fend for themselves. They have to deal with the intense implications of this work on their own. So that was sort of the institutional focus.”

The report’s researchers on the number of worker deaths from online sources that included articles, GoFundMe pages, and social media posts. An official database of worker injuries, deaths, accidents, and instances of abuse and harassment is not available, however, and press and social media reports continue to be the most reliable resources for counting work fatalities. 

After Bella’s homicide, the Lewis family created a and successfully raised $8,950 to cover the funeral costs they otherwise would not have been able to pay. According to a 2021 study from the , the average cost of a funeral is $7,848. But not all GoFundMe drives raise enough to cover all the costs borne by the families of app-based workers who die on the job. 

Alyssa said she would have preferred that Lyft cover the funeral costs, but the family’s expenses didn’t end there. “My sister was 26, so it was unexpected. I’m sure members in my family needed therapy. I would say, [they should be] taking care of families that go through this by providing resources to cope.”

According to the Pew Research Center, about 16% of Americans have worked for an online gig platform, with more likely to have taken part in the gig economy. Many take the work for the extra income or more flexible working hours, and they often end up driving for large companies, like Uber, DoorDash, Lyft, and Instacart. Non-White workers also reported feeling unsafe and being treated rudely more frequently than their White counterparts. 

In addition, a majority of workers do not receive compensation for injuries on the job. Treating work-related injuries cost an average of $44,000 in 2020, according to the . The families of gig workers who died on the job, whether in an accident or from violent crime, for the death of their loved ones, because most companies don’t provide compensation for death-related costs. 

The Gig Workers Rising report calls for greater safety measures for app-based workers—finding information about individual workers’ injuries was more difficult in comparison. “Part of the reason we started with highlighting folks that have been murdered on the job is that it’s hard to come by any information on accidents, because these companies are misclassifying workers,” Avila said. “The stories of accidents are invisible. There are very few reporting requirements that these companies have to actually adhere to.”&�Բ�����;The writers of the report suspect the actual number of worker injuries and fatalities is much higher. 

An estimated do not receive employer-provided benefits, according to Employee Rights Advocacy Institute For Law & Policy, a labor advocacy organization. Most gig workers are classified as independent contractors and are not entitled to benefits enjoyed by full-time employees. Those missing benefits can include paid sick days, health and safety protections, or unemployment insurance, according to a survey analysis by the . 

“These companies created a business model where they misclassify workers, and so folks lack protections on the job,” Avila said. “There’s an ecosystem of impacts that workers have to grapple with—companies offload responsibility onto workers.”

“I saw how destructive and exploitative the industry was,” said Lori Simmons, an organizer and activist with the , which works toward expanding app-based gig worker rights in the city. Simmons also was a full time ride-share driver from 2015 to 2020, and cited her experience as leading her to organize workers. 

The Chicago Gig Alliance has been working with the mayor’s office and city council, organized rallies in the city, and participated in protests at Uber’s Chicago offices. Most recently, the alliance proposed a city for better safety policies, including having Uber and Lyft require riders to identify themselves on the app. So far, the city has not taken up the organization’s proposed legislation. 

“There is a subset of people who are using the app to anonymously commit crimes against drivers,” Simmons said. “Police have sent out warnings for ride-share drivers, and the company’s refused to change their policies to require passengers to identify themselves when they’re using the app.” Lack of identification means that drivers who are assaulted or harmed by passengers have difficulty holding the perpetrators accountable. 

Gig workers’ rights vary from state to state. In New York, the , an organization of app-based delivery workers and drivers, organized a series of marches and rallies. Their efforts were ultimately successful: In September 2021, the New York City Council announced it wouldexpand its . By January 2023, workers will have a say in the safety of their routes. They will be able to set limitations on the distances they travel and the bridges and tunnels they use.

According to the nonprofit National Safety Council, from 2018 to 2019, the for employee accidents and injuries, which are paid for by employers, was $42,008. The highest average costs, however, were from motor vehicle accidents, with an average workers’ compensation claim of $81,971. 

All told, were lost from work-related injuries, and the number is expected to increase by an additional 50 million lost days in future years as a result of those injuries. 

Tracy Carson, a 43-year-old Chicago Uber driver, was injured in an accident in 2021. Another car rear-ended hers on the job, and she suffered six herniated discs, from which she still experiences severe pain. 

Carson contacted Uber’s driver’s accident number, and it sent help immediately. But she hasn’t heard from the company since that initial call. “So there just really isn’t any help whatsoever,” Carson said. “You’re just on your own.” She still works as much as her injuries will allow, about 20 hours a week at most, whereas before the accident, she “easily” worked 40- or 50-hour weeks. 

“I just can’t tolerate working a full workday. My body is what ultimately determines what I can do. I’m going to have to continue health care for probably the rest of my life,” Carson said. 

Carson eventually sued the other driver and won financial compensation to pay her medical bills, which have totaled more than $40,000 to date. Her own health insurance would not have covered the expenses.

She said the damages she suffered also aren’t limited to her physical disability. The accident also resulted in lost wages, depression, and anxiety. She shared her story with the Chicago Gig Alliance, which continues to strive to ensure workers and their families get the resources they need to recover from an accident or have the resulting losses paid for.

In the meantime, Carson still has not heard back from Uber. 

Gentrification is natural. Neighborhoods change over time. Different groups move in and out, businesses change hands, land uses shift. But just because change is normal doesn’t mean it’s natural. What drives middle-class residents into working-class and minority communities? What policies, economic forces, and cultural dynamics propel these changes? What makes it profitable and desirable? The answers lie everywhere from city zoning practices to historic redlining and racial segregation policies to a capitalist system of private property where housing is an investment and an asset. There may be a wide array of forces that encourage gentrification, but they are all human-made.

Gentrification is good for the city. It’s hard to argue with some of the changes that come with gentrification: renovated housing, clean parks, cute local businesses. A darker reality lurks under the surface. Those renovations may have begun with reno-victions, booting people out of their homes to allow landlords to jack up rents. The clean park might have been home to unhoused people, who were rounded up with heavy-handed policing and forced into crowded, unsafe shelters or out of the city altogether. A charming new café may have displaced a low-cost diner where locals have gathered for decades. While many welcome the sanitized, homogeneous face of the gentrified city, this change comes with a tremendous cost paid by the city’s most vulnerable communities.

Gentrification is caused by hipsters and artists. Artists have been categorized by some as “first-wave gentrifiers,” ushering in a new vibrancy, while hipsters’ particular tastes in coffee, craft beer, and organic products are blamed for changing the “vibe” of the neighborhood. But do these folks really have the capital or the clout to create the large-scale transformations that characterize gentrification today? Artists don’t build condominiums, and hipsters don’t tear down public housing. Yes, these groups signal changes that may lead to gentrification. However, we should be more concerned with the actions of landlords, developers, and city politicians.

Gentrification happens at the neighborhood level. In the 1960s, the first observers of gentrification noticed that middle-class homeowners seemed to “tiptoe” into neighborhoods and gradually alter their social character. Today, this quaint picture has been erased by gentrification in the form of massive “urban revitalization” projects. These changes can bring rapid influxes of new residents, a completely new physical environment, and major cultural shifts. Neighborhoods are affected, yes, but the forces driving this are operating at city and even regional levels, pushed forward by powerful actors in industry and government.

Gentrification is all about class. Class is right there in the name: The “gentry” take over and transform neighborhoods with their wealth and status. Working-class communities are objects of gentrification because the real estate is cheap and the profit potential is high. However, in many places, these conditions are created because of racist housing and immigration policies that “ghettoized” non-white communities and prohibited investment in those places. Today, the “working class” being displaced includes high numbers of women-headed households, recent immigrants, and racial minorities. Gentrification’s biggest winners are those who control the development and real estate industries, a group that is mostly white and male. It is no longer adequate to say that “gentrification is about class.”&�Բ�����;

Gentrification improves minority neighborhoods. Those in favor of gentrification suggest that racialized, inner-city neighborhoods will experience reinvestment through an influx of wealthier, white homeowners. Unfortunately, there’s little evidence to support this “trickle down” economic claim. While some homeowners see their property values rise, this can lead to displacement as property taxes and other expenses also climb. And what about renters and public housing residents? In cities all over the world, people describe a hostile takeover of their communities by white or other dominant racial groups who seek to quell the sights, sounds, flavors, smells, and activities of longtime residents. These residents report feeling like strangers in their own neighborhoods.

Gentrification is the new colonialism. Words like colonization, invasion, pioneering, frontier, and settlement have long been used in academic and popular descriptions of gentrification. Activists have even decried gentrification as “the new colonialism.” What these metaphors miss, however, is that the “old” colonialism is still here. In settler-colonial and post-colonial cities, Indigenous peoples are struggling to claim basic rights to inhabit territories stolen centuries ago. In this context, gentrification is not a “new” colonialism; rather, it furthers the ongoing displacement of Indigenous peoples by expanding the ownership of land by individuals, governments, and corporations.

Gentrification helps women. Feminists have long argued that city life is preferable for women. The close proximity of employment, schools, services, and transportation makes it possible for women to juggle their multiple roles as carers and workers. Gentrification, as a “back to the city” movement, would seem to be a solution for women’s woes. But any good feminist will stop and ask, “Which women benefit from this, and which women don’t?” Some very privileged women may “win” at gentrification, but women are over-represented among renters, public housing residents, single parents, low-income and part-time workers, disabled people, and other social and economic groups who are threatened by rising housing costs and the loss of affordable housing.

Gentrification is unstoppable. The greatest trick gentrification ever pulled was to convince the world it couldn’t be stopped. Even among its critics, a defeatist attitude can prevail. Cities have thrown up their hands and claimed that measures such as rent control, tenant’s rights, and anti-eviction rules “simply don’t work,” without bothering to explain why or to look for other strategies. Activists have struggled to learn from one another’s work in different cities, as stories of successful pushback against gentrification rarely reach the national news. It is possible to counter the bulldozer of gentrification, though. Whether it’s strategies that “pump the brakes” or halt it in its tracks, communities have found ways to hold on to affordable housing, local business, cultural uniqueness, and more without gentrifying. It is long past time to stop playing dead in the face of gentrification and to stop believing the lie that it’s inevitable. 

This excerpt from  by Leslie Kern (Verso, 2022) appears with permission of the publisher.

To me, these recent union wins recall another pivotal period in the U.S. labor movement several decades ago. But that one was led by migrants from Central America.

I’ve been researching human rights and immigration from Central America since the 1980s. In today’s  over immigration, the substantial contributions Central American immigrants have made to U.S. society over the past 30 years rarely come up. One contribution in particular is how Guatemalan and Salvadoran immigrants helped expand the U.S. labor movement in the 1980s, organizing far-reaching workers’ rights campaigns in immigrant-dominated industries that mainstream unions had thought to be untouchable.

Migrants and Unions

������Ƶ than  Salvadorans and Guatemalans came to the United States from 1981 to 1990, fleeing army massacres, political persecution, and civil war.

Since the 1980s, I have  this wave of migrants. Back then, President Ronald Reagan warned apocryphally that Central America was a threat to the United States,  in 1983 that “El Salvador is nearer to Texas than Texas is to Massachusetts.”

Just 2% of Salvadorans and Guatemalans who applied —so few that a 1990 class-action lawsuit alleging discrimination compelled the U.S. government to reopen tens of thousands of cases. In recent years, about  of their asylum petitions were granted.

Then, as now, many undocumented immigrants in the U.S. worked in agriculture or service industries, . Unionization barely touched these sectors in the 1980s.

������Ƶ broadly, the bargaining power of labor unions was suffering under Reagan, whose  started with his . Downsizing and outsourcing at American companies in the 1980s also  and pushed wages down.

Many Guatemalans and Salvadorans were veteran community organizers. They had faced down government terror to participate in , peasant leagues, , and  initiatives—all currents in 1980s revolutionary Central America.

Drawing on these experiences, many Central American immigrants began to organize in their U.S. workplaces, demanding higher wages and safer conditions.

Salvadorans Led Justice for Janitors to Victory

Salvadoran immigrants in California were pivotal in , a  low-paid workers’ movement that inspired today’s .

Justice for Janitors began in Los Angeles in 1990. It aimed to reverse the wage drops janitors suffered over the past decade.

Rather than do battle with the small subcontractors who hired cleaning crews for big office buildings, Justice for Janitors targeted the corporations that owned those buildings. Led by experienced Salvadoran unionists—some of whom had  back home—the movement used nonviolent civil disobedience and strikes to expose exploitative labor practices.

Speaking out could be dangerous. Police once clubbed participants at a  through Los Angeles’ Century City neighborhood on June 15, 1990. Undocumented workers feared deportation.

But it worked. Janitors in Los Angeles won a  after their 1990 citywide strike,  mainstream labor unions that even the city’s most marginalized workers—undocumented Central Americans, many of them women—had real organizing power.

Over the next decade, some , under the banner of the . The movement negotiated contracts that increased wages and health benefits for janitors across the U.S.

Guatemalans Defended Florida Farmworkers

Hundreds of thousands of people fled Guatemala during the early 1980s, escaping a  against Indigenous communities that left entire regions of its highlands charred and empty.

Roughly 20,000 of these Guatemalan refugees, many of whom spoke , landed in  in 1982, finding work in sweltering tomato farms and citrus groves.

Up to 90% of the fresh tomatoes in U.S. supermarkets .

Working conditions in the state’s tomato fields were dismal in the 1980s. Migrants  per 32-pound bucket of tomatoes picked. Some were , as a 1997  exposed.

In 1993, Guatemalan immigrants joined with Florida’s Haitian and Mexican farmworkers to form the , a community worker alliance that began in the basement of a local church in Immokalee, Florida. It used strategies common to Latin American protest movements, including street theater and socially conscious radio broadcasts, to unite Florida’s agricultural workers.

After five years of work stoppages, hunger strikes, and marches, Florida’s tomato pickers won wage increases of . A multiyear nationwide boycott of  convinced the fast-food chain in 2005 to increase the earnings of the farmworkers who supply its ingredients. Other fast-food giants followed suit.

In 2015, the Immokalee coalition launched the , an industrywide agreement with Florida tomato growers to promote strict health and safety standards and allow outside monitors to oversee working conditions. That same year, President Barack Obama gave the Coalition of Immokalee Workers the  in Combating Modern Day Slavery.

Guatemalans Organized North Carolina Poultry Plants

As Guatemalan migrants  during the late 1980s, recruited by labor contractors in other states, they soon became a powerful organizing force in North Carolina, too.

Case Farms, a poultry company that supplies KFC, Taco Bell, Boar’s Head, and the federal school lunch program, was a  place to work. Safety regulations were routinely ignored to increase output, and workers suffered serious injuries—including losing limbs to cutting machines.

In 1990, the Guatemalan immigrants at Case Farms’ plant in Morganton, North Carolina, organized a union drive.

As labor historian Leon Fink describes in his book , Guatemalan poultry workers drew on prior organizing experiences back home—including coffee plantation strikes and Mayan pride movements—to organize workers.

After  of walkouts, marches, and hunger strikes, the Case Farm workers voted in 1995 to join the Laborers’ International Union of North America. The company refused to negotiate, however, and the union pulled out of contract talks after six years.

In 2017, Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio challenged Case Farms to , after a New York Times and ProPublica investigation exposed ongoing abusive labor practices there.

These unionization stories show Central American migrants in a new light—not as criminals or victims, but as people who have helped make the U.S. a safer place for workers.

This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the . This is an updated version of an  on Jan. 18, 2019.

The increase in student loan debt should come as no surprise given the increasing cost of college.

In conversations among politicians, college administrators, educators, parents and students, college affordability seems to be seen as a purely financial issue—it’s all about money.

My into the historical cost of college shows that the roots of the current are neither economic nor financial in origin, but predominantly social. Tuition fees and student loans became an essential part of the equation only as Americans came to believe in an entirely different purpose for higher education.

Cost of a college degree today

For many students, graduation means debt. In 2012, more than (14 percent of the population) were still paying off student loans. And the average graduate in 2016 left college with more than $37,000 in student loan debt.

Student loan debt has become the among Americans. Besides leading to , student loan debt slows economic growth: It from buying houses and cars and starting families. Economist , among others, has shown a negative correlation between .

These loans can influence students’ decisions about which majors to pick and whether to pursue graduate studies.

The increase in student loan debt should come as no surprise given the increasing cost of college and the share that students are asked to shoulder. over the last two decades caused colleges to raise tuition fees significantly. From 1995 to 2015, tuition and fees at 310 national universities ranked by U.S. News , increasing by nearly 180 percent at private schools and more than 225 percent at public schools.

Whatever the reason, tuition has gone up. And students are paying that higher tuition with . These loans can influence students’ decisions about and .

Early higher education: A public good

During the 19th century, college education in the United States was offered largely for free. Colleges trained students from middle-class backgrounds as high school teachers, ministers and community leaders who, after graduation, were to serve public needs.

This free tuition model had to do with perceptions about the role of higher education: College education was considered a public good. Students who received such an education would put it to use in the betterment of society. Everyone benefited when people chose to go to college. And because it was considered a public good, society was willing to pay for it—either by offering college education free of charge or by providing tuition scholarships to individual students.

Stanford University, which was founded on , was an example of the former. Stanford charged no tuition for almost three decades from its opening in 1891 until 1920.

The cost for educating students rose significantly in the second half of the 19th century.

Other colleges, such as the College of William and Mary, offered comprehensive tuition scholarship programs, which covered tuition in exchange for a pledge of the student to engage in some kind of service after graduation. Beginning in 1888, William and Mary provided to about a third of its students. In exchange, students receiving this scholarship pledged to teach for two years at a Virginia public school.

And even though the cost for educating students rose significantly in the second half of the 19th century, college administrators such as Harvard President insisted that these costs should not be passed on to students. In a letter to dated June 9, 1904, Eliot wrote, “I want to have the College to men with much money, little money, or no money, provided they all have brains.”

College education becomes a private pursuit

The perception of higher education changed dramatically around 1910. Private colleges began to attract more students from upper-class families—students who went to college for the social experience and not necessarily for learning.

This social and cultural change led to a fundamental shift in the purpose of a college education. What was once a public good designed to advance the welfare of society was becoming a private pursuit for self-aggrandizement. Young people entering college were no longer seen as doing so for the betterment of society, but rather as pursuing personal goals: in particular, enjoying the social setting of private colleges and obtaining a respected professional position upon graduation.

The shift in attitude regarding college has also become commonly accepted.

In 1927, John D. Rockefeller began campaigning for charging students the full cost it took to educate them. Further, he suggested that students could shoulder such costs through student loans. Rockefeller and like-minded donors (in particular, , a wealthy real estate magnate) were quite successful in their campaign. They convinced donors, educators and college administrators that students should pay for their own education because going to college was considered a deeply personal affair. Tuition—and student loans—thus became commonly accepted aspects of the economics of higher education.

The shift in attitude regarding college has also become commonly accepted. Altruistic notions about the advancement of society have generally been pushed aside in favor of the image of college as a vehicle for .

A new social contract

If the United States is looking for alternatives to what some would call a , the solution may lie in looking further back than the current system, which has been in place since the 1930s.

Tuition-free education can only be realized if college education is again reframed as a public good.

In the 19th century, communities and the state would foot the bill for college tuition because students were contributing to society. They served the common good by teaching high school for a certain number of years or by taking leadership positions within local communities. A few marginal programs with similar missions ( and ) still exist, but students participating in these programs are very much in the minority.

Instead, higher education today seems to be about what college can do for you. It’s not about what college students can do for society.

I believe that tuition-free education can only be realized if college education is again reframed as a public good. For this, students, communities, donors and politicians would have to enter into a new social contract that exchanges tuition-free education for public services.

This article was originally published by . It has been edited for YES! Magazine.

Black Americans lost 90% of their lands across the United States during the 20th century, government figures show, because of factors such as predatory developers and a lack of access to the legal system and expert advice.

Now, an alliance of Black farmers and civil society groups wants to get an equal amount of property back.

“We were stripped of that land,” said Kenya Crumel, a director at the National Black Food & Justice Alliance (NBFJA), which includes nearly 50 Black-led organizations.

“Land is freedom. Historically in this country, so many policies were connected to land ownership—you couldn’t vote if you didn’t have land,” Crumel told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

The echoes of that loss continue to reverberate today, she said, noting a huge impact on “generational wealth.”

The group is in the process of taking ownership of that Southern plot, which is being donated, as its first piece of land.

It ultimately aims to obtain between 15 million and 20 million acres across both rural and urban areas—an amount Crumel said may seem “ridiculous” today but would match the estimated total acreage lost by Black households.

Upset Inequities

The project comes amid a growing focus on Black farmers and land dispossession, with projects working to help them get a fairer share.

White people own 98% of U.S. farmland, said Duron Chavis, a board member of the new Central Virginia Agrarian Commons (CVAC) nonprofit, which supports farmers of color.

“The gap we’re trying to fill is the land control, land ownership, land tenure gap that Black and Brown communities face not only in Virginia but across the nation,” he said. “Our work is to upset that inequity and put land back into the hands of the most marginalized in our community.”

The organization is fundraising to purchase land as well as soliciting donations.

This month, landowner Callie Walker will give away 75 acres of her family plot in Amelia County, Virginia, to allow farmers of color to set up homes and agrarian businesses, such as vegetable growing or beekeeping.

On a sunny May day, she surveyed the rolling fields and woodlands where she grew up, about an hour’s drive west of the state capital Richmond. A line of bright-orange surveyor’s flags showed where the property was to be split in two.

“I’ve watched other people try to start a farm dream on borrowed land or some other kind of land deal, and it seems like it always falls through,” said Walker, a United Methodist pastor. “The vision is to collect beginning farmers or dispossessed farmers and to get the housing in place that would allow them to try living and farming here.”

Restorative Economics

The burgeoning effort is increasingly focused on urban areas, too.

The national racial justice protests of 2020 after the police murder of unarmed civilian George Floyd sparked a growing momentum around using urban lands to foster agricultural work by small-scale farmers of color. 

Those were also the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, when communities suddenly faced empty supermarket shelves fueled by widespread panic buying, recalled Erin PJ Bevel, co-founder of the Detroit Black Farmer Land Fund. 

“It became very scary,” she recalled of the confluence of Floyd’s killing and the pandemic. “This was a crisis for Black people.”

The experience not only increased interest in locally produced food, she said, but also brought new attention to the network of Detroit urban farmers who had been growing on vacant urban plots for years—often in a legal gray area. 

Detroit has been buffeted by population losses for decades and has significant amounts of urban land left vacant.

While some of those properties have been available for a few hundred dollars, others in gentrifying areas have been priced at upward of $6,000, Bevel said.

Two years ago, on the June 19 commemoration of the end of slavery, a coalition of groups created the Detroit Black Farmer Land Fund to address the issue. 

Since then, the fund has crowdsourced more than $200,000, gathered donated land, and helped 70 farmers and farm businesses navigate city processes allowing them to buy vacant urban plots.

Bevel said she sees the initiative as an example of “restorative economics,” seeking to repair harm from injustices and help empower local residents to shape their own communities.

“We had no idea that this would blow up the way it did,” she said, noting the project has spawned at least two similar funds in Michigan alone.

Urban Greenery

One of those the fund is seeking to help is Timothy Jackson, 38, co-executive director of Detroit Hives, a nonprofit that sells about 700 pounds (320 kilograms) of raw honey annually.

The grant will help Detroit Hives purchase two vacant lots. 

“When you have ownership over your project in your community, it allows you to have a thorough investment—you’re not just renting,” Jackson said. 

Another local farmer, Erin Cole, runs Nurturing Our Seeds, a farm that grows “everything that can be grown” and sold more than $30,000 in produce last year. 

The farm started off as an effort to tame a vacant lot, and over the past decade has grown to eight lots—six of which the fund helped the nonprofit purchase last year.

Other projects are also looking to develop urban spaces for Black growers.

The Central Virginia Agrarian Commons, for instance, is in the process of purchasing parcels totaling nearly 9 acres in the cities of Petersburg and Roanoke, said Ian McSweeney, director of the national Agrarian Trust. 

The plots are in areas officially designated as “food deserts” where residents lack access to fresh food, he said. They will be used for growing, farm training, and as a base to help growers on Walker’s land and elsewhere connect with urban markets.

The NBFJA is looking to use its collective heft to buy up spaces that are already being used informally. 

“A lot of Black people are farming on vacant lots, and often they don’t own those lots, but you can negotiate with cities or counties to get ownership,” Crumel said. “So we want to take advantage of that and use our power as a group to negotiate those terms, and through that, mitigate loss.”

This story originally was published by the , the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters that covers the lives of people around the world who struggle to live freely or fairly. This story is republished here as part of the SoJo Exchange from , a nonprofit organization dedicated to rigorous reporting about responses to social problems. It has been lightly edited for YES! Magazine.

We asked three experts to explain the decision and its impact.

Relief Makes Real Difference but Ignores Structural Issues

Terri Friedline, Associate Professor of Social Work, University of Michigan

The Biden administration’s plan is an important step that I believe will make a real difference in many people’s lives. The  that about 20 million of the nation’s  will see their entire balance canceled.

Despite this considerable impact, the plan is still limited. I hope it’s just the beginning in much-needed policy conversations about debt and education in the United States.

For one thing, Biden’s plan  of America’s $1.75 trillion student debt tab.

In addition, the income cap of $125,000 focuses on borrowers’ socioeconomic class while ignoring the roles  and sexism play in terms of who borrows and how much. For example,  about $38,000 on average to finance their education, compared with $30,000 for White men. And because interest on student loans quickly accumulates, most Black female borrowers  their original balance 20 years after enrolling in school. By comparison, most White borrowers have paid off their loans completely within that time period.

The Biden administration will have to do more if it aims to adequately address these and the many other remaining structural problems with debt and education.

Plan Extends Much-Needed Relief to Black Borrowers

Dominique Baker, Assistant Professor of Education Policy, Southern Methodist University

When approximately 10,000 student loan borrowers had their private student loans randomly canceled from 2010 to 2017, researchers found that it ultimately enabled them to . The borrowers were also 11% less likely to default on credit cards or other loans.

I expect similar outcomes will flow from the Biden administration’s decision to cancel federal student loans. And the decision to cancel up to $20,000 for those who received Pell Grants means that .

From the standpoint of racial justice, I believe this additional relief for Black borrowers is necessary because of  of . Such inequities include accumulating education debt through “,” a practice in which Black people are offered access to things like college or buying a house but on exploitative financial terms that have long-term negative effects.

Black student loan borrowers are also often the      . As , Black bachelor’s degree earners are more likely to default on their student loans than White students who earn a bachelor’s degree—21% versus 4%, respectively. Even more startling, Black bachelor’s degree recipients default at a higher rate than White students who leave college with no degree—21% versus 18%, respectively.

The Biden administration also has , which should help future undergraduate borrowers by reducing the monthly percentage of discretionary income borrowers would pay from 10% to 5% and increasing what counts as non-discretionary income. That means borrowers will have more money that will not be used to calculate the percentage they owe each month.

I’d argue there is still work to be done to create an affordable college education. But today was an excellent start.

Loan Forgiveness Could Fuel Inflation

John W. Diamond, Director of the Baker Institute’s Center for Public Finance, Rice University

The price tag for Biden’s debt forgiveness plan is estimated .

While it will provide direct financial benefits for some people who currently owe money on federal student loans, I believe there will be another cost: higher inflation.

U.S. inflation is already rising at just below the , prompting the Federal Reserve to  to reduce it, even at the risk of recession. Biden’s plan will make the central bank’s job tougher.

The upward pressure on inflation will result from increased spending by those who see their student debts reduced, as well as from the continuing moratorium on federal loan repayments. This higher demand for consumer goods—relative to a world without debt relief or a repayment moratorium—has the effect of driving up prices for current goods and services.

The  found that a similar though more modest version of debt forgiveness would lead to a measurable increase in , which would have the effect of driving up prices for all consumers. That was based on a plan to spend roughly $230 billion on debt forgiveness—at least $70 billion less than Biden’s plan.

Another side effect could be that Biden’s debt relief offers incentives to students entering or currently in college to  in anticipation of future rounds of forgiveness. Economists call this . Other research found that increases in student borrowing .

Some research has pointed to  for those who receive debt relief, such as less future indebtedness, greater job mobility, and higher salaries. But these effects are based on a full discharge of student debt and not an incremental reduction like the one Biden announced.

Ultimately, loan forgiveness—whatever its merits—will likely lead to larger federal deficits and higher inflation. While it benefits those with student loan debt, those benefits should be weighed against the costs it imposes on others and the economy.

This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the . It has been lightly edited for YES! Magazine.

“I lost the fear,” she says. She began advocating for minimum wage—and now works for employers who pay it. “I had used my children to help negotiate deals, and now I can do that.”

Camacho is one of about 50 women who make up the quickly growing Liberty Cleaners, a group under the New York City–based  that started four years ago with just a few women. In July, the group celebrated the completion of a first-of-its-kind training program, developed in partnership with the State University of New York’s Harry Van Arsdale Jr. School of Labor Studies, with a focus on green cleaning, technology, and labor empowerment. A few weeks ago, the group kicked off ESL training at the Worker’s Justice Project Williamsburg HUB to support women negotiating in English.

“This was a group motivated to see a change, organize themselves, and grow,” says Maria Valdez, Worker’s Justice Project Williamsburg HUB director who leads the Liberty Cleaners. The group loosely modeled itself after , a group of app delivery workers who also organize under Worker’s Justice Project.

Their early work included OSHA and “know your rights” trainings, as well as outreach to  who gathered on a corner of Williamsburg, Brooklyn—known as La Parada—in search of work. As they continued to organize, the women rejected the title of domestic workers. “The word sounds like we’re being domesticated,” Valdez says. “We thought we deserved a name. … We identified as a powerful group of cleaners.”

Two years ago, roughly 20 women settled on the name Liberty Cleaners and picked the Statue of Liberty as a logo. “Many of the community are immigrant community, and the statue represents changes and better opportunities,” Valdez says.

Liberty Cleaners noticed a major difference between the informal economy of the women day laborers and Los Deliveristas Unidos, whose work is mediated by apps. “Women would pick up work and sometimes, at the end of the day, the employer doesn’t pay,” Valdez says. “If the employer sees you don’t speak English, they will take advantage.”

Liberty Cleaners wanted to increase tech education among workers, with the goal of utilizing existing apps as well as developing an app to pick up jobs and ensure fair pay. They turned to SUNY’s Harry Van Arsdale Jr. School of Labor Studies—which had previously worked with Los Deliveristas Unidos—about developing a curriculum that covered tech education alongside green cleaning and workers’ rights.

“The idea was to combine workforce development with labor education and leadership,” says Maria Figueroa, dean of the school. She and Liberty Cleaners worked with one faculty member, two university employees, and two consultants to design a curriculum. The team found that when it came to comprehensive training for the cleaning industry, “there wasn’t much,” says Figueroa.

The team broke down the training into soft skills and hard skills modules. Topics include cleaning training (with a focus on green products that have less health implications), technology basics, filling out safety forms, negotiation, and business principles of the industry. They also added tips on self-advocating for better working conditions and wages.

They picked a two-day span to hold the training at the university. “These two days meant a lot for the women,” Valdez says. “For many of them, they left hours of work, had to find babysitters, and had to do a lot of juggling.”

Camacho, the Liberty Cleaners member who advocated for minimum wage, also attended. “Through the training, I learned more about how to negotiate with my employers, how to use eco-friendly products, and about technology,” she says.

The class was an opportunity for the women to converse with each other and instructors about their experiences in the cleaning industry, their purpose in doing this work, and the skills acquired over the years. For participant Merced Aguilar, who has been organizing with Liberty Cleaners since the beginning, it was also a way to share the power of organizing.

“I want to let more of my compañeros know that being part of Liberty Cleaners will help you get more fair wages and more respect and dignity,” Aguilar says. “I want others to have the opportunity and learn the way I did.”

A total of 50 women graduated from the new program with a formal ceremony, wearing caps and gowns. “It was a special date, and I wanted women to feel proud,” says Valdez.

She and Figueroa hope to continue the partnership and evolve the curriculum into an accredited course and apprenticeship program. “It can become something official that can contribute to a degree,” Figueroa says.

Liberty Cleaners, for its part, is building off the SUNY curriculum with twice-a-week ESL classes, which includes tech practice skills, at the Williamsburg HUB to help women negotiate in English. Liberty Cleaners knows the importance of this skill—it’s what allowed Camacho to speak out against employers who weren’t paying minimum wage.

Valdez believes trainings can be the main strategy to attract new women to Liberty Cleaners—she plans to expand options if the group receives more funding. Her dream is to start a collective retirement fund to support the women in the group.

“Liberty Cleaners are here, and they’re growing,” she says. “These are women dominating whatever they need to face, powerful women that are giving themselves an opportunity to learn.”

This article originally appeared in , and is republished here as part of the SoJo Exchange from , a nonprofit organization dedicated to rigorous reporting about responses to social problems.

I am the director of programming for a nonprofit that works to reduce food insecurity in South Florida. We were born in the COVID-19 pandemic, and as a small team of six artists with day jobs, we see firsthand the failures of our local and state governments, as well as the total lack of support and acknowledgement from the federal government. Most of my work involves making sure people have the resources they need to survive. 

At first glance, we pair homebound and immunocompromised folks with a volunteer who brings them free food, and host 10 community fridges in food deserts that are free for everyone. The reality is that food insecurity is not the only thing our clients worry about, but rather, it is just one link in a longer chain of struggle. We also set people up with food stamps, find housing for undocumented folks, and start crowdfunding campaigns for people with outrageous medical bills, rent issues, and so much more. 

These are jobs that should not exist—it is only due to the failure of the U.S. government that the nonprofit industry is so prevalent. Still, doing the work I do makes me feel like I am not wasting the time I get to be alive. It is complicated and heavy and can pile on the guilt and expose my privilege front and center, but at the end of the day, I feel a little better about the way the world can be. I am able to find purpose while also paying all my bills, which feels more and more like a rarity, especially now that the .

Nonetheless, the national mood has been more bleak than usual lately. Every day that I clock in for work, I feel a deep sense of urgency: Each email I answer, each grant I send off are nagging reminders that we are wasting time. We are too busy complying with the way the world is instead of fighting for how we believe it should be. To me, a better world is one that encourages who we truly would be away from who we become when we are struggling to survive. 

According to the , “employed Americans with high family incomes again say they are the most satisfied [with their jobs].” The same survey from 2016 cites that nearly half of working Americans tie their identities to their jobs. When individuals and families are not worried about their basic needs being met, there is more room for creativity, joy, abundance, pleasure, and more. There is more freedom to explore identity away from work. 

Together, we need to organize for a true living wage, improved working conditions, and safe and affordable housing for everyone. Even with full-time work, these folks cannot make ends meet. Only when we ensure all of us have dignity and just compensation in our work can we truly thrive as full humans. 

Joining collectively to fight for people’s freedom to exist outside of work is an abolitionist practice. What this means is abandoning traditional capitalist practices, like extremely long work hours, no work-life boundaries, and burnout, in order to actually make the time and capacity to attend local government meetings, support local and national unions, organize labor strikes, and get to know the people you are working with and fighting for. When we are all living with our most basic needs met, then we can become our true selves and fight together for true liberation from White supremacy, hetero-patriarchy, and capitalism. As the anarchist writer , “With human nature caged in a narrow space, whipped daily into submission, how can we speak of its potentialities?” 

As a practice, I’ve stopped asking new people I meet what they do for work right away. It is a default question and it doesn’t tell me who you are or what you care about. Partly, I don’t want to talk about the work that I myself do. I am not the work I do, nor am I the money I get for it to keep myself housed, fed, and clothed. Instead, I want to know what someone does to find joy. I want to know what they have been thinking about. I want to know where they see themselves in the process of making the world more equitable. I want to ask about the abundance in their lives, the community they live within, and what makes them feel free. I want to share in the bridging between who we are as workers and who we want to be as people.

It is a relatively small way to move forward in anti-capitalist praxis, but it has changed the way I think about how we can encourage movement building. It has helped slow the urgency I feel, grounding me in the reality that organizing is always slow and intentional, with limitless potential. If we are willing to learn more about each other rather than the ways we compulsively participate in capitalism, we can begin to collectively act for a better future for all. 

Ruth is recovering from knee surgery and feels isolated and fatigued. Olga is restless and exhausted by the war in Ukraine, where she has family connections. Our go-to coping strategies—Ruth’s walks in nature, Olga’s bicycle rides—became less restorative and started to feel like obligatory tasks to perform. So we decided to do nothing.

There are countless books and articles about silence, doing nothing, or simplifying your life. Among wellness trends from outside the U.S. were the Danish tradition of hygge (chosen for the Oxford Dictionaries’ in 2016) and the Japanese ikigai (which can be understood as “finding your purpose”). Recently, we have encountered the Dutch term niksen, and one of us about it. 

Niksen, a Dutch verb meaning “to do nothing,” is a practice of just being, and can be understood as one way to get some rest. It is watching clouds pass by, not scrolling through Facebook. It is letting your mind wander, instead of reading emails or even making plans for the future. Purposelessness is an important aspect of niksen. Niksen, therefore, is doing nothing despite the health, productivity, and creativity benefits of rest and leisure—not because of them. 

Admittedly, this definition is somewhat nebulous and deceptively simple. It does not prescribe a specific activity or method, only purposelessness—and when does doing nothing become doing something, anyway? It also does not speak to the myriad interconnected personal, cultural, economic, and political factors that determine the extent to which people can “niks.”

In many modern societies, every minute has to be accounted for, spent in productive pursuits. Even leisure has turned into effortful—and expensive—self-care. The simplest of pleasures have been subsumed into quantifiable goals. We no longer eat food because it tastes delicious, we do it because it’s healthy. We no longer go for walks simply because it feels good, deep inside our bodies. We do it because we want to cross 10,000 steps off our to-do lists.

Why, then, do we feel like we have to be productive at all times? If rest is so important, why is it so elusive?

Even in the Netherlands, a country with a generous social support system, people have been complaining of burnout and overwork. During the pandemic, schools and daycares were closed for weeks, making this crucial part of Dutch society hard to access. Olga is a mother, and homeschooling three children with different abilities was incredibly hard. Even then, Olga managed to carve out time to do nothing. Because her husband also worked from home, she has found that in many cases, she actually had more freedom than she had before the pandemic when her husband worked long hours at the office and Olga had to be home to welcome the children when they came back from school.

Leisure as a Human Right

Article 24 of the United Nations’ proclaims: “Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.” Rest and leisure aren’t actually defined in the UDHR, but time off work helps create more space for both, as well as doing nothing. 

Yet too many people see these rights—and, consequently, niksen—as privileges that some people just have, some work for and earn, and still others should not be allowed to enjoy. According to the Protestant work ethic prevalent in North America and parts of Europe, hard work and productivity are the basis of being a good, moral person.  that these societies also tend to be more individualistic than collectivist and have a more rigid relationship with time than other cultures, which also has implications for who is able to niks.

These racial and socioeconomic distinctions of who is “worthy” or “allowed” to do nothing are a global phenomenon. Ingrained stereotypes, media messaging, and government and workplace policies illuminate and reproduce this hierarchy.

First, there is a big difference between how men’s and women’s leisure time is perceived. spend two to 10 times as much time as men do performing unpaid work, including caring for children. They also have less leisure time compared with their male counterparts, and because they also more often multitasked. 

Even positive stereotypes make it harder to do nothing, particularly for people with intersecting marginalized identities. Second-wave feminists and millennial “girlbosses” have perpetuated the idea that women “can have it all”—career, family, and a smokin’ hot sex life. Studies show that the pressure to be a “Strong Black Woman,” , increases stress and decreases for Black women. The “model minority”myth of relentlessly hardworking and high-achieving Asian Americans presents similar mental health risks for this demographic, according to partially funded by the Asian American Health Initiative. Doing nothing is not only antithetical to the attitudes and values inherent to these gendered and racialized stereotypes; the expectations of those stereotypes also rob people trying to embody them of time they could use to niks.

Even White immigrants within Europe are not immune to stereotypes. In 2018, Dutch media on the so-called “Polish fraud,” accusing the Eastern European agricultural workers of living off Dutch unemployment benefits, even though the was that temporary job agencies were taking advantage of this underpaid and overexploited population.

The United States’ lack of a robust social safety net makes niksen a pipe dream for most workers there. As , author of the Culture Study newsletter on Substack, wrote, “Other countries have social safety nets. The U.S. has women.” It’s the only developed country without mandated parental leave, and no federal law requires employers to offer paid sick days, both of which disproportionately affect women and people of color.

found that during the COVID-19 pandemic, American women spent around 31 hours per week on child care (compared with around three hours per week for men). But all women did less paid work, focusing more on unpaid, invisible labor, such as cooking or taking care of the house—making some researchers call it a “,” or a recession that disproportionately impacted women because of existing .

The Benefits of Doing Nothing

Despite the many obstacles to niksen, people all over the world have a term for it. In Olga’s native Polish, it’s “lying down with your belly up,” while the Germans call it “letting your soul dangle.” The romantic French flaneur wanders around aimlessly, the British enjoy “,”and even Americans sometimes enjoy a “lazy Sunday afternoon.” In Swahili, starehe means being “comfortably contented,” like basking in the sun doing nothing, and the Chinese tradition of wuwei can be translated as “non-action.”&�Բ�����;

The Bible may uphold the virtue of hard work, but it also prescribes a day of rest. In fact, the Polish word for Sunday, niedziela, literally means “the day when no work is done.” For Jewish communities, that day is Sabbath, which starts on Friday night and ends on Saturday evening. During that time, all work, even cooking, is forbidden. While not all Jews adhere to these strictures, many do reserve the day as a time for slowing down.

Whatever you call it, niksen has benefits for the human body and mind. It wasn’t easy to find anything on the benefits of doing nothing in particular, so we had to look at similar concepts, such as boredom. In 2014, found that being bored could increase creativity, and, as she told Olga in an interview for her book, this could extend to doing nothing.

As it turns out, the brain’s default mode network, the specific parts of the brain that light up only when we’re not engaged in a specific task, could offer a neural explanation for why we tend to get our best ideas in those unfocused moments in the shower or while on a walk, and not when we’re actively trying to solve a problem. Marcus Raichle, a neurologist at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, has found that when people were focused on a task, overall brain activity actually decreased, but this only meant that the “energy” was diverted to the parts of the brain actually needed for the task. The default mode network is a more elaborate system, connecting different parts of the brain, which might explain why it’s associated with creativity.

Paradoxically, doing nothing could also improve productivity because it allows for a better clarity of mind. Happiness and productivity expert advocates doing nothing as a way to fight procrastination. And last but not least, the has found that people made much better, more intuitive decisions when they didn’t focus on identifying the positive or negative sides of each option but instead did something completely unrelated to the task at hand.

While this isn’t exactly about niksen, it shows that the ways we think about working, focusing, and creativity might be a little off. There’s a reason why your best ideas and solutions emerge during slow and unfocused moments. These sparks of inspiration come to us in droves when we let our thoughts run free.

The Time Is Now

But increased productivity, creativity, and overall well-being are not why governments and employers should encourage protections and policies to allow more people to do more nothing. 

Wellness is , and these days, wellness treatments include diets, retreats, apps, and more. According to , which has its roots in the 1950s, it’s no longer enough for you to have a clean bill of health. By contrast, wellness is an active pursuit—a constant striving for self-improvement. The problem, however, isn’t just that many of these prescriptions aren’t scientifically valid, but also that they put the responsibility on the individuals to care for themselves, leaving us exhausted and, even worse, blaming ourselves when our health isn’t perfect. This is in line with the many Western societies are expecting today, which is affecting the way we see our fellow human beings by encouraging competition and weakening social ties.

������Ƶover, there is an between wellness and right-wing politics and conspiracy theories. As such, wellness culture isn’t just misleading or wrong, but can actually be harmful and toxic. Not only do feel like additional tasks, they are also insufficient to dismantle structures and policies that privilege White male knowledge workers over women, people of color, and blue-collar workers. 

But rest and leisure should be a human right upheld by policymakers and employers, whether or not it can be used to generate profits for companies. The Great Resignation has demonstrated that the way we work is broken, and it underlines the need for more support for vulnerable and oppressed groups. 

That support can vary for different people. For Olga, it meant her husband working from home, but most importantly, it meant having access to daycare for her children when she was a new mother. For others, support might take the form of financial security of caring for children at home. But no matter what the individual’s solution may be, we need to discharge the faux empathy of requiring people to care for themselves and their families without support, and instead create systems and spaces that allow people to do nothing.

We need to stop treating rest, niksen, dolce far niente, woolgathering, whatever you want to call it, as something we have to earn and start thinking of it as something we deserve—something we’re already worthy of. And we have to do it soon.

Of course, there are those who might disregard my call for frugality. They are the ones who, despite all efforts, will never be able to live within their means even if they wanted to. The working poor are just that—working one, two, or three jobs and still unable to make ends meet. For them and us, advocating for workers’ rights, fair wages, and enacting legislative policies aimed at economic equality is vital. But this is not an either-or position: We can be advocates of economic parity while at the same time turning down the heat on a historically rapacious capitalist economy by becoming producers and consumers in the home economy.

Over the years, I have taught and written about living in a home economy. But this is less a throwback to some 1950s-era domestic ideal than an approach toward undermining an American psyche and economy that has thrown us into unnecessary debt, encouraged us to buy our way to happiness, and all but driven us from our homes. 

By “home,” I am not referring to a physical space alone, though we are being driven, evicted, and displaced from our homes more and more these days, which is why we have become homeless in both form and function. I’m talking about the transiency and dependency that defines and supports the capitalist consumer culture. With neither the skills nor the inclination to stay in place or do for ourselves, we turn to the marketplace for our needs. (Not for nothing, there is an irony to all this talk of place-making when no one wants to stay in place anymore.) This dependency has a long history. It is not for naught that we have become, for all intents and purposes, indentured servants, living on credit and owing our soul to the company store. This is how the system is intended to work. The indentured make docile workers, and Amazon would be happy to bring you into its fold. 

Beyond that, there is value and comfort in the making of a home. My respect for “home,” or the type of work that living in a home economy suggests, is due, in part, to my childhood. Growing up as the daughter of two immigrant parents who moved to New York following World War II, I understood, or saw, what utility born of frugality looked like. My father worked as a tailor and my mom worked to make a home in a railroad flat shared with relatives and boarders, and later in our own apartment in the Bronx. 

Together, my parents sewed our clothes, made curtains and bedspreads, mended, repaired, cooked every meal at home, and basically did for themselves or did without. But, more significantly, they offered a sense of home, security, and comfort that was tangible to me as a child; one that I have carried forward as an adult. And yet, despite all my skills, my knowledge, and my refusenik underpinnings, I do not have what my parents had. In fact, many of us do not have this: the relationships bound by the need and a commitment to make a self-sufficient home.

It was the ancient Greeks who first coined the term “economics,” or “oikonomia,” as a system of household (oikos) management (nomia). So economics refers to the management system that serves your home. What that home is may vary—the planet, your body, the marketplace, or where you live—but knowing how you define it should determine how you manage it. It is overly simplistic to think that home economics deals exclusively with making cupcakes or jam. It is the serious effort toward creating a management system that works to support the needs of your home.

For me, this includes working in and with seasons, putting up the harvest, avoiding packaging, and cooking my meals from the “stores” I have at season’s end. It includes doing without or making do by repairing, mending, and being grateful for the blessings I have been given, and, of course, being frugal—radically frugal. But it also means living in community with what I call the “new farm family,” that distillate of days gone by when generations lived and worked together to care for each other, and an ethic and lifestyle I embraced following my time as a small-business owner.

Running a business these days requires the sort of branding and niche marketing that can feel more competitive than cooperative. Besides that, as a one-time small-business owner, I know how beholden we are to institutions (banking, insurance, etc.) and goods that either come from, or are regulated by, international markets or organizations. ������Ƶover, if you calculate the amount of carbon used on the build-outs and equipment required to launch and run most businesses, you’ll quickly understand how unsustainable “local” can be. 

Still, I understand the theory of “buy local.” Shopping locally allows our dollars to circulate more within the community, and to support the people and businesses we care about. But this is no panacea, particularly when attempting to live within your budget. 

As I like to point out, many people are lucky to be earning $15 an hour, but we are living in a $100-an-hour world. Every time we step out and into the marketplace, we are faced with the costs of goods and services that have outpaced our income.

I’m not advocating for cheaper goods, however. We haven’t been paying the true cost of anything for quite some time. Still, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know where living outside your income will lead. We can’t spend money we do not have to support local businesses, but if we don’t take part in the local economy, we tend to feel guilty.

Which is why, when a friend of mine still running a small business once told me, “Your frugality is killing my business,” I was heartsick. I knew what she was saying. It is not easy to be a business owner these days, but I’m very careful with my “disposable” income, and, well, with a planet begging for limits to growth (or no growth), I can’t help wondering when we will begin to take it seriously, and how we will respond.

One of our responses can be the type of collective living that this new farm family implies. And yet, we moderns have become addicted to an ethos of independent living, uprooting ourselves from our home communities to chase better jobs or schools elsewhere. We do not “need” each other as we once did. Our modern anything-anytime consumer culture has made our need to rely upon others near-obsolete. 

This is why living collectively seems such a challenge. Mired in the mindset of independence, collective living is seen by many as primarily a means to keep rent cheap, which makes it fickle, temporary, and resistant to the larger commitment of turning down the heat on this capitalist monster. Without asking or learning the functional and emotional skills necessary to live in a home economy, our experiment in collectivity will do little to effect permanent change. 

In speaking of farm families, however, I admit to waxing poetic on a lifestyle that, from a historical perspective, was more complex and compromised. Farmers were victimized, in the Great Depression and afterward, as the capitalist system demanded bigger economies of scale. “Get big or get out” was the call, and many farmers perished in attempting to take it on. ������Ƶ soberly, many landowners in this romanticized past were responsible for the displacement and genocide of cultures that only today we are willing to acknowledge, even if we’re not doing more than speaking about it. 

But survival is an impartial taskmaster. The plight of the immigrants coming to America isn’t pretty. Neither is the story of slavery or genocide or the feeding frenzy of those who came from England to gain access to land and resources for the crown. Dang it if Jefferson’s “nation of farmers,” a rallying cry for many small farmers today, has not been overly simplified for easy reading. 

But there is a movement of young farmers returning to the land, and they, too, are attempting the audacious act of living outside the tethers of the capitalist system. This makes us bedfellows in a movement, which is what home economics is really about: an effort to stand up against an economy that is doing its best to steal the best this life has to offer, a place to call home, in both form and function.

But believing in the virtues of a home economy will not magically change our values, nor will it immediately bestow the skills or intention for living in the seasons or turn us into people who would rather make, repair, sow, grow, or stow our foods than buy them from the store. And it will not immediately turn us into capitalist refuseniks, or even someone who wants to save whatever resources and time we have to support the efforts of young farmers. 

But with time, our lives as consumers in the capitalist economy will appear frail when compared to a life in the home economy. And eventually, we’ll come to understand that this is about more than making cupcakes. A lot more.

“Climate scientists warn that we are already perilously close to tipping points that could lead to cascading and irreversible climate impacts.

But high emitting governments and corporations are not just turning a blind eye; they are adding fuel to the flames.

They are choking our planet, based on their vested interests and historic investments in fossil fuels, when cheaper, renewable solutions provide green jobs, energy security, and greater price stability.”

The institutions he cited are also blocking efforts to protect Earth’s natural environment, end poverty and extreme and growing inequality, and prevent further deaths from weapons of war.

There are many good and committed people working within these institutions, but their structures are relics of an era of imperial rule in which their function was to secure the absolute rule of kings and queens on the pretext that they ruled by the will of God.

Much has since changed. We are no longer ruled by kings and queens, but we are not free of the top-down structures designed to enable their rule. Power now rests in the hands of global financiers who rule by their control of our access to money. They enjoy the support of economists who assure us that the lust for power through wealth is inherent to human nature, and that maximizing our individual financial return ultimately maximizes the well-being of everyone.

We have tested this perverse premise on a global scale and are now bearing its devastating consequences: The destruction of Earth’s capacity to sustain life, an unprecedented concentration of wealth and power, and billions of people leading lives of daily desperation.

The deeply flawed economic theory that drives this disaster ignores or denies three foundational truths:

1. Money has no intrinsic value. It will buy only that which is for sale. It will be useless on a dead Earth.
2. Science now confirms what thoughtful humans have long recognized: Life exists only in communities of living beings that self-organize to create and maintain the conditions on which life depends. The Indigenous peoples of South Africa call it ubuntu: “I am because you are.”
3. While we know from daily experience that there are demented souls among us who gain pleasure from harming other people, most people derive their greatest pleasure from caring for and sharing with others.

Over the span of my 85 years, I have had the joy and privilege of working with and celebrating people of widely varied cultures, genders, religions, and races. This includes living for 21 years in Africa, Latin America, and Asia working initially for the foreign aid establishment and later for civil society organizations on a mission to end global poverty. It also included periods of residence in Washington state, California, Florida, Virginia, New York, and Massachusetts. Of all the many people I have encountered, most, by far, were kind, caring, and ready—even eager—to help others, including strangers, in need.

But we are being failed by the society we built. We cannot expect our dominant institutions to lead us to the transformation on which a viable human future depends.

Change will come, and can only come from committed people mobilizing in common cause as a powerful social movement. Together, we can transform the institutions of global society to distribute power and organize from the bottom up. Critical elements are in place, but we have yet to acknowledge our common purpose.

Fifteen years ago, Paul Hawken, environmentalist, entrepreneur, author, and activist, wrote Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming. He set out to collect the names of all the organizations around the world working to achieve ecological sustainability and social justice. He first estimated that the number of such organizations exceeded 100,000. As his research progressed, he found that there were actually at least 1 million, and possibly 2 million.

Blessed Unrest devotes more than 100 pages to listing and defining the categories of organizations engaged with issues of peace, justice, equality, governance, environment, Indigenous rights, and related issues foundational to the well-being of people and Earth. Together, they constitute all the varied elements of what we can call .

In his book—and countless presentations, interviews, and articles that followed—Hawken suggested that, together, these organizations potentially constitute the largest social movement in human history. But it was not evident that these various organizations saw themselves as part of a larger movement, nor recognized the interdependent nature of the causes they sought to advance.

Since the publication of Blessed Unrest in 2007, the continued deepening of humanity’s environmental, social, and political crises has drawn ever more people to active engagement in one or more of the many elements of the essential human transformation. These forces are most visible in local communities that are committed to reducing dependence on fossil fuels; supporting local organic farms; forming unions and cooperatives; working for racial, gender, and religious justice; supporting local businesses; providing housing for the homeless; aiding refugees; assuring clean water and sanitation for everyone; and much more.

Many of these key players now recognize the inherent interdependence of their initiatives. It is that recognition that holds the potential for millions to see themselves a part of a transformational social movement that can bring about the change we so desperately need.

The current failed system dehumanizes us all—including the rich—and threatens the future of all our children. Our viability as a species depends on reshaping our relationships with one another and Earth. This requires new ethically grounded choices relating to culture, institutions, technology, and infrastructure consistent with the well-being of all people and the living Earth.

The institutions responsible for the current crisis will not transform themselves. A redistribution of wealth and localization of power can only come through bottom-up initiatives in which individual leaders see their work connecting with others as part of a larger transformation.

We are living beings born of and nurtured by a living Earth. There will be no winners on a dead Earth. We will survive and thrive together, or we will perish together.

What we humans have created, we can change. That change must be dramatic, rapid, and grounded in love and ethical sensibility. Can we achieve it within the time available? We will know only if we try.

For over 200 years, coal companies—like the , like the one owned by my own great-grandfather—have seen West Virginia as a backwater packed with easy resources: thick seams of rich coal and a seemingly bottomless population of labor-ready, poverty-toughened workers.

In the early 2000s, the financial return on coal mining began to diminish—thanks to both increased federal regulation and the decreasing caliber of accessible coal. Around that time, unethical pharmaceutical companies—notably, but not exclusively, —took the same tack as the coal barons before them, asking: How can we best use West Virginia, and the poverty of its kindhearted people, to our advantage?

The answer: bribe, prescribe, deny. Ship of hydrocodone and oxycodone to pharmacies statewide in the six slim years between 2007 and 2013 (amounting to 433 pills for every adult and child in the state). Drown West Virginians in this deadly medicine.

While coal mining and addiction are certainly not equivalent, they do overlap: Mining is hard, physical work—the type of labor that begets injuries that call for prescription painkillers. In 2015, Carl “Rolly” Sullivan, longtime director of West Virginia University Hospitals’ addiction program, that many West Virginians are “blue-collar workers who were in farming and timbering and coal mining and things that were likely to produce injuries.”

Beverly Sharp, a former correctional officer, now directs the West Virginia Reentry Councils, a statewide group of 24 regional councils that collaborate to help people re-enter life and community after incarceration. “Coal mining is a difficult job, and you often end up with people injured, and that leads to prescription painkillers and that whole cycle begins,” she says. “The inability to access affordable health care is another issue—you end up taking someone else’s medication or taking another illegal drug instead.”

Charleston-area business owners Charlotte and Kenny Webb understand that cycle well—and this experience helps them envision a solution. The couple, who are both in long-term recovery from addiction, have dedicated themselves to helping recovering people find a way forward. They readily hire these “fair-chance” employees at their company, Charleston Property Restoration, and offer other practical assistance through their nonprofit, Way Makers. As Charlotte Webb says, “We are in recovery [thanks to] a spiritual experience; we have a responsibility to pass it on.”

As King Coal continues to decline, joblessness, poverty, and addiction persevere in West Virginia’s communities—the consequences of coal’s collapse. Yet, West Virginians—both born and made—prize the value of a day’s work. Mountaineers are hailed for their resilience and independent spirit, their innate inclination to bear up under hardship and make do with the resources at hand.

No surprise, then, that individuals, communities, and organizations around the state are creating imaginative solutions by helping recovering and formerly incarcerated individuals gain access to worthwhile work. Practical visionaries like Beverly Sharp and Charlotte and Kenny Webb are partnering with state-run programs, such as Apprenticeship in Motion and Jobs & Hope, to find creative ways to regenerate more than just careers.

A Shift to a New Altruism

Sharp began volunteering as a lay pastor after she retired from the prison system, but she soon found herself itching to take action, thinking, “We need to do something other than sit around and talk.” Part of the practical solution Sharp prescribes is a shift in perspective: What worked for granddaddy may not work today. A new understanding of how meaningful occupation can be a healing force, for the individual and for their community, is essential. “I think part of [the struggle] is that mentality of ‘lock ’em up and throw away the key,’” says Sharp, the mindset that “you made that choice, you live with it.”

Through her work with incarcerated people, both in and out of institutions, Sharp’s experience decries the common viewpoint that “if we pile on more consequences, people will stop [using drugs, committing crimes to facilitate their habit].” Sharp’s voice rises with emotion as she reminds us all not to lose sight that each one of these formerly incarcerated individuals “is a human being, is a person; something brought them to that point.”

Charlotte and Kenny Webb can relate: “The whole reason we started the company was to create space for individuals in recovery and/or re-entry,” says Charlotte Webb. Their construction workforce is comprised of 75% “fair-chance” employees—workers who have arrests or convictions that dissuade many businesses from hiring them, regardless of charisma or skill. Nearly two-thirds of the Webbs’ employees have felonies stemming from addiction, which further limits their employment options. Charlotte Webb, who sees the consequences daily, says, “When people are in active addiction, they do things they would not do otherwise.”

Sharp agrees. “If you are living in poverty your whole life and that’s all you know, and you have no hope, no motivation to escape poverty, no role models, many times poverty leads to trauma that is inescapable. People in poverty need to do things that those with a living wage would not do, [like] stealing to feed their families.”

What the Webbs and Sharp are advocating for—not only in word, but supported by their own benevolent deeds—is a return to neighborliness. Although drivers in West Virginia always seem to make room for one more car to merge into a line of traffic, the Appalachian tradition of common kindness has been burnished by the addiction epidemic, by years of pain in our communities.

When we view people only as resources—as a monolith, as equipment—we close off access to empathy, making way for abuses like those exacted by the coal companies and pharmaceutical giants. In an environment where human kindness is missing, the divisive “us” and “them” replace the unity of “we”—a limitation that makes it too easy to take advantage of another’s humanity. When that happens, we miss the beauty of offering a hand up, a fair chance.

This shift in perspective can begin with language, as Charlotte Webb exemplifies in her explanation of why she prefers the term “fair-chance” employees over the more commonly used “second chance.” With an insider’s chuckle, she says, “The guys we have [working for us], probably most of them are past their second chance… [but] as long as people are willing to work on their recovery, they ought to have a chance at gainful employment.”

Putting Neighborliness Into Practice

After three years of hiring fair-chance employees, Charlotte Webb identified another gap that needed attention: “There’s a lot of space in between starting your recovery and being ready for employment, so we started a nonprofit [Way Makers] that works alongside the for-profit… making sure they have IDs, clothing, housing, SNAP food benefits, Medicaid. Then, when they are referred for employment, they are ready to come in and give it their all.”

Sharp’s comments support this notion: “The philosophy always was that once you came out of prison, you’ve paid the price. That’s no longer true.” She says there are 851 collateral consequences of having a criminal record in West Virginia—from the understood (difficulty finding work and ) to the unexpected (from West Virginia Code: “” or “”). All of these consequences make re-entry troublesome to navigate, even for citizens with education or other privileges. Sharp started the West Virginia Reentry Councils to help employers better understand the incentives and opportunities inherent in hiring fair-chance employees.

Charlotte and Kenny Webb were already working with fair-chance employees when they heard about the bonding, payroll, and tax incentives available to companies willing to take that chance: “West Virginia [has] really made an effort to help employers become willing to hire,” Charlotte Webb says. “We didn’t start the company for this purpose, but it has given us the courage to hire new people.”

Beginning with an employee’s first day on the job, West Virginia businesses are granted a via —a state-run partner of Jobs & Hope—to insure their tools and other equipment. In addition, if a fair-chance worker is eligible, employers can receive up to 100% reimbursement on wages paid during the first six months, through a state program called .

After the first six months, employees may be eligible for another state program——which reimburses employers for up to 50% of wages. Companies that hire fair-chance employees are also considered for up to $6,200 annually. And nonprofit organizations are there to help: “Part of what we do is help employers to understand that these aren’t bad people, they just made bad decisions… sometimes, they make the best employees,” Sharp says.

Dave Lavender, the apprenticeship program coordinator at the West Virginia Department of Economic Development, is quick to identify reasons why some employers are shy about hiring employees with complicated histories: “Companies got burned by folks who they employed … in active addiction, [causing] wounds that are hard to heal.” Now, Lavender says, “The recovery ecosystem is more developed and more successful. … Jobs & Hope [offers] generous wage reimbursements and bonding so that a company can’t be burned if an employee doesn’t work out.”

Kenny Webb notes the magnifying effect so much neighborliness has on his employees: “They’re paying it forward, too,” and helping each other with the basics of recovery, parole etiquette, and passing word about the healthiest recovery houses and friendliest employers.

Participants in such programs are taking college courses and receiving practical retraining in manufacturing, the nonprofit sector, agriculture, addiction treatment, and other constructive types of work. In rural West Virginia—where generations of corporate abuse have damaged the human landscape as much as they have compromised the ecology of mountains and waterways—word-of-mouth is often considered the most credible source of information. If a neighbor, or a cousin, secures a stable, high-paying career despite her felony record, the route she took—whether via apprenticeship or college classes—will serve as a shining beacon for others in her community.

West Virginians are establishing a replicable template that enables people to start again and to give back—to begin to nourish the communities where they live. Determined citizens continue to band together with nonprofits, charitable corporations, and state and local governments, seeking out solutions to uplift recovering and formerly incarcerated people seeking a fair chance at a career.

As they look ahead, the Webbs are keeping their sights simple: one employee at a time. Kenny Webb articulates success as giving workers a fair chance to “get their associate degree and contractor license; we are hoping they will go out and launch their own business, and maybe be fair-chance employers themselves.”

For Sharp, the measure of success includes a grander scope. Her hope is “to remove the collateral consequences related to employment of justice-impacted people to work in certain professions, making an easier path for justice-impacted individuals to earn a living wage.”&�Բ�����;

Charlotte Webb recognizes West Virginians as “the kindest, most gracious, authentic people,” yet feels that a “poverty mindset”—an “acceptance of meager existence: ‘this is as good as it gets’”—sometimes interferes with opportunity. She says, “People in West Virginia have what it takes, but they don’t see that. I feel like they are looking for an industry, politician, the right company—someone to make it all right. I don’t think they need that, I think they have it in them.” West Virginians do have what it takes to redefine what good work means in a state long ravaged by corporate abuse—and the shift away from that pain has already begun.

In April, the workers in Alabama with the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, and then also in March 2022 after the National Labor Relations Board found Amazon had improperly interfered in the first election.

Despite those losses, Littrell was inspired to take action in Campbellsville. He is now leading an effort to get his union to become the second workplace to unionize with the independent Amazon Labor Union following the historic union election. 

“Amazon just doesn’t treat people right,” Littrell says. 

Littrell’s story is representative of the stories of many workers of his age who are flocking to unionize at chains like Apple, REI, and Starbucks, which has seen more than . According to the NLRB, by more than 56% since then. 

These massive organizing efforts follow an unprecedented wave of strikes that saw . 

“There is a sense of momentum here,” Littrell says. “People really want change.”&�Բ�����;

Littrell’s journey is a tale of a moment that has seen unprecedented organizing, and of a struggle to overcome barriers to unionization both in labor law and that big businesses set up to thwart workers. 

At first, Littrell liked working at Amazon, but right away, he began to notice problems at the plant. He tried to get involved in a plant-wide safety committee but noticed that management wasn’t responsive to its feedback. 

“I would still see people getting injured over some of these things. I would still see people getting written up for getting injured when it really wasn’t their fault,” Littrell says. 

The failed Bessemer unionization drive opened his eyes to more possibilities. 

“I was just a working-class guy before that—just working to pay bills,” Littrell says. “It was my own personal looking into what they were doing down there in Alabama and I saw that, hey, there’s some real potential here to actually force management to do some things.”&�Բ�����;

Littrell slowly began talking to some of his own co-workers about organizing. In September, the employees launched their SDF1 Action Committee, which they named after the Amazon warehouse where they work.

The SDF1 Action Committee slowly grew in 2021 to a few dozen members. Then, in April, Amazon Labor Union workers in the company’s Staten Island warehouse became the first in the country to unionize. The victory kicked Littrell’s organizing into high gear.

“That was very motivating,” Littrell says. “That’s when most of our momentum actually picked up. That’s when I was emboldened to go out and start talking to people more and more.”

The Staten Island drive lit a huge spark across the country, with the Amazon Labor Union quickly receiving calls from hundreds of Amazon workers across the country seeking to unionize their workplaces. Littrell was one of those workers who called the Amazon Labor Union.

“It filled me with hope and optimism,” Littrell says. “And just really, you know, there’s times when you’re organizing that you’re gonna get kind of discouraged when you’re a small thing, right? And that really provided me some reassurance.”&�Բ�����;

Not only did the Staten Island workers win, but their victories also called into question established labor union practices, such as relying on professional union organizers, who lack shop floor experience, instead of the rank-and-file workers to lead campaigns.

“When we took our organization efforts on, we just decided that, you know, Amazon workers need to organize other Amazon workers,” . “We knew we had to have an unorthodox approach.”

Now, the Amazon Labor Union is attempting to unionize two more Amazon warehouses in Campbellsville and Albany, New York. Littrell says the independent union model appeals to many workers.��

“With an independent union, people really feel like they run the union, because they are the ones forming it,” Littrell says. 

However, being an independent union doesn’t mean unions are going to automatically win elections. When the Amazon Labor Union attempted to unionize a second warehouse on Staten Island, the company ran an aggressive anti-union drive. Ultimately, the Amazon Labor Union lost the vote by a 2-to-1 margin. 

In Campbellsville, the anti-union pressure from the company is getting intense. Littrell says he has been written up multiple times and he fears he could get fired any day as the union drive intensifies. 

“Surprised they haven’t gotten rid of me yet. The clock has been ticking for a while,” Littrell says. 

Even if the workers do win, their employer could drag out the process of recognizing the union and bargaining a contract for years. 

“An employer is always in a position where it can say, ‘No, no, we’re not going to bargain with them,’” says St. Louis University labor law professor Michael Duff. “And the NLRB, the administrative agency has no authority to command anybody to do anything.”

It’s unclear if independent unions will be able to muster the resources for long multiyear union struggles. 

“With an independent union, we will have to do so much fundraising on our own and all this other stuff. And, you know, the fundraising so far hasn’t really been all that great,” Littrell says. “Independent unions have a lot of struggling to do.”&�Բ�����;

To prepare for long-term battles, the Amazon Labor Union has already begun courting larger unions and has begun a financial partnership with the Teamsters, a massive union with 1.2 million members and one of the largest strike funds in the United States, which could become a crucial advantage in upcoming negotiations.

To win contracts, unions will likely have to engage in large-scale strikes at multiple Amazon warehouses across the country, Duff says. 

“If an employer thinks that a union can engage in a work stoppage and can hold out for months, a period of months, then that may inflict real economic pain on their employment,” Duff says. “If on the other hand, the employer believes that at the end of the day, the union really can’t and won’t do anything like that, it really doesn’t have that level of support, then the employer, if it’s a rational actor, is not going to bargain.”&�Բ�����;

Duff says that if unions are to take advantage of this moment, they will need to prepare for long, tough battles ahead. 

“I think labor has to have a long game,” says Duff. “What’s essential is for labor consciousness, to return to workers to understand the situation. We are in an incredible moment right now, but we need to take a five-to-10-year view.”

In Campbellsville, the workers are preparing for a long fight. They have already begun to win changes, including to a company policy that required workers to buy expensive shoes from an Amazon-owned company, Zappos. Now, workers are free to buy less expensive shoes from other companies. 

Workers also have begun studying groups like Amazonians Unite, a nationwide network of Amazon workers fighting for change on the shop floor without union support. Littrell says workers in Campbellsville are preparing for the possibility of having to fight on the shop floor for years with or without a union contract. 

“The long-term vision is that maybe one of these days we’ll get a union. And we’ll certainly keep organizing under the pretext of getting a union,” Littrell says. “But we have to focus on short-term goals, medium-term goals, and the overall purpose is to achieve that solidarity, and to fight.”��

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 3:10 p.m. PDT on July 24, 2022 to correct the location of an Amazon work site. It is in Albany, New York, not Albany, Kentucky.��Read our corrections policy here.

As the stories I’ve told in this book declare, cooperation is no drop‑in solution-​for-​everything. It’s a process that happens a million ways at once, a diversified democracy. The troubles are as endemic as the promise. It starts with the capacities we already have, recombined to solve common problems. The commonwealth doesn’t defer its business until after the world passes through some revolutionary event. It doesn’t wait for things to get worse so they can get better. It doesn’t appear from nowhere and disrupt everything. Instead, it grows through what Grace Lee Boggs called “critical connections”—bridging generations, forging bonds too strong for profiteers to break. It requires people who know their own strengths. A lot of those who have been drawn into the co‑op movement in recent years hope it can be something like universal basic income—a drastic, radical fix that changes everything. They try to create co‑ops for the hardest of problems, using the most untested of means, building their dreams out of policy proposals and foundation grants and panels at conferences. I watch the news of these developments closely. But some of the most remarkable things are happening more quietly, making use of latent resources already in our midst. 

When I first took a phone call from Felipe Witchger, the young executive director of the Community Purchasing Alliance in Washington, D.C., I’d never heard of him or his organization. I’d never come across it on the newsletters and feeds I follow. And when I attended CPA’s 2017 annual meeting, I realized what a lapse this was. Seated around me were representatives of the 160 D.C.‑area organizations—mainly churches and charter schools, largely people of color—that used CPA for purchasing such unglamorous things as electricity, security, sanitation, and landscaping. After three years in existence, CPA had saved them and the people they serve nearly $3 million. (A woman seated next to me, a part-​time church staffer, said she’d cut out $17,000 on copier contracts alone.) The co‑op had helped many of them switch to renewable energy, and their purchase of 580 solar panels, so far, had already brought down the price of solar for everyone in the region. On one end of the room were employees of a Black-​owned security company whose size more than doubled because of CPA contracts. Witchger was talking with some of CPA’s contractors about converting their businesses to worker co‑ops. This kind of stepwise, ground‑up cooperation has enjoyed less fanfare since the Great Recession than the pursuit of theoretical tropes that seem fresh and radical. Some, for instance, regard the precise locus of production as so important that they would reserve governance rights in a worker-​owned co‑op solely to “producer” workers, who physically make a given widget, over the “enablers,” who answer phones, sweep floors, craft contracts, and the like. This kind of doctrinal fixation doesn’t do much to anticipate automated or offshore production, rising demand for service work, and the disguised labor of online platforms. It also inclines us to neglect how pockets of commonwealth might emerge from zones of economic life other than factory floors—from schools, from churches, from taking out the trash. Hints from the cooperative past, and latent opportunities in the present, might be better-suited to survive among profiteers with a multibillion-dollar head start. Rusty old farmer co‑ops could show urban contract workers how to organize joint bargaining and insurance. A buttoned‑up mutual fund like Vanguard might be the model for a basic income grounded in genuine shared ownership. Whether or not the Silicon Valley prognosticators are right to expect an economy less dependent on human labor, cooperators need to build on a diverse foundation, one that recognizes the diverse ways people interact with their economies—not only as certain kinds of workers but as consumers, users, contributors, small-business owners, and crowdfunders. We can learn to revive the democratic spirits dormant in so many credit unions, electric co‑ops, insurance mutuals, and employee stock-ownership plans. There is no single, gleaming, out‑of‑the-​box model. Commonwealths spread through variety.

The largest worker co‑op in my town is Namasté Solar, a solar-​panel installation company with more than 100 member-​owners. Since converting to a co‑op in 2011, it has been a thriving business—and a certified B Corp whose members get six paid weeks off every year. It has no trouble finding investors willing to finance growth without demanding control. But its greatest systemic effect has happened outside the worker-​ownership structure. First, Namasté spawned a spin-​off, Amicus Solar, a purchasing cooperative that helps small solar companies across North America stay competitive against large corporations. That, in turn, spun off another co‑op that pools maintenance services. Now the Namasté team is helping to create the Clean Energy Federal Credit Union, designed to provide loans for homeowners nationwide switching to renewables. One thing led to another, and out came a sizable chunk of commonwealth. Our newly legalized housing co‑ops did much the same thing; cooperative grocery stores have never done well in Boulder, as the market for good food is already crowded, but when the co‑op houses put their purchasing power together, they created a business that sells local and organic food for a fraction of the retail price. They realized their latent power and put it to use. When we know the diversity and dexterity of past models, we’ll be better at finding the combinations we need for the present. The trouble is, longings for a perfect order can tempt us more than the unfinished commonwealths of the past, whose salvation remains incomplete and locked in procedural dullness. Unlike capitalism’s penchant for perpetual disruption, cooperation works best when it can work with what is already at hand. Excerpted from  by Nathan Schneider. Copyright © 2018. Available from Nation Books, an imprint of Perseus Books LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group Inc.

At the time, my mom was living in Bellingham, Washington, two years into providing unpaid live-in care for her father-in-law (my step-grandfather, who I reluctantly call “Grandpa,” despite not having much of a relationship with him). He was suffering from debilitating cancer and heart disease. But providing home care to him came at a price to my mom’s health, safety, financial security, and family. The job was all-consuming: She quit painting and gardening, which she loved, and she grew isolated from her own children and grandkids during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

My mom’s experience is not unique. She is among the roughly who provides care to an adult or child with special needs. Of the estimated 48 million people caring for adults, about 41.8 million provide unpaid care, just like my mother. While the work of unpaid caregivers is deeply undervalued, paid home care workers struggle too. Roughly 2 million people make up the home care workforce, which is 86% women, 60% people of color, and 14% immigrants. According to the National Domestic Workers Alliance, nearly , with . 

In 2019, Grandpa had asked for my mother’s help in exchange for room and board. The offer came just when she was on the brink of homelessness. But keeping up with the demands of caring for Grandpa meant she put her own health needs last. She hadn’t seen a dentist in years, and her jaw pain traced back to an abscessed tooth that eventually would have to be pulled, along with three others. It was the first in a series of health issues that would eventually land her in the hospital.

In addition, the home environment began to feel unsafe for my mother. Shady visitors would show up at the house to do odd jobs and steal stuff. Grandpa also hoarded newspapers, and my mother worried about the potential fire hazard the stacks could create.

My mom’s needs—for her health, finances, and personal happiness—have always taken a back seat. Raised in a strict Catholic family, she grew up believing women were supposed to care for others, whether blood relatives or not, and not pursue careers or dreams. When doctors found a tumor in my father’s brain, my mom, then in her early 20s, set up a hospital bed in our dining room and tended to him for five years until he died. She later remarried, but her second husband stole her life insurance payouts, used them for drugs, and turned abusive. She got a restraining order, which he repeatedly broke. After selling our house, we spent three years moving around—living with family, in hotels and rentals, and in a tent—until my stepdad died and my mom felt safe enough to settle down and purchase a home. 

In her 40s, she returned to unpaid caregiving, first for her father, who had a heart attack and died six months later, and then for the last four years of her mother’s life, and her mother had Alzheimer’s. Then, my mom’s then-boyfriend revealed he had cancer, so she cared for him until he, too, died. By her 50s, my mom was living below the federal poverty line, had lost her house, and had begun staying with relatives. She cared for grandkids and worked short stints as a housekeeper at hotels and nursing homes. She survived on a minimal government annuity check, the bulk of which went toward credit card debt and storage unit fees. In 2019, when relatives could no longer house her, she thought about living in her car, until she lost that too. That’s when her late husband’s father called.

My mom overheard Grandpa tell people he rescued her from homelessness by offering her room and board. While taking her in was a kind gesture, my mother was providing him with round-the-clock care—a job that paid caregivers in the state of Washington receive a living wage for. According to ZipRecruiter, paid live-in caregivers in Washington make more than the national average, which is about , and that the is required to be clean and habitable. Every night, my mom tripped through the sea of clutter just to reach her bed. She kept her belongings in plastic storage bins in the bathtub. 

The cost of caregiving can be devastating, especially for those with fewer resources. According to a 2021 study, have experienced job loss or reduced hours. In June 2020, when Colorado nursing student April Kimbrough learned her 23-year-old son Da’Corey was diagnosed with a rare kidney cancer and had six months to live, she faced a terrible choice: Keep her job at a hospice call center or accompany her son to his treatments.

No mother should have to ask herself, “Do I go to work, or do I sit by my son’s side?” Kimbrough said. Her employer didn’t offer paid family leave and denied her requests to work remotely when her son needed chemotherapy. Ultimately, she lost her job and ended up living in her car. Kimbrough shared her story as part of the campaign to pass , which, starting in January 2023, will mandate paid family and medical leave in Colorado. But it’s a benefit that came too late for Kimbrough. In May 2022, her son died. 

“The system we currently rely on is built on the backs of the unpaid support of family caregivers. … [They are] the invisible workforce that the government has just relied on,” says Nicole Jorwic, the chief of advocacy and campaigns at , a caregiver advocacy group. Caregivers contributed an estimated but face rising financial strain. The 2020 AARP study found that of the 1,392 unpaid caregivers sampled, 28% had stopped saving, 3% filed for bankruptcy, and 2% were evicted or had their homes foreclosed upon.

Meanwhile, only a small portion of caregivers qualify for public support through the recipient’s health insurance program. Medicaid programs offer Home and Community Based Services, which provide home health care, medical equipment, and physical therapy, as well as case management, home meal deliveries, transportation, and adult day care—necessary services that help people stay out of nursing homes. If an elderly recipient qualifies for these services, their benefits can be allocated toward compensation for their caregiver. While other non-Medicaid programs offer limited and short-term home care services, Medicaid is the largest funder and the principal way family caregivers can get paid.

But the national average wage for these caregivers is $12 an hour. Eligibility for Medicaid services varies , is income-based, and has so low—$841 month in some states—they hover under the national poverty level. If over 41.8 million people are unpaid adult family caregivers, and only elderly recipients receive HCBS through Medicaid, there’s a good chance many people are not getting the benefits they qualify for, either because they aren’t aware that financial help exists, because the process is too daunting, or because there’s a that averages more than three years long. 

Barriers to care like these mean many family members step in, receiving no compensation in return. In my mother’s case, Grandpa didn’t qualify for Medicaid, which by default meant she didn’t qualify for payment as his caregiver, because his income was too high. He received a pension and U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs benefits, and had assets, including a house and three cars. She also didn’t qualify to become his caregiver through the VA, because his medical conditions were not a direct result of his time in the service. Lastly, she missed out on accruing Social Security benefits that would have been available to her at age 62 had she been working an on-the-books job. 

Meanwhile, my mother grew increasingly scared of the people loitering in and around the house. She installed a lock on her bedroom door to protect her belongings. A paid worker would likely have had somewhere to turn, an agency supervisor, possibly a social worker, but my mother had no advocate, and even a visiting social worker never pulled her aside, out of Grandpa’s earshot, to see if she was OK, because she wasn’t the patient or the client. 

Christina Irving, client services director at the , says caregivers aren’t on the radar of social workers and case managers, but they should be. “If caregivers aren’t given a voice in care planning or conversations about health, then we’re missing a lot,” she says. 

Today, caregivers are able to obtain support through organizations such as the , the , and online support groups, such as , which has a 7,900-member Facebook group. Jorwic notes that when caregivers share experiences, momentum builds, and legislators are forced to listen. Unpaid family caregivers start to see the work they do as worthy of payment. In cases where the care recipient doesn’t qualify for Medicaid, Irving suggests that families draft so family caregivers’ financial health and well-being are better maintained. 

For years, advocacy groups have been fighting systemic injustices within what’s called the “care infrastructure.” Organizations such as the , , want to see lasting and substantial changes: expanding Medicaid Home and Community Based Services, Paid Family and Medical Leave, affordable and quality child care, and wage increases for paid care workers, who are often also providing unpaid care for their own families. A robust movement has been forming around the .

Recently, moved to nearly eliminate monthly income and asset limits by July 1, 2022, which means more people will qualify for home- and community-based care. “Eliminating restrictive financial requirements,” Jorwic says, will prevent older adults and people with disabilities from having to “spend down all of their personal assets before they can get the services they need, or remain in a state of poverty to keep them.” Jorwic adds that this is something advocates will be pushing for on a federal level. “Everyone will need these supports, or will know someone who does.”&�Բ�����;

In December 2021, I received a text from my sister that my mother had been admitted to the hospital. She had difficulty breathing and acute anemia from stomach ulcers. The doctor told her that had her blood cell count been much lower, she could have had a heart attack or a stroke, both of which are considered growing among family caregivers during the pandemic. 

She told her father-in-law’s extended family that she was no longer able to take care of him and moved into my younger brother’s one-bedroom cabin in the woods to recover after her hospitalization, which was hours away from her doctors and other necessary services.

The change of scenery helped, however. Living in a wooded area with deer, coyotes, and foxes inspired her to return to landscape painting, the dark circles under her eyes have faded, and she’s paying more attention to her own health. 

She now says she will never return to caregiving, however, and her housing situation remains precarious. 

I teased her over FaceTime that maybe she should start online dating now that she had access to Wi-Fi, and maybe even fall in love (but only with someone in supremely good health). She shook her head no. She told me that all she wants to do is paint and garden and, for the first time in her life, think about her own needs.

“I’m happy where I’m at,” she said, smiling. “I’m ready to fall in love with myself.”&�Բ�����;

This story was supported by the journalism nonprofit the .

Led by the , Chicago’s offer a “people’s history” of the Windy City and an alternative to the more traditional guided walking or bus tours chock-full of nationalist monuments, displays of institutional or monarchical power, and squares and statues named for White men. A growing number of tours like this one have emerged in cities across the globe in recent years, uncovering local labor histories, Black histories, or other stories of the historical actors often left out of our standard textbooks and tourist experiences. 

The term “people’s history” was popularized by historian Howard Zinn in his 1980 book , which revisits U.S. history from the perspective of Indigenous Americans, enslaved Africans, and the working classes from the arrival of Columbus to the 20th century. Zinn calls people’s history “a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people’s movements of resistance,” and his text and those that have followed in its tradition tell stories of groups that are underrepresented in curricula, pop culture, and tourist experiences, like city and museum tours. 

These histories include working-class histories and the histories of marginalized groups, like migrants, the queer community, and people of color—and all the ways these groups overlap. In the United States and Europe, LGBTQ+-inclusive histories have begun to be . But inclusion is often met with pushback, and anti-LGBTQ+ curriculum laws . Meanwhile, people of color are under-represented at every level of classroom education, from the to the . 

Representation is also uneven in the tourism sector. In 2020, that “Black people are under-represented at all levels within the travel industry,” including destination management organizations, travel-related retail and financial services brands, and travel press. According to data from Zippia, of travel journalists are White, meaning the stories that we read about travel are also .

Organizations that offer tourist experiences rooted in people’s histories seek to disrupt these narratives. “The story of the labor movement, and especially the thousands of events that have built this middle class, are usually not taught well or taught at all,” says Larry Spivack. As president of the Illinois Labor History Society, Spivack says his organization’s mission has been to reclaim the narrative and “tell the story of the profound significance of labor history in the Illinois region.”

Its Labor History Tours are part of this work. The tours are made-to-order for local community groups, union conventions, visiting researchers, or tourists interested in learning more about Chicago’s workers movements, and can be led as walking or bus tours. Spivack, who has been leading tours since the ’90s, long before he became president of the organization in 2006, says everyone who joins him learns something new.

“When people find out that the benefits inured to them in workplaces are from people’s history, organizing, collective action—they’re shocked,” he says. The experience also reminds visitors that everyday people like themselves are historical actors with the power to shape the future. Spivack says visitors often leave the tour wanting to get engaged in their union or organization after hearing the stories of Mother Jones and Lucy Parsons, Chicago-based labor organizers who Spivack says “were part of this historical collective action that gave us a much better society.”

“People are interested in the idea that history is created by people, and that we can be part of that,” says Kathryn Lloyd, senior director of programs and interpretation at the in New York City. Like the Illinois Labor History Society, the Tenement Museum is committed to introducing visitors to understudied histories. Its guided tours through preserved tenement apartments and neighborhoods on the Lower East Side center on the waves of working-class European, Jewish, and Black migrants who lived in tenement buildings in the 19th and early 20th centuries. 

“It’s this idea of looking at the stories of people who weren’t considered important in their time, and really lifting up those stories to see them as essential stories for understanding U.S. history,” says Lloyd of the Tenement Museum’s guiding mission. 

During the COVID-19 pandemic, people developed a heightened sense of living through history, which has driven visitors to the Tenement Museum since it resumed programming following pandemic closures. “We really hope to have people come away with the sense that they are also part of history, and we can all be active participants in shaping the future,” says Lloyd.

By encouraging visitors to see themselves as historical actors and raising tough questions about who has been left out of commonly told histories, these organizations also tie their work to current discussions about social justice in tourism, the classroom, and out on the street. “The work that we’re doing is all about the history of resistance against racism, anti-imperialism, Black Power, activism,” says Tony Warner, founder of , an organization offering tours, educational talks, and films about Black histories in London. 

Warner founded Black History Walks in 2007 after taking several walking tours around London, where Black histories were conspicuously absent. “I thought, ‘That’s ridiculous. There must be some Black history here,’” recalls Warner. Based on research in historical sources and oral history interviews conducted with family and neighborhood sources, Warner developed , one of London’s oldest neighborhoods, highlighting the heretofore hidden history of African people, influences, and resources that led to British colonial wealth. “It was things that I’d seen, things that my family experienced, and also things like reading books,” he says. “Then you bring it to life [on the tour].”

What was meant to be a single event has grown beyond Warner’s wildest dreams. “I had two people on the very first walk,” he says. “I was going to call it a day after that. But they liked it so much. They said I should do it again.” Black History Walks now offers 12 walking tours through different London neighborhoods, a , and even a . Its bus tours accommodate up to 72 people at a time, and the river cruise often sells out at 150.

Warner says his organization’s programming has grown more popular with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and particularly in the wake of the George Floyd protests that rocked the United States and rippled across the globe in the summer of 2020. “When BLM came along, [that momentum] just kind of melded into what we’re doing already.”

The Tenement Museum has also been ramping up programming around Black history. Its initiative started by developing a new neighborhood walking tour in spring 2019 that highlights Black history on the Lower East Side going as far back as the mid-17th century. 

“One of the common misconceptions is that Black New Yorkers or African Americans came [to New York City] during the Great Migration,” the project’s lead researcher Lauren O’Brien . But a tour through the Lower East Side shows that “Black New Yorkers have been a part of the city since its founding.”

For these organizations, part of their work is challenging the standard sources used to write histories and working with and giving back to local communities, descendants, or folks otherwise affected by their work in both history-telling and tourism. The Tenement Museum exemplifies this approach in its recent work on Black histories, partnering with descendants of Black tenement residents; Black history institutions, like the ; and Black artists, like , to develop museum programming.

In London, Black History Walks pursues similar partnerships, offers free programming, and keeps tour prices as low as possible—at least one-third less expensive than the average city tour, according to Warner—to ensure its work remains accessible. The organization also installs plaques to mark famous Black people and spaces around London, like one commemorating Black , of a former office in south London earlier this year. 

Similarly, in Chicago, the Illinois Labor History Society is overseeing the restoration of a mural , which the society initially commissioned in 1974. These initiatives make Black and working-class history more visible.

In his text, Zinn embraces this type of engagement and activist scholarship, writing that people’s histories “lean in a certain direction,” opposite dominant historiographies. With commemorative plaques, murals, and people’s history tours, locals and visitors are invited to see destinations in new ways, disrupt historically exclusionary narratives, and become active participants in shaping a more just future. 

Many other organizations do similar work, including the , San Francisco-based , and Seattle-based , which offer tours on Chicanx, queer, and Indigenous histories, respectively. Published guidebooks, like  and  also support self-guided treks steeped in radical history. 

“We see a lot of tourists that come to us because this feels like history that you can’t get in textbooks, and I think that’s happening all over the world,” says Lloyd. “We have this sense that we can get deeper histories by thinking about our own stories, what is represented, what is not, and why.”

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 10:25 a.m. PDT on June 7, 2022 to correct the photo credits. Read our corrections policy here.

Brazil is not usually associated with generous social programs. However, Maricá, a small seaside city of 160,000 people, is making a tremendous impact on the lives of its citizens. Over the past nine years, various social programs have been instigated, especially a basic income program called Renda Básica de Cidadania, which is paid in a local social currency named mumbuca—named after both a river that runs through Maricá and also one of the local Indigenous peoples. 

A basic income program consists of a regularly paid stipend of money given to all citizens of a community, regardless of income. Although discussed since the Enlightenment period by such prominent figures as Thomas Paine and the Marquis de Condorcet, only a handful of cities and provinces have piloted schemes based on a form of basic income worldwide, in places in the . Supporters of basic income recognize it as a fair way to redistribute funds to reduce growing inequality and simplify a convoluted welfare state. But the idea of unconditional cash payments funded by the state has not gone much further than successful small-scale pilot programs. 

Residents of Maricá who have lived in the city for at least three years and belong to a household with a monthly family income of up to 3,135 Brazilian reals (approximately $640 USD) and have signed up for the program currently receive 170 mumbucas a month. The mumbuca converts to reals at a ratio of 1-to-1, in a country where the poverty line is set at 178 reals per family per month. Indigenous residents receive 300 mumbucas per month.

Accounts in the alternative currency are held by Banco Mumbuca, a city-owned bank. 

The money can be accessed in the form of a card (there is no physical form of the currency), and residents can manage the money through the bank’s mobile phone app. The mumbuca is accepted within the city at approximately 3,000 establishments, such as hairdressers, grocers, and pharmacies. About in the alternative currency. 

The municipal community bank of Maricá, Banco Mumbuca, opened in 2013 with a cash balance of 2 million reals ($410,000) and is a branch of Instituto Banco da Periferia, a nongovernmental organization based in Fortaleza in northeastern Brazil whose purpose is to provide economic and social development for communities in the region. The Maricá local government decided to open the bank to distribute money from royalties from oil sales found in the Santos Basin along the Maricá coastline in 2010.

The bank had just 40 accounts open on its first day, a slow beginning, and at the time, it distributed just 85 mumbucas per person monthly. “As a pioneer, the municipality of Maricá had to invent a form of social and political engineering to, at the same time, make the basic income program economically viable, making the merchants convinced that it would be a benefit for them too and the benefit for people in vulnerable situations,” said Adalton Mendonça, the secretary of economy for the Maricá council. “Teams were assembled in the squares, in the shops, to register, create accounts, and open bank branches … even with some difficulties, we managed to win this battle, but we continue in the fight to make basic income a right.” At the end of 2021, the bank had 65,367 active accounts, and 2 billion mumbucas circulated in Maricá from 2018 through September 2021. 

Retail merchants that accept mumbuca pay a 2% fee, which pays for a zero-interest line of credit offered by Mumbuca Bank to entrepreneurs in the formal and informal market segments, with the program helping residents open businesses that they otherwise would not have been able to open. Residents can also receive interest-free home improvement loans in mumbuca. 

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Maricá boosted its payments to help reduce the harmful effects of the pandemic on its citizens. From April to June 2020, residents received an extra 170 mumbucas per month. In addition, in 2020, the , an additional payment paid in December every year through the mumbuca program, was paid eight months in advance, in April, so beneficiaries of the program received 430 mumbucas in April 2020. 

Informal workers, “micro-entrepreneurs” in the city who are not registered with the federal government, were also paid the minimum government salary of 1,045 reals ($210) in mumbuca for three months. “The mumbuca helped me a lot during the pandemic, as no one was buying anything,” said Rose Souza, who runs a small business selling handbags.

Washington Quaquá, the mayor of Maricá until 2016, was inspired to initiate the program by a to create the basic income program in the city. “,” he said in a statement at the time. As a member of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party), this was entirely in keeping with the party’s socialist ideology. Quaquás’ successor, Fabiano Horto, also of the Workers’ Party, . 

The local government sees the program’s success based on how many of its residents have access to and use the mumbuca: ������Ƶ than 42,000 families have signed up since the program launched. 

“Social currency today is no longer a benefit to reach another policy, which has as its final point that every citizen of the city has the right to have an income from the resource from oil royalties,” Horto told the newspaper O Dia in 2019. The mayor said he plans to invest the money received from oil responsibly. The to make the mumbuca and other social programs sustainable for the future. In 2022, the wealth fund is expected to control 1 billion reals ($210 million).

The local government also provides 1.8 million in mumbuca for more than 2,000 students living in Maricá, which pays students 50 mumbuca per month and offers additional support of 1,200 mumbuca to incentivize students to continue with their studies. “We are going to give these young people the opportunity to start thinking, from an early age, about what they want for their lives,” , the education secretary in Maricá, said in 2019. “This is liberating education, not only in the educational sense, but also in the sense of thinking about work. With this resource, they will be able to think about forming companies, cooperatives, and producing their work. Educating is this, dreaming together, making dreams come true, and giving them wings so they can fly.”&�Բ�����;

The city has used its share of oil revenues to fund other social services outside of the basic income program. In 2021, the city government also created a free local mass transit program within the city, along with 188 bus shelters and 37 transport routes. The buses are called vermelhinhos, which can be translated to “little reds,” a nod to the color associated with the Workers’ Party. 

And in November 2022, beneficiaries of the basic income program are expected to receive a card that provides access to municipal transport vans throughout the city. In 2022, of these buses. The city also operates a free public bicycle program accessed via a mobile app.

Several cities in the state of Rio de Janeiro receive royalties from oil, but until 2022, none of them aside from Maricá had used the funds to directly tackle poverty. In the past year, the mumbuca model has inspired other cities within the state of Rio de Janeiro, such as Niteroí, another coastal city that has a population of 450,000 people, to create its own community currencies based on the success of this model. Niteroí’s social currency is named and started payments in January 2022 to 27,000 vulnerable families.

States outside of Rio de Janeiro are also showing interest in the program. “Today, this success story extends to other states, such as Bahia, which has already demonstrated its intention to take the model, and the state of Minas Gerais, which has municipalities that have scheduled visits to learn about our model,” Mendonça said. “So it is the sustainable model that has popular support, political support, and national and international recognition. In this sense, we believe that we are on the right path.”

Willis is a co-founder of SACC Movers, a volunteer service project of South Acton Congregational Church in Massachusetts. For 50 years, SACC Movers has moved household goods for people facing the challenge of moving without sufficient funds. “We go into someone’s home and move all their worldly possessions,” notes Willis. “We carry a person’s life. And we make a unique and vital contribution each time.”&�Բ�����;

Eviction and Losing Everything

Before COVID-19 hit, there were approximately  affecting 2.3 million people annually, notes Matthew Desmond, founder of the Eviction Lab at Princeton University. That number doesn’t include people forced out of housing because of rent increases, illegal lockouts, and failed living arrangements. And evictions don’t just happen in cities. According to a  published by the Eviction Lab, research showed that about one in every 30 urban renting families and one in every 50 suburban renting families faced eviction each year.

With evictions looming as a public health threat at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the federal government placed a moratorium on evictions in September 2020. This action kept countless housing-insecure people in their homes during a time of economic uncertainty, but the moratorium was struck down by the Supreme Court in August 2021. Renters in some parts of the country were still protected by state and local eviction moratoria in 2021. But as those protections are lifted, the numbers of evictions are rising.

The lack of affordable housing means that evictions or sudden loss of housing will continue to threaten lower-income people, with racial disparities due to systemic long-term discrimination. In its 2022 study “,” Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies found that even with income assistance under the CARES Act, 15% of renter households were in rent arrears by the end of 2021. Due to job losses during the pandemic, Black households were almost three times as likely, and Hispanic and Asian households twice as likely, to be behind on rent as White households.

People facing eviction frequently contend with a requirement to leave their home quickly. Many have to store items as they look for new housing. But this can set up a no-win scenario for many lower-income people. 

“We hear, over and over, that people end up one payment late and get forced out of their homes,” notes Andrew Witherspoon, of the nonprofit . “They put their items in storage to look for a new place and can’t afford to make their storage payments to get their furniture back. Then they lose everything. When they find their new place, they come to us.”&�Բ�����;

Witherspoon co-founded Chicago Furniture Bank in 2018 to address the need for dignified, comfortable shelter for low-income people. In just three years, it became one of the largest furniture banks in the U.S., having furnished 7,600 homes for over 18,000 people. Clients hand-pick all their new home’s furnishings for free.

“Shelter doesn’t just mean four walls and a floor,” asserts Witherspoon. He notes that when people get evicted, they’ve lost a lot of choice. Many have to move to a place that’s foreign and uncomfortable; they’ve lost their friends, neighbors, and support systems. “We believe everyone should be able to sleep in a bed, share a family meal at a kitchen table, and enjoy the comfort of a furnished home,” he says.

Many Chicago Furniture Bank clients don’t have the income and resources they need for daily life, let alone to move on short notice. Over 50% of the furniture bank’s clients take advantage of its low-cost delivery service. “It’s a matter of accessibility,” says Witherspoon. “Even using the cheapest way possible, renting a van and moving things yourself, for instance: If you don’t have a major credit card, you have to pay 200% of the booking fee as a deposit that’s refunded when you return the truck. Many of our clients simply don’t have that kind of money.”

In Massachusetts, the SACC Movers work with Household Goods, a nonprofit that partners with social services agencies to provide free household furnishings to people in need. Many of its clients have experienced eviction and have lost everything. Household Goods is powered by a network of volunteers who accept furniture donations and distribute them to over 60 households who are moving to public and affordable housing each week. 

“Household items, which many take for granted, may seem unimportant, but they make a huge difference,” says Sharon Martens, executive director of . “Many of our clients have lost everything when they’re forced out of their homes. Our clients tell us that they find more than just a couch, dishes, or a lamp: They also find hope. Waking up comfortable and having a shelter that they’ve turned into a home makes it easier for them to start every day.”

Scenes of Moving Help:

The SACC Movers are called to help a woman and her two young children, recent immigrants from Pakistan who’ve found a place through the local housing authority but have no way to move their possessions. A few hours later, boxes and furniture fill every corner of their new apartment. The beds are assembled, the kitchen supplies unpacked. It looks like the job is finished, and the movers prepare to leave. But one man quietly approaches the woman and asks, “Where will you pray?” 

She gazes around the room, her glance alighting on space next to a sunny window. “There, I think,” she replies, pointing, though the spot is filled with boxes and furniture. The team sets to work again. When the space is cleared, the woman gathers her children to her side, her face breaking into a smile.

***

The SACC Movers show up to move a woman whose landlord has decided to upgrade her apartment and wants her out immediately. She lives on the second floor, with no elevator. The team will have to carry her possessions down two flights of stairs. When they arrive at the apartment, they find her packing the last boxes in a dark one-bedroom apartment. She moves easily in her wheelchair as she does her final organizing. There is almost no food to pack: She reports that her helper hasn’t come lately. Once her furniture and boxes are in the moving van, it is time to go. 

“Who’s carrying me?” she asks. The volunteers look at her quizzically; she repeats her question. “Who’s carrying me? I don’t walk.”

“How do you usually go out?” they ask. 

“I never leave,” is the short reply. “I haven’t been out of this apartment in two years. My helper brings me everything I need.”&�Բ�����;

The local fire department is called, and two firefighters carry her down the stairs to her long-neglected car. The housing authority luckily has a good option available: The woman’s new place is a ground-level one-bedroom in a large apartment complex, with access to the outdoors and other people. She can even drive again. 

Surrounded by boxes in her new home, the woman takes a long breath. “I haven’t felt sunshine on my face in a long time,” she says. “I’m home, I’m really home.”&�Բ�����;

Volunteers who help soften the hardships of eviction and moving on a low income show that “There’s a lot of good out there, and a lot of good people,” says Martens, of Household Goods. They’re helping others make a new home, with furniture, lamps, and access—at last—to some sunshine.��

At , the project management training company that I co-founded more than 13 years ago, we’ve seen this firsthand. In the more than 13 years that we’ve been working with digital product studios, agencies, and other creative teams, we’ve noticed a pattern. The more companies involve their workers, the healthier their operations are.

In 2021, we decided to put this theory to the test and make the ultimate commitment to workplace democracy. We became a worker-owned cooperative.

Why Become a Worker-Owned Cooperative?

As a society, we fight for democracy in government but settle for dictatorships in our workplaces, the place where we spend 70%–80% of our waking hours. Companies their team’s movements and actions in the name of “productivity.” They use time-scheduling software that dates back to a . They deny workers . They make health care professionals work through a global pandemic without .

In short, many workplaces treat people more like economic units than human beings. Even “cushy” jobs embrace toxic hustle culture and lay people off the second things go south in the company.

At Louder Than Ten, we know that worker-owned cooperatives are to be more sustainable, more productive, and longer-lasting. Our conversion to a co-op was the next logical step in our belief and commitment to an equal power structure—and it just makes practical business sense.

What’s a Worker-Owned Cooperative?

In a cooperative, workers own and manage the company. Unlike a traditional structure, where decision-making is at the top level, every worker has one equal vote on all company matters.

Co-ops live by the , and most co-ops do . This means worker-owners determine how profits are generated, used, and distributed. Unlike traditional companies, where CEOs make than the average worker, co-ops experience.

Co-ops aren’t necessarily anti-profit. It’s just that they’re controlled by the workers. They grow sustainably and ethically, providing a living wage for their members and giving back to their communities when they can. Co-ops reject the idea that people are labor. They know that people own labor.

How to Become a Worker-Owned Co-Op

Heads up: Every journey will look a bit different. These steps just worked for (and keep working for) us at Louder Than Ten when we converted to a co-op:

1. Get educated.

The first step on your co-op journey requires educating yourself and all company members about worker cooperatives. Cooperatives either are built from the ground up or are conversions of other kinds of businesses.

Louder Than Ten maintains a list of . If you’re starting a new co-op or converting an existing business, we’d suggest working with a professional co-op developer who can help develop the structure and bylaws, strategize the conversion process, and provide facilitation and training.

2. Find the right partners.

You can’t do this alone.

One of the identified by the International Cooperative Alliance is cooperation between cooperatives. Finding the right partners and professionals who understand and advocate for co-ops can be hard, so it’s critical to lean on the co-op community for support. Louder Than Ten is based in Vancouver, Canada, so we worked with a local co-op association, the , which provided training as well as access to key connections to co-op developers, cooperative-friendly accountants, lawyers, credit unions, and other cooperatives.

3. Write the rules.

Every co-op has a set of bylaws or rules that define how the organization is run that need to be developed before incorporation. These rules should be collectively decided and must benefit the community, the environment, and the workers.

Your rules will cover things like membership eligibility and requirements, governance procedures, share structures, and other core policies. Every set of rules is different and is a reflection of the values and interests of the cooperative. This was our most daunting task in the entire process and required the founding members’ full cooperation, alignment, and vision for the future.

4. Prepare for operation.

This should include discussions about your financial setup and transition plan (if applicable). You’ll also need to form your board of directors, and undertake a number of operational tasks:

• Set up bank accounts.
• Write the business plan (especially if you need financing).
• Form the board.
• Issue the initial shares.
• Design governance systems, like a corporate minute book used to record board meeting notes and a share ledger to track equity holdings.
• Raise money and apply for grants.

This step has a waterfall effect on your business operation. Expect to change your business name and address on everything and anything. Forming a co-op is a layered process, but at the end of it, you’ll be ready to begin operating under the new structure.

5. Convert.

If you’re converting into a coop, you’ll need to valuate the company, then sell it to the workers. This can be a complicated process depending on a ton of factors (especially if the current owners will continue on as employees of the new cooperative). So you will need to urge everyone, including your lawyer, accountant, and the workers, to make a fair conversion plan for everyone. .

6. Operate (and enjoy your new co-op existence).

Once you’ve completed the conversion, you can begin operating as the fully democratic organization you have been dreaming of. ������Ƶ importantly, you’ve officially become a part of the cooperative movement and the larger . Your workplace is no longer paying lip service to its employees. It is a truly democratic institution that gives more material power to your people than a lifetime of electoral votes ever will.

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 10:50 a.m. PDT on May 12, 2022 to correct the number of stated principles of cooperatives identified by the International Cooperative Alliance.��Read our corrections policy here.

This story originally appeared in and is republished here as part of the SoJo Exchange from , a nonprofit organization dedicated to rigorous reporting about responses to social problems.

Life in America was not easy.��“It was crowded,” Meidan “Abby” Lin says.

In March 2016, Lin; her husband, Yin Zheng; their young son, Yuchen; and Zheng’s mother left Fuzhou, China, a bustling coastal city at the mouth of the Min River, for another port half a world away on the Charles River in Boston.

They shared their first apartment in Boston’s Chinatown with another family. During nights in that cramped space, Lin started dreaming of a place she could call her own. But Boston’s soaring real estate prices seemed to put that dream out of reach. Zheng works at a restaurant. Lin works at home.

Then, a friend told Lin about the Chinatown Community Land Trust. The organization was just getting its start, but maybe it could help.

The group was selling apartments at discount prices, and Lin jumped on the waitlist. But there was only one apartment big enough for her family. “I didn’t think we were able to get it,” she says. All she could do was hope.

Community land trusts, many of them recently founded, are pursuing a novel solution to the nation’s affordable-housing crisis: They’re buying their own properties to preserve them as affordable housing in perpetuity and give residents more say over what happens in quickly changing neighborhoods. 

That mission has gained new urgency over the past year as homeowners reap the rewards of a red-hot real estate market while renters are hit with steep rent hikes, deepening the divide between the housing haves and have-nots. Estimates show home values in U.S. metropolitan areas increased a record-breaking 18.8% in 2021. Rents were up by 19.3% over the same period.

“As neighborhoods change and gentrify really fast, the idea of having community control and having more say about how neighborhoods are changing and who’s going to be able to live in the neighborhood over time, from an affordability perspective, I think becomes really important,” says Beth Sorce, who works with community land trusts nationwide at the Grounded Solutions Network, an affordable-housing advocacy group.

“Breathing Space”

Community land trusts have been around for decades, but the trend really began to accelerate after the 2008 recession. In 2019, the Schumacher Center for a New Economics counted 215 land trusts in the U.S. and estimates that there are more than 250 today.

Basically, land trusts raise money from donations, grants, and government funds to buy property. Then, they lease the house or apartment to a buyer well below market value, but the trust retains ownership of the land.

This way, occupants typically get an ownership stake in their homes. They build equity over time, but at a rate that is often capped at 1% or 2% a year. The trust, which is governed democratically by residents and neighbors, can decide to whom the dwelling can be sold and at what price, usually through a covenant in the lease. This ensures the property remains affordable.

The land trust idea was imported to the United States by civil rights activist Charles Sherrod in the early 1970s from the kibbutzim of Israel. Sherrod saw land trusts as a way for Black Americans to buy agricultural land in the South.

“We don’t always talk about community land trusts as tools of justice, but they are,” says Andre Perry, a housing policy expert at the Brookings Institution.

Perry’s own research shows that an “intrinsic value of whiteness” persists at almost every step of homebuying, from the appraisal to the sale. Minorities, but especially Black people, must pay more and get less. 

By taking property out of the traditional market, land trusts reduce the discrimination baked into that system and empower communities to actively fight it, Perry says.

When Susan Saegert, a professor of environmental psychology at the City University of New York, compared homebuyers and renters with land trust homebuyers in several U.S. cities, she found that the land trust buyers were more likely to be minorities, especially single mothers. ������Ƶover, she found that they received all the social benefits of homeownership—things like stability and a sense of home—without as many costs.

One of the most striking findings was in survey data from Minneapolis, Saegert says. Freed from the stress of constantly worrying about the next rent hike or eviction, land trust homeowners there reported they had more time to pursue their passions.

“They have breathing space,” Saegert says. “They can now imagine a better life than before.”

Innovation Needed

In California, justice is what drives Jacqueline Rivera and her fellow housing activists in San Jose. In the heart of Silicon Valley, where even high-paid tech employees struggle to find housing, development was pushing out vibrant Black, Hispanic, and immigrant neighborhoods.

In community conversations Rivera and her colleagues held around the city in 2018, land trusts kept coming up. Rivera grabbed hold of the idea, and by 2020, she was heading up the South Bay Community Land Trust.

Success has not come easily, though. 

By definition, land trusts do not make profits, and fundraising is the biggest challenge they face. To buy their first property, a fourplex in downtown San Jose, they need to fundraise at least $1 million, on top of the half-million dollars they need to pay professional staff and make the organization run. Speed is a problem, too. Developers snap up properties with cash in a matter of days, while the land trust moves “at the pace of community,” Rivera says.

Yet, in order to disrupt traditional real estate, land trusts “still have to play in the real estate game,” she adds.

Advocates stress that land trusts are just one tool in a broader approach to the affordability crisis, but it could be a more effective one with government help. Sorce, of Grounded Solutions, says state and local governments should invest money in land trusts and change appraisal policies so land trust properties aren’t paying taxes based on their speculative value.

With or without such help, land trusts must innovate to succeed.

“When we think about community land trusts, so many times we think about just the homeownership level,” says Sheldon Clark, who recently served as president of the board of the Douglass Community Land Trust in Washington, D.C. “And that really just doesn’t cover the housing needs that we have.”

Douglass has units it’s maintaining as permanently affordable rentals and other properties set up as cooperatives. They’ve also helped tenants take advantage of a District of Columbia law that entitles them to buy their unit if their landlord plans to sell.

Really, land trust leaders say, homeownership is just one aspect of their focus on what Clark calls the “big C” in community land trusts: the community.

Douglass organized food drives during the pandemic and helps connect residents to credit unions, as many are unbanked. In Boston’s Chinatown, the land trust helped save a local park.

Lydia Lowe, the Chinatown Community Land Trust’s executive director, strides down the narrow streets of the neighborhood she’s fought for since the 1980s with pride and determination. She points out low-income apartments she’s worked to save from developers on Johnny Court and buildings the land trust is eyeing near the Ding Ho takeout place on Harrison Avenue. 

Lowe has needed plenty of determination since the land trust’s incorporation in 2015. “We couldn’t get anyone to give us property, because they’re sitting on a gold mine,” she says. In 2019, the land trust finally secured two row houses, seven units in total, and set about refurbishing them.

Finally, one day in September 2021, the three-bedroom walk-up on Oak Street was ready. After their long wait since moving from China, Lin and her family opened the door and walked in. They could hardly believe what they saw: three cozy bedrooms, a living room with big windows, and a spacious kitchen.

Most of the apartments on Oak Street in Boston are priced from $600,000 to well over $1 million, according to Zillow. Chinatown Community Land Trust sold Lin and Zheng their apartment for about $220,000. Lin said homeownership in Chinatown would not have been possible without the land trust.

“I’m here with my husband and my kids. I have my own family. That’s all that matters,” Lin says. And six years after coming to America, it finally feels like her family has a home.

This story originally appeared in and is republished here as part of the SoJo Exchange from , a nonprofit organization dedicated to rigorous reporting about responses to social problems.

Carlos Partee’s tall frame rises above the milling customers. Partee is one of the co-founders of the Market and the owner of , a clothing brand that sells apparel highlighting Nashville’s forgotten history. Together with Javvon Jones, who also started his own clothing brand called , he’s created something special.

The two of them grew up in North Nashville, in the 37208 ZIP code. About two-thirds of the area’s current residents, including Partee and Jones, are Black, according to from 2020. Partee and Jones met in high school through their early entrepreneurial ventures in the fashion world, but later found out they were cousins. In 2018, they were both looking for locations to do pop-up shops for their brands. Every storefront location they found seemed a little off—too expensive, too small, or just not what they were looking for. They wanted to do more than just sell, too, Jones says. “We had a conversation about coming together and doing things for the community along with the pop-up shops, so that’s how we started with the Nashville Black Market.”

From the beginning, it has been clear that Jones and Partee are filling a community need. The first pop-up market they put on in February 2019 had just 15 vendors, but more than 1,000 people showed up. “From that moment,” Partee says, “we knew that we had something.” The market has only grown from there. Since then, more than 380 vendors have participated in the market events, averaging 65 vendors per market. In 2021, the market grossed approximately $205,000 for Black entrepreneurs, despite the COVID-19 pandemic restricting the market to just four events that year.

“I sell out every time. Every single time,” says De’Jenea Shaw, owner of health food company . Other vendors echoed this sentiment.

Hailey Wesley, a professional self-taught painter and owner of , heard about the market from a friend, “because I wasn’t doing so well at the other markets,” she says. “And the first night I came here, I sold literally everything, and it was truly amazing.” Wesley also sells through the but emphasized, “Here is where I gross the most money.”

For some vendors, it’s less about making money and more about exposure. Many of the vendors sell mainly online and at pop-up shops. “Online sales can get stagnant month to month,” says Shardae Robinson, owner of , which sells children’s books and novels that feature Black characters and Black culture. The Nashville Black Market, she says, “Generates a buzz about my business, and it’s an opportunity for me to interact with my potential customers.”

Lea Avery, founder of the game and event facilitation company , notes, “It’s kind of hard to get exposure for your business in Nashville being a Black entrepreneur, so it’s great to have these events once a month to let people know that we are here and we need the support as well.”

For other vendors, entrepreneurship isn’t their full-time job. The market “gives you confidence because you know you can sell,” says Reuben Dobson, creator of an all-purpose spice rub called . “I’m a normal guy just like everybody else; I have a regular job, but I have something that I think people might like. It took me 10 years to have enough confidence to think that I could actually sell it.”

It’s not just confidence that you need to start a business, though; it’s capital too. Often, Black-owned businesses don’t have access to the same opportunities as White-owned businesses— from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta showed that Black-owned businesses have a harder time getting approved for the financing they apply for. As a result, nationwide, of businesses are Black-owned, despite the fact that the U.S. population is 14.2% Black.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, a higher percentage of Black-owned businesses reported financial hardship, a problem that was further exacerbated when Black-owned businesses received less pandemic relief than their White-owned counterparts, both in and in the . And though Black buying power is close to , only a of that is spent at Black-owned businesses.

Beyond that, there is a long history of discrimination against Black-owned business, especially in a city like Nashville, where the construction of interstate highways in Black neighborhoods and meant Black people had a much harder time accumulating wealth through homeownership.

As Nashville grows, too, its are rapidly shifting, in part due to rising housing prices.

“Nashville is an amazing city,” says Stephanie Pruitt Gaines, who is in the process of launching her business, , which sells peel-and-press nail polish wraps. “I was born and raised here, but it’s changed so significantly, especially in the last five, 10, 15 years.”

Partee seconds that concern. “It’s heartbreaking to see a lot of the places you grew up … or the people you grew up with not here anymore, not being able to stay here due to gentrification.”

Gaines goes on to say that the diversity, in part, is what brings people to a city like Nashville. But “unless we take very intentional steps to ensure that Black people and Black businesses can stay, you’re going to see a totally different Nashville, and a lot of the things that attracted people to Nashville in the first place—the culture, the diversity, the music, the food—people are being priced out of that, and it’s no longer going to be the Nashville that we all actually want to live in.”

Gaines sees spaces like the Nashville Black Market as playing a key role in keeping the city diverse and thriving. “They stimulate the Black economy, which is crucial, but it also creates kind of a cultural and social hub that allows all Nashvillians to really be a part of the rich culture that is here,” she says. “And, you know, owning a business in a city that is growing very, very quickly is one way to make sure that the growth is spread across all people.”

Though increasing the number of Black-owned businesses won’t by itself solve racial inequality in Nashville, it does have the “potential to in Black neighborhoods, including health care, child care, and food,” as a recent Center for American Progress report put it.

As Jones and Partee work to grow the market, they are taking notes from similar efforts in other cities. In Atlanta, the provides not only a marketplace, but also serves as an incubation center, offering classes and mentorship to aspiring Black entrepreneurs. In Stonecrest, Georgia, is a mall, named for the thriving community that was destroyed in the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, that gives Black-owned businesses a brick-and-mortar location. And in Los Angeles, the nonprofit Black-owned and -operated community land trust has a cooperative retail space and an incubator program that helps Black business owners get their projects off the ground.

Partee and Jones are hoping for all of that and more for Nashville. They imagine a future where they have a permanent location where culture and commerce come together. Where, whatever you need, you can go there and get it from a Black-owned business. Where kids can come and see people who look like them, who are from their community, having the kind of success they dream about. Someday, Jones hopes, “when you think about Nashville, you’ll think about the Nashville Black Market.”

The co-founders at the Nashville Black Market know it takes a community to cultivate change; that it’s less about what they alone can do and more about how they can empower the people around them. “People say, ‘Oh, you know, it’s just another market,’ or ‘It’s just another pop-up shop,’” Partee says. “But it’s like, no, we’re putting value into our community.”

“It’s about building an intentional, mission-driven community,” Jones says. “We talk about common principles—anti-gentrification, the importance of shared cultural assets, green space assets, things that aren’t part of our common dialogue in America anymore. Older generations did it in the 1940s, ’50��, ’60��.”

Jones says her buyers collective members have all come through word of mouth so far. She talks about her work everywhere she goes—like volunteering with a local church, where a pastor’s family is now part of her collective. Some are from the area of West Baltimore where Parity Homes is focusing its work; others are originally from the area but moved out when they were teens and now want to move back.

Parity Homes keeps an architect on retainer to help buyers select one of six floor plans for Baltimore’s signature row houses. Options include splitting the home into a two-flat to create some extra income for the homeowner and another affordable housing unit. Three buyers collective members have made their selection, and Jones hopes to deliver their homes later this year, hopefully by July.

“They call me every week [to ask] how’s the house coming along,” Jones says.

For all that Jones has made possible so far, it’s not yet sustainable. For now, Parity is selling the homes for less than what the firm has paid to acquire them. That’s because the homes suffer from the appraisal gap, which disproportionately affects historically Black neighborhoods. After generations of disinvestment, which started with redlining in the 1930s, the homes today require significant rehab, the cost of which can far exceed the values that the homes will appraise for, even after rehab.

Some help may soon be on the way. Last year, Maryland state legislators  to create the Appraisal Gap From Historic Redlining Financial Assistance Program. Jones says it started with a conversation between her and Maryland Sen. Antonio Hayes.

“He had asked me to testify about a related issue, and after I did that, he asked if there was anything he could help me with, and I didn’t know better, so I brought up the appraisal gap,” Jones says. “It was a little bit of beginner’s luck.”

The funds would fill in the gap between the costs of rehabbing a vacant home or constructing a new home on a vacant lot and the appraised price at which the home eventually sells. However, the bill did not go into effect until the start of the fiscal year in Maryland on July 1, which meant the new program never made it into budget negotiations for that fiscal year.

Jones is banking on it being funded in this year’s budget, which is currently under negotiations. She knows other potential emerging developers like her—especially other women of color—would appreciate the support to do similar work in other disinvested areas across Maryland.

“Financing mechanisms for entry-level housing stock are still few and far between,” Jones says. “Big federal programs, like low-income housing tax credits or new-markets tax credits, don’t really do it. Why not try to make something that fits us?”

The real estate industry has long had “.” According to Enterprise Community Partners, . At the Urban Land Institute, one of the country’s major real estate developer networks, —and 69% identify as men.

Even the real estate subsectors of community development and affordable housing that serve many Black and Latino neighborhoods have helped perpetuate those disparities. In New York—where Jones was born—the nonprofit Community Preservation Corporation has financed tens of thousands of affordable housing units in communities of color since 1974, but according to its internal analysis, .

Often, lenders cite the lack of collateral. But that is a chicken-and-egg situation, given that the persistent history of redlining means White homeownership rates and typical White household wealth levels in general remain far beyond that of non-White households.

Jones wants to help break that cycle by getting the homes she’s developing into the hands of primarily, though not exclusively, Black households. When otherwise talented but less experienced developers of color approach lenders with little to no wealth from family or friends as a starting point, most lenders find it challenging to work with them while also satisfying their regulators or rating agencies. Those number crunchers come in on a regular basis and scrutinize each and every loan a lender has made since the last time they were there for an examination or rating update.

It’s not impossible but it’s very challenging for lenders to battle with regulators or rating agencies over and over to defend multiple acquisition and construction loans to multiple emerging developers of color with little to no personal collateral—even more so when everyone can see down the road that the developer may not be able to sell the properties at a price that can cover the cost of acquisition and construction. Often, the lenders who are most willing to work with borrowers in these situations will also charge the highest interest rates on the market as compensation for taking on the perceived “risk.”

Bank regulation isn’t inherently evil. The point is to ensure the safety and soundness of the banking system. But the reliance on personal collateral as a risk-management factor to dominate all other risk-management factors , though it can seem that way if you don’t have any collateral.

Jones has relied on corporate donors, state grants, philanthropic fellowships, and a few personal connections to “very patient” seed investors to get Parity Homes going. She’s amassed a portfolio of 40 properties—half through foreclosure auctions or private sales, and half via Baltimore’s annual tax lien sale. The lien sale is  after complaints that .

Jones says the tax lien process could also be a lot friendlier to smaller, mission-driven developers like herself. In one 10-or-so-block area she’s been examining closely, she says she’s identified at least 300 properties with tax liens, maybe 70% of them with liens in the six figures. Properties can take up to two years to drag through the foreclosure process. “There’s so much inventory in Baltimore City, but it’s all locked behind liens, encumbrances, and other barriers,” Jones says.

The most recent statements from City Hall  15,032 vacant houses in Baltimore. Jones says the true number could be much higher—perhaps four times as many. For every 50 vacant properties, Jones says, there may be 50 different owners, half of whom are deceased, a third in defunct LLCs with outdated, if any, contact information, “and the rest are owned by speculators who are trying to profit off other people’s trauma.”

The situation bears similarities to other predominantly Black urban areas, , where local community organizations and small emerging developers face a maze of tax liens upon mortgage liens layered in with a tangle of LLCs and dead-end brokerage phone numbers.

In this post-COVID housing market boom, Jones sees more speculators swooping in with all-cash deals in the neighborhoods where she has properties in the pipeline. Blocks where empty shells used to go for $5,000 are now selling for close to $100,000. Those sales might be connected to the  in single-family rental properties.

In its sales, Parity Homes puts in a “soft second” mortgage—essentially a slice of seller financing that the buyer doesn’t have to repay unless they sell the home later or refinance their mortgage. It helps keep the primary mortgage affordable for the homeowner while serving as a disincentive against house-flipping.

Given all the cards stacked against her—woman, Black, new to real estate development, focused on neighborhoods faced with ownership challenges—Jones is taking all the help that is worth her time. She’s an alumna of the , a program of Capital Impact Partners, a community development financial institution (CDFI) based in the Washington, D.C., area. The initiative is one of  to help diversify their base of developers.

JPMorgan Chase funded the Equitable Development Initiative, which recently awarded a $2 million recoverable grant to Parity Homes, in conjunction with , intended to support more women of color in real estate.

“We’re building the bench for diverse developers in this region,” says Dekonti Mends-Cole, vice president for the mid-Atlantic at JPMorgan Chase Global Philanthropy.

The $2 million infusion enables Jones to finally hire her first full-time staff and get her the runway to acquire and sell at least 200 formerly vacant homes. If the appraisal gap program from the state kicks in, or perhaps new federal support from the , Jones might be able to acquire, rehab, and sell even more.

Jones is also hopeful that with larger institutional support, the city will take emerging mission-oriented developers seriously as part of the solution to fix long-standing vacant property challenges.

“The issue is so big it creates a feeling of helplessness, but an institutional partner makes it seem like we can actually do something about it,” Jones says.

This article was originally published by . It has been lightly edited for YES! Magazine.

The crisis has a simple explanation, and it didn’t start with the current occupant of the Oval Office. Irrespective of where we fall on the political spectrum, a great many of us don’t trust our own political system. Nor should we: It represents power that is captive to interests quite at odds with our own.

Two recent news stories brought this home to me in a way that might help us find common cause across the political spectrum.

The first story was about a . Ecuador introduced a resolution calling on governments to “protect, promote and support breast-feeding” and to restrict promotion of food products found to have deleterious effects on young children. Now what could be more unassailable than that?

Breastfeeding is a wholly natural process and scientific studies confirm that breast milk is the best food source for infants. While most all the national representatives rallied behind the initiative, the United States’ representatives stood firmly in opposition. They even threatened Ecuador with trade sanctions and a cutback in military aid.

Their stance surely did not represent the interests or preferences of the American people. The U.S. representatives left those present with no doubt that they were representing the interest of transnational corporations that sell infant formula.

Within days of the breastfeeding incident, President Trump was attacking the U.S.’s NATO allies in Europe for spending too little on their militaries. At first mention his argument seemed reasonable. Surely our allies should pay their fair share for our common defense.

But then a deeper reality hit home for me. Collapsing environmental and social systems are the greatest current threat to U.S. and world security. The more of Earth’s resources we use preparing for and conducting wars, the less we attend to the needs of our own people and the greater a burden humanity bears. That means we deprive more people of a means of living, more places on Earth become rendered uninhabitable, and a greater number of people are forced to flee their homes as desperate refugees, or are turned in fear and hatred to terrorism against real and imagined enemies.

The biggest share of U.S. military expenditure goes to preparing for war with another world power—specifically, Russia or China. Russia may tamper with our elections and China is beating our socks off as a global economic competitor, but both have much to lose and nothing to gain from starting a 20th century-style conventional war with the United States that would be fought with 21st century weapons. They are aware such a war would have devastating consequences for all—worst of all if it involved nuclear weapons.

Since the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Russia has not threatened us and our interests nearly so much as we have threatened Russia’s interests. We’ve integrated former members of the Soviet Union into NATO right up to the borders of Russia. China’s economic expansion is simply following the U.S. example, but doing so far more competently.

Our military, however, has not been idle. We have wasted many lives and caused much damage to people, infrastructure, and nature pursuing pointless wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Our drone strikes inflict further pain and terror on helpless innocents .

Our problem is not that we and our allies are spending too little on war, but that we are spending far too much. The parallel to the U.S. stance on breastfeeding is clear. The interests served by bloated military budgets and endless wars against sometimes wholly imagined enemies are corporations that profit from defense contracts.

The misguided corporatist loyalty of the U.S. political establishment did not begin with the Trump presidency. Defense contractors and infant formula corporations are just two examples of the abuse of unaccountable institutional power in which both Republican and Democratic parties have been complicit for decades. Not all Republican and Democratic politicians are willing corporate shills, but the dynamics of the political process force most of them to fall into line with corporate interests—especially at the national level.

The political establishment’s sellout to corporate interests is reflected in every aspect of policy from military, to health care, to financial regulation, to education, the environment and much else. And the sellout is not exclusive to the Republican Party. We experienced it as well with the Clinton and Obama administrations—which explains why so many didn’t trust Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.

When two corrupt parties control the political system, debating which is the more corrupt simply diverts attention away from addressing the source of the corruption. In this case, the source is extreme inequality combined with a system of law that allows for a virtually unlimited concentration of corporate power. At the same time, corporations are granted more rights than people are, and are exempted from accountability to the communities in which they do business and from liability for the harm they cause.

The corporate establishment has been winning this battle for decades by keeping us divided between those who place the blame on business and the market and those who place the blame on government.

Responsible businesses and accountable governments are essential institutions, as are fair and ethical markets. All could be corrupted if the electorate allows for concentrations of unaccountable monopoly power. All institutions require an ethical frame and a clear order of accountability.

Government must be accountable to the electorate. Businesses must be accountable to accountable governments. And markets must function within an ethical framework and agreed rules that are fairly enforced by those accountable governments.

Unaccountable corporations protected from public accountability by unaccountable governments leads to certain disaster. And yet, here we are.

President Trump’s unintended gift to the nation and the world may be to awaken us to the reality that, far from being the global model for democracy and a community-centric market economy, the United States’ political system is fundamentally corrupt and destructive to the common good.

Our future depends on bridging the artificially cultivated political divide that serves only interests fundamentally contrary to our common well-being. In the short-term, only the richest of the rich are served by the concentration of wealth and power that in the long term serves none of us. We must all, including the principled wealthy, work to dismantle the institutional instruments of monopoly power while creating truly democratically accountable institutions and markets that advance the equitable redistribution of wealth.

United we stand, divided we fall is a rallying cry for our time. We must do this together.

When you get home, boil water for noodles and add some barbecue sauce to the pot, for flavor. Fry your chicken. 

Pour the noodles into a bowl. Add chicken. Add spaghetti sauce. 

Voila! Joseph “J.W.” Harris Jr.’s special recipe for Southern-style barbecue chicken spaghetti. It’s one of the many dishes he’s been crafting since moving into his home in . The low-income housing apartment complex in Wichita, Kansas, is run by  for people transitioning out of homelessness. The ability to make his own meals is one of the best parts about his new apartment, Harris said.

“You can cook your own stuff,” he said. “You’re more independent here.”&�Բ�����;

Harris, 46, moved into The Studios last fall using an emergency housing voucher. These provide rental assistance funded by the  for . But the vouchers, which were meant to provide relief during the pandemic, are vastly underutilized. As of March 15, only  are being used to lease apartments. 

Challenges, including a  and skyrocketing rents, have made it difficult for those who receive vouchers to find housing. Plus, the emergency voucher program has “added complexity,” according to Brian Handshy, regional public affairs officer for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. That’s because it requires close collaboration between government and , like nonprofits. 

Wichita, though, stands out with its success in the voucher program. About  are currently used to help residents rent apartments, according to federal data as of March 15. This gives Wichita the second-highest utilization rate among the  at using emergency housing vouchers. 

The Solution

Hurricane Katrina hit Harris’ hometown of Meridian, Mississippi, in 2005. 

The storm’s path of destruction left him homeless. His work in the oil fields dried up in its aftermath.

“After Hurricane Katrina hit, a lot of Mississippi people and Louisiana people, a lot of people from down there, started moving up this way,” Harris said. 

He came to Kansas in 2010, knowing no one. Since then, Harris has been in and out of permanent housing, co-workers’ homes, and shelters. Last summer, he reached the 30-day limit of a shelter where he was staying. He moved downtown and stayed at , a shelter run by HumanKind Ministries. 

Around the same time, the Wichita Housing Authority was preparing to distribute its emergency housing vouchers, which became available on July 1, 2021. The agency wanted to distribute them as quickly as possible—and the housing authority had two tricks up its sleeve, according to Sally Stang, director of Wichita’s Housing and Community Services Department.

The first one?

“We were two years ahead,” Stang said.

The emergency housing voucher program  agencies that work with people experiencing homelessness or fleeing domestic violence, like HumanKind, to refer potential voucher recipients to the housing authority, which then approves that person for an emergency voucher.

The initiative requires coordination between nonprofits and the housing authority—something Wichita had in place prior to the emergency voucher program. In 2020, the Wichita Housing Authority established the . This allows homeless service providers to refer homeless people to the city’s already-existing housing choice voucher program and be popped to the top of the list. The city receives  that are separate from the emergency housing vouchers.

When the Wichita Housing Authority received the emergency vouchers in 2021, nonprofits already had infrastructure in place to communicate with the city about who was homeless and in need.

“I kind of laugh about it, because we set up what we call our homeless preference program, and it works very similar” to the emergency voucher program, Stang said. 

Then, there was The Studios, where Harris lives now. This project filled in a major part of the puzzle—once someone gets a voucher, where do they go?

“For us, it wasn’t a challenge, because the facility [The Studios] was right there, literally ready and waiting for people,” said Emily Lohfink, marketing and communications manager with HumanKind.

The city decided in December 2020 to use nearly  of federal COVID relief funds to buy a former hotel and renovate the facility into permanent housing, now known as The Studios. The apartment complex on North Topeka Avenue specifically targets helping those experiencing homelessness. .

The Studios opened on Oct. 4, 2021. Harris moved in the same day. Twenty-seven of the 54 units are filled with residents using emergency housing vouchers, Stang said. 

“You have to keep all your meetings. You have to do the right thing. You really got to want this for yourself,” Harris said. “It comes down to that, as a homeless person. You really gotta want to do it.”&�Բ�����;

“Private Landlords Kind of Shy Away”

When Harris learned in late August that he was getting an emergency housing voucher, he spent time calling apartment complexes that he heard might be a fit. 

But outside of The Studios, he had no success. One complex he called wouldn’t accept his emergency voucher. 

“That kind of put a turn on me,” Harris said. “You only got a certain amount of days.”

The emergency housing voucher comes with a deadline—if you don’t find housing within  of receiving it, you lose it. Agencies that worked with clients who received the vouchers said it was a challenge to find landlords who would accept them.

“Early on, a lot of landlords and apartment complexes didn’t really know what this was,” said Keri McGregor, program director at Harbor House, which works with domestic violence survivors. “And I think they were hesitant to accept something when the participant isn’t able to pay for it on their own. I think private landlords kind of shy away from that.”

Stang said building The Studios was one part of the solution to this problem. So is an  that provides landlords with support when leasing to tenants who experienced homelessness. 

Even though finding housing could be a challenge, McGregor said she didn’t know of anyone whose voucher expired because they couldn’t find housing. Neither did Tracey Gay, director of client services for the Wichita Family Crisis Center.

This success may have been helped by Wichita’s housing market. Average rent in Wichita is less than half the national average as of . And according to , Wichita’s rental vacancy rate is 9.7%—about 62% higher than the national vacancy rate. This vacancy rate is higher than what’s considered healthy, according to Kirk McClure, a professor emeritus at the University of Kansas who studies housing.

What Lies Ahead

After years of rotating between living situations, Harris said he plans to stay at The Studios for the foreseeable future.

The emergency housing vouchers allow this, Stang said. Tenants can use them through .

“We’ve had discussions about—what do we do in 2030?” Stang said.

But for the time being, Harris has a lot of goals he is working toward. And he’s starting with teaching cooking classes at The Studios. He wants to share how he makes meals with just a microwave, toaster oven, and electric skillet.

Southern-style barbecue chicken spaghetti is just the beginning.

This story was originally published in the and is republished here as part of the SoJo Exchange from the , a nonprofit organization dedicated to rigorous reporting about responses to social problems.

There’s a long history stretching back to the Middle Ages that resulted in our occupations determining our socioeconomic status, and what rights and privileges accrue to it. What did work mean for pre-capitalistic (and pre-feudal) societies? How did we come to a place where a job, no matter how demeaning or poorly compensated, is intended not just to provide for our needs, but also be “fulfilling”? What would society look like if resources were allocated based upon need, instead of how much your toil increased profits for someone else?

What would people do if they had no fear of poverty, but were instead focused on seeking satisfaction and joy? And what do we need to do to get there?

The Fall 2022 issue of YES! Magazine, the “W�ǰ���” issue, will examine what work really means in contemporary society, and what it could mean if our society were reordered to prioritize health, fulfillment, fairness, and joy. We’ll look at solutions that are adaptations to the current system, such as labor organizing, reduced workweeks, and prioritizing well-being and leisure. We’ll also explore boundary-pushing ideas, such as universalism as an alternative to means-tested or pay-for-privilege benefits; an end to unpaid labor in the home; alternative structures of business that value equity, fairness, and democratic decision making; and severing the connection between a job and basic human needs.

Where are there compelling stories on these topics in your communities? Send us your leads and pitches for reported stories on initiatives or groups that are transforming the nature and purpose of work.

All the stories we seek will be examples of excellent journalism and storytelling: stories that are well-researched, with compelling characters and that demonstrate struggle and resolution. Hurry and send your pitches to fall2022@yesmagazine.org by April 29 to be considered for the Fall 2022 issue. (After that, you can continue to send them to submissions@yesmagazine.org.)

This disparity may affirm progressive ideas about successful and inclusive governance, but it also holds grave implications for the country as a whole.

Anger is roiling in Republican America, along with conspiratorial fabrications about who to blame for their condition. A harbinger of this trend is Antlers, Oklahoma, where I grew up: a once-thriving town in the southeastern part of the state, bordering the lush Ouachita foothills of dense forests, abundant agriculture, and lucrative tourism resources. The town rebuilt after a , but it has not weathered 21st century politics.

Racially and politically, Antlers is typical of much of rural Oklahoma, a state forged from the 19th century territory set aside for Native American tribes forcibly removed from other parts of the United States. Antlers is now 75% White and 22% Native American or mixed race, but with very few Latino, Asian, or Black residents. In 2020, Antlers and its county, Pushmataha—which supported former President Bill Clinton in 1996 and even Jimmy Carter over Ronald Reagan in 1980—voted for Republicans, 85% to the Democrats’ 14%, up from an 80% share for Republicans in 2016, 54% in 2000, and 34% in 1996.

���Գٱ������’ are beyond alarming. Nearly one-third of its residents live in poverty. The median household income, $25,223, is less than half , which in turn is well below the .

The best-off ethnic group in Antlers is Native Americans (median household income, $35,700; 48% with education beyond high school; 25% living in poverty). That’s still well below the national median, but the conditions of the White population are dismal: a median household income of $24,800, only 41% with any post-high school education, and 30% living in poverty.

In a growing nationwide trend, the median household incomes of people of color, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, now exceed those of White people in nearly 200 of the 1,500 counties—those in which the party controls the governor’s office and both legislative chambers of state government (see Figure 1). This is a visible factor that has fueled Trump voters’ complaints alleging White people’s .

In the most telling statistics, White people in Antlers are nearly twice as likely to die by guns as Native Americans (see Figure 2). Compared with Whites nationally, Antlers Whites suffer excessive from drugs and alcohol (1.3 times the national average), suicide (1.5 times), all violent deaths (1.8 times), homicide (2.5 times), and gunfire (2.6 times).

The numbers on paper look bad enough. Seeing them on the ground is a new kind of scary. When I was growing up in Antlers 60 years ago and visited it 20 years ago, my family’s old block consisted of well-kept middle-class homes fronting yards for chickens and horses. On my latest visit in January 2022, I found the houses all boarded up or blowing open in the wind (see photo at top). There are with collapsing roofs and walls and junk-filled empty lots alongside barely intact, yet still occupied, houses.

Antlers is not all devastation, however. It sports a gleaming travel center financed by casino revenues, which are also invested in local . And there are some thriving neighborhoods, including a ritzy mansion suburb uphill from town. ���Գٱ������’ 2,300 residents can avail three liquor stores and .

A Widening Social and Economic Chasm

Across America, the partisan gap in gross domestic product per capita is also huge and growing: $77,900 in Democratic-voting areas, compared with $46,600 in Republican-voting areas. Antlers and Pushmataha County are hardly alone: 444 Republican counties have a GDP per capita of under $30,000, and 10 times as many people live in those counties than in the seven similarly low-GDP Democratic counties. Whites in about 40% of all Republican counties lost income over the past two decades. And Trump’s administration was no help to his base. During his presidency, the overall Democrat–Republican GDP per capita gap widened by another $1,800.

This is not simply an urban–rural divide. For the largest urbanized states, the three with Democratic control of all branches of government (California, New York, and Illinois) had GDPs per capita vastly higher than the three biggest Republican-controlled states (Texas, Florida, and Ohio).

The right-wing canard that hardworking White people subsidize welfare-grubbing cities is backward. Democrat-voting counties, with 60% of America’s population, generate .

Mirroring Antlers, White Republican America also suffers , including from suicide, homicide, firearms, and , far higher than Whites in Democratic America and higher than non-White people everywhere. To top it off, Republican-governed Americans are . As the death gap between Republican and Democratic areas widens over time, the for Whites in Republican-voting areas (77.6 years) is now three years shorter than that of Whites in Democratic areas (80.6 years), shorter than those of Asians and Latino people everywhere, and only a few months longer than Black and Native Americans in Democratic areas.

Misplaced Blame

Surveys and studies consistently find Trump’s generally older, White supporters enraged at “” and in fear of being “” by non-White people. That across key economic, health, and safety indexes is not due to victimization by immigrants and liberal conspiracies, however, but to victimization by other Whites and self-inflicted alcoholism, drug overdose, and suicide.

Is the solution to undividing America to improve Republican America’s struggling economies and troubled social conditions, then? Aside from the problem that Republican members of congress (and ) have sabotaged beneficial initiatives, former President Barack Obama already tried that. From 2010 to 2016, the Obama administration’s economic recovery measures fostered millions of new jobs and thousands of dollars in real median income growth for Whites in urban and most rural areas alike, reversing the recession under Republican George W. Bush’s presidency.

Yet, despite these gains, White voters vehemently rejected Democrats in successive elections. Today, Trump’s base voters are electing candidates who share their and imagined victimization, not those who actually are advancing their safety and economic well-being.

Despite the superficial resemblance of the crumbling neighborhoods, junk-filled lots, and widespread poverty of Antlers and conditions in a devastated city of color like Camden, New Jersey, the origins of their devastations are very different. Camden is the product of systemic racism and inflicted on poor, primarily non-White residents powerless to prevent their exploitation. Antlers is the predictable endgame of White majorities who had better options instead empowering incompetent, corrupt demagogues (segregationist Democrats in the past; nihilist Republicans today) who flatter White claims to racial and religious privilege while awarding largesse to rapacious outsiders.

Poverty in cities and on reservations requires mainly the sustained political will to work with populations who welcome the effort. In stark contrast, fixing rural White poverty against the angry, anti-democratic recalcitrance of most Whites themselves requires an entirely new political thinking we have yet to imagine.

We see this every day. In cities where developers are trying to gentrify Black neighborhoods, Black-led organizations, such as The Guild in Atlanta, East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative in Oakland, and Downtown Crenshaw in Los Angeles, have stepped up to take real estate off the market and maintain community ownership. Black farmers in the South and in urban centers across the country are implementing new farming practices rooted in Afro-Indigenous principles, making agriculture more sustainable and fostering equitable regional food economies. Native groups are winning litigation to assert their rights to reconfigure water management practices in the West. Finally, Black and Brown entrepreneurs are launching worker-owned cooperatives in record numbers, bringing services to neighborhoods abandoned by corporations and disinvested in by the public sector, while building community wealth. 

Collectively, the new economic models these Black and Brown leaders are pioneering are essential to resetting our relationships with one another and with the planet. Yet, as these alternatives take root, we must support this grassroots-led work to grow and scale, because even though these projects hold incredible promise, existing systems are not designed to support these seemingly unconventional strategies. This is because these leaders are not white, do not come from well-resourced communities, and do not have intergenerational wealth; the barriers they face are rooted in the racism that cuts across all systems and financial sectors, from lending to philanthropy. Without access to financial and nonfinancial resources, Black and Brown movement leaders and social entrepreneurs face substantial roadblocks that prevent them from realizing their vision and expanding their work. 

What’s needed is a massive focus on unlocking capital for their critical work to grow and scale.

Implicit bias and unfounded narratives surrounding communities of color plague the predominantly white financial institutions that unfairly deem Black and Brown organizations as “too risky” for investment. Numerous realities bear this out: Only 3% of venture funds go to Black and Latino ventures; 2% of philanthropic funds are invested in racial justice; Black and Brown racial justice nonprofits get 34% less funding than white-led groups; and only a fraction of the $450 billion in philanthropic capital given every year in the U.S. goes to support efforts led by people of color.

So where do movement leaders turn? If Black farmers or worker-owned cooperatives need to secure vital capital, they almost always have to rely on small grants from private foundations or the government, both of which require cumbersome paperwork to access. Meanwhile, white-led ventures are resourced boldly, trusted to receive and manage massive capital infusions from philanthropic institutions and impact investors alike, all of whom are operating under assumptions about the needs of the communities that are incongruent with the realities that Black, Indigenous, and people of color community builders and grassroots organizers see and experience every day. Thus, the actual risk is not only in the lack of investment in their innovative and bold work, but also in the improper allocation of resources that perpetuate cycles of harm in Black and Brown communities. 

Now, imagine what would be possible if Black and Brown movement leaders had access to the resources supplied to white-led groups. What if, instead of philanthropy and finance operating out of antiquated and racist risk models that are built on the idea that money is scarce, we responded with agility to the work and needs of Black and Brown creators?

Often overlooked by elected officials and government leaders, a central goal of the Defund the Police movement is exactly this—shifting municipal funding to proactively invest in the work our communities need. We need elected officials willing to lead with visionary investments of their budgets. We need lenders who are willing to provide both patient and bold capital. We need philanthropic funders willing to give multiyear, seven-, eight-, and nine-figure grants, as well as unlock alternative investment tools. And we need innovative and scalable infrastructure that can support the flow of this new and more creative capital that can bring abundance back to where resources are truly scarce—our communities’ well-being.

Only this kind of sea change will truly catalyze the transformative power of people of color leaders to build an economy where all people and the planet thrive. While there is a growing ecosystem of actors already co-creating new frameworks—such as enterprise capital, trust-based philanthropy, and impact investing that truly has impact at its core rather than focusing on extractive financial gains—there are still trillions of dollars trapped in endowments, donor-advised funds, and investment funds that could be directed to this transformative work. A critical next step will be ensuring that philanthropy and finance, in partnership with the necessary infrastructure, are effectively growing and sustaining the leadership of Black and Indigenous people and all communities of color in building the regenerative economic models that we need, creating the world where all people, especially Black and Brown people and those who have been most impacted by injustice, thrive. 

Vasquez, 17, is the youngest of three siblings in a household of four. Her mother, the family’s sole provider, works as a hotel housekeeper, but even with her income and access to dry goods from the local church pantry and food bank, it’s still hard to keep food in the fridge. Vasquez says her mother had to take out payday loans with super-high interest rates just to buy essentials like milk and water, and when they shop, they’d catch the bus to the least expensive grocery store and load up on what seemed like a lifetime supply of instant ramen noodle soup. Even though her family depends on ramen, Vasquez says the soups do more harm than good, especially since her mom and sister are diabetic.

“It’s like 50 cents for one cup of Ramen, but it’s like 300 calories in one cup,” Vasquez says. “We learn in school you need to have your veggies, your proteins, your meat, but [ramen noodles] have no source of vegetables, no source of protein, no source of healthy fats, or anything like that.”

Not knowing where her next healthy meal would come from each day had taken a toll on her, both socially and mentally. At school, she was too embarrassed to chat with friends about food, and she found herself battling to stay focused in the classroom, which was problematic, because she has ambitions to attend college after graduation.

In the waiting room at St. John’s, a worker with , an organization that helped local institutions like the St. John’s clinic support underserved neighborhoods hit hard by the pandemic, offered to enroll Vasquez’s family in , a pilot health-intervention program that uses text messages to connect food-insecure people and families to prepaid groceries and full-balance meals. (Stop the Spread fulfilled its charter in December 2021 and ceased operations.)

According to Pew Research Center, 97% of all Americans , and federal government assistance programs provide eligible low-income individuals with free phones and plans.

In addition, 38.3 million people lived in food-insecure households in 2020, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, while Feeding America, a hunger-relief organization, projected that number would jump to the following year (the final data for 2021 have not been released yet) as a result of the pandemic.

Research has also shown , such as heart disease, stroke, and Type 2 diabetes, and a 2019 study funded by the National Institutes of Health estimated that these diseases drive $50 billion a year in .

The first test market for what became Bento was in Texas in March 2020, when it was used to help the Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Houston with the growing number of families and children in need of food due to pandemic-related job losses and school closures.

Now spun off into its own for-profit company, Bento sees eliminating food insecurity as a component of preventive health care.

“And if we’re dealing with a low-income population, that part of the health care system are Medicaid members, which is a taxpayer-supported program,” says company co-founder Adam Dole. “So, at the end of the day, this is a taxpayer issue that has never been thought of as a taxpayer issue.”

The Bento Model

Bento’s text messaging software is integrated with other online ordering platforms, such as Postmates, allowing clients to order meals and groceries tailored to their dietary needs. That data is gathered, logged, and automated during enrollment in the program.

Bento plans to eventually sell its intervention program to the health care industry—especially health insurance companies—because they have the scale needed to improve the health of low-income, food-insecure populations as a whole, Dole says. As the service rolls out in test markets, Dole says the company will be analyzing the health outcomes of Bento participants to gather more data. They expect to find that focusing on preventive health care results in lower costs for taxpayers and insurance plans that depend on public funding.

“One of the biggest misconceptions is that we have to be a nonprofit to address food insecurity,” Dole says. “We support nonprofits. We want them to exist, but we recognize that that alone isn’t going to solve the problem. There are not enough donations in our country to solve food insecurity.”

Establishing relationships and secure contracts with the health care industry takes a long time, Dole says, so Bento pitched its initial rollout to smaller community organizations that serve food-insecure individuals and families.

Stop the Spread was one of the first organizations to contract with Bento. English isn’t Vasquez’s mother’s native language, so the family enrolled in Bento using Vasquez’s cell phone. For six months, the duration of the program, Vasquez says she received a text message from Bento every morning with a list of food options from about a dozen grocery stores and restaurants within walking distance of her home. She’d text back to order dinner for her family.

At the end of the school day, she’d throw on her headphones and zone out to Kim Petras and Lady Gaga as she strolled to the restaurant. The restaurant staff would only see her as a regular customer; the app doesn’t reveal its participants to be part of a food-insecure program in order to maintain their dignity among Bento’s participants. 

In contrast to the instant ramen, Vasquez says the dinners—which have included salads, green power smoothies, submarine sandwiches on wheat bread, chicken, raw and steamed vegetables, and brown rice—were fully balanced and met her family’s dietary needs. Not only did she feel healthier and more focused in the classroom, but she also felt less insecure around her friends, and, most important, she enjoyed spending more quality time with her family.

“I don’t know if this may be cheesy or something, but I noticed me and my family got to sit down and enjoy food together,” she says. “It just feels good knowing that you’re around family and you don’t have to be stressing out over food.”

Bento also works with other organizations to connect clients to additional resources. For example, Bento and Stop the Spread helped Vasquez’s family apply for support from the local public utility to pay their electricity bill.

, a nonprofit that helps California youth aging out of foster care transition into adulthood, contracted with Bento to launch its Meal Nation program, says Chloe Kinman, the organization’s program director. Meal Nation started as an emergency crisis program to support foster youth college students and their dependents who were food- and housing-insecure when campuses closed at the start of the pandemic. The program works with colleges across California to enroll students in Bento. A survey of Meal Nation recipients showed that 86% of the participating students said it helped them stay motivated and keep up with schoolwork.

In its own preliminary survey, Bento found that all its participants wanted to sign up for the program again. The company was named one of Time magazine’s “,” finalists Fast Company’s “,” and placed on Fortune’s “.”

Who Gets Meals? How Many, and for How Long?

To date, Bento has served about 200,000 meals to 4,000 families in 10 cites through a couple dozen local social services organizations. However, Bento meals must be picked up at the restaurant or store. Foster Nation has had to contract with a delivery company to serve students who live in rural areas or food deserts.

According to hunger-relief organization , Native Americans, senior citizens, and those living in rural areas comprise a significant portion of the food-insecure population. Bento doesn’t target organizations that serve these communities right now, because the additional delivery costs would make Bento less affordable for the smaller nonprofits that serve those communities.

However, Bento is about to launch a pilot with the , a nonprofit that serves older people, adults with disabilities, and caregivers. In this program, the caregivers will deliver the meals for their clients, says Susan Schaffler, Bento’s director of strategic communications.

Vasquez says that even though her mother recently started working six days a week and is earning more money now, the time the family was enrolled in Bento gave her a little breathing room to save more, as the interest on those payday loans was continuing to compound.

Vasquez says there are good weeks and there are weeks where her family still survives off potatoes wrapped in fried tortilla shells and potato soup, which she says are stigmatized as “poor people’s food.”

“And now I’m back to ramen noodles,” she says. “I just think ramen is something that will always be a part of my life.”

At the height of the pandemic, Foster Nation provided its college students one meal a day for 90 days, but it has since scaled back to 30 days, using Bento as a short-term bridge to longer-term resources, such as CalFresh (California’s name for the federal SNAP program), which usually takes a month for approval.

Kinman says Foster Nation has paid about $100,000 to Bento since March 2020 to provide 13,500 meals to students in 57 different colleges and universities, which the organization funded through grants and .

Foster Nation’s work is to help foster youth become self-sufficient, Kinman says. “[Bento] is a capital-intensive program, but we have been able to leverage and get foster youth way more resources, like mentorship and career readiness and life skills, because of this program. So, we see Bento as a program that’s worth it in the long run.”

Meanwhile, Vasquez is now preparing her college applications. Her first choice is California State University, Los Angeles, because of its criminal justice program, where she wants to study to become either a homicide detective or a forensic scientist. She is applying for scholarships to help her cover not only tuition, but also food costs.

“I wish I could have Bento with me in college,” she says.

Bento is working to develop its own partnerships with colleges, because battle with food security, Schaffler says.

And the company is now branching out to work through health insurers, which would allow for longer-term support and reach more families. Bento plans to launch a pilot with Medicaid enrollees in Pennsylvania by late March.

“Those pilots [with the community organizations] have validated the product and given us the kind of data and evidence that allows us to achieve the kind of outcomes the health care systems are looking for,” Dole says.

“They rounded us all up and took us to hotels,” Velu said of city officials and caseworkers. “We were all tested, and I tested positive, so I couldn’t leave my room. But once I got better, they let me out.”

Velu, 70, went back on the streets, where he’s lived for more than 20 years, but he found that survival has been harder than it’s ever been. Shelters are always full because they’ve had to reduce capacity to accommodate social distancing guidelines, he said, and the streets are getting crowded.

“Every day, someone new arrives,” he said this week while sitting on a bench at Akard Plaza, just outside city hall. “I’d say most lost their jobs or got sick, but they’ve never been out here before. It’s getting pretty bad.”

Since the start of the pandemic, states and localities across the country have received billions in federal aid to help reduce homelessness. But most areas have been slow to get the money to those in need, like Velu, in large part because the huge influx of dollars has overwhelmed agencies’ capacities. Still, some have seen progress: In the Dallas area, more than a dozen nonprofits and government agencies joined forces last summer to launch a new program using the federal aid, aiming for successes that other localities could replicate.

The goal of the new initiative is to place 2,762 people and families experiencing homelessness in permanent housing by September 2023. An estimated 4,570 people were without homes in the region as of March 2021, up 3% from 2020. Rapid rehousing is a federally funded national program designed to reduce the amount of time a person is homeless by providing housing before other social services.

“This is the most ambitious plan to curb homelessness that Dallas has seen,” said Sarah Kahn, chief program officer at Metro Dallas Homeless Alliance, which leads the initiative and is the region’s largest nonprofit organization providing homeless services. “I mean, this is a historic level of new resources and new dollars coming into our community that’s used to running on a scarcity model and often fighting for scraps. We have a very, very large infusion of resources that we need to move quickly.”

States and localities received more than $5 billion in federal stimulus money in the form of Emergency Housing Vouchers and Emergency Solutions Grants to help people experiencing homelessness during the pandemic. Agencies and housing advocates nationwide are using the influx of funds to create new long-term solutions to homelessness, but relatively little of the money has gone out so far.

As of Jan. 6, less than a third of the $4 billion in Emergency Solutions Grants had been spent nationwide, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

And only 11.6%—or 8,110 of 69,810—of Emergency Housing Vouchers had been accepted by landlords nationwide as of Jan. 18, according to HUD. States have until September of this year to spend the emergency grants and until September of next year to use their housing vouchers.

Challenges Elsewhere

California, which has the country’s largest homeless population, illustrates the difficulties.

A  by the state auditor found that California’s Department of Housing and Community Development did not give its partners access to the first round of federal Emergency Solutions Grants until December 2020, seven months after the federal government announced the funding. That’s mostly because the department lacked the capacity to manage the grants and failed for a full year to hire a contractor to run the program, the report said.

That $316 million was 25 times the department’s typical yearly allocation, noted Geoffrey Ross, the deputy director of federal financial assistance. The department’s private partners struggled to expand housing capacity while meeting pandemic safety guidelines, he said.

The Dallas area likewise lagged in getting money out, but the new initiative has helped.

The city of Dallas received $19 million in Emergency Solutions Grants through the CARES Act and 490 Emergency Housing Vouchers through the American Rescue Plan Act, worth some $8 million, HUD data shows. The city has used 26 vouchers, and as of last week, it has spent roughly $10 million of its funds and allocated the remaining $9 million, according to Christine Crossley, director of the city’s Office of Homelessness Solutions. 

“I think most cities and most organizations have this issue where it’s amazing to have this money, and it’s needed, but there’s also only so many contracts and programs anybody can hold in a year,” she said. “And you can hire more staff, but it’s also COVID, and there’s a shortage of people, so it’s kind of, well, we can spend it, but we might not be able to spend all of it simply because it’s just so much money to spend in so little time.”

The initiative’s total budget is $72 million, including $50 million from federal relief funds; $12 million in emergency vouchers allocated to Dallas, Mesquite, and Plano; and $10 million in funds from private donors, including the Meadows Foundation, Dallas Regional Chamber, and Lyda Hill Philanthropies. (Lyda Hill Philanthropies has also donated money to The Pew Charitable Trusts, which funds Stateline.)

Private donations are being used for landlord incentives, including extra rent, deposits, or money for repairs, according to Crossley.

One of the main problems nationwide is that landlords don’t want to lease to people using housing vouchers, because they often lose money while they wait for the housing authorities to inspect their rental units and process the lease, according to Myriam Igoufe, vice president of policy development and research at Dallas Housing Authority.

On behalf of the initiative, Igoufe and her team were tasked with creating computer software to coordinate all the agencies’ efforts while streamlining the application and housing process. They spent more than a month last summer working 13-hour days to program content management software that could seamlessly coordinate 15 agencies and some 100 caseworkers.

“We knew we were designing something from scratch that other people were going to look at and say, ‘Look, it could be done,’ or, ‘See, we shouldn’t be trying to do this, we should use our money for something else.’”

Before this new system, it took weeks or months to get emergency voucher recipients into a rental property. But now, it takes only a few days.

“Without this investment in technology and automation, this would not be possible, not at this pace,” Igoufe said about the initiative.

‘A Safe Place to Sleep’

On Monday, near the corner of Cadiz and South St. Paul streets, a large crowd of homeless people began setting up camp as the sun began to set. Joel Martinez Gregorio, 60, leaned against a building while weaving a belt out of neon-colored shoelaces.

He said he’s been living outside since he was hospitalized for three weeks with COVID-19 in September and lost his job. It’s the first time in his life that he’s been homeless.

“It’s been rough,” he said. “I’ve been trying to find work, but it’s hard, because I don’t sleep and I spend a lot of time just trying to find something to eat.”

He said people on the street have been talking about a new program that pays people’s rent for a year.

“That would be a godsend,” he said. “If I had a safe place to sleep and to leave my belongings, I know I could get back on my feet.”

This story originally appeared in , and is republished here as part of the SoJo Exchange from , a nonprofit organization dedicated to rigorous reporting about responses to social problems.

“This was really a godsend for me,” she says from her apartment in Harlem, speaking in hushed tones while Garrett naps.

are distinct from presidential candidate Andrew Yang’s idea of a , which is premised on cash payments to everyone, not just the most vulnerable. A prominent example of a guaranteed income project is the , which put $500 a month into the hands of 125 low-income residents of Stockton, California, for 24 months. Data gathered from the SEED project found that the cash significantly helped recipients stabilize their finances, acquire jobs, and improve their mental health, compared with a control group.

Can Guaranteed Incomes Benefit Low-Income Women and Children of Color?

Buoyed by the success of the Stockton experiment, guaranteed income projects, like the one Gardner is part of, are cropping up in major cities around the country. With the understanding that systemic economic racism results in within Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities, many projects are specifically targeting low-income people of color, and primarily women and mothers.

Megha Agarwal, the executive director of The Bridge Project and of , which funds the program, explains that it “was formed out of our desire to support the babies and mothers in New York and beyond who are suffering devastating effects from poverty.” According to Agarwal, of the 100 mothers currently enrolled in the program, 74% identify as Hispanic or Latino, and 40% identify as Black; 20% are undocumented. “Guaranteed income has long been on the list of demands to receive racial and economic liberation,” she says.

A similar program, run by the , also focuses on women of color—specifically Black women—in Atlanta. Hope Wollensack, the executive director of the GRO Fund and co-director of the Guaranteed Income Initiative based in Atlanta’s Old 4th Ward, says it is “the largest program focusing on Black women in the country.”

“Centering Black women is really important,” Wollensack explains, because “they are one of the groups experiencing the most acute and sharpest impacts of economic insecurity that exists.”

Over the brief six-month duration of the child tax credit program, the modest monthly payments of a few hundred dollars by almost 30%. According to the , more than 90% of low-income families receiving the payments used the money “for the most basic household expenses—food, clothing, shelter, and utilities—or education.”

“Our national social safety net is predicated on the idea that poverty is a personal choice and not structural or a policy choice,” says Moran.

In reality, Agarwal says the choice to maintain poverty is an external one—made by our government. Through the child tax credit, “We were able to alleviate poverty at massive scales.” In letting the program expire, she adds, “We’ve said it’s OK to let those people fall back into poverty.”

For women like Gardner, a modest amount of available cash is making a world of difference. “I don’t know what I would be doing if I didn’t have it,” she says.