How to Win Back Rural America
The path to restoring and securing democracy runs through red, rural America. Here’s our strategy for forging it. I am the executive director of Western Organization of Resource Councils (WORC),...
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Deb Love
Deb Love is the Executive Director of Western Organization of Resource Councils, where she has taken the nine-member network through a strategic planning process and reorganization to re-center organizing and...
Four Opportunities To Grow Powerful And Resilient Organizers
In recent years, a growing chorus has pointed to community organizing as critical to rebuilding our democracy and countering rising authoritarianism. But community organizing is only as strong as the...
Katie Fox
Katie Fox is a Principal with Grassroots Solutions, based in Maryland, and facilitates long-term learning and research partnerships with foundations, power-building groups, and intermediaries. Over the course of her career,...
Completing the Social Housing Vision
A call to fellow organizers: Don’t replicate the exclusions we’re all fighting against. The progressive left has correctly diagnosed the housing crisis. We understand that Wall Street landlords and...
Luddite Socialism: Revising Our Relationship to Technology
Leftists must become more critical of cell phones and social media. Is Luddite Socialism the answer to decentering digital technology from our organizing? The Left, like the rest of society,...
Jeremy Saunders
Jeremy Saunders (he/him) has worked at VOCAL-NY since 2007, and became the Co-Executive Director in 2016. He began community organizing in 2001, working at ACORN, Community Voices Heard and Northwest...
Kumar Rao
Kumar Rao is a Senior Fellow at the Initiative for Community Power at NYU Law School. He is a social justice lawyer who has spent his career partnering with grassroots...
Luke McGowan-Arnold
Luke McGowan-Arnold is a writer from Rockford, Illinois, based in Philadelphia. He writes about American subject formation, subcultures (on and off the internet), Black people and social movements. He likes...
Inviting Communities To Take On Corporate Power Structures
Although people are intimately aware of the impact that corporate power has on their families and communities, and know what is needed to curb it, many find it difficult to overcome skepticism about creating change through the political process. Our guests, Dania Rajendra, a writer and organizing and founding director of the Athena Coalition, and Andrea Dehlendorf, co-founder of United for Respect, discuss ways we can meaningfully invite, engage, and empower people to join and lead the fight to curb corporate power.
The Opposite Of Corporate Power Is People Power
Although we’ve seen meaningful progress in recent years to rein in runaway corporate power, a lack of a strong, grassroots-baked base has meant those actions haven’t been able to be sustained for long. In this conversation, LiJia Gong, formerly with Local Progress, and Ryan Gerety from Athena Coalition, focus on the need for bold, accessible, and relevant policy solutions that center everyday people, name corporate harms, and move beyond the limits of elite-driven anti-monopoly strategies.
How Our Money Feeds Corporate Power
All too often, corporate power is measured largely by the profits and balance sheets of Big Business. But the story of how these corporations and those that own and control them make this money isn’t simply about whatever tangible goods and services they offer; it's a story of how corporations have managed to deeply embed themselves in our economy to extract as much of our resources as possible. Our guest, Lenore Palladino from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Sue Holmberg from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, discuss how our public and private money is enriching the wealthy at the expense of small businesses, workers, and consumers.
Lessons From Fights For Public Control of Banking and Broadband Infrastructure
Looking around our economy, many of us know that the fight to rein in corporate power isn’t limited to a few very powerful tech companies. In this conversation, Trinity Tran from the California Public Banking Alliance (CPBA) and Sean Gonsalves from ILSR discuss how communities are successfully organizing for public banking and public broadband today.
How We Beat Corporate Power Before
The concentration of wealth and power we face today is on a scale once unimaginable to many. Yet, the presence of corporate power in our lives is not new. Over the course of our history, a wide range of communities have come together to fight back and reclaim the economy and the levers of power in service of everyday communities. Our guests, Ron Knox from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) and Candace Milner from Demos, discuss the history of reining in corporate power and the people who led those fights.
Andrea Portillo
Andrea Portillo is a Policy Manager at Liberation in a Generation (@libgen_econ), where she supports grassroots partners and campaigns with policy and strategy analysis. Previously, Andrea was Director of Community...
When Disaster Strikes: Housing Inequality and The Rising Threat of Disaster Capitalism
Fueled by massive resources, corporate power is reshaping vast parts of our housing market, and with it, many of the neighborhoods that communities across the country have long called home. However, as our communities face more frequent once-in-a-generation climate events, corporate investors are also exploiting these disasters to acquire more of our homes. In this conversation, Iris Craige from Strategic Actions for a Just Economy (SAJE), Audrey Aradanas from Miami Homes for All, and Stella Adams from Blueprint North Carolina discuss the role of corporate power in housing and specifically after natural disasters.
Adem Sengal
Adem Sengal is a Policy Manager at Liberation in a Generation (@libgen_econ), where he supports grassroots partners and campaigns with policy and strategy analysis. Previously, Adem was a Senior Organizer...
Emanuel Nieves
Emanuel Nieves is the Director of Policy and Research at Liberation in a Generation (@libgen_econ), where he leads LibGen’s policy strategy. Prior to this role, Nieves has held various positions...
The Corporate Power of It All
Building on our efforts to curb corporate power, Liberation in a Generation recently organized a special edition of The Forge—an online magazine focused on organizing and strategy—centered on reining in the rising influence of Big Business on our lives, communities and economy. Bringing together a wide range of grassroots leaders and organizers, this edition offers firsthand perspectives and collective strategies for weakening corporate power, reminding us that these challenges are part of a long arc and that we all hold power and potential, collectively, to rein in runaway corporate power.
The Contours of Corporate Power
Corporate power, its reach, and impacts are felt in all kinds of ways in our daily lives, but often its presence isn’t clearly visible or easy to spot. Our guest, Corrine Hendrickson from Wisconsin Early Childhood Action Needed (WECAN) and Sofia Lopez from Texas Organizing Project (TOP), discuss the visible and invisible ways corporate power harms communities.