Articles
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How Domestic Workers built POWER in Philadelphia
How a worker-led coalition won Philadelphia’s POWER Act (the Protect Our Workers, Enforce Rights Act), and how they’re fighting to make it real. A few years ago, one of our members — a Black Caribbean immigrant nanny working in one...
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Beyond Democracy, Everyone Eats
In this conversation, Claire Maracle, Executive Director of Words of the People, and Baratunde Thurston, storyteller and author of How to Be Black, excavate the origins of American democracy to expand and reshape our political imagination. It turns out we’ve...
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Organizing as Ancestral Practice: Building Infrastructure for the Next Era of Movements
All social movements need infrastructure capable of sustaining across multi-generational fights. But how do we build this infrastructure and ensure that we lower the cost of onboarding new people into our movements so they can grow? As Judith LeBlanc, Executive...
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Repair in Practice: On Wealth Redistribution
Wealth redistribution, as a relational practice rooted in accountability, has the potential to spiritually transform a person, as shared here by redistribution organizers Brittany Koteles and Morgan Curtis. Koteles, Executive Director of Land Justice Futures, an organization that supports Catholic...
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Democracy and Decolonization: The Poor People’s Campaign and the Black and Indigenous Fight for Mino Bimaadiziwin
We are living in fascist times, which means we must remember history to help us understand the possibilities of our futures. Do we want to subjugate ourselves to the tyranny of a dictatorial leader? Or do we want to struggle...
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Braided Movements: Black & Indigenous Perspectives on Reclaiming Land
In a country where land has historically been central to wealth and power-building, we must carefully consider how we want to work together towards land reclamation. Kailea Loften in conversation with Nick Tilsen and Brea Baker At the start of...
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Reclaiming Power as a Practice to Get Free
The abolitionist movement transformed America from a slaveholders’ republic into a multiracial democracy in just decades, proving that organized people are the engine of real change. As America turns 250, social movements can look back on where we’ve been to...
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A New Politics of Togetherness: Rebuilding the Sacred Canopy
If we’re going to work to bring diverse groups of people into conversation and ultimately solidarity, we will need an updated politics of togetherness capable of bringing nuance to intersectionality. Trevor Smith in conversation with Amara Enyia and Scot Nakagawa...
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The Right To Wealth
Trevor Smith in conversation with Anne Price and Jhumpa Bhattacharya of The Maven Collaborative. The racial wealth gap is not a product of individual behavior but of policy design. Because of this, we must create new frameworks for wealth, inheritance,...
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Tending to Liberation
The American Dream was built on stolen land and enslaved labor, so true freedom means rejecting it and building a Liberation Economy rooted in repair and abundance. You and I will always sit at a crossroads, surveying our options at...
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The Legacy of Displacement: Reclaiming Borders & Solidarity across North America
The family policing system and the colonial legacy of the pass system, boarding schools, slave patrols, and immigration policies. Indigenous, Black, and other communities of color across North America know all too well how quickly civil rights and community safety...
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No Matter the Moment, You Organize: A Conversation on Responding to Disaster with Action St. Louis
The trauma of climate disaster, and the lack of state response and care, makes us hyper-individualized within this shared moment—but we have to be nimble enough to respond with a bigger strategy and to organize our people. Miski Noor: Kayla,...
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Being Pro-Working Class Isn’t Enough, We Need Victories People Can Feel
We must reclaim populism from process. Being pro-union, anti-billionaire, and pro-working class isn’t a sufficient economic vision for the scale of crisis we’re in. To win, the Left needs to prioritize promises and outcomes working people can feel. What a...
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A Love Letter and A Call to Women of Color Leaders
In the wake of backlash against racial equity in tech and intensifying authoritarianism, what can an Audre Lorde-inspired reading group teach us about the care practices necessary to turn grief and rage into collective power? For many of us, the...
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(Almost) Everyone is wrong: Reparations are possible
Every critic of reparations should know that it’s already been done. Back in 1862, America gave reparations, but they were given to the wrong people. President Lincoln signed the District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Action Law, which offered reparations to...
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Returning Autonomy and Power to the People: The Case for People’s Assemblies
Introduction: More Than a Vote In the United States, democracy is often defined by the ballot box. Every two or four years, citizens are asked to cast votes for candidates who make promises to represent them. But what happens in...
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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), a 47-year-old multicultural, multi-issue network of nine grassroots organizations spanning...
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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 people who do the organizing work, and right now, many...
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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 private equity firms have transformed homes into profit centers. We...
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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, is addicted to their cell-phones and social media. The consumption...