do you remember
all the times we’ve been right here
knowing exactly enough to thrive
but slowly surrendering the garden
to private cruelties, made loud

every split rock holds 
one mother bent over one precious child 
amethyst joy, ruby sacrifice
she blesses the fragrant crown
how dare you not worship?

don’t you remember
with time they always lose this war
nothing is cooler than true love
the darkness is canal and portal
and we can all be doulas

repeat after me��
crush supremacy in the palm of your hand
and then bite down on your fist
the new world is coming through you
breathe in, yes

now scream

Lena and her husband both work in restaurants in the sparsely populated Rogue Valley. Already hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic, which had left them both with fewer hours at work, the family has struggled to rebound. 

The Almeda wildfires, which were supercharged by hot, dry weather caused by climate change, left thousands of homes in southern Oregon destroyed. In rural cities like Talent and Medford, farmworker families in particular faced a : Stay and work through the haze of smoke that was growing thicker as the fires got closer, or lose out on their daily wages, which had already been cut because of the pandemic. 

“We need to work three times as much,” Lena says, reflecting on her financial situation of late. “The cost of everything—rent, food—is so much higher.”

To offset the inflated cost of living since the wildfires, Lena has relied on a weekly farmers market run by a local nonprofit called , where she can receive staples like eggs, vegetables, and fruits for free. The organization was founded after the Almeda fires and initially worked with local businesses to provide hot meals and food boxes to survivors of the disaster. Since then, it has evolved to provide long-term support for families who are still facing food insecurity as recovery stretches on. 

By purchasing local produce, Rogue Food Unites is not only feeding families but also supporting the small, independently owned farms that are working hard to rebound after the pandemic and wildfires. The produce and eggs they provide happen to be low-carbon foods, which can help solve the community’s food insecurity as well as reduce its climate impacts. The group has also started working with local growers to make emergency dried food kits for residents to prepare for the next climate disaster. 

It’s an ironic twist that the climate crisis is fueled in part by the food system in the U.S.—namely the land use and emissions from concentrated livestock operations—and so many of the climate effects are felt first and worst by farmworkers and their communities. That’s why Rogue Food Unites redistributes local produce to residents at no cost—and no questions asked about need, income, or immigration status. 

A significant portion of Rogue Food Unites’ clients are undocumented families, and many are farmworkers who work seasonal jobs. “The intention is to welcome all families,” says Jesus Rios, the client liaison manager at Rogue Food Unites. “It’s open to anybody.”&�Բ�����;

Connecting Food and Home and Climate

The Almeda fires destroyed some 2,400 homes, of which three-quarters were in mobile home parks. The region was already facing an affordable housing crisis; in Medford, paid more than one-third of their income on housing. 

Many families Rios works with were living in mobile homes, which they owned outright before the fires. “That’s a lot more affordable than paying for an apartment or residential home,” he says. Now, people’s budgets are becoming tighter with higher rents for the available apartments or houses post-disaster. “Usually, toward the end of the month at the market, we hear families saying, ‘We’re really grateful for this food because we don’t have any more money left for groceries.’” 

Lena says she has noticed the lines getting longer at the market in the past couple years, as more and more families rely on the market to make ends meet. Lena says it’s been harder for young people who normally haven’t needed to access aid like this: “I talked to a young lady [in line] who said that even with two jobs, she couldn’t afford her studio apartment.”&�Բ�����;

Lena and her family were able to catch a break in at least one way: During the worst of their financial woes, her two teenage children, who are U.S. citizens, were able to apply for benefits through the Supplementary Nutrition Access Program, commonly referred to as SNAP. The federal program provides monthly funds to purchase groceries to more than 40 million Americans facing food insecurity.   

Receiving SNAP benefits made it easier for Lena to stretch her and her spouse’s paychecks to cover other household necessities like toilet paper and soap—and to start putting away savings to fix up their house. Additionally, in Oregon, local farmers markets often offer a matching program for SNAP users, called, through which every dollar in SNAP funds counts as $2 at a farmers market. 

But across the state, many undocumented or noncitizen households may not have the ability to access those benefits, particularly among farmworker communities who were displaced by the wildfires. 

Farmworkers in southern Oregon consistently say that the cost of housing is their biggest issue, says Reyna Lopez, the director of Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste (PCUN), a statewide farmworkers union. “Within our membership, at least a quarter of folks say they have gone to a food bank over the last year,” she says. 

The is below $25,000 a year, according to state data. “It’s pretty devastating that the same population that ensures America is being fed, that a big chunk of them are food insecure,” Lopez says. “And it’s no secret that a majority of that workforce is from Mexico or Latin America.”&�Բ�����;

Across the United States, are shut out of this essential food aid program due to immigration status. That isn’t just limited to undocumented residents; legal permanent residents aren’t eligible until they’ve . As many as 5 million people may live in mixed eligibility households—meaning that some family members are citizens, and others aren’t, according to the Migration Policy Institute.  

“Immigration status is connected to everything,” Lopez says. “There’s so many doors that are shut for you, like SNAP benefits, health care services, social security benefits—even if you have worked there your entire life.”

Opening Up Food Access

In 2023, PCUN and a coalition of food justice and immigration justice organizations backed a bill in the Oregon legislature called “.” The bill would set aside state funding for a SNAP-like program for Oregonians who can’t access federal benefits due to their immigration status. “The basic premise is that if you’re human, you deserve food,” says Susannah Morgan, the president of the Oregon Food Bank, which is one of the largest organizations involved in the coalition. 

Though the bill didn’t pass in the 2023 session, advocates plan to reintroduce it in the 2025 session, which begins in January. 

“Not providing food assistance to folks working in the food industry is cruel and unusual,” she says. “The impetus for this [advocacy] was realizing that pandemic-level resources, like the $1,200 checks and extra SNAP benefits or extra unemployment benefits we were getting—that wasn’t available to our neighbors who didn’t have full citizenship.”&�Բ�����;

More than from the expanded benefits, at a cost of $120 million every two years, Morgan says. As proposed, the program would allow people to use the same applications for state or federal food assistance; applicants who are citizens would qualify for federal benefits, while those who are undocumented would qualify for the state-subsidized benefits instead. 

“If we’re able to ease the eligibility requirements and streamline the application process, many more families are going to be able to access these essential nutritional supports,” Lopez says. 

A More Just Future

In 2022, the coalition successfully pushed the legislature to pass a bill that And after the Almeda fires, PCUN pushed for stronger heat and smoke rules, protecting outdoor workers from unsafe conditions during climate disasters. In 2022, , mandating that employers provide access to shade, cold water, and rest breaks during extreme conditions. This is all the more important in a changing climate. 

“Having higher wages and making sure that people are able to live a better quality of life is really important when it comes to food justice,” Lopez says. “Financial insecurity leads people to rely on less nutritional food—or maybe people just go without eating, because the fear of deportation can prevent undocumented workers from seeking help.”&�Բ�����;

SNAP benefits and other food aid programs have never gone far enough in the first place, Morgan says. “SNAP benefits run out between the second and third week of every month.”&�Բ�����;

Across Oregon and southwest Washington, more than 1 million people—about one in four residents— at least once a year. “We are the very last line of defense against hunger,” Morgan says. “When large numbers of people are coming to us, that tells me the federal safety net is very hole-y.”

Now, with the re-election of Donald Trump as president, observers that the new administration may target these already inadequate safety nets, slashing what conservatives see as wasteful government spending. The plans, outlined in a conservative manifesto called Project 2025, are frustrating but not surprising, says Morgan. “Immigrants and refugees—our neighbors, coworkers, friends—experience some of the highest rates of hunger in our state. It’s unacceptable that federal policies continue to exclude our communities.”&�Բ�����;

There’s virtually no chance that the Trump administration, which campaigned heavily on the idea of “,” would extend those benefits to undocumented workers. 

“We are not trying to take advantage [of benefits programs],” Lena, the undocumented restaurant worker from the Rogue Valley says. “But life is hard. The government should think about that—our children suffer the consequences of hunger the most. If there is money available, people shouldn’t go hungry.”&�Բ�����;

This story is part of an ongoing series of reporting on a just and climate-friendly food system produced in collaboration with , Nexus Media News, and Yes! Magazine with funding from the Solutions Journalism Network, advisory support from Garrett Broad (Rowan University) and audience engagement through Project Drawdown’s Global Solutions Diary.

“No more lunch tickets,” he said to a woman standing in the hallway. 

When Walz held up the signed bill in the crowded school cafeteria, the room erupted into applause as children hugged the former coach’s neck. “As a former teacher, I know that providing free breakfast and lunch for our students is one of the best investments we can make to lower costs, support Minnesota’s working families, and care for our young learners and the future of our state,” on the legislation. “This bill puts us one step closer to making Minnesota the best state for kids to grow up, and I am grateful to all of the legislators and advocates for making it happen.”

The law reimbursed public school districts, charter schools, and non-public schools for meals purchased through the National School Lunch and the School Breakfast Programs. The state-funded Free School Meals for Kids program also provides reimbursement for meals served to students who do not qualify for free or reduced-price meals so all students receive the meals at no cost. The program is estimated to over a two-year budget period.

“Based on the latest data from the Department of Education, lunch participation was up about 19 percent and breakfast participation was up 41 percent,” says Sophia Lenarz-Coy, executive director of the Food Group, which is focused on increasing access to healthy, locally grown food in Minnesota. “We can see that students are just better prepared. They’re better able to learn and focus.”

Minnesota could be setting the framework for adoption on the federal level. In 2023, Rep. Ilhan Omar, who also represents Minnesota, Rep. Adam Schiff, and Rep. Jahana Hayes introduced the . The law would provide students with free breakfast, lunch, dinner, and a snack each day, without needing to prove eligibility.

It would also raise , the amount of money the federal government provides to states for lunches, afterschool snacks, and breakfasts served to children participating in the National School Lunch and School Breakfast programs. The bill would also increase the national average payment for free lunch from $4.01 to $4.63 and include additional payments to schools using locally sourced food.

“Minnesota has a long history of good coalition work around food,” says Lenarz-Coy. “When we look at what got us to universal school meals in Minnesota, [the health sector] was involved, food producers were involved, public health was involved, education advocates were involved, and anti-hunger advocates were involved. It really was a coalition.”

It is going to require that level of coalition-building to bring Minnesota’s approach to universal school meals to the national level. But now, with a Republican president-elect and a Republican majority in the Senate and the House, Project 2025 is a real possibility.

With its implementation comes the removal of many protections provided to school children across the country, including calling for an end to the community eligibility program (CEP), which, beginning in the 2014-2015 school year, allowed high-needs schools to begin providing free lunch to all their students and receiving reimbursement based on the percentage of students eligible for those meals. Schools are designated as high needs if a significant percentage of its student population qualifies for free or reduced-price meals.

The Food Group notes Project 2025 and similar proposals do not acknowledge or the need of many students who are above the CEP free or reduced-price eligibility threshold but are still unable to afford school meals. Since Barack Obama signed the into law in 2010, which aided the creation of the CEP, children in the U.S. have at school, and breakfast participation has increased by nearly 25 percent.

While feeding all children in schools is an expensive endeavor, Lenarz-Coy says it’s an essential element of education that shouldn’t be overlooked. In July, Food Research and Action Center (FRAC) compiled studies showing the value of free school meals for all children, including improved physical and emotional health among students, increased attendance rates, improved test scores among marginalized student groups, and reduced discipline infractions.

“[In Minnesota], we’ve made sure to continue talking to school nutrition associations about how we can keep improving the quality of the lunch along with getting lunch to everybody,” says Lenarz-Coy. “It’s not an easy lift, so the key is to have champions. [You need] several stars to align. Having a champion in the governor’s office was really important to getting a policy this big over the line.”

Hunger Is a Health Problem

Healthy meals for the nation’s children is not a new concept.

In 1946, to low-income students. The Child Nutrition Act of 1966 then condensed control of the school lunch program from several government agencies to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), established the School Breakfast Program, and authorized the Special Milk Program, which provides milk free of charge or at a reduced cost to children in schools who do not participate in other child nutrition programs.

The USDA piloted the Child Care Food Program and Summer Food Service Program (SFSP) in 1968 to provide food and resources for local sponsors who want to combine a feeding program with a summer activity program. In response to reports of hungry children, out of churches and community centers, eventually expanding to 36 cities across the United States by 1971.

During the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, supplying school meals became an even more urgent priority. In 2020, Congress passed the , which gave the USDA authority to issue nationwide waivers making meals free for all students in participating school districts. More than 5 million children were served during the summer of 2020, nearly double the number of children who received meals through the program in each of the five previous summers. The move led to a record drop in food insecurity among families with children, from nearly 12 million in 2020 to 9 million in 2021.

“It was a huge success,” says Crystal FitzSimons, interim president of the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC), an organization that aims to improve the nutrition, health, and well-being of people facing food insecurity in the United States. “Schools loved it, parents loved it, kids loved it.”

Though the program ended on June 30, 2022, when Congress failed to extend the waiver, at least eight states, including California, Colorado, Michigan, and New Mexico, have now passed legislation to provide free school meals to students.

Other bills such as the , the , and the would expand free meals to students, an idea the majority of people in the U.S. support. A found that 63 percent of voters nationwide support legislation that would provide free meals to students.

Free Food Without Shame

Despite this widespread support, Project 2025 suggests , which it refers to as a “major welfare agency” and removing references to “equity” and “climate smart” in the USDA’s mission statement. Besides the devastating overall effects of this move, conflating free meal programs with welfare discourages students from participating in free meal programs.

This framing continues the stigmatizing of free school meals as “welfare” that began during . In a 2023 interview on , Jennifer Gaddis, Ph.D., an associate professor of civil society and community studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, said that before the pandemic, 30 million children participated in the school lunch program on a daily basis. However, about 20 million more had access to the program but chose not to participate, partially because of the stigma.

“I think shame [was a reason people didn’t participate],” Gaddis said. “And just the stigma of this being like a government handout versus something that you expect to be part of the school day.”

Universal school lunch eliminates the visibility of who is receiving assistance. Consequently, more students are likely to participate in the lunch program. When students feel comfortable participating, they are more likely to consume healthy nutritious meals, which can positively affect their health and academic performance. Eliminating the negative connotation associated with school lunch also fosters a more inclusive learning environment and a decrease in disciplinary actions, while also alleviating stress on families that may already be resource-strapped.

“Families are struggling with increased food costs and housing costs,” FitzSimons says. “[Universal school meals] reduce the household food budget and make it easier for families to make ends meet. It’s much easier when [parents] don’t have to worry about making sure their kids have lunch, and it helps ensure that students have access to the nutrition they need so that they don’t show up in class hungry or get hungry in the afternoon.”

When the School Doors Close

As the push for free healthy school meals increases, so does the discussion about how the U.S. can reduce child hunger once the last school bell rings. Since the Families First Coronavirus Response Act expired, the number of children living in hunger has increased. Today, in the United States.

Some schools currently supplement school-day breakfast and lunch with weekend meals for students with an identified need, while other families are reliant on care food programs offered through local organizations. “If there is a weekend program, like at a rec center, a YMCA, or a Boys and Girls Club, they can serve meals through the child and adult care food program,” FitzSimons says. “They don’t reach as many kids, obviously, as school meals.”

But this isn’t a new problem, though there are old solutions: In 1995, a school nurse, who has remained unnamed, in Little Rock, Arkansas, observed that many of the students she treated for illness or fatigue were hungry because they did not have enough to eat at home. So she created a backpack meal program, where she partnered with a local food bank to provide bags with food for students to take home over the weekend.

Over time, programs such as Feeding America’s BackPack Program, Blessings in a Backpack, and Operation Backpack have cropped up in schools and districts all across the country. benefit from food backpack programs on any given weekend.��

The BackPack Program works with food banks and schools to provide healthy, easy-to-prepare food for weekends and school breaks. The program feeds more than 450,000 children each week by sending backpacks of groceries home with students. A study of the program in Urbana, Illinois, found that meals provided to families beyond the school day . Thirteen percent of families surveyed moved from “low food insecure” to “food secure” between October and December, and schools reported , school attendance, literacy and math test scores, and interest in school.

If we want to bring universal school meals to all children, regardless of income, it’s going to take a combination of imagination, tolerance for criticism, and a shift in how we consider this issue. “On test days, schools feed all kids well. Every day is a good day to do well in school,” she says. “We’re really trying to make the case that in the same way we cover books and other things about school, we should make sure all kids going to public schools are fed.”

“It does affect the dogs when they are caged like that, without getting walks, or exercise or any stimulation or any human contact,” the volunteer told NBC Los Angeles. “It’s not natural for them to live like that. It’s inhumane.”

Corea, who underwent three surgeries for the injuries she sustained in the attack, left the field after the incident, but the incident still highlights the consequences of the crowding crisis spreading through animal shelters in the U.S.—and as a geographically, culturally, and socioeconomically diverse state, California’s approach to this overcrowding crisis could be an incubator for other states facing similar issues.

“We are very overcrowded right now,” an animal control officer in Southern California who asked to remain anonymous tells è������!. “It’s resulted in a dangerous working environment, not just for staff but for the people who have to do business in the shelter, the public, the volunteers, our own animals. We’re having to jam them into cages with other animals. Sometimes there’s fights, or they’re not being cleaned as often as they should be.”

Data organization Shelter Animals Count estimates , with 69,988 non-live outcomes such as euthanasia or unassisted death in care and 302,698 live outcomes, including adoption, transfer, and return to owner. The remainder are still in the care of shelters, rescues, or fosters.

Lisa Young, a veteran of animal welfare and executive director of Rescue Train, a Los Angeles–based organization, describes the current situation as “the worst I’ve ever seen.” It has been compounded by the state’s, and , a , and the dramatic .

A looking at national trends found 43 percent of respondents cited costs as a concern for prospective adopters, with people making less than $75,000 annually experiencing increased financial barriers. Vet care in particular is a serious issue, according to the report, which identifies a growing number of veterinary “deserts” where care is not simply not available at any price.

“In East Valley,” a shelter Rescue Train partners with, “they have animals in crates in the hallways,” Young shares. “It’s disgusting, it’s inhumane. I’ve never seen animals in the hallways living in crates.” Young is quick to note that this is not the fault of shelter workers, who are “just here trying to clean up the mess of our community,” but is instead a symptom of how dire the issue is.

Nina Thompson, director of public relations at the San Diego Humane Society, which operates a shelter that also manages animal care services contracts from 13 cities in San Diego County, explains that overcrowding has serious consequences for shelter animals. “Any time that you have too many animals in kennels, there are disease outbreaks, and also the stress of sitting in a kennel for long periods of time increases with time.”

San Diego Humane is experiencing an uptick in upper respiratory illnesses and a rise in the number of “behavior dogs” who are not coping well with life in the kennels, especially young, large dogs with high energy who aren’t getting adequate exercise and enrichment. Length of stay for at least 100 dogs at the shelter was more than three months, and large dogs across the state and country are similarly lingering longer in shelters. Shelter Animals Count reports the has doubled since 2019.

Organizations such as , founded in 2020 by Austin Pets Alive! and a coalition of animal welfare partners, propose investing resources in keeping animals out of shelters altogether. Shelter intervention programs, a relatively recent innovation in animal welfare, include pet food pantries, free and low-cost veterinary care, spay/neuter programs, help with pet deposits and landlord disputes, behavior counseling, and assistance with self-rehoming.

Models that approach animal sheltering as part of a larger community care program are working; San Diego Humane, for example, has managed to fulfill its pledge to “,” with no euthanasia of healthy, treatable animals. Pasadena Humane’s program has been similarly successful.

High-volume spay/neuter, which streamlines surgical processes to alter as many animals as possible while still maintaining quality, may also be a part of the solution. This approach involves coordination to keep animals constantly moving through the various stages of surgery, from initial induction to recovery. It’s particularly valuable for and can be done as a mobile or pop-up event to eliminate barriers such as transport and travel.

Related community clinics such as that at can also decrease barriers to access to veterinary care; on a tour of the facility in August, staff highlighted the clinic’s critical role in keeping pets and people together by providing affordable vet care to families who might otherwise surrender their animals.

However, shelters are in critical need of more funding to reduce intake, administer these creative community programs, and safely house the animals who will inevitably need care. While there are some grant programs such as those offered by or , a state-funded program administered by the University of California, Davis’ Koret Shelter Medicine Program, it hasn’t been enough to meet the need.

Increasing government contracts (which can seem large as budget line items—in San Francisco, Animal Care and Control ) could help shelters expand their services and capacity.

And, Young argues, more philanthropists need to open their pockets: Despite a growing awareness of , a found that just 3 percent of philanthropy in 2020 went to the environment and animals, a small slice of the $471.44 billion donated by individuals, foundations, corporations, and bequests. “Of all the money donated in this country”—a nation of animal lovers with 90 million dogs and 74 million cats, according to the —“and with all these foundations closing, it’s a scary time.”

Community buy-in is also key to any solution, says Lisa Kauffman, a campaign strategist at . She’s working on the , which is pressuring county officials to improve conditions at three municipal shelters, including “one of the highest-intake shelters in the United States.” The grassroots campaign encourages residents to show up at community meetings and includes extensive Spanish-language outreach to connect with stakeholders who are sometimes overlooked.

An engaged community doesn’t just adopt animals and create more space in shelters for animals who vitally need it. It’s also more likely to foster, getting vulnerable animals such as neonates, seniors, and long-stay dogs out of the shelter and into homes where they can decompress and experience socialization. Large foster programs are especially valuable for rescues, which can serve the community without a physical shelter location. In addition to fostering, community members who volunteer also relieve pressure on underfunded, overcrowded shelters and their staff.

For California’s animals, this moment may feel bleak, but, Young says, “like any storm, it will pass.” They just need a helping hand, from lawmakers drafting policies that help animals such as , which would restrict “no pets” housing policies, to the workers who creatively utilize resources for the animals in their care, to the volunteers who show up every day, rain or shine.

Clearly, what happens in a child’s early years matters. But there are a to early childhood development opportunities, including the exorbitant costs of childcare in the United States, miles-wide childcare deserts in rural areas, underpaid and burnt-out educators, and under-resourced facilities that can’t meet the overwhelming demand for their services.

Amid this already-uphill battle for early childcare, Project 2025—the , former Trump officials, and right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation—plans to make these barriers even higher.

Though Project 2025 aspires to overhaul nearly all aspects of the federal government under Donald Trump, its and family care are particularly brazen. Not only does Project 2025 intend to strip reproductive rights through federal abortion bans and restrict family-planning options such as IVF and contraceptives, it would also eliminate , a federally funded childcare and early-development program for low-income kids, pregnant people, and families.

Launched in 1965, Head Start was designed to disrupt, and ultimately end, intergenerational poverty by providing free, wraparound early-development services to children from infancy to age 5. Head Start offers education, full-time childcare centers, medical support, and social services to families in need. Since its founding, .

Even those who may never access or qualify for Head Start benefit from it. In the South, for example, local Head Start programs became spaces for . In the ’70s, for childcare centers and caregivers across the country and has since set the standard for innovative childcare methods and research. Head Start even funded the much-loved children’s TV show Sesame Street.

“Programs like Head Start serve majority-Black and Brown communities, and I think it’s just racist to defund these programs,” says Liz Bangura, a doula, social justice coordinator, and former educator at Jump Start, a national nonprofit partner program for Head Start. As a doula, Bangura works exclusively with Black and Brown mothers and says they’ve seen firsthand how Head Start changes families’ lives.

“Head Start plays a huge role in caring for the child after labor … when [families] are able to be in these programs, I visibly see the relief in [mothers] when they’re able to go to work and also drop their kid off somewhere where they know they’re being taught how to read, [where] they’re socializing with other students.”

Project 2025’s overt targeting of Head Start is about more than just early education and childcare centers. It’s about creating a country where generations of low-income children and families are left behind. But rather than fighting only for the preservation of Head Start, it’s equally important to understand its limitations and work toward a society where all families have access to the consistent, high-quality care they need—regardless of who sits in the White House.

Without Early Care, a Cascade of Harm

Head Start is a critical program, but it simply isn’t reaching all the families who need it. Access to Head Start is determined by , and as a result many families are caught in the welfare gap: scraping by, living paycheck to paycheck, but still making too much to qualify for Head Start. A (NIEER) found that in the 2020-2021 school year, Head Start and its sister-program, Early Head Start, did not reach even half of all eligible children living in poverty.

Likewise, many families who don’t meet Head Start’s eligibility requirements are left to make do on their own.

For Ymani Blake, a lower-middle-class mother living in Chicago, accessing quality childcare for her 3-year-old has been a challenge from Day 1. Despite applying for funding and assistance multiple times, Blake has always been denied support “because we’re either making too much money or our schedules are not aligned [with the programs].”

Timing, too, is a challenge. Last year, Blake applied to a program that would give her daughter, who has a speech delay, access to occupational therapists, speech therapists, and other resources the family couldn’t otherwise afford. But by the time program coordinators got in touch, Blake’s daughter was only a month away from aging out of the program. “No services were rendered because she aged out,” Blake says. “It’s a lot of advocacy and labor that is falling back on parents to get quality education and childcare.”

With limited options, Blake put her daughter in a private daycare program—but pulled her out after less than a month due to the cost. According to data from the Center for American Progress, the attending a childcare center was more than $13,000. For two children under 4, that number jumps to more than $23,000.

Blake was then drawn to a sliding-scale Montessori school with a progressive approach to early-childhood education. “Unfortunately, there was a situation where they left the gate open, and my daughter got out and crossed the street on her own,” Blake says. “It was so hurtful because that was the only option that I could find … but then it’s not safe.”&�Բ�����;

Caught between age and income restrictions, the high cost of private care, and a concern for her daughter’s safety, this lack of childcare support has led to a cascade of harm for Blake. Without assistance, the family can’t afford daycare or private speech therapists, so Blake is forced to stay home from work and look after her daughter, who loses out on critical social-emotional and development opportunities with kids her own age. And without two parents in the workforce, the family’s income is ultimately lowered even more. 

Everybody should have access to these programs like Head Start, Blake says. “Daycare should be free.”

It Takes a Village

Without accessible childcare, many families must instead rely on their own creativity, grit, and communities to ensure their children have the support they need.

After separating from her husband in late 2021, Hattie Assan, a mother living in Ohio with her two children, ages 5 and 7, began relying more and more on the support of friends—mostly other moms in the process of divorce. The following year, one friend, Rachel, mentioned her landlord was increasing her rent, and Assan offered to share her own home. By August of 2022, Rachel and her three children moved into Assan’s three-bedroom house, forming a new household with two adults and five kids. 

“[Shared living] has always been a seed, and it really only started blossoming after my marriage ended,” says Assan. “I felt more free to just live the way that feels more compatible and sustainable and supportive to the realities of living in late-stage capitalism. I think we’re probably all designed to be more interdependent than an individualist society sets us up to believe.”

Eventually, Rachel moved directly across the street from Assan. This past fall, Assan welcomed in another single mom, Carli, and her three kids. (Rachel and Carli both requested their last names be withheld to protect their privacy.) In each situation, Assan and her housemates worked out equitable house payments and utility costs, and shared in the labor of cooking, babysitting, and running a household.

Assan opens her home to her wider community as well. Twice a month, Assan hosts “spaghetti nights” in her front yard, a free meal and welcoming space for families and kids of all ages. After Assan’s mother had a stroke in 2022 and was no longer able to help with babysitting, Assan says spaghetti night attendees banded together and raised $9,000 in less than 24 hours—enough to cover childcare costs for more than six months.

Blake, too, is finding success through mutual aid. Using her background as a doula and birth worker, Blake is working twice a week at a local play- and nature-based daycare in exchange for her daughter’s enrollment. “I do not get paid a lot for this position, but [my daughter] will have access. And that’s because me and the owner are centering community care,” says Blake. “I love being there because it also gives me the tools that I need to help parent my child.”

Still, no matter how important or inventive an individual workaround is, both Blake and Assan believe wider, systemic changes are needed to ensure all children and families have access to childcare and early-development resources. These solutions require not only defending Head Start, but also investing in programs not dependent on income.

Some politicians are already answering this call. In 2014, former New York City Mayor for all 4-year-olds, and then launched 3-K for All in 2017 to provide free childcare and education for all 3-year-olds. In 2023, New York City Council members proposed legislation that would aged 6 weeks to 5 years old—a dramatic expansion of early-childhood programming for all families in the city, regardless of location, income, or citizenship. (This legislation is especially important as the city’s current mayor, .)

Other countries, too, have long recognized universal childcare as a key strategy to support families, address inequality, and simply raise healthy, happy young people. in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, and are well known for their generous parental leave policies and well-run national childcare systems. Both at home and abroad, these initiatives provide a working model for the United States—and prove that universal childcare programs, at both the state and federal level, are attainable.

Given the , federal solutions to the country’s childcare struggles are unlikely under the incoming Trump administration. While states and cities can implement smaller-scale solutions, the reality is that many families will need to follow the community-care models embraced by Assan and Blake: fortify and expand existing networks, lean on their neighbors, and get creative when it comes to housing, childcare, and early-learning opportunities. 

Amid ecological collapse, rising authoritarianism, genocide, and widening inequality, the urgent need for these stories and tools is clear. The challenges we face often feel overwhelming, but we are not starting from scratch. Across history and geography, people have responded to injustice and hardship with ingenuity, laying the groundwork for solidarity economies and imagining new systems that can work for all of us.��

The stories that follow illustrate how community-driven approaches can challenge entrenched institutions, foster collective well-being, and create tangible solutions to pressing global challenges.�� served the cuisine and culture of nations in conflict with the United States, sparking meaningful dialogue across political and geographic divides. ��transformed its cooperative network during COVID-19 to produce essential medical supplies, proving that mutual aid and collective ownership can outpace traditional business models. Meanwhile, the push for��publicly owned pharmaceutical systems demonstrates how prioritizing health over profit can lower costs, reduce shortages, and ensure equitable access to life-saving medications.��

These stories are part of a larger collection we call  (OR Books, 2024), a rallying cry for those ready to resist repression, reimagine thriving in our current conditions, and keep building a better world. The future we deserve isn’t a distant dream; it’s in the seeds already being sown in our communities. This collection inspires us to nurture that future, together. Written collaboratively by more than 70 contributors, and born from the lived experiences of grassroots organizers, solidarity economy practitioners, and communities on the front lines of climate and economic crisis, Beautiful Solutions demonstrates that a more just and democratic world is not only possible—it’s actively under construction.

Conflict Kitchen

Written by Sydney Arndt

Believing that the quickest way to a person’s heart is through their stomach, Conflict Kitchen sought to promote peace and build cross-cultural understanding by introducing people to the food and culture of places with which their government is in conflict. Based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and the brainchild of artist-activists Jon Rubin and Dawn Weleski, Conflict Kitchen used a simple takeout window framed by a colorful facade to serve up the cuisine, and celebrate the culture of a succession of countries, including Iran, Afghanistan, Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela, Palestine, and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.

The takeout window functioned as a platform for public dialogue, and the food line became a space for hungry Pittsburghers to engage with people and places the media consistently distorts and misrepresents. The takeout counter was staffed by chefs and public artists trained to facilitate conversations about the featured country. Each food wrapper was printed with personal profiles of people who live in the country being celebrated, as well as articles on the country’s food, art, religion, culture, and government.

To extend the experience beyond the takeout line and further encourage cross-cultural dialogue, Conflict Kitchen also organized public events that centered around food. Pittsburgh locals and Iranians in Tehran shared a meal via webcam in a virtual, city-to-city dinner party. Both groups made the same Persian recipes, then sat down to eat together. Other events have included informal lunch-hour discussions on food and politics, dinners with invited speakers, and live cooking lessons through Skype. 

In November 2014, a series of death threats forced Conflict Kitchen to close down for nearly a week. In response to the threats and allegations of being anti-Israel, the directors of Conflict Kitchen emphasized that their purpose is to hold a loudspeaker to the voices and historical experiences of people from across the world—Palestinians and Palestinian Americans included. The backlash they received is proof that this type of work is necessary.��

Conflict Kitchen offered the public many points of entry, from the taste of a new dish, to interactions with employees or fellow customers, to the interviews printed on the food wrappers, and the intimate meals with people far away. Cultural exchange was central to the project; the organizers prioritized facilitating a space for locals and people overseas to express their respective points of view.

The webcam meals between Pittsburgh and abroad provided a temporary glimpse of what it can mean to share cultures, politics, and, of course, food. By creating a zone of open dialogue and cross-cultural understanding for at least one meal, Conflict Kitchen made a world where we listen to each other and draw our own conclusions seem possible. It used food as a vehicle for cross-cultural understanding—and also provided delicious takeout.

Carolina Textile District and COVID-19

Guided by Marciela Lopez

Written by the Industrial Commons Team

Western North Carolina has long been a center for manufacturing, especially of textiles and furniture. Despite free-trade agreements, which stripped jobs from communities on both sides of the U.S.–Mexico border, one in four people in North Carolina’s Western Piedmont region still work in manufacturing. Many Guatemalan Mayan immigrants have settled in the area to work in textiles and furniture production. Over the years, they have shaped the region by campaigning for dignified workplaces. Organizer Molly Hemstreet witnessed their struggle to unionize a production facility in Morganton, North Carolina, and began to wonder: Could workers own and operate their own companies?

In 2008, Hemstreet and leaders from the Mayan community co-founded a sewing cooperative, Opportunity Threads. They drew on inspiration from Frank Adams, an early architect of the Highlander Folk School (now the Highlander Research and Education Center). Opportunity Threads has become one of the largest immigrant-led sewing co-ops in the United States, with more than 50 workers as of 2020.

Aiming to expand cooperativism across the textile industry and strengthen local supply chains, Hemstreet collaborated with the area’s economic development association and a textile research and development center to establish the Carolina Textile District (CTD). Fueled by its mantra, “Be big by being small together,” CTD is a network that brings together over 30 small manufacturers, including Opportunity Threads, and is led by nine partners, representing 1,500 workers in total. Members cooperatively govern, train new workers, share contracts and contacts, develop strong ethical standards for the industry, and share their struggles and joys.

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck the United States in early 2020, CTD was well-positioned to produce personal protective equipment and cloth face masks. Pivoting its textile and furniture member-companies to manufacture medical supplies was a challenge with many moving parts. It required consulting with doctors and public-health professionals, navigating ever-changing federal guidelines, prototyping masks and gowns, sourcing medical-grade materials, organizing the cohorts of manufacturers, connecting with markets and sponsors, developing a cohesive warehousing and distribution center, upscaling production, and overseeing quality control. As factories in Western North Carolina were shuttering, CTD was not only safely keeping open their plants, but hiring as well. The pandemic underscored the need for CTD and accelerated the network’s growth.

Opportunity Threads was the hub for CTD’s sewn goods during the pandemic. Worker-owners responded quickly, putting their technical skills to use in developing market-ready goods. Other CTD members came on board to help. Since CTD members had several years of “coopetition” under their belts, the network rapidly developed new products and increased production. At one point, they were producing 50,000 units per week, which kept more than 60 mills humming. “We have achieved so many things that we probably would not have been able to accomplish in a company owned by one person,” says Maricela Lopez, a worker-owner at Opportunity Threads. 

Through this project, CTD supplied 190,000 sanitary gowns to North Carolina’s Department of Health and Human Services and more than 500,000 face masks and other personal protective equipment to frontline workers. Additionally, it generated $2 million in revenue for its textile and furniture manufacturers. According to Sara Chester, CTD co-founder and Industrial Commons co-executive director, “When weekly mask production hit 40,000 units, [we] realized something tremendous was being achieved.”&�Բ�����;

Instead of communities having to wait for companies to come in and to solve economic, health, and social problems, cooperative industry networks can solve critical problems quickly and creatively. This model is one replicable example of how rural communities can actively build an industry ecosystem where workers own a secure supply chain, collaborate in mutually beneficial ways, and solve their communities’ most pressing problems.

Public Pharmaceuticals

Written by Dana Brown

The global medicines market is dominated by large private drug companies responsible for a decline in meaningful innovation as well as skyrocketing prices, recurring shortages, troubling safety issues, and corruption in the institutions that are supposed to regulate them. These trends are harmful to our health, economies, and democracies—and they are inevitable outcomes of an industry driven by profit maximization.

So-called “Big Pharma” companies spend less than one-fifth of their revenue on research and development, but half of their revenue on marketing. Many also regularly distribute more than 100 percent of profits to shareholders by selling off assets, taking on more debt, and downsizing production—inefficient and extractive practices in an industry we depend on for our health and well-being.

To get different outcomes, we need a different design. Democratic, public ownership of pharmaceutical institutions at scale would remove the profit motive and help reclaim medicine for the common good. Public ownership of pharmaceuticals can exist at any or all points in the supply chain, from research for new medications to manufacturing and distribution services. Since they are not beholden to shareholders and have some insulation from market pressures, they can focus on goals other than maximizing profits—like contributions to public health, scientific advancement, and local economies.

From Massachusetts to the U.K., Thailand, India, and beyond, there are many existing examples of states turning to public ownership of pharmaceutical companies in efforts to combat high prices, medicine shortages, and political interference by multinational corporations. 

Since 1960, Cuba’s entire pharmaceutical sector has been public. It produces both low-cost generic drugs and first-in-class discoveries, while providing thousands of good jobs and educational opportunities in the national economy. Known principally for its innovations—like the world’s first lung cancer and meningitis B vaccines—the industry also manufactures most of the domestic supply of medicine and shares its technology with numerous low- and middle-income countries, lessening those countries’ reliance on Big Pharma to meet health care needs.

When properly resourced, Public Pharma can lower drug prices, reduce inefficiencies, and ensure broad, equitable access to new drugs. Public control of manufacturing, wholesale distribution, or retail pharmacies can serve as the basis for large-scale investments in public health, creating educational opportunities and decent jobs and increasing resilience in supply chains. South Korea, for instance, supports small and medium pharmaceutical companies with publicly owned manufacturing facilities, which generate local jobs and purchasing power that broadly benefit the economy.

Public Pharma can also assure that medications most essential to public health are prioritized for development. State-owned pharmaceutical companies in both Cuba and Brazil operate with explicit mandates to develop medications ignored by the market, like those for neglected tropical diseases, while Big Pharma companies prioritize medications that generate the most profit—often copies of existing products.

Public Pharma can contribute to the creation of a biomedical commons in which life-saving technologies, and the information needed to produce and improve upon them, are treated as collective resources for all of humanity. Large-scale public ownership and control of the benefits of pharmaceutical innovation, for instance, could help facilitate programs in which the wealth created by the industry could prioritize serving historically marginalized communities, rather than perpetuating neglect in the name of business imperatives. Public Pharma is a vital tool for reorienting the purpose of health care from profits to human needs.

Successful examples from around the world can inform the design and development of a robust Public Pharma sector for any country. Sweden’s state-owned Apotek Produktion & Laboratorier AB has found a niche in specialty pharmaceutical manufacturing, selling products to dozens of countries, and directing any profits it earns to its only shareholder: the Swedish state. China’s and India’s state-owned drug companies have long produced a significant portion of the world’s supply of active pharmaceutical ingredients. Brazil’s state-owned labs produce more than 100 essential medications that allow its national health service to offer free and reduced-price medications to low-income patients.

Around the world—even in the United States—public-sector labs were historically responsible for the development of most vaccines. Insulin as a treatment for diabetes was developed in a public lab in Canada and the subsequent sale of the rights to produce insulin to private United States manufacturers remains a powerful cautionary tale about the harm that can happen when privatizing public goods. Despite being a century-old drug, insulin prices in the U.S. have skyrocketed in recent years as the three companies that control virtually the entire insulin market make small tweaks on their products in order to take out new patents and continually raise prices. This trend has produced a uniquely American epidemic of cost-related deaths because of people rationing insulin.

Because of the U.S.’s outsized role in global trade talks and the utter dominance of its Big Pharma firms in the global medicines market, developing a public pharmaceutical industry in the U.S. in particular would be decisive in global efforts to roll back Big Pharma monopolies and reclaim medicine as a public good. It would reduce regulatory capture and shrink corporate lobbying, opening up political space for much broader input into the priorities and outputs of this critical industry. With democratic, public-sector institutions innovating and producing medications at scale, Big Pharma’s interests would no longer dominate, and public institutions would have incentives to cooperate instead of competing in times of public health crises.

Many of us are experiencing election grief, defined by as an “unresolved grief” that shows up in “the loss of hopes and dreams and plans that [people] thought were coming from the other candidate, a loss of certainty in the future that was what they wanted, loss of trust in the world as a safe place, loss of feelings of freedom over your own body, the loss of support for people who have lesser means than the rest of us do, the loss of support for your neighbor and people who are different from you.”

Election grief has a tendency to debilitate us, leaving us in a frozen or shutdown state. This information is worth paying attention to, especially when it is critical to stay focused and mobilized as the state of democracy is increasingly threatened. As we participate in more collective actions, we need to find places of retreat to sustain our commitments to social justice.

With , Filipinos in the diaspora have been co-creating places of healing and restoration. Three of these community spaces have been actively seeding and tending cultures of both rest and solidarity. Who are they, and what can we learn from them?

Centering International Solidarity

Pinay Collection is a feminist brand with a team of 15 Filipino members from both the homeland and the diaspora. The social enterprise helps diasporic Filipinos reconnect with Filipino culture by , , and writing articles about the struggles in the motherland, including , , and .

Founder Jovie Galit created Pinay Collection in 2019 to “amplify [the] voices of the masses” and to “rethink [the] ways we tell stories [about Philippines-based Filipinos] that resonate with the people of the diaspora so that they [take] action.” Galit dreams of using Pinay Collection to create a more grounded form of reconnecting in which diasporic Filipinos do not neglect the struggles of the exploitation and state violence in the homeland.

“There’s so much urgency in the work,” Galit shares. “Doing this work with Pinay Collection, I’ve come to understand how activists back home [in the Philippines] do their work. I see the need to be out there [on the ground].”

Galit, who was raised in the Philippines, migrated to Canada at 19. When she relocated, she noticed some diasporic Filipinos were reclaiming Filipino culture and identity without developing an awareness about systemic issues within the Philippines.

“There’s beauty in [decolonization], [but] there’s also the privilege of being able to reflect on who we are, our identity, and our connection to Filipino culture versus Filipino people [in the Philippines] who are organizing to survive,” Galit says. “As much as it’s important to understand who we are, it’s also important for us to [turn] that understanding into mobilizing and organizing.”

Galit believes international solidarity is essential to reclaiming Filipino identity, especially for those living in North America. As the archipelago country faces incessant and , Galit says it becomes “dissonant not to address [these] real issues.” That’s the reason Pinay Collection has an emergency fund for typhoon relief as well as , farmers, impoverished people, and other marginalized groups in the country.

Galit hopes for a time when Pinay Collection doesn’t need to exist because the work of liberation is more realized. “That means we created a more sustainable structure for community organizations to thrive or maybe that means that communities of the diaspora are really honed in doing international solidarity work with Filipinos back home.”

Ultimately, A Resting Place, the Reimagination Lab, and Pinay Collection are offering spaces that, as Rodriguez explains, are “less in the space of a resistance and dismantling an unjust system but really in the space of creatively imagining, manifesting a different kind of future.”

“The situation in the mountains, where our community lives, is even worse,” she says. More floods as well as long periods of drought have made the perennial water sources in the upper mountains run dry.

Thousands of kilometers from Gurung’s community in the mountains, the United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP29, was just held in Baku, Azerbaijan. At this annual global convening, professionals, stakeholders, and politicians spent weeks deliberating situations like that of the Tamang and the nearly 500 million Indigenous people around the world. 

Gurung attended COP29 as program officer for the Center for Indigenous Peoples’ Research and Development, based in Kathmandu, Nepal. And her demands were clear: “We want $5 trillion—not as a loan, but as a grant,” she says. 

This target aims to address the urgent needs of developing countries for transitioning to clean energy and adapting to climate change. But COP29 ended on Nov. 24 with a pledge from developed nations to contribute just $300 billion annually to support adaptation. It has not been decided whether this will take the form of a grant or a loan.

Gurung was certainly disappointed. as “unacceptable.” And climate envoy Juan Carlos Monterrey Gómez, the chief negotiator for Panama, called it a “.”

Despite Indigenous peoples’ crucial and outsized role in climate action, their demands for financial support have again gone unheeded.

COP’s History of Exclusion

Indigenous peoples have always been shortchanged by the agreements that have come out of COP negotiations. 

In 2021, at COP26 in Glasgow, a pledge of $1.7 billion was made to support land rights and forest tenure for Indigenous peoples and local communities. And while countries are on track to meet that goal, .

Much of the funding that comes out of these global agreements is funneled through institutional banks including the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. These entities have been criticized for their approach to climate finance, particularly in relation to Indigenous peoples.By providing a significant portion of the , for example, they increase the debt burden on those communities.��

Also, the process to access these funds is often complex and bureaucratic, making it difficult for Indigenous communities to benefit directly. Funds are often channeled through national governments or large organizations, which may not prioritize or effectively address the specific needs of Indigenous communities. There even have been instances where projects funded by these institutions have led to human rights abuses and displacement.

So besides a bigger “fair share,” of climate funding for Indigenous communities, Gurung wants direct access to these grants “without an international finance institution in between, like the World Bank or the IMF.” She emphasizes that Indigenous peoples are rightly afraid that those international institutions could demand economic reforms or policy changes that may not align with the priorities or needs of those communities.

“It’s important that Indigenous peoples obtain direct access and control without bureaucratic delays and mandates about how the funds are allocated and spent,” Gurung says. 

Investing in Indigenous Women and Youth

While there is much discussion about Indigenous communities, Indigenous voices aren’t heard enough at COP gatherings, Gurung says: “A lot of negotiations are not open for us.”

Many Indigenous the exclusion and lack of transparency in the negotiation process. Indigenous leaders publicly expressed their frustration with the process’s inadequate consultation of Indigenous communities. For instance, Alessandra Korap Munduruku, an Indigenous rights campaigner from Brazil, criticized the carbon-credit mechanisms being discussed, highlighting how they often lead to land grabs and displacement of Indigenous communities.

Indigenous delegates also reported limited access to negotiation rooms and decision-making processes to. This exclusion was highlighted by various human rights groups and Indigenous organizations, who noted that their voices were not adequately represented in the final agreements. 

As a kind of protest against this exclusion, Gurung organized a side event about Indigenous women. Along with two colleagues, she shared her experience and how climate change affects Tamang women more than men. She also highlighted the resilience and the knowledge of Indigenous women in her community and Indigenous communities more broadly: “We have more knowledge about natural medicines, about seed banks, food storage, and agricultural practices. We know the surroundings, the environment, and to work as leaders.”

Gurung argues that Indigenous female knowledge is not only richer than that of non-natives, but also superior to that of Indigenous men. She says that for men in her community, it’s more acceptable to find a job in the city, so “men are often migrating from the community.”&�Բ�����;

Therefore, in order to make the most meaningful investments in climate solutions, the focus should be on women and youth. “For they need to gain the knowledge and they need to take leadership in the future,” Gurung says. 

The Challenge of the Maasai

The climate realities faced by the Tamang are not unlike those of the Maasai in East Africa. Pastoralist Isaac Nemuta says the effects of climate change have held him and his peers in an iron grip for decades. 

The Maasai are known as a people who hold on to their traditional way of herding—having persisted through centuries of persecution by British colonial rule and Christian missionaries—but they are now being forced to change. In the past 30 years, periods of drought have become more frequent and intense, with rising temperatures and unpredictable rainfalls. 

“In recent years, the situation has worsened,” he says. The past five consecutive rainy seasons all brought way too little water, leading to severe drought conditions. Since the end of 2020, hardly a drop of rain has fallen, which has led to the death of more than 2.5 million cattle.

With millions of pastoralists in East Africa adrift, Nemuta teamed up with colleagues to start an NGO called Climate Smart Pastoralists Limited. They help pastoralists adapt to the new climate conditions and mitigate the impacts of drought through sustainable practices such as rotational grazing, water conservation techniques, and grassland restoration. 

The NGO also engages in community education and capacity building. Their school for pastoralists, launched in 2007, serves not only Maasai in Kenya and Tanzania, but all pastoral peoples. “Even Turkana from the far north of the country attend our school,” Nemuta says.

Most of the funding for Climate Smart Pastoralists Limited comes from small and medium NGOs like Heifer International and German Agro Action (Welt Hunger Hilfe). They also receive funding through the Savory Institute and the Africa Wildlife Foundation.

Nemuta says he has tried to gain access to international . The different funding streams for climate adaptation, mitigation, and even the loss and damage funds discussed at COP29 are simply out of reach. The application process for the climate funds that are collected on a global scale is inscrutable for small, Indigenous communities like his.

Making COP Money Accessible

Many Indigenous peoples face significant challenges in accessing the large amounts of money that come out of global conferences like the one in Baku.

The application procedures for UN funds can be highly complex and bureaucratic. Indigenous communities often lack the technical expertise and resources needed to navigate these processes effectively. 

Applications and related documents are often in languages that Indigenous peoples may not be fluent in, making it difficult for them to understand and complete the necessary paperwork. And like Nemuta’s Maasai community, many Indigenous communities are not aware of the available funding opportunities or do not have access to the necessary information to apply. 

But solutions to overcome these barriers exist. The UN itself, through the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (which organizes COP29), for Indigenous peoples to access climate funding without the bureaucratic hurdles typically associated with UN climate money. The mechanisms are built by and for Indigenous people and local communities, and they can operate in different sociocultural regions and contexts.

These Indigenous Led Funds (ILFs) provide a mechanism for resources to reach Indigenous communities directly, bypassing complex bureaucratic processes, with culturally appropriate grantmaking. They use approaches that align with Indigenous knowledge, priorities, and worldviews.

Some ILFs work internationally across several countries, while others focus on national or community-based initiatives, allowing for flexible and context-specific support. 

At the end of the day, all different forms of ILFs strengthen Indigenous peoples’ ability to make decisions about resource allocation and project implementation. And they act as intermediaries between Indigenous communities and external resources, facilitating partnerships and knowledge exchange. In short: ILFs streamline climate solutions. 

Gurung is clear that for climate solutions to get traction, climate funding needs to be available through an easy and accessible process without too much delay. In short, she says, “It needs to be Indigenous friendly.”

The Democrats seemed to get this. From the moment vice presidential candidate Tim Walz stepped into the public spotlight, he centered the importance of policies that honor care. It was a refreshing twist to hear from a man with the trappings of traditional masculinity—football, guns, and camo—who really gets why to a thriving country.

And, of course, his running mate, Vice President Kamala Harris, put housing at the center of , which included detailed plans to spur new construction and reduce costs for renters and homebuyers, largely through tax incentives. “We will end America’s housing shortage,” she promised point-blank in . She also spoke widely and enthusiastically about her intention to create a Medicare at Home benefit, which would have unlocked billions of federal dollars for in-home health aides and other indispensable sources of care for our elders.

By contrast, the Republican agenda, which is now confirmed to be outlined in tome, will not only privatize Medicare and defund Medicaid—crucial care support for elders—but also intends to eradicate the Department of Education, gut the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and retreat from fair lending policies and other recent reforms within the real estate industry intended to cut down on racial discrimination.

It’s easy to be discouraged, and even downright fearful, of these shifts; for some of us, they are life-threatening. But we can’t let our fear keep us from dreaming about a longer-term shift that would honor the universal labor of care in all of our lives. For too long, we have thought about housing and care in separate circles, when in fact, they are overlapping spheres. Where and how we live—the structures of our homes, the density of our neighborhoods, the division of public and private spaces—influences everything about how we show up for one another in times of need.

Despite the narrative being put forward by conservative forces right now—namely, that all care needs can be met by unpaid labor within nuclear families—the reality is far more complex. We start as largely helpless little beings, needing round-the-clock care, and while we don’t like to think about it, we sometimes end life like that, too. In between, there is illness (acute and chronic), disability (which is also inevitable, though many of us struggle to acknowledge that reality until we’re forced to reckon with it personally), and the run-of-the-mill cooking, cleaning, nurturing, calendaring, wiping of butts, listening over tea, processing of feelings, and so much more along the way.

All of this—all of it—happens under the roof of a home—something too many in this country still struggle to access and hold on to. How we care for our people, how we share the care labor, who we even define as our people, is drawn into the subtext of every blueprint and regional planning drawing. Historically, women of color have borne the brunt of caregiving in this country, often invisibilized and underpaid—a fact powerfully surfaced by the dignifying and their allies in recent years. Most of the time, the dynamism between our built environment and our care labor is still largely unintentional. But among a growing number of wise and thoughtful advocates, it is becoming the text, not the subtext. 

Take Washington-based Frolic Communities, an innovative new response to the issue of gentrification. Frolic works with single-family homeowners to co-develop multifamily housing on their properties, which they live in, alongside their children, and other friends and community members. Homes in these projects—unlike so many cooperative models—can be purchased with low down payments and are affordable to middle-income families, and importantly, are designed with care in mind. Multiple generations can live, cook, eat, play, and support one another through the typical struggles of daily life. More and more to create more density. Co-founder Josh Morrison believes, as he told me, that the “process can be more graceful and kind” by utilizing new financing models and care-conscious design. under its belt already, one of which is fully built and thriving.

But, of course, dealing with zoning, financing, and creating functional communities is a heavy and sometimes burdensome lift. Another example of innovation at the intersection of care and housing is the ADU, or accessory dwelling unit. An ADU is a secondary housing unit on a single-family residential lot, sometimes called a “granny flat.” California, where so far, is on the cutting edge of this remarkably flexible and widely accessible solution, and many other states are modeling their approach on what’s happening there.

Casita Coalition, a California-based nonprofit, is teaching other states how to get the right reforms in place to unlock this decidedly middle-income solution to create room for adult children to care for their aging parents, grandparents to care for their grandchildren, and so many more creative combinations. The magic of ADUs is that they offer both privacy and proximity, and often at the right price.

There are so many big questions for us to be asking right now at the intersection of care and housing: What if we had real, scalable examples of housing that honored the centrality of care all over the country? We can’t build what we can’t see; so many people in this country are hungry for more care-conscious housing options, like , but they have never been to Denmark to check one out.

What if we reimagine the financing structures to help people of all different economic classes access care-focused housing? This could look any number of ways: from updating appraisal practices to finding entirely new sources of housing financing from the health care sector. Housing, after all, has a profound impact on the health and wellness of people.

What if zoning policy followed the logic not of the market alone, but also the logic of love? This could look like the loosening of single-family zoning, minimum lot size, and/or parking requirements in order to make way for more affordable, dense, and multigenerational lots. We can’t be creative about how we live and how we care when there is so much red tape obscuring our imaginations.

What if politicians didn’t just talk a big game during election season but became obsessive about governance that actually met people where they are? So many people are trying to afford homes and meet a wide variety of needs for their families (of all shapes), communities, and futures. What if government housing policy supported these myriad family configurations across a lifespan, with a combination of vulnerabilities and loving commitments to care?

What if we, the people, started to apply this mindset—that care and housing are intertwined—to our own lives, choosing not to wait on the powers that be to catch up to our vision of a more caring future? What if we reached out to neighbors and audited their care needs and capacities, created ad-hoc cohousing by tearing down fences, and created more communal rituals—shared meals, cooperative childcare, and other mutual aid interventions—in our communities?  

Sometimes a problem is actually best solved when we understand that it’s not one problem but multiple problems intertwined. That is the case with care and housing in this country right now, which is so desperate for new systems and structures that reflect our deep and challenged commitment to our families, both by blood and choice. We will keep fighting for policies that reflect our intersectional values, and in the meantime, we will live into them in creative, communal ways.

When I played for the first time, the feeling was transcendent. For a brief moment, the oil masquerade granted anonymity to engage in bacchanal and revelry, a direct to the expectation of respectability and decorum demanded specifically from women. J’ouvert strips back the fanfare and glamor of feathered costumes, compelling participants to surrender themselves to the collective prerogative of the mas.

J’ouvert restored me. When I finished playing, I hopped into a motorboat water taxi and headed to Grenada’s Grand Anse beach. The sands were lined with people washing off themselves with water after an energizing morning of marching on the road. It was a shedding—and I reemerged feeling revived.

Connecting to the Past

Though J’ouvert is commemorated across the Caribbean—particularly in countries subjected to French colonial rule—the celebration is unique in Grenada because its participants transform into the Jab or Jab Jab character. The procession is creolized with and , but playing Jab during J’ouvert also has roots in enslavement.

According to the , “[t]he Jab Jab portrays the spirit of a slave who met his [death] when he accidentally fell (or may even have been pushed by his white master) into a copper vat of boiling molasses. His ghost comes back every year during Carnival to torment his former master.”

Prior to Grenada’s emancipation from slavery in 1838, enslaved Afro-Grenadian people were referred to as devils. As an act of satire, the enslaved rubbed any substance that would blacken their skin—molasses, tar, mud, or soot—over their bodies, made helmets emulating the devil with cattle or goat horns fastened onto a construction helmet (early iterations of the helmet were made from found materials such as the large posey bowls found on plantations), and walked around with chains. The Jab turned any descriptor deemed to be transgressive—being Black, being in chains, being the devil—into a symbol of rebellion, resilience, liberation, and freedom.

Now, on J’ouvert morning, Grenadians of all ages gather right before day break—“J’ouvert” is a combination of the French words jour, which means “day,” and ouvert, which means “open”—to march through town to a percussive beat (in St. Georges, Grenada, it is often paired with sound systems) and remind themselves of who they are and what their people have overcome.

For Kered Clement, a United Kingdom–born journalist currently residing in Grenada, Jab is a structured ancestral practice. When she moved to Grenada 10 years ago, she attended J’ouvert with her cousin. But it wasn’t until she played Jab with a family friend that she realized the ritualistic nature of the procession. “There were rules I didn’t even know [when I played] with my cousin,” she says. “As Jab Jabs, we don’t laugh, we don’t smile. We’re having fun, but this is serious business.”

Outside of its ancestral heritage, J’ouvert is also accessible: Costumes aren’t required, so participants are encouraged to wear old clothing. However, as Carnival in Grenada has become more popular and attended by celebrities and influencers, the once-insular celebration is now a shared experience with those who aren’t native to the island.

Given this expansion, Clement sees the importance of reminding people that their engagement with J’ouvert derives from a structured cultural practice. She describes her process of getting ready saying, “Everyone’s in the same place. Together, we put lard on, but we don’t apply the oil yet. We take our bucket of oil down Tanteen Road where the real Jab Jab band leaves off, and that’s where we put on our oil. We march through the streets with a band. When the sun gets intense, we depart. We walk through the streets back to the same location where there’s bakes and saltfish waiting for us.”

Clement’s reverence for J’ouvert extends to what she wears on the road. This year, , released the song “,” whose title references a burlap sack . Clement also decided to this year. “I’m gonna get a Grenadian designer [named] Ali Creations to design me a crocus bag dress,” she says. “Initially, [wearing the dress] was about the song and doing something different, but a lot of people messaged me and said, ‘Wow, I feel like you brought back the culture and the uniqueness.’”

For this year’s Spicemas, also created a costume, , inspired by Grenada’s connection to Africa, Jab, and the Black women who play it. Nevlyn John, a representative with ORO, says Mecca is indicative of “the strength of women, and the appreciation of our African heritage and [its] influence in our Carnival and our society. So, when we speak about [Mecca] being the ‘queen of queens,’ it is about celebrating our womanhood where the Blackness and authenticity stems from.”

In the Land of 100,000 Jabs

Though J’ouvert’s visual economy of imagery is dominated by men, women also take part in the celebration. For Black women who play Jab, there are a variety of benefits that contribute to their overall cultural, mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual wellness. “When I talk to folks about Jab Jab, they felt that spiritual connection even more deeply,” says Sherine Andreine Powerful, DrPH. “It recruits so many different emotions for people that you can’t help but feel very present and even more connected in that moment.”

For her , Dr. Powerful explored how the quarantine impacted the ability to play mas and what this meant for Caribbean people in the region and the broader diaspora. Ninety percent of her research participants were Black women who described their involvement as a “collective social self-care ritual,” she shares. “[Playing Jab mas] provides a space for catharsis, a space for joy, a space for release and space for healing.”

After Saharrah Green, who was born in Grenada, moved to Toronto at the onset of COVID-19 to pursue a degree, she felt disconnected from J’ouvert. But playing J’ouvert in 2024 helped her re-ground herself in her heritage. “You really get a chance to just be free,” she says. “I don’t have to think. I just get to be myself. I get to just be home, allow myself to fully be in that moment around people that truly get me.”

Tamika Nelson, who is based in the United Kingdom, agrees. She began playing J’ouvert when she was around 13. Now, she describes her participation in J’ouvert as a way to improve her mental health. “Playing mas, no one cares really what you look like,” she says. “You just go out there to have a great time. … You always find like-minded people on the road and without even thinking, you’re in a better mental state.”&�Բ�����;

For Black women, Jab is something to look forward to that embraces body positivity. It is also an opportunity to reconnect with heritage or continue Caribbean cultural practices that celebrate individual expression. 

When Black women play Jab, it offers both great comfort and great power—an opportunity to free themselves. “Our ancestors have these healing practices that combine body, mind, and spirit,” Dr. Powerful concludes. “That connection has never been severed. From what I’ve experienced … Carnival brings us back to that ancestral body, mind, and spirit are all connected. People feel all of that on the road.”

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 12:23 p.m. PT on December 9, 2024, to update the honorific for Sherine Andreine Powerful, DrPH and correct the spelling of Kered Clement’s name.��Read our corrections policy here.��

Just meters away stands a library where several men either watch an educational program on television or immerse themselves in books. In a nearby carpentry workshop, three men work on furniture and model ships, while another room serves as a textile workshop. 

These diverse activities are part of Liberté, a cooperative association operating within Unit Number 15 of the maximum security complex of Batán, located in Mar del Plata, Argentina. This penitentiary facility houses approximately 1,600 inmates. But many individuals here, deprived of their liberty, have found a way to reclaim some for themselves.��

At first glance, the entrance to Liberté may appear to be just another barred gate within the prison. Yet on the other side of this barrier, things feel distinctly different.

“When we cross that gate, we forget we are in a prison. We feel free,” says Ariel, who works in the textile workshop. (Incarcerated individuals are being identified by their first names only, for legal reasons.)��

This sentiment is common among the 80-some men who make up Liberté today. They don’t define themselves as prisoners. Instead, through work, education, sports, and cultural activities, they are people preparing to integrate into society.

“If the punitive model of punishment worked, it might be worth pursuing,” says Xavier Aguirreal, who founded Liberté. “But what truly works is restorative justice.”&�Բ�����;

A Different Kind of Opportunity

“In prison, you either become dependent or beg,” says Aguirreal, 55, who is known to everyone as Pampa. “You come in with a couple of pairs of shoes and a shirt, but when those wear out, you cannot obtain new ones unless a family member or an NGO provides them. I didn’t want that for myself,” he recalls. So in 2014, two years after arriving at Batán, he asked permission from the Penitentiary Service to launch an entrepreneurial initiative. 

The head of the Work Department told Pampa that he needed at least two people to start, so he and his cellmate made a proposal to bring in materials and produce something that they could then sell outside the prison. “We started manufacturing wall clocks,” Pampa says.

According to official statistics, last year less than half of people incarcerated in Argentina��were involved in an educational program. Only a third had paid work in prison.��

But, says Diana Márquez, a lawyer and the coordinator of Víctimas por la Paz, “Most prisoners want to leave their cells and desire to work or study.  The problem is that in prison there are very few educational options available—mostly just elementary school—and nearly no job opportunities, many of which are undignified.”&�Բ�����;

The Víctimas por la Paz association was created by people who were affected by crimes and now works to promote restorative justice. This organization has supported Liberté since 2017, thanks to Judge Mario Juliano, who believed that model was the best route to restoration. 

Liberté operates on a self-management model, where each participant is responsible for doing their own work to earn their own money. “This fosters autonomy and self-esteem, essential values for successful integration into society,” Pampa explains. 

Liberté has launched various work projects, including leatherwork, carpentry, blacksmithing, radio programming, baking, beekeeping, and organic gardening workshops. There is even a small grocery store where incarcerated people can purchase their food and a restaurant named Punto de Paz. The meals prepared in Liberté’s kitchen have received official permission from the Buenos Aires government to be sold in supermarkets outside the prison.��

In addition to these ventures, Liberté has developed educational, cultural, and sports programs—such as soccer and karate—to support personal growth and promote teamwork. 

“Liberté offers something broader than just a single workshop or course. That’s its richness: Our lives consist of various interests and needs. Everyone has different preferences, and when I enter Liberté, it feels like a small neighborhood with diverse activities,” Márquez says.

An Effective Model for Change

“If you deprive someone of their rights for decades, what do you think they learn?” Pampa asks. “That human rights don’t exist.”

There are no official statistics regarding recidivism in Argentina. However, the Latin American Center for Studies on Insecurity and Violence at the Tres de Febrero National University estimates that seven out of 10 individuals who regain their freedom commit a crime within the first year after leaving prison.

“Prison should not be a place of punishment but of restoration. When we leave, we should be seen as people like anyone else—not as those deprived of their rights.”

Over the past 10 years, more than 1,000 people incarcerated at Batán have participated in Liberté. Of those,��104 have been released—none of whom have reoffended.

Moreover, Liberté’s vision of self-restoration involves recognizing mistakes and addressing the harm caused by those actions. This is why they created the Victim Support Fund: They donate part of their grocery earnings to organizations that assist victims of crimes.��

“Liberté has changed my life,” says Omar during a break in his carpentry work. While at Batán, he got married in a ceremony at Punto de Paz. “I’ve learned to value things I previously overlooked,” he says. “All of this will help me in the outside world.”

“Here, I can do things like I would outside; I don’t feel like a prisoner,” says Roberto, the current coordinator of Liberté. Before arriving at Batán four years ago, he worked as a cook and played soccer for a club. Now, he cooks in Liberté’s kitchen and coordinates a soccer team. He has learned new recipes and how to manage with limited kitchen utensils. “All of this will help me in the future; otherwise, it would just be wasted time in jail.”

More than that, Roberto says he has experienced personal growth that is not always available in the environments in which people grow up. “Liberté gives us the chance to depend on ourselves and appreciate every little thing. Outside, I used to be more selfish; here, I’ve learned about solidarity,” he says.

Carlitos shares a similar sentiment. He coordinates the library, which houses more than 5,000 books and offers opportunities for discussions and screenings of educational films. “Outside, we didn’t learn to love or respect one another or how to share. Here in Liberté, we’ve come to understand that dialogue through love is essential.”

Punishment vs. Restorative Justice

Marcelo spent the day selling religious ornaments in Mar del Plata. After work, he visits the homeless to distribute food with a Christian group. After that, he’ll travel to La Plata to visit his mother.

His life was very different two years ago when he was still at Batán. He arrived with mental health issues that led him to contemplate suicide. For a time, he felt guilty and worthless.

One day, Pampa invited Marcelo to lunch with other Liberté members and brought him a plate of burgers with French fries. “I started to cry. I couldn’t remember the last time I had eaten something like that,” Marcelo recalls. “I felt I was regaining my dignity.”

An engineer and teacher, Marcelo was drawn to Liberté by its library. He soon began participating in various cooperative activities, including restoring an old laundry facility into the current Liberté space. Eventually he became the cooperative’s treasurer, managing the accounts for Liberté’s grocery store. This role gave him a sense of worth.

“When my daughter and son visited me, they didn’t have to bring food for us to share. I could offer them a cake made by one of Liberté’s bakers or invite them to drink mate with my own yerba,” Marcelo says, referring to the traditional infused beverage that holds great cultural significance in Argentina. “I don’t know what would have become of me if I had spent all my time in the pavilion.”

That sentiment is shared. “Prison reinforces resentment and hatred, but Liberté fosters courage and helps us overcome those feelings,” explains Michael, a member of Liberté who runs the radio program. “In Liberté, you stop viewing prisoners as mere characters from movies; instead, you see them as individuals with new possibilities who can even find joy within prison walls. Because without joy, how can you move forward and experience change?”

Broader Cultural Change

Liberté’s innovative approach encourages a fundamental shift in how society at large perceives incarceration. To promote this model, Liberté launched a diploma program three years ago in collaboration with the Mar del Plata National University that focuses on restorative justice, social integration, and peaceful coexistence within prison contexts. The program is open to anyone who is directly or indirectly linked to the prison environment—from detainees to prison officers, as well as students and professionals in law, social work, and psychology. 

The program is conducted online using platforms like Zoom and a virtual campus, along with YouTube. Since the pandemic, people incarcerated in Buenos Aires Province have been allowed to use cell phones, which has also facilitated the program’s operation. The curriculum combines theory classes with practical workshops and activities, equipping participants with tools to understand and transform the penal system while promoting a vision of justice rooted in care, dignity, and reconciliation.

The program was initially designed for 100 students but has attracted more than 8,000 participants. “Preliminary data indicate changes in perceptions among those who held prejudices and stigmas. They have broadened their horizons by understanding the realities of prisoners and now see solutions as a collective effort,” stated Claudia Perlo from the Rosario Institute for Research in Educational Sciences in . She highlights Liberté as a model for policymakers regarding prison reform. And Liberté continues to innovate, now developing a Popular University based on a German model. 

Márquez attests to the impact of these programs: “Liberté has made me feel free too. It helps me shed my prejudices. When I come here, I see people—not prisoners or inmates.”

Ongoing Challenges

Despite ongoing legal blocks and bureaucratic hurdles thrown at them by the Penitentiary Service, Liberté persists. The group achieved legal status as a cooperative in 2021. “Every single piece of paperwork is difficult. For example, to create a bank account, a bank manager had to visit the prison, which took considerable time and goodwill,” Pampa explains. But the hard work is paying off.

“In 2021, the head of the Penitentiary Service told me he had received many calls from various places interested in replicating our self-managed model,” Pampa recalls. Prisons in Neuquén in southern Argentina and Rosario and Victoria in the north have expressed interest in Liberté’s work. Last year, Liberté began expanding its efforts into a prison in Rio Grande, Tierra del Fuego—the southernmost province in the country.

“We are convinced that ours is not the only model or even the best one. But it’s working, and we want to share it,” Pampa says. “If we do that, human rights and dignity will emerge.”

Sophomore Sophia Bugarim remembers taking the survey. To the first question—“Do you experience any of these climate emotions?”—Bugarim answered “fear.” The next question narrowed down the four core emotions into more specifics. This time Bugarim selected “worry.”&�Բ�����;

“I feel worried that one day I’ll be in a situation where I have to leave my house, and I’ll come back and have no idea what it will look like,” says Bugarim, who recalled her survey answers on an October day when school had been canceled due to the possibility of storm water surge and high winds. While Miami was not in Hurricane Milton’s path, Bugarim wonders how soon the city will be in the path of another storm. “These storms are getting worse. There was a hurricane last week in Tallahassee. Next week gets me worried. It’s very unpredictable.”

Sebastian Navarro, who manned the table as sustainability ambassador during his senior year, thinks students at Maritime and Science Technical Academy probably learn about climate change more than others in the district due to the school’s focus on maritime sciences. He says students visit the reefs just offshore from the beachside school. But that classwork is focused on cognitive learning, not discussion about feelings. 

On the climate emotions survey, when given options for what worries them most about climate change, about one-third of students said sea level rise. Another third said biodiversity loss and coral bleaching. 

Sarah Newman, executive director of the , says climate change adds another layer of mental health risk for youth and can deepen existing inequities. In 2021, Newman founded the Network to provide solutions beyond traditional therapy, which can be cost-prohibitive and faces ongoing provider shortages. 

She sees the climate emotions wheel as a supplement to mental health therapy and believes schools are a key place to . This is a stark contrast with the conservative Project 2025, which aims to erase climate change from public education and the federal government entirely. Newman sees the importance in grassroots solutions to support individuals and communities impacted by the changing climate, regardless of what’s happening in Washington, D.C. 

“Having climate anxiety is a normal response to the climate crisis, so if you respond to what is a societal issue with an individual approach, you’re isolating someone’s experience to a clinical setting,” she says. “Because it’s a collective experience, the process of navigating our climate emotions, managing them, and healing needs to be done in community with others.”&�Բ�����;

A New Tool

Multiple reports suggest there is plenty of room for improvement to deepen climate content across subjects and add more social and emotional learning in public schools in the United States. On the , Florida received a D for its lack of climate change content in state science standards. The center graded 20 states at no higher than a C+, while 21 states, which all use the Next Generation Science Standards, received a B+.

Then in 2022, the North American Association for Environmental Education found in one subject in addition to science (usually social studies), and only 10% of climate change content addressed the socio-emotional learning dimensions of the crisis.

A led by the American Psychological Association and others concurs that more school-based and health-system solutions are needed. Newman sees the climate emotions wheel as a tool that educators everywhere can begin using now. It’s a bottom-up approach that can skirt the obstacles being thrown up in institutions and governments at all levels.

Finnish environmental theologian Panu Pihkala, who popularized the idea that “” is a more useful term than “climate anxiety,” consulted with the Climate Mental Health Network to create the climate emotions wheel. It is now available in 30 languages, including Spanish, Kiswahili, and Bengali, and used in a variety of settings.

“Everything about the school day is a learning experience. It’s not just the curriculum being directed by the teacher,” said Michele Drucker, who heads the Miami-Dade County Council Parent Teacher Association environmental committee.

Drucker also ran a sustainability ambassador program in local high schools, which Navarro completed during his lunch hours. Navarro invited students to enter a drawing for completing climate actions such as bringing a reusable water bottle, using for uneaten food at lunch, and eliminating single-use plastics. This is also where Navarro shared the climate emotions wheel, which he says received a lot of engagement and seemed to bump up participation in the weeks that followed.

Navarro says the wheel helped generate hallway conversations about climate, too, as peers asked each other: “Which emoji are you?”

Climate Emotions in the Classroom

In other schools, teachers are adding the climate emotions wheel to their coursework.  

“One of the biggest problems with climate education is not a lack of knowledge,” says Kimberly Williams, a science teacher at Smithtown High School West on Long Island in New York. She began integrating emotional support into her climate change units a few years ago. She says her classes would start the year “discouraged and apathetic,” and that “it’s easy for the students to feel ‘there’s nothing I can do, so I should do nothing.’”

Williams tasked her students with using the paint tool on a tablet to shade portions in a circle representing the degree to which they were feeling a climate emotion. A guide then and evaluate their own strengths and possible contributions to climate solutions.

Williams concedes that most science teachers do not include this kind of social and emotional learning into their lessons: “They don’t see the two as interwoven, and I don’t see the two as something you can separate.”

Williams says in her district, most teachers only “dance around the subject” in an effort to avoid the politics of climate change. To her, that indicates that teachers aren’t connecting it to students’ lives. “They’re showing a graph,” not saying, “‘Why do you think that is?’ or ‘What we can do about it?’”

In nearby New York City, , but most only dedicate a few hours per year. A , which died at the end of the 2024 legislative session, would have mandated that all grades and subject matters include climate.

This bill would have addressed mental health, as well, said Elissa Teles Muñoz, the K–12 programming manager for the Climate Mental Health Network, at a recent . 

“When there is climate education … it does need to include safeguards for youth mental health,” said Muñoz, who helped write the bill with the National Wildlife Federation. “It’s not responsible to drop a bomb on a child’s brain.”

Growing Support From the Grassroots

The climate emotions wheel relies on grassroots leaders—teachers, parents, or others—to find ways to implement it, which may limit its reach and impact.

Some teachers may not feel supported to include the exercise. Susan Clayton, a conservation psychologist who studies K–12 climate education, considered teacher surveys alongside local politics. She found that teachers from states where school or government leaders oppose climate education felt more anxious. For example, the 7% of teachers in Clayton’s sample who were from Florida reported significantly higher levels of climate anxiety.

But Clayton found that when teachers perceived parental support for climate education, they were more likely to talk to students about climate emotions. 

In Miami-Dade public schools, Drucker is bolstered by how the PTA can bypass some state or district politics with grassroots action at schools. She advocated for years for systems-level climate action, though Florida schools lack state support for fully embracing climate action. And that obstacle is only getting worse: that strikes the phrase “climate change” from state law entirely.

Newman also believes there’s power in hyperlocal action. One of the climate emotions wheel’s strengths may be that it empowers students. 

For Williams’ part, she includes the climate emotions exercise to help students move toward action. At the end of her courses, she asks students to complete the survey again and asks what they would modify from their earlier responses. One student updated the colors in the wheel and said she felt a little more empowered to take her own actions once she wrote them down.

Navarro says he is still working through climate emotions, but he feels encouraged by peer support in the environmental clubs at his school. “You have the opportunity to advocate for different causes,” he says. Recently, students acted on their concerns by advocating for and landing the district. Navarro says it feels good to know that “you’re actually making a difference.”

Ofelia, then 25, had just moved into her new home in the northern Mexico town of San Pedro de las Colonias when she vanished in 2007. A shootout between law enforcement and the Los Zetas drug cartel occurred that night, but no one knows what happened to Ofelia. Though 17 years have passed, this is the first time Martínez dared to protest her daughter’s disappearance. “I waited two years to report it,” says Martínez. “People were being murdered in San Pedro every day. If you dared to file a report, you risked being shot.”

Around 9 a.m. the following morning, a group of about 40 mothers began marching through San Pedro de las Colonias, chanting “Alive you took them! Alive we want them!”

Since in December 2006 and deployed thousands of troops, widespread violence has ensued, leading to a surge in homicides, extortion, forced displacement, femicides, and disappearances. Since 2006, there have been and in Mexico. Men between the ages of 20 and 35 are disproportionately likely to be disappeared, though there are regions where a significant number of women have disappeared.

San Pedro de las Colonias, an agricultural town in the Coahuila desert, has officially recorded 106 disappearances between 2007 and 2013 during the conflict between the Los Zetas and the Sinaloa cartels for control of the La Laguna region, a key part of a drugs and arms trafficking route between Mexico and the United States. However, the actual number of missing persons remains unknown.

Relatives of these thousands of victims, especially mothers of the disappeared, often called madres buscadoras, or searching mothers, have spearheaded a movement advocating for strategies, laws, and actions to locate their loved ones, seek justice, and prevent future disappearances. 

Although levels of violence have significantly decreased due to the collaborative efforts of the local government, civil society, and businessmen, families continue to fear reporting disappearances due to threats and persecution. In many cases, they have been coerced into accepting the loss of their loved ones.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., the idea of attacking Mexico to combat drug cartels has gained popularity, particularly among the Republican elite. Although Donald Trump has repeatedly denied supporting Project 2025, this 900-page policy urges the next U.S. administration to adopt a “creative and aggressive approach” to addressing drug cartels at the U.S.–Mexico border, which echoes some of to assassinate drug kingpins. 

However, such an intervention could lead to a continued battle against Mexico’s most vulnerable without guaranteeing significant impacts on organized crime enterprises or drug trafficking.

The Legacy of U.S.-Funded Militarization in Mexico

When then Mexican President Felipe Calderón declared war on organized crime, he received through the Mérida Initiative. During Calderón’s six-year term, the Mexican military, with U.S. assistance, arrested or killed . 

While Mexican authorities have declared the “kingpin strategy” mostly a success, it has also fueled , leading to the fragmentation of the cartels. According to the International Crisis Group, at least between mid-2009 and the end of 2020. Fragmentation has also escalated local violence and put citizens, journalists, and human rights defenders at risk as criminal groups diversify their illicit activities, including human trafficking, poaching, extortion, illegal logging, and more.

Even searching for the disappeared is a dangerous endeavor: Since 2010, 21 people have lost their lives while searching for their relatives. One mother, Lorenza Cano, has been missing since Jan. 15, 2024. And yet, despite the danger, Martin Villalobos, a spokesperson for Movimiento por Nuestros Desaparecidos en México, a movement uniting more than 60 collectives of families of the disappeared, says these families are still best positioned to understand the operations of criminal groups and facilitate searches for their loved ones.

“We’ve been saying that we families, across the country, know the territory,” says Villalobos. “How does organized crime operate? Not based on the result of a police investigation, but rather from our own experience. This knowledge has cost some of our ���dz��貹ñ������� their lives.”

Despite the risks, these families have often exposed varying degrees of collusion between state agents and organized crime that make their work even more dangerous. In 2020, General Salvador Cienfuegos, who was head of Mexico’s army from 2012 to 2018 and once the country’s secretary of national defense, was on charges of participating in an international drug trafficking and money laundering network. After being pressured by Mexican authorities, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration dropped the charges and released Cienfuegos, who was then bestowed an honorary military decoration in 2023.

This level of collusion places madres buscadoras in greater jeopardy. As drug cartels continue to infiltrate the Mexican state, from local officials to high-level government, “silence zones” emerge, where reporting human rights abuses and seeking justice becomes too dangerous.

Despite the challenging conditions families of the disappeared face, hundreds of collectives continue to lead searches across the country. In Culiacán, Sinaloa, Sabuesos Guerreras, a group of nearly 2,000 relatives of the disappeared, has located more than 650 bodies in clandestine graves. “We have found more than 18,950 charred fragments in water wells and rivers,” María Isabel Cruz Bernal, founder of the collective, adds. 

Cruz is the mother of Yosimar García Cruz, a police officer who disappeared in 2017 in Culiacán. She believes the only thing authorities are doing is “betting on our deaths” to end the search for the disappeared. Through their investigations, Sabuesos Guerreras have identified high-ranking officials colluding with criminal groups. They have urged the government to purge corrupt institutions and authorities as a first step toward increasing trust and transparency, but their demands have been ignored.  “There is no security strategy that protects us,” she adds.

A Civilian-Led Path Forward

In September, Mexico’s Chamber of Deputies approved that would place the civilian-led National Guard under the control of the armed forces. Fundar, a center for analysis and research on democracy-related issues, warned that the concentration of power in the state and armed forces has that “disproportionately affect marginalized groups, exacerbating their precariousness and intersecting with gender and ethnic vulnerabilities.”&�Բ�����;

While a direct connection between the surge in disappearances and the country’s militarization is difficult to establish, Alejandra Ramírez, a researcher at Fundar, said it’s concerning that public security remains entrusted to military forces that often operate with impunity. “Instead of continuing to bet on the much-emphasized strengthening of state and municipal police forces, prosecutors’ offices, and other institutions, it appears that these entities [the military] are being given primary responsibility,” Ramírez says. “History shows that they have a track record of committing crimes that go unpunished and unsolved.”

In Culiacán, for instance, videos obtained by the influential daily Reforma show military and National Guard forces shooting at and detaining a man on Oct. 7. The footage suggests they planned to kill him but abandoned the attempt when they realized they were being filmed.  

In early October, Mexico’s new government unveiled its strategy to combat violence and crime. Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s first female president, said she would not engage in a new war against Mexico’s powerful drug cartels. “The war on drugs will not return,” she said after taking office. “We are not looking for extrajudicial executions, which is what was happening before. What are we going to use? Prevention, attention to the causes, intelligence, and presence [of authorities].”

Instead of deploying assassination squads to capture drug kingpins (), the Mexican government wants to strengthen the National Guard and enhance intelligence gathering, similar to the work families have been doing for years. 

While both countries continue to rely on military efforts to counterattack drug cartels, families are demanding technical and financial assistance to accelerate the search of the missing and the identification of the more than 70,000 bodies that remain in the forensic backlog. As a first step, they seek to initiate a national dialogue, with the support of the international community, to advocate for their demands against the Mexican government and amplify the urgency of their struggle.  

Meanwhile, they continue searching for their loved ones, gathering information on criminal modus operandi, demanding preventive measures, and calling for the implementation of real actions. During the march to commemorate the International Day of the Disappeared, dozens of families walked through the quiet streets of San Pedro de las Colonias, breaking a decade-long silence. Many onlookers stood in stunned disbelief, watching the procession. 

Martínez walked in the middle holding the tarp featuring Ofelia’s face. For two hours, Martínez and the other mothers marched, chanting, “Where are they, where are they?”

Now, more than one year since the world started watching the genocide in Gaza—a reality Palestinian journalists have been trying to broadcast for generations—the general public is finally sharing in the Palestinian resistance. People around the globe have , , rallied despite , and orchestrated . “Israel can no longer coast on this idea of being this beacon of democracy in the Middle East,” Elal says. “People understand intuitively [that] this is a colonial situation.”&�Բ�����;

But as solidarity with Palestinians grows, so too does repression. In the United States, lawmakers have tried , while university administrators have , , and . Mainstream media outlets publish , while politicians  

Yet as those in power continue to attempt to crush the Free Palestine Movement, artists, writers, and other cultural workers are using creative practices to resist. They’ve organized to fight censorship, exposed the propagandist nature of mainstream media, and asserted Palestinians’ rights to their land and lives. They’ve refused to accept genocide and colonialism as normal. “That, I think, is actually what preserves your humanity and your sanity,” Elal says. “The fate of Palestinians is bound up in your own, whether you like it or not.”&�Բ�����;

Narrative Resistance

Since Israel’s inception 76 years ago, government and media institutions have continuously worked to control the public’s collective memory of Palestine. In 1969, Israel’s prime minister denied that Palestinians existed before . After Hamas carried out Operation Al-Aqsa Flood in October 2023, tearing down walls that helped make Gaza an , media outlets described the attack as When Israel’s defense minister announced its food and water blockade on Gaza days later, he called it a fight against further dehumanizing Palestinians and their resistance against occupation. 

“Narratives are used to justify systems of domination,” Elal says. “Palestinians want liberation, freedom, the right to live in their homes and return to their homes, just like any other people. It requires this enormous apparatus of narrative to dehumanize and delegitimize Palestinian claims to the right of return, sovereignty, living free from violence, on a land where they aren’t second-class citizens subjected to genocide.”&�Բ�����;

According to the Gaza Health Ministry, Israel has����since Oct. 7, 2023. However,��scholars estimate that����of Palestinians have died��from starvation, infection, and disease caused by Israel’s food and water blockades and destruction of Gaza’s hospitals. The death toll continues to rise, and attempts to rationalize the Israeli government’s murderous impulse are proving ineffective.

Polls across the West show that an increasing number of people , and young people in the U.S. are . “This didn’t start last October,” says Elal. “The roots of what we’re seeing now with this genocide are structural, historical, and political.”��

Since 2021, Elal has worked as the information designer for , an organization founded in 2012 that uses data imagery to communicate the experiences of Palestinians and disrupt colonial narratives. The organization’s infographics, interactive visuals, and posters have been circulated all over the world, published by major media outlets, posted on subway billboards, and translated into multiple languages. 

“We see our role in the movement in terms of how we can intervene in narrative and media discourse around Palestine,” says Elal. “Especially since the start of the genocide, we’ve seen how rampant this dehumanization is, how distorted the Palestinian narrative is, how there’s not a lot of grappling with the deep history of the legacy of colonialism in Palestine.”&�Բ�����;

Visualizing Palestine works with partner organizations, including some in Palestine, to turn research reports into accessible visual resources. For instance, its presents side-by-side images from the and the current genocide in Gaza to show how the latter is an extension of the previous catastrophe. Another project called “” demonstrates how Israel uses artificial intelligence programs to surveil and kill Palestinians. 

Other visuals aim to expand the documentation of Israel’s brutality beyond statistics, including its impact on those who survive. “” takes the form of a child development chart that illustrates how children born in Gaza in 2007 have lived through four wars before turning 18, suffering compounded trauma. “” memorializes Palestinians who survived the 1948 Nakba to later be killed by Israel in 2023. “These people are older than the state that is killing them,” Elal explains. “[Palestinians] aren’t numbers. Each one of these people who has been killed [is] an entire world.”&�Բ�����;

The collective’s new book, , spotlights more than 200 visuals created in the past decade, alongside essays on humanizing data and provoking narrative change. Elal believes putting this resource in people’s hands can help organizers, advocates, and educators “build the kind of people power we need.”&�Բ�����;

The Role of the Artist

When Israel began bombing Gaza in October 2023, Hannah Priscilla Craig was among the group of artists who decided to launch , a movement using art and culture as “ in the struggle for sovereignty, dignity, and self-determination.” They released a solidarity statement, which received more than 8,000 signatures in the first few days. Soon after, Artists Against Apartheid transformed into a network that encourages artists to embed themselves in organizing and activism. “It’s not just we as individuals [who] are dedicating ourselves to Palestine,” Craig explains. “It’s actually a recognition of the practice of the artwork as part of the overall strategy toward liberation.”&�Բ�����;

Craig, who serves as the director of arts, culture, and communications for the —the community space in New York City where Artists Against Apartheid originated—sees how integral cultural production is to raising awareness about the plight of Palestinians. “People are consuming culture almost every moment of every day … whether we consciously realize it or not,” she says. “It’s important for us, on the side of justice [and] liberation, to take up that tool—and take it more seriously than our enemies.”&�Բ�����;

Artists Against Apartheid offers to help artists create banner drops, public art installations, film screenings, street theater, and more to bring the Palestinian liberation movement into their communities. the (theatrical testimonies written by Palestinian youth), of President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the annual , and developed more than 6,000 poster designs. Craig says the posters have been pasted around Barcelona, Spain; exhibited in galleries in Arizona; and made into stickers circulated throughout the U.S. 

People are consuming culture almost every moment of every day. … It’s important for us, on the side of justice [and] liberation, to take up that tool—and take it more seriously than our enemies.” —Hannah Priscilla Craig

Artists Against Apartheid draws inspiration from the , a group of cultural workers who in the 1970s and later inspired an international boycott that helped undo apartheid policies. Craig also highlights the , which were first formed in 1929 by artists, writers, and journalists to advocate for better working conditions during the Great Depression. 

“Those histories are often ignored, forgotten, and left out of the history books because they are so dangerous to the ruling class,” Craig says. Artists Against Apartheid works to “reinvigorate and bring back to the forefront the way that artists and cultural workers are part of political [and liberation] movements.”&�Բ�����;

The number of signatories on Artists Against Apartheid’s statement has nearly doubled in the year since it was released, with prominent musicians including , , and Noname signing on and using their art to . “Musicians are ready to take on the charge and the task of speaking clearly and with conviction about the need to take seriously the political situation in the world,” Craig says. “It’s really showing that these cultural spaces, these social spaces, are also spaces of political struggle.”&�Բ�����;

Ultimately, Artists Against Apartheid calls on artists of all media to use creative intervention as a strategy for mobilization. “The reality is that struggle happens everywhere,” she explains. “We have to fight back in all of the spaces that are available to us.”&�Բ�����;

Do Not Consent

While artists continue to envision an end to the U.S.-backed genocide, Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG) are disrupting the media apparatus that defends it. After releasing an , the coalition of media, cultural, and academic workers has engaged in a series of actions to call out national media outlets over their coverage of Israel and Palestine, including The New York Times. 

“[The Times] is considered the paper of record in the U.S. [and] in the West,” says Nour, a writer and member of WAWOG. (Nour requested to be identified by first name only and emphasized that the coalition acts as a collective.) But The Times has been “manufacturing consent for a genocide.”&�Բ�����;

Some writers at The Times after it cracked down on its own journalists for publicly supporting Palestine. Others, including Nour, in November 2023 to protest its coverage, carrying agitprop newspapers titled . “The Times is equivalent to an arms manufacturer, but in the cultural space,” says Naib, a journalist and writer who is also part of WAWOG and has asked to be identified by first name only out of concern for retaliation. The paper represents, in theory, “both objectivity [and] the high-minded, liberal elite of America.”&�Բ�����;

Following the protest, the coalition evolved the agitprop into a , debunking the false notion of objectivity and critiquing and analyzing The Times’ coverage of Israel. In the article “,” the paper provides a style guide demonstrating how The Times’ word choice, syntax, and passive voice push the narrative that Israel is fighting a “just war.” Another revealed that The Times quoted Israeli and American sources following Oct. 7, 2023, more than three times as often as Palestinian sources, and U.S. officials more than all of its Palestinian sources combined. The New York Times did not respond to a request for comment. 

Naib says mainstream reporters use other rhetorical tools to “create empathy amongst American audiences for Israel and not for Palestine.” For example, when a story describes occupational violence against Palestinians, it doesn’t specify that it was done by Israel or the Israeli military. “It’s ‘a strike killed Palestinians,’ not ‘an Israeli strike,’” he explains, referencing coverage of the ongoing air strikes. “In almost all media, any discussion of Palestine will always come with, ‘These events started on October 7.’ … We always have to acknowledge what happened on October 7, [but never what happened] before October 7.”&�Բ�����;

WAWOG is also committed to shining a light on the humanity of Palestinians. Through more than a dozen issues of The New York War Crimes, the coalition has published the words of and ; spotlighted , , and solidarity; and uplifted the voices of those (uprising). They’ve also inspired the birth of similar publications such as . 

The coalition also encourages audiences to collectively hold establishment media accountable. “We think so much about what is happening in the writing itself, but being an observer, a reader, [or] in the audience is not a passive activity,” Naib says. “You are actively legitimizing the organization by consuming what they’re producing.”&�Բ�����;

Nour adds that audiences can “refuse to be part of the New York Times narrative” by boycotting publications complicit in their coverage of Palestine, while motivating media workers to organize within their workplaces. “If we refuse to write the way they want us to write, we can actually do something,” she says. 

The network’s plan to build a “” also includes a that covers organizing history in both Palestine and the U.S., touching on the Black Panther Party as well as movements formed during the Vietnam War and the AIDS crisis. “Culture is oftentimes the strongest tool in maintaining the status quo,” Naib says. “Our role as cultural workers isn’t only to produce culture; it’s to take action.”&�Բ�����;

A Dance for Palestine

“It is the right of children in Gaza to be joyful,” says Bashar Al-Bilbisi, a 24-year-old Palestinian dancer, theater artist, pharmacist, and head of the . Since 2016, the troupe of young people has performed and trained others throughout Gaza in , a traditional and Indigenous Palestinian dance. 

When Al-Fursan first launched, Al-Bilbisi used dance to address issues such as COVID-19, gender-based violence, and youth emigration. The group performed at the Palestine International Festival and toured around France. Their performances even contributed to the registering of dabke as “intangible heritage” . 

But everything changed when Israel began relentlessly bombing Gaza and destroying theaters and cultural spaces. Now, Al-Bilbisi and his fellow dancers mainly teach dabke to children in displacement camps across the region. “We face lots of trauma, lots of wars, and we need a tool such as dance to get that out,” says Al-Bilbisi, whose responses have been translated from Arabic to English. 

Sometimes that means encouraging children to “forget about the external world and to enjoy themselves” during training. Other times, it’s leaving space for them to grieve. During one exercise, a young girl suddenly began to cry. Her two brothers had been taken by Israeli forces, and she no longer knew where they were or if they were alive. “I left her alone to cry as much as she wanted,” Al-Bilbisi says. Afterward, she began talking more openly about her brothers’ capture and became more involved with the group. “That’s why I would work on the training of dabke. It helps them express themselves,” he adds. “It’s not just about movement or choreography; it’s what’s beyond the performance.”&�Բ�����;

Al-Fursan trainers are located throughout the Gaza Strip, including in heated war zones where, Al-Bilbisi says, “the only thing between them and death is a coincidence.” Two trainers were bombed by Israel at the Church of Saint Porphyrius; another in North Gaza trained children whose parents were killed in yet another Israeli bombing, Al-Bilbisi says. “Whenever we go to train children, there is always somebody targeted and killed as we go.”&�Բ�����;

At the time of this writing, Al-Bilbisi is based in a supposed safe zone. He plans to continue the work, saying, “The risks are enormous … but we believe in a mission and a vision, and we would like to fulfill it.”&�Բ�����;

Though the genocide has yet to end, he is firm in the role the ensemble will play in rebuilding Gaza and all of Palestine. “If houses are demolished, they can be rebuilt,” he says. “What’s more difficult is to rebuild people psychologically and to rebuild humanity.”&�Բ�����;

That’s why the ensemble also works to deepen the world’s understanding and awareness of what it’s like to be a Palestinian in Gaza. In 2023 the group released , an directed by Al-Bilbisi that focuses on how artists’ lives changed throughout the last year of occupation. It has been shown at across the world. “The message—as a group, as an ensemble, as trainers, as artists, as children whom we work with, and as a community in Gaza—is that we would like war to stop and that we love life,” Al-Bilbisi says. 

Underneath it all, he believes it is his duty to create not only artists, but human beings who belong to their land. “When we are in one line, holding each other’s hands, it gives the sense of solidarity, that we are all together,” he continues. “It also shows how rooted we are, touching the land or the floor. We’re there, strongly. We’re there.”&�Բ�����;

This is Patrick Blindauer’s last puzzle for è������! as he moves on to new projects. We would like to thank Patrick for all the engaging and thoughtful puzzles he’s contributed since our Spring 2018 issue. 

After the Dull Knife Battle in November 1876, a society of Cheyenne men sat down and documented their account of the events on a buffalo hide or robe—the traditional medium on which my ancestors told stories and kept records. The buffalo hide is where they memorialized important moments in the Tribe’s history, as well as their own personal achievements. And they did so using pigments they created from their environment with ingredients like ash, soils, berries, and plants.

The Dull Knife hide was kept in a camp at the foothills of the Bighorn Mountains. But this camp was a major target for the United States Cavalry, which was still in search of those tribes involved in the Battle of the Little Bighorn, which had taken place in June 1876 and left the U.S. military sorely defeated.

After scouts reported the camp’s whereabouts, the cavalry ambushed it. The Cheyennes put up a good fight but eventually fled deeper into the Bighorn Mountains in freezing conditions. As the cavalry raided the now-empty camp, a soldier stole the painted buffalo hide out of a tipi. And thus the beloved hide, and the story it told, began its journey away from its people.

Heartbreakingly, this kind of theft was all too common for us. It was part of the settler-colonialist effort to erase us from our homelands—and erase us altogether. Oftentimes when sacred objects were taken from camps, they were locked in private collections with no way to track or find them. Many were never seen again, and the Cheyennes had mourned the loss of this buffalo hide and accepted its fate to be gone forever. But after more than 100 years, this hide was once again seen by the descendants of the people from which it came.

On the 146th anniversary of the battle, the unveiling and honoring of this historical object took place at the Brinton Museum in northern Wyoming. Tribal Members and the Northern Cheyenne Tribal Historic Preservation Office were invited to view it. Many eyes filled with tears as our traditional honor songs filled the room. The sacred objects that surrounded us, caged in glass, hummed in their display cases. They, too, were excited to be a part of this honoring; it’s not everyday we as Indigenous people get to practice our ceremonies for pieces put into institutions. This was a raw and powerful experience for everyone and everything involved.

At this moment, in the presence of it all, I felt the importance of keeping our hide-painting tradition alive. I understood the impact this form of storytelling has on my own culture and on those who experience it from near and far. Although this painted retelling of the Dull Knife Battle now hangs in another non-Indigenous collection, it is closer to home than it’s ever been, and relatives are able to view it freely.

And so, in the winter of 2023, I began my renaissance of buffalo hide paintings, not far from where the Dull Knife robe was painted nearly 150 years earlier.

As a storyteller and an artist, I have painted with many different media before, on canvas, ledger paper, felt cowboy hats, and more. I had never painted on something like a tanned buffalo hide, though. Plastic paints like acrylics simply didn’t stick to the surface. Oil paints bled and left dark spots. This required me to use trial and error, as well as asking elders, scouring the internet, and reading historical books to figure out the best way to use modern materials for such a traditional technique.

To practice, I started with a vintage elk hide, which I hoped would behave similarly to buffalo, but was much easier to source. Black, white, blue, red, and yellow pigments sat in small vibrant piles of powder on my palette. While I wasn’t able to source everything the way my ancestors had, I gathered materials from far and wide to bring these pieces to life. Slowly, I began to add water and buffalo fat, mixing them with the powders until the consistency was smooth and even. The thinner the paint was, I found, the easier it was to push it across the surface of the hide.

I hung the elk hide from the wall, tacked along the top and pulled taut by gravity. I sprayed a layer of water and watched as the hide went from a bright off-white to a dark tan. Spraying the hide opens the skin’s pores and makes the painting process much easier. After a deep breath to steady my hand, I began with my first paint stroke. The nerves, the worry, and all other thoughts in my head went silent. I could feel my ancestors guiding my hands as I worked the earth pigments into the tanned hide. Almost like being in a trance, I brought paint to hide without feeling the passage of time, and the portrait of a woman appeared in front of me. She was an Arapaho/Cheyenne woman warrior who gave me the confidence that the vision I was seeing in my head was achievable in real life.

After I finished the elk hide, I was ready to move on to the much larger buffalo hide that was patiently waiting its turn to become a part of my story, the story of a modern Indigenous artist. I already knew who I wanted to paint next: I could see in my mind’s eye the contrasts of bright red and electric blue against neutral black and white, and the tan of the unpainted skin of the hide.

I chose to paint an Apsáalooke (Crow) medicine woman by the name of Pretty Shield. A strong matriarch revered for her knowledge of medicinal plants, Pretty Shield had influence that reached far beyond her own tribe. I chose to render her in black-and-white natural pigments, representing a time when reservations were fresh and photographers were documenting the foreign feelings throughout Indian Country in black and white.

Rising above her is a halo of medicinal plants. I chose to represent this aspect of her work in contemporary color to show its continued relevance and vitality in modern times.

Each aspect of the hide represents a different generation of storytelling and art. The first generation is the hide itself, the traditional material. The second generation is the black-and-white photography that captured the first accounts of reservation life. The third generation is the contemporary style of bright colors and stylized plants.

My own love for medicinal plants comes from another matriarchal figure in my life: my mother. Bringing wellness back to the reservation through healers, medicinal plants, and creative outlets, she provided opportunities for people to help themselves, much like Pretty Shield. These two women reflect each other’s energy and inspire me to see the medicine women of today.

Pretty Shield is the first in a collection of women I plan to pay tribute to with my paint. Each of them has impacted their Plains Tribe communities with their inspiring accomplishments and gifts. I want to honor our shared stories by continuing to push the boundaries of traditional materials and contemporary ideas. I want to uplift the generations surrounding me to live in their medicine, to live out their dreams, and to live how our ancestors dreamed for us.

My name is Shawnee Real Bird, and I am Apsáalooke (Crow). Five years ago, I held a first-edition Edward Curtis portfolio in my hands for the first time. Curtis’ revolved around preserving his outsider view of lifestyles that existed before the United States of America did—before we were ever called “Indians.”

He spent the first three decades of the 20th century photographing more than 80 tribes across the continent, including mine. The published result, , is a 20-volume set that captures a pivotal time in Native American history. Curtis recorded my Apsáalooke people in 1908, as they began their transition from nomadic freedom on the plains to isolation on reservations.

Among the thousands of sepia-toned images Curtis took is one of my great-great-grandfather, Richard Wallace, known to our people as Eyes Taken Out, as well as one of his brother, John. Today these visual remembrances aid the oral histories of my people. Born in 1998, I am part of a generation of Native Americans who know the stories of life on the plains but whose upbringings reflect reservation life. For us, The North American Indian has become a sort of Rosetta stone, helping us connect our ancestral memories with our modern lives.

In the spirit of his great-grandfather, whom the Northern Plains people affectionately referred to as Shadow Catcher, Graybill and his wife, Coleen, are working to capture shadows of today’s realities. Their “” aims to amplify the voices of Native Peoples whose ancestors were photographed by Curtis.

I am one of those descendants.

Five generations after Curtis’ visit to the Northern Plains Tribes, Graybill journeyed to the Crow Reservation to capture my story on a dry plate glass negative. I chose to bring him to the Wolf Teeth Mountains, where my mother rode horses with me in her belly and where I now chase wild horses on foot. It is also the only place I’ve ever seen my dad, a lifelong Indian-Cowboy, connect to himself, and only then on the back of a horse. It’s a place his ancestral DNA understands better than anywhere else. Among the sagebrush, my father and the horse become one spirit.

I began riding horses with my parents when I was 3. It was then that I witnessed my dad’s ability to create a connection to our First Maker and integrate that spiritual relationship into his modern existence. As a young person, I wondered what I would connect with that could become a portal to the old way of life I longed for.

Growing up on the reservation, I heard oral histories from my elders and often questioned where I belonged. Those who existed before me thrived in the harsh mountains of Montana. They survived wars with enemy tribes, followed by genocide and boarding schools, then reservation life, always striving to preserve what makes our Apsáalooke hearts strong.

In today’s fast-paced world, filled with isolating technologies, the way of life that my Apsáalooke elders taught me felt out of place. It wasn’t until I learned to fly that I was able to merge my modern identity with my ancestral roots. In 2019, I became the first Apsáalooke airplane pilot. In the cockpit of a Cessna 172, I find solace with the sky beings who populate my tribal histories. When the plane’s altimeter reads 10,000 feet—the same altitude at which my Apsáalooke people once sought visions atop mountains—I honor the ability to connect, to have finally found my place among the clouds.

As Graybill sets up the vintage camera, I close my eyes (for all great things are felt most fully with your eyes closed). I am full of adrenaline, surrounded by 15 wild horses from the herd of my grandfather, Timber Leader. I know the feeling well. It bounces between the palms of my hands and gathers as sweat along my lips. I trust the horses with the entirety of my being. I take a deep breath and imagine my light expanding beyond me. All the generations of cowboys and medicine women that make up my “blood quantum” stand behind me. I put my spirit in that moment to be captured by exposure and alchemy.

From behind the camera I hear Graybill say, “Got it,” and we all breathe again. The feeling from my hands disappears. It now lives within that dry plate image. More than 100 years separate my image from those captured by Curtis. Looking at my photograph next to those of my ancestors, I am unrecognizable to them, and one day I will be unrecognizable to the generations that follow. Only the contents of our hearts will reveal our creation stories to be the same.

While enslaved people were intentionally kept illiterate, the abolitionist movement still treated these pamphlets—and antislavery newspapers—as signposts, signaling that even amid their suffering, enslaved people were being fought for. Their human condition wasn’t being disregarded in favor of profit; instead, there was a growing movement advocating for their freedom and for their right to lead a self-determined life. 

In her new book, , Tricia Hersey calls upon some of these same abolitionist tools, including pamphlets, hymnals, poetry, and imagery, to convey a similarly urgent message: If we do not take rest seriously and divorce ourselves from capitalism, we will die much sooner than we should. While that might feel alarmist, it’s a message Hersey has been conveying for years as the . The “” uses her own life as a model for how we can collectively escape “grind culture” and embrace rest as a spiritual practice. 

“I thought I would die,” Hersey writes in We Will Rest!, an unconventional manifesto and meditation about how she learned to care for herself in a world that doesn’t allow us to slow down. “I thought the exhaustion of capitalism would crush me. Rest saved my life.” As Hersey often reminds us: Rest is a matter of life and death. 

Rest is essential to our long-term survival as individuals and a collective. Birthing a creative renaissance requires rest that isn’t reliant on productivity. Hersey’s book calls upon our ancestors, including Harriet Tubman, the Underground Railroad conductor who , to become escape artists ourselves—to help unchain our imaginations from the bounds of capitalism and embrace new possibilities. “Anyone in this culture who believes and feels they are enough right now has begun the escape artist transformation,” Hersey writes. “To know in the deepest parts of your soul that your birth grants you divinity, rest, care, and power is a seed planted in fertile ground.”&�Բ�����;

Much like those abolitionist pamphlets, We Will Rest! serves as a guidepost for those who seek rest but are unsure if it’s available to them. The book begins with a thought-provoking question: “How do you find rest in a capitalist, white supremacist, patriarchal, ableist system?” This system teaches us that rest must be earned through work, and received with humble gratitude. But Hersey offers an alternative: If we become “escape artists” or “tricksters” who defy systems that discourage us from rest, then we can prioritize our needs. 

For Black people, in particular, Hersey accurately argues that rest is our ancestral inheritance and must be protected at all costs. “The first step for morphing into an escape artist is belief,” she writes. “You must believe you have the power to refuse. You must believe you have been gifted with everything necessary. You must be a trickster. No matter what, you must not show fear. We are abundant.”&�Բ�����;

Once we believe we’re entitled to rest and our ancestors have paved the way for us to claim this birthright, then we must imagine the life we desire for ourselves. “Create community,” Hersey writes. “Be community. Community care can seem impossible when you are exhausted. It is possible.” It is only through crafting this community— day by day, moment by moment, and person to person—that change can come. 

It’s not as complicated as we might make it out to be. The world we imagine will come to us through silence, through daydreaming, and through unwavering belief. “Every day, morning or night, or whenever you can steal away, find silence,” she writes. “Even if for only a few minutes.”&�Բ�����;

We don’t need to have it all figured out to begin this personal and collective rest revolution. “Capitalism has a choke hold over our lives right now,” Hersey writes. “The next second, the next minute, the next hour, is ours to refuse the grind. We can craft and build temporary spaces of joy and freedom here now.”&�Բ�����;

Like those abolitionist pamphlets, We Will Rest! offers encouragement in times of uncertainty—a reminder of our fundamental humanity, and affirms the truth that rest is ours for the taking. And we’ve already done all we need to do to “deserve” the freedom it brings. 

The shout came from a group of Proud Boys, a far-right street gang, while they approached a (IWW) in September 2018. While the IWW, a radical labor union that and Washington State, is certainly anti-fascist, this was a union action—not an “antifa” protest. But those facts mattered little to the right-wing agitators who had made Portland a flash point in political violence. As the Proud Boys sought to instigate, one IWW member, Sinead Steiner, remembers union activists pivoting in an attempt to de-escalate. 

IWW members engaged the Proud Boys in mundane discussions about labor law while other demonstrators began using silly chants to lower the emotional temperature. The method was effective, no one faced harm, and the union action continued. This was not the first time the far right had threatened the IWW, so members knew they needed to walk into any protest with a nimble plan that included employing some form of community self-defense. 

As Donald Trump ascended to power in 2016, there was in as well as far-right and racist groups such as the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and militias, and other neo-Nazi formations. They stormed U.S. cities, often holding rallies intended to provoke counterprotesters whom they could attack. As a result, there was a rise in left-wing formations, including the John Brown Gun Club and the Socialist Rifle Association, that say armed community self-defense may be a necessary component of safety, which in this case means protecting activists from racist militants.��

The threats that the far right presented to Portland’s left—along with the historical repression of unions by racist foot soldiers—are why unionists were prepared in Portland that afternoon. In the 1910s and ’20s, IWW members, who were called “Wobblies,” invited coal miners and others to join “industrial unions” to win power by organizing as many workers as possible. Meanwhile, private security contractors whose job was to disrupt strikes with force in the 19th and early 20th century. 

The Ku Klux Klan, which, like later fascist groups, despised the anti-capitalist and multiracial implications of the IWW, also showed up to crush labor. In June 1924, members of the in San Pedro, California, injuring 300 members while kidnapping, tarring, and feathering others. To be a unionist, and a leftist, was to be a target.��

Amid this rise in brutality and repression, some IWW members created the IWW General Defense Committee (GDC) in 1917 as a separate organization to support activists facing reprisals. Nearly a century later, IWW members in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota—some of whom had been involved in anti-fascist organizing across the 1980s and ’90s—re-engaged the GDC as an anti-fascist auxiliary to the IWW. GDC chapters then popped up around the country, including in Portland, to fight the fascist insurgency and to defend communities against a rash of street violence. 

These kinds of threats were nothing new. Historically, wherever working-class social movements grow, fascists see them as distinct threats both because of their politics and the marginalized communities they represent. To guard against this, self-defense projects—organized efforts where people from these communities are trained, and often armed—are formed to ward off these outside threats. Whether the appearance of self-defense squads is enough to scare off fascist attacks or if actual force is necessary to fight far-right militants back, these kinds of formations have been a reasonably common feature of how communities maintain their autonomy during escalating right-wing violence. 

At the same time, the police—ostensibly defenders of peace and order— and rarely keep activists safe from right-wing assaults. For abolitionists who prefer transformative justice to incarceration, police are not the answer to community safety. “To me, community self-defense can be … an alternative to the police and courts, but it would depend on the situation—and for that matter the community,” says Daryle Lamont Jenkins, founder of the and its news website, . “It means you do as much as you can to handle a situation as a community when one arises.”&�Բ�����;

Community self-defense has become central to contemporary social movements. Just as their predecessors did, activists today seek a safety model that understands the threats they face and doesn’t reproduce the problems of the justice system. 

Deep Roots

Social movements have historically had a self-defense component. Many earlier left-wing political parties or organizations had a militant wing, in which members were trained as a defensive force that could keep their growing membership safe from violent right-wing counterefforts. 

In the early 20th century, the Jewish Labour Bund, a Jewish socialist movement involved in organizing labor unions and Yiddish schools around Eastern Europe and Russia, created self-defense squads to protect Jewish communities from racist attacks, known as “pogroms,” which were escalating during that time. 

By 1905 there were Jewish self-defense groups in 42 cities, and they were often a collaborative offshoot from various leftist groups. Because many left-wing revolutionaries saw both modern nation states and reactionary political movements as their enemies, they believed they had to take measures to keep themselves safe from both entities. 

Much of the postwar left emerged directly out of the need for community safety. Take, for instance, the Black Power movement, which formed in the 1960s and ’70s and considered resilience and empowerment to be central to their work. “I have asserted the right of Negroes to meet the violence of the Ku Klux Klan by armed self-defense—and have acted on it,” wrote Robert F. Williams in 1962. Williams was an organizer who took control of the Monroe, North Carolina, chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, grew it by hundreds, and chartered it with the National Rifle Association to teach members how to defend themselves against Klan terror. 

In 1966 the Black Panther Party was founded first and foremost as an organization to monitor and intervene on police violence, a project the party eventually saw as part of a “united front against fascism.” That slogan became the name for the Panthers’ 1969 conference that convened a range of other radical groups, including Students for a Democratic Society, the Young Patriots Organization, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.��

In 1966, Panthers began armed patrols of Oakland neighborhoods as a message to local police not to threaten the rights and safety of Black residents. They held rallies when police refused to investigate police killings, such as the . The Panthers used these opportunities to teach community members how to build armed self-defense squads as both an alternative to the police and a deterrent against police violence. The Panthers inspired other self-defense efforts, including the Lavender Panthers (sometimes known as Purple Panthers), an armed defense group formed by the Gay Activist Alliance in 1973 to defend San Francisco’s LGBTQ community against homophobic attacks. 

“Something that the Black radical tradition tells us … is that we can’t organize in just one mode,” says Jeanelle Hope, Ph.D., an associate professor of African American Studies at Prairie View A&M University who studies Black anti-fascist movements. Along with legal pathways, self-defense, and more radical anarchist tactics, Hope points to the myriad mutual aid programs the Black Panther Party organized to meet people’s daily needs, including offering free breakfast to children and running the . 

This history creates what Ejeris Dixon described as a movement lineage, whereby she and others come from a tradition of radicals “who have dedicated our lives to our community safety.” This communal resiliency inspired Dixon to co-write “,” a community safety tool kit she created alongside the anti-racist organization . The guide offers a number of ideas, including how to create effective protest formations. 

When people on the right talk about security, it often simply means firearms. But for those on the political left, community self-defense is a much bigger idea. “The most important part of how you frame community defense is to acknowledge that you provide something the state cannot … when you build a culture of community defense around you … you have a lot more protection from violence,” says Lucas Hubbard, communications director for Socialist Rifle Association, which does not advocate for forming militias but does support working-class people learning firearm skills and developing mutual aid networks. 

But as Hubbard notes, self-defense projects are only an alternative to the status quo if they match the community’s expressed desires. “First thing you do in providing community defense … is to ask what that means to them,” says Hubbard, pointing to issues like food insecurity and housing access as frontline threats. Community defense could mean developing strong bonds between affected people to better address their needs, employing armed security at queer youth events, or securing resources for those facing eviction, but it is just as likely to involve getting people the resources they need during a COVID-19 spike. 

“If you want to help a community, they have to trust you,” says Snow, a founding member of the Asian American self-defense group (YPT) who goes by one name. The organization works to demystify community self-defense, including gun ownership and mutual aid organizing, in part by creating an alternative media infrastructure to shift perception about who owns firearms and why. 

“In moments where I have seen [community defense], it’s always been something that has been asked for explicitly,” says Snow. YPT formed in 2020 amid a slew of anti-Asian hate crimes. Organizers from around the U.S. met through activist networks and began supporting each other not just in learning self-defense and firearms skills but also in creating more visible networks of care and connecting their ideas about community empowerment to international struggles such as supporting anarchists fighting Russian aggression in Ukraine.��

YPT helped create educational programs around responsible firearm ownership and started a podcast, Tiger Bloc, that demystifies disaster preparedness and community defense in terms that avoid adventurism and right-wing cynicism. As Snow points out, firearms themselves are often less important to community safety than, for example, “good digital hygiene” (using security protocols in digital communication and taking measures to remove personal information from the internet), locating good de-escalators to intervene in tense protest interactions, and ensuring demonstrations have trained street medics who can save lives if needed.��

Community self-defense is directly intertwined with other social movements because all political causes—and their solutions—are tied with intersecting issues of race and class. Effective safety plans bring together a community’s struggles, identify what creates cracks in safety, and consider all movements to be potential tools for repair.��

A True Safety Plan

Because many potential harms and threats are distinct, a complete plan for community safety has to be broad enough to address everything from racist violence to incursions with the police. An expansive vision of community safety does not stop at the most immediate threats but offers some vision of an alternative to existing carceral options. 

Vision Change Win’s guide says a comprehensive vision of community safety includes “security, office and organizational safety, verbal de-escalation, physical de-escalation, personal safety, transformative justice processes, community safety neighborhood strategies, bystander intervention, and cop watch.” It helps to outline the different questions you need to ask about events you are holding, what roles are necessary to keep attendees safe, and how to align every security choice with the community’s values. 

While police often play similar social roles in repressing movements, they have different legal leeway and require different responses. This is why Vision Change Win’s training focuses on a range of situations, including what to do when police attempt to enter activist spaces and how to de-escalate nonpolice threats. 

An example is Vision Change Win’s section on dealing with Rebellion Containment Agents—“less lethal” weapons such as chemical gas or pepper spray that are used by police against protest crowds. While often presented by law enforcement as relatively safe, these containment agents were tied to major injuries during the 2020 racial justice uprisings. The guide instructs demonstrators on how to deal with incoming projectiles, how to care for someone who has been exposed to caustic chemicals, and how street medics and those providing on-site care can make medical remedies from common materials.��

In addition to responding to police arrests and ensuring people know their legal rights, community defense also includes strategies to mitigate COVID and other pandemics. Good safety plans take into account both a community’s values and COVID transmission so as not to replicate many of the harms activists are hoping to mitigate. 

“I think having vulnerable relationships with people … where if there is somebody in your life you can talk [to] about both survivorship and harm, I think that makes us safer,” says Dixon. This also points to what are often called transformative justice programs designed to, as Dixon describes, “prevent and intervene in violence, and repair and heal from harm without the use of prisons.”&�Բ�����;

These can take the form of “accountability processes” that combat harm by addressing the behavior, demanding change and the admission of culpability, and supporting both the survivor and the perpetrator in their journey. This kind of vulnerability can exist in many kinds of communities, but especially those that are bonded. “Transformative justice is relying on the relationships … to leverage them into better behavior and accountability,” says Dixon. 

These are big, radical ideas—and that is part of the point: Community self-defense is not a singular solution but part of an ongoing project that seeks to address the fundamental unsafety of the society we currently inhabit. Through overlapping systems of inequality and oppression, many people feel isolated, targeted, and forced to face huge hurdles alone. But when members of a community see their struggles as interconnected and their issues as systemic, then modest responses become insufficient. 

Community self-defense is a piece of the larger work of building an equitable society, but it will only be truly realized if a larger mass movement confronts the entire system of structural inequity. “You have to believe in something bigger,” says Dixon. “You have to believe in transformation.”&�Բ�����;

Election 2024 brought the lowest of lows—Donald Trump’s wildest, most fascist fantasies manifesting in a parade of hate—and the highest highs—the late-breaking entry of a multiracial woman of color who snagged the Democratic Party’s nomination. Vice President Kamala Harris launched a record-breaking billion-dollar campaign amid a tidal wave of young women progressives spurred by attacks on their bodily autonomy. 

Over and over, we were told this was the most important election of our lifetimes. We, the people, were asked to choose between an apologist for genocide, the specter of fascist insurrection, or a third-party option that had no serious prospects for victory.

Along the way to winning the election, Trump and his allies reduced so many of us to objects, to evildoers, to garbage, to the enemy. If we made it through these past months, it was with a sense of nervous hope that the insults and attacks had an expiration date. If we could just make it to Nov. 6, we could deal with the trauma, heal, and look forward to holding the centrist establishment accountable. 

Along the way to losing the election, Harris and her backers flirted with A-list celebrities and , repeatedly shunned Palestinians fighting for their rights, pushed back against demands to hold Israel accountable for genocide, and wrapped it all up with an appearance on Saturday Night Live.��

With both candidates’ approaches top of mind, I began monitoring election results on Nov. 5, feeling—to quote one woman I overheard say to another that morning—“nauseously optimistic.” As I anxiously monitored the New York Times’ , coaxing it toward the blue-tinged left, I found myself reliving the , when that same needle veered suddenly to the red-hued right.��

So, here we are again, waking up to a new chapter of the same nightmare we experienced from 2016 to 2020. Now, as we are still reeling from many months of abuse, we face the prospect of four more years of it. 

We need to understand what has happened and how to move from here. But we also need to take a moment to mourn—for ourselves; for our fellow Americans and especially immigrants; for our Black, Brown and queer sisters, brothers, and kinfolk; for our children’s imperiled future; and for our country’s fate. 

In the coming months, we’re going to read reams of analyses about why Harris lost the  election: the insurmountable polarization our country is experiencing, third-party candidates’ “spoiler” effects, the blind spots and failures of the Harris campaign, political amnesia, whether the nation is ready to elect a woman, and how Trump’s voters will regret supporting a demagogue. 

But maybe it’s not even that complicated. 

“In so many ways our leaders have failed us, and a lot of people are really struggling,” immigrant rights organizer and author Silky Shah said on a recent episode of my show, . “And the easy thing that happens is blaming immigrant communities when, in fact, obviously we should be blaming those who have put in these policies that aren’t helping communities on the whole.”

Most Americans agree on their basic needs: good jobs and , , and so on. They also . Indeed, some of those who picked Trump might have done so because , while others might be hopelessly invested in racist, misogynist, queerphobic, anti-immigrant hate—or both. Together they number , or 51% of the electorate, with of Latino men, younger voters, and first-time voters.��

The rest of us—about 67 million—who picked Harris, either did so holding our nose to keep Trump away from the levers of power, or genuinely believed she was a force for good. (It is this latter group that is probably most shocked and perplexed by the election results). 

Instead of a shift toward policies that prioritize collective care—which could unite Americans—what we got from the two major-party political candidates were false narratives that largely fell into two camps: Trump painted the nation as a dystopian quagmire that only a strongman like him could fix, while Harris’ campaign was based on the idea that we must preserve the booming economy she and incumbent President Joe Biden ushered in. 

But in truth, both parties have moved dramatically rightward. According to investigative journalist and è������! contributor Arun Gupta, “One is a hard-right Republican party known as the Democrats, and the other is a fascist party, a MAGA party known as the Republicans.”��

Shah concurred, saying she found it “actually really surreal to see how far to the right things have moved and how much Democrats aren’t even really advocating for immigrants in the way that they were before.”

Gupta attended Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally in New York City that made headlines for its speakers’ . He saw a different reality than the one being reported in corporate media outlets. “You had lots of anti-Palestinian, anti-immigrant bombast. But that is only half the equation,” he said, a week before the election. “What’s really going on at these rallies … is love and �󲹳ٱ�.”

He concluded that Trump supporters are “there as much out of hate as they are out of love. And they go there because these rallies make them feel good about themselves. They make them feel good about the country, that they’re part of a movement.”

What if we all seek a love-based movement that prioritizes us over the interests of elites? What if Trump’s election is a horrific manifestation of a nation cutting off its nose to spite its face? There are no easy answers to these questions, but since we have failed to stave off extremist hate from occupying the highest rungs of power, we know the most vulnerable among us will likely pay a heavy price in the coming years. The rest of us can’t give up. 

“Our power and our potential actually goes beyond the ballot box,” says Khury Petersen-Smith, co-director of the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies. “We need to keep on pushing on all of those levers [of power], regardless of who wins, no matter what day—Election Day, the day after, Inauguration Day, the day after.”

We will—we must—get through this time by reminding ourselves that most of us want the same things: safety, security, stability, and—dare I say it?—love. But how we get there as a nation is a conundrum we must continue grappling with.

The two of us have spent the past year protesting the Israeli military’s assault on Gaza, which is funded by the United States government. The day after the storm, as we surveyed the destruction all around us wrought by Hurricane Helene, we thought of the people of Gaza, whom the Israeli government has relentlessly bombed for the past year, destroying their homes, schools, markets, hospitals, places of worship, as well as crucial components of their water and food systems.��

We have always opposed the Israeli military’s destruction of Gaza—one that began long before Oct. 7, 2023—but in observing the destruction in our own backyards and neighborhoods that day, we felt more committed than ever before to ensuring that our government stops sending the bombs that destroy life, land, and infrastructure in Palestine. In our grief, we committed to working toward the restoration of life from Asheville to Gaza.��

Since Oct. 7, 2023, the U.S. government has sent , including $3.8 billion from a supplemental appropriations act in April 2024. Meanwhile, a request from FEMA for an additional $9 billion for disaster relief efforts in the U.S. , a shortfall that limits recovery efforts in Western North Carolina and other areas hit by Hurricane Helene. The numbers tell the story: The U.S. government invests in death while neglecting the lives of people and our planet.

As Western North Carolina University professor Robert Clines wrote in in Mondoweiss: “The devastation from Hurricane Helene and Israel’s escalation in the Middle East may not seem connected. But they are linked through the United States’s commitment to mass militarization, imperial arrogance, exacerbation of climate change, and refusal to work toward a just global future.”

We and other Appalachian Jews are speaking up from the depths of climate devastation, demanding collective liberation now. Anti-Zionist Jews like us live in every corner of the United States and are essential activists and organizers in Southern struggles for environmental justice and collective liberation. Promoting Jewish safety means investing in life rather than death. It looks like fighting real antisemitism in communities that we love and protect, even when we’re cast out by pro-Zionist institutions, including our own religious congregations.

And that is why, on Oct. 6, 2024, we made the decision to still hold a tashlich action that we had been planning for months. Tashlich is a ritual that is part of the Jewish high holiday season and centers on atonement and repair. Out of necessity, we shifted the location from a riverfront park—as the riverbank was washed out and much of the surrounding area was coated in toxin-laden mud—to a bridge overlooking the French Broad River, a waterway so inundated by Hurricane Helene that its currents smashed buildings; carried away people, animals, and vehicles; and spread rocks and mud and trees on its banks for many miles.��

The two of us together and talked of teshuvah—repentance—contemplating how our country’s unwavering support for the Israeli apartheid regime makes all Americans complicit in the genocide of Palestinians. Rather than toss pebbles into the water, as is customary, we opted not to add to the debris lining the riverbed; instead, we placed them on the railing of the bridge, a choice that we later realized was reminiscent of the Jewish tradition of placing stones at gravesites to mark the occasion of visiting the deceased.��

In Asheville, we have begun the process of rebuilding from the hurricane. Gazans, on the other hand, cannot, because the Israeli military has not stopped dropping thousand-pound bombs on their land. that the Israeli military is even targeting aid workers—those who are instrumental to the process of survival. Between October and May, the Israeli military targeted at least eight convoys of aid workers. This is a horrid violation of international law and a devastating act of inhumanity.��

In mid-October, Israeli forces killed ��who were on their way to conduct repairs to Gaza’s water infrastructure, which is itself being destroyed by Israeli air strikes. Receiving news of such killings is always heartbreaking, but after spending the past three weeks contributing to here in Western North Carolina (along with other community-led efforts being coordinated by the and networks), a story like this hits even harder, as we imagine the horror of doing this already-challenging work of delivering aid and humanitarian efforts while under constant threat of state violence.

As we continue to rebuild and heal here in Western North Carolina, we recognize that the destruction we face is a fraction of what the people of Gaza endure daily. While we recover from a single storm, Gazans endure an unrelenting succession of human-made storms being driven by a genocidal war campaign, even as the people working toward recovery and crisis response are themselves being targeted as enemies in this war. 

We will continue to demand that our government stop funding the Israeli military, and to instead spend our tax dollars on repairing harms in Gaza, Asheville, and everywhere there is human suffering. 

Not surprisingly, . A Pew Research Center survey of people in 24 nations in 2023 revealed that 70% of people support direct democracy, with the percentage rising to 77% support for representative democracy. However, since democracy is designed to equalize power among people, it tends to be a work in progress. Even in functioning democracies, and use it to their ends, while those who have less power struggle for their fair share. 

The United States——was once regarded as a shining example of that form of government. But now, people around the world are disappointed in the nation’s approach to democracy. A of people in 34 nations concluded that only about 21% of those surveyed believe the U.S. offers a good model of democracy for the world, while 40% believe the U.S. used to be a source of inspiration but is no longer. The view from within is hardly better: Most people in the U.S. tend to distrust the government, with only about at any given time since 2007. 

Their suspicions are justified, as , a researcher at , explains: “The data suggests that the U.S. is less democratic now than it was a decade ago, even though it remains much more democratic than it was for most of its history.”&�Բ�����;

Because of the incredible promise it holds, democracy is fraught with contradictions and often triggers deep dissatisfaction when it doesn’t live up to its ideals. Indeed, . Herre found that the number of people living in democracies fell from 3.9 billion in 2016 to 2.3 billion in 2023, and that more people are living in countries that are autocratizing.��

To understand why democracies are in decline, it’s worth examining how systems are enacted. The devil is often in the details. In the space between our decision-making and the enactment of those decisions, nefarious and power-hungry actors can hijack processes and sow the seeds of autocracy. 

There are many ways to strengthen democracy amid a rise in authoritarianism. It begins with voters making wise choices: “People can work toward making [the U.S.] more democratic by voting for pro-democracy candidates,” Herre notes. Indeed, we tend to equate democracy with voting—the most tangible way representative democracy is enacted and a critical step in choosing the public servants who make decisions on our behalf. Beyond that, Herre suggests that to make democracy more inclusive, what’s needed is “supporting pro-democracy organizations, and expressing their support for democracy in protests and conversations.”&�Բ�����;

Unfortunately, contemporary systems of representative democracy have become popularity contests in which participants are called upon every couple of years to pick between exceedingly narrow choices. In the U.S. especially, the question of —and therefore participate in democracy—has been debated and legislated for centuries. 

Further, there are structural obstacles to voting baked into the U.S. Constitution, which is the definitive document laying out the rules of democracy and within which are embedded those devilish details that determine the responsiveness of the system. Even after adding various amendments to right historical wrongs, rather than individual voters when it comes to electing a president, and allows for the undemocratic, racist, and complicated Electoral College system. The Constitution also specifies the undemocratic makeup of the , a powerful body that allows smaller, whiter states to have the same power as larger, more racially diverse ones.��

In other words, as Elie Mystal, justice correspondent for The Nation and author of , told è������! in 2022, the U.S. Constitution is “a flawed document that needs to be perfected in order to achieve a level of fundamental fairness and equality that was … missing from the initial draft of it.”&�Բ�����;

He points out that none of the original authors of the Constitution or its amendments were women.“[T]he same goes for LGBTQ communities. The same goes for racial, ethnic, and religious minorities in this country.”&�Բ�����;

If U.S. democracy is exclusionary by design, is it even a democracy at all? 

Democracy for Some

The U.S. Constitution was inspired not only by , but also by formations that had greater physical and temporal proximity to the nation’s modern founders. A acknowledged how the “original framers of the Constitution … are known to have greatly admired the concepts, principles and government practices of the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy,” which today is referred to as the . 

“Our ‘Founding Fathers’ based the U.S. Constitution on the Haudenosaunee Law of Peace,” says Fern Naomi Renville, an enrolled member of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota and Omaha nations, and a Seneca-Cayuga storyteller from Minnesota. Renville adds that acknowledges this debt to the Indigenous peoples of the land. 

“At the time when all of the ‘Founding Fathers’ were having conversations, there were Native people at the table who were consulting … [and] giving input to the colonists, who weren’t all getting along, and they were being advised to come together in the way that the Haudenosaunee Tribes had,” Renville says. 

Through their experience, Indigenous advisers showed the power in forming a union of disparate groups and modeled how settler colonialists could do the same to counter the power of the British Crown. However, Renville says some of the differences between the U.S. Constitution and the Haudenosaunee Law of Peace were deliberately designed to preserve power for those who already had it: wealthy white men. 

“When people learn about the actual inspiration for the U.S. Constitution, it changes how we think about inclusion in those rights,” says Renville. “It changes how we might think about the Bill of Rights, which enshrines what are basically Haudenosaunee principles for good governance. … Just learning that might prompt people to do some growing around how we include everyone … men and women, rich and poor.”&�Բ�����;

Tribes centered women in their democratic structures, and did not operate as capitalists or enslavers. In contrast, the Constitution’s framers imported European ideas of women’s disenfranchisement, human enslavement, and even landownership and property rights. 

When in 1920, they were strongly influenced by Indigenous women who enjoyed political power and decision-making authority over land and food. In 2016, women’s studies historian Sally Roesch Wagner told that early white suffragists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton “believed women’s liberation was possible because they knew liberated women, women who possessed rights beyond their wildest imagination: Haudenosaunee women.”&�Բ�����;

“The Haudenosaunee Law of Peace that the Constitution is based on relies on the power of the clan mothers as the ultimate authority,” says Renville. “That is the one piece that got left out in the application of these ideas on the U.S. Constitution and so that might be a part of why these ideas haven’t been as successfully applied in our country that we have now.”&�Բ�����;

For example, the U.S. Constitution does not enshrine reproductive justice or the right to an abortion because, according to Mystal, “the Constitution did not treat women as full people.”&�Բ�����;

People of color and especially Black people were also excluded from the writing and passage of the , , and Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, which ended enslavement, granted citizenship to African Americans, and legalized voting rights for Black men, respectively. And yet, white supremacist forces continued to curb the democratic rights of people of color until the civil rights movement forced passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. 

Calling it “the most important piece of legislation ever passed in American history,” Mystal attributes Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential win to the Voting Rights Act. “Forty years after the civil rights movement, we end up with the first Black president,” he says. 

U.S. democracy has suffered from constant push-and-pull factors, with excluded communities fighting for and winning rights, and reactionary forces working to undo those gains. Mystal laments how, after Obama’s election, the U.S. Supreme Court “eviscerated” the Voting Rights Act in 2013 and spawned a slew of and dilute the impact of their votes. 

The exclusionary nature of U.S. democracy remains one of its central problems. Today, is seen as a continuation of slavery, with millions of people who are forced to and . 

History offers many lessons in strengthening democracy: After the U.S. incorporated the , a pay-to-play patchwork system that required people to pay taxes in order to vote, women, people of color, and low-income people overcame the corruptive power of money. Eventually, , a retired domestic worker, successfully challenged the poll tax through the 1966 Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections Supreme Court ruling. 

And yet, the overrepresentation of wealth in politics remains one of the greatest challenges to U.S. democracy. A found that 83% of Republicans and Republican-leaning people in the U.S. and 80% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning people in the U.S. feel that big-money donors and special interest lobbyists “have too much influence on decisions made by members of Congress.”&�Բ�����;

What Renville considers “most terrifying” today is “the rulings that recognize corporations as equal to people, so that economic structures have more legal weight than a human being.”&�Բ�����;

Democracy is healthiest when there is greatest participation and power sharing, especially among those who have been historically excluded.”

Gerald Horne, who holds the Moores Professorship of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston, agrees money has too much influence in politics. He offers a salient piece of advice to those seeking to strengthen democracy: “You would have to democratize the economy to begin with,” he says. “When you don’t democratize the economy, the malefactors of great wealth—as [Theodore] Roosevelt used to say—are able to use their economic strength to put a thumb on the scale with regard to politics.” A weighing scale is an apt metaphor for who has influence in U.S. democracy: The political power of historically marginalized people has been outweighed by the nefarious power of wealth and capital. 

Labor unions are microcosms of democracy and offer useful examples of how direct democracy via inclusive decision-making can counter the power of money. Horne says in the early part of the 20th century, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) tended to organize skilled workers but not low-wage workers such as secretaries in their quest for labor rights and better wages and benefits. 

In contrast, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) “was organizing across the board, from top to bottom” in auto plants, Horne adds. “Obviously the CIO model was more democratic than the AFL model.” Ultimately, McCarthyism eroded the CIO, which was then absorbed by the AFL. “We have not learned that much from unions,” says Horne. 

Furthermore, unions are relatively small formations in which direct democracy is a more viable prospect than in nation states. Most of the world’s democracies are representative, which means that people choose leaders to make decisions on their behalf rather than making every decision themselves. In contrast, direct democracies allow people to directly choose policies that govern them. 

Direct Democracies Lead the Way

When it comes to large nations in particular, representative democracy seems more efficient than, say, how a small nation such as —one of the world’s only direct democracies—is run. A nation of fewer than 9 million, the Swiss elect seven councilors every four years to carry out the day-to-day functioning of the government and participate in popular votes up to four times a year on specific measures. It is the closest to a direct democracy the world has today. 

At more than 333 million people, the U.S. is the third most populous nation on the planet, behind India and China. It is also the third-largest in size, behind Russia and Canada. By virtue of its sheer population and geographic size, U.S. democracy is complicated. A republic of 50 states and various territories, the federal government shares sovereign power with state governments. It makes little sense for residents of, say, Maryland, to vote on an issue that disproportionately impacts Oregonians. 

About have some form of Switzerland-like direct democracy, allowing residents to regularly cast votes on ballot measures—a sound approach, at least on paper, to ensuring state-level governments remain responsive to their voters. But there is no direct democracy at the federal level, even for something as simple as choosing the president. 

The Electoral College, where citizens vote for state-level delegates, is arguably one of the biggest tools used to dilute the power of democratic federal representation. Those delegates in turn cast ballots for the president. This is one step removed from representative democracy and could even be considered . 

The complexity of the Electoral College system becomes most apparent every four years, when adults attempt to explain to the children around them that the path to the White House winds its way through a handful of so-called “swing states.” Watch the face of a young person contort in confusion over the fact that a Michigan ballot is far more consequential than one from California, and try to explain why such a system is allowed to define itself as democratic. 

The fact that the Electoral College makes it possible for a presidential nominee to win office even if they lose the popular vote—which has happened , including twice in the past 25 years—has prompted many to call for its abolition. After all, minority rule is a hallmark of autocracy. About favor ending the Electoral College and want direct democracy—at least when it comes to choosing the president. 

“We don’t have to get into these complicated arguments about economic democracy and the power of billionaires,” says Horne. “You can just start with the Electoral College. It’s obvious that the Electoral College reflects a belief on the part of the framers of the Constitution that those small percentages of a potential electorate that could vote were not trustworthy and so therefore you needed this intervening force … to ‘correct’ any ‘mistakes’ that voters had made.”&�Բ�����;

There are efforts underway to end the Electoral College system, the most promising of which is the, a state-by-state effort to end the winner-take-all electors system practiced by 48 out of 50 states. Although the Constitution specifies the use of electors, it doesn’t require states to award all electoral votes to the winner of the statewide popular vote. Each state can therefore pass a law switching to proportional apportionment of electors and, as of , 17 states and the District of Columbia—representing 209 Electoral College votes—have done so. When states representing the majority of electoral votes—270—pass such laws, the Electoral College will effectively become a popular vote. 

Democratizing the Supreme Court

Another obstacle to people’s ability to rule themselves is the increasingly unaccountable U.S. Supreme Court, where only nine people with lifetime terms make decisions affecting hundreds of millions—a dynamic veering uncomfortably close to autocratic rule. 

The Court is prone to financial corruption, with justices having been found to from wealthy friends and then . It is also severely exclusionary in terms of race and gender—out of 116 justices since the nation’s founding, . Moreover, justices are instead of interpreting laws—in effect becoming proxy legislators. 

“One of the reasons why Republicans prefer to do certain things through the Supreme Court is that they can’t actually get them done at the ballot box, because they’re unpopular,” says Mystal, who sees the Supreme Court as one of the biggest counterbalances to U.S. democracy. “People support women’s rights. People, now, support gay rights. Taking those away politically is difficult. That’s why they want the courts to do it.”&�Բ�����;

There are numerous ideas around reforming the Supreme Court, including —a popular idea—and creating a binding code of conduct. President Joe Biden has backed both these ideas, but so far, none of these efforts appear likely to come to fruition. 

Indigenous Democratic Principles

“I believe that how we treat land is how we treat people,” says Renville. The sentiment captures another major difference between the U.S. form of democracy and the Indigenous democratic principles on which the U.S. Constitution was loosely based: Landownership, which is the root of individual financial accumulation and capitalism, had no place in the Haudenosaunee Great Law of Peace. 

Per Renville, “the recognition of the ‘rights of nature’” is a critical piece of inclusion in the U.S. political system that can strengthen democracy. Humans exist within the context of their environment and consequently thrive when their environment is respected. Modern-day democratic systems tend not to consider the rights of nature. Yet, as Renville asserts, we need to begin incorporating “the right of a river or a forest or a mountain or so forth to exist and to be preserved and protected for the future” into our democratic system, as the Haudenosaunee did. 

There is precedent for such an idea. In 2008, in the world to vote on a new Constitution that centered the rights of nature and of natural systems to “exist, flourish, and evolve.” Remarkably, the idea originated in the U.S. and was pushed by a grassroots organization from San Francisco called the , and drafted with the help of the , which is based in Pennsylvania. Today, the is leading a worldwide effort to incorporate similar clauses in the constitutions of all democracies. 

Indigenous principles centering women and nature offer a pathway toward stronger democracy in the U.S. Renville cites the leadership of , the chairwoman of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe in the Northwest U.S. Charles was “a huge part of the force that brought down that Elwha Dam successfully and restored their ancestral beach, and restored the salmon run” so that people could sustain themselves, according to Renville. “That kind of female leadership, I see it as being very connected to the ability to advocate for land and water, and to take care of our lands and people.” After all, care for people and the land is the ultimate measure of success in any democracy. 

Democracy is healthiest when there is greatest participation and power sharing, especially among those who have been historically excluded. Or, as Herre concluded in a , “People turned previous autocratic tides by advocating relentlessly for governing themselves democratically. We have done it before, and can do it again.”&�Բ�����;

A November 2024 for Rosas and thousands of other Santa Ana residents. If voters pass , noncitizen residents will have the right to vote in Santa Ana’s local elections beginning in 2028. It would be the third jurisdiction in California to offer limited voting rights to noncitizens. Meanwhile, nationwide, the number of jurisdictions that have granted some is nearing two dozen, with just last September by a vote of the local Board of Aldermen.

The measure to expand voting rights in Santa Ana is the only one like it on any ballot nationwide in November 2024. It comes as voters are being asked to decide on constitutional amendments that will to preemptively block any noncitizen voting measures from moving forward. Those amendments have been spurred by and former president about immigrants violating voting laws.

Pro-democracy and voter education groups, such as the and , have condemned the proposed amendments for giving credence to conspiracy theories about voter fraud and Democrat-led ballot harvesting. 

“We don’t know what the outcome of the presidential election is going to be in November, but we do know that immigrants have lost regardless because of the rhetoric that has been spewed by both candidates,” says Carlos Perea, executive director at the , which has helped drive the movement for Measure DD in Santa Ana. Not unlike Republican nominee Trump, Democratic nominee Kamala Harris has also adopted a callous tone toward migrants during her campaign, including bragging about backing a bipartisan anti-immigrant bill that her campaign ads call “.”&�Բ�����;

“In an election year where immigrants have become the preferred boogeyman for both presidential candidates, we want to send a message that we are not going to stand for our communities being demonized,” says Perea. “We are defining our lives at the local level, and we want self-determination through political representation.” Perea, a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipient who has lived in Santa Ana since he was 14, is also among the residents who could vote in local elections for the first time if Measure DD passes.

If the call to expand limited voting rights to noncitizens sounds far fetched or new, the suburban town of Takoma Park, Maryland, has news for you. “We just celebrated 30 years of noncitizen voting,” says Jessie Carpenter, Takoma Park’s city clerk responsible for election administration. Voters in Takoma Park voted to allow noncitizen residents to cast ballots in local elections in 1992. The change was implemented the following year and has worked smoothly for decades.

The movement is younger in California, where San Francisco became the first city in the state to grant noncitizens some voting rights in 2016 with a ballot measure called . The change went into effect two years later. San Francisco’s measure, which is more limited in scope than Takoma Park’s, enables noncitizen parents of school children to vote only in school board races. In contrast, all noncitizen residents of Takoma Park can vote in all municipal elections. similar to San Francisco’s in 2022.

Annette Wong, managing director of programs at in San Francisco, says the initiative to enfranchise parents in school board elections was important to the city’s Chinese American community and other immigrant communities because they wanted to be more involved in the politics of their children’s education. “It came from this desire by the parents that we had been organizing with for them to have a bigger say and a voice in their child’s education,” she says.

A similar sentiment has driven the movement in Santa Ana, where parents like Rosas want to vote in local contests based on what they believe is best for their children. The campaign for Measure DD also highlights how much the noncitizen community contributes to the local economy. Each year, noncitizen residents of Santa Ana pay an estimated , according to analysis from the Harbor Institute.

That number is based on U.S. Census Bureau data and information from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. “Regardless of immigration status, regardless of where we come from, today we live in this city … our children go to school, we contribute our labor, and we pay taxes,” Rosas says. “Simply, we [should] be allowed to participate just like any other person in this city participates in local decisions.”

The expansion of limited voting rights to noncitizen residents in parts of California has faced challenges from opponents who argue it burdens cities with additional costs and complexities in election administration and could contradict the state’s constitution. After Proposition N passed and was implemented in San Francisco, a conservative activist named , who does not live in San Francisco, brought a lawsuit in a local court, alleging the program was unconstitutional.

A San Francisco Superior Court judge initially sided with Lacy in July 2022. However, the city appealed that decision to the California Court of Appeal, which reversed the lower court decision and upheld the legality of San Francisco’s noncitizen voting program in what city attorney David Chiu called “.”

that California’s constitution, which states that “a United States citizen 18 years of age and resident in this State may vote,” only established a “floor,” meaning a lower limit on enfranchisement, rather than a “ceiling” or upper limit. Therefore, it does not preclude expanding voting rights to groups beyond what is named in the state’s constitution. (The ruling also paved the way for the enfranchisement of 16 and 17 year olds in some California cities.)

Julia Gomez, senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, says the California Court of Appeal’s holding “highlights that it’s state specific,” and whether other jurisdictions can pursue similar noncitizen resident voting programs will depend on their state constitution. 

In New York City, where the city council passed legislation allowing noncitizen residents to vote in local elections in 2021, Republican officials the rule at the appellate court level. Unlike in the California case, a judge in New York ruled that the state’s constitution establishes a ceiling beyond which voting rights cannot be expanded. In March 2024, the city council filed a in support of the law. 

In spite of repeated conservative claims that widespread and illegal noncitizen voting threatens U.S. democracy, researchers conclude that there is essentially . Carpenter, who administers elections in Takoma Park, says the noncitizen voter program in her jurisdiction does not threaten the integrity of state or federal elections, in which noncitizens remain barred from voting. The city clerk’s office maintains its own supplemental list of noncitizen voters and does not feed any information into county or state systems, meaning there is no chance that noncitizen voters from Takoma Park could accidentally end up on the Maryland voter rolls. 

Other jurisdictions that pursue limited enfranchisement for noncitizen voters have put similar safeguards in place. For example, in San Francisco, the ballots for noncitizen parents are a different color and only feature the applicable school board races, so no one could accidentally vote in another contest. 

“The stories that noncitizens are voting [in federal elections] or we’re registering people so they can vote for Democrats—none of that is the case,” says Carpenter. “What it does mean is that people could feel like they’re really a part of the community and that they have a say in how the local government works.”

Plus, noncitizen voters themselves have no desire to commit voter fraud and risk disrupting their immigration status. “Folks in the noncitizen community, the immigrant community, they’re not trying to jeopardize things for themselves,” says Wong, whose organization also anchors the . That group provides outreach and education services to newly enfranchised immigrant parents to ensure they are familiar with the bounds of their hard-won rights and feel empowered to get involved in their children’s education, whether or not they decide to cast a vote in school board elections. Gomez says that if Measure DD passes in Santa Ana, the coalition there will launch a similar effort before the new rule goes into effect. 

As Republican-led legislation to preclude the enfranchisement of noncitizens gains steam amid rising anti-immigrant sentiment nationwide, proponents of noncitizen voting programs remain focused on the heart of the issue: “We see this movement as an acknowledgment that we are all a part of this shared society,” says Wong. “No matter where you are in the society, you have a stake and you should have a voice.”

When I turned 18, one of my proudest moments was completing my voter registration application. I grew up in a politically aware household. My grandma, who was raised with Jim Crow laws, discussed the importance of voting and being politically informed with me from a young age. She grew up in a time where voting was not a right extended to Black people, especially those living in the South, as she was. She instilled that history in me.

My elders wanted me to be an informed voter and to know more than just the names on the ballot. I also knew which issues I cared about and where candidates stood on those issues. As I developed my own understanding of the world and the societal and political issues that mattered to me, being informed was imperative so I knew which candidates aligned or misaligned with the world I hoped to see and be a part of. 

I voted in my first presidential election in 2004. During that time, the U.S. was embroiled in wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq, so I would attend campus events to better understand the concurrent conflicts and how we came to be at war to begin with. As I learned more about Islamophobia and colonialism, I began questioning our country’s role around the world.

Those events, coupled with the classes I was taking in African American Studies, broadened my worldview, allowing me to better understand how the U.S. interacts with other countries, especially those in the Middle East and Africa, and how political propaganda skews our collective perspective. I was already liberal about the “controversial” issues of that time, including supporting LGBTQ rights, but now my rose-colored glasses were off. I was no longer buying into the propaganda that the United States is the “greatest nation on Earth,” so I knew I would be more prepared when the next election rolled around.

In January 2008, I learned about a Black man who was running against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. I didn’t know much about him, but I knew he was gaining attention among the other students on campus. When he planned a visit to my alma mater, I knew I had to attend. 

I had no idea I would be wowed by then Senator Barack Obama. I was mesmerized by his charisma, his intelligence, and his ability to work the crowd as he explained how his background led him to run for president. By the time the event concluded, I knew if he secured the Democratic nomination, I would be voting for him. I wasn’t the only person excited by Obama’s potential; my elders, all of whom were widows, never thought they’d see the day a Black man could be elected as president.

I haven’t been enamored by a candidate since Obama’s first presidential election. He imbued me with a sense of hope after living through George W. Bush’s disheartening presidency. We were electrified. And yet, the political veil I’d begun removing during Bush’s presidency came completely off during Obama’s tenure.

I began organizing in 2013 around policies that impacted the lives of disabled people and, more specifically, disabled people of color, including police violence, which . Through that organizing, I learned that the “trainings” police departments were using to better understand disability weren’t stopping them from harming and killing us, though these trainings were being heralded as “groundbreaking.”&�Բ�����;

I came to better understand that laws that should protect disabled people are in desperate need of an overhaul in order to be truly significant in the times we lived in. All of these truths hit me and kept me from being omplacent with the mere presence of a Black president; I want a president that fully supports the people who do and don’t look like me.

“When you know better, you do better” has been a guiding light in my politics, but now, I know when we know better, we demand better. As I entered my 30s, my political understanding was not just shaped by my worldview but also by those I was now in community with. Finding and learning about candidates throughout the country who not just cared about the issues that mattered to me but had a strong track record of supporting them became pronounced. This view was the reason I dived deeper in supporting candidates whose values and politics aligned with mine.  

In 2020, I had the opportunity to be a consultant on the disability policy plan for Senator Elizabeth Warren’s presidential run. Being a part of the movement to ensure every Democratic candidate that election cycle had a disability policy plan reignited my commitment to connecting with candidates who don’t overlook disabled people and figuring out what accountability looks like for me as a voter.

Now, as we face another presidential election, the awakening of Gen Z, many of whom are voting in their first election, has given me an extra boost of energy. Gen Z’s excitement is infectious. Even as they are watching a Black and Indian woman running for the most coveted position, they’re not losing sight of the issues that matter most to them—a reminder to me and others that we can and should demand better from our elected officials.

Nothing is perfect, and it never will be. But this election is pivotal for people in the United States and abroad. Every position on the ballot matters—school boards, city councils, state representatives—and it’s on us to use our votes to push for the causes we’re passionate about. As voters, we must remember that whoever is in office works for us; if we don’t like what they’re doing, then we can vote them out when their term is up. Gen Z is learning this reality and voting for the future they deserve to have, including one without genocide and without gun violence.

I hope Gen Z knows their presence at the polls matters and their work doesn’t end after they’ve dropped off their ballots. We the people have the ultimate power, and it is critical to remember that the government is much bigger than the White House. Know who the treasurer, sheriff, and coroner of your city is—it’s just as critical as knowing who the president is. Learn what policies are being enacted and blocked that will either improve or hinder the quality of life for yourself and those more marginalized than you. You are the adults now, in charge of ensuring Gen Alpha and the generation after them will live in a world where their rights are protected.  

And, most of all, keep that hopeful energy. Don’t dive deeper into the belly of despair. Hope and joy are our birthrights as humans to hold onto and find when we need them, and they are essential elements when organizing for the world we desire to live in. Use history as a guide. Even amid the most unimaginable circumstances, people still found ways to push forward, build community, and fight for a more just world.

If we don’t believe things can and should be better, then what will motivate us to not back down when beaten down (literally or metaphorically)? Every movement has had people who believe, are hopeful, and find joy among each other—and we need that in this moment, no matter who is elected president. Having hope is not a sign of disillusionment; it’s a reminder that every storm eventually runs out of rain. While we are in a storm right now with so much at stake, let us all do our part to demand more so that when this storm breaks, we will not be more broken. We’ll be as strong as we can be. 

Ashley Tchanyoum, a high school junior in Oakland, says she has been encouraging her classmates to register in the lead-up to the election and looks forward to exercising her right to vote for the first time. “It empowers students to have a voice in shaping the policies that affect them every day,” she says. 

The Oakland initiative is part of a growing movement in the United States to lower the voting age to enfranchise 16- and 17-year-olds. Proponents of the change argue that young people are already shaping the nation’s politics through influential organizing movements, including and . Those student-led organizations respond to issues that disproportionately affect young people, including gun violence and climate change. With so much on the line, lowering the voting age would give young people a more direct means of intervening in the political process to shape policy on issues that affect them and their futures.

A dozen municipalities have already enfranchised 16- and 17-year-olds in either school board elections, such as in Oakland, or all municipal elections, meaning young people can also vote on local ballot measures and for municipal representatives. The majority of these municipalities are in . There are also ongoing campaigns to lower the voting age in Washington, D.C., and . This November, voters in Albany, California, will decide on . Meanwhile, statewide campaigns to lower voting age in , , and are growing and have garnered support from both Republicans and Democrats.��

At the national level, Representative Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Representative Grace Meng of New York have introduced legislation to lower the voting age in federal, state, and local elections. When Pressley proposed it as an amendment to the House Democrats’ voting rights bill in 2019, —a significant number, even though the amendment failed. More recently, Meng an amendment to the Constitution that would lower the national voting age to 16 years old. 

“Over the past few years, we have seen the influence [that] young people in our nation have on trends, political movements, and elections,” said Meng in announcing the legislation. “It is time to give them a voice in our democracy.” She first introduced similar legislation in 2018 and then reintroduced it in 2019, 2021, and 2023. Each time, it has failed to move out of committee.

While a federal move to lower the voting age might sound far fetched, Lukas Brekke-Miesner, executive director of (OKF), likes to remind naysayers that it has happened before. Less than six decades ago, in 1971, the 26th Amendment to the Constitution lowered the voting age from 21 to 18. “[The Oakland campaign] felt like a bit of an uphill battle,” admits Brekke-Miesner. “But understanding that there is a legacy and precedent of this having happened was a point of hope.”&�Բ�����;

Today, the push to lower the voting age enjoys less popular support than half a century ago. Back then, both liberal and conservative politicians backed it, arguing that if young people could be conscripted and go to war at 18 years old, they ought to be able to vote then, too. show that most Americans supported the change as early as the 1950s, following a change in eligibility for the military draft, which allowed Americans as young as 18 to be conscripted into World War II.

Today, those poll numbers are much different. One found that 75% of registered voters opposed letting 17-year-olds vote, and 84% opposed voting rights for 16-year-olds. Opponents express doubts about whether people in these age groups are mature enough to vote and question whether their votes would differ from those of their parents. Some Republicans, who tend to oppose lowering the voting age in greater numbers than Democrats do, are just ploys to get more votes for their rivals.��

Studies on adolescent brain development suggest that fears of 16-year-olds not having the decision-making power to cast a vote are unfounded. Instead, that what psychologists call “cold cognition”—meaning a person’s judgment in situations that allow for unhurried decision-making and consultation with others—is likely to be just as developed in 16-year-olds as in adults. While a person’s “hot cognition,” meaning their judgment in high-pressure or emotional situations, tends not to mature until later, the skills needed to make informed decisions at the ballot box are already developed at age 16.

“This idea that young people don’t have the maturity, don’t have the smarts, don’t have the intellect to vote, I think is not only problematic, but it does a disservice to young people,” says LaJuan Allen, director of , a national organization that supports youth-led campaigns to extend voting rights to 16 and 17 year olds at the state and local levels.

Research also suggests that if 16- and 17-year-olds were enfranchised, they would not necessarily vote the same way that their parents do. While there is little data on this phenomenon in the U.S., conducted before the 2014 Scottish independence referendum showed that more than 40% of 16- and 17-year-olds planned to vote differently than their parents. According to Jan Eichhorn, the researcher who led that study, when young people did intend to vote the same way as their parents, they nonetheless came to that conclusion on their own. “They really make up their mind in quite a complex way themselves, and that is really encouraging to see,” .

In Oakland, the campaign to lower the voting age was a student-led one. Students were driven to organize around lowering the voting age because of issues they experienced and that adults seemed to overlook. First, in 2019, the Oakland School Board cut vital support programs for its students. Student organizers spoke out against the cuts, but the board pursued them anyway. “We could definitely see a disconnect between what students think is important and what school board members do,” shares Tchanyoum. More recently, Tchanyoum says students at her high school have been concerned about the lack of accessible bathrooms on campus and disparities in the amenities and extracurricular programs offered on different campuses in the district. Students would also like to implement programs to improve student–staff relationships and are concerned that their rights to speak about Palestine-related issues are being restricted.

To help get youth voting rights on the ballot in Oakland, Tchanyoum joined the movement as an organizer with Oakland Unified School District’s and the , both of which are part of the . That coalition was formed in 2019 with the goal of lobbying the Oakland City Council for a ballot measure to lower the voting age in school board elections. They succeeded, and in November 2020, voters were asked to decide on . 

Leading up to the vote, student organizers mobilized voters through phone banking, media interviews, social media, and other advertising. Measure QQ passed, with 67% of Oakland voters voting in its favor. The new rule is being rolled out for the first time this year after organizers worked with election officials, school board officials, and consultants to ensure its smooth implementation. Sixteen and 17-year-olds in neighboring Berkeley will also be for the first time, following a ballot measure that passed there in 2016 but was slow to be implemented.

For those who argue that enfranchising more young people would be a power grab for Democrats, Allen of Vote16USA says that’s simply not the point: “Lowering the voting age is about enfranchising young people, prioritizing youth voting rights, and strengthening our democracy.”&�Բ�����;

Plus, some research suggests that voters between the ages of 18 and 24 than voters between the ages of 25 and 29. When girls between the ages of 7 and 12 were surveyed about the 2024 election, the proportion who said they with either the Republican or Democratic party was larger than those who did identify with one. 

While it is unclear how future 16- and 17-year-olds would vote if enfranchised, evidence suggests that either way, enfranchising this group would have benefits for the nation’s democracy, including boosting low voter turnout. Data from Takoma Park and Hyattsville, Maryland, a pair of towns that allow 16- and 17-year-olds to vote on all municipal matters, show that enfranchised teens tend to than the general population.

Plus, engaging young people in the voting process earlier could encourage long-term civic engagement. Reaching young, would-be voters for the first time when they turn 18 can be challenging because they tend to be going through significant life transitions, like moving from high school to college. However, according to Ava Mateao, president of the voter turnout organization , “If you reach a young person and engage them in the voting process [in] whatever capacity you can when they’re 16 or 17, they’re more likely to be a lifelong voter.” The group also supports lowering the voting age to 16 to boost turnout. 

Brekke-Miesner says these big-picture benefits are the ultimate goal: “Our young folks didn’t enter the chat to say, ‘Hey, voting is the end-all, be-all,’ but really because they wanted to have power within their communities,” he says. “That’s the ultimate drive—to get folks re-engaged, organizing in their communities, and engaging in local governance.”

As support for immigration has waned, Donald Trump, in his most tried and true political move, has stoked a moral panic over rising “migrant crime,” fearmongering and pitting communities of color against each other to gain votes. Meanwhile, President Joe Biden has not only gone along with the narrative, but his administration has gutted the asylum system and outsourced immigration enforcement to Mexico, exacerbating the U.S.-manufactured crisis at the border and leading to more senseless deaths and precarity in the borderlands and beyond. Vice President Kamala Harris has followed the lead of the president she hopes to succeed.

I have organized around immigration for over two decades, during which Democrats repeatedly succumbed to their opponents’ playbook and positioned the issue as a national security and public safety issue. Yet even in this climate, there is no escaping how surreal this moment is. In , I write about how moral panics and so-called “tough on crime” policies have facilitated the expansion of immigrant detention. The Democrats’ play on immigration feels akin to the Clinton era in the ’90s, when Republicans took hold of Congress for the first time in decades. The 1994 crime bill, along with immigration laws passed by Congress in 1996,  of the criminal legal and immigration enforcement systems, doubling the capacity of the immigrant detention apparatus.

Later during President Barack Obama’s tenure, his administration expanded collaborations with local police and ramped up border enforcement to make the case for comprehensive immigration reform and a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. As a result, deportations skyrocketed, earning him the moniker “deporter in chief.” But as I write in the book, years of accepting border militarization and criminalization as a strategy to bring relief to “innocent” immigrants in the United States have only resulted in more dehumanization of migrants in general, thus creating more barriers to securing legalization for the 11 million undocumented people living here. Despite this lesson, many organizations are falling back into the “good immigrant versus bad immigrant” frame—or in this case, the old immigrant versus the new immigrant, making the case for some at the expense of others.

It all feels incredibly bleak. But I try to remind myself that there have been numerous moments when anti-immigrant sentiment has ruled the political discourse only to retreat as movements fought back: California in the ’90s after the passage of the harsh ballot measure Proposition 187; the 2006 immigrant rights marches that brought millions to the streets in response to the post-9/11 immigration crackdown; and more recently the boycotts of the state of Arizona protesting SB 1070, the “show me your papers” law that gave the state unconstitutional immigration enforcement authority. In some of our most dire political moments, immigrant communities, organizers, advocates, and ordinary people have stepped up to fight back, opening space for crucial movement victories.

After the gut punch that was the 2016 election result, organizers and advocates have more seriously engaged in . Sometimes these sessions only serve to cause more anxiety. But they have also been critical spaces to figure out how our movements can prepare. It is important to recognize that we have lost ground since the 2020 onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the near-simultaneous mass uprising for Black lives, which produced significant leftward shifts on mass incarceration, policing, and immigration enforcement. Since then, the backlash has been building, and opportunities for major victories are now out of reach. In many ways, the current conditions require us to return to the basics of organizing and movement building. There are no easy solutions, and broadening the base of support is our best bet for combating the harmful narratives about immigrants and immigration.

Since the release of Project 2025,  about what a second Trump term would look like on immigration. His administration would strip status from millions of undocumented people who benefit from programs such as Temporary Protected Status, which allows them to live and work in the United States. This would make them even more vulnerable to deportation. Along with local, state, and federal police forces, a second Trump administration plans to deploy the National Guard to round up immigrants already residing in the United States and warehouse them in detention camps across the country. The proposals conjure up images from World War II, when Japanese Americans were labeled “enemies of the state” and incarcerated in “relocation centers.” In addition to the full-on attack of immigrants currently living in the country, the plans include a more robust Muslim and African ban and other efforts to shut down the border to people seeking refuge. Other proposals that have been floated, such as ending birthright citizenship, are more outlandish and difficult to accomplish, but the intent is clear. Right-wing politicians have embraced the racist “” theory, and the goal is to end immigration as we know it.

In the case of a Trump election win, demanding that the Biden administration dismantle the detention and deportation systems and rescind harsh border policies will be imperative. So far Biden has received a pass from liberals and even some immigration advocates on his ramping up of enforcement, but the short period of time between the election and inauguration will require a united front to make Stephen Miller’s dark agenda that much harder to implement. Once Trump is in office, there will no doubt be a relentless onslaught of executive orders requiring rapid response. Many will turn to litigation, but there are obvious limitations given the makeup of the courts. And if we want to build for the long-term, it is critical that we invest in organizing and base building.

It may seem difficult to imagine a Trump administration being affected by mass mobilization, but in 2018, after widespread public outrage, he ended the zero-tolerance policy separating families at the border. Separations continued, but not at the same scale. As immigrant communities are targeted, going local in our strategies will also take center stage to mitigate the harm of his administration. Creating spaces for sanctuary and community defense networks, limiting collaboration between police and ICE, and waging campaigns to prevent detention expansion will be essential to throwing a wrench in their plans. We must also create on-ramps for those newly engaged or returning to the fight, fortifying the movement to protect communities now and build for the future when there may be openings.

As for Harris, her  made clear that she is positioning herself as tough on immigration and will continue to campaign around what both parties like to call “border security.” Depending on the makeup of the House and Senate, an immigration bill could move in Congress in 2025. The bipartisan Senate border bill proposed earlier this year, and , created a new floor for how much Democrats are willing to trade off to get something passed. Before this point, legalization for a large portion of undocumented immigrants was always on the table, but in this instance the tradeoff was more funding for military aid to Ukraine and Israel, and nonpunitive reforms to the system were minimal.

The border panic has divided the movement, but it’s imperative for us to understand that anti-immigrant sentiment is driven in part by rampant and widening social inequality. Solidarity across movements for racial and economic justice and against U.S. militarism will be essential as we tackle the rightward lurch on immigration. Now is the time to offer an alternative approach, one grounded in a vision of a world without cages that embraces the freedom of movement—one in which all our communities can thrive.

In addition to border policy, we should anticipate a Harris administration to follow Biden’s approach to interior enforcement. Despite Biden proclaiming a hundred days into his presidency that there should be “no private prisons, period,” his administration is still  and expanding their use. As of this summer, ICE has  for at least seven new detention centers in the Chicago, El Paso, Harlingen, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, and Seattle jurisdictions. Much as if Trump were to win, similar strategies of ending ICE–police collaborations and preventing detention expansion would be paramount.

Already sanctuary policies are being attacked, as a moral panic is stoked over “migrant crime.” In an attempt to debunk these claims, many organizations have emphasized data showing that immigrants commit fewer crimes than do citizens. But this only serves to accept public safety as a metric for immigration and ends up throwing  under the bus, effectively pitting working-class communities against each other. A better understanding of  with immigration enforcement has helped the movement limit deportations. Given the backlash moment we’re in, we must continue to challenge the whole system and not fall into the moral panic over crime.

Just as concerning is how conservative states have acted under Biden, which we can expect to continue under a Harris administration. From Texas to Florida, states across the country are enacting some of the harshest anti-immigrant legislation we’ve ever seen. Through these efforts, such as Operation Lone Star and SB 4 in Texas, states are commandeering state-level criminal legal systems to target and prosecute migrants as well as people providing aid to migrants. SB 4, for example, includes a 10-year minimum sentence for “human smuggling” or “harboring” undocumented immigrants. Governor Greg Abbott and Texas officials are essentially dictating immigration policy for the whole country. By filing lawsuits against forms of administrative relief such as DACA, deploying its own deportation force, and busing migrants to sanctuary cities, Texas has gone on a rampage, and Biden has done very little to intervene. If Harris wins, the question remains whether, given her history as a state attorney general, she will be more likely to push back on Texas and other states. But based on her recent comments on immigration, it is clear that she will need to be pushed, and we need to prioritize building up grassroots capacity to protect immigrant communities and fight back in these states.

The coming months will undoubtedly bring more heartache and confusion for immigrant communities. Regardless of who is president, educating people about their rights and expanding our base will be essential to building power toward longer-term change. Across the country, organizers and advocates are already planning for either outcome, hoping to be more prepared than we were in 2016. Dozens of organizations have gathered in multiple forums, such as Democracy 2025 and the Immigrant Movement Visioning Process, to develop strategies for preventing mass deportations if the worst were to happen. In this environment, abolition is a helpful tool for analysis and guidance. We must reject the reduction of immigrant lives to “public safety” and “national security” frameworks, and we must instead put forth a narrative of belonging and collectivity that helps bridge our struggles for racial and migrant justice. In this moment of political fervor, now is the time to start planting the seeds for a more grounded and accountable movement.

This article was originally published by . It has been republished here with permission. This essay was written in the author’s personal capacity. The views expressed are her own and and do not necessarily represent the views of Detention Watch Network. 

Meanwhile, Donald Trump and J.D. Vance seem to be recognizing that a campaign whose gendered messaging has consisted almost entirely of overt misogyny is not doing them any favors with women voters. The last few weeks have seen the Republican ticket making a host of promises to women: to “” them, to give them “” that will help them “,” and to ensure a world where they will “.”��

This women-specific messaging from Trump and Vance reflects an important shift in our political culture. Feminism has achieved an unprecedented level of popularity. In a time when , it has become difficult to reach women without making some kind of claim about understanding their plight.

Yet Trump and Vance—who oppose abortion rights, have no plans to raise the federal minimum wage, and who seem to —cannot present themselves as advocates for women without undermining their own policy positions. Yet they are now addressing what have traditionally been thought of as feminist issues, such as sexual assault, Title IX, and the struggles of moms. Their gloss on the issues is, unsurprisingly, racist, transphobic, and indifferent to economic inequality. But they seem to be banking on the idea that elite women will mistake the candidates’ investments in oppressive systems with investments in the fate of women.

There is a preexisting reservoir of arguments available to help Republicans accomplish this confusion, and it comes from a surprising place: from within feminism. As I argue in my new book, (Beacon Press, October 2024), feminism has always had many strands within it, and some of these have sought to advance the interests of privileged women at the expense of less privileged ones.

Trump has, in recent weeks, repeated the message that he will be women’s protector. This position has been roundly criticized for being condescending to women, and for coming from an alleged rapist. But less has been said about which women Trump and his surrogates claim to be protecting, and whom he claims to be protecting them from. 

Trump’s original protector comments were embedded within a set of dog whistles about men of color. His specific promise was to and on “city streets.”

This is part of in which Trump has repeatedly attempted to associate rape with Latinx and undocumented people, in spite of the fact that the prevalence of sexual assault is high among all racial and ethnic groups, and in spite of the fact that many rapes of migrant women are . 

This strategy of associating Black and Brown men with rape also has a longer history within white feminism. actively argued that “other” men’s treatment of women was a reason that countries in the Global South need to be colonized. The dominant feminist response to rape in the U.S. until quite recently was what is known as “,” an approach that proposes widening the reach of a racist criminal justice system as the solution to gender-based violence.

Trump’s and Vance’s borrowings from white feminism extend to another domain in which they are using the language of “protection”: women’s sports. Vance recently claimed that in sports would prevent his daughter from being “brutalized,” repeating a false image of the trans woman as a violator of women’s “safe spaces.” This concept has recently resurged since its initial popularity in feminist separatist circles in the 1970s. Feminists of color were vocally critical of , because it assumed that there was one way to be a woman—usually, implicitly, the white way.  

Vance’s recent rhetoric around family and childcare draws on another, “softer” side of white feminism. The sarcastic tone of his “childless cat ladies” comments and his participation in banter about the “” seems to have vanished, replaced with a man who wants to , and instead give them “.”

The idea that feminists are enemies of stay-at-home moms has its roots in . Conservatives of the time managed to block feminist efforts to secure free childcare by portraying the feminist as a judgmental career woman who looked down her nose at motherhood. 

The legacy of this period endures in the popular feminist claim that the aim of feminism is to respect individual women’s choices—that women should be able to make decisions about their lives without fear of judgment. Yet a feminism focused on non-judgment continues to serve only the most privileged women, since the “choice” not to work outside the home has only ever been available to the well-off. Across a range of issues—childcare, abortion, and sexual harassment—what women actually need is not the false guise of options, but also material support.

Whether these strategies of appealing to privileged women will win Trump and Vance the election remains to be seen. But the lessons from these appropriations of seemingly feminist arguments extend far beyond what happens this November. Unless we achieve greater moral clarity about the goals of feminism, it will remain easy for privileged women to confuse their interests with the interests of women and gender-expansive people as a group.

Fortunately for feminists, arriving at this clarity does not have to mean starting from scratch. White feminism, and its sister ideologies such as neoliberal feminism and femonationalism, have never been the only games in town. These ideologies, I argue in the book, are united by an understanding of feminism as a movement to increase women’s individual freedom. 

But feminism should really be understood in the way famously described it in 1984—as a movement against oppression. Oppression is not the same thing as restrictions on what individual women can do; it is a set of social structures that brings down women as a group. It is only by reclaiming this heart of feminism that we can fight against the proliferation of faux feminisms that serve the interests of the powerful.

Wearing a dark blue suit and a broad smile, he walked out of his naturalization ceremony holding a small U.S. flag and his citizenship certificate. The timing was no coincidence; he aimed to become eligible to vote before the Nov. 5 presidential election. 

“I am very excited that I will be able to vote,” says Garcia, 57. “We can express our voice and, more than anything, we can make ourselves count.”

In swing states such as Arizona, Nevada, and Pennsylvania, and large states such as California, the influence of Latino voters like Garcia could be key to choosing the next president in the race between former President Donald J. Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. Newly naturalized citizens and an influx of young Latinos reaching the voting age of 18 boosted to 36.2 million in 2024, up from 32.3 million in 2020.

A by Phoenix-based advocacy group (LUCHA) and Data for Social Good shows that a majority of 1,028 registered Arizona voters surveyed between April and May are highly motivated to cast a ballot. While immigration remains important for many Latinos, the poll found they are also deeply concerned about the economy, health care access, and affordable housing. The findings track with examining the issues Latino voters are thinking about less than a month before the election.

The shifting demographics of Latino voters reflect the nuanced distinctions within an evolving population often characterized as a monolithic voting bloc. “We’re a diverse community with a wide range of political views, experience, and priorities,” says Alejandra Gomez, executive director of LUCHA.

Canvassers have been knocking on doors all over the state since March to encourage voters—Latinos in particular—to cast a ballot and hopes are high that they will turn out en masse, says Stephanie Maldonado, managing director at LUCHA. “I definitely do see our community showing up and showing up big this November 5th,” she adds.

Garcia says he’s looking forward to making his vote count. For years after coming to the U.S. from Mexico, he worked in construction. In the 1990s, he started his own landscaping business, which he still operates. These days he worries about inflation because his earnings don’t go as far as they used to when buying necessities. “Prices have gone way up, for food and gasoline and other items,” he says.

Garcia is hopeful the next president will take on issues related to the economy, but he also would like the future commander-in-chief to push for immigration reforms. What’s needed, he says, is an orderly, speedier process that gives eligible people already in the country or waiting to apply for U.S. asylum south of the border an opportunity to live here legally. “People come here to improve their lives and to achieve the American dream, as I did,” he says. 

Dustin Corella, who was born in Tucson, is among a generation of young Latinos coming of age in 2024. Soon after turning 18 in June, he registered to vote and is eager to cast a ballot. “It feels like a big responsibility,” he says.

The issues motivating Corella to vote include his desire to elect politicians who ensure appropriate funding for public education as well as after-school programs and other resources aimed at youth in the community. And he says there’s a need for elected officials who can better address the impact of climate change, adding, “Those are the things that I care about, and I’m looking for leaders who can tackle them and create opportunities for the next generation.”

Corella is one of 1.3 million eligible Latino voters in Arizona. The state, along with California, Texas, Florida, and New York, is home to about two-thirds, or 65%, of all Latino eligible voters in the country, according to the .

For Latinos and immigrant communities across the country, the stakes are high this election, says Nicole Melaku, executive director of the . The coalition of immigrant and refugee rights organizations is working to encourage the nation’s naturalized citizens to vote, especially in the face of anti-immigrant attacks. For example, a slew of focuses negatively on immigrants.

“With the likes of Project 2025 looming about in the background, of family separation and of attacks to our democracy, I think it was important for us to make sure that our communities, and naturalized voters especially, are aware of the power that their vote and their voice has to shape the outcome of the election,” Melaku says.

Project 2025 is a policy agenda of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that aims to radically restructure the federal government in a conservative administration. Experts caution that and promotes with far-reaching implications.

from the project, but he has made immigration a key part of the race. In one campaign stop after another, Trump’s against immigrants punctuates his speeches. Should he win, he promises to quickly launch living in the country without legal status—and even some with legal status.

Instead of countering him with pro-immigrant rhetoric, Harris has responded by taking a tougher stance on the issue, including a proposal to implemented by the Biden administration. She has also endorsed . for a record number of migrants—many of them asylum seekers—entering the U.S. from Mexico, even as amid policy changes on both sides of the border.��

In the border state of Arizona, the immigration debate is ever present. On Nov. 5, voters will reject or approve Proposition 314, which would give the state authority to enforce federal immigration policies. The initiative, Maldonado says, “specifically targets immigrant communities and continues to push racial profiling, which we know is a top concern among the Latino community. And I think that this election for us is pushing back against policies that continue to criminalize our families and communities.”

Immigration hits close to home for Maldonado, who comes from a mixed-status family. She and her two siblings are U.S.-born citizens and her father is a legal resident. However, her mother is undocumented, says Maldonado, and returned to Mexico some time ago. Her mother’s departure was the catalyst for Maldonado to become more involved in electoral and civic matters. “We need a permanent solution on immigration, not just for my family, but millions of families across the country and many diverse families that are living in these complexities of being separated,” she explains.��

The Latino vote in the upcoming election could mean a shift in the usual narrative about the nation’s second-largest group of voters, Maldonado says. “If we didn’t have this much power, there wouldn’t be so many attempts at trying to strip away our rights.” She adds, “We just need to come together and make it happen even greater this year.”&�Բ�����;

Let me make it clear at the outset that this is a family affair; the whales about whom and on whose behalf I write are part of said family, as are you. I’ve been building relationship with the community of whales who migrate from Bahia, Brazil, to Antarctica for the past seven years and sharing that process through my project, . It is from the depths of our shared oceanic origins that I bring you this offering.

Whale Whispering is an ancestral commission, an ode to water, a work of interspecies translation and co-creation between me, humpback whales, and other cetaceans and people. It is a diasporic healing quest, an exploration and transmutation of the legacy of transatlantic enslavement through music. Based in Praia do Forte, Bahia, Brazil, it is a soundtrack for personal, communal, and global transformation, a love song for whales, for Bahia, for Earth, for the ancestors, and for life. 

I’m listening to and singing with the whales to tap into the echoes of the Middle Passage contained within their songs, to bring forth sounds that honor Nature’s prescription for this time of reckoning and share water’s wisdom as it is relayed to me. Through underwater and studio recordings, filmed documentation, blog posts, and community gatherings focused on collective singing and water blessing rituals, Whale Whispering serves as a way of dreaming forward via the lens of the so-called past.

As I address the womb sickness that has affected my own womb and those of so many Black womb-carriers due to generations of sexual trauma, I’m learning to wail with the whales as a form of curative release, just as the Africans who crossed the Atlantic in slaving vessels surely did. This siren call, summoning awareness of the unity of all being(s), and resonating with the movement in support of planetary healing, is a vibrational antidote to the violence that threatens to engulf the planet right now. These messages, shared through waves of water and sound, affirm that, for those who are listening, Love’s song is stronger. 

has emerged as the central theme of this collaboration. With this echoing phrase the whales affirm that there is no reality in which we are not all connected to every other being, every other particle in existence—through our breathing, our intake and transpiration of water, our dreaming. Among their many offerings to the human members of their extended family is the gentle nudge to ask ourselves if we are dreaming big enough.

This is a question adrienne maree brown and I were exploring during one of our near the end of the Pandemic Pause, just as the wheels of the global economy (i.e., racial capitalism) were starting to churn back into gear. Via that conversation, I first relayed the whales’ message from the 2022 season. Clearly, the reduction in sonic, vibrational, and chemical interference in the oceans as a result of diminished shipping traffic had proven beneficial to them, and their perception of the retrograde slide toward pre–COVID-19 levels had moved them to make their most forceful, emphatic declaration thus far: “We Will Run This World.”

It is not lost on me that whales everywhere have proceeded to occupy increasing amounts of space in international news, asserting and claiming visibility and acknowledgement, demanding to be seen and heard. While I’ve repeated their declaration a few times publicly since that interview, I’ve mostly been listening and observing, wanting to be sure that any further details I bring forth about that statement are rooted in the clearest and sincerest point of connectivity between me and the whales. In my experience, this clarity requires time. Given their size, lifespan, and range of movement, it’s no surprise that the whales have their eyes on the long game with regard to guiding their human kin, as they watch what, to many, looks scarily like our imminent self-destruction.

Speaking of eyes, anyone who has had the rare and singular experience of gazing into the eye of a whale can attest to having met with a being of far vaster intelligence, sensitivity, and wisdom than most human minds can begin to fathom. Since living that wonder myself, I’m convinced that whales are capable of feats that would qualify as miraculous in any context. In considering the meaning behind the declaration that they will run this world, I’m compelled to lead with miracles. They could be as fantastical as the whales adjusting and accelerating their evolution in the blink of one of those knowing eyes, making them suddenly capable of living on land, communicating through language with humans as a whole, and deconstructing and restructuring the systems that have brought us to this point of global upheaval through direct intervention. My sense though, is that, per their nature, the whales intend something more nuanced and easily absorbed. 

Looking to the (technically dolphins, but whales by association) in the Strait of Gibraltar as an example, I see not as some type of revenge or retribution for human destructiveness, but as intentionally headline-grabbing activity drawing our attention to the rudders they have consistently disabled. They are pointing out faulty steering by humans, the ones who have been driving the planet to destruction, suggesting that a new way is needed. As far as I know, no one has died as a result of these encounters, but they have definitely put whales on many people’s minds.

By overturning boats, then , leaping onto and stealing the scene , among other shenanigans, the whales are impressing themselves upon collective human awareness. They are infiltrating our conscious and subconscious minds with suggestions to listen to their subaquatic songs and sounds. Through both our listening and the vibrational reverberations that result from playing their songs above water, the whales can infuse us with massive doses of compassion, pour into us and other species from the fount of grace to which they have access. 

Based on what the whales have shown me, their songs have the capacity to reverse so much of the damage caused by humans—they could dissolve microplastics and oil spills, deactivate the harmful properties of chemical and other pollutants threatening the world’s water supply, and perhaps most importantly, soothe the indignation of our mothering planet, preventing her from wiping us out completely. But because fear, doubt, and subjugation to the nightmare spell of our current moment are so pervasive, and because most humans are living unaware of their own psychic impact, there has been a block on the extent to which the whales can wield their miracles—and to which we can wield our own. From our fitful slumbering, the whales are calling us to lucidity, on behalf of all the species smaller and thus more easily ignorable than they are. They have visions of healing technologies that they can float into our imaginations, infusing them with solutions to such pressing issues as how to ensure safe, viable water for all, for example. Like so many plant spirits and human stewards, they are calling us to exalt the connective practices that Indigenous peoples worldwide have been preserving: to gather at and with water, joining our sung voices as sources of generative and regenerative force, engaging the Oneness that is the origin of all possibility.

It’s unlikely that every human will hear or answer this call. Only a critical mass of deeply engaged, genuinely receptive and open-hearted individuals is required to make way for the whales to steer us into a new dream. This whale-sized waking dream is one in which life on this planet is more balanced, healthy, just, and sustainable. It is one where the expansive generosity and compassion of these ancient beings have permeated the modus operandi of the planet’s powerful problem children—humans. 

While people will continue to hold—and debate—a diversity of beliefs about spirituality, divinity, and the supernatural, everyone can agree that whales exist. And each one who opens themselves to imbibe the medicine the whales pour forth can taste the truth, can become imbued with the knowing that there is indeed a Higher Love, one that scales beyond what this current, shared reality suggests is real. Each one who receives that medicine and deepens into that knowing becomes a conduit for that Love—one among the countless channels through which it flows, hydrating them with real magicalisms that have only awaited the acceptance of their own sublime potential in order to come true.

Are you One?

“I’m really surprised so many people had reports today,” says the National Weather Service meteorologist based in Boulder, Colorado. “This is their most important observation—maybe of their whole time volunteering—and so they want to get it right.”

At 7 a.m. on Oct. 10, in the chaotic hours after the swept ashore, one citizen scientist in Daytona Beach Shores reported 15.8 inches of rain. Another near Lake Helen clocked 15.37 inches for a similar 24-hour period, and added in the notes section: “Lots of tree limbs down. Some roads are flooded due to lakes overflowing their banks.”

Observations like these are added to an internet database at 7 a.m. each day by volunteers with the nationwide Community Collaborative Rain, Hail & Snow Network, or CoCoRaHS. The observations from 26,500 stations across the country contribute to National Weather Service flood warnings that may save lives by accounting for the variability of how much rain fell and where. Radar and satellites are not sophisticated enough to provide such down-to-the-backyard estimates.

In one such alert, for the St. Johns River in Florida’s Seminole County, forecasters more than an hour’s drive away, in the city of Melbourne, added CoCoRaHS rainfall totals to other on-the-ground observations, radar data, and river models. They estimated that runoff from Milton could cause the river to rise to 10.2 feet by the night of Oct. 14.

“The river is forecast to reach Minor Flood Stage later tonight, and will continue to climb through Moderate Flood, reaching Major Flood Stage later this weekend,” reads the alert Gimmestad pulls up on his screen. It cautioned many roads were “impassable, limiting access to homes.”

CoCoRaHS reports also help forecasters provide tornado, hail, fire, and other weather-related warnings in real time by allowing participants to log storm notes in the network’s computer system any time of day.

These observations—which provide input in up to half of such warnings—get routed to the nearest National Weather Service station, where they ring alarm bells. Meteorologists use them to caution people to take shelter or evacuate. Scientists also use CoCoRaHS data after storms have passed to refine computer models to better reflect precipitation variability.

Such life-saving weather data are vital as the United States suffered 28 climate and weather disasters each—the most such events ever recorded in a year. Storm warnings will become all the more important as a warmer atmosphere traps more moisture—leading to more recurrent and intense rainfall.

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 calls for a breakup of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which houses the National Weather Service, saying that these federal agencies push climate propaganda. But shutting down these essential services could stymie the ability of forecasters to issue comprehensive weather warnings and protect people at risk during climate disasters. 

As the presidential election looms and global warming intensifies, CoCoRaHS precipitation records, which account for two-thirds of the observational data collected by federal agencies on how much it rained or snowed, are becoming even more indispensable. 

“It’s a huge value,” he adds. “Radar is really good at capturing the pattern, and CoCoRaHS observations give us the amounts, and so we put those together and it gives us a really nice map of how much it rained, hailed, or snowed.”&�Բ�����;

The Critical Role of Data Collection

Altogether, CoCoRaHS’s stations span all 50 states, Canada, the Bahamas, and several U.S. territories. The network comprises about 75 million measurements and growing. 

The effort emerged in the wake of a deadly 1998 flash flood in Fort Collins, Colorado, that caught many people by surprise. The network is now one among hundreds of citizen science projects nationwide whose data are helping researchers, identify, and catalog.

“CoCoRaHS changed the way we do weather forecasting,” says Ellen McCallie, program director in the Directorate for STEM Education at the U.S. National Science Foundation. The consistency and reliability of the data are helping improve National Weather Service precipitation predictions, she adds.

After CoCoRaHS volunteers watch a training video, they are assigned a station number. They install a National Weather Service–approved cylindrical plastic rain gauge, from which they measure precipitation and record the data online.

Network coordinators, who often work for state climate offices, urge volunteers to collect readings each morning, even if there’s no precipitation. These data are immediately visible on weather service maps. Each station is represented by a dot whose color reflects the amount of precipitation—red for more, blue for less. 

In addition to the vast public benefit CoCoRaHS provides, the citizen scientists who are the backbone of the network say they benefit personally from the work, too.

“It’s something to do every day at 7 a.m.,” says Noah Newman, the program’s education and outreach coordinator. “One volunteer working their way through Alcoholics Anonymous got their five-year [sobriety] chip thanks to CoCoRaHS, because they said no to going to the bars so they could get up to read their rain gauge.”&�Բ�����;        

Retired Montana State University scientist and faculty member Bill Locke recounted in an email how recording daily precipitation in the CoCoRaHS database has helped him cope with his depression in the 11 years since he signed on to be a part of the network. 

“From now until March I need to pull on Bean boots, a headlamp, and appropriate attire to trek to my gauge,” he wrote, adding that the plastic cylinder is about 82 feet away from his Montana home. In the winter, these duties often involve measuring and collecting snow from a board on the ground and swapping cylinders if the existing one is full. “It’s tough to go back to bed after all that!”

A People’s Climate Record

The CoCoRaHS network isn’t the only example of how citizen scientists contribute to the nation’s climate record. Federal agencies also rely on about 8,700 people who volunteer with the 134-year-old , or COOP.

These citizens collect temperature and precipitation data daily from National Weather Service equipment, and then report it electronically to the service. This on-the-ground grassroots system is smaller and not as geographically diverse as CoCoRaHS, says meteorologist Gimmestad.

“Instead of having official weather reporting stations that are 30 or 40 miles apart—so we might have one per county—with CoCoRaHS, we might have 10 or 50 stations in the county,” he says. “This way, we don’t have to use one point to represent a huge area, and so we know how rainfall was distributed around that county.”

Data from CoCoRaHS and COOP—together with observations from at the nation’s airports—account for about 80% of the precipitation numbers that federal scientists use to compile what’s known as the—a catalog of temperature and precipitation averages from 1991 to 2020. The 30-year retrospective is vital for the health of the nation’s economy because it’s a go-to resource for businesses. 

“The construction industry wants to know how many rainy days there will be at a location in which they are putting in a bid—and to learn how to design air conditioning and heating for buildings,” says Michael Palecki, the lead scientist on the project at the National Centers for Environmental Information. “People want to know what the weather is going to be like where they are looking to move, and, of course, agriculture is one of our biggest users.”

Tracking Hurricane Helene

Some 11 CoCoRaHS volunteers work in Palecki’s office in Asheville, North Carolina. The physical scientist, who had to remove a few trees from his property following Hurricane Helene, recounts how the region spent two weeks without power and remains without drinkable tap water.

When the air conditioning went down in the National Centers for Environmental Information’s computer room—a vast repository of weather data—temperatures soared to 120 degrees, requiring officials to shut down the system and delaying the publication of weather-related information nationwide.

The life-saving value of volunteer precipitation data was also evident in North Carolina as hardy CoCoRaHS participants tugged on rain gear to collect rainfall totals from their plastic gauges in the face of Helene’s “.”

One wrote in observation notes from Flat Springs on Sept. 28: “Absolutely catastrophic impacts from flooding, landslides, and high winds. Major roads impassable. Neighboring fire department … completely carried away by Elk River.”

The North Carolina State Climate Office relied in part on CoCoRaHS observations to determine where, and how much, rain fell. Four network volunteers in the western part of the state recorded totals from : 24.12 inches in Spruce Pine, 22.36 inches in Foscoe, and about 22 inches each at stations south of Black Mountain and Hendersonville.

Using a federal weather that categorizes the likelihood of extreme storm events, state weather officials rainfall produced by Helene likely qualifies it as a one-in-1,000-year storm.

“Yet another event of this magnitude within the state offers even more evidence that our climate is changing, and in extreme ways,” wrote Corey Davis, an assistant state climatologist, in an online summary of Helene’s formation and impacts.

Davis continued: “The rapid intensification of Helene over the Gulf, the amount of moisture available in its surrounding environment, and its manifestation as locally heavy—and in some cases, historically unheard of—rainfall amounts are all known side effects of a warmer atmosphere.”

The National Weather Service is currently updating this atlas, and in doing so, is relying “very extensively” on extreme precipitation data recorded by CoCoRaHS volunteers to determine where heavy rainfall was distributed over time, Palecki says.  

Understanding Science in Daily Life

One volunteer whose data will likely be reflected in this record is Matt Kelsch, a hydrometeorologist in Colorado who is also the Boulder County coordinator for CoCoRaHS. Kelsch has collected precipitation data for the network—or asked a house sitter to do it—without missing a day since June 2001.

His plastic rain gauge sits in his expansive backyard near his garden, which, on Oct. 10, is bone dry.

But it’s not always this way. Kelsch, who has an encyclopedic memory for notable water-related weather events, says the wettest year he recorded was 2013, when about 34 inches fell. And one of the “most impressive spells of snow” occurred in 2006, with 26 inches around Dec. 21, then 14 inches a week later, and 11 more inches seven days after that. 

For Kelsch, the value of CoCoRaHS lies in its ability to teach people of all ages to tune into the variability of precipitation in their own neighborhoods. Volunteering helps participants “improve their skills at estimating how much rain is falling,” he says.

“They can see when the storm is analyzed how much rain fell—their report was one of the dots that was used,” he adds. “CoCoRaHS, even though it’s simple, connects people with the science.”

“I understand why young people are really angry and really hurting,” Fonda said. “What I want to say to them is: ‘Do not sit this election out, no matter how angry you are. Do not vote for a third party, no matter how angry you are. Because that will elect somebody who will deny you any voice in the future of the United States. … If you really care about Gaza, vote to have a voice, so you can do something about it. And then, be ready to turn out into the streets, in the millions, and fight for it.’”

Fonda’s remarks came in a wide-ranging interview organized by the global media collaborative����and conducted by The Guardian, CBS News, and Rolling Stone magazine.

Making major social change requires massive, nonviolent street protests as well as shrewd electoral organizing, Fonda argued. Drawing on more than 50 years of��, from her anti–Vietnam War and anti-nuclear protests in the 1970s to later agitating for economic democracy, women’s rights, and, today, for climate action, Fonda said that: “History shows us that … you need millions of people in the streets, but you [also] need people in the halls of power with ears and a heart to hear the protests, to hear the demands.”

During the Great Depression, she said, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt agreed with helping the masses of unemployed. But FDR said the public had to “make him do it” or he could not overcome resistance from the status quo. “There is a chance for us to make them do it if it’s����and Tim Walz [in the White House],” she said. “There is no chance if Trump and Vance win this election.”

Scientists have repeatedly warned that greenhouse gas emissions��, Fonda noted, so a President Harris would have to be pushed “to stop drilling and fracking and mining. No new development of fossil fuels.” Trump, on the other hand, has promised to “‘drill, baby, drill.’ For once, let’s believe him. The choice is very clear: Do we vote for the future, or do we vote for burning up the planet?”

Fonda launched the����three years ago to elect “climate champions” at all levels of government: national, state, and local. “The PAC focuses down ballot—on mayors, state legislators, county councils,” she said. “It’s incredible how much effect people in these positions can have on climate issues.”

Forty-two of the 60 candidates the PAC endorsed in 2022 won their races. In 2024, the PAC is providing money, voter outreach, and publicity to more than 100 candidates in key battleground states and in California, Fonda’s home state. California is “the fifth-biggest economy in the world, and an oil-producing state,” she explained, “so what happens here has an impact far broader than California.”

Fonda is also, for the first time in her life, “very involved” in this year’s presidential campaign, “because of the climate emergency.” She plans to visit each battleground state, she said: “And when I’m there, we give our schedule to the Harris campaign. Then they fold in Harris campaign [get-out-the-vote events], volunteer recruitment, things like that … and then I do them for our PAC candidates” as well.

Her PAC has a strict rule: It endorses only candidates who do not accept money from the fossil fuel industry. The industry’s “stranglehold over our government” explains a crucial disconnect, Fonda said.Polls show that��, yet their elected officials often don’t deliver it. In California, she said, “We’ve had so many moderate Democrats that blocked the climate solutions we need because they take money from the fossil fuel industry. … It’s very hard to stand up to the people that are supporting your candidacy.”

Fonda also faulted the mainstream news media for not doing a better job of informing the public about the����and the abundance of solutions. Watching the Harris–Trump debate, she thought that “Kamala did very well.” But she “was very disturbed that the No. 1 crisis facing humanity right now took an hour and a half to come up and was not really addressed,” she added. “People don’t understand what we are facing! The news media has to be more vigilant about tying extreme weather events to climate change. It’s starting to happen, but not enough.”

Given her years of anti-nuclear activism—including producing and starring in a hit Hollywood movie, The China Syndrome, released days before the����in 1979—it’s perhaps no surprise that Fonda rejects the increasingly fashionable idea that nuclear power is a climate solution.

“Every time I speak [in public], someone asks me if these����are a solution,” she said. “So I’ve spent time researching it, and there’s one unavoidable problem: No nuclear reactor of any kind—the traditional or��, none of them—has been built in less than 10 to 20 years. We don’t have that kind of time. We have to deal with the climate crisis by the 2030s. So just on the timeline, nuclear is not a solution.” By contrast, she said: “��takes about four years to develop, and pretty soon it’s going to be 30% of the electricity in the world.”

The reason that solar—and wind and geothermal—energy are not prioritized over fossil fuels and nuclear, she argued, is that “big companies don’t make as much money on it.” Noting that air pollution from��, she added: “We’re being poisoned to death because of petrochemicals and the fossil fuel industry. And we [taxpayers] pay for it!��[in government subsidies] to the fossil fuel industry, and we’re dying. … We need that industry out of our lives, off of our planet—but they run the world.”

The two-time Academy Award winner’s decades as one of the world’s biggest movie stars has given her an appreciation of the power of celebrity, and she applauds����for exercising that power with her endorsement of the Harris–Walz ticket.

“I think she’s awesome, amazing, and very smart,” Fonda said of Swift. “I’m very grateful and excited that she did it, and … I think it’s going to have a big impact.”

“My metaphor for myself, and other celebrities, is a repeater,” Fonda added. “When you look at a big, tall mountain, and you see these antennas on the top, those are repeaters. They pick up the signals from the valley that are weak and distribute them so that they have a larger audience. … When I’m doing the work I’m doing, I’m picking up the signals from the people who live in Wilmington and the Central Valley and Kern County and are really suffering, and the animals that can’t speak, and trying to lift them up and send [their stories] out to a broader audience. We’re repeaters. It’s a very valid thing to do.”

Climate activism is also “so much fun,” she said, and it does wonders for her mental health.

“I don’t get depressed anymore,” she said. “You know, Greta Thunberg said something really great: ‘Everybody goes looking for hope. Hope is where there’s action, so look for action and hope will come.’” Hope, Fonda added, is “very different than optimism. Optimism is ‘Everything’s gonna be fine,’ but you don’t do anything to make sure that that’s true. Hope is ‘I’m hopeful, and I’m gonna work like hell to make it true.’”

This article by is published here as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.

Each year, those who live near the Atlantic Ocean, particularly those near the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean, brace themselves for . As the water temperatures increase and mix with warm, humid air, tropical thunderstorms form and gather speed. Once a storm’s winds reach 74 miles per hour, the storm is officially classed as a hurricane—and people on land begin paying much closer attention. Between June and the end of November, the looming threat of high-speed winds, heavy rainfall, and coastal flooding hangs in the air; those who live closest to the water make emergency plans, keep an eye on their vulnerable neighbors, coordinate mutual aid efforts, and hold onto hope that, this year, they’ll be safe.

If a hurricane does make landfall, many in the area of impact will have the option to drive, fly, or run away from the danger and ensure their families are warm, dry, and far from danger. Some will choose to stay behind in spite of the risks, but thousands of others will be left with no choice at all. Prisons and jails are often when natural disasters hit. While people on the outside are given ample warning, the incarcerated are at the mercy of prison staff, government officials, and state politicians.

On Sept. 26, 2024, Hurricane Helene smashed into northwestern Florida and quickly made its way toward Tennessee, Georgia, and North Carolina. When it made landfall, its winds whipped the air at 140 miles per hour, causing massive flooding and destruction across all four states. Authorities were well aware Helene was on its way, with each state declaring a state of emergency ahead of the storm. “There will be no place for you to go if things get bad,” on Florida’s Gulf Coast warned. “This is going to be a life-threatening surge. It is nothing to take lightly.”

Yet, even as the hurricane barrelled down, people incarcerated in prisons and jails in multiple states were not allowed to evacuate. Instead, or, as was the case in Florida, to “ built to withstand high winds.” In other cases, they were simply . 

Less than two weeks later, Hurricane Milton hit Florida again, knocking out power for millions, throwing up , and causing widespread flooding. The lead-up to the storm was grim, and photos of fleeing residents stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic only added to the alarm. Tampa Mayor Jane Castor went on television to tell Floridians, “If you choose to stay in one of those evacuation areas, you are going to die.”

For the second time, though, thousands of the state’s incarcerated people—including more than —were left with no option but to ride out the storm behind bars. The stated it had “successfully relocated” 5,950 people ahead of the storm—out of 28,000 who lay in the hurricane’s path. As Jordan Martinez, an organizer with watchdog Fight Toxic Prisons, told , the number of evacuees only made up a small percentage of the individuals in harm’s way and some of the evacuations barely qualified as such.

The majority of those evacuated came from work camps, halfway houses, and work release centers, and in many instances they were “evacuated” to theoretically stronger facilities nearby. For example, women at Lowell Work Camp, a section of the Lowell Correctional Institution in Marion County, Florida, were evacuated just a few dozen yards away … to another part of the same prison complex.

“The fact that they are unable to evacuate people in mandatory evacuation zones goes to show the complete lack of prioritization of the lives of incarcerated people during hurricanes,” Martinez said. “If we are prioritizing the safety of our communities, those communities must include the incarcerated people inside that are themselves organizing on the inside to fight for better conditions, and quite often being forced during hurricanes to prepare to protect their communities via forced slave labor with sandbags or in cleanup in the aftermath.”

As Martinez noted, the trouble does not end once the wind stops blowing, either. Hurricane damage can disrupt incarcerated peoples’ access to light, clean water, food, and medical supplies, leaving them cold, hungry, thirsty, or sick for days or weeks at a time. Power outages can cut them off from communicating with their loved ones and the rest of the world, which also hamstrings their ability to report unsanitary or dangerous conditions inside their facilities. It also leaves them unable to check in on their own communities, or to find out whether their own families are safe.

When Helene slammed into western North Carolina, prisoners in multiple facilities outside Asheville told about losing access to running water—and having to relieve themselves in plastic bags. As one woman’s husband told her, “We thought we were going to die there. We didn’t think anybody was going to come back for us.”

Elsewhere, Jailhouse Lawyers Speak, a nationwide collective of incarcerated individuals who provide support and legal resources to other prisoners, were able to share as Milton tore through the state: “Power’s out in here, and the COs are hiding in their offices while we’re left in the dark. We’re shouting for meds and updates, but no one’s listening. Just trying to hold on and hope this storm doesn’t swallow us whole…”

Another message illustrated the inhumane conditions inside as the storm raged, mirroring the hellish conditions stirred up by Helene: “Toilets backing up, feces running over. We’ve been told we’ll have to lay in it. No movement allowed.”

While incarcerated people can be denied the most basic level of hygiene inside their dorms, they are also often the first to be drafted to clean up after a climate disaster. As reported, both and to clear roads and haul debris after Helene and Milton. During a press conference, cheerfully framed this forced labor as “utilizing” the state’s “resources.” “They do prison labor anyways,” he said. “The good thing about that is you can use that on private property, not just on public.” He also noted the cleanup “would cost us way more money if you had to do that through some of these private contractors.”

Unsurprisingly, Florida and are two of seven states in which incarcerated workers are for nearly all prison jobs.

As the climate crisis worsens, incarcerated people and those who love them will continue to worry that every new weather emergency may mean a death sentence unless real, concrete action is taken and laws are put into place to ensure state and local county officials are prepared in advance to evacuate everyone who may be under threat, regardless of their address or legal status.

Amid this ever-growing threat, incarcerated people, their loved ones, and organizers are on the front lines, advocating for themselves and their co-prisoners. “We urge the public to understand our plight as people in jails and prisons,” a member of Jailhouse Lawyers Speak told . “We suffer during natural disasters and lock our dark cells, not knowing if we will survive or not.”

Publications such as , , and are also closely following the impact of the climate crisis on prisoners and amplifying the stories of incarcerated individuals who have been subjected to dire conditions or left behind during catastrophes. Every letter, every social media post, and every phone call counts. The louder the public outcry about this cruel practice becomes, the less likely officials will give a repeat performance the next time a deadly storm starts brewing.

“This is not just a logistical failure, it’s a profound moral failing,” the member of Jailhouse Lawyers Speak emphasized. “While entire towns are evacuated and communities band together to seek safety, we remain locked within these walls, treated as less than human. It is heartbreaking to think that while the world preps for survival during a pending natural disaster such as Hurricane Milton, we are still treated as if we don’t matter, as if our lives can be tossed aside in the name of protocol. We must end this normalized routine. We beg the public to pay attention and have a heart of compassion.”

A sus 19 años, se dirigía a Canadá. Ella sería la primera de su familia en ir a la universidad en el extranjero. Todos sus familiares vinieron al aeropuerto para la despedida. Ella recuerda el adiós como un momento desgarrador. En ese momento, a Chavan y a su familia les resultó difícil comprender plenamente el sacrificio que implica migrar. “No teníamos idea de lo que significa dejar tu hogar,” dijo.

Una nota de los editores: Esta historia ha sido traducida al español por . Puede leerla en inglés �����í.
(Editor’s note: This story has been translated into Spanish by . You can read the story in English here.)

Pero inevitablemente, el duelo llegó a sus vidas. Casi doce años después de la partida de Chavan, mientras se encontraba sentada en su departamento en Winnipeg a principios del 2020, Chavan sintió un nudo en el estómago cuando su mamá le llamó por teléfono para compartir la noticia. La abuela de Chavan, quien vivía en Sidney, Australia, se había enfermado y, tras unas cuantas semanas, había fallecido. Su abuela había sido una de las personas más importantes en su vida, pero Chavan no tenía manera de ir a Australia para llorarla en persona. Además del costo de los boletos de avión, no contaba con la visa necesaria para ingresar al país, ni con el presupuesto necesario para solicitarla. Ante esta situación, Chavan se apagó emocionalmente. “Me sentí congelada por un largo tiempo,” explicó.

Los expertos en temas de migración y psicología usan los términos “duelo transnacional” o “luto transnacional” para describir esta experiencia, la cual se refiere a la pérdida de un ser querido estando en otro país. Aunque el duelo en sí es un proceso difícil, los inmigrantes que experimentan el duelo transnacional frecuentemente enfrentan sentimientos adicionales de culpa, negación y sufrimiento, ya que les es imposible asistir a los rituales de luto de sus seres queridos. 

La imposibilidad de ver a sus seres queridos en persona complica lograr una sensación de cierre, y el doliente puede sentirse incapaz de procesar la pérdida y seguir con su vida de una manera sana. En años recientes, esta experiencia se ha vuelto más común, ya que el COVID-19 acabó con millones de vidas, y simultáneamente causó que aumentaran las restricciones fronterizas. La pandemia resaltó la importancia del apoyo comunitario y los cambios a las políticas migratorias para ayudar a aquellos que enfrentan sus duelos desde lejos.

El Dolor de la Pérdida a Larga Distancia

Desde hace mucho tiempo, experimentar el duelo a larga distancia ha sido la realidad de muchos inmigrantes. Cualquiera que deja a su familia atrás también corre el riesgo de estar separado de sus seres queridos durante tiempos de pérdida. Esto frecuentemente conlleva un torbellino de emociones complicadas.

“Hay un fuerte sentimiento de culpa. Hay un fuerte sentimiento de arrepentimiento de no haber podido estar con su ser querido al momento de su muerte,” explicó , una investigadora del duelo, de la Universidad de Alberta. Ella recuerda una conversación que tuvo cuando entrevistó a un inmigrante Iraní-Canadiense, quien había perdido a su hermano durante las cuarentenas de la pandemia del COVID. Porque no le fue posible viajar a Irán, o siquiera ver su cuerpo antes de que fuera enterrado, se negaba a aceptar la muerte de su hermano.

Chavan recuerda experiencias similares que sufrió al estar separada de su familia por fronteras después de la muerte de su abuela. “Sentía que no tenía derecho a llorar su muerte, porque no había estado ahí,” dijo.

Sin este espacio para llevar luto, el duelo puede volverse difícil de superar; especialmente para los inmigrantes indocumentados. , una socióloga en el Center for Racial Justice de la Universidad de Michigan, trabaja con estas comunidades, y contínuamente escucha sobre cómo el duelo afecta la vida cotidiana. “Las personas describen estas experiencias de duelo y luto a larga distancia como una de las partes más difíciles de estar indocumentado en Estados Unidos,” explicó.

Por ejemplo, mientras estudiaba entre el 2017 y el 2023, Fullerton Rico conoció a una mujer a quien llama Florencia (un pseudónimo usado para proteger su privacidad), quien dijo: “Era algo que no había de qué manera poderlo arreglar. No queda de otra más que aceptar que no puedes hacer nada.” Fullerton Rico también comparte una conversación que tuvo con un hombre a quien llama Felipe: “Felipe me dijo que el duelo te cambia profundamente.” La distancia aumenta el dolor del duelo porque es imposible decir adiós o asistir a un funeral, y esto impide obtener una sensación de cierre. “Hay un capítulo que no se cerró, que está como abierto,” explicó Felipe. 

 El peso del duelo transnacional frecuentemente es una carga soportada en soledad, lo cual agrava la situación. “No es algo que se suele reconocer abiertamente,” explicó Fullerton Rico.

Acortando la Distancia

Los rituales sociales, en cualquier cultura, son una parte importante del proceso del duelo. Los velorios y otras conmemoraciones pueden ayudar a la gente a pensar activamente en la persona difunta, dice , una neurocientífica que estudia el duelo en la Universidad de Colorado en Boulder. “Pensar en estas memorias le permite a tu cerebro como… remodelar y pensar en cómo encajan esas memorias ahora en tu vida,” dice ella. Pero para aquellos quienes están lejos al momento de la muerte y no pueden asistir al funeral en persona, este proceso puede ser mucho más difícil o quedar inconcluso.

, una psicóloga que trabaja con expatriados, ayuda a sus clientes a crear sus propios rituales para que cada uno pueda conmemorar su relación con su ser querido de una manera única. Ella los guía a través del proceso del duelo a larga distancia, usando acciones como escribir cartas, comer la comida favorita de un ser querido, o participar en una actividad que solían hacer juntos. El proceso toma tiempo. Frecuentemente son necesarias varias sesiones de adioses y rituales para que alguien haga las paces con una muerte repentina, dice Encina.

Similarmente, durante la pandemia, Chavan encontró su propia manera de enfrentar el duelo a través de la escritura. Ella había perdido su trabajo en ese tiempo y decidió asistir a una clase de escritura. Así inició un proyecto de “no-ficción creativa” que le permitía sumergirse en sus experiencias con el duelo transnacional. Chavan lentamente rompió el hielo que había encerrado a su corazón por ocho meses. Sollozaba mientras recordaba todos los detalles de su abuela: los debates enérgicos que juntas tenían, cómo dominaba los lugares a pesar de su pequeño tamaño, cómo reforzaba los lazos familiares con su amor.

“Fue horrible. Fue devastador. Se sintió como perderla de nuevo,” Chavan dijo.

Pero fueron estos actos de escribir y recordar los que le permitieron reconectarse a sus memorias… Y empezar a sanar.

Soluciones Sistémicas

Apoyar el duelo transnacional requiere que reconsideremos la forma en la que pensamos acerca de la inmigración y la pérdida. Actualmente, pocos inmigrantes indocumentados pueden ajustar su estado migratorio en los Estados Unidos. Los pocos que son elegibles típicamente reciben una autorización de trabajo antes de tener la opción de viajar de visita a su país de origen, y toma años para que obtengan la residencia permanente legal, explicó Fullerton Rico.  Es así que la oportunidad de visitar a sus seres queridos se vuelve una espera alargada, incluso mientras ellos envejecen o fallecen. Para muchos, es una espera sin fin.

“Si aprobamos leyes que le den prioridad a crear un camino rápido hacia la ciudadanía, podríamos evitar que las personas tengan que vivir estas experiencias,” dijo Fullerton Rico.

Muchos inmigrantes indocumentados también tienen trabajos inflexibles y de salarios bajos, lo cual los presiona a tomar decisiones dolorosas, como ver los funerales de sus seres queridos a través de su celular mientras ayudan a los clientes o preparan comidas en un restaurante. “En lugar de estar ahí en persona, ellos tuvieron que escaparse al baño, o esconderse en una cámara frigorífica para tener vistazos de uno de los rituales más significativos en la vida de una persona,” dice Fullerton Rico.

El permiso remunerado beneficia a las personas que están procesando un duelo. Esto les permite a los dolientes tomarse tiempo libre de sus trabajos sin tener que asumir las consecuencias potenciales de perder un cheque de pago o sus mismos trabajos. Chavan recuerda la presión de continuar su trabajo en medio de su duelo porque no tenía la flexibilidad financiera para perder horas de trabajo pagadas, lo cual gradualmente degradó su salud mental. En la actualidad, solo cinco estados de los E.E.U.U. requieren que los empleadores den permiso de faltar a causa de duelo, dice Fullerton Rico, y solo dos de esos estados requieren que los empleados sigan siendo pagados durante este periodo.

También es crucial “hacerle saber a las personas que no están solas en este dolor,” dice Fullerton Rico. Ella considera que es necesario que más organizaciones que apoyan a los inmigrantes reconozcan esta realidad y brinden apoyo para lidiar con el duelo transnacional. Por ejemplo, podrían ayudar a los inmigrantes a tener acceso a terapia, ofrecer otros recursos de salud mental, o ayudar a organizar rituales religiosos para que puedan conmemorar a sus seres queridos desde lejos. Así, los dolientes enfrentando el duelo transnacional correrían menos riesgo de condiciones como la depresión clínica. Ella comparte el ejemplo de un sacerdote católico que entrevistó en la ciudad de Nueva York, quien ha ayudado a realizar misas memoriales para dolientes transnacionales desde los 1990s. Hoy en día, estas ceremonias funerarias son transmitidas a través de Facebook Live, YouTube o Zoom, ayudando a las familias a sentir algún grado de cercanía.

Los expertos coinciden en que la formación de este apoyo social es un factor clave en el proceso de duelo. “El duelo es algo así como una experiencia social,” dice Bayatrizi. “Es una experiencia emocional que es formada a través de nuestras interacciones sociales.”

Chavan dice que la única razón por la cual ella finalmente se sintió lista para afrontar las emociones fue gracias a que su pareja y sus suegros fueron solidarios, proveyéndole una comunidad pequeña pero fuerte en un tiempo aislante. Tras escribir acerca de la experiencia, ella también comenzó a tener más conversaciones con familiares y amigos alrededor del mundo quienes habían leído su artículo, sobre el dolor del duelo a larga distancia y cómo lo habían afrontado ellos.

“Esencialmente, llegué a tener una comunidad, una comunidad global a la cual yo podía recurrir,” dice ella. “Comprender que no eres la única persona que ha pasado por una situación difícil puede ser una gran ayuda.”

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 3:29 p.m. PT on Nov. 11, 2024, to correct a few translation and production errors.��Read our corrections policy here.

Alongside get-out-the-vote efforts that happen right before elections, long-term policy-oriented campaigns are underway nationwide to boost voter turnout in the U.S., including making Election Day a national holiday to give voters time off to cast their ballots, rolling out automatic and pre-registration options, and expanding vote-at-home options. “Generating higher voter turnout is critical toward building a healthy democracy that works for everyone,” says Andrea Hailey, CEO at .

Several factors influence voter turnout in every nation, including voter enthusiasm; candidates and issues; and whether the election is a presidential, midterm, or local election. The U.S. is unique in its complex and patchwork state-led voting system, which creates stumbling blocks for would-be voters at every turn. “One of the largest contributors to low voter turnout in the U.S. [are] the laws that govern voting,” says Gayle Alberda, a professor of politics and public administration at Fairfield University.

Depending on where a voter lives, they must navigate a series of hurdles, including registering to vote, requesting an absentee ballot or locating a polling place, and ensuring they have the documents required to cast a ballot before they even get to the ballot box. These burdens are multiplied for some groups, including individuals with limited English proficiency, students attending college away from home, those in rural or low-income areas, and disabled people to whom registration processes or polling locations may be inaccessible. “This process places the burden of voting on the individual,” says Alberda, making it less likely people will turn out to vote.

Organizations focused on voter education and mobilization, including community groups and national giants such as and , backed by tens of thousands of volunteers, help eligible voters navigate these complexities each election cycle. Their efforts are vital, but the groups are fighting an uphill battle. The nation also needs policy interventions to streamline the burdensome election system and ensure more Americans can access the democratic process. 

Making Election Day a national holiday is one such intervention that has gained steam and even Congressional backers in recent years. “Work-related barriers hold back as many as 35% of non-voters from going to the polls,” says Hailey, citing data from a Pew Research Center survey conducted after the . Currently, “time off to vote” laws vary widely across the country, and require employers to provide paid time off for employees to vote.

Representative Anna G. Eshoo introduced the in 2024 to standardize state rules by making Election Day a federal holiday. Hailey says her organization hopes the bill is passed “so every voter has the flexibility they need to vote.” In the absence of a federal mandate, in August 2024, Vote.org challenging businesses to guarantee paid time off for their employees to vote on or before Election Day. 

While making Election Day a national holiday is a simple way to signal the importance of civic participation, researchers and voting rights advocates say the intervention should be coupled with changes to how people register to vote and cast their ballots. Research from the at Tufts University suggests that automatic and pre-registration options significantly positively impact turnout, . 

With (AVR), eligible voters are automatically registered when they utilize the services of a state agency, such as when they apply for a driver’s license or identification card at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Those who do not want to register to vote can opt out. “Studies show that automatic voter registration does increase voter registration and slightly increases voter turnout as it does eliminate a key barrier to voting, the registration process,” says Alberda. 

Oregon was the first state to implement AVR in 2016, and showed that AVR added more than a quarter of a million voters to the state’s rolls. Of that group, 36% were first-time registrants, and the group was younger and more ethnically diverse than the population of voters who had registered before automatic registration went into effect. A total of nationwide have enacted AVR policies so far. From Oregon’s introduction of AVR in 2016 to the 2018 voter registration deadline, Oregon and seven other states with new AVR programs added a combined .

Another innovation in voter registration is pre-registration, which allows young people to register to vote before reaching voting age. Many states allow 17-year-olds to register to vote as long as they will turn 18 before the next federal election. and allow those as young as 16 to pre-register. This approach eliminates the challenge of reaching would-be voters for the first time when they turn 18, an age at which many are transitioning into college life or new jobs away from home.

Pre-registration also allows young people to become familiar with the election process while still in school and rooted in a community. These factors encourage an enduring sense of civic responsibility and can turn teenagers into lifelong voters, according to Ava Mateo, president of voter organization . “Pre-registering to vote not only provides pathways for younger people to be involved in the civic process earlier, but it also, through our experience, has shown to have a positive impact on youth voter turnout,” she says.

Expanding vote-by-mail is another way to boost voter turnout. With this method, which resembles absentee balloting, the government mails ballots to eligible voters, and the voter marks their ballot at home and returns it before a deadline. Currently, , mail paper ballots to every registered voter before every election. Many voters also got a taste of this system when in-person polling locations had to be closed in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and . 

Alberda says that shift helped drive “record-high turnout” in the November 2020 election. Most states only offer in limited cases, and moving toward universal mail balloting could give turnout another boost. Similar to making Election Day a national holiday to ensure paid time off for voting, allowing people to vote from home eliminates work-related barriers that prevent so many Americans from getting to the polls. Recent research from the , a research and advocacy nonprofit, suggests that implementing vote-by-mail could boost turnout by as much as in some jurisdictions.

For Barbara Smith Warner, executive director of the National Vote at Home Institute, expanding vote-by-mail is not only a matter of engaging more voters but also of showing respect for voting as a fundamental right. “If you think voting is a right, it should be as convenient and voter-centric as possible, and nothing is easier than sending everybody their damn ballot.”

Some innovations to expand voter access have faced criticism from conservatives, who claim they . However, there is no evidence to back assertions that leads to illegal voting. Errors with automatic voter registration programs are also rare and mitigable. In Oregon, where it has recently come to light that some voters were mistakenly registered through the automatic system without showing requisite proof of citizenship, . The Oregon Secretary of State’s office emphasized that the records show evidence of clerical errors, meaning that clerks had mistakenly identified people as U.S. citizens when they obtained a driver’s license, even though they had not provided proof of citizenship. Previously, in cases such as this, many of the registrants were, in fact, citizens and only needed to provide a missing document to update their registration.

While pro-democracy organizers fight to protect the right to vote and boost the nation’s relatively low voter turnout on multiple fronts, they are also forced to confront harmful conservative narratives that paint expanding voter access as potentially leading to fraud. They are also up against regressive legislation from Republican lawmakers to restrict rather than expand access to the polls. The nonpartisan research group has tracked a surge in restrictive voter identification laws, restrictions on mail voting, and other policies undermining voting rights . 

Advocates argue that the struggle to expand access and boost turnout is nonpartisan, and legislation to restrict voting is a threat to all. “Voter suppression threatens the constitutional rights of every American,” says Hailey. “The best way to safeguard the foundations of our democracy is to empower the electorate and ensure every voter has the opportunity to make their voice heard.”

At first, getting in this much of a tizzy over what to wear to an abortion might seem silly or frivolous. But as Bracey Sherman talked to more people about their abortion experiences, she found that worrying about what to wear was quite common. It is the manifestation of uncertainty that stems from near-constant abortion stigma and lack of knowledge and expectations.

“I wish I had known” is a common refrain. Despite abortion being a near-universal experience, it can be hard to find advice that resonates. That’s the reason we believe a critical part of sharing our abortion stories and changing the narrative is sharing abortion wisdom.

Somatics coach, artist, and abortion storyteller Nik Zaleski taught Bracey Sherman about abortion wisdom—the advice that those of us who’ve had abortions impart to one another to try to make the path forward a little easier for those coming after us. These are the little tips and tricks we’ve learned from experience or that someone passed along to us—the little touches of care that we know to provide when showing up for one another, because we’ve been there, too.

We hope you can create an abortion experience that’s meaningful for you based on the advice of those of us who’ve been there. Although we can’t pick out your appointment outfit for you, we hope you’ll pick out clothes you feel confident in as you begin this next chapter of life.

Confirm What You’ve Suspected

There are a lot of reproductive conditions that mimic pregnancy symptoms, so first and foremost, confirm your pregnancy with a test. Pregnancies can be confirmed through a blood test at a clinic or hospital or by using a urine sample with an over-the-counter pregnancy test at least one week after missing an anticipated period.

Also, despite what the marketing suggests, the cheap pregnancy tests from the dollar store work just as well as the expensive ones at the pharmacy or grocery store, so grab whatever feels right for you and your budget. You may want to pick up more than one in case you don’t believe the positive result of the first one, which is quite common, or in case you take the test too early after your missed period and you need to test again in a few days.

We suggest picking up at least two—one to confirm the pregnancy now and another to confirm you are no longer pregnant a month or so after your abortion. But if you don’t believe the first positive test, get as many as you want. They’ll all say the same thing: It might be time to schedule an abortion.

You should be wary of free pregnancy tests. Anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers love to advertise free pregnancy tests to entice you to stop in, only to use the opportunity to proselytize, slut-shame, and misinform you. A lot of really wonderful community organizations, clinics, and abortion funds give out free pregnancy tests because they know tests are expensive—so free isn’t always bad. But if you’re looking for a free test, be mindful about who is giving it out.

Cover Your Tracks

Depending on whom you live with, where you live, and a whole host of other factors, you should be careful about whom you text with, what you search on the internet, and what information about your condition and decision you share.

As Texas-based organizer and We Testify storyteller Nancy Cárdenas Peña explained, it’s often the people who are closest to us who put us at deeper risk. She knows this from experience: “I wish I could have had more time to disclose my abortion story in the manner I felt comfortable with just as anyone should be able to share their story on their own terms.”

Surveillance is a reality of life now and can lead to criminalization for people seeking abortions. Even if you end up not having an abortion, you should be careful about your digital footprint throughout your process.

Talk to people on the phone or in person rather than in writing. Try to use messaging apps with encrypted or disappearing messages or those that don’t allow screenshots. Delete your call log history. Clear the browser history of the search engine you use, or use a private browser that doesn’t save or track your history. Use a lock on your phone and computer so that others can’t look at your messages or browser history when you’re not watching. Protecting your communications can help keep you safe.

Get Your Money Right

One of the most challenging aspects of obtaining an abortion is paying for it. The cost of an abortion (depending on how far along you are and the method) can range from $150 to well over $15,000. If you’re seeking a first-trimester appointment at a clinic in the United States, the average cost is $500. On top of that, you may have to pay for short- or long-distance transportation to and from the clinic, a multi-night hotel stay, meals, childcare, and pain medications. Some state and federal policies ban private and public health insurance from covering abortions. If you are going to a clinic, ask if they accept insurance—some do not.

Prepare for Your Abortion

It’s common to feel scared or embarrassed about asking questions during a medical appointment, even when it’s not an abortion. But the answers to your questions can put you at ease, so muster your courage and ask questions so you can feel as comfortable and informed as possible.

Travel Planning

If you’re traveling for your abortion, save all important phone numbers, including the numbers for the clinic, abortion fund case manager, practical support volunteer, or any other emergency contacts. Download maps to your phone so you can access them offline if cell service is slow or unavailable. Familiarize yourself with directions to and from the airport or train station so you know where you’ll need to go to catch your ride smoothly.

Getting to Your Appointment

Arranging a ride to your abortion can be complicated, because you have to trust someone else with your experience, and they may need to travel across state lines with you. If you trust a friend enough, this is a good opportunity for a bestie road trip. If you have the cash, you can always take a cab or use an app service to book a car, but remember there may be a digital history of your ride to the clinic. If you need to enter a destination digitally, instead of using the clinic’s address, try choosing a spot nearby.

Local abortion funds and practical support organizations can arrange volunteers to drive you from your home, work, airport, or train station—truly wherever!—to your appointment and back.

Be vigilant for police outside of the clinic or Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, who set up traps on thoroughfares and near clinics, schools, and hospitals to detain and arrest Black and Brown people, undocumented immigrants, and other marginalized groups. This step is critical if you’re crossing checkpoints or borders or if you live in or near heavily policed communities. The morning of your appointment, you might want to check with your community and trusted immigration organizations that document ICE checkpoints.

When you arrive for your appointment, double-check to make sure the place you’re headed to is indeed the clinic. Anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers often set up next door to abortion clinics, or an anti-abortion clinic may have a name similar to the name of the exact clinic you’re trying to get to. There are often anti-abortion protesters outside of clinics who scream and yell at anyone walking near the abortion clinic, in hopes of scaring people out of going inside or disorienting them so they walk into the wrong place.

Call “Your Person”

In the first season of Grey’s Anatomy, Dr. Cristina Yang (Sandra Oh) sits at a bar with Dr. Meredith Grey (Ellen Pompeo) as they grieve their failing love lives over snacks. Cristina is pregnant and has an abortion scheduled, but according to clinic policy, she needed to designate an emergency contact on her form, so she wrote down Meredith’s name. “That’s why I told you I’m pregnant,” Cristina tells Meredith. “You’re my person.” Meredith hugs her friend, who receives the hug reluctantly. “Shut up. I’m your person,” Meredith replies.

This short scene in the iconic long-running television show created a beloved shorthand for best friends who promise to show up for one another, no matter what. That it grew out of a supportive abortion decision is just the icing on the cake for us. 

Like Cristina, you may want to identify “your person” to check in on you, hold your hand in the waiting room, or sit with you as you pass the pregnancy while binge-watching Grey’s Anatomy. Ask your clinic whether you can bring a friend or loved one with you. 

You might be a little dizzy after the sedation or cramping a bit if you have an in-clinic procedure, so we recommend having someone else drive you home. We Testify abortion storyteller Cazembe Murphy Jackson suggests finding someone who can attend the procedure with you and be with you in the days following. “Maybe plan out some restful activities that you really like to do or that will keep you happy—shows you want to watch, stuff like that. I think that would have been really helpful for me,” he explained.

If you’re having your abortion at home, you may want to call on someone from your community to sit with you through the process. They can help you get to and from the toilet, clean up, make food, and dote on you as you deserve.

Ask for What You Need

As wonderful as abortion providers are, some are still learning how to better care for patients with disabilities, those who are fat, survivors, or nonbinary or trans people, to name a few identities. Be ready to tell your provider what you need in order to have an abortion experience that is right for you. If your body doesn’t move in a particular way or you do not like body parts to be touched or referred to in a certain way, tell your providers during the counseling conversation.

You may also want to remind them your body requires a different dosage of pain medication compared with other patients. Good providers will be accommodating of your needs. While it is unfortunate you may have to be the one to initiate, you deserve an abortion experience that centers you.

Adapted excerpt from . Reprinted with the permission of the publisher Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollins. Copyright © 2024 by Renee Bracey Sherman and Regina Mahone.

Jones pauses and clears his throat, wiping his eyes. “I get emotional about it,” he says quietly, looking down at the black Labrador retriever sleeping at his feet. “Midnight has done so much for me. I really don’t know what I’d do without him.”&�Բ�����; 

serves individuals experiencing homelessness in Upper Darby, a township on the outskirts of Philadelphia. It is the only shelter in the area to welcome guests along with their “Three P’s”: pets, possessions, and partners of all genders. 

A few years ago, Jones was in a car accident that left him unable to work. As a result, he lost his apartment and began living on the streets. During this time, Jones left his service dog, Midnight, in the care of a friend. Every day, for months, he would take the bus to visit Midnight.  

In addition to his role as an emotional support dog, Midnight is also trained to care for Jones in the event of a medical emergency. Jones suffers from hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and relies on Midnight to bring him his medication and phone during cardiac episodes when Jones is unable to stand.  

When Jones finally secured a spot at a shelter that allowed service animals, he found the staff to be confrontational about Midnight’s presence, despite the dog’s status as a service animal. Eventually Jones was evicted from the facility. 

After sleeping in a storage unit for two nights, Charles and Midnight visited the Breaking Bread Community Shelter in search of food. They were immediately invited in for coffee and a meal. Soon after, Charles and Midnight secured a room in the shelter, shared with two other guests, and were able to move in.  

“The first day we came, the staff called us by name, even Midnight,” Jones shakes his head, emotional once again. “They told me they had my back. I felt like I was in heaven.”

Once securing a bed at Breaking Bread, Midnight was given vaccines and other medical care from volunteer veterinarians in the community. “I owe this place everything,” says Jones. “We’ve got a whole new family here.”&�Բ�����;

An Impossible Decision

“Approximately 10% of people experiencing homelessness do so with service animals, emotional support animals, or companion animals,” according to the . However, very few homeless shelters currently accept pets. This means that many unhoused people are forced to make the often impossible decision between safe shelter and staying with their pet. 

Additional research by the Alliance indicates that many choose to remain with their animal, even if that means sleeping on the street or staying in a violent situation. According to the , “50% of domestic abuse survivors would not leave an abusive home unless they could take their pet with them.”&�Բ�����;

Biana Tamimi, a veterinarian and the director of shelter medicine at the Animal Care Center of New York City, believes this decision is only natural. Tamimi explains that for many people, an animal is more than a pet—they are a member of the family. Over her years of veterinary care in New York City, Tamimi has witnessed animals providing critical companionship, comfort, and trauma healing to people experiencing homelessness or poverty.  

“I have met so many unhoused people who say there’s no way on Earth they would give up their animal. [Their pet] is their reason to get up in the morning, a reason to go out and look for food,” Tamimi says. “We all know what it feels like to come home after a hard day and pet your cat or have your dog jump on your lap and give you licks. Imagine in the darkest time of your life, having a companion that’s been with you for years suddenly taken away. We never want that to happen to people.”

The Interconnected Health of Pets and their Owners

In addition to her role at the Animal Care Center of New York City, Tamimi serves as a co-lead at , an organization that believes the well-being of the pet and the owner are inextricably linked. At pop-up street clinics across the nation, the Coalition provides free veterinary care to pets of people experiencing or at risk of homelessness, while also offering social services and medical resources to owners. This model of care is known as the “” approach. Attributed by many to 20th-century veterinary epidemiologist , the One Health movement has gained popularity in recent decades. 

“One Health is a way of providing care that recognizes the connection between human health and animal well-being,” Tamimi explains.  “Practically, what these clinics look like is a veterinary team working alongside human health care providers. For example, I’ll be examining the animal, and maybe there’s a psychiatrist with us, and we’re having a conversation as a group.”

Tamimi shares that, often, the focus of the appointment is first on the pet, utilizing the human-animal bond to help the owner feel comfortable. 

“People want their animals to get the care they need,” Tamimi says. “One of the biggest benefits [of One Health clinics] is getting someone through the door who might have a lack of trust with housing providers, with health care. … We use that bond with the pet to facilitate the human getting care for themselves as well.”&�Բ�����;

At a recent New York City pop-up clinic, Tamimi recalls a man who brought his cat to the clinic, concerned that she was developing asthma. Through conversation with the man, Tamimi and the volunteer social workers at the clinic discovered he was a heavy smoker, which was likely causing his cat’s breathing issues.

“That was a great opportunity to discuss how the owner could smoke a little less,” Tamimi says. “He didn’t realize his smoking was causing this problem, and he said he didn’t want to do that to her. … Our team was able to say, ‘Let’s tackle this problem together, because you’re going to be helping your cat and ��dzܰ��������.’�ĝ

To Tamimi, this illustrates the effectiveness of the One Health model and the power of the human-animal bond to positively influence a person’s life. 

“Pets keep their owners grounded. They keep them well, especially in really dark times of isolation and stress,” she continues. “Humans can get through the most challenging times of their lives because they have an animal there with them that relies on them. … That interconnectedness is really valuable.”

In Texas, a Safe Space for Pets and Owners

in Dallas is also working to keep unhoused people with their pets. The nonprofit has 20 dog kennels in its 750,000-square-foot center, along with shaded walking areas and a full-service grooming room. Recovery center clients are also provided with free dog food, leashes, and toys. 

David Woody, a social worker and the president and CEO of The Bridge, says that in his experience, if a client is offered a spot in a shelter that does not welcome their animal, they often refuse services.

“Here at The Bridge, we’ve developed a real sensitivity to that kind of experience,” Woody says. “Through the kennel program, we offer dogs a safe space while the guest gets their needs met as well. We take care of the whole person, and the canine is just as important as anything else.”

Channon Cavazos, kennel manager at The Bridge, explains that often, guests open up to her about their trauma while talking about their pet. This allows the team at The Bridge to better serve the client’s individual needs. 

Cavazos says there is nearly always a waitlist for The Bridge’s pet-friendly shelter services. In the coming years, she hopes to expand the kennel program, allowing more Dallas residents to receive shelter without being separated from their animal. 

“There are people who will wait on our waitlist for weeks at a time because they can’t part with their animals. A lot of these people have been through a lot. The last thing they want to do is get rid of their animal,” Cavazos says. “I would love to see a kennel in all homeless shelters so that no one has to part with their animal to receive shelter.”

Mobilizing the Public

a nonprofit working across all 50 states, provides food and medical services to the animals of unhoused people. Since it got its start in 2008, the nonprofit has provided more than 2 million pounds of food as well as medical care to more than 30,000 pets.  

“When we first started, our clients would tell us they were giving their pet half of whatever food they could find,” says founder Geneveive Frederick. “And we knew this wasn’t healthy for the person or the pet.”&�Բ�����; 

Feeding Pets of the Homeless relies on donation sites across the country to collect pet food and supplies from the public. These donation sites are located in hair salons, doctors’ offices, pet shops, and other small businesses. The food and supplies collected then gets distributed by social service centers like domestic violence shelters and food banks. Feeding Pets of the Homeless also offers financial support to unhoused clients whose pets need urgent medical care. 

The majority of the organization’s clients are women, Frederick shares. She highlighted that, many times, unhoused women are at and rely on their animals for safety.

“Even the smallest dog can alert them that danger is coming,” she says. 

Additionally, she mentions the among people experiencing homelessness. For some people, pets can provide a reason to seek help, even when they feel hopeless.  

“For many [unhoused people], they’ve lost all hope … but they reach out to us because they feel responsible for their animal,” Frederick says. “Programs like ours can give people hope that somebody out there wants to help them, and their pet, in their time of need.”

That the United States incarcerates people at a higher rate than most countries in the world is, by now, a truism.

But that’s not the only way in which the country is an outlier. The vast majority of people locked up in prisons throughout America cannot vote. In many democratic nations, including Canada and most of the European Union, . Imprisonment itself is seen as sufficient punishment. 

The exclusion does not stop at the prison walls. There are over 2 million other Americans who have served their time but remain barred from voting because of a felony conviction. 

In total, 4.6 million people are locked out of the democratic process in the United States. Nearly . That’s a fundamental flaw in this experiment called democracy. 

Restoring our right to vote would make society safer. It would give incarcerated people a means of pushing back against a system that controls our lives. And it would help America realize a truer, more inclusive version of itself. 

People in this country have a long history of fearing the other. I wonder what people might fear about currently and formerly incarcerated people voting? Is it that we might vote against the interests of fellow Americans? 

Maybe some of us would vote in humane policymakers who mandate , or who challenge  like picking cotton, the major cash crop of U.S. slavery. Others might mark their ballots for lawmakers committed to creating more green spaces and reducing food deserts in under-resourced communities.

Or maybe that wouldn’t happen. We are not a . In fact, inside I have noticed that it’s the working class, across all demographics, who overwhelmingly support Donald Trump. Those with more formal education tend to support Kamala Harris.  

We probably care a lot about what you care about. We want our kids to grow up healthy and safe. We want fair politicians reelected and corrupt ones voted out. We want to fund and strengthen our communities, but not waste money.

For me? I would throw my support behind school board members who would allow my daughter to read The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, one of Texas’ most frequently banned books. I would advocate for safe and clean drinking water in rural towns, where prisons are often located. And I would rally behind leaders who protect a broad range of reproductive rights because I don’t believe my daughters should have fewer reproductive rights than their grandmother.��

Meanwhile, by letting us have a say in politics, you are helping us become reinvested in our communities, where . The Sentencing Project released  last year that argued restoring voting rights for people with felony convictions can improve public safety. The right to vote and the act of voting are linked to  for Americans who have been involved with the criminal legal system, according to the report. 

Instead of getting involved in our communities, we’re forced to sit on the sidelines and let the state do with us what it pleases.

A few years ago, Texas began . Before then, I was able to hold letters from my loved ones. I remember tracing the pink crayon-heart indentations of my daughter’s script, and taking in the signature scent of my mother’s perfume, which she sprayed on the page. Now, that simple but profound moment of physical connection is gone, and I can’t do anything about it.

Larger, attacks on our rights and dignity are also occurring while we cry out into the abyss, hoping someone will hear us. Failed forms of  continue to extend sentences for convictions, no matter how old. Marijuana possession is still criminalized in many states, including Texas, a fact responsible for countless ruined lives. And , who in some cases can’t even recall their convictions, are routinely denied compassionate release. Shouldn’t those of us most impacted by these policies have an opportunity to influence them?

Some people think “no.” Supporters of felony disenfranchisement laws tend to argue that incarcerated people gave up their privilege to vote when they chose to break the law. But this view ignores the fact that our legal system treats the poor differently than the rich. 

Consider the financial crisis of 2008. None of its bank CEO architects, who ruined millions of lives and cost the country an estimated $23 trillion, went to jail or prison. Same for members of the infamous Sackler family, whose company Purdue Pharma created Oxycontin and marketed the fatally addictive drug under false pretenses, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths nationwide. Neither the bank CEOs nor the Sacklers lost their privilege to vote, despite breaking the law. 

Meanwhile, former President Donald Trump, who was found guilty on 34 felony counts earlier this year, continues his run for re-election to the highest office in the land.

But my neighbors incarcerated for bouncing grocery checks at Walmart are left without the right to have a voice in our government? 

More than anything, restoring our right to vote would honor the spirit of our democracy. It would signal to everyone inside and out that all voices matter, no matter what.

That would be a novel but no less essential development in the history of America. Since the end of the Civil War, the United States has found ways to disenfranchise Black voters. It started with literacy tests and poll taxes and threats of racist violence. Now, it’s through  and mass incarceration. 

“We the People” includes we the incarcerated. It’s long past time to allow all voting-age Americans the freedom to vote.

A court of teenagers, by teenagers, and for teenagers, Teen Court is exactly what it sounds like: a program giving a new name to justice and serving young people across Texas. The court offers a voluntary alternative from the traditional court system for teens under 17 who commit Class C misdemeanors. Students can avoid a fine and instead receive their penalty in constructive ways such as community service and jury terms in the Teen Court. Once completed, the charge is completely removed from their record.

The program allows young people to plead guilty in front of a student jury that empathizes with their situation and asks them questions about circumstances—their background, home situation, economic status, and what led them to commit the offense. Rather than face a punitive system, teens can avoid unpleasant experiences with law enforcement and move through an alternative criminal justice system that values them.��

Student attorney Alex Gonzalez, who is from El Paso, says the program is a way to avoid pigeonholing teens. “The program shifts the focus from labeling students as ‘offenders’ or ‘juveniles’ in a negative light to seeing them as people who made a mistake and are now learning from it,” she says.

The goal of the court and the student jury is to set teens up for success by making sure the penalty is feasible for each person. In Teen Court, what counts as community service isn’t strictly limited to volunteering; it’s any self-improvement action, such as going to counseling, achieving a higher grade in a class, or joining an extracurricular class. 

Sophia Garza, the juvenile case manager and director of El Paso’s Teen Court program explains how community service is defined broadly to accommodate all students. “I have kids that live on the other side, in Mexico, but they attend school in El Paso. … But as long as they’re doing anything that betters themselves or betters their community, I will take it as community service,” she says.

Sherry Maximoff, Williamson County attorney and Teen Court supervisor, says the volunteer hours also work as constructive punishment for teens because it encourages them to take care of a community they have served. “If you are taught to give back to your community and to volunteer, it gives you a sense of ownership and responsibility over your community. This is my community, and I’m going to clean up those streets, then why would I commit criminal mischief or litter?” she says.

In recent years, Texas has increased criminalization and policing of teens, especially those of color. The state has intensified the number of law enforcement officers on K–12 campuses with larger populations of Latinx and Black students. This has resulted in in arrests, court referrals, and use-of-force incidents. With students of color across the state saying they fear the officers on campuses, Teen Court allows them to avoid traumatizing experiences with law enforcement and have their stories heard without judgment from people within the system.

“[Students are] not dealing with anyone who they identify as law enforcement. That’s the whole point of positive peer pressure, that it is their peers who stand in judgment of them, not law enforcement, not the system,” explains Morales about how the program is a part of the justice system that veers heavily away from criminalizing students of color. 

Garza also says that she notices teens feeling more comfortable once they see other teens on the jury. “When I sit with the youth I can see some are being very cautious. I do see the youth open up more, share a little bit more with their peers, maybe because they feel like if they’re going to be judged, their peers are going to understand their situation a little bit better,” she explains.

As a state that eschews gun regulation, Texas has also used the overpolicing of schools as a temporary for gun violence. At a time when students are being criminalized at such a high rate, Teen Court programs allow students from marginalized communities to have their stories heard. This is especially important because students going through the system are often dealing with issues far too serious for their age bracket and sometimes beyond their control.

Williamson County Teen Court volunteer Audrey Seigman talks about a case in which a teen was involved in an accident while driving their siblings to school. “This person was put in a very difficult position. Their parents made them drive their siblings because they were busy with jobs. The accident wasn’t their fault, but the police found out they weren’t qualified to be driving and cited them,” she says.

Other student attorneys say that they’ve seen similar cases with teens who struggle with issues beyond their control because they come from first-generation families. “[There was] a case involving a student who didn’t speak English. He was charged with theft, but it became clear that he didn’t fully understand what was happening or how the legal system worked. His family had recently immigrated and there was a huge language barrier,” says Gargi Singh, a student attorney with the Williamson Teen Court program.

Gonzalez says that declining mental health is common among teens who enter the program. “Cases involve students dealing with emotional or psychological issues such as depression, anxiety, or trauma. A student might engage in risky behavior as a coping mechanism for their mental health struggles.”

In recent years, there has been a resurgence in “tough on crime” approaches to the justice system, including and harsh from the right. The conservative federal policy agenda Project 2025 seeks to increase criminalization and policing by eliminating training for federal law enforcement. Former President Donald Trump has promised he would increase the militarization of police and expand incarceration and the death penalty if elected. In such a context, Teen Court programs are more important than ever,  offering a crucial opportunity for teens to bypass the. Students are more likely to avoid entering the system later in their lives because Teen Court embodies a form of restorative justice that doesn’t use law enforcement or incarceration for discipline. 

“At the very lowest level, where the consequences are least impactful, we give them a positive experience with the criminal justice system. You interrupt that pipeline there, both with the way the child begins to define themselves and by actually physically dismissing the ticket,” says Morales about how Teen Court directly curbs the school-to-prison pipeline. “We have defendants who have gone through the program and have had such a positive experience at the end that they have chosen to become volunteers,” she adds.

Judge Elaine Marshall from Houston, Texas, talks about her Teen Court program and how it has discouraged recidivism among teens in her community. “I started my Teen Court in 2000. From those years I have had no repeat offenders. It says a lot that we’ve had students who come through as offenders wanting to join the program.”&�Բ�����;

For student volunteers, the program is also a unique way to learn about the legal system and restorative justice. Especially in a state like Texas, which from learning about historical injustices, Teen Court gives students a hands-on opportunity to learn about nuances within the criminal justice system.

“[The program] is not about branding students as ‘criminals’ but about showing them that they’re capable of growth. It has shown me how crucial empathy and understanding are in fostering real change,” says Singh.

Teen Court is creating a generation of students who know that reform in the criminal justice system is both necessary and possible. The program bridges gaps between teens and builds community and empathy, giving students the confidence to fight for change.

I was incarcerated for more than eight years in Florida. I’ve been free for 18 months and just recently got the bug to vote again. Problem was, I didn’t know if I was eligible to register. I wasn’t debriefed on the matter when I left prison, and I’d heard different things from different people. Some said: “Felons can’t vote in Florida. Ever.” While others claimed: “You can vote as long as you’re done with your sentence.”������������

I needed guidance. And clearly I wasn’t the only one.  

A new proposal by the Florida Division of Elections seeks to end confusion around restoration of voting rights. If passed, the update to its existing advisory opinion process would provide people with felony convictions the chance to request a formal opinion stating definitively whether their voting rights have been restored. In so doing, it will clarify a complicated state statute that governs the process of reinstating voting rights for formerly incarcerated people. 

“We wanted to figure out a simple question: Whose job is it to determine voter eligibility?” Desmond Meade, executive director of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, told Spectrum News 13 in August in support of the proposal. 

Confusion Over the Law

The state statute in question, SS 98.0751, dictates that for all crimes other than murder or sex offenses, restoration of voting rights is contingent upon sentence completion, including parole or probation and the satisfaction of all court-ordered fines and fees. People convicted of murder or sex offenses must seek additional permission in the form of clemency from a state-appointed board.

But this alone doesn’t definitively answer the question of eligibility. Many people are not even aware of all the fines they owe post-incarceration, let alone the offense-specific guidelines laid out in the statute.   

Meade said the proposed process, including a special form, would affirmatively address these issues. He added, “The other thing, which I think is huge, is that it provides protection for people against” being arrested for voter fraud. 

Forty-one formerly incarcerated people were arrested in 2022 and 2023 for voter fraud in Florida, according to Southern Poverty Law Center. At least some of them had attempted to vote based on honest misunderstandings of the state statute—yet their prosecutions proceeded. 

In response, some critics charged that Gov. Ron DeSantis and state Republicans were deliberately suppressing the voting rights of felons. 

“Instead of fulfilling its role to enable Floridians to vote, the state has made it more difficult, which is anti-democratic,” said Courtney O’Donnell, a senior staff attorney for voting rights with the Southern Poverty Law Center, in an article posted on the group’s site.

Florida does indeed make it hard for felons to vote. A 2023 fact sheet by The Sentencing Project states that Florida disenfranchises nearly 1.5 million people with felony convictions, more than any other state in the nation.

A History of Controversy

The latest saga in the battle over felony disenfranchisement in Florida began heating up in 2018. 

That’s the year voters in the state approved Amendment 4, which automatically restored voting rights to anyone with felony convictions—minus those convicted of murder or sex offenses—upon release from prison. DeSantis opposed the measure. Not even a year later, thanks to legislative support by his fellow Republicans, DeSantis signed SS 98.0751 into law.   

Legal battles ensued. Opponents of the bill, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), said it effectively instituted a “poll tax,” whereby only those who could pay could vote, echoing similar attempts from the Jim Crow era. 

DeSantis said the measure was a safeguard against giving “violent felons” certain societal benefits “without regard to the wishes of the victims.”&�Բ�����; 

Ultimately, the fight reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 2020 decided against intervening in a lower-court ruling that upheld the new law. In a dissent joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the law “prevents thousands of otherwise eligible voters from participating in Florida’s primary election simply because they are poor.”

Moving Forward

SS 98.0751 is the law of the land for the foreseeable future. In my case, once I did my homework, the registration process ultimately went smoothly. However, I credit this to my relative privilege in being resourceful enough to conduct such research and pay my fines, coupled with my not being convicted of murder or a sex crime.  Sadly, many others aren’t so lucky.   

The special opinion process proposed by the Florida Department of Elections is not expected to go into effect before the Oct. 7 deadline to register to vote in the fall election, according to CBS News Miami. 

For more information on voting in Florida, visit the website of the supervisor of elections in your county or. You can also review this����from the ACLU of Florida.

When in April 2024, Barrymore referenced that nickname. “That’s a great segue to say that I keep thinking in my head that we all need a mom,” Barrymore said. “I’ve been thinking that we really all need a tremendous hug in the world right now. But in our country, we need you to be ‘Momala’ of the country.”

I thought a lot about that moment while watching Harris debate former President Donald Trump in September. At the start of the debate, before shaking Harris’ hand, which continued throughout the night. Harris was poised, standing firmly on her policies, while Trump struggled to directly answer questions and made and poor Americans.

As Trump made silly faces and referred to Harris as “this one” instead of her name and title, I was reminded of the ways Black people, especially Black women, have long been called upon to be the adults in the room. Thanks to both and , Black people are required to be above reproach, emotionless, and with a heightened understanding of the feelings of white Americans. In many ways, Harris had to embody the role of “Momala” during the debate to assuage the fears of fragile white Americans, and some Americans of color, who were looking for her to be well-behaved, respectable, and unrattled.

Despite Trump’s overt disrespect and disregard for Harris’ station, many voters in the United States were interested in how Harris handled his childishness, his antics, his attacks, and his reactions, rather than judging her debate performance based on her expertise and preparedness for the role.

As I write in , Black women who seek political office are often expected to be hypermasculine superheroes with the ability to save white Americans from problems they themselves have created. These expectations play into the stereotype of the unsexed, unattractive, obsequious mammy, whose only desire is to care for white families, nurse white children, and relieve white women of their household duties. When Barrymore asked Harris to mother the country, that is the stereotype she was referencing—and that’s what white Americans hoped to see at the debate.

This isn’t the first time we’ve witnessed a Black presidential candidate withhold their emotions during a debate while their white male opponent displayed uncontrollable bouts of anger. When then Senator Barack Obama debated the late Senator John McCain in 2008, I distinctly remember McCain referring to Obama as “” and refusing to make eye contact with his opponent.

It’s a level of disrespect seemingly only tolerable when it’s exhibited by white men. But these behaviors are deeply rooted in anti-Blackness and the belief that Black Americans do not deserve the same level of regard and honor white Americans receive. We call that white supremacy.

And yet, in the face of impossible expectations, Harris managed to be pensive, thoughtful, clever, funny, and above her opponent’s demeaning critiques of her as a person. Regardless of your opinions of Harris, there are many people who will find safety and solace in her embodying the role of the country’s mammy, and they will care more about her performance of this insidious stereotype than anything she said on that debate stage.

But if we ever want to move past a political imagination limited to gender binaries and racial hierarchies, we must hope for more from anyone who stands to represent us. As such, it’s likely that those of us who believe in the fullness of Blackness and Black life have largely been left under-satisfied by Harris’ approach to this campaign.

Being white America’s “Momala” may win Harris the presidential race. It might even win her reelection in 2028. But it won’t challenge the expectations of those who see Black women as caricatures and reflections of their darkest fantasies. Being white America’s “Momala” won’t get us any closer to freedom—and it certainly won’t pave the way for the radical liberationist politics we need at this moment and moving forward.

Throughout the book, Giovale faces the dark truths about her European ancestors and pushes through to see an opportunity to create a new way of being and thinking. She explores and acknowledges the atrocities committed by her European ancestors toward Indigenous peoples, the impacts on her own identity as a white person, and the systemic perpetuation of this violence. In doing so, she creates a blueprint for European-descended people living in America to examine their own role in white supremacy—and to heal. 

Read an excerpt from Becoming a Good Relative here.

By embarking on a journey of rekindling ancestral memories, Giovale uncovers the hidden stories and legacies of her own lineage—even those that involve the perpetration of harm or complicity in injustice. She dives deep into the historical context that led her Irish ancestors to emigrate to the United States, including the British settlement of Ireland in the 1600s and its deliberate attack on Irish culture and systems of governance as a means to dissolve communities from within. Generations later, British rule exacerbated the already catastrophic Irish potato blight, resulting in mass forced migration to the U.S., where Irish immigrants were labeled dirty and dangerous. This was the inflection point where Irish immigrants assimilated to American whiteness, leaving behind cultural traditions and practices that connected them to their heritage. That assimilation also required the once-othered Irish to participate in and perpetuate harm and violence toward other U.S. communities deemed “non-white.”

Ancestral aversion is a common experience—the urge to sever ties with the parts of ourselves that relate to painful histories. Yet Giovale urges her white peers to examine their own lineage as a way to build empathy and compassion for their ancestors. While she does not excuse or justify the harms of her ancestors, Giovale shares a road map for forgiveness, a critical first step in creating a personal reparations plan. This process of exploring ancestral narratives can create healing across generations and enable a deeper understanding of how historical traumas continue to impact individuals and societies today.

Giovale’s depiction of her family’s history draws not-so-subtle connections to other Indigenous peoples whose worlds have been destroyed time and time again by European colonizers. It also brings to mind the harmful narratives currently being perpetuated about migrants crossing our Southern border. This parallel is critical and has the power to catalyze healing on a tremendous scale. 

We need more white relatives to face their own truth, though doing so may bring immense discomfort. As we see on Giovale’s journey, it is only through this initial discomfort that she is able to achieve true growth, ultimately uncovering her own cultures and ancestral practices that have been tragically lost through colonization. It is optional for white folks to investigate their whiteness, and that itself is a privilege. Giovale acknowledges that it was many years into her own life until she was confronted by her whiteness, her ancestry, and her own role in white supremacy. 

In a time when division is the air we breathe, Giovale offers our white relatives an opportunity to stop the cycle of extraction, exploitation, and control, and embrace a worldview of human interconnectivity and mutual thriving. This is especially powerful for European-descended individuals who also have ancestors with Earth-based traditions and beliefs, whose ways of being were destroyed through the same colonialist mindsets that created the environment we live in today.  

Giovale’s story reminds us that discomfort begets connection. Her encounters with Indigenous people from around the world, and her exploration of how their practices can be applied to her own life and lineage, illuminate our commonalities—and our relatedness. Her journey, and this book, demonstrates a deep truth: All our suffering is mutual—and so is our healing.

But as we face the prospect of another potential Trump presidency, the architects of Project 2025 have made it clear that overturning Roe was just the first in a multistep plan to eradicate access to safe abortion. Though the Republican Party removed a federal abortion ban from its official party platform, there’s something more sinister that’s been hiding in plain sight for 150 years.

, signed into law in 1873, made it a federal offense to disseminate contraceptives, abortifacients, and information about either across state lines or through the mail. Named after Anthony Comstock, an anti-obscenity crusader who inspired the title of the biographical book , the Comstock Law had far-reaching tentacles. Even married couples who used contraception could be sentenced to up to one year in prison.

Over time, various challenges to the Comstock Act, including in 1936, which made it possible for physicians to distribute contraception across state lines; in 1964, which established the constitutional right to contraception; and, of course, in 1973, essentially made it unenforceable. However, the law was never repealed and has instead become a “zombie law,” a term used to describe laws still on the books that have been overruled by other legal cases. Take, for instance, Arizona’s 1864 abortion ban, a zombie law that became legally viable after the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade. Though , it still remained on the books long enough to instill fear in those .

Now, after the fall of Roe, Project 2025 plans to revive the zombie Comstock Act and make it workable. Since it’s already on the books, Congress isn’t required to pass the Comstock Act. Instead, a president and appointed judges can choose whether to enforce it. Project 2025 architects hope that, if given another term, Trump will do just that.

A Significant Threat to Abortion

in the U.S. Since Roe fell in June 2022, every single time the issue has been on the ballot, even in traditionally conservative states like Kansas, Montana, and Ohio. While a national abortion ban could threaten congressional seats for Republicans, it would also require control of both houses of Congress and the executive branch, a higher threshold than simply winning the presidency. So, it seems, the architects of Project 2025 have developed a workaround to meet their aims.

After Roe was overturned, issued guidance about whether the Comstock Act could be used to criminalize someone who receives mifepristone and misoprostol through the United States Postal Service. “We conclude that section 1461 does not prohibit the mailing, or the delivery or receipt by mail, of mifepristone or misoprostol where the sender lacks the intent that the recipient of the drugs will use them unlawfully,” the memorandum opinion states. “Federal law does not prohibit the use of mifepristone and misoprostol,” the memorandum continues. “Indeed, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (‘FDA’) has determined the use of mifepristone in a regimen with misoprostol to be safe and effective for the medical termination of early pregnancy.”

But under a Trump presidency, the DOJ would likely have a different view, especially since Project 2025 explicitly calls for “against providers and distributors of [abortion] pills.”

Additionally, the spate of radical, far-right judges Trump appointed during his first term have already proven their willingness to to curb access to abortion. In 2023, , who has deep ties to the anti-abortion movement, defied court precedent to suspend the approval of mifepristone. “The Court does not second-guess FDA’s decision-making lightly,” he wrote in his decision. “But here, FDA acquiesced on its legitimate safety concerns—in violation of its statutory duty—based on plainly unsound reasoning and studies that did not support its conclusions.”

If Trump is able to appoint even more partisan judges like Kacsmaryk to the federal bench, it’s possible they would use the Comstock Act to criminalize folks sending or receiving mifepristone and misoprostol (or even information about it) through the mail. “If the Comstock [Act] were enforced, it would seriously impact the work we do,” says Sneha S. Nair, partnerships coordinator at , a collection of online platforms that provides abortion and contraception information and services. “We rely on digital platforms to share [sexual and reproductive health] content worldwide, and restrictions like the Comstock [Act] could lead to significant censorship and suppression of vital information.”

But even the threat of Comstock being enforced is concerning for abortion advocates and providers. “What people believe the law to be is just as important, if not more so, than what the law actually is,” says Farah Diaz-Tello, senior counsel and legal director at , a legal organization that aims to transform the policy landscape to make reproductive justice a reality. “When people have to second-guess what their options are and they just know that there’s a sort of vague and looming fear of criminalization … that is not a risk that everybody has the privilege to tolerate.”

For Black and Brown people, who have already for pregnancy outcomes, even the threat of an enforceable Comstock Law could be enough of a deterrent to prevent them from seeking necessary care.

Refusing to Be Silent

While Project 2025’s architects may be banking on the Comstock Act, they will have to contend with a network of providers and advocates refusing to put the genie back in the draconian bottle. For example, ’s post-Dobbs campaign, “,” promotes information about and access to medication abortion online.

Similarly, the , a DIY medical collective, has literally turned into medication abortion. Embedded in the cards are three doses of misoprostol, which can be used on its own to induce an abortion, and since it’s a paper card, the pills are harder to detect.

Others believe the best way to combat Project 2025’s insidious ploy to use the Comstock Act as a backdoor abortion ban is to refuse to be cowed into silence about the revolutionary power of being able to terminate a pregnancy in your own home.

Today, the in the U.S. are induced through medication, most often a combination of the drugs mifepristone and misoprostol. Telehealth for abortion care, in which a provider virtually prescribes these drugs to patients, has become , even in states with abortion bans.

“The number of people served through telehealth has just grown exponentially since the pandemic,” says Elisa Wells, co-founder and co-director of , which promotes access to medication abortion online. “[When people find out] that you can get an abortion by the mail, which is a really new idea … they think, ‘Wow, that’s amazing!’”

Research from the revealed that in the second half of 2023, more than 40,000 people in states that restrict telehealth or ban abortion were able to receive medication abortion from providers in that protect providers from being criminalized. Plan C’s website traffic has surged since Dobbs; Wells says they now receive approximately 2 million visitors annually.

There’s also the option of self-managing abortion with abortion pills. For people in states with severe restrictions or bans, self-managed medical abortion with pills has become an option for many who otherwise wouldn’t have access to abortion care. Plan C, for example, showcases many sites that prescribe and mail medication abortion to folks directly, including and .

There is a vast digital ecosystem of medication abortion information and services that abortion seekers can have mailed right to their door—unless Project 2025 goes into effect.

“​​What we are most concerned about is that people have access to accurate information about how to get the pills, how to use the pills, and the fact that in some states there might be legal risks associated with using the pills,” says Wells. “Every day is a risk assessment, and people can make good decisions about their lives. It’s not for me to say about somebody else’s life. What’s the best choice for you?”

And while an overabundance of water is a major threat to the Netherlands, the even greater threat for the country is actually a lack of it. “The concept of droughts in the Netherlands is new to most people,” explains Frank van Gaalen, a researcher with the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL). “It doesn’t match the image of the Netherlands as a country that lies, for a large part, beneath sea level, is surrounded by sea, and contains rivers, lakes, canals, and ditches.”

When van Gaalen published a report that pointed out the danger of droughts this year, people—even locally—reacted with “amazement and disbelief.”

Having too little water and having too much share a common cause: climate change. “We know that climate change is already happening and will continue. The way we are dealing with water in the Netherlands will have to take all these threats into consideration together,” van Gaalen says.��

So while leaders work to combat both floods and droughts, they also have to consider the fact that the land itself is sinking—a process called subsidence. And some researchers are pointing out that the measures the government has been implementing against floods are insufficient and overly reliant on technological solutions, such as dikes. 

“If we keep on increasing our coastal protection only with grey structures—for example, a concrete dike—subsidence behind the dike will continue and sea level will rise,” says Marte Stoorvogel, a researcher at Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ). “At some point you’re creating some kind of situation where when it goes wrong, it will go really badly wrong.”��

For the last 20 years or so, various Dutch initiatives have tried to tackle the problem. For example, the Amsterdam district of IJburg is known for its floating houses that move with the rise and fall of a lake called IJmeer. Since the severe river floods of 1993 and 1995, the government introduced a new approach, a project called Ruimte voor de Rivier ), which tries to give back swaths of land to previously regulated rivers, letting them meander, and even overflow as necessary. Dunes are also getting more attention, not just as beautiful nature preserves, but also as dynamic, biodiverse areas that can offer an additional buffer against the effects of climate change.

The sustainable solutions that Stoorvogel and her team are working on envision a transition zone that incorporates both water and land. The work also includes making sure people in the Netherlands don’t only see the sea as a threat. 

“Instead of keeping the boundary between sea and land very sharp, we need to start incorporating the sea more into our landscape,” she says. 

A More Spiritual Solution

For Stoorvogel, inspiration to solve this issue came from an unlikely source: a powerful but little-known goddess called Nehalennia. While the goddess was worshiped in the Netherlands in pre-Christian times, Stoorvogel is now hoping to introduce her to more of the modern Dutch population as a way to “reconnect with the water in a spiritual way and see also the beauty in it.”

Nehalennia—goddess of the sea, as well as fertility and rebirth—plays an important role in Dutch neopaganism today. According to Hanneke Minkjan, an independent researcher who wrote her , Nehalennia was declared the most important female deity in the Netherlands during the 2006 Goddess Conference, despite the fact that not much was known about her.��

“People immediately embraced the scarce evidence because they had something tangible, something that was really there,” explains Peter Versteeg, a cultural anthropologist at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam who specializes in neopaganism and religion. “She was a goddess of seafarers and travelers, and her altar was found in the sea. I can imagine that this has been very inspiring to a lot of Dutch neopagans.”

Even though the majority of the population in the Netherlands identifies as non-religious, Stoorvogel set out to create an altar to Nehalennia. She teamed up with the Berlin-based art studio Nonhuman Nonsense, which describes itself as “a research-driven design and art studio creating near-future fabulations and experiments somewhere between utopia and dystopia.” comprises natural components, such as wood and mud, as well as an AI-generated triptych of the goddess and a space that allows visitors to listen to the sounds of the sea through a shell.

The project, called��“Mud and Flood: The Return of Nehalennia” won the Bio, Art and Design (BAD) Award in 2022 from a consortium of various scientific and cultural institutions in the province, demonstrating that the goddess can garner interest from scientific, artistic, and environmental communities as well.

Stoorvogel hopes that becoming aware of Nehalennia’s importance to this country—as well as her function as a medium between the sea and humans—could help change the stance of people trying to keep water out at all costs. “The water doesn’t always have to be a threat,” she says. “Instead of letting water into our landscape and seeing it as a gigantic loss, [we can see] the beauty of it.”

A return to nature is an overarching theme in neopaganism, which is “firmly associated with nature spirituality, the worship of nature, the energy of nature, the energy of the elements,” explains Versteeg. “This is another form of inspiration, and that’s when people turn to nature and try to become aware of it.”&�Բ�����;

That awareness can be an essential tool for combating climate change. 

From Landscape to Seascape

At a time when the lack of water in the Netherlands is becoming an even bigger threat than an overabundance, it becomes crucial to consider what the sea, lakes, and rivers truly mean to a country so long defined by them. “With climate change bringing more, longer, and more extreme dry and hot periods, we have to find a new balance between discharging of excess water and conserving water for dry periods,” van Gaalen says.

While attempts to fight drought are less known than the struggle against the water, they do exist. For example, the Ijsselmeer—a reservoir that provides fresh drinking water to Amsterdam and its surroundings—has fluctuating water levels. This makes it possible to store more water in the wet winter months that can then be used during the drier summer months. 

The Dutch government has also implemented measures for spatial planning they call , or “water and soil guiding,” which involves, among other things, opting for and no longer building apartments or houses in areas prone to flooding.

Implementing so many systemic changes would require a paradigm shift. “The most important aspect in these considerations is adapting our activities and land use to the possibilities and restrictions of our water, soil, and natural systems,” explains van Gaalen, “including accepting that not all activities are possible on all locations.”��

But maybe solutions can be found in a more spiritual approach alongside a purely technological one. 

“Nehalennia and her history and characteristics are a way of showing people that we don’t have to fight against the water,” Stoorvogel says. “It’s about trying to open up to the idea that it’s part of our landscape.”

But in the words of Mark Charles and Soong-Chan Rah in their 2019 book “White America could not perpetrate five hundred years of dehumanizing injustice without traumatizing itself.” 

On the night of December 31, 2015, I learned about my ancestors’ long-standing history on this land. The next day, January 1, 2016, the process of unraveling our family’s amnesia began. As I began sharing my ancestral discoveries with my white friends and family, I encountered blank stares and shrugging shoulders, accompanied by a quick change of subject to something more timely, relevant, or entertaining. I was often told reassuringly, “Well, that was a long time ago. Everyone thought differently then. You shouldn’t feel guilty about that.” Far from being placated, I wanted to scream. People literally could not hear what I was saying. I felt isolated in a process that was rewiring my core identity.

What I had discovered in my own family history posed a threat to the person I thought I was, and to the person I was taught to be. Looking back now, it felt like I was receiving an ancestral push toward truth and healing after many generations of silence. The process went far beyond a tidy phrase like “white guilt.” Over time, I began distinguishing guilt from accountability. Staying stuck in guilt is not helpful. Moving into accountability catalyzes necessary change. I was rapidly becoming someone I did not recognize. 

What was now glaringly obvious and “in my face” all the time was being actively ignored by well-meaning white people all around me. Overwhelmingly, I felt pressured to calm down, behave, and just stop talking about it. Why? Talking about the shadows of colonialism and enslavement contradicts the heroic American mythology that we learned as children. Within the Euro-American diaspora, our capacity to deal with our ancestral legacies is compromised. We are part of a culture that is more invested in maintaining a narrative of innocence and denial than in embracing truth and healing.

I imagine this work to confront our collective amnesia will continue for the rest of my life. I hope it will persist into future generations as well. Over the years, I came to see our amnesia as .

When our European ancestors carried to Turtle Island their diseases, poverty, disrupted communities and families, severed cultures, and violence, it did not expunge their own historical trauma. Establishing dominance over the unique civilizations that were already thriving on this continent did not make us whole again. Kidnapping African leaders, healers, holy people, Elders, mothers, fathers, and children to build us a wealth-accumulating economy did not bring us peace. 

In her book , Euro-descended Elder Louise Dunlap shares how she perceives the suffering of our settler ancestors: “…a nightmarish, button-your-lips suffering that warped the mind, closing it to compassion for other humans and encouraging brutality against perceived enemies and the Earth itself. These ancestors struggled with a punishing legacy that still afflicts us.”

Our ancestors’ punishing legacy went into the underbelly of our society. Today, it hides out behind a polite mask of denial. Almost everything in Eurocentric culture conspires to keep us asleep. Amnesia is the path of least resistance. 

I am grateful that the ancestors have shown me the unpopular truth: Unleashing their tears and reviving their memory might just be the messy, raw, healing balm for the wounds our people sustained and perpetrated so long ago. If we muster the courage to traverse these shadows, who might we become on the other side of all that pain? Who are we underneath the denial, amnesia, grief, guilt, and shame? 

Let’s find out.

This essay is excerpted with permission from by Hilary Giovale (Green Writers Press, 2024).

“Over [two] months ago, I decided to permanently stop treatment for my autoimmune illnesses,” Alexandria wrote. “The side effects were absolutely horrendous and the treatments only provided a temporary fix that has to be administered again and again for the rest of my life to stall the illness, which isn’t a cure.” She ended the post by naming her dual diagnosis, which she had been largely private about aside from .

For people with rare diseases—estimated to be between —finding the right doctors and treatments can feel like a Herculean feat, a reality Alexandria knew all too well. “There is no long-term cure,” she wrote. “I’m very very very sick, things are progressing fast. I’m wheelchair or bed bound most of the time. I had 16 seizures yesterday and over 30 stiff person attacks.”

In the United States, rare-disease patients often go into significant medical debt to pursue treatment, even traveling to different states to see specialists with months-long waiting lists. In addition to the monetary burden, those seeking treatment for rare diseases also face a mental, emotional, and spiritual toll. 

“I wake up with excruciating pain,” says , a disabled adaptive fashion influencer and one of just a few hundred people in human history to have been diagnosed with , a cancer disorder that causes bone tumors and vascular lesions most often in the hands and feet. “There’s not a moment that I don’t have excruciating pain, which is awful for a variety of reasons. It obviously takes a toll on your mental health and your social and interpersonal and professional life. The first thing I have to do in the morning is wake up, take my opioids, and then wait an hour just to be able to get out of bed and do anything at any capacity.”

In the face of these obstacles, rare-disease patients like Durán must relentlessly call insurance companies and medical offices, create and share resources, and form care networks to lift some of the burden—and help keep them alive.

Routine Misdiagnosis

As a baby, Durán was misdiagnosed with , which similarly causes bone tumors in different parts of the body. When her father sought a second opinion, she was again misdiagnosed, this time with , which occurs when scar-like tissue replaces healthy bones.

“They ran with that diagnosis until I was 18,” Durán says. “The treatment is similar in that I still got leg lengthening, but I was also supposed to get annual cancer screenings with full-body MRIs or full-body CT scans with radiation, and they weren’t doing that.” The Cleveland Clinic notes that Maffucci syndrome patients , with up to 50% of Maffucci patients developing chondrosarcoma, a bone cancer that begins in cartilage cells. (Durán estimates her odds of getting cancer at 55%.)

Just before Durán graduated high school, her doctor misdiagnosed her with cancer and referred her to orthopedic oncology. However, when she showed up for her appointment, she learned she’d been kicked off her when she turned 18. To continue treatment, she had to apply for adult benefits or find other insurance, which would severely delay care.

In 2017, Durán was officially diagnosed with Maffucci syndrome. “[Maffucci syndrome] is so rare that when I was diagnosed, they didn’t even know what gene caused it,” Durán says. Unfortunately, Durán isn’t the only rare-disease patient who’s been misdiagnosed more than once.

Miranda Edwards, a.k.a. , was dismissed by multiple doctors for “anxiety” when she had a malignant tumor in her adrenal gland. Due to the delay in care, her tumor became untreatable. She has been “” since 2014, sharing each step of her journey online as well as resources she’s created herself—like a —so others can advocate for their health.

In 2023, Edwards asked for help raising thousands of dollars to pay for life-saving molecular testing of her thyroid after she was outright denied surgery to remove a Grade 5 tumor because of her existing condition. Edwards, who is based in Canada, said her health care would have paid for the testing if the tumor had been Grade 4 or lower; essentially, she was once again put at extraordinary risk because of doctors dragging their feet with the “watch and wait” approach.

Tools for Progress

In many cases, rare-disease patients are forced to become the foremost experts on their conditions, putting them in the position of educating the medical professionals who are supposed to be treating them. “I think a lot of health care professionals give up on finding answers beyond our rare diseases,” Durán explains. “I was at a Maffucci syndrome and Ollier disease patients summit at Johns Hopkins last year, and my researchers told us that when doctors see a rare-disease patient, they often focus on the rare disease and forget [the patient] can have common diseases too.”

Durán describes seeing multiple doctors, independently researching her test results, and persistently asking questions of her care team, particularly when they didn’t have an immediate answer for symptoms that didn’t line up with her Maffucci diagnosis. Eventually, she was diagnosed with both hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and Hashimoto’s disease. “We already deal with a lot of health issues,” Durán says. “Stress is a notoriously bad thing—for lack of a better word—for pain, for chronic pain and energy levels and mental health. I think having an advocacy group to help patients navigate the system would definitely improve the quality of our lives.”

Since 2008, the last day of February has been celebrated as , a patient-led effort coordinated with more than 65 global organizations, including the European Organisation for Rare Diseases (EURORDIS), to raise awareness for lesser-known diagnoses and the people living with them. Stanislav Ostapenko, who’s been director of communications at EURORDIS since 2021, says rare-disease patients must have strong support networks, including online, to effectively navigate their illnesses.

“We know that patient populations are very scarce,” he explains. “We know that for certain diseases there are just a handful [of] patients across the globe. So it is very important to know that you belong to a community and you can be accepted, you can be understood, and you can also speak to people who have the same condition as you do and that you can find support.”

A major component of Rare Disease Day is translating and adapting tool kits for multiple languages and impairments so anyone can use them, even if they lack expertise. EURORDIS uses this tool to encourage us all—those with rare diseases and those without—to be good patient advocates.

The Significance of Burnout

A from the physician network MDVIP and online random-probability panel Ipsos KnowledgePanel indicates that 61% of polled patients see the U.S. health care system as a hassle and that one in three are “burned out.” One-third of patients reported deferring care in the last five years because they couldn’t get a timely enough appointment to address their concerns or they had a bad experience with a provider. The survey also states that at least one in four Americans who did seek care suffered a negative impact on their mental health, had worsening symptoms, or were misdiagnosed.

All of these factors lead to patient burnout, with chronically ill, disabled, and rare-disease patients facing these issues on a more frequent basis because of how often they are forced to seek care for symptom management, procedures, and medications.

In her 2022 book , Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha writes about the importance of learning both one’s own and their loved ones’ “care languages” to create inter-abled care webs in which everyone can get what they need without harming others and getting caretaker burnout: “When I think of the care webs I am a part of that mostly work, they are a complex moment-by-moment dance of figuring out what we need that is a lot like consent negotiations in sex,” Piepzna-Samarasinha writes. “Raw embarrassment, messiness, confusion, working through shame at needing something (or anything), figuring out what I might need to even begin to ask for.”

Piepzna-Samarasinha also writes about the necessity of employing “a diversity of care tactics” so people can, for example, seek help chasing a referral from a doctor to another doctor to the insurance company and back again, or assistance applying for financial aid from organizations such as the National Organization for Rare Disorders (NORD) to help offset the costs of medication, diagnostic testing, travel assistance, and caregiver respite.

When the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020, mutual aid and collective care became even more important for people with disabilities, including people with rare diseases. Whether it’s nondisabled people offering rides, helping call doctors or email insurance companies, or assisting with documentation and organization, advocacy networks—no matter how small—have become essential for rare disease patients.

In 2022, disability-justice activist Alice Wong wrote about that ended with her family expending great financial and personal resources to prevent her from having to move to an inpatient facility: “The safety net is not a net!” Wong wrote. “It’s a big fucking hole.” Without Wong’s family advocating for her, she would have had few choices for continued care: “The system drives people toward institutions,” she wrote. “It is designed to segregate expendable and ‘non-productive’ disabled and older people like me. Out of sight, out of mind.”

Advocacy networks can help patients fight for their needs with insurance companies, which are often quick to dismiss medications that are “too expensive” or treatments that are “not medically necessary.” They can work with NORD to launch local registries, promote or host funding drives for patient-focused drug development, and work directly with existing disability-rights organizations to streamline processes and/or build out their volunteer base.

Durán, like Wong, relies heavily on her nondisabled family members for help with daily tasks, which can include bringing her food and water or cleaning her room (the latter which she pays them to do). “As disabled people, we’re already grappling with our health and it already bleeds into every aspect of our lives,” says Durán. “If we had nondisabled allies caring about accessibility or ableism at any capacity and advocating on our behalf, or just calling out ableism or inaccessibility even when we’re not in the room, I think it would make a world of a difference, especially because I think a lot of disabled people already face a lot of burnout because of our health or lack thereof.”

Highly visible advocates like Durán and Edwards use their platforms to educate their followers, but ultimately they shouldn’t be tasked with radicalizing nondisabled people into confronting and seeking to improve the medical system. “No one is immune to becoming disabled,” Durán points out. “It can happen to quite literally anyone.” If that doesn’t radicalize nondisabled people, perhaps nothing will.

On June 11, a week after a police training facility in Richmond, California, broke ground, organizers from the  marched to the Overaa Construction headquarters in protest. Citing concerns over rising police militarization and repression in the predominantly Black and Latino area, the protesters—joined by local residents—called on Overaa workers to boycott .

“By furthering the militarizing and surveillance of our city—and coordinating law enforcement resources across the region, including ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement]—they’re actually making our cities into Cop Cities,” said Refilwe Gqajela, a community organizer with the  in California’s Bay Area.

Gqajela said organizers in Northern California have been working to form the coalition since the facility was announced in August 2023. They’ve expressed their opposition at , saying the money should instead be put into other programs that would benefit the community.

Of course, California isn’t the only state where Cop Cities are being built. The term first captured national attention in January 2023, when  while  that’s displacing one of the largest urban forests.

The influx of these facilities parallels the emergence of the Defund the Police movement, which—following the murder of George Floyd in 2020—saw thousands of people across the country mobilize to decry police violence against Black and Brown communities. Within the last five years, there has been a across the country. 

This development is raising concerns with anti-police organizers, especially when it comes to the impact on marginalized communities and movements. There is now a facility in almost every state and, according to researcher and mutual aid organizer Renee Johnston, at least 10 states have multiple police compounds. 

“This nonsense with ‘the training needs to improve’ has been on a slow incline,” Johnston said. “2020 marks that period where, if we’re looking at a graph, there would be a sharp uptick in how quickly [Cop Cities] were going up.”&�Բ�����;

Groups like , , and Stop Cop City Bay Area have been fighting these new police facilities in their communities by way of canvassing, holding rallies, petitioning, and more—similar to the effort in California. 

At least seven cities, including Chicago and Baltimore, have allocated more than $100 million to their Cop Cities—and many are meant to host international police training programs like . Activists and scholars have said that Cop Cities are replicated after Israel’s own Cop City,  against Palestinians. This would be an expansion of already existing police training exchange with .

“We’re told that police are here to serve and protect the public and they care about the community, but I just don’t think any of that is true,” Johnston said. “That’s why training doesn’t work, because there is no training that you can give that’s going to change the nature of a system.”

While Cop Cities have been rolled out , activists around the country have been vocal about their opposition. Many have decried the multi-million dollar allocations to policing, and called on their local leaders to instead invest in resources needed by their communities.

Divestment From Police, Investment in Communities

Tennessee lawmakers are throwing $415 million into their , an 800-acre facility to be built in a historically Black Nashville neighborhood currently experiencing a housing crisis, extreme displacement, and gentrification, according to Erica Perry, executive director of Nashville’s .

“$415 million is a huge amount of money, especially in a state where we ranked low in health, literacy, education, and housing,” Perry said. “That’s extremely frustrating because we know that money could be spent on things that would help people have healthy, thriving, safe lives.”

In response, the Southern Movement Committee began advocating for in the creation of an office of youth safety, community centers, and alternatives to police in schools—programs they say the community actually needs. In June, $1 million of this budget was approved by the Nashville City Council.

“We’re trying to approach our budget work in a way that addresses safety and creates alternative forms of safety that do not require cops, courts, and cages,” said Southern Movement Committee Arts and Culture Director Mike Floss.

Activists in Chicago have shared similar concerns. In the years before the , the city had seen the closure of, as well as  in U.S. history. Naturally, many residents were outraged when the new multi-million dollar police training facility was announced, especially considering the Chicago Police Department already had seven other training facilities in the area.

“Why is there suddenly this new investment available, when we were told that the city was broke when we were asking for investments in our own communities?” asked Benji Hart, an adult ally with the youth-led No Cop Academy Coalition.

Chicago’s Cop Academy came after the police-killing of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, who was  by a Chicago police officer in 2014. Not long after, youth organizers from the Stop Cop Academy campaign began spreading information by canvassing and passing out fliers, as well as leading more disruptive actions like taking over trains in large groups chanting, passing out flyers, and talking to other passengers about the campaign. They also blocked city council building elevators. Eventually, they grew the effort into a coalition of more than 100 local organizations. 

 “The initial thought was that there has to be a challenge to this narrative,” Hart said. “It can’t just be that the city announced it was going to build this thing. There needed to be some evidence of pushback and opposition to the construction, and calling for different funding priorities on the part of the city and for investments in community resources.”&�Բ�����;

For many organizers, the work is about making it known that crime isn’t the biggest threat—it’s houselessness, rising rents, food deserts, and the myriad other issues plaguing communities competing for funds with Cop Cities.

“The safest communities in the United States are not the communities that are over-policed,” said Kamau Franklin, a lead organizer with the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta. “They are the communities that have resources that benefit the young people in their communities, that give people outlets, and make sure schools are satisfactory and building your mind. Those are the ways in which these resources could and should be used.”&�Բ�����;

Repression of Movements

Within the last two and a half years, local activists have been leading the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta through canvassing, demonstrations, rallies, town halls, and creating petitions that garnered more than 116,000 signatures, growing the mobilization into a national conversation.

They’ve faced pushback from the other side. Dozens of  and . According to Franklin, this a coordinated effort to criminalize activism and scare organizers. He said a large part of the facility will be built by the end of the year, even though that 59% of residents don’t support it.

Over the last year, repressive policing has extended beyond Stop Cop City organizers to encompass Gaza solidarity student encampments as well. Tamera Hutcherson, an organizer with Stop Cop City Dallas, said the city council held secretive meetings and used vague language around “public safety” to get  that gave $50 million to a police training facility. Soon after,  Gaza solidarity student encampment. 

“For students peacefully protesting, they came in riot gear and in tactical gear, they looked like they were ready for war against civilians,” Hutcherson said. “I think most residents are concerned about what this means, not just for the city of Dallas, but for Dallas county and North Texas as a whole.”

While Hutcherson said there are still not many people in Dallas who are aware of the facility being built, she is starting to see more conversations happen as organizers continue canvassing, going door-to-door, and making phone calls to community members. 

“Not just in Atlanta, but around the country, the militarized police are on full display, meant basically to derail and destroy movements, to scare people,” Franklin said. “Cop City is a way for them to organize that policing and practice those tactics and strategies even more so.”

In the Bay Area, Refilwe Gqajela said activists have faced increased police and city council repression amidst their efforts to host rallies and town halls. For example, when residents attended city council meetings to speak out about Cop City, the normal three-minute public comment period would be cut down to one minute. The San Pablo Police Department also shut down one of their attempted town halls at Costa County Community College. Nevertheless, Gqajela and others have continued to organize.

“We understand this to be a direct threat to our organizing—this is a state repression tactic,” Gqajela said. “We know that this isn’t just going to impact the people of San Pablo. It’s a regional training facility to organize the policing forces in the Bay Area to squash the kind of organizing that’s being done right now for Palestine, for example.”

The Movement Continues

Activists vow to continue their advocacy, despite the pushback. Along with Black Youth Assembly, the Southern Movement Committee has been meeting with Nashville city officials to get their Varsity Spending Plan on the city council’s radar. 

“It’s our work to help people see what is happening—when it comes to their health and education needs—is connected to the state’s insistence on spending $415 million on this campus,” Perry said. 

As the organizers with Stop Cop City Dallas continue to strategize and mobilize, Hutcherson said that she sees the mobilizing of students across the University of North Texas system as a victory. Four of the five campuses have to pressure administrators to back out of the partnership with the Dallas Police Department through protests and organizing.

“We are continuing to educate the public, and also figure out and strategize ways to continue applying pressure to ensure that this is not built,” Hutcherson said.

The organizers with the Anti Police-Terror Project and the coalition in the Bay Area have been holding town halls and rallies to stop their Cop City from being built—and teachers, students, environmental activists, residents, and health care workers have been mobilized to join the cause. They’ve also been organizing alongside the Ohlone people, who are native to Northern California where this project is being built and have been  being built on their land. 

In Chicago, activists were able to delay the Cop City project, but not its eventual construction. Undeterred, Hart said that some of the youth organizers involved in the No Cop Academy coalition successfully campaigned for  contract with the Chicago Police Department, which eventually led to the contract’s end.

Around the country, activists and organizers have been building solidarity with the struggle in Atlanta and other states, as well as Palestine. As Hart noted, solidarity is important during this “clear orchestrated push for militarization and hyper investment in police—in the wake of arguably the largest protests in U.S. history calling for the defunding of the police.”

“We need to be supporting each other across city and state lines, and not just treating these as a bunch of little battles against individual Cop Academies or Cop Cities,” he said. “Our response needs to be as orchestrated as the police state’s response to our organizing.”

Though a world away from my daily life as a climate communicator in Boston, I found myself returning to a pressing question: “Is it too late to address climate change?”

It’s a question that marine biologist and self-proclaimed “policy nerd” Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, with her own family connections to Jamaica, is intimately familiar with. In her latest book, (One World Press, September 2024), Johnson offers an evocative exploration of possibility and transformation in the face of climate change. The collection of essays, interviews, poems, and art began as an attempt to spark conversation about climate solutions in popular culture, but it evolved into something much bigger: “This book is my response to anyone still wondering whether all of our climate efforts are worth it,” Johnson told me when we spoke on the phone in September as she was traveling for her book tour. 

Johnson, who co-edited the bestselling 2021 anthology All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solution for the Climate Crisis, builds on her previous work to deliver a timely and urgent guide for envisioning and implementing climate solutions. The book is not just about understanding the problem (though Johnson and climate scientist Kate Marvel make clear “the atmosphere is fundamentally different now” due to human activities); it’s about contemplating—and in a way, manifesting—the various paths we as a society can take toward a livable future.

Find your people, whoever that might be, or bring your people. Don’t feel like you’re supposed to go it alone. This requires community.” —Brian Donahue

One of those paths must inevitably involve looking to nature for solutions. In a section of the book entitled “Replenish and Re-Green,” Johnson and others imagine a world where food systems are regional and regenerative, biodiversity is valued, and human stewardship of other species is the norm. Brian Donahue, a professor, farmer, and New Englander like myself, proposes a novel plan to revitalize rural America by growing more food closer to home and repopulating small towns. 

As a Black woman with dreams of leaving urban life for a country homestead, I’ve often felt afraid of the conservative values that typically come with living in rural communities. But Donahue offers sage advice: “Find your people, whoever that might be, or bring your people. Don’t feel like you’re supposed to go it alone. This requires community.”

Community is a throughline of the book, and not just the human variety. Animals and insects, ecosystems, and various natural cycles are incredibly important for planetary health. But they remain enigmatic for most of us. Take, for example, the fact that even documenting the number of species on Earth is a never-ending effort. Yet Johnson writes that “the climate solutions that nature offers can comprise more than one-third of the CO₂ mitigation needed to hold global warming to below 2 degrees C.” A crucial part of unlocking this potential for change is having greater respect for—and ceding decision-making power to—the naturalists, conservation scientists, and Indigenous communities already stewarding the natural world.

What if we had systems that loved us and, by extension, the planet?”

Just as the book homes in on specific solutions, it also zooms out, taking aim at the cultural values undergirding many of our modern systems. In an interview with author and activist Bill McKibben, Johnson draws connections between the capitalistic values of short-term growth and the funding of new fossil fuel development. The book lays bare the fact that money that companies and consumers have sitting in major banks produces more carbon than the average American does in a year. 

According to McKibben, a reimagined financial ecosystem might rely more on credit unions and locally owned banks that keep money in a given community: “That should be happening as we start to rely more on renewable energy, because oil and gas are in Texas and Saudi Arabia and Russia, but happily, sun and wind are everywhere.”

Through the exploration of subjects from media and labor to transit and legal systems, Johnson and co-conspirators answer a deeper question about the climate crisis: What if we had systems that loved us and, by extension, the planet? In the section she calls “Away From the Brink,” Johnson sees these ideas to their rightful conclusion: Advertisements for fossil fuels and gas-powered cars would be an aberration. Climate change would be embedded in all local journalism, not viewed as a niche topic. We would evolve beyond the climate-apocalypse box office flick, and climate realities would become the backdrop of every genre of television and film. The influence of fossil fuels in politics would be reigned in, and our democratic system would become more representative. Exploitative labor practices would be abolished, and a livable wage would be commonplace. Seeing this vision laid out with striking specificity, it feels to me like it’s within our grasp.

Johnson admits that on the role of electoral politics in climate action, and the climate impacts of mega industries like fast fashion, the book is a bit light. These are two topics Johnson plans to cover in her new podcast debuting on her in the fall of 2024. “This is such a useful question—what if we get it right?—that this book can’t fully answer,” she tells me frankly. “So I want to keep the conversation going.”

Whether you’re an activist, a parent, or simply curious about climate, you are likely to find pieces in this collection that appeal to you—and that’s intentional. The book does not argue for one-size-fits-all solutions. “Too often, the climate movement and the media tell everyone to do the same things: Vote, protest, donate, spread the word, and lower your carbon footprint,” Johnson writes. “But all too rarely are we asked to contribute our specific talents, our superpowers.”&�Բ�����;

For my part, I saw myself in the book’s Afrofuturist agricultural artwork by Olalekan Jeyifous. And reflecting on Marge Piercy’s poem “To Be of Use” inspired me to view my climate work, with its many ups and downs, as an exercise in perseverance. It encouraged me to recommit to incremental change and stay invested for the long haul. 

We need to live as though we understand this crisis is real.” —Ayana Elizabeth Johnson

The variety of pieces in the book and the many forms they take serve as a reminder that everyone has a place in these climate futures and a hand in bringing them to life. Johnson’s climate action Venn diagram aims to pinpoint the intersection of what brings you joy, what you’re good at, and what work needs doing. That, she says, can be your place in the climate movement. For me, it’s probably something involving but the book overflows with inspiration and starting points for anyone struggling to picture a replenished world.

That’s not to say that this world is without sacrifice, though. In a concluding entry, Johnson and ocean farmer Bren Smith are clear-eyed about the necessary work and change ahead. “We’re going to have to say goodbye to some things we hold close to our heart,” Smith says, remarking on the many natural wonders we’ve already lost. Johnson adds, “We need to live as though we understand this crisis is real,” which means trying out a range of solutions and having a healthy relationship with failure. 

A book of this kind, with its cautiously optimistic view on climate, might read as wishful thinking. To me, it is a prayer for the modern era: where practicality meets possibility.

Cultural queerphobia is nothing new. In many ways, this recent wave of legislation is an overt escalation of the long-standing and long-normalized homophobia and transphobia in U.S. culture, not unlike ” of the 1950s.

Queer and trans people are deeply familiar with the myriad, relentless ways they experience daily discrimination, erasure, and misrepresentation interpersonally, institutionally, and through dominant beliefs and values. The cultural platforming of these values creates an environment for bigoted, discriminatory politics to be framed as legitimate, logical, and even “necessary.” Cultural attitudes build the stage that anti-LGBTQ politicians love to preach from.��

However, there’s nothing inevitable or permanent about anti-LGBTQ sentiments or cultural beliefs, according to , a queer studies and education scholar and professor at California State University. “Restrictive, binary understandings of gender and heterosexuality as the ‘norm’ are ideas that don’t start out ‘naturally,’ but rather get reinforced through repetition, social stigma, or restrictive policies,” says Mattheis. “We can just as ‘naturally’ direct people to expand their perspectives rather than restrict them.”

There are many ways cultural beliefs “happen.” The American educational system, and in particular K–12 public schooling, is one of the most prominent places where young people learn what’s considered normal, desirable, and valuable—and what isn’t. In this sense, education is both a window and a mirror, reinforcing certain worldviews and creating space for alternative perspectives. 

Because students are a captive audience and spend a significant portion of their formative years in the classroom, schools are, logically, a key site to change—or codify—cultural attitudes. Modern , , and anti-LGBTQ activists have been working to ensure schools mirror the existing power structures and exclusionary attitudes that benefit them, at the expense of everyone else. As a result, much of the recent anti-LGBTQ legislation targets youth and public schools, including book censorship, , and other and administrators, , and exclusions . And this list doesn’t even touch on the predatory that disproportionately targets youth of color and youth with disabilities.

As devastating as it is for the LGBTQ community, this legislation pales in comparison to Project 2025—a sweeping initiative developed by former Trump officials and the Heritage Foundation, a shadowy, conservative, . Project 2025 is a for the next conservative president to overhaul the federal government and implement an authoritarian regime of widespread surveillance, mass censorship, and discrimination. Project 2025 would dismantle the Department of Education, eliminate Head Start and other programs designed for low-income youth, revoke federal protections for LGBTQ students, and threaten schools that protect trans kids or develop inclusive curriculum with lawsuits. Public education would .

In short, queerphobic attitudes and increasingly prevalent anti-LGBTQ policies form two sides of one toxic bridge, mutually reinforcing one another and making life hellish for queer and trans people of all ages. Project 2025 merely scaffolds itself onto existing queerphobia and takes anti-LGBTQ policies in education to new heights. 

Still, schools can be a window. For every horror story, there is a knowing English teacher who slips a queer kid a life-changing book. There are the no-nonsense coaches who ensure trans kids are welcome on and off the field. And there are the lessons, friendships, and classes that offer all students a chance to connect, collaborate, and think critically across differences. Schools are sites of incredible potential—and spaces that can effectively intervene against homophobia and transphobia.

Sparse Support for Teachers—and Students

Creating an environment where homophobia and transphobia are challenged—and where LGBTQ youth feel seen, safe, and valued—requires understanding the challenges facing many students and educators on the ground.

Rebecca* is a third grade teacher in Florida—ground zero for much of the country’s anti-LGBTQ legislation, given the state’s proudly regressive political leadership. (Editor’s note: Rebecca asked to use her first name only, out of concern about professional retaliation for speaking candidly. Read è������!’s policy on veiled sources.) She says teachers in her district lack the support they need to navigate both age-appropriate conversations around identity and a provide culturally responsive, LGBTQ-affirming curriculum (which is ). 

At 8 and 9 years old, Rebecca says her students are already starting to use the word “gay” as an insult and parrot reductive gender stereotypes. In her experience, students don’t always have the social-emotional skills to understand corrective discussions. Educators are often left to address issues of identity or name-calling ad hoc—and Rebecca says many aren’t equipped or don’t feel comfortable with the responsibility.

“Some of my own teammates will get into [these situations] and they’re like, ‘Oh, well, “gay” means happy, so consider it a compliment,’” Rebecca says. Educators who know better, meanwhile, are caught in an impossible bind—trying to support students, teach kids and colleagues how to respond to these incidents, and not run afoul of state laws that in some cases prohibit the very mention of sexual orientation or gender identity.��

Though her school’s administration has been supportive of her personally, as a lesbian teacher, Rebecca says the school district does not invite discussions about LGBTQ issues, figures, or history in or outside of the classroom. Instead, LGBTQ topics are swept up under the umbrella of teaching “respect” and anti-bullying efforts. Rebecca sees her district as mostly reactive to bullying rather than proactive about inclusive curriculum, culturally responsive staff training, and social-emotional learning opportunities for students.��

In the absence of any meaningful presence of more inclusive, expansive cultural models, many students are absorbing restrictive, queerphobic norms by default.

Even in states with , there’s little direction on how to actually enact inclusion-focused policies. As a result, many of these responsibilities end up falling through the cracks or onto well-intentioned but overburdened teachers. “In California, state education code describes multiple aspects of school life in which teachers are expected to actively support and include queer and trans youth,” says Mattheis. “However, most teachers receive little to no introduction to state laws and policies as part of their preparation and are unfamiliar with these protections and requirements.”

Taken together, these factors—from top-down policies and lackluster curriculum to underresourced teachers and underprepared students—create an environment where all kids can struggle to shine and grow.��

Shaking Up the Syllabus

Building an LGBTQ-affirming classroom starts early, according to Erica Castro, MSW, a facilitator and educator at , a Denver-based organization serving queer youth. A large part of Castro’s job is going into schools, summer camps, and nonprofits—anywhere kids are growing up—and providing educator training and organizational audits.

“Particularly in elementary, there is this stigma and idea that talking about gender and sexuality does not belong,” says Castro. But Castro says that by the age of 2, kids are and differentiate between boys and girls—meaning the adages that kids are “too young” or “can’t understand” age-appropriate conversations around gender and sexuality just don’t hold up.��

“Being able to get into the elementary schools and do these workshops has been, I think, transformative for the ways that teachers are able to build foundational, cultural, and policy-level structures [from the] first day of school,” says Castro. 

In shaping workshops for all ages, Castro works directly with youth to identify what resources they want and the types of training their educators need—including using and respecting pronouns, creating gender-support plans in the classroom, and connecting to free or low-cost therapy and mentorships for LGBTQ youth. Castro also partners with educators to diversify and update curriculum. (As a jumping-off point, Castro recommends .)

Aside from comprehensive, and above all, consistent education for students, educators, and their families, it’s also important to consider two more factors: the physical environment and policies at a school.

“Am I seeing visual cues of queerness [or] that the school is openly accepting?” asks Castro when making an assessment of a school environment.  “And beyond it looking safe as a checkbox, what does it look like for our young people to actually feel safe?”

The implementation of many of these resources occur at the intersection of physical space and policy. Gender-neutral bathrooms, for example, are —but the policy doesn’t necessarily guarantee the resource is in place. At one Denver high school, Castro says a group of queer students were forced to cross a busy road to access a bathroom at a local library. “[LGBTQ students] were just holding it all day, or they would just go home and stay home. There were attendance barriers that impacted their education tenfold.” Access to sports, too, can be make-or-break for many queer and trans kids.��

To truly support their LGBTQ students, most schools need a major shake-up when it comes to the variety, consistency, and depth of resources they offer queer and trans youth, their families, and communities. The good news is that, by and large, these tools already exist. As their own program faces closure largely due to , Castro believes a school district’s budget and priorities must reflect .��

“What made us want to become an educator in the first place is to protect all students,” says Castro, who taught high school for five years themselves. “[LGBTQ youth] are experiencing so much at home, in addition to homophobia and transphobia, and it is our responsibility to be that safe place for them.”

Beyond the Classroom

In an ideal world, every school administration and teacher nationwide would hitch their wagon to the potential and needs of LGBTQ students and families. But as Nereyda Luna, a community organizer and former case worker for the gender-expansive community in New York City, points out, trans youth can be bullied at the kitchen table just as easily as in the classroom. 

“People often think that youth exist in this whimsical world. And no, I think that youth are very aware of what is happening around them,” says Luna. “They know that ‘If I come out, if I present myself to the world for who I am, this is going to be hard.’”

Community spaces often provide much-needed educational opportunities for caregivers to disrupt a queerphobic culture. Outreach to cisgender and heterosexual parents—particularly those with misconceptions about LGBTQ people or those unaware of the impact of anti-LGBTQ legislation—is especially important, because these adults vote, raise queer and trans kids, and take their values to all areas of public and private life.

“The most effective way to help families and ensure people break through cultural norms is through personal connection and stories,” says Rev. Ray McKinnon, in North Carolina. “The most effective way to reach people is not with data; it’s not going to be some incredible argument. It is humanizing the person, it is taking these means and scare tactics and [putting] a face on it.”

Through PFLAG, McKinnon and his colleagues offer peer-to-peer support and workshops for adults—primarily the parents and grandparents of LGBTQ kids. Last year, PFLAG Charlotte offered 29 workshops to more than 1,200 total participants. More than 600 people—ranging from their 20s to 70s—used PFLAG Charlotte’s peer-support services. To better serve their community, McKinnon says they’ve recently launched Apoyando con Amor, a Spanish-speaking peer-support group, and plans to start groups for Black and gender-expansive families as well. “We also firmly believe that it is not the responsibility of queer people to educate straight people on these things, and it especially isn’t the job of queer kids to do that,” McKinnon adds.��

Though the organization is nonpartisan, PFLAG Charlotte also offers voter outreach and education on local legislation and policies that target LGBTQ people. “Advocacy, allyship must always have an action,” says McKinnon. “You are not just accumulating information when you come to the workshops … it’s for a purpose. It’s to give you tools so that you can become an accomplice who is walking lockstep with us.”

Those accomplices—in schools, churches, community centers, and culture-setting institutions nationwide—will be integral to cementing a culture shift that not only makes U.S. society safe for LGBTQ people, but welcoming and affirming. Building an LGBTQ-affirming culture requires a healthy dose of imagination, problem-solving, and critically, the willingness to become a life-long learner (and un-learner) to help map out a more just culture—in and out of the classroom.

Hell’s Kitchen, the loosely based on Alicia Keys’ upbringing, follows 17-year-old Ali (Maleah Joi Moon) as she searches for purpose and freedom in ’90s Manhattan. Ali’s being raised by Jersey (Shoshana Bean), her overprotective single mother who Ali believes is “suffocating” her.

As a Black woman, who’s also biracial, grew up in the ’90s, and navigated early adulthood in New York City, I was enthralled by the show’s colors and effervescent characters, some of whom have curly hair like mine. Within the musical, Keys’ familiar, soulful songs reverberate and shatter spaces that diminish women while making space for vulnerability to become the loudest melody.

While Hell’s Kitchen’s premise is promising, the perspective of Black women slowly withers away as other characters’ development and traumas are prioritized. When Ali meets Knuck (Chris Lee), a man who drums a bucket near her apartment, she develops a crush on him, though it is unclear why they’ve fallen for each other. “What y’all even got in common?” Ali’s friends ask her, before saying, “Don’t waste energy on this.”

Their relationship quickly becomes unhealthy: Ali follows him to his job at a construction site, while he lurks outside her apartment. Though Jersey says they are “babies in grown-up bodies,” the reality is Knuck is in his 20s, while Ali has just barely passed the. Their relationship reaches a boiling point when Ali sneaks Knuck into her apartment when her mother’s not home. Though Knuck knows he shouldn’t be there, the musical portrays Ali as the sexual instigator: “[Jersey’s] at work, we got plenty of time,” she tells Knuck. “Let’s do it, baby.”

When Jersey walks in on them, she calls the police, who arrest Knuck without explicitly charging him with a crime. Since Ali supposedly didn’t tell Knuck her actual age and Black men, including Knuck, are overpoliced, Jersey’s actions are framed as a betrayal. “Every time she [Jersey] tries to speak to me, I remember what she did to Knuck,” Ali says.

In her angst, Ali turns to her piano teacher, Miss Liza Jane (Kecia Lewis), who belts a heart-wrenching tribute to her son and all the Black people who have been murdered by the police. However, juxtaposing Jane’s son’s murder with Knuck’s arrest feels manipulative, especially considering that .

Both realities can be true: Knuck’s history with the police is dehumanizing, and Ali’s unspoken trauma in her problematic affair with him (and within systems) also matters. By prioritizing one struggle over another, Black women’s traumas, triumphs, and stories are silenced. In essence, Ali becomes an audience member—a vessel for the people and systems around her rather than a stand-alone character. I left the theater asking, “Who’s Ali? Why was she portrayed that way?”

Theater’s Minstrel Show Roots

Theater’s depiction of Black women has deep roots in that reinforced Jim Crow segregation and reduced Black people to stereotypes. In a 2011 paper, historian , Ph.D., writes that these shows fueled negative characterizations of Black women in theater and broader culture, including perpetuating stereotypes such as the oversexualized, aggressive “jezebel” and the “mammy,” who’s a “natural caretaker.”

In the 1960s and ’70s, Black women playwrights began producing plays that resisted these dehumanizing characteristics and offered a more layered worldview. “Women playwrights of the Black Arts Movement followed a tradition of Black women intellectuals who actively resisted controlling images of Black womanhood,” writes La Donna L. Forsgren, Ph.D., in her 2018 book, . Rather than reinforcing “distorted images of Black womanhood,” these playwrights, including Pearl Cleage and Ntozake Shange, used art to challenge and complicate the portrayal of Black women as “scapegoats for the ills within Black communities.”

Forsgren argues that through plays such as For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf (1976) and Mad at Miles: A Blackwoman’s Guide to Truth (1990), playwrights began focusing more on Black families rather than solely Black men while also revealing hidden truths about Black women’s traumas and joys.

There might be no better example of this approach than The Color Purple, an award-winning play adapted from Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 1982 book that explores three Black women’s experiences with sexism, racism, and intimate-partner violence. While the book’s film adaptation in 1985 for its portrayal of Black men, remains a touchstone for Black women seeking understanding of themselves and their experiences.

“When it was first released in 1985, The Color Purple was a cinematic outlier,” NPR host Aisha Harris notes in a . “For the first time, many Black women saw a movie that reflected their own experiences at home. Characters like Celie and the free-spirited Shug, who’s played by Margaret Avery, or Sofia, the self-assured force of nature who’s played by Oprah Winfrey. They were women who had seen or experienced abuse firsthand and pushed to seek happiness in spite of it all.”

Yet even plays that don’t feature explicit stereotypes about Black women can be harmful. In the musical Hamilton, Sally Hemings, the woman Thomas Jefferson enslaved, was only portrayed briefly caring for Jefferson. Also, the young Maria Reynolds (white in real life, but not in Hamilton) seduces the older Hamilton—before trapping him in a scandal, the very epitome of the “jezebel.”

While not all theater characters require tragic backstories, plays should depict Black women as layered—not foil characters.

Trauma-Informed Theater Practices

Though musicals purvey joy, there’s also a responsibility to be trauma-informed. Theater productions should consult mental health professionals, scholars, and even members of the production itself. In May, , Hell’s Kitchen’s lead actor, publicly revealed her battles with depression. “I wasn’t getting out of bed,” she told The New York Times. “I was missing class … it got really bad.” Imagine if Moon, with this lived experience, helped write Ali’s journey. 

Broadway plays haven’t often done this work, though the jukebox musical Jagged Little Pill is an exception. In 2021, after the play’s producers , they and revisited the script. They also with mental health organizations, recognizing the impact that theater has on trauma. “We are very proud of the show we made and its transformative power,” the lead producers said in a statement. “It is precisely because we have made this show about these charged and nuanced issues—a show about radical empathy and truth-telling, about protest and vulnerability—we have to hold ourselves to a higher standard.”

Even if Hell’s Kitchen’s writer, Kristoffer Díaz, isn’t solely responsible for Ali’s character arc, playwrights should be trained to understand trauma responses so they can better be conveyed onstage. Perhaps Ali made these choices because women often blame themselves for trauma—because it gives them control when the world feels out of control.

Imagine if Miss Liza Jane told Ali that she wasn’t responsible for Knuck’s trauma and suggested support beyond the piano? What if playwrights held characters like Knuck accountable and showed how systems and environments inform a character’s choices? 

There are some organizations, coalitions, and producers attempting to address these issues, including , , , and

In 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, more than 300 theatermakers of color released “,” a statement demanding “a more equitable and safe space for BIPOC communities in our nation and inside of the American Theater.” The statement—which holds the theater industry accountable for actions such as dangling “opportunities like carrots before emerging BIPOC artists … at the expense of [their] art and integrity”—offers a number of demands. One such demand is for productions to “provide therapists or counselors on site for the duration of a rehearsal process and production run when producing/programming content that deals with racialized experiences, and most especially racialized trauma.” Another demand asks for theater companies to diversify the plays they offer by not having the BIPOC plays in any given season centered solely on “trauma and pain.”

If Hell’s Kitchen is any indication, theater is still struggling to meet these proposed standards more than four years later. While more than 100 theater organizations have —making changes that lessen the harm BIPOC performers, producers, and directors experience—there is still more work to do to create a more equitable theater industry.

Theater professionals don’t just imitate life—they shape it. Keys said she crafted Hell’s Kitchen , so its writing should remind audiences that women’s inner “” of bright colors shouldn’t dim because people around them are struggling to find theirs.

Since the 1960s and the election of President John F. Kennedy, younger voters have supported Democratic candidates, while older voters leaned Republican. But , and now, in 2024, large numbers in both groups are bucking traditional assumptions about their political affiliation.

This shift challenges the age-old political adage that youthful idealism gives way to conservative pragmatism with age. As pollsters and pundits scramble to explain the phenomenon, one intriguing theory emerges: It may .

The Unhappy Vote for Change

I am an  and the co-founder and co-director of the . Our lab investigates and analyzes public opinion and political trends nationwide. With the upcoming election, I’ve been specifically examining the potential influence of happiness on voting patterns.

Research worldwide indicates that happy people prefer keeping things the same, and they . Voters who aren’t as happy are more open to anti-establishment candidates, seeing the government as a source of their discontent.

These findings may help to explain the Democratic Party’s waning support among young people.

This group is still reliably blue. Vice President Kamala Harris , with 50% favoring her over former President Donald Trump’s 34%. U.S. voters ages 18 to 35 mainly prefer Democratic views on  and . Yet they are more likely to vote Republican than they have been in the past, especially young men.

Youth Are No Longer Carefree

Declining life satisfaction and happiness levels among young Americans may help to explain their changing political preferences.

Our  found that 55% of respondents ages 18 to 34 reported dissatisfaction with their lives, compared with 65% of the general population.

These findings, , challenge the common belief that young adulthood is one of life’s happiest periods.

 suggests that older voters, long a Republican base, are trending blue in 2024. As of September 2024, Harris leads among older voters, with somewhere between 51% to 55% favoring her over Trump.

These happy seniors appear to be concerned about sweeping changes that could occur under another Trump administration, like . The Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022 erased what was seen as a major milestone and accomplishment for that generation.

Older Americans are also focused on retaining , a Democratic priority that Trump has wavered on, and maintaining lower prescription drug costs. Both of these programs help keep older Americans happy and healthy. They barely register for young people.

Polls are notoriously slippery, and they’ll keep changing. But, increasingly, age is no longer a very good indicator of party affiliation.

Happiness Matters at the Ballot Box

I am not suggesting that happiness drives all voting behavior or explains changing political preferences in the United States. But I am saying that it should not be ignored.

My research indicates that to understand why people vote the way they do, it’s essential to examine happiness alongside other key factors like the economy and personal experiences. By studying how happiness connects with age, life experiences, and engagement with social media, researchers can gain clearer insights into the changing voting behavior of both young and old voters.

The 2024 presidential candidates seem to have intuited this. The Harris campaign is all about “joy” and . The Trump campaign adopts an angrier tone and a grievance-filled approach.

Ultimately, happiness is more than just a mood. Just as much as ideology, the literal pursuit of happiness may be shaping decisions at the ballot box.

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