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Fishers operating off the coast of Sulawesi, Indonesia, are detonating more than 8,000 underwater explosives each year, researchers estimate. The practice is turning picturesque coral reefs to “rubble.”
Migrant Farm Worker Safety During Niagara Elections
A pledge for Niagara municipal candidates
Road Safety for AllEveryone deserves the freedom to move safely through their community. Migrant farm workers are asking candidates to commit to practical action so that every worker can get to work, reach essential services and return home safely.
See where candidates stand Read the commitments Candidate? Sign the pledge Sign the petitionFreedom of mobility
Road safety is about the freedom to live a full life.Freedom of mobility means being able to travel between work, home, grocery stores, health care, legal services and community without risking your life.
For many migrant farm workers, there is little or no public transit. Workers may have no choice but to walk or cycle on dark rural roads without safe shoulders, bike lanes, crossings or lighting to get privacy and access basic needs.
Essential Work. Invisible to public planning.Migrant workers have helped sustain Niagara’s farms and food economy for sixty years. Their labour is visible everywhere. Their safety, transportation needs and voices have too often been missing from road design, transit planning and government decisions.
They have names
These deaths and injuries are part of a pattern.At least seven migrant farm workers have been killed or seriously injured on Niagara roads since 2019. Behind that number are workers, neighbours, friends and family members.
2026 Sinhue GarciaSinhue was killed while cycling home on Concession 6 near Line 4 in Niagara-on-the-Lake. He was 39 years old and leaves behind his wife and two daughters in Mexico.
2019 ZenaidaZenaida, a Mexican farm worker and mother, was killed in a hit-and-run in Niagara-on-the-Lake.
2022 Fermin Soto Sanchez and two co-workersFermin was killed and two of his co-workers were seriously injured when they were struck near St. Catharines.
2022 Ceto ReidCeto, a Jamaican farm worker, was seriously injured while cycling home from a laundromat.
2023 OmarOmar, a migrant farm worker, was injured in a hit-and-run on Lakeshore Road.
Sinhue Garcia was a neighbour, a co-worker, a friend and a father. He deserved to get home safely. So does every migrant worker who comes to Niagara to work.
The Road Safety for All Pledge
Candidates who sign commit to:Working with migrant farm workers, community members, municipal staff and regional partners to advance the following actions.
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Create and fund a migrant farm worker road safety plan
Support multi-year funding for improved lighting, protected shoulders or bike lanes, traffic calming, safer crossings and lower speeds on routes used by workers.
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Complete a worker-led road safety audit and map
Ensure migrant farm workers directly identify dangerous roads, routes and destinations and help set priorities for action.
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Put worker-identified routes into municipal and regional plans
Use transportation and master planning processes to prioritize routes identified by migrant workers.
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Assign responsibility and report publicly on progress
Identify a lead Niagara Region staff person and provide at least two public reports to council each year: one before and one after the height of the agricultural season from May to September.
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Ensure migrant worker housing is safe and dignified
Support proactive inspections through Niagara Region Public Health, including access to basic facilities, privacy, adequate space and protection from unsafe conditions.
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Call for a coroner’s inquest
Publicly support a coroner’s inquest into migrant farm worker road deaths and serious injuries in Niagara.
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Meet directly with migrant farm workers
Hold direct meetings with workers and release a public implementation plan during the first year of the new council.
For municipal candidates
Sign the pledgeAdd your name to publicly commit to the Road Safety for All Pledge and to working directly with migrant farm workers on implementation.
By signing, you commit to supporting all seven actions listed above.Your contact information will be used to confirm your response and communicate with you about the pledge. Only information you have agreed to make public should be published.
Candidate pledge formPlease complete the form below. We will follow up to confirm your response.
For everyone
Justice for Sinhue GarciaAdd your name to demand safer roads and real support for migrant workers in Niagara. Together, we can push municipal leaders to act so no one else is killed simply trying to get home.
Send a message now calling for safer roads, dignified housing and action with migrant workers at the table. Sign the petitionAdd your name and send your message to decision-makers.
The post Migrant Farm Worker Safety During Niagara Elections first appeared on Migrant Workers Alliance for Change.
The post Migrant Farm Worker Safety During Niagara Elections appeared first on Migrant Workers Alliance for Change.
Saving Democracy Means Ending Extreme Inequality
Labor organizer Saru Jayaraman makes a clarion call to action: support workers across the United States who are saying there’s always been an affordability crisis and are asking politicians what has democracy done for me lately? Addressing inequality worse than the infamous Gilded Age requires ensuring living wages for all.
FeaturingSaru Jayaraman (JD, Yale, MPP Harvard), an academic at UC Berkeley and a renowned labor activist, is President of One Fair Wage, which organizes to raise wages and end sub-minimum wages nationwide. She is author of: Behind the Kitchen Door; Forked: A New Standard for American Dining; and One Fair Wage: Ending Subminimum Pay in America.
Credits- Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel
- Written by: Kenny Ausubel
- Senior Producer and Station Relations: Stephanie Welch
- Associate Producer and Program Engineer: Emily Harris
- Host and Consulting Producer: Neil Harvey
Take This Job and Shove It: The Great Resignation or The Great Revolt? | Bioneers Podcast
Saru Jayaraman – What has Democracy Done For Me Lately? Engaging Working People in the Fight to Save Democracy | Bioneers 2026 Keynote
Saru Jayaraman – The Great Revolution: What A Worker Power Moment Can Mean for Climate Justice | Bioneers 2023 Keynote
A Dime a Day: The Impact of the Miller/Harking Minimum Wage Proposal on the Price of Food
‘Give Me a Chance to Survive’: Workers, Employers Dread Deportations’ Effect on Health Care | Labor Notes
This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to find out how to hear the program on your local station and how to subscribe to the podcast.
Subscribe to the Bioneers: Revolution from The Heart of Nature podcast TranscriptNeil Harvey (Host): In his book Goliath’s Curse, researcher Luke Kemp at Cambridge University looks at the rise and collapse of over 400 societies over the past 5,000 years. At the center of every collapse is extreme inequality caused by wealth extraction by the one percent. As inequality spikes, these increasingly hollowed-out societies become acutely vulnerable to shocks, collapses and rebellions.
Fast-forward to Peak Inequality in the U.S. in 2026. The Goliath wealth pump has been cranking at warp speed to extract the biggest wealth transfer in history from bottom to top. They want to have their cake and eat yours too.
The world’s 12 richest billionaires have more wealth than the poorest half of humanity. The top one percent control $58 trillion in assets, more than the combined GDPs of the U.S. and China. That’s more than enough to eliminate global poverty 22 times over.
About three to five giant corporations dominate around 80% of almost every industry and marketplace. About 60% of rising costs since the pandemic can be attributed to corporate “greedflation.” “All that the market will bear,” as the Robber Barons fondly put it.
While basic living costs balloon, savage policies are shredding the social safety net and workers’ rights, hurling people into economic free fall. Labor’s share of income is the lowest since the Great Depression.
But when the mass immiseration becomes this extreme, people fight back against Goliath.
This is the terrain where labor organizer Saru Jayaraman takes her stand. As founder and president of One Fair Wage, a national organization of over 300,000 restaurant and service workers, 1000 restaurant owners, and organizations, she leads campaigns to raise wages and end all subminimum wages nationwide. She spoke at a Bioneers conference.
Saru Jayaraman speaking at Bioneers 2026. Photo: Alex AkamineSaru Jayaraman (SJ): I have been organizing for 25 years and represent an industry, the restaurant industry, which is 13.6 million people in the United States who work in the lowest wage jobs in the United States. The largest employer of women and people of color, and youth and immigrants, and pretty much all of us, gets to pay $2.13 an hour in 2026.
When half of America cannot afford to feed themselves, their families to survive, they also cannot engage politically, and as long as they are paid the wages they are paid, as long as they’re working three jobs instead of one, and as long as they do not see any reason to vote because the people in power, the people who run all represent the antithesis of everything they need and stand for. [APPLAUSE]
So I’ve been sharing this and facing a lot of push-back. In 2024, when we were trying to raise money to put wage increases on the ballot in key states like Arizona and Michigan, donors told me that’s cute, you’re trying to raise wages. We’re trying to save democracy. And I had a really hard time trying to explain to people that raising wages is saving democracy. [APPLAUSE] It is the same thing, because there is no world in which democracy can function with these incredibly high levels of inequality. And I’m sad to say we haven’t heeded the warnings that working people have been trying to tell us for so long. We’re in a moment when working people either stayed home or went the other way because we didn’t listen; we didn’t pay attention; we did not say your lives matter.
Host: Saru and her organization are traveling around the country, organizing meetings and rallies with the Living Wage for All Coalition. In every state, workers are joining and telling their stories…
Credit: OFW member and photographer Nortei DowuonaJohannah: My name is Johannah Alabi. I am a CN certified nursing assistant from Connecticut. I dedicate 15 years to this work caring for those who cannot care for themselves. But today I stand before you not just as a CNA, but someone who is struggling… I have 2 fulltime jobs over 80 hours a week just to make ends meet. I do not have a day off. I make under $25 an hour at both jobs even with my experience. I work endlessly to provide for my kids, but we just make it. My wages cover food and roof over our head. But there’s nothing left over for savings or for emergency. Caregivers are working 60, 70, 80, even 100 hours a week to make ends meet. This is not sustainable. This is not respect. That is not care. It’s time for $25 an hour minimum wage for all. Thank you so much! [CHANTING]
Silvy: My name is Silvy, I’m from Bridgeport Connecticut. I’ve been bartending since 2018. I work hard, I work long hours, sometimes up to 13 hours a day. My base pay is $8 an hour, which is $8 less than the Connecticut state minimum wage. It hasn’t changed since the cost of living has skyrocketed. Service workers are often grouped under unskilled labor and we are told that our work isn’t valued much. And when profit is the dominant interest at large, it will only be service workers who are paid less than they’re worth. I ask that we are paid the full minimum wage plus tips. We are human beings who deserve to be paid a living wage! No less than $25 an hour. Thank you!
Host: There’s not a single state, city or county where a full-time worker making the minimum wage can afford a modest two-bedroom rental. Roughly half of Americans can’t afford a thousand-dollar emergency. Poverty is now the fourth leading cause of death.
As director of the Food Labor Research Center at UC Berkeley, Saru witnesses the real-world human costs of these chilling statistics every day. She’s authored several books, including One Fair Wage: Ending Subminimum Pay in America. She’s working with over 100 labor and community organizations on a Living Wage for All campaign to address the twin affordability and democracy crises.
She knows that the affordability crisis is actually a billionaire crisis, which in turn is a democracy crisis. The most unequal countries are seven times more likely to experience democratic backsliding or autocracy.
Raising wages is not a left-right issue – it’s a top and bottom issue. Meanwhile, she says, both major political parties play a cynical game of political football that sidesteps tackling the imperative for a living wage.
SJ: We were struck by a series of USA Today articles that came out documenting a rumor video that the right had been circulating among MAGA voters saying that Donald Trump had already raised the federal minimum wage to $25 an hour. The videos were so popular and gained so much attention among right-wing voters.
Now, we all know it’s a lie, and they lie all day. No big deal. That’s not the news here. The news here is that they didn’t say Donald Trump raised the wage to 15 or 17 or 20. They said he raised it to $25 an hour, which is the least you need to live anywhere in the United States of America right now. The MIT Living Wage calculator says the cheapest county in the U.S. is McLennan County, Texas, and you need $25 to survive. So they picked the very number that affects all of us, including MAGA voters.
When I saw these articles, I said we have a five-alarm fire. The right is talking about 25 and agitating their base about 25, and the left is stuck on 17, some places 15. And I gotta tell you, this is why people hate us. People hate us because they see us negotiating against ourselves before we even get to the room. [APPLAUSE] They see us arguing for half a loaf.
Even as I’ve started talking, I’m sure there are people in the room who, some part of their brain is saying, “What about small business?” “What about will the economy survive?” “Can we manage 25?” And I’m not blaming you. That is what you have been fed your entire lives. But we negotiate against ourselves before we even tell working people we are fighting for you; we are fighting for the full loaf, not half a loaf. We know what it takes, and it’s no less than 25. So it is time for a living wage for all, a floor of 25. Let higher cost regions go to 30 and higher.
So we polled across red, blue and purple districts – overwhelmingly popular. And I gotta tell you, people are so angry right now. If you tell them we can’t raise the wage, prices will go up, they say, “What are you talking about? Prices have already gone up!” The only price that hasn’t gone up is the price of human beings.
We have to give people some sense of hope that a different future is on the horizon, one in which they can survive, and, yes, maybe thrive.
Source: Saru Jayaraman / One Fair WageHost: Taxpayers are subsidizing wages because companies refuse to pay a living wage or provide enough hours. Saru Jayaraman says that while it’s clear a living wage is essential for people to survive and thrive, the general focus of politicians has been only on reducing costs and inflation.
SJ: There’s so much talk about affordability, but most of it is “bring costs down”, “freeze the rent”, “affordable childcare”, “affordable healthcare”. Nobody is saying those things aren’t essential, critical, important and there is no world in which we achieve affordability by simply bringing costs down.
Look at inflation over the last 75 years. It has never come down. It has never gone backwards. Do you know that now half of Americans earn less than $25 an hour? Half of America earns less than what it costs to live in the cheapest place in the United States of America. So half of America thinks maybe things are okay, and half of America has been in a five-alarm fire for a very long time.
And if you look at the last six years in particular since the pandemic, it is double or triple the level of inflation of the last 75 years. So this is not the stagflation of the ‘70s. This is not anything we have ever experienced as a country. This is unprecedented. Unprecedented affordability crisis means an unprecedented democracy crisis, means unprecedented crisis, period.
I have heard from so many older people: I am so sad to say that the young people in my life will never leave the house. Because they can never afford to! And that’s a funny thing and a heartbreaking thing because the California budget office just reported recently that a new trend we’re seeing among minimum wage workers is that young people are deciding never to have children because they can’t afford to; they can’t imagine a life where they could actually afford their own place and have their own children. How heartbreaking is it that we are denying the next generation the ability to have kids?
Host: Saru says that ensuring a living wage for everyone is a popular policy, but big business often discourages that support by repeating the false claim that raising wages will hurt small businesses.
SJ: It’s, you know, fair game and exciting and popular for everybody to say billionaires, trillionaires. I think there’s still this reverence for small business over people that is used by the billionaires and the trillionaires and the corporations to get even the most progressive people on our side to shy away from raising wages.
And so, let us push our representatives, even our best friends, to say this cannot be a one-sided conversation. It has to be about prices and paychecks. It has to be about, yes, bringing costs down or freezing them, but life will never be affordable unless people have enough money in their pockets.
Host: We’ll hear more from Saru Jayaraman when we return.
I’m Neil Harvey. You’re listening to the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature.
Host: Extreme concentration of wealth leads to extreme concentration of power. In 2024, just a hundred billionaire families poured two billion dollars into U.S. federal elections. That’s about a 160-fold increase since the Supreme Court passed Citizens United in 2010, allowing unlimited dark money to be poured into elections. A billionaire is 4,000 times more likely to run for office than a regular citizen. Few policies pass that they don’t want.
The National Restaurant Association – the extremely powerful corporate lobby that’s often referred to as “the other NRA” – continues to wage class war on restaurant workers by swaying state and federal policy. It came about in 1919 with the express intent of being able to hire newly freed Black women after Emancipation, not pay them, and have them live only on tips. That is the origin story of the miniscule $2.13 an hour wage for restaurant workers today.
SJ: Since 1938, when FDR first – created the first federal minimum wage in the United States, you have to know that the opposition has used the exact same arguments over and over again for a century – “prices will go up, jobs will be lost, people will lose hours, small businesses will close, and the economy will tank”. Right? Whole industries will collapse. Same thing over and over and over and over again.
Your restaurant didn’t need to raise prices, they just did. And, you know, the National Restaurant Association’s own data shows there’s a natural closure of about 20 percent of all restaurants every year, but when the wages go up, they’ll pull those restaurants in particular and say, look, they closed because of this.
Prices have not actually gone up that dramatically each time we’ve raised the wage. In fact, I did a study with another professor here at UC Davis, and the title of the study was—at the time, this was way back when we were doing Fight for 15 and all the same arguments came up, prices are going to go up, jobs will be lost, blah, blah, blah, and we—the title of this study was A Dime a Day, because we studied—if you gave every worker in the food system, from farm workers up to restaurant workers $15 an hour, how much more would it cost the average consumer, and the answer was a dime a day. It’s not a dollar to dollar increase, y’all.
Our calculation is it’s about, at most, at 10 percent over many years. None of the wage increases, none of the bills we’re moving raise the wage overnight. We can afford that, especially we can afford that if we’re earning enough to consume.
Host: Saru says it’s well documented that countless initiatives across the country to create living wage policies have been stymied by the same tactics of disinformation, intimidation, and fear that the National Restaurant Association has deployed for decades. Even minor wage increases in Blue states have often been rolled back – by both political parties.
SJ: We’ll have hearings in blue states, very Trifecta blue states – Colorado, Maryland, New York – and the restaurant association will require all workers to attend a pre-shift meeting, and tell them, listen, the legislators are trying to take your tips away. Right? When the law is: Let’s raise the wage to a full minimum wage with tips on top. “The legislators are trying to take your tips away, so we’re going to shut down the restaurant, pay you all $15 an hour”, which, by the way, they could never afford to pay normally, because they normally pay $3 in the very blue state of Maryland. $2 in the very blue state of New Mexico. You know? Most of the country, it’s 2, and 3, and 4. And they’re like, you know, this law is about taking your tips away, so we’re going to shut down the restaurant, pay all of you. Come, come—you know, and then it’s 75 or 100 workers getting up one by one: “Please don’t take my tips away.”
And we do everything in our power to get workers to come to say, “No, I need a raise!”, which the overwhelming majority, of course, of workers want. But those workers are working three jobs and terrified of showing up with their name and their face, and their employers see it. So democracy doesn’t work when the majority of people are unable or terrified to come speak up. And then a minority of people are paid to come speak for their bosses. Right?
And the Democrats, I don’t believe they’re this dumb. Maybe they’re this dumb. But their response is, oh, we can’t do this because workers don’t want it. And I really believe it’s a good excuse, or maybe they are that dumb to be taken in by what we call an AstroTurf campaign, right, Fake grassroots campaign.
But that’s been my experience of democracy, is Democrats blocking wage increases because of the restaurant association, rolling back—Do you know in 2025, as the affordability crisis became the thing that everybody understood, it was Democrats, who for the first time in United States history, rolled back workers’ wages, cut them in half in Michigan, in Colorado, in DC, in Chicago. I could say state after state. Republicans would never touch this with a ten-foot pole, because turning back workers’ wages they would always consider to be political suicide. Democrats thought it was okay because we have not created the consequences for those Democrats.
Do you know what the Republican stand on minimum wage is? It’s not leave it where it is. I mean, I’ve debated them on The New York Times podcast. Their stance is there should not be a minimum wage. The free market should take care of wages. They never negotiate—Do you think they sit in a room with policy wonks and say, “What’s acceptable? What’s feasible? What’s palatable?” before they come out and say there shouldn’t be a minimum wage? No. They don’t care. They will say exactly what they need and want.
So this has been my experience of democracy. What would it look like in a real democracy? In a real democracy, workers would be able to have one job instead of three. They could show up en masse and say, oh, take your hands off our wages. If we can make it a big deal in the policy arena, then we see workers who’ve been afraid start to talk about it with one another. If you are alone in a workplace and you’re like, we deserve $30, and nobody else is talking about $30, it becomes really, really hard. But if it’s on the television and everybody’s talking about it, suddenly it becomes something we can talk about. “You know? Let’s talk about it. Do you think we’re worth $30, first of all? Hell yeah, we’re worth $30.” They could overpower any lies or AstroTurf campaign, and they would be listened to. That’s what democracy would look like; that’s why it would be important.
Host: More and more people are seeing the reason they’re sicker, poorer, and chronically insecure is the giant sucking sound of the Goliath wealth pump.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Congress could make policy changes, like an embarrassingly modest wealth tax on millionaires and billionaires, which would raise an annual estimated $414 billion for social programs and fighting poverty. Remember, from WWII until 1980, the top marginal tax rate in the U.S. was 81%.
But the most effective, lasting change comes from the grassroots. Saru Jayaraman calls for a bold, proactive vision that unites working people across the country and that addresses their key concern: the cost of living.
SJ: I know there’s a lot to be unhappy about, I know there’s a lot to cry about, there’s a lot to be angry about, there’s a lot to defend. Yet if all we do is defense, we will lose.
But I have to tell you in terms of democracy, I have been hearing so often from our members across the country, if I ask them, ‘Come to Saturday’s rally, No Kings; help us save democracy,’ they’ll say, “Save democracy? I earn $3. I work three jobs. What has democracy done for me lately?”
And I have asked workers: What would you do? What would you do if you actually had the capacity to engage in the democratic process? If you had one job instead of three, if you could engage politically, what would you work on? Do you know what they tell me time and time again? They say the climate crisis.
Working people live in the communities that are most impacted by environmental crisis. So of course they care, but they do not have the capacity, again, nor do they see people in power doing or speaking to anything that represents them or resonates with them, or frankly addresses the top need they have, which is the cost of living.
Photo: Steve Sanchez Photos / ShutterstockAs sad as this moment is, there’s a moment of opportunity where the pendulum could swing in the exact opposite direction. And yes, they would have time to engage on the issue they said they would engage on if they had capacity, which is the climate crisis.
What’s so hopeful to me is that when I travel the country, I’m in Michigan, Pennsylvania, or even the South, every red, blue, and purple district, the one thing I find working people across the political spectrum can agree on is if you work, you deserve to earn enough to feed your family, to have a roof over your head, maybe even to take a vacation. What a concept.
But I really want to ask you to join me in stopping this notion of “saving democracy”. It’s not working. It didn’t work in 2024. The messages we were told – “you’re wrong, the economy is working; you’re wrong, there’s so much that we’ve done, we’re just not messaging it right.” No! No! You know what the best message is for working people? Delivering. Delivering on the things that allow them to survive and thrive and live.
So that is why I feel such deep urgency to work with you to deliver, to deliver on wage increases that will put more money in peoples’ pockets, that will give people a sense of hope. And, yes, together, building a different future in which all of us can thrive. Thank you. [APPLAUSE]
Host: Saru Jayaraman, “Saving Democracy Means Ending Extreme Inequality.”
The post Saving Democracy Means Ending Extreme Inequality appeared first on Bioneers.
The Village We Lost: Rebuilding Maternal Care From Gaza to Oakland
Across the world, mothers and children are absorbing the sharpest edges of humanitarian catastrophe — in Gaza, in Sudan, in conflict zones where medical infrastructure has collapsed entirely. And here in the United States, the crisis wears a different face but is no less urgent: Black women are three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women, a disparity that has held steady for decades despite the country’s wealth and medical resources.
These are not separate emergencies. They are the same failure, showing up at different scales — systems that were never built to protect the most vulnerable, and the people stepping in, often without pay or institutional backing, to hold the line anyway.
The following conversation brings together four women doing that work from radically different vantage points: Brandi Gates-Burgess, founder of Breast Friends Lactation and Support Services, who has spent her career closing the breastfeeding gap in Black communities across the Bay Area; Sandra Adler Killen, an ER and pediatric nurse who has deployed to Gaza three times to train local clinicians in infant nutrition and lactation care amid famine and mass casualty; and Dr. Cindy Nelly, a global health consultant and midwife who has spent 25 years building health systems in conflict zones from Rwanda to the Democratic Republic of Congo to Gaza. They were brought together by Sandra, and guided in conversation by journalist Tiffany McElroy.
What emerges is not a comparison of suffering, but something more like a shared diagnosis of what happens when the people closest to a crisis aren’t the ones being listened to, and what changes when they finally are.
What follows is an edited excerpt of a conversation recorded at the Bioneers 2026 conference.
TIFFANY: My first question is for all of you: why did you choose to get into the specific work you’re doing right now? Brandi, let’s start with you.
BRANDI: Black women are least likely to breastfeed their babies. There are enormous health disparities behind that fact, and it’s what drew me into this work.
I was 21, in college at UC Riverside, when I had my daughter. I breastfed her because I was a broke college student — but once I learned how critical breastfeeding is to Black maternal health, and how much it reduces infant mortality, I knew I had to get the word out. I changed my major to sociology so I could understand how these outcomes were shaping Black birth in this country.
The numbers are what convinced me this was my life’s work: Black women and birthing people are three times more likely to die in childbirth than any other race or ethnicity. If we can get Black families to breastfeed for at least six months, it changes the health trajectory of an entire community — lower rates of diabetes, asthma, allergies, obesity, breast cancer. Once I understood that, the mission became simple: We support each other, and we get moms breastfeeding for at least six months.
In 2023, I launched Breast Friends Lactation to bring that support to low-income families in the Bay Area, specifically pairing them with lactation consultants who look like them and understand what it means to navigate motherhood as a Black woman in America. We’ve been at it ever since, and we’re booked solid.
SANDRA: Nursing is actually my fifth career. I came to it late — I became a nurse at 50, after working in several very different fields, because I wanted to dedicate myself to this work. I worked as an ER nurse and a postpartum nurse, and I’d always wanted to do lactation support. I breastfed my own two children and saw firsthand the health benefits, the bonding, how emotionally powerful it was. So I became an IBCLC, just like Brandi.
For many years now, I’ve done international humanitarian work, first in Syria and Lebanon with refugee populations, and for the last two years in Gaza, training neonatologists, pediatricians, OB/GYNs, midwives, doctors, and nurses to deliver this kind of support in some of the most challenging environments imaginable.
CINDY: My own path, I’ll admit, wasn’t especially altruistic at the start. I began traveling early, and as someone very privileged to be able to do that, I started noticing the disparities around me. I wanted to keep traveling, but I wanted it to mean something — to give something back to the communities I was moving through. If I don’t have a plane ticket in hand, I get anxious. I just need to be on the road.
Then I had my daughter at 23. I chose a midwife without really thinking about why, but my great-grandmother had been a midwife, and somehow, through whatever force that is, maternal lineage, I knew that was how I needed to give birth. My first career had actually been in environmental science, but in that moment of giving birth, with that connection to my midwife, I realized: This is what I want to do.
As healthcare providers, we have incredible privilege. We’re present with people during the most painful, and sometimes the most joyful, most intimate moments of their lives. When else do we get that? It’s sacred. We can find that connection with trees, with plants, with nature — but connecting human to human in such a vulnerable space is powerful in a different way.
TIFFANY: In so many systems, especially healthcare, it feels like the most vulnerable end up working against the odds the system creates. Brandi, can you talk about why breastfeeding matters so much in the Black community, and what the barriers are? And then Sandy and Cindy, I’d love to hear why breastfeeding matters even amid everything going on in conflict zones.
BRANDI: Breastfeeding is a safety net for every baby. Every baby deserves their birthing parent’s milk — it’s uniquely designed for that specific baby. Throughout pregnancy, the body is creating the optimal food for that particular child. We do families a disservice when we say formula is just as good. I tell my clients: Formula is good if a baby doesn’t have a mother. But if they have one, that baby should be fed her milk, because it’s built specifically for them.
That said, there are real barriers here in America — not just for Black families, but for everyone. One is our reflex toward medical intervention at every step. We’ve forgotten what normal newborn behavior and weight loss actually look like, so we over-supplement early on. That first month is critical for establishing milk supply for the entire breastfeeding journey. If it’s not established properly, families end up needing donor milk or formula to make up the gap.
Another barrier is that we have no paid maternity leave. We live in a country where you can’t legally separate a puppy from its mother before eight weeks, but we tell a woman her body isn’t healed and she still has to return to work at six. During COVID, we proved this doesn’t have to be the case. People were paid to stay home. If we can do that, we can provide six months of paid maternity leave. Instead, in the U.S., many people don’t even get six weeks; some go back after two.
Formula companies also heavily target Black and Brown families. We already have high cesarean rates, and when someone feels like their body “failed” at birth, that insecurity carries over into feeding. So when a formula ad shows up on Instagram or TikTok asking, “Is your baby getting enough?”, it lands. That’s how formula gets introduced, along with the early risks that come with it: allergens, digestive issues, and more.
These barriers hit the Black community hardest, but really, all women and birthing people in America face them — the lack of paid leave, and the early, unnecessary push toward formula.
SANDRA: I’ll speak to Gaza specifically. Many of you already know, from the news, what’s transpired there — periods of starvation, no food, no medical supplies. Add in environmental factors like asbestos and munitions exposure, plus malnutrition, stress, and PTSD, and it’s a perfect storm for infant mortality and morbidity.
Culturally, families have their own traditions and religious practices around infant feeding. I’m not Muslim myself, but I’ve learned a great deal about Islamic tradition, including that Muhammad called for breastfeeding for two years, long before Western medical bodies caught up with that same recommendation. I use that with the families I work with, because there’s often a fear that their milk isn’t good enough, or that they’ll pass on toxins to their baby. We’re seeing high rates of cleft lip and palate, congenital birth defects, prematurity, and extremely low birth weight.
When aid does get in, one of the first things allowed through is formula in massive quantities. I believe that’s not an accident. Poorer health outcomes follow. I’d go so far as to say that using formula this way is itself a strategy of this genocide.
I’ve worked with well-meaning clinicians and surgeons who hear formula is needed and bring it in their luggage — and I have had to tell them, directly, not to. Their intent is to place a can of formula at every mother’s bedside immediately after delivery. But once formula is introduced, milk supply drops and health outcomes worsen. I had to work directly with hospital directors at al-Aqsa Hospital, Al-Shifa Hospital, and facilities in Gaza City to stop well-meaning charities from distributing formula this way. Formula is medicine. We use it when it’s medically necessary, not as a default.
CINDY: You can’t talk about formula without talking about water. Globally, one in four health centers lacks access to clean water — water that’s often used to mix formula.
That’s before you even get to displacement camps or rural areas.
And this isn’t only a Global South problem. In the U.S., we have water deserts — over two million people without access to safe water. Combine unsafe water with formula feeding, and you get the full range of illnesses that come with it. Those two issues are inseparable.
But there’s real hope, too. Milk banks are one of the most incredible developments I’ve seen. There’s one in Gaza. I saw it firsthand in the NICU, and the team there was rightly proud of what they’d built. A milk bank is where a mother with an abundant supply, or one who has lost her baby, continues pumping and donates that milk to other infants who need it.
CINDY: Domestically, we face this too. At the tertiary care hospital where I work — where we take care of the sickest of the sick babies, many requiring surgery and immediate intervention — we have a milk bank, but more barriers than systems to support it.
Policy around safe milk banking in the U.S. is something we need to take seriously. And globally, there’s a tendency to assume that in places facing poverty or crisis, something like a milk bank is too ambitious, even a privilege. It’s not — it’s fundamental. In fact, we have a lot to learn from systems already in place. I think of Pumwani, in Africa, which delivers over 20,000 babies a year and has an incredible milk bank system. That’s a model worth studying, not underestimating.
TIFFANY: Brandi, tell us about your nonprofit. How do you get women excited about breastfeeding, and what connections do you help them make?
BRANDI: My nonprofit is Breast Friends Lactation and Support Services. We now run eight support groups throughout the Bay Area — in Richmond, Concord, Pittsburg, West Oakland, Fruitvale, San Leandro, San Francisco, and Rancho Cordova — providing in-home lactation support for Black and Brown families. We have four lactation consultants who go directly into people’s homes. If a client reaches out, they don’t even need to see a doctor first. We bring everything with us: a scale, pillows, formula if it’s needed for weight issues, nipple shields, feeding tubes, syringes, ice packs. It’s basically a lactation office in a suitcase.
We also run a peer support program built on a workforce development model: We take mothers from the community who’ve successfully breastfed for a year — our goal for every family — and train them through the USDA’s Loving Support peer counselor model, which includes 20 hours of lactation-specific education. They go on to work as peer counselors themselves.
We’re entirely grant- and donation-funded. Our peer counselors call clients weekly for the first eight weeks to make sure breastfeeding gets off to a strong start, and even if a client doesn’t pick up, we send text check-ins — “Congratulations, you made it through the first two weeks. Your baby may start feeding more frequently, so this is a great time for skin-to-skin contact” — so they’re still getting guidance either way.
We also run a “latchline,” our version of a breastfeeding warmline, available by call or text every day from 7am to 7pm, and a NICU support group for families with babies in intensive care. And we train birth workers directly — doulas, nurses, pediatricians, midwives — because they don’t always have the lactation-specific knowledge to catch red flags early. Instead of a provider saying, “Your baby’s losing weight, here’s some formula,” we want them saying, “Let’s get you to a lactation consultant and start pumping” before jumping straight to supplementation.
Our groups are open to the whole community, but they’re intentionally tailored to Black families, because our goal is to increase Black breastfeeding rates specifically — creating a safe space that’s led mother to mother, peer to peer.
Most recently, we launched DABS — Dads About Breastfeeding — a support group from the father’s perspective, led by my husband, who I had trained as a peer counselor. Dads often feel left out of the feeding journey, so DABS gives them a space to learn how to safely handle breast milk, assemble pumps, and support bottle-feeding — moving them from “I don’t know, he seems hungry, feed him more” to actually being part of the process. We launched it in October, and it’s already working well.
TIFFANY: Cindy, can you tell us about your work in the field? Brandi walked us through her work with clients — I’m curious what your day-to-day looks like.
CINDY: I’ve spent the last six years working internationally. While most people were home during COVID, I wasn’t. I worked in over four countries during that time, building healthcare infrastructure at a senior level for the federal government, the WHO, and the UN.
My work now is focused on systems, specifically, where they’re broken.
It’s easy to celebrate rescuing people from crisis, whether it’s Katrina or Gaza, any conflict or natural disaster. But why do we keep having to rescue people in the first place? Why does that keep being the model, and where does it break down?
There’s a concept in global health called the Humanitarian Development Nexus. On one side, you have humanitarians — the “cowboys,” as they’re sometimes known, myself included at various points, working with organizations like MSF. We rush in and put a bandage on the hemorrhage. On the other side, you have development actors — organizations like USAID — implementing, or trying to implement, long-term policy and infrastructure. The problem is these two groups rarely coordinate. And the biggest failure, in my experience, is that neither group reliably listens to the people on the ground.
That’s the work I’m focused on now: How do we build systems that actually lead from the ground up? In Gaza, the Ministry of Health had produced a new maternal health protocol — remarkable, given it happened during a war. But it hadn’t been implemented. When I arrived, I spent the first two days doing nothing but listening. I didn’t rush in to deliver babies; that wasn’t my role. I just listened to the providers.
One issue that came up repeatedly was episiotomies — the surgical incision made during childbirth, cutting the perineal tissue between the vagina and anus. The new protocol said doctors shouldn’t be performing them routinely; the evidence doesn’t support it as standard practice. But every first-time mother was still getting one.
Think about what that means in context: A woman has this incision, then returns to a tent, sharing a bathroom with 300 other people. The tissue breaks down. Infection sets in. There are long-term consequences. I’ve seen this pattern before, in the DRC, in cases involving sexual violence. It’s not unique to Gaza; it’s a practice still happening in the U.S. too, despite decades of evidence against it.
The point is: Gaza’s government had already put out a policy ready to change this, during a war, no less — and plenty of people had come to help, but no one had taken the time to actually listen and act on it. Just by listening first, I was able to help the incredible providers already on the ground solve a problem they were already trying to solve, rather than showing up with outside ideas about what needed to change.
I still get texts from providers there — “Another first-time mom, no episiotomy.” The physicians were remarkably open; they just hadn’t had support in changing the practice.
SANDRA: I want to share something specific about my practice. The first time I went to Gaza, I was part of a team doing mass casualty support — treating gunshot wounds and explosion injuries — working out of tents in the Al-Mawasi area, near Khan Yunis. We became one of the medical points of care for that community: primary care, wound dressing changes, mothers giving birth, mothers with mastitis, babies with hypoglycemia. When those cases came in, I could help. I had the training. The local clinicians started asking, “Can you teach us this? We know nothing about it.”
So I put together a training proposal. I was fortunate that an NGO brought me on, because very few international humanitarian healthcare workers are allowed into Gaza — I believe it’s down to around 10 a week now, and since the war with Iran, even fewer, sometimes just one entry a week. Many people get denied.
My work is about capacity building. I go in, I listen, and I ask what they want to be trained in. Then I build that plan and teach with the goal of making myself obsolete. I’m not a white woman coming in with answers. I ask: What do you need? What do you want? I’ll educate you, keep coming back as long as you want me to. And when there’s peace, I’ll come back simply to visit.
CINDY: That’s exactly why I came when you asked me to. It sounds obvious, put that way, but you’d be surprised how many people go into this work with a different agenda entirely.
TIFFANY: I can imagine. What does the future of maternal health and reproductive care look like to each of you, and where do you find hope, given everything going on right now?
CINDY: Just recently, Representative Adams introduced what’s known as the Momnibus legislation — a reintroduction of a bill aimed directly at the fact that Black women in this country face three times the maternal mortality rate of other groups. Even in the middle of everything happening politically right now, people are still putting forward legislation to address that.
There’s also a push through the International Confederation of Midwives to train a million more midwives worldwide. Midwives, nurses, and IBCLCs are critical frontline infrastructure. The estimate is that expanding access to them, along with community health workers, could reduce maternal and child mortality by 67%. That’s a campaign worth joining.
Even in the darkest moments, grassroots organizations keep pushing good work forward. Those are two efforts close to my heart, especially working in the Southeast. I still don’t understand why we aren’t listening to Black and Brown mothers, or why we haven’t built a workforce of midwives, nurses, and IBCLCs that actually reflects the people giving birth. That’s on us — on me, too, as someone in this field.
BRANDI: There’s a bill right now — AB 2160 — that would let lactation consultants bill for our services like any other healthcare provider. That would matter enormously, because this work is so often unpaid; it’s done purely out of passion. Getting reimbursed for these services would make organizations like Breast Friends far more sustainable.
There’s still so much work to do in reproductive justice, and I don’t know how quickly things will change. But my hope is built on initiatives like these — more midwives, more lactation consultants, more community members stepping in, professional or not. I tell people all the time:
My dream is that you won’t need me. That we build a village again, where this knowledge — how to breastfeed, how to care for our babies — is just something we know and share with each other, the way it always used to be. My hope is that I put myself out of a job, because everyone already knows how.
SANDRA: When I was in Syria and Lebanon in 2023, working with internally displaced people and refugees — Palestinian and Syrian — women who weren’t nurses, midwives, or doctors, women who worked in building administration, would come up to me and ask if they could just sit in on my trainings. When I asked why, they’d say: “I just want to be the person in my camp that moms can come to for support.”
That’s what this comes down to. Whether it’s advocating for these bills, or being that person in your own community — it’s us. Change happens over time. It’s not a hundred-yard dash; it’s a marathon. We stay committed, we don’t give up, and we remember that even two minutes today, 20 minutes in three weeks, two hours next month, adds up. That sustained effort is what changes things.
The post The Village We Lost: Rebuilding Maternal Care From Gaza to Oakland appeared first on Bioneers.
Are you an Undocumented Care Worker in Toronto? Join Our Meeting.
Join a private and confidential meeting for undocumented care workers.
Request an invitation Meeting details
Saturday, August 8
3:00–5:00 p.m.
In person in Toronto
The location will be shared only with people who are invited and confirmed to attend.
Who is this meeting for?This meeting is for people who:
- Live in the City of Toronto
- Do not currently have valid immigration status in Canada
- Currently work or have previously worked in care
The criteria for this meeting were set by the City of Toronto, which is funding this project.
Space is limited. We will review responses and contact people who are invited.
People who are invited and attend the full two-hour meeting will receive:- A $50 gift card
- Food
- PRESTO fare
- Access to health care, housing, transit and other City services
- What support undocumented care workers need
- Problems at work, including low wages, unpaid wages, abuse or unfair treatment
- Immigration status, permits and access to permanent residency
- What needs to change in Toronto and across Canada
Your experiences will help us identify the changes, services and resources undocumented care workers need. We will also share information about services and support available in Toronto.
Need support or do not meet the criteria?Contact us for support , join us as a member or call 437-518-8662.
This is a private and confidential process. Your name, immigration status, employer information and other personal information will not be shared with the City of Toronto, immigration authorities or your employer. We will not contact your current or former employer. Request an invitationShare your information below. We will contact you if you are invited and send you the meeting location.
Request an invitation (function () { var registrationSection = document.getElementById("mwac-registration"); var stickyButton = document.getElementById( "mwac-mobile-register-button" ); if ( !registrationSection || !stickyButton || !("IntersectionObserver" in window) ) { return; } var observer = new IntersectionObserver( function (entries) { entries.forEach(function (entry) { if (entry.isIntersecting) { stickyButton.classList.add("is-hidden"); } else { stickyButton.classList.remove("is-hidden"); } }); }, { threshold: 0.08 } ); observer.observe(registrationSection); })();The post Are you an Undocumented Care Worker in Toronto? Join Our Meeting. first appeared on Migrant Workers Alliance for Change.
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LFF Volume #29: Across Borders, a New Vision for Maternal Care
This is Volume #29 of the Leading from the Feminine newsletter, a vibrant resource in the flourishing world of leading from the heart, hands and spirit.
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Motherhood has become one of the defining fault lines of our time. From the dismantling of maternal health systems in Gaza to the ever-present crisis of Black maternal mortality in the U.S., the policies around and resources for caregiving are increasingly shaped by those who have the political and economic leverage to bypass restrictions created by our failing systems and institutions. Yet across these vastly different contexts and continents, the people at the center of intervention are often the same: midwives, nurses, lactation consultants, community organizers, and mothers themselves.
From Gaza to Oakland, the work of nurturing mothers and children—and expectations around how mothers should nurture their children—reveal just how intimately braided social, environmental, and reproductive justice are. When maternal healthcare systems collapse, when clean water becomes scarce, and when communities lose the threads to traditional and intergenerational knowledge that once sustained them, the damage disrupts generations. These systems we’ve built often exploit both the planet and the people whose labor sustains it, especially women, caregivers, and communities on the frontlines of injustice.
These realities raise an urgent question for us all: what does it mean to care for life in a time of cascading crises? As ecosystems unravel, conflict displaces communities, and inequities deepen, the health of our societies is inseparable from the health of the living world.
The most attuned solutions to ecological and social crises emerge by listening to the people closest to them. The Earth—our first mother—offers an abundance of models for generosity, interdependence, and regeneration. Nurse logs—old fallen trees—provide homes, water, and food for tiny new seedlings to grow. Fungi connect tree roots underground to trade water and nutrients through mycorrhizal networks. In wetlands marshes filter dirty water and renew the health of local rivers. These other mothers—the nurse logs, the tree roots, the wetlands—demonstrate how to sow the seeds of renewal and rebuild a village from the ground up.
Their work challenges us to imagine a culture where care is recognized as essential infrastructure, where communities hold the wisdom to heal, and where the work of mothering, in all its forms, becomes a blueprint for building a more just and life-affirming future. It’s time to turn to our mothers and ask: what do you need in order to caretake safely, with dignity?
The following conversation brings together four women approaching this work from radically different vantage points: Brandi Gates-Burgess, founder of Breast Friends Lactation and Support Services, who has spent her career closing the breastfeeding gap in Black communities across the Bay Area; Sandra Adler Killen, an ER and pediatric nurse who has deployed to Gaza three times to train local clinicians in infant nutrition and lactation care amid famine and mass casualty; and Dr. Cindy Nelly, a global health consultant and midwife who has spent 25 years building health systems in conflict zones from Rwanda to the Democratic Republic of Congo to Gaza. Sandra brought everyone together, and journalist Tiffany McElroy facilitated the conversation.
What emerges is not a comparison of suffering, but something more like a shared diagnosis of what happens when the people closest to a crisis aren’t the ones being listened to, and what changes when they finally are.
What follows is an edited excerpt of a conversation recorded at the Bioneers 2026 conference.
TIFFANY: Why did you choose to get into the specific work you’re doing right now? Brandi, let’s start with you.
BRANDI: Black women are least likely to breastfeed their babies. There are enormous health disparities behind that fact, and it’s what drew me into this work.
I was 21, in college at UC Riverside, when I had my daughter. I breastfed her because I was a broke college student — but once I learned how critical breastfeeding is to Black maternal health, and how much it reduces infant mortality, I knew I had to get the word out. I changed my major to sociology so I could understand how these outcomes were shaping Black birth in this country.
The numbers are what convinced me this was my life’s work: Black women and birthing people are three times more likely to die in childbirth than any other race or ethnicity. If we can get Black families to breastfeed for at least six months, it changes the health trajectory of an entire community — lower rates of diabetes, asthma, allergies, obesity, breast cancer. Once I understood that, the mission became simple: We support each other, and we get moms breastfeeding for at least six months.
In 2023, I launched Breast Friends Lactation to bring that support to low-income families in the Bay Area, specifically pairing them with lactation consultants who look like them and understand what it means to navigate motherhood as a Black woman in America. We’ve been at it ever since, and we’re booked solid.
SANDRA: Nursing is actually my fifth career. I came to it late — I became a nurse at 50, after working in several very different fields, because I wanted to dedicate myself to this work. I worked as an ER nurse and a postpartum nurse, and I’d always wanted to do lactation support. I breastfed my own two children and saw firsthand the health benefits, the bonding, how emotionally powerful it was. So I became an IBCLC, just like Brandi.
For many years now, I’ve done international humanitarian work, first in Syria and Lebanon with refugee populations, and for the last two years in Gaza, training neonatologists, pediatricians, OB/GYNs, midwives, doctors, and nurses to deliver this kind of support in some of the most challenging environments imaginable.
CINDY: My own path, I’ll admit, wasn’t especially altruistic at the start. I began traveling early, and as someone very privileged to be able to do that, I started noticing the disparities around me. I wanted to keep traveling, but I wanted it to mean something — to give something back to the communities I was moving through.
Then I had my daughter at 23. I chose a midwife without really thinking about why, but my great-grandmother had been a midwife, and somehow, through whatever force that is, maternal lineage, I knew that was how I needed to give birth. My first career had actually been in environmental science, but in that moment of giving birth, with that connection to my midwife, I realized: This is what I want to do.
As healthcare providers, we have incredible privilege. We’re present with people during the most painful, and sometimes the most joyful, most intimate moments of their lives. When else do we get that? It’s sacred. We can find that connection with trees, with plants, with nature — but connecting human to human in such a vulnerable space is powerful in a different way.
Read the full excerpt of the conversation For Further ComplexityWe would be remiss in not touching on what often gets lost in the conversation around infant feeding: women’s choice. For some mothers, breastfeeding is an empowering and rewarding experience. For others, it can be physically difficult, medically contraindicated, or simply not possible.
Factors including low milk supply, infant feeding difficulties, workplace barriers, and the need to continue medications for mental or physical health can all shape feeding decisions. In these situations, discussions about infant nutrition can sometimes overlook the health, well-being, and autonomy of the mother herself. While public health messaging has emphasized the benefits of breastfeeding—which are real and substantial—many parents suffer from pressure and guilt when their circumstances do not align with that ideal. These considerations are especially relevant in communities where safe drinking water and infant formula are readily available, making formula feeding or combination feeding safe options.
Holding these truths together means recognizing that promoting breastfeeding and centering maternal well-being are not competing priorities but complementary ones: children flourish when the women caring for them are healthy, supported, and empowered to make informed choices for themselves and their families.
Some of the resources below offer additional perspectives on the complexities of infant feeding, including a “fed is best” perspective.
Featured MediaWatch:
Indigenous Milk Is Medicine from director Missy Whiteman (Northern Arapaho and Kickapoo) and the American Indian Cancer Foundation
Andrea McLean on letting go of breastfeeding pressure from Giovanna Fletcher’s Happy Mum Happy Baby Podcast
Read:
‘For the women who gave birth in the dark’: a portrait of motherhood in Gaza from The Guardian
When breast isn’t best by Laura Frances Callahan in Aeo
Listen:
Midwifing a Movement: Birth Centers and the Care Economy – Bioneers Radio & Podast episode
Trump Destroyed USAID. Now People Are Dying. Reveal Podcast episode
Earth Altars by Laura LoescherThe post LFF Volume #29: Across Borders, a New Vision for Maternal Care appeared first on Bioneers.
Petition: Justice for Sinhue Garcia. Safer roads and support for migrant workers now.
Sinhue Garcia, a migrant farmworker from Mexico, was killed while riding his bicycle in rural Niagara-on-the-Lake. He leaves behind a wife, two children, and many loved ones. He is not the first. At least six other migrant farmworkers have been killed or seriously injured on Niagara roads in recent years.
Send the email nowWe grieve with Sinhue’s family, friends, co-workers, and the migrant worker community. But his death is not an isolated tragedy.
Migrant farmworkers keep Niagara’s farms, greenhouses, wineries, restaurants, and food system running. Too many have no choice but to travel long rural roads by bike or on foot, often at night, without safe transportation, wide shoulders, bike lanes, proper lighting, or access to public transit.
This is a public safety crisis and reflects serious gaps in road infrastructure, housing, workplace protections, and political responsibility.
We are calling for action at every level of government.- Safer roads and transportation, including lighting, protected shoulders and bike lanes, lower speeds, and traffic calming.
- Worker-led road safety planning, with dangerous routes identified by workers, acted on, and publicly reported.
- Safe and dignified housing, with stronger standards and enforcement.
- More control over work schedules and protection from reprisals, so workers can make decisions about their own safety.
- A coroner’s inquest, compensation, and support for injured workers and families of workers who die in Canada.
- Permanent resident status so migrant workers can speak up, change jobs, and exercise their rights without fear.
Migrant workers are not disposable. They are our neighbours, co-workers, friends, and community members. They deserve to live with dignity.
Send an email now to Niagara-on-the-Lake, Niagara Region, Ontario, Canada, and election candidates.
This petition is co-hosted by Niagara Community Legal Clinic, Migrant Workers Alliance for Change and other local migrant worker organizations.
Send the emailAdd your name. You can edit the message before sending.
One message goes to all listed decision-makers. It takes less than two minutes. Every message increases public pressure. Migrant workers feed our communities, care for our families, and keep the economy running. Safe roads, safe work, support and permanent resident status cannot wait.The post Petition: Justice for Sinhue Garcia. Safer roads and support for migrant workers now. first appeared on Migrant Workers Alliance for Change.
The post Petition: Justice for Sinhue Garcia. Safer roads and support for migrant workers now. appeared first on Migrant Workers Alliance for Change.
Challenging American Patriarchy at Its Roots
Sociologist, storyteller, and best-selling author Anna Malaika Tubbs calls for dismantling the key system that has determined who actually gets to be considered human in the United States: The American patriarchy. She says that transforming the forefathers’ vision of a republic of men requires deep change at the personal, community, and national levels.
FeaturingAnna Malaika Tubbs, Ph.D. is a bestselling author and leading multidisciplinary expert on race, gender, and equity. Her most recent bestselling book is Erased: What American Patriarchy Has Hidden From Us (2025).
Lisa Rudman, Partnership Director at the San Francisco Public Press, a local investigative newsroom, is a lesbian feminist journalist, media professional and environmentalist.
Credits- Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel
- Written by: Stephanie Welch and Emily Harris
- Senior Producer and Station Relations: Stephanie Welch
- Producer: Teo Grossman
- Associate Producer and Program Engineer: Emily Harris
- Host and Consulting Producer: Neil Harvey
Erased: What American Patriarchy Has Hidden From Us
This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to find out how to hear the program on your local station and how to subscribe to the podcast.
Subscribe to the Bioneers: Revolution from The Heart of Nature podcast TranscriptNeil Harvey (Host): After 250 years of existence as a republic, the United States stands as a symbol of many things to many people. Some struggle every day to counter the popular notion that the U.S. is a thriving democracy. They work to shed light on how the country has always been separate and unequal for Black people and other people of color, and how the patriarchal structure that the founding fathers crafted from the very beginning remains firmly embedded in the systems that shape U.S. society.
As a scholar and author, Anna Malaika Tubbs has carefully studied how patriarchy and systems of capitalism, white supremacy, and colonialism intersect and reinforce one another.
In a conversation at a Bioneers Conference, Lisa Rudman, Partnership Director at the San Francisco Public Press, spoke with Anna Malaika Tubbs about her book Erased: What American Patriarchy Has Hidden From Us, and strategies to move beyond this deeply embedded and destructive system.
Lisa Rudman (LR): Anna is a New York Times best-selling author and multi-disciplinary expert on current and historical understandings of race, gender and equity, with a PhD in sociology and a Master’s in multi-disciplinary gender studies from the University of Cambridge, in addition to a Bachelor’s in medical anthropology from Stanford. You see why I wanted to go through this. [LAUGHTER]
Anna Malaika Tubbs (AMT): I’m just a nerd, just a proud nerd. [LAUGHTER]
LR: Anna translates her academic knowledge into stories that are clear – that is true – and engaging.
Please join me in welcoming Anna Malaika Tubbs. [APPLAUSE]
AMT: Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you.
LR: You made a distinction earlier that I think is a good segue. You said, you know, in America, we like to talk about patriarchy everywhere else. You specifically talk about the brand of American patriarchy. I really want you to start there, and if you can define what you mean by both those words together, both those words separately, anywhere you want to take that.
Lisa Rudman and Anna Malaika Tubbs speaking at Bioneers 2026. Source: @annamalaikatubbsAMT: Yes. I love defining it. It’s one of my favorite things to do. So thank you. And I’ll say, when I wanted to talk about American patriarchy, it’s not because I think that it’s the worst patriarchy in the world. I’m really not in the business of ranking patriarchies. They’re all bad. [LAUGHTER] We’ll just say that. But I think that we haven’t spoken as much about patriarchy in the United States. And I think that, from what I’ve observed and from what I’ve studied, patriarchy operates differently in each of the places that it exists.
And so our definition of patriarchy has often really been reduced to this notion that it’s about men against women. That’s not the case. That’s not the definition of patriarchy. It’s actually about how we define who gets to be human in any nation, and that changes, right, from place to place. So patriarchy in the U.S. is different than patriarchy in India. It’s different than patriarchy in France. It’s different.
And so, in the U.S., I point to the founding fathers, and that doesn’t mean that they created patriarchy. Right? Obviously, they’re taking from the monarchy, etc. But when we’re looking at each nation, we can really point to the leaders who chose patriarchy. So we have to remember patriarchy is not divine. It’s not the natural order. It wasn’t our first way of organizing ourselves. Right? Indigenous people organized themselves very differently. There still made of—might have been some elements of patriarchy, but it’s different than what we’re seeing right now.
And so, in 1776, if we just all go back to look at the founding fathers for a second, they win the Revolutionary War. This is a surprise to everybody. They were the underdogs. They weren’t expecting to win. [LAUGHS] No one was really expecting them to win. Many of them were young men. They are very fearful that this revolutionary spirit is going to spread across this new nation, because they’re also oppressing a lot of people who they needed to win the Revolutionary War, so they’re oppressing the women in their lives, they’re certainly oppressing Indigenous people, they’re certainly oppressing people who are enslaved – Black people. So they’re very afraid of what happ—they’re oppressing poor people, poor farmers, especially. They’re afraid of what would happen if that revolution spreads.
And so the period of time between writing—or the Declaration of Independence, winning the Revolutionary War, and then writing the Constitution, we all—we see several rebellions taking place, one of them, the most famous, being Shay’s Rebellion. It’s the thing that makes them want to go and write the Constitution, because they’re worried that they couldn’t actually quell this rebellion fast enough, and they want to form a national military, mainly inspired by and—a local conflict, not an international one. So they’re motivated to write the Constitution and decide who is going to get to have power in this nation. This is when we choose patriarchy – they do. And they say that they want to create a republic of men.
Anna Malaika Tubbs. Source: annamalaikatubbs.comSo the Constitution tells us that they are the ones that are going to get to own land. They are the ones that are going to get to vote. There’s a lot of other things they’re going to get to do, but these are two of the primary ones. They, on purpose, leave out women. And we see in the letters that they write to their mothers, to their wives, to their daughters, that women should not participate politically. They do not want that to happen.
“Depend upon it, We know better than to repeal our Masculine systems. Altho they are in full Force, you know they are little more than Theory. We dare not exert our Power in its full Latitude. We are obliged to go fair, and softly, and in Practice you know We are the subjects. We have only the Name of Masters, and rather than give up this, which would compleatly subject Us to the Despotism of the Peticoat, I hope General Washington, and all our brave Heroes would fight. I am sure every good Politician would plot, as long as he would against Despotism, Empire, Monarchy, Aristocracy, Oligarchy, or Ochlocracy.”
Letter from John Adams to Abigail Adams, April 14, 1776
Now this is not just a sign of the times, because there are other countries that are choosing differently. In fact, we see in France, not that women could vote, but that women could have Parisian salons where they talk about politics and voice their opinions, at the very least they’re allowed to talk about it. And Thomas Jefferson says that this is going to ruin France. And so he says, in particular in the United States, we will not repeat the mistakes of the French.
So they’re aware there are other ways and other things that they could choose. They choose a republic of men.
So they define women as those who are simply meant to reproduce the power of men through children. This is where we get the binary in the United States, of—there’s a man that’s recognized, there’s woman that’s recognized. Clearly that’s leaving out a lot of people who they’re not recognizing as neither man nor woman, so they create a problematic binary. But then we have, in the Constitution, clauses to protect the institution of slavery. So they’re not including Black people in the definition that’s already limited of man and woman. They’re not including Indigenous populations. They’re not including immigrants from that point forward. They’re no longer including them. They’re not really including poor white people either. They make it up to the states to decide if people who don’t own property can vote. It was really important to some of the founding fathers it would only be people who could—who owned property who would be allowed to participate.
So then all these people who are excluded from notion of man and woman are told: You’re not going to be treated as human beings, however, you may some day be treated as human beings if you assimilate to the two groups that are recognized. And if you do your part to protect this social order, then one day you might be able to ascend this made-up ladder of humanity. And that’s where the trick of so many people who are not included in it fully still support it, protect it, because they think some day they’ll be able to get there.
And so all of American history can really be summarized by a group of people who loved that social order, who thought this is the way that this nation needs to be organized, who said that that was democracy, but it’s not democracy, because democracy means that power is vested in the people, all of the people. So we’ve not actually experienced that. So what we’ve actually experienced is American patriarchy.
But then you have a part of American history, the other part of it, which were all the people who were not included but who did not fall for the trick, and who said: This is not good enough, this is not democracy; we can get closer to democracy. The more that we include people, then we will be closer to that ideal, and that has been the tug of war of American history ever since.
LR: You have to. Yeah, I mean…[LAUGHTER]
To your point about these structures and systems are not accidental, they get set up, they… give power and privilege to certain people, it’s not about a conspiracy, it’s saying this is not an accident. And so I’m going to ask you, how do you see, then, the structures and systems of white supremacy and racism interlocking with American patriarchy? Because even though this book is defining American patriarchy, I’m trying to think of gender binaryism and – it’s more than sexism. It’s really about everything underneath that umbrella. So how do you see those systems interlocking and working? And maybe there’s a story from the book that you want to refer to.
AMT: Yeah. So I see American patriarchy encompassing all of those -isms, because if you’re saying that people who are enslaved are not counting as man or woman, that’s how we’re furthering the justification of racism in the United States. And if you’re saying that people who don’t own land cannot participate, that’s where we have classism. If we’re saying that in order for us to be human we must be man or woman, of course, you’re leaving out people who are non-binary, and you’re very specifically erasing many Indigenous belief systems that did recognize people beyond this gender binary. It’s where all of it kind of stems from under first telling us that you either have to be a man or a woman.
And so, in a way, we’ve all been told that we’re kind of fighting for our right to be gendered in the United States, that gender becomes our path to humanity. But it’s not just gender, it’s white elite gender. So it is all of those things. That’s why American patriarchy is really unique. That’s where—That’s the difference.
And as an example, if—in the example that I gave earlier, where the founding fathers are saying we are the ones who get to have power, we are the ones who get to have status, and the women in our lives are solely meant to reproduce that status through children, if we look instead at Black women at the time, Black women who are enslaved, the law was saying that their children were not children but were somebody else’s property, and that no matter how a Black woman came to have children – and we know that there horrific ways in which this has happened – no matter how, that child would always carry the status of the mother. So this is a direct opposite definition than what they’re showing of the white male.
So this is why, in many ways historically, Black women have been seen as the antithesis of that power. But what I argue is that actually that, having been so separated from it, is the power that Black women hold, because if you were told by law you’re not a human being, your children are not human beings, in fact, you’re somebody else’s property, Black women don’t go, oh, well, if the law says it, it must be true. [LAUGHTER] Instead, you immediately wake up to the con, and you say this is BS, this is made up; I don’t believe you, and therefore I need to make up something else; I need to create new systems; I need to reclaim systems before patriarchy; and I need to make this nation worthy of me, worthy of my children. That is how progress has happened in the United States. That’s how change has happened. It’s not ever been that those who loved the original social order woke up one day and said: [SIGHS] I feel like giving people their rights today. You know? I’ve changed my mind. They deserve their rights. No. It’s been that those who did not have those rights guaranteed to them, they grabbed it with their hands, they fought, they bled, they sacrificed. They made it so that we made it to where we are today.
July 4, 1863 issue of Harper’s Weekly depicting slaves escaping to a Union ship in the Combahee River Raid, organized by Harriet Tubman. Source: Library of CongressAnd so when we’re having even conversations right now, where so many people are saying this is the worst it’s ever been, we don’t know what to do, that is just a complete misunderstanding of American history, quite frankly. This is a continuation of the pattern, and now we’re being called to fight like those who had to redefine and make new systems, and claim those rights and protect them.
Host: More from Anna Malaika Tubbs and Lisa Rudman when we return…
I’m Neil Harvey. You’re listening to the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature.
Host: Let’s return to the conversation with Anna Malaika Tubbs and Lisa Rudman… Waging a fundamental challenge to the American patriarchal system, Anna says, requires solidarity and looking to the long tradition of collective struggle in the United States, which has repeatedly confronted and reshaped American institutions.
Lisa asked Anna about the role of white women in sustaining and challenging patriarchal structures—a complicated dynamic, given that white women both benefit from, and are harmed by, those structures.
AMT: So white women…So the reason—And I will say it first, too. My mom was a white woman, so I’m also going to talk about the allyship of white women, but first I want to talk about the problematic part. A lot of people ask this question: Why are white women voting for Trump? Why are they protecting this? What is—You know, this is not in their best interests, and they’re voting against themselves, all those things. But if you understand American patriarchy, you understand that actually, in a lot of ways, they’re not, in their minds, voting against their interests, because in American patriarchy, they’re at least recognized, they’re seen. If we’re looking at the scale that I described, and you have the white elite man, and then you have the wife connected to him who has a role to play – you can talk about “trad wives” if we want to – she has a role to play in reproducing the power of that man. And we see that everyone else has just said you don’t get any of this recognition. Okay? Well, in that case, that person is saying I kind of would like to stay in this; I have some proximity to this power.
So, similar to what I was saying earlier around how Black women were cast so far away from that power, that they see it very clearly; they’re not trying to fall for the trick, those who have any proximity to the power can be fooled.
LR: A little more erased for them?
AMT: Yeah. They can be closer to it. They want to replicate it. They want to protect it. They want to play their role in it.
But that’s not all white women. And so in the book I also talk about allyship. I talk a lot about how my mom, in particular—it’s something that I took for granted because she’s my mom. I wasn’t really even thinking of her obviously in the sense of an ally, but the more I had conversations with people who struggled with allyship and what it means to be an ally, I realized that there was a lot that they could learn from my mom, because my mom never said to me that she knew, because she was a woman too, what it would be like to be a Black woman. Never. In fact, she said, “I don’t know what that is like, but I will do my part to learn; I will walk alongside you.” And similar to what I was saying earlier about Black mothers, she said, “I will do what I need to do to make this world worthy of you, my child.” And that’s allyship.
So even if it doesn’t—you don’t feel like you know exactly that experience, you have to see what it means to change this world for all of us to be included.
LR: And you don’t need to be stuck, if I can say, in the essentialism of who you are. You need to recognize that. You might feel guilty for a couple minutes, but guilt is not really motivating emotion, really—doesn’t really get you into change. But then you can decide where you want to be—What I always say, like, in relationship to struggle. And really, it’s beautiful what you said about your mother saying my relationship is to change the world to deserve you.
You get to choose how you want to—and it might mean you have to give up some stuff to move away from that proximity to power, and to join with people who—who you know are really fighting for the new world.
AMT: Yeah. And the thing is it’s this trick of power and what that means. Right? Everybody’s losing in this system. It’s hurting everybody. It’s hurting those who were supposed to be the primary beneficiaries. Even, you know, white men who seem to have it all, if they are not aware of the trick of this system, they’re actually experiencing really high levels of depression, drug dependency. People don’t realize there’s a lot of pain, no matter where you fall in this system. And that’s where those who have kind of woken up to it, to the con, choose allyship, choose let’s stop trying to ascend this ladder, it’s made up; the system isn’t working; let’s try to change the system versus let me try to thrive within it.
LR: Yeah. And individually navigating a way as opposed to collectively seeing where liberation is.
You talk about “breaking free”, so we want to talk about what we can do and how to actually work together. But I know that you have some more to say about men particularly, and fear, how fear motivates a certain amount of staying stuck in what’s not really even good for any humans.
AMT: Yeah. I think that anything that comes from fear and insecurity is going to lead to control. It’s going to lead to having to silence parts of yourself that keep you from being vulnerable, that keep you from being an actual human being. You know, obviously the violence that’s been waged against women is not something that I’m trying to minimize by any means, and so much of that has come from men not being allowed to be fully human. And so there is just a conversation to be had there.
And then in terms of the layers of how we start to break free from this, I think the first layer is it happens on a personal level. This book is deeply personal for a reason. I want the reader to also really take kind of—to see how it’s operating in your own life, first of all, how are you speaking about yourself to yourself. For many of us, we really have internalized the notion of I am supposed to be quiet, I am supposed to be in the background, I am supposed to allow somebody to talk to me any kind of way. Or we’ve internalized I’m supposed to dominate, people are supposed to listen to me— so what’s going on internally? That’s going to be really important as a step. And all of this can happen simultaneously, it doesn’t have to be one at a time. But internal work is really important.
The second part is in our relationships, we may be replicating American patriarchy, whether that’s in our friendships, whether that’s in romantic relationships, certainly within parenting. If we look at our children and we’re thinking, actually, I need to just tell you how the world works right now, and you need to fit into that; or are asking them something June Jordan said is that “when a child is born, the world begins again”. And if we look at children in that way, instead we think what beautiful new world are they carrying, and how do I protect that as much as possible. That would be the opposite of American patriarchy. But if we’re saying to them: This is how things work, and this is how you need to do it, and this is the box you need to fit in, that’s one way in which we’re replicating it. So then we need to analyze it on that relationship level.
Public domain image donated by Robert “Bob” SimpsonThe third level is really kind of one of the most important. This is the community level. This is where we see new systems forming all the time. This is actually where change happens always first, is at the community level. It doesn’t happen nationally first. It always happens where a neighbor sees a mother who needs help with childcare, and they help; where a person says, “It doesn’t make sense that children don’t have food,” and let’s say the Black Panther Party, they make free meal systems. Right? These are where we see the models of what the world could look like. If we look at American history and we look at Black American history in particular, the Black church was one example. There’s other issues with—we could talk about the Black church, but the good parts have been meeting the community needs and creating a nation within a nation. It’s why so many of the powerful orators in American history have come from Black church, because that was one of the first places where they were allowed to speak as human beings, and be taken seriously.
And then, that’s when you actually start to see something take hold on a national level, because people have been able to see it operating. And so they then advocate for that on a political or policy level. And that’s really kind of like a fourth layer of change.
So, yes, it can feel very daunting when you’re coming up against American patriarchy because it’s in all of our experiences. It’s in all of our systems. Every law that came out of this vision of insecurity, every—the medical system, you know, why Black women are dying at such high rates when they go in to give birth, all of it comes back to this. And we’re not just—None of us are going to solve this on our own. It’s not going to be one person who brings the solution to everything, but if we recognize that we’re a part of a larger team of people in this tug of war, and we recognize the needs of those around us, and we recognize that we actually have the power to always create something new in every single one of our interactions, you can start right away.
And the final part is that when we talk about people saying: We don’t know what to do right now; this is so scary. I’m not minimizing how scary it is, I agree. It’s scary. It’s one of the scary times. But this is when you really learn how people have done this in the past. What did they create together in order to achieve change, in order for us to have many years of, honestly, privilege that we’ve forgotten what it means to be brave? This is the time to study them. We know how to live differently every single day. We have the tools, we have the stories. If we’re not doing so, that’s just our choice.
Host: “Challenging American Patriarchy at Its Roots” with Anna Malaika Tubbs and Lisa Rudman
The post Challenging American Patriarchy at Its Roots appeared first on Bioneers.
ACTION ALERT: Pittsburgh City Council Considers New Slush Fund for Downtown Developers—on our Dime
Developers are asking Pittsburgh City Council to vote on another major tax giveaway scheme – giving up to $200 million dollars to a handful of Downtown private real estate companies, without any requirements around public benefit. This vote to implement the Downtown Transit Revitalization Improvement District (TRID) will divert tax revenue from the Strip District, Downtown and the North Shore for the next 40 (!) years into the coffers of private corporations.
Right now, when working people and our public agencies are struggling to make ends meet, Pittsburgh City Council is being asked (via the Urban Redevelopment Authority) to hand the Golden Triangle yet another golden ticket.
Take Action: Tell Council to fund neighborhoods, not developers What is the TRID proposal?A TRID is a type of legislation intended to fund transit improvements—but this one won’t do that. Instead, here’s how this proposal would work:
- The City (i.e., taxpayers) would initially borrow $50 million to invest exclusively in the TRID area: the Strip District, parts of the North Shore, and Downtown. This money would effectively be a grant paid to wealthy developers, with the City gambling on future tax revenue to pay down the debt.
- Many Downtown developers are concurrently challenging their commercial property assessments, so that they could pay lower taxes in the future.
- Many Downtown developers are concurrently challenging their commercial property assessments, so that they could pay lower taxes in the future.
- Only 20% of this money would be invested in public infrastructure—but they’ve not named any particular public projects that would benefit. By contrast, the remaining 80% has been earmarked for specific, private, for-profit real estate developers.
- All future public tax dollars from Downtown, the Strip District, and the North Shore for the next 40 years would be diverted to a “Golden Triangle Reinvestment Fund”, exclusively financing development in a small pocket of Downtown. This fund would be controlled by the non-elected Urban Redevelopment Agency (URA)—not City Council, a public body that is accountable to the public.
Members of Pittsburgh City Council and the Mayor’s administration have said that we are facing a massive City budget crisis. So why are they fast-tracking a $200 million handout to Downtown developers, with almost no public process?
What’s at stakeWe have already given almost a billion dollars to Downtown developers in tax breaks over the past 5 years. Enough is enough.
Our communities deserve so much more: public transit infrastructure, affordable housing, local food initiatives, street and sidewalk repairs, childcare programs and more. These are critical investments for the well-being of our City—and we cannot fund them if our City Councilmembers signs away millions in tax dollars to private developers for the next four decades.
Transit riders must tell our elected officials to vote NO on implementing the Downtown Transit Revitalization Investment District (TRID). Public dollars – whether borrowed or generated from tax revenue – should be invested across all communities – from Fairywood to Fineview, Brookline to Bloomfield. Our resources should be allocated through the annual City budgeting process, with robust public input to ensure that our tax resources are distributed equitably and address the needs of the moment.
We say: no more handouts to Downtown corporations until our neighborhoods, our small businesses, our workers and our students are given their fair share!
Take Action NowAfter you send a letter, CALL your City Councilmember to urge them to vote NO (find your councilmember here):
- District 1 (Northside, Strip District, Parts of Downtown):
Bobby Wilson (412) 255-2135 - District 2 (West End, Sheraden, Elliott, Banksville):
Kim Salinetro (412) 255-8963 - District 3 (Oakland, Southside, Arlington, Allentown):
Bob Charland (412) 255-2130 - District 4 (Beechview, Brookline, Carrick, Overbrook):
Anthony Coghill (412) 255-2131 - District 5 (Greenfield, Hazelwood, Lincoln Pl, Swisshelm Park):
Barb Warwick (412) 255-8965 - District 6 (Manchester, Downtown, The Hill, Uptown, Perry Hilltop):
Danielle Lavelle (412) 255-2134 - District 7 (Bloomfield, Lawrenceville, Polish Hill, Stanton Heights) :
Deb Gross (412) 255-2140 - District 8 (Squirrel Hill, Shadyside, Oakland):
Erika Strassburger (412) 255-2133 - District 9 (East Liberty, Larimer, Homewood, Garfield):
Khari Mosley (412) 255-2137
The post ACTION ALERT: Pittsburgh City Council Considers New Slush Fund for Downtown Developers—on our Dime appeared first on Pittsburghers for Public Transit.
Transporte Público para la Gente: Únete a la campaña de Socios 2026
Me llamo Evelyn Ulysse Alcántara. Uso el transporte público a diario para ir al trabajo, al médico, actividades de ocio, reuniones, llevar a mi hijo al colegio— para todo.
Soy latina y mi inglés no es perfecto, así que cuando me mudé a Pittsburgh me costó usar el transporte público porque había muy poca información disponible en español. Por eso me ofrecí de voluntaria para ayudar como embajadora en los Recorridos de tránsito de PPT. Fue muy frustrante y aislante intentar aprender a usar el sistema de transporte público por mi cuenta. Sabía que si podía hacer algo para apoyar el aprendizaje de mi comunidad, ¡tenía que hacerlo!
Ser miembro de PPT no solo ha mejorado mis propias necesidades de transporte. Me abrió la puerta para ayudarme a marcar la diferencia.
Cuando hubo recortes en el transporte público en Beechview, hubo ocasiones en que el autobús o el Tren no venían—y no sabía la razón, porque los cambios sólo se comunicaban en inglés. Pero hoy, si vas a Steel Plaza o Wood Street Station, ¡escucharás anuncios en español! Y hay instrucciones paso a paso en español en la web de PRT. Esto se debe a que PPT y Casa San José se unieron para dar voz a mi comunidad, para que PRT pudiera entender el verdadero impacto que esto estaba teniendo en nosotros.
Este es el verdadero poder de PPT: realmente escuchan a la gente.
Cuando descubrí que PPT, me pedían testimonios sobre el papel que tiene el transporte público en la vida de las personas, para mostrar lo importante que sería un programa de media tarifa. Sabía que tenía que dar mi testimonio, porque necesitábamos actuar para mejorar el acceso. En aquel entonces solo era una idea y un proyecto, pero hoy es una realidad que lleva el servicio de transporte a la gente.
Me encanta el PPT porque sé de primera mano lo que podemos lograr juntos.
Solo en 2026:
- Llevamos a 120 miembros a Harrisburg para arrojar luz sobre la brecha presupuestaria de 80 millones de dólares y enfatizar la importancia de los servicios para tránsito y viajes compartidos para nuestros representantes.
- Compartimos habilidades y construimos poder con 170 personas de todo el país, compartimos habilidades y construyeron poder en nuestro Entrenamiento de Primavera 2026.
- Formamos a 13 becarios de organización comunitaria en toda la colina del barrio de PGH, y las regiones de Lancaster y Lehigh Valley en Pensilvania.
Por eso quería preguntar: ¿apoyarán el trabajo urgente de PPT haciéndote miembro que paga cuotas hoy?
Puedes apuntarte por solo 2,75 $, ¡el precio actual del billete de autobús del PRT! Ese dinero va directamente a la defensa de un presupuesto de transporte que mueve a TODOS los habitantes de Pensilvania. Todo el mundo merece acceso al transporte público.
¿Nos ayudarás a hacer realidad ese sueño?
The post Transporte Público para la Gente: Únete a la campaña de Socios 2026 appeared first on Pittsburghers for Public Transit.
Transit for the People: Join the 2026 Member Drive
Image Description: Evelyn Ulysse Alcantara, a dark-skinned woman in a red PPT shirt, smiles in front of a collaged picture of Pittsburgh
I’m a mother and member of the Latino community fighting with PPT for a transit system that truly serves everyone. Will you join me by becoming a dues-paying member? Donate to become a PPT member!My name is Evelyn Ulysse Alcantara. I use public transportation daily for going to work, the doctor, leisure activities, meetings, bringing my son to school—everything.
I’m Latina and my English isn’t perfect, so when I first moved to Pittsburgh I struggled to use public transportation because there was so little information available in Spanish. This is why I volunteered to help be an ambassador for PPT’s Transit Tours. It was so frustrating and isolating to try and learn how to use the system by myself. I knew that if I could do something to support my community’s learning, I had to do it!
Being a PPT member hasn’t just improved my own transit needs. It opened the door to help me make a difference.
When there were cuts to transit in Beechview, there were times the bus or T didn’t come—and I didn’t know why because the changes were only communicated in English. But today, if you go to Steel Plaza or Wood Street Station, you’ll hear announcements in Spanish! And there are step by step instructions in Spanish on PRT’s website. This is because PPT and Casa San Jose came together to uplift my community’s voice, so that PRT could understand the true impact this was having on us.
This is PPT’s real power: they truly listen to the people.
When I first found out about PPT, they were asking for testimonies about the role transit has in people’s lives, to show how important a half-fare program would be. I knew I had to give my testimony, because we needed to take action to improve access. Back then it was just an idea, but today it’s a reality that brings transit service to the people!
I love PPT because I know firsthand what we can accomplish together.
In 2026 alone, we have:
- We brought 120 members to Harrisburg to shed light on the $80 million dollar transit budget gap, and emphasise the importance of paratransit and shared ride services to our representatives.
- We trained 13 community organizing fellows across the Hilltop neighborhood of PGH, and the Lancaster and Lehigh Valley regions of PA.
- Shared skills and built power with 170 people from across the country at our 2026 Spring Training.
That’s why I wanted to ask: will you support PPT’s urgent work by becoming a dues-paying member today?
You can join for just $2.75—the current cost of a PRT bus fare! That money goes directly towards advocacy for a transit budget that moves ALL Pennsylvanians. Everyone deserves access to public transportation. Will you help us make that dream a reality?
Donate now to join Evelyn as a member—and build transit for the people!The post Transit for the People: Join the 2026 Member Drive appeared first on Pittsburghers for Public Transit.
Breaking down how much Congress cut AML funds by state
In January Congress passed a “minibus” bill that raided $500 million in previously appropriated coal mine cleanup funds to pay for other federal programs. We’re now seeing the first results of that bill: $45.5 million less in mine cleanup funding every year for the next 11 years. Combined with growing inflation, this means fewer jobs will be supported cleaning up mines and more hazardous coal mining damage won’t be reclaimed in Appalachia and across the country.
When it passed in 2021, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law provided about $10.9 billion for the reclamation of Abandoned Mine Land (AML) sites across the country in fifteen annual grants to states and tribes. The first four years’ worth of grants were awarded between 2022-2025. The minibus bill cuts $500 million from the total AML funding provided under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law – but it was unclear at the time of passage if the $500 million would be cut entirely from the last (fifteenth) year of AML grants or equally across the remaining 11 years worth of annual funding. Now we have our answer.
The 2026 AML grants for states and tribes were announced in May and the cuts are here. According to the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, the $500 million cut “will be applied equally to the remaining 11 grant distribution years, approximately $45.45 million per year.” The figure below shows the annual reduction in funds for each state and tribe, as well as the total cuts that will play out over the next 11 years. Pennsylvania and West Virginia have the largest cuts (by absolute value), at about $15 million and $9 million per year, respectively.
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The cuts are reducing the amount of damage states and tribes can reclaim. Inflation – especially recent rises in fuel costs that can drive up the cost of operating construction equipment – is also lowering the spending power of reclamation dollars even from last year, further reducing the amount of reclamation states and tribes can accomplish in 2026.
States and tribes have a five-year window to spend their FY2026 AML grant, and those agencies will now begin planning for fewer dollars by taking steps like selecting fewer reclamation projects or reducing the scope of projects. In Pennsylvania, for example, the cuts are equivalent to the cost of two large abandoned mine drainage treatment systems.
As we explained in a previous post, the extent of AML damage that needs to be cleaned up is likely twice as large as the existing $10.9 billion in funding– even before $500 million was cut.
This is damage to land and water that has lingered since at least the 1970s, and now residents will have to wait even longer for cleanup. If this cut hadn’t occurred, $45 million per year in more mine cleanup would be put to use across the country in the next few years, removing hazards to the local population and supporting more jobs, such as in construction, doing reclamation work primarily in rural areas. Congress should reverse the $500 million reduction, and should protect the program from similar cuts in the future.
The post Breaking down how much Congress cut AML funds by state appeared first on Ohio River Valley Institute.
Statement on ACT NOW Clean Tech Initiative
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
June 4, 2026
Statement on ACT NOW Clean Tech Initiative
ALLEGHENY COUNTY, Pa. — On June 4, Allegheny County Executive Sara Innamorato signed the Advancing Clean Technology for Neighborhood and Next-Generation Opportunity and Workforce (ACT NOW) Executive Order. In response, Ohio River Valley Institute Industrial Decarbonization Program Manager Justine Hackimer issued the following statement:
Clean technology and advanced manufacturing present a generational opportunity to strengthen Allegheny County’s economy, create high-quality jobs, and build on our region’s long history of industrial innovation.
For generations, southwestern Pennsylvania’s workers, manufacturers, and research institutions helped power economic growth across the country. As global markets increasingly demand cleaner technologies, our region is well-positioned to compete for the industries that will shape the next generation of manufacturing.
But realizing that opportunity requires more than individual projects. It takes coordination and smart policy like ACT NOW to ensure workers and local communities directly benefit from investments. We applaud County Executive Sara Innamorato’s leadership in shaping a clean tech future that works for all Pennsylvanians.
By investing in the industries of tomorrow while strengthening the systems that support workers and communities, the region can build a more diverse, resilient economy that creates opportunities for generations to come.
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The post Statement on ACT NOW Clean Tech Initiative appeared first on Ohio River Valley Institute.
From remunicipalisation to the democracy of the commons
By Vanessa Mascia Turri
Naples became one of Europe’s most ambitious experiments in democratic water governance after Italy’s 2011 referendum against water privatisation. Yet bringing water back into public hands did not necessarily redistribute power over how water itself would be governed.
In 2011, after the Italian referendum against water privatisation, Naples became one of the most ambitious experiments in remunicipalised water governance in Europe. The city transformed its water utility into ABC Napoli (Acqua Bene Comune Napoli), a publicly owned entity presented not simply as a return to public management, but as an attempt to implement the “democracy of the commons” theorised by the Italian Forum of Water Movements.
Within this perspective, water was understood not only as a public service, but as a common good whose governance should involve the direct participation of citizens and social movements.
Over the following decade, Naples became a testing ground for a broader political question that has emerged across many remunicipalisation struggles: what happens when the language and practices of the commons enter public institutions? The Neapolitan experience shows that bringing water back into public hands does not automatically democratise its governance. Instead, participation became continuously negotiated and reshaped through political conflict, financial pressures and struggles over who should control public resources.
From water struggles to the democracy of the commonsSince the early 2000s, struggles against water privatisation have connected local mobilisations to broader debates around the commons. Struggles against water privatisation in Europe have often gone beyond opposition to market reforms and increasingly connected demands for public ownership with broader claims around the commons and direct democracy, as explored throughout the Reimagining, remembering and reclaiming water series. In many countries, water movements have challenged not only privatisation, but also the idea that essential services should be governed through technocratic and top-down forms of management, increasingly linking water struggles to broader claims around the commons and direct democracy, as discussed in Transforming capitalism? The role of the commons and direct democracy in struggles against water privatisation in Europe.
In Italy, these debates converged in the Italian Forum of Water Movements, one of the broadest water movements in Europe. As broader discussions around the commons in Italy have shown, these debates extended well beyond water itself and raised wider questions about collective resources, democracy and institutional change. Under the slogan “si scrive acqua, si legge democrazia” (“it is written water, it is read democracy”), the movement argued that remunicipalisation should involve not only public ownership, but also direct civic participation in water governance.
Naples became the most ambitious attempt to translate this political vision into institutional practice.
Poster from the 2011 Italian referendum campaign against water privatization reading “Water is not for sale.” Image courtesy of the Forum Italiano dei Movimenti per l’Acqua.
Naples became the most ambitious attempt to translate this political vision into institutional practice.
Yet public and academic debates on remunicipalisation have often focused on privatisation conflicts and legal transitions, paying far less attention to what happens afterwards. How are participatory mechanisms actually organised inside remunicipalised utilities? How much power are institutions willing to share with social movements and citizens once remunicipalisation has taken place?
My article From theory to practice: evaluating civic participation in Naples’ remunicipalised water service examines these questions through the case of ABC Napoli, reconstructing how participation was progressively organised, contested and reshaped during the decade following remunicipalisation.
Participation and the limits of the commonsAt the moment of remunicipalisation, Naples faced deteriorated infrastructures, chronic underinvestment and a massive municipal public debt. For many activists of the Neapolitan water movement, remunicipalisation was therefore not only about public ownership, but also about transforming the priorities of water governance through ecological restoration, infrastructural investment and more equitable access to water.
Over the following decade, ABC Napoli experimented with different forms of civic participation. Initially, the municipal government opened the board of directors to representatives linked to the Italian Forum of Water Movements and to environmental associations. Yet local activists who had led the mobilisation against privatisation were largely excluded from these arrangements, generating immediate tensions over who had the legitimacy to participate in the governance of the utility.
The most ambitious participatory experiment emerged with the creation of the Civic Council, a public assembly open to citizens, activists and ABC workers. Meetings were held directly inside the company and addressed issues such as tariffs, infrastructure maintenance, hiring policies and investment priorities. Delegates from the assemblies also participated in discussions with the board of directors, creating one of the most advanced attempts in Europe to institutionalise direct civic participation inside a remunicipalised water utility.
However, participation became far more conflictual once these assemblies started intervening in concrete political and economic questions. Members of the Civic Council promoted long-term infrastructural investments and the recruitment of specialised personnel while defending the financial stability of the utility. According to several interviewees, these priorities increasingly clashed with those of the municipal government, which was more focused on short-term employment policies and the management of public-sector jobs within a broader context marked by debt, unemployment and political pressures surrounding public employment.
These tensions ultimately led to the removal of the board of directors and to the progressive weakening of participatory governance. In the following years, participation increasingly shifted towards weak consultative mechanisms with limited influence over decision-making processes. Many activists gradually distanced themselves from the experiment, while severe financial constraints continued to limit investments in infrastructures and ecological renewal.
Rather than evolving towards deeper forms of democratic governance, the Neapolitan experience progressively revealed the difficulties of institutionalising the “democracy of the commons” within existing municipal structures and political priorities.
Remunicipalisation without democratisation?Poster from the Italian public water movement following the 2011 referendum campaign, emphasising water as a public right rather than a source of profit. Image courtesy of the Forum Italiano dei Movimenti per l’Acqua.
The experience of ABC Napoli complicates many celebratory narratives surrounding remunicipalisation. Bringing water back into public hands did not automatically redistribute power inside public governance. On the contrary, the Neapolitan case shows how quickly the language of the commons can become absorbed into existing institutional structures once participation starts challenging concrete political and economic interests.
The weakening of participatory governance inside ABC Napoli did not result from a lack of civic mobilisation or technical expertise. Quite the opposite: activists involved in the water movement developed increasingly detailed proposals on tariffs, infrastructures and long-term investments, becoming capable of intervening directly in the governance of the utility. Participation became problematic precisely when it stopped being symbolic and started questioning how public resources, infrastructures and employment should be managed.
In Naples, these tensions unfolded within a broader context marked by public debt, deteriorated infrastructures, unemployment and long-standing systems of political mediation surrounding public-sector employment. Under these conditions, the “democracy of the commons” increasingly collided with the political and administrative logics shaping municipal governance.
More broadly, the Neapolitan experience suggests that remunicipalisation alone cannot democratise essential services without a real willingness from public institutions to share decision-making power. Commons become politically difficult when they move beyond participation as consultation and start demanding participation as co-governance.
Rather than offering a linear model of democratic transformation, Naples reveals the unresolved tensions that emerge when social movements attempt to institutionalise the commons inside existing state structures. The question, then, is not simply whether remunicipalisation is possible, but whether public institutions are truly willing to democratise the power through which public resources are governed.
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Featured image: Protest sign reading “Public water, public management. Clear?” during a demonstration of the Italian water movement. Photo courtesy of the Forum Italiano dei Movimenti per l’Acqua (acquabenecomune.org).
The post From remunicipalisation to the democracy of the commons appeared first on Undisciplined Environments.
Russian socialists: “Solidarity means accepting Ukrainians’ pain and suffering as our own”
Organising action on climate and social justice: what next
NEW We the People Story Map
Backbone Intern Giacomo Moody's Story Map for We the People is now LIVE!.
The Story Map traces the journey of this Iconic image, from its 2007 debut at Seattle Center to its current deployments in pro-democracy protests around the country. Check out Giacomo's great work and the amazing fruits of our collective labors.
Learn more about joining us in DC or pitching in to support our team going to Washington, DC to mark the 250th Birthday of this country. We'll once again take the streets in a defiant and beautiful expression of common cause and our shared commitment to fulfilling mission of creating a more just, sustainable, and democratic nation, and a future we can be proud to hand our children.
Check out the We the People Story Map at BackboneCampaign.org/WeThePeople.
We the People on display at Folklife 2026!
We the People featured at NW Folklife Festival this weekend!
Two copies will be at Seattle Center this weekend at the NW Folklife Festival, one at the Mural Amphitheater Stage, near the Space Needle and another in the International Fountain Pavilion, with pens for signing. Use this chance to add your signature in time for it to be taken to DC this July 4th!
Over the last 19 years, Backbone's giant We the People banner has served as an icon of people power and our aspirations to fulfill the shared mission of creating a more perfect union. Adding two more Preamble sections has allowed it to appear in even more cities in the past year, collecting signatures and grabbing the attention of the press and public as a symbol of resistance and resilience.
How the Gutting of the Voting Rights Act Deepens Environmental Injustice
In April 2026, the Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling in Louisiana v. Callais gutted a core protection of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — the provision barring racial gerrymandering designed to dilutes the voting power of Black communities. The Trump administration called it a victory. For communities on the frontlines of pollution, climate change, and environmental injustice, it is one most deliberate act of erasure and as Dr. Beverly Wright of Deep South Center for Environmental Justice (DSCEJ) says, it is a “theft of our movement’s inheritance”.
This ruling did not arrive alone. It is part of a coordinated, multi-front strategy to remove impacted communities — particularly Black communities — from the rooms where decisions get made. Through the courts, through Executive Orders seizing control of elections, through the SAVE Act’s documentation barriers that would block more than 21 million Americans from voting, through a Department of Justice that has sued all 50 states to build a national voter surveillance database, and through the threat of criminal prosecution against election officials and civic organizations.
This administration’s goal is not election integrity. The goal is the permanent political marginalization of Black communities, Indigenous communities and communities of color.
The pattern is unmistakable when you see it whole. The Supreme Court’s ruling applies not just to Congressional districts, but also to state legislative districts and maps for county and municipal elections — determining who gets to serve on a school board, a city council, or in the judiciary.
Meanwhile, the administration has turned the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department into an agency that violates the very definition of civil rights, redirecting it toward suppressing voting rather than protecting voting rights.
At the same time, another assault on voting rights is being advanced through Congress. If signed into law, the SAVE Act would require every American to produce a passport or certified birth certificate, in person, at an election office just to register to vote, eliminating online registration, mail registration, and most voter registration drives. For Black communities, this lands on a foundation of deliberate historical denial: many older Black Americans were never issued birth certificates by governments that refused to recognize their full humanity.
For Indigenous communities, the SAVE Act’s promise that Tribal IDs will suffice is a fiction, ignoring the fact that virtually no Tribal ID includes place of birth, another barrier buried in the bill’s text. And even with documents in hand, the nearest election office can be a hundred miles away across reservation land, or in Alaska, accessible only by plane.
These are not bureaucratic inconveniences; they are systemic barriers deeply rooted in this country’s history of racial segregation. They reflect the architecture of laws written around people who were never meant to be politically represented and applied to communities still fighting to be counted.
The same communities facing barriers to their rights to vote are bearing the greatest burden of air pollution, toxic contamination, extreme heat, and climate disasters. And the fact that these communities are overwhelmingly Black, Brown, Indigenous, and low-income, and this is not a coincidence. It is the predictable result of political exclusion and the enduring legacy of segregation.
When communities cannot elect representatives who share their priorities, when their votes are diluted through racial gerrymandering, the outcome is a petrochemical plant permitted next to an elementary school, a neighborhood left without clean water, or a community absorbing the full cost of an energy system it had no power to refuse.
A political system that makes voting harder perpetuates the very conditions that make environmental justice necessary.
This is also why the assault extends beyond the ballot. The same administration that is dismantling voting rights protections is also terrorizing immigrant communities — deportation threats, surveillance, and the weaponization of documentation status as a tool of political control.
What this administration is attacking, in every instance, is the fundamental democratic principle that the people most affected have a rightful voice in decision-making.
That principle does not begin and end at the voting booth. It lives in every planning meeting, every regulatory comment period, every public hearing, every coalition room where communities are fighting for their lives and their land. Undocumented neighbors, visa holders, green card holders, people who live and work and raise children in the same fenceline communities, who breathe the same air and drink the same water, carry knowledge and moral authority that no policy process can afford to exclude.
Voting is an essential mechanism through which communities exercise the most direct form of political power available to our communities, and its protection is non-negotiable. The fight for voting rights and the fight for full community participation are intrinsically linked because they are being waged against us by the same forces, for the same purpose: to ensure that the communities with the most at stake in our climate and environmental future have the least say in shaping it.
Our communities continue to show up, no matter the barriers put in our way: voters and non-voters, citizens and non-citizens, people who cast ballots, people who testify, and people who organize. No matter the injustices we face, environmental justice leaders know that our solidarity is unstoppable and our resolve to fight for true representation will never be broken by any court or politician.
Byron Ramos Gudiel is Executive Director of the Center for Earth, Energy & Democracy (CEED).
Sources:
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/save-act-and-election-power-grab
https://www.vote.org/save-act/
https://narf.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/narf-save-act-native-voters.pdf
https://www.aclu.org/trump-on-voting-rights
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/how-gerrymandering-tilts-2024-race-house
LCV – https://www.lcv.org/media-center/lcv-statement-on-scotus-decision-in-louisiana-v-callais/
Not NRDC Action Fund: https://www.nrdcactionfund.org/news/scotus-voting-rights-act-decision-hurts-our-democracy-and-the-court-itself/
Sierra Club: https://www.sierraclub.org/press-releases/2026/04/sierra-club-statement-supreme-court-ruling-gut-voting-rights-act
The post How the Gutting of the Voting Rights Act Deepens Environmental Injustice appeared first on CEED.
Food Justice from the Local to the Global: A Conversation with Raj Patel and Leah Penniman
At our recent annual Conference, Bioneers brought together two ground breaking figures in the struggle for an equitable and healthy food system. One working on the global architectures of that system and the other a hands on farmer and educator exemplifying how solidarity can empower dispossessed communities to reclaim their food sovereignty. Raj Patel is one of the world’s experts on sustainable food system, and a tireless activist against neocolonial and extractive agriculture, Leah Penniman is the visionary founder of Soul Fire Farms and the author of Farming While Black. The conversation was moderated by Naomi Starkman founder and former Editor-in-chief of Civil Eats, the award winning nonprofit newsroom focused on the US food system. The following is an edited excerpt of that conversation.
NAOMI: We are living in a time of multiple crises. How do we understand what the polycrisis means for us?
RAJ: The idea of polycrisis is that it appears that there’s a whole bunch of very bad things happening at the same time: the climate crisis, the rise of authoritarianism, the pandemic disease, catastrophic weather events, and a range of things that are a series of unfortunate events. That is, I think, a misunderstanding of the structural forces that are driving all of these events.
Capitalism has always managed to patch up problems by extracting in new places, and finding new frontiers to open up. You see this process even happening now, where Elon Musk, for example, has a new frontier in low Earth orbit. He’s created a new space that’s monetized and is now his zone to be able to extract wealth from. He’s the king of low Earth orbit [with his company Space X], and he will be for a while. But there’s only so much deferring and fixing that can happen.
Now, what we’re seeing is what happens when there’s no more cheapening of the world that can be done, and the climate crisis is not just bad, but getting worse. There was a terrifying paper in the Reviews of Geophysics two weeks ago that shows that the rate of climate change is going up; the world is not just heating, it’s heating up faster than we thought it was.
On top of that, of course, we are seeing rising authoritarianism. The far right capturing our media, our means of attention. All of this is not an accident but precisely an outcome of a series of crises in capitalism that have been brewing for a while.
When you hear polycrisis, sometimes you will hear a narrative that it’s just a really bad time, but it’s going to get better. But unfortunately you need a clear-eyed structural analysis to understand that, in fact, movements on the frontlines that are taking on the crisis understand this to be the outcome of decades, even centuries of capitalist accumulation. If you understand that, then you can understand why the imagination of what needs to come next is so radical, and in which lots of post-capitalist experiments are happening.
One of the things that you need if you’re going to imagine a better world is a rocket fuel of joy. That’s why protests like the No Kings marches matter, even though at times they get criticized for not having a focused political agenda, while white supremacist organizations are undermining the state.
But a protest, when it’s done right, is how we meet and intersect and listen to one another by meeting people who are not necessarily in our normal circle. I have to declare a preference here. I met my wife on a protest.
NAOMI: This might be the moment for Leah to talk about strategic optimism.
LEAH: I would like to bring Wendell Berry into the conversation. One of my favorite poems is the “Mad Farmer Liberation Front Manifesto.” Please read it if you have not, there are many quotable lines. The one that is relevant to this conversation is “Be joyful, though you have considered all the facts.”
At Soul Fire Farm, the way we situate our work as Afro-Indigenous regenerative agriculturalists is by feeding the community and training farmers. We’re builders. We’re building these institutions that inhabit the values we wish to see in the new world. But that can’t be the only strategy.
I like the image of butterfly with each of its four wings representing aspects of transformative social justice: build, resist, reform, and heal with kinship at its center. Resist includes protests and civil disobedience. Reform is getting involved in the electoral politics and public education, and then heal. So we build, resist, reform, and heal with kincentricity at its center which fuels of our love, our connection, our Ubuntu, “I am because you are.” That helps us to envision a post-capitalist society.
I agree with Raj about the insanity of the growth imperative of a three percent compound growth on a finite planet is literally insane, and it is colonial, it is white supremacist, it is dualist, and the only way that we’re going to survive on this planet is in reciprocity with all the other beings that live here.
NAOMI: My daughter is now 23, but when she was 19 or so, we had the talk, and it’s not the talk you’re thinking. It was the climate catastrophe talk. If any parents have had to try to convince their child it’s worth going on with their hopes and dreams in this catastrophe, it’s a really hard. It’s much harder than the birds and the bees talk.
My daughter, bless her heart, was challenging me about optimism. What we decided together is something that we call strategic optimism.
If you decide to be a pessimist, then the rational behavior would be some sort of hedonistic nihilism. You would be like let me accumulate as much as I can in the near term, bump everybody else; I’m just going to get mine because everything’s about to go up in flames. No long-term planning, no altruism, no generosity, no compassion. That’s sort of the logical extreme of this pessimistic, nihilistic viewpoint.
If on the other hand you choose optimism as a practice – not as a feeling but as a practice – then your attitude is I’m going to get up today and I’m going to plant this crop, I’m going to feed my community, I’m going to sequester carbon in the soil, I’m going to look out for my neighbor. Maybe there is only an infinitesimal chance we will win. But in the meantime, today I can alleviate suffering for some beings in my immediate community, and tomorrow I can alleviate some more. And maybe, just maybe we can alleviate enough suffering that we’ll all survive together.
But if we don’t do that, there’s absolutely no hope. So we’ve decided in our family that this strategic optimism is our practice. It’s our discipline. The way that you get up and you take your vitamins, or you go on a run, or you brush your teeth. You get up and you decide to do whatever step it is on whatever wing of the butterfly you have access to help build that world that we want to see.
We talk about food justice. We talk about equity. We talk about sovereignty. We talk about accessibility. A lot of the practices at Soul Fire Farm are not only about those three, but are also about weaving in Black and Indigenous wisdom, and ancestral wisdom into the land, and teaching people to become their own sacred farmers on other lands.
LEAH: I love the term sacred farmer. I would like to bring the ancestors into the room. Fannie Lou Hamer organized the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. She was sick and tired of being sick and tired. She was radicalized as a sharecropper. She was only 6 years old when she noticed that the landowner was setting the scales incorrectly to undervalue the cotton harvest and not pay the Black laborers their fair due. That kept them indebted and in extreme poverty so they couldn’t leave the plantation. As a child her first act of civil disobedience was to fix the scales.
Later in her life, when she was an organizer during the Civil Rights movement, she learned that many sharecroppers were being kicked off their land for registering to vote, for joining a protest, signing a petition, or joining the NAACP. She would have organizing meetings in her house, and as a farmer, she canned food that she grew. Radical youth would ask, “Mama Hamer, why you wasting your time canning these peaches and stuff?” Her answer was, “Child, if you have 400 quarts of greens and gumbo soup canned for the winter, no one can push you around or tell you what to say or do.”
So she organized the Freedom Farm Cooperative, where 500 sharecroppers who had lost their land co-owned the land. They were doing all kinds of beautiful mutual aid.
So Fannie Lou Hamer is our inspiration at Soul Fire Farm. To realize the idea that to free ourselves we must feed ourselves, we have to make sure that our agriculture is locally rooted, it’s regenerative, it’s tied to our heritage, and it’s in our hands.
There were 16 million Black farmers in the early 1900s. Most of them were kicked off their land by white supremacists, literally pushed off their land and lynched. The U.S. Department of Agriculture selectively gave loans to white farmers, causing bankruptcy among Black farmers. TIAA – Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association – and other investment firms unscrupulously grab up Black owned land, which is vulnerable because a lot of Black farmers don’t have access to lawyers and don’t leave wills.
So the rising generation of Black and Brown farmers is landless, they have no capital, and are just a few generations away from the red clays of Georgia – with its traumatic association with the forced removal of Cherokee people and the slave labor of African descended people. We say the land was the scene of the crime, but the land was never the criminal. Now a beautiful rising generation of people who are the color of soil are ready to reclaim that right to belong to the earth, to have agency in the food system, and are recognizing that regenerative agriculture was invented by Indigenous and Black people.
Dr. George Washington Carver is literally the godfather of regenerative agriculture. He worked with farmers when he was at Tuskegee University from 1890 to 1940 promoting cover crops, compost and crop rotation. Dr. Carver made sure that the soil health was the foundation of farming practices. He had a whole generation of Black farmers doing regenerative agriculture before Rodale came onto the scene in the 1940s.
We can look back to the Ovambo people of Namibia with their raised beds and the people of Liberia with their African dark earth, and the polycultures of Nigeria. That’s the kind of agriculture that we’re doing. We feed our community, no cost, door-step delivery. We train thousands of Black and Brown farmers in person on the farm through a 50-hour course, and then they go off and they do their sacred farming all across Turtle Island and, beyond.
The theory of change involves practices like sewing of seeds, of being trans-local, and locally adapted. Providing land-based mutual aid, in which the farm becomes a hub for feeding folks, for gathering, for organizing, a safe haven, a kind of aboveground railroad. The land becomes the scene of the revolution, just as it was in the Civil Rights movement. Black farmers were the ones who housed, fed and clothed and protected the freedom riders. If there were no Black farmers, there wouldn’t have been a Civil Rights movement. You think the Freedom Riders stayed at the Hyatt? No, they went to a Black farmer’s house. That’s where they hid. That’s how they stayed alive. As Malcolm X said, “Land is the basis of all revolution, all freedom, all justice.”
NAOMI: Thank you for all of your work. I just have to ask, how your work has been impacted by the current administration.
LEAH: It sucks. But we’re not stopping, I would say one of the more heartbreaking things, is that we had a major legislative victory with the Inflation Reduction Act under the Biden administration. They actually folded in a provision for Black farmers that we had fought for for over a decade. Historically, the USDA had discriminated against Black farmers. There was a landmark Civil Rights settlement called Pigford v. Glickman in 1999 that offered a very small amount to each of the farmers who had lost their land, but it wasn’t nearly enough. We needed full debt forgiveness for these farmers.
So we helped, along with farmers across the country, to introduce legislation, the Justice for Black Farmers Act, which was led by Senator Cory Booker. It was debated and I got to speak to Congress. It was crazy. They were actually listening to Black people. I could hardly believe what was happening.
A 5 billion dollar provision for the debt relief went into the Inflation Reduction Act, and was passed; payments were going out. And now they stopped.
The Disadvantaged Farmers and Ranchers Training grant is gone. All of the socially disadvantaged farmers programs are gone. People bought things based on contracts that were made, now the contracted money has evaporated. So it’s a shit show. It’s really, really rough.
We’re doing our best to piece together mutual aid networks. Susu is a Caribbean lending society. We’re trying to put together a national susu to try to stop the bleeding, so we don’t lose any more land. But now all the funders are skittish. Their attitude is, Black people were cool in 2020, but they’re not cool anymore. Don’t you do any programs for white farmers? I’m like, are you kidding me? The white farmers receive over 90% of the USDA funds. We absolutely need to support Indigenous and Black folks in getting through these times, and to continue the work.
NAOMI: Raj, when the government starts to clamp down, what are the models that you’ve seen that have been successful? Where can we look for inspiration in places perhaps in this country, historically, as Leah has been sharing with us, but also around the world?
RAJ: One of the places I have been very inspired by is Arkansas. I was just traveling through Arkansas for a book that I just finished that weaves together the history of all the things that have happened in Arkansas, ranging from Indigenous dispossession to the Elaine Race massacre [1919 massacre in which as many as several hundred Black tenant farmers, who were organizing against abuses were murdered], the site of the largest race massacre in U.S. history, to the rise of Walmart also in Arkansas.
One of the movements that I particularly was taken by is the Southern Tenants Farmers Union. The origins of this are germane to us now because in 1928, the Mississippi flooded and grew to 60 to 100 miles wide, depending on where you were. It was a catastrophe. The cleanup was a billion dollars back then. It was a huge expense, but of course, Black farmers saw none of that money. In fact, it was that event that flipped Black farmers’ voting allegiance from Republican to Democrat.
It was the failure of the federal response to a catastrophe that politicized people. It wasn’t the event, it wasn’t the flood. It was the government’s failure afterwards. This is important for our mobilizing in this moment, because in that moment, there was socialist organizing happening throughout the South, and the Southern Tenants Farmers Union was a site of social organizing where white and Black tenant farmers together organized despite the attempts of white supremacists to sew racial division. It turned out that white and Black tenant farmers had much more in common with each other than they did with the white bourgeoisie.
That is a moment that we can learn from particularly as we see the betrayals of the white working class and the absence of any dividend of white supremacy for white working class people. This is a moment to be able to split what appears to be a fairly firm hegemonic block into its constituent parts and to recruit. It is something to think about because this is a moment in which government failure writ large is a recruiting ground for a genuine grounded working class transformation.
But it depends on us using the language of recognition, mutuality, solidarity and socialism. It doesn’t happen because we’re just all going to get along and kumbaya our way out of this. You need a materialist analysis, otherwise people don’t see one another and recognize that we have much more in common than the white supremacists would have us believe.
Elsewhere in the world, there are movements that have managed to lay foundations that are paying off right now. One of my favorites is in India in the state of Andhra Pradesh. There are descendants of organizations that started off as women’s literacy groups, and that have survived the scourge of Hindu supremacy. It’s not an accident that Narendra Modi and Donald Trump were best buds in his first term I’m thinking of an event in Texas called Howdy, Modi, which was the only event that Trump came to where he was not the star. Trump opened for Modi in a stadium in Houston, and then Trump buggered off and everyone cheered for Modi because there’s a whole phalanx of rightwing desis [Indian Americans], who are part of the South Asian diaspora who believe in Hindu supremacy.
In India, Hindu supremacy is nasty and vile, and there have been people who have fought back against that, particularly in Andhra Pradesh where there is a system of farming that was originally coded as Hindu natural farming, but has been reclaimed as the world’s largest agroecological transition. More agroecological farmers have been spawned in Andhra Pradesh than anywhere else, where over two million farmers are currently agroecological farmers. And by 2035, six million farmers will be agroecological farmers.
India is hostage to fossil fuels, particularly through the Gulf of Hormuz, and hostage to fossil fuel based fertilizers which are scarce and expensive due to the US/Iran war. One of the ways to avoid using fertilizer is to farm agroecologically. They’ve set up systems so that farmers wean themselves off fertilizer, so they don’t pay the high cost of fertilizer and can start making money.
It’s predominantly women and Adivasi [people indigenous to an area], and low-cost farmers. That has happened despite the scourge of Hindu supremacy because these movements have been robust and understood how to experiment and how to protect oneself against divisive racial rhetorics.
NAOMI: Raj, you’ve written about the difference between food security and food sovereignty Would you explain that.
RAJ: The idea of food security is a way of depoliticizing the word hunger, because it renders hunger into something that’s tractable for the state. Food security is when you have sufficient access to foods to be able to lead a healthy life. But you can be food secure in prison. The idea of food security says nothing about power.
The term food sovereignty was coined by La Via Campesina in the early ‘90s, and launched in 1995 at the World Food Summit in Rome. The idea of food sovereignty is about reclaiming power from the World Trade Organization and the World Bank. Food sovereignty is about a community’s right to be able to end hunger and define its own food policy.
What that means is that communities have to decide what food sovereignty is by studying and discussing it. La Via Campesina decided that food sovereignty was dependent on an end to all forms of violence against women. The idea being that if this is about communities’ right to decide what food policy is, then everyone has to be equal, and the biggest obstacle to that, as identified by La Via Campesina, was patriarchy and that needs to be fought against.
Particularly now, given the revelations about Cesar Chavez, that dialectic is sharp and vital to remember: food sovereignty is about a radical naming of inequality of power and a redressing of it.
NAOMI: Leah, the matriarchy is a big part of your practice. Would you talk about your work on farms in Haiti and Dominican Republic, and how that may relate to the matriarchy and the patriarchy.
We don’t really have an agroecological movement in this country. We don’t have a politicized agricultural alternative community. It’s happening in smaller ways in which people are being trained how be farmers, as well as how to be the next generation of political leaders.
LEAH: When we talk about deconstructing the patriarchy, our model is not one of franchising; the other farms I work on are not our farms. We intentionally have a de-growth framework. We are aiming towards our own irrelevance. We have no interest in pushing our survival on anybody. We are part of mycelial network.
The farms in our network are all women-led, as is our farm. We only have two men on our staff of 22 (those poor guys). Altair Rodriguez runs an organic family farm in the Dominican Republic called La Finca Tierra Negra in the area that was the training ground for the militia against the Trujillo regime. Trujillo burned down the farm of Altair’s great grandfather and killed many family members. She revived the farm out of the ashes. It’s an agroecological farm growing coffee and 22 other crops. They are constantly producing fruits and medicines and work with Haitian migrants and Dominican women.
We have a sister farm amongst my homeland of Ayiti (Haiti) on the Western side of the island, outside of Léogâne, where one-third of the community was killed in an earthquake in 2010. We did so much grief work there. Out of the ashes of that earthquake, we planted thousands of fruit trees, moringa trees, and had woman-led seed exchanges. We helped reforest the hillsides that were denuded by the French as part of their extortion and punishment of our beautiful revolutionary island.
On the Caribbean island of Vieques is the Maroon Farm. In an effort led by women, they cleaned the soil that the U.S. military destroyed. They are providing food security by feeding the entire island. We also work with farmers in Sierra Norte in Oaxaca, Mexico.
All of these farms are incredible. We spend our winters doing solidarity brigades. We raise money, we bring resources, we bring skilled people to do projects that they want to do, not ones that we pretend we know that they should do. We do consciousness raising. We do political education. We’re all members of La Via Campesina. We study together and we plan and strategize together.
Something that I’ve noticed in the past ten years especially in the Caribbean, is people used to identify with colonial borders that have been imposed by the French, English and Spanish, but there has been a revival of Taíno and Arawak identity. At food sovereignty conferences by and for Taíno and Arawak Black women, the perspective has changed to “we’re one people; what is this BS they’ve been trying to convince us of? We have enough food. We have the best soil. There’s food all year round; let’s feed our people.”
NAOMI: Raj, in this very strange post-neoliberal world that we are entering into, there might be some hope that there could be some transformation. Do you think in this time of seemingly endless uncertainty and confounding ways that there might be some potential for optimism?
RAJ: There’s nothing guaranteed. Often at this stage of the conversation, it turns to “if only we do this, this and this, everything’s going to be fine.” No, because that’s an unreasonable way of understanding the world. In Brazil, for instance, under the first Lula administration, there were some victories. For example, in the food system, there were certain laws about being able to get food, one example was the Popular restaurant initiative, supported by the government that offered very cheap healthy meals. Here in the U.S. now most food is eaten outside the home, and to have public restaurants is a way to have dignity for the working class.
Then under the Bolsonaro administration, that was ground into dirt. And most of the public restaurants now are roach motels. But now under the second Lula administration, they have a program for cozinhas solidárias, or solidarity kitchens. The government will pay people to open a licensed kitchen and make local food available to the public. There are still some public restaurants, but the zones in which organizing happens have moved into these spaces of social gathering in the solidarity kitchens.
What does that have to do with hope? Well, this is precisely the dialectical process. We won something under the first Lula administration, then the fascists came and then destroyed it. Now we rebuild with something else. The engine for hope is always the social movements. One of the engines for getting rid of Bolsonaro was his abject failure in dealing with the massive floods that Brazil had experienced a couple of years back. Again, the failure of a government to be able to respond to the climate crisis is an engine for the kinds of radical care that our movements are in the business of providing.
What I see that as the fulcrum of hope is the recognition that movements are already providing care. And, there’s nothing inherently leftwing about that. If you followed what happened after the hurricane Helene that tore through North Carolina, there were neo-Nazis on horseback, providing aid and media and solidarity. The far right are doing it as well, and that’s the terrain on which we struggle, we need to recognize it. They get a move in this world as well. They get to redefine the terms of climate change. They get to have a say about how climate change needs to be met with yet more racist exclusion. Our recruiting has to be stronger. We have to organize better, and there’s no guarantee we’ll win, but there’s everything to fight for.
NAOMI: The examples that Raj gave of the Popular restaurants and solidarity kitchens in Brazil makes me think of the concept of food commons. Leah, how do food commons come into your work?
LEAH: What unifies nonviolent strategies is the idea of ubuntu – “I am because you are” – of kinship. It’s an indigenous concept of animism or non-duality, this idea that I am the mountain, the mountain is me; I’m not a defender of the river, I am the river. The pre-enclosure concept that you could own a person or the land, is absolute insanity. You mean to say we’re going to take Mother Earth and put some lines on her and this part is going to be mine, and I have the right to exclude everyone, even if they starve? Insanity.
The idea of the commons is a reclamation of our sanity to humble ourselves below our big siblings who are the hawks, and the rivers, and the sequoias. They were on the scene before us; we came later, and are younger and less wise. So we need to defer to those who have figured out how to live in relationship and harmony. They understand that if there’s some sugar, some photosynthate coming into the forest ecosystem, that it will be shared amongst kin and non-kin. If there is a pest coming in and there’s a warning that needs to be distributed, everyone’s going to get the warning, not just the people I like or the cute ones, but everybody’s going to get it. The air is to be shared, the water is to be shared. When we signed papers for our farm we immediately got to work figuring out how to put it in a cooperative, which is a Western legal approximation of an indigenous commons.
The land has veto power over the people in our cooperative. We gave our pro bono student lawyers the challenge of giving the legal right for the land to have veto power. The local indigenous Mohican people need to have it too. We became the first cooperative in New York state to do a culture respect easement with Indigenous people, and also the first in New York state to do the Rights of Nature with our co-op.
So our little 80 acres is somewhat of a commons, but we want to spread this idea. Food is for everybody. Water’s for everybody. The land is for everybody.
The post Food Justice from the Local to the Global: A Conversation with Raj Patel and Leah Penniman appeared first on Bioneers.
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