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Sky Woman

Long before the world was created, there was an island in the sky inhabited by sky people. One day a pregnant sky woman drops through a hole created by an uprooted tree and begins to fall for what seems like eternity. Coming out of the darkness, she eventually sees oceans. The animals from this world congregate, trying to understand what they see in the sky. A flock of birds is sent to help her. The birds catch her and gently guide her down onto the back of Great Turtle. The water animals like otter and beaver have prepared a place for her on Turtle’s back. They bring mud from the bottom of the ocean and place it on Turtle’s back until solid earth begins to form and increase in size. Turtle’s back becomes Sky Woman’s home, and the plants she’s brought down with her from Skyworld, including tobacco and strawberries, are her medicine. She makes a life for herself and becomes the mother of Haudenosaunee life, as we know it today. ¹

We all begin with a story. It is through story that we are connected, not only to each other, but also to our homes, to our lands, to our communities, to our people, to our past, and to our future grandchildren. It is the collection of stories that we are able to hear and witness that will make the whole of our lives and define the shape and character of our community, but also, through the stories, we share and tell and retell what will shape the whole of our future. We organize our worldviews on the patterns of storytelling. The way we tell our stories sets our expectations and influences how we view our lives in relation to our world. Whether our characters are data points or monetary values represented by numbers or by animals and stars, the story is one of management and redistribution of resources, or, as many Indigenous people say, “life sources.” Stories help conceptualize what is possible.

When we talk about economies, we are still telling a story. In mainstream storytelling paradigms, there is always a need for a hero, usually one, and the idea that we can live happily ever after. The villains are named as the ones who set limits or barriers that should and will be overcome by heroes. In capitalism, land, plants, animal beings, people, places are replaced with numerical symbols that create a system of relationships that can be deciphered by understanding the numerical values and often the predetermined rules of engagement. Even further complicated, these systems of numbers are then used to predict future stories using equations, interest rates, but all focused on continued growth, overcoming limitations and barriers. We see this facet of Western storytelling reinforced in iconic stories like the American Dream—and even more stark, in current news reports of new billionaires and the ever epic quest for oil. The message: “There is always more.” In mainstream capitalist storytelling and economy, there is an endlessness that captivates and encourages dreaming, even when this leads to extinction of species, destruction of environments, and separation of community and people into more valuable and less valuable. The less valuable become areas of sacrifice. Entire neighborhoods and communities have become environmental waste zones in the quest for more wealth, space, and money.

There is a place for absence. For nothing. To not consume. For frugalness. This part of the story is just as important, because it establishes limits, ends, and the concept of exhaustion as part of natural and recurring cycles.

Overconsumption, hyperconsumption, and, more recently, continued extraction despite constant calls for slowed development dominate conversations about global, national, regional, and even local economies. The constant need to drill or frack for more oil and find or colonize lands that remain “underdeveloped” are a result of this fundamental focus on continued growth. No growth and absence are the barriers or limits that mark failure and failed economies.

As society continues operating under the cultural understanding of limitless growth, we are destroying the very sources that maintain life. Even more alarming, rather than hinder growth, we find ways to separate and continue consumption: people, life, communities have to become less valuable in order to extract from them. In our mainstream economic equations, we are in constant search to increase the low values and find ever more creative ways to extract value to continue building. Mainstream economies avoid pauses or halts, because those are iconic markers of failure. The mainstream panics at the sign of failure. In more recent discourse around mainstream economies, there is a call for change reflected in conversations around “circular economies” or “responsive economies” or any number of callouts for a changed version of how mainstream society understands economy.

But before we change the equations at the base of mainstream economies, change the idea of limitless growth, we will need to change how we tell, and even listen to, stories. We will need to recognize the importance of, and embrace, absence that is followed by the practice of absence.

In mainstream Western traditions, we are subject to the economy like we are subject to the weather. Yet in Indigenous stories, collectively, we are the story—we are the economy. We influence the world, including life sources, all around us.

Many, if not all, Tribal creation stories recognize the importance of “absence.” This is often referred to as a “darkness” or “nothingness.” It is because of absence that emergence occurs. While Western economies focus on the light, the continued growth, “the absence” is critical in Indigenous understandings on how we manage economies. There is a place for absence. For nothing. To not consume. For frugalness. This part of the story is just as important, because it establishes limits, ends, and the concept of exhaustion as part of natural and recurring cycles. Life sources or resources, if we not are not mindful, can be exhausted.

A Hopi Story

The Creator gathered all of Creation and said:

“I want to hide something from the humans until they are ready for it. It is the realization that they create their own reality.”

The eagle said, “Give it to me, I will take it to the moon.”

The Creator said, “No. One day they will go there and find it.”

The salmon said, “I will bury it on the bottom of the ocean.”

“No. They will go there too.”

The buffalo said, “I will bury it on the Great Plains.”

The Creator said, “They will cut into the skin of the Earth and find it even there.”

Grandmother Mole, who lives in the breast of Mother Earth, and who has no physical eyes but sees with spiritual eyes, said, “Put it inside of them.”

And the Creator said, “It is done.” ²

In the Hopi story, as with the Indigenous economies, there is recognition that we, presently, are part of the story—we are the economy. In mainstream economies, the economy is an external system that is controlled by markets, policy, and institutions outside of community, family, and individuals.

In mainstream Western traditions, we are subject to the economy like we are subject to the weather. Yet in Indigenous stories, collectively, we are the story—we are the economy. We influence the world, including life sources, all around us, because we are part of the equation as active participants in economic systems. Essentially, our collective actions, presence, and practice are a form of communication that influences the world around us—including economy, including weather.

In her article “The Pendulum of Climate: A Hopi Story,” Monica Nuvamsa explains:

Farming families work hard to prepare corn for storage for later use, and we are taught to keep at least four years of corn harvests in storage in case of drought or to prepare for major life events such as marriages, births, and ceremony. My household has not had a harvest in nearly three years. I follow the teachings I’ve learned and set aside seed for the next planting cycle, but in the past two years I’ve reduced my portion of seed each year, because the risk of loss in my community heirloom seed stock is too great for me….It is in these times that the teachings come forth and I begin to fully understand why we do this: why we save, why we work hard to have good storage for future years, and why we anticipate the years that may not produce a good harvest. ³

Nuvamsa is describing the practice of absence that influences how their life sources—seeds—are managed. Nuvamsa is a reflection of Hopi, Hopi people, and their stories. The Hopi stories center conversations, relationships, unique gifts that contribute to the whole, and more important, recognize places as important understandings—lessons with stories in and of themselves, places as opportunities to learn about our collective experience in that particular spot. Places are characters in our stories in their own right. Humans are not manipulators of economic or spiritual equation, but are only a small part of the dynamic interactions that occur around humans and the natural world. We humans are only part of the story. As told in both “Sky Woman” and “A Hopi Story,” humans are actually the least aware and gifted of life beings.

Additionally, there is a recognition that “the absence,” “the frugalness,” contains lessons, learnings, and behaviors that cultivate and protect life. There is a clear understanding that life has limits, not limits that should be overcome but rather recognized, acknowledged, and accounted for. This fundamental understanding is the key difference between an Indigenous economy and Western capitalist economies. Moreover, when you have many dynamic Indigenous economies interacting and engaging under the same understanding of limitations as strengths and not limitations as deficits, this is emergence and the creation of symbiotic ideas and environments. Connections among Indigenous communities are valuable not just because they are economically beneficial but also because there is an accountability of shared protection of limits and recognition that each community is responsible for spatial and regional limitations. These connections and understandings are so strong that even through decades after what Anishinaabe scholar Kyle Whyte calls “industrial settler campaigns” ⁴ that intentionally weakened Indigenous economy, self-governance, and self-determination, there are visible intense material, cultural, and social connections that continue to connect communities. Indigenous trade routes are invisible connections forged over generations, leaving rivulets in the earth between Tribal communities that still very much exist today. We were economic pollinators that have left their evidence in cultural practice in the present. These connections and practices are subtle reminders of our responsibilities to each other, our Tribal communities, and the trade items that found their way from village to village, region to region, and continent to continent.

This is the essence of an Indigenous economy: relationship and community—not just human community—to function in balance. It is community, relationship, and emergence that have value. Ironically, it is community, relationships, and emergence that are rare and much harder to numerically quantify in Western capitalism. Indigenous economy is humbleness, frugalness, and it protects limits. The lessons in Indigenous storytelling, as in Indigenous economies, are clear, important, and practiced: the pauses, the silence, and the stillness are also part of the story; it is the dark stillness that precedes emergence.

Notes

1. “Sky Woman,” by Shelley Niro, Kanien’kehaka, 1999; Keller George, Oneida Haudenosaunee, 2001; Alan Brant, Tyendinaga, 2001. There are many variations of this story, and sources differ.
2. “A Hopi Story.” There are many variations of this story, and sources differ.
3. Monica Nuvamsa, “The Pendulum of Climate: A Hopi Story,” Nonprofit Quarterly Magazine 29, no. 3 (Fall 2022): 14–18.
4. I use the term campaigns because these waves of settlement are sustained, strategic, and militaristic. These campaigns include both warlike violence and the tactics for suppressing populations that are used alongside belligerence, from assimilative institutions (for example, boarding schools) to containment practices (for example, reservations) to the creation of dependency (for example, commodity foods). See Kyle Powys Whyte, “Our Ancestors’ Dystopia Now: Indigenous Conservation and the Anthropocene,” in The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities, ed. Ursula K. Heise, Jon Christensen, and Michelle Niemann (New York: Routledge, 2017), 206.

This article originally appeared in the Nonprofit Quarterly. See the original article here.

This is the fourth article in NPQ’s series titled Owning the Economy: Stories from Latinx Communities. Coproduced with the National Association for Latino Community Asset Builders, a national network of Latinx community development groups, this series highlights community preservation, land ownership, and business development efforts in Latinx and immigrant communities across the country.

How does a small Latinx community organize itself to support homegrown businesses? Adelante Mujeres (which means Forward, Women), the nonprofit where we work and which has operated for over two decades, seeks to answer this question. Central to this work is developing a holistic support system for Latina¹ immigrants and their families in Washington County, Oregon, that can help them build community wealth. 

Washington County is the county with the largest Latinx population in Oregon, estimated at 107,000 people (out of a total population of roughly 600,000). Statewide, Oregon’s Latinx population has grown steadily, increasing by 63 percent between 2000 and 2010, and by another 31 percent between 2010 and 2020.

Estimating the size of the Latinx business community is complicated since many Latinx-owned businesses have not been certified as such. But a 2016 report published by the Oregon Community Foundation noted that between 2002 and 2012 alone, the number of Latinx-owned businesses statewide increased from 6,000 to almost 15,500. These businesses, the same report points out, tend to be small. Only one in six has employees other than the owner. Of those that do have employees, the average business employs only seven people. As of 2016, their average wage was only $26,500, far short of the national median income of roughly $59,000 that year.

In short, the community’s Latinx business community is growing, but it is not yet fully thriving. Below, we offer a story of how our local Latinx business community, largely women-led, is learning to organize itself. 

Addressing Community Challenges through Business

Immigrant business owners across the United States face many challenges. These include:

• Difficulty navigating the complex system of registering a business and acquiring proper licensing, insurance, and bonding
• Difficulty building relationships with potential clients, vendors, and other professionals because of limited English skills
• Lack of marketing skills and social capital needed to create a strong client base
• Trouble accessing resources such as start-up capital
• Lack of computer literacy and information technology skills

This situation is only worsened by the realities of being a Latina trying to succeed in the US business world. Nationwide, Latinas are typically paid just 55 cents for every dollar paid to White men. According to a 2020 report from the National Women’s Law Center, in terms of lifetime income over a 40-year career, that gap costs the average Latina over $1.163 million. The Latinx immigrants of Washington County are no exception to these trends. 

So, how does a small Latinx community organize itself to support its businesses? To be effective, it is critical to employ an equity lens in all our business development work. Promoting equity—by which we mean breaking down the barriers for people of color to live a dignified life—requires active efforts to dismantle racial and structural inequities. It requires specialized support to low-income Latinx microbusiness owners who require business counseling in Spanish, as well as specific resources to build sustainable businesses and create jobs, thereby improving livelihoods for their families and the community overall. This includes:

• Having access to resources that are culturally specific and bilingual in Spanish
• Building strong relationships with local government entities
• Being empowered to participate in leadership opportunities that will support their growth as entrepreneurs and provide an opportunity to have voice and influence on policy, especially in our local communities

Building a Local Entrepreneur Support Network

Since the challenges that [Latinx] entrepreneurs face are multifaceted, meeting those challenges requires combining many different components.

The many needs that Latinx entrepreneurs face, as outlined above, led to the creation of the Empresas Program (empresas meaning businesses). The program was launched by the nonprofit Adelante Mujeres during the Great Recession in 2008. Of the many business owners that we have supported, over 65 percent identify as Latina entrepreneurs. 

At Adelante Mujeres, the staff reflects the community served. Over 80 percent of staff identify as Latinx. Our children and their families suffer the impact of generational trauma just as much as their beneficiaries do. The work, in short, is centered not on bringing in experts from afar, but rather on peers supporting peers. Guiding our work is our vision, which is based on six central premises: 

1) A healthy, vibrant Latinx community strengthens our society. 

2) The empowerment of women is essential for a thriving community. 

3) All people have an innate capacity for growth and transformation. 

4) Learning leads to a flourishing life. 

5) A strong community requires the inclusion of everyone. 

6) Everyone has a responsibility to cultivate a peaceful community and a healthy planet.

The work…is centered not on bringing in experts from afar, but rather on peers supporting peers.

To operationalize this vision, Adelante provides technical assistance and limited financing both to startups as well as existing businesses, with a principal focus on supporting Latina entrepreneurs. This is done in coalition with many organizations—local, state, and national—including the Washington County Small Business Support Network and local chambers of commerce, the Oregon Small Business Development Center, and the National Association for Latino Community Asset Builders, among other groups. Through this network of organizations, entrepreneurs are provided with a suite of resources and guidance to help their businesses thrive, from educational courses and workshops that transform an idea into a business plan, direct coaching to put the business plan into action, networking, and access to capital. 

Since the challenges that entrepreneurs face are multifaceted, meeting those challenges requires combining many different components. Among these are the following: 

• Lending capital: Tools here include the use of matched-savings or individual development accounts, which help microbusiness owners finance more of their business development on their own, as well an affiliated Kiva Zip lending program that offers business owners the chance to obtain up to $5,000 in zero-interest loans.
• Industry-specific capacity: Three industries get specialized support (determined by current entrepreneurial demand). These are the three commercial kitchens that help support food businesses, a retail incubator that offers a storefront called Casa Qui ² (or “House of Quality”) for Latinx entrepreneurs to sell locally made products, and two farmers market locations to support local producers.
• Wraparound support: This includes adult education, leadership development, education programs, nutritional education, and mental health assistance.

How does this all work in practice? Here are a couple of examples:

Olga López is one of the many Latina business owners that Empresas has supported. She had comanaged a business with her husband for 19 years, but when she and her husband divorced, López was left without a business or income—and her home was at risk of foreclosure. Business training enabled López to get back on her feet, and she set up her own cleaning business. Called Royalty Maid Services, this business has now taken off. The small business maintained all but one client account during the pandemic, a major achievement given that domestic cleaning work largely dried up in 2020 when the economy shut down. 

Now López uses her leadership and empathy to drive the business. Many of her employees are mothers. López, in managing the business, has ensured that her employees have the flexibility in their scheduling that they need. This has enabled her to retain a largely Latina workforce in a growing business that both provides decent jobs while enabling employees to have healthy, quality time with their families. 

Another team of Latinx business owners in our community are Alma Hernández and her husband Christian Morales. Both immigrated to Oregon from Mexico. In 2020, they started to sell their products and foodstuffs in local farmers markets in the Washington County communities of Forest Grove and Cornelius. 

Looking to expand and develop a permanent storefront, they participated in the food business course. Now they have a storefront which they call La Loteria Taco Shop in North Plains; they also operate a food truck.

These are just two of many examples. In 2021, 105 people sought technical assistance support; businesses receiving support saw a 22 percent increase in revenues and technical assistance support led to 20 new businesses being formed. 

Developing Community Leadership

Entrepreneurs play a critical role as community builders. But aligning economic development with community development requires more. For this reason, Adelante works with Latinas in the community to increase civic engagement, supporting community-led efforts to address unjust and deficient policies at their roots. For example, in coordination with Bienestar Oregon, Centro Cultural, Community Action, DREAMers Resource Center, SOAR Immigration Legal Services, and the Virginia Garcia Memorial Health Center, Adelante participates in a coalition that we call our immigrant solidarity program. All immigrant community support volunteers (also known as promotores) receive a seven-week training course and then support immigrants in the field. 

More broadly, in 2022, Adelante launched a new policy program, focused on both advocacy and, critically, leadership development. This new effort was spurred by the growing recognition in our community of how critical it is to have Latina voices at the table in decision-making roles to counter the structural racism and sexism that our community faces. There is so much knowledge in the Latinx community that needs to be elevated. 

Technical assistance work often takes place business by business, but our dreams extend much further—far beyond supporting businesses.

This work, however, cannot be done alone. There is direct support provided by government agencies and foundations who are working with Adelante to promote culturally responsive information and equitable bilingual access to Latinx entrepreneurs. Most important in all of this, however, are the members of the Latinx community in Washington County themselves, who build power and community by exchanging experiences, recommending services to one another, and supporting each other through the confusing and even scary steps of embarking on a business and negotiating their way as immigrants in a society that can often be hostile to them.  

Building Community Wealth

The work of community building and of building community wealth is complex. Some of this work involves group advocacy and community building activities. Other parts of the work are much more individualized.

By necessity, technical assistance work often takes place business by business, but our dreams extend much further—far beyond supporting businesses. In our work, we are motivated to build toward a future where people of color, immigrants, refugees, and rural residents are leaders who advance systemic change to build a truly just society. 

This vision is reflected in how we conduct our entrepreneurship trainings. In our trainings, we speak not only of a triple bottom line of planet, profit, and people—but of a quadruple bottom line of planet, profit, people, and purpose.  

The purpose of business development, simply put, is not just to sell more goods and services, but to sustain our cultures and develop a thriving community that generates health, income, and wealth for all. Together, our vision for the Latinx business community in our small corner of Washington County, OR, is to continue to engage with business owners, organizational allies, and community leaders to build the just and caring society that we all desire. 

Notes 

1.  We use Latina to refer to women of Latinx descent. Otherwise, we use the gender-neutral term Latinx. 
2.   The name combines the Spanish word for house (casa) and the Nahuatl word for quality (qui).

This article originally appeared in the Nonprofit Quarterly. See the original article here.

For decades, communities around the country that are home to large, wealthy nonprofit institutions like universities and hospitals have struggled with an economic conundrum.

On the one hand, these nonprofits drive employment; attract talent and capital; and bolster the status, reputation, and desirability of the cities they call home. On the other hand, the same nonprofits often have vast real estate holdings—land on which, as nonprofits, they generally pay nothing in local property taxes.

The city of Boston is a telling example. Home to dozens of colleges and universities and world-class hospitals, fully one-tenth of the city’s increasingly valuable land is owned by nonprofit tax-exempt institutions, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars in lost property tax revenue every year.

Boston is also one example, among a growing number in the United States, of attempts by local leaders and grassroots movements to hold wealthy nonprofits more accountable for the disproportionate tax advantages they enjoy and for the cost those advantages impose on the communities that house them.

The Troubles with PILOTs

Since 2010, the City of Boston has had in place a program known as Payment In Lieu of Taxes, or PILOT, in which the city’s largest and wealthiest nonprofits are asked to make voluntary payments to the city, with amounts requested based (at least loosely) on the tax-exempt value of their property holdings.

The program brings tens of millions of dollars in extra revenue into city coffers, but its success has been mixed. Under its provisions, nonprofit institutions with more than $15 million in property holdings are expected to pay one-fourth of what they would pay if the property were assessed at commercial tax rates. Fifty percent of this amount is supposed to be paid to the city government in cash, while the remaining 50 percent can be in-kind “community benefit” contributions. What counts as “community benefit” is largely defined by the nonprofit institutions themselves.

Not only are community benefit rules loose, but particularly when it comes to cash payments, only a small fraction of the nonprofits asked for contributions meet the requested amount. Many of the city’s wealthiest institutions—Harvard University, Boston College, Boston University, and Northeastern University, among them—routinely fall short.

For example, in fiscal year 2022, $123.6 million was requested: about $61.8 million in cash payments and the same amount in community benefit contributions. Yet when it came to cash contributions, the total paid was only $35.5 million—a shortfall of over $26 million. It is also worth bearing in mind that were the institutions taxed at for-profit rates, the amount owed would be four times $123.6 million—or nearly $500 million.

Community Members Respond

Since 2018, a Massachusetts grassroots coalition comprised of over 20 different community groups going by the name PILOT Action Group has been pushing elected officials, as well as the nonprofits themselves, to do better.

“Let’s not just have Harvard decide what Harvard wants to do.”

“We’re not interested in making an institution go bankrupt, but we are interested in having the heavy hitters pay their fair share to the city,” says Enid Eckstein, a founding member of the PILOT Action Group.

The group is pushing on two fronts, pressuring wealthy nonprofits to contribute more, and at the same time demanding more accountability from political leaders when it comes to how those resources are spent.

“Right now, the institutions get to decide what they do with community benefits, and the city approves, as opposed to the city leading,” says Eckstein. “Let’s not just have Harvard decide what Harvard wants to do.”

And the partial success of Boston’s PILOT program, says Eckstein, is reason for grassroots advocates to be pushing for more.

“Boston prides itself on having the PILOT program,” Eckstein notes. “This is its opportunity to lead and be bold and to say to Harvard or [other nonprofits]….Hey, let’s sit down with the community and talk about what real partnership means.”

A National Movement

Similar campaigns are playing out around the United States.

In 2020, after years of intransigence, the University of Pennsylvania agreed to contribute some $100 million over ten years to remove lead and asbestos from Philadelphia schools—a victory for organizers who have long been pressuring the Ivy League school to reengage in PILOT payments after it unilaterally stopped making the voluntary contributions years ago.

In 2021, after years of negotiations and lobbying by a coalition of grassroots groups, nonprofits, unions, and city officials, Yale University agreed to significantly increase its PILOT contributions to the city of New Haven, pledging to pay the city an additional $52 million over six years.

That success didn’t come overnight, says Henry Fernandez, executive director of the New Haven nonprofit LEAP, and who served as lead liaison for the city in negotiations with Yale.

One major factor, Fernandez says, was the level of grassroots engagement.

“There was a significant amount of community engagement on the PILOT issue. There were a lot of folks in the community, the labor unions, [the community coalition] New Haven Rising, and other community groups that really organized and pushed towards this idea of greater contribution from the university.”

But another key piece, Fernandez says, was bridging the gap between two seemingly opposing, and both valid, viewpoints: that of the university, which saw its expansion as benefitting the city and its economy; and that of the city, for which the university’s expansion meant at least short-term loss of precious tax revenue.

“I think for a long time the conversations were about how the growth of the university is ‘bad,’ and the university was like, ‘That’s crazy’,” notes Fernandez.

At the same time, residents could accurately complain that “my taxes are going up while yours stay at zero,” says Fernandez.

“There’s a lot of conversation that needs to happen to get through that fundamental difference of opinion and to have everyone understand that everyone appreciates the other side’s point of view,” says Fernandez, noting that successful negotiations required the varies parties to create “structures such that the city and the university share interests around these economic realities.”

The ultimate success of those negotiations, Fernandez says, was largely a process of building hard-won trust between the city, the university, and community members.

Broader Issues at Stake

“Campus land has become a tax shelter.”

Victories for PILOT advocates, when they occur, are hard-fought. It is also true that, especially outside the northeast and mid-Atlantic states, PILOT payments remain the exception, not the norm. Even in those cases where voluntary payments are being made by wealthy nonprofits, they remain just that—voluntary—and generally fall far short of the actual property tax revenue lost to the nonprofits’ land holdings.

Meanwhile, many wealthy nonprofits—universities, especially—have significantly expanded their land holdings over the past decades. Universities like Yale and Harvard, for example, have become major real estate developers in their home cities, expanding their campuses and (generally untaxed) footprint.

“Campus land has become a tax shelter—both for the universities and for their private partners. And this has been a reality for decades,” observes Davarian Baldwin, a professor of American Studies at Trinity College, and the author of, among other works, In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities are Plundering Our Cities.

The question of whether those institutions should or can be pressured into making voluntary PILOT payments, Baldwin says, is a “window into unjust land arrangements that are triggering both capital growth and capital hoarding.”

It’s a trend that dates back to the early 1960s, when a new federal statute, part of so-called urban renewal efforts, allowed urban universities to pair up with local redevelopment authorities to clear and acquire urban land—often occupied by lower-income Black and Latinx residents.

“All of these communities that have PILOTs are still struggling.”

“A lot of the areas that are now lucrative research parks or innovation districts near the university, were once Black communities that were demolished through this federal program, this urban renewal program,” says Baldwin.

That sense of historic injustice was paramount in the negotiations that resulted in Yale’s promising more in PILOT payments to New Haven community institutions, says Baldwin, who advised and collaborated with organizers of that effort.

“What was most relevant to them was the way we talked about the university as being like a factory, and the host community as a company town,” notes Baldwin. “And you know, we were relatively successful.”

PILOT payments are one way for communities to recoup revenue and resources lost to wealthy nonprofits’ tax-exempt status—but they aren’t a panacea, Baldwin argues. “All of these communities that have PILOTs are still struggling—because it’s a fraction of what the university or nonprofit would pay if their properties were on the tax rolls.”

Meanwhile, PILOT payments can act to smooth relations with a host city and its leaders without changing the underlying behavior of aggressive real estate expansion. “They continue to just, you know, to build, to expand their footprint in the city and take more and more properties off the tax rolls,” Baldwin says. “And yet they say, ‘Well, wait, we paid our PILOT.’”

Rather than a fix-all solution, Baldwin argues, PILOT programs are a means for the public to exercise at least limited leverage over wealthy and powerful nonprofit institutions that are sensitive to public opinion.

“This is what gets these institutions, these companies, to the table to talk about more equitable financial and land control and labor arrangements,” says Baldwin. “If you’re not talking about land control…especially for a predominantly White institution in predominantly Black and Brown and poor White neighborhoods…you’re not talking about DEI,” Baldwin says.

For institutions, like universities, that purport to believe in and advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion, “it’s got to extend to all the places where you are,” notes Baldwin. “It’s got to follow your physical footprint.”

This article originally appeared in the Nonprofit Quarterly. See the original article here.

How can we safeguard radical, mutual aid funding efforts?

On May 31, Georgia Bureau of Investigation agents and Atlanta police arrested three organizers of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund. These were Marlon Scott Kautz, the fund’s chief financial officer; Savannah D. Patterson, the group’s secretary; and Adele MacLean, CEO of the fund.

Organizing that challenges capitalism, White supremacy, policing and prisons, and imperialism always carries risk.

For over seven years, the fund—a nonprofit fiscally sponsored by the Network for Strong Communities—has provided legal defense and bail support for Atlanta. For aiding #StopCopCity protesters, the three fund organizers were arrested on charges of money laundering and charity fraud.

Of what did this “fraud” consist? The warrants cited standard nonprofit reimbursements such as COVID tests and forest clean-ups in their rationale for the arrests. In the words of Kamau Franklin, an organizer with the Atlanta-based collective Community Movement Builders: “This is an arrest which is meant to, again, criminalize the movement, chill dissent, stop organizing, and stop activism from happening to stop ‘cop city’.”

In so much as the work is radical, it will be under attack. Organizing that challenges capitalism, White supremacy, policing and prisons, and imperialism always carries risk. In the case of the bail fund, for example, what can movements do in the face of state repression? Potentially by shining a light on how mutual aid funding strategies are under siege, a clearer picture may emerge of ways to protect this valuable activity.

Multiple people have noted that the Atlanta arrests represent yet another novel authoritarian and growingly fascist tactic to intimidate grassroots organizing and also draws on a long tradition of state repression against the Black freedom struggle. If successful, it could have far-reaching impacts on the swell of bail funds, abortion funds, transgender healthcare funds, and immigrant justice funds that have grown in recent years.

The Rise of Mutual Aid During the Pandemic

At the onset of the COVID pandemic, mutual aid efforts proliferated to meet communal needs, but that has not come without complication.

Both of us organized mutual aid efforts in 2020. Julian recounts some of the complexity of that process: “We were trying to get such efforts to stand on their own according to all-too-vague instructions and guidance from some veteran organizers. The tension was thick. Critiques of the nonprofit industrial complex abound; we questioned what fiscal infrastructure was needed and what could be done away with.”

Julian’s own organization worried about surveillance, and comrades warned their collective about philanthropy being a short-term Band-Aid, and how the government uses nonprofit grants to defang social movements by ways of compliance. In 2023, these discussions feel like premonitions.

The solidarity economy movement, which seeks to activate and grow an economy that prioritizes care rather than profit, contends with these same tensions. To what extent, if at all, can state institutions and structures support and incubate efforts that challenge them?

Since 2020, political tectonic plates have obviously shifted—and mutual aid, which exploded early on, is now facing distinct threats. These threats can be classified into three different areas: repression, monetary constraints, and co-optation.

Mutual Aid Fundraising and State Repression

The Atlanta Solidarity Fund arrests did not occur in a vacuum. There is a long history of state repression against radical, grassroots power-building efforts—and those efforts continue today.

Historian Say Burgin and political scientist Jeanne Theoharis aptly point out that across 1960 Southern sit-ins, 1961 Freedom Riders, and 1964 Freedom Summer, bail funds were a critical organizing effort for crystallizing and sustaining solidarity action. Where politically motivated captivity for civil rights activists loomed, bail funds responded.

Mutual aid funding for these bail efforts were not just tactical, they were cultural. Mutual aid fundraising, in these contexts, gave everyday people a way to invest and engage in the very struggles they supported and needed. Mutual aid would provide yet another cultural outlet for radical, anti-repressive intent. This opportunity to mobilize people in radical efforts clarifies a threat to stakeholders in White supremacist institutions.

Mutual aid organizers need only look to historical nonprofit legal cases to know what tactics of state and corporate repression can be exacted upon high-profile dissent. After Greenpeace mounted a campaign targeting Energy Transfer Partners (the corporation behind the Dakota Access Pipeline), the company filed RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) charges in 2016.

While Greenpeace won the case in 2019, corporate exploitation of the RICO Act has been endemic since it was passed in 1970. In an interview with CNBC, Energy Transfer Partners CEO Kelcy Warren said the quiet part out loud when he declared he was “absolutely” trying to stop Greenpeace from receiving funding as rationale for the case.

Greenpeace International legal counselors Charlie Holt and Daniel Simons write how the case was just one example of a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation. SLAPPs are suits “brought by a developer, corporate executive, or elected official to stifle those who protest against some type of high-dollar initiative or who take an adverse position on a public-interest issue (often involving the environment).” SLAPPs are global in their scope, but the authors write that the United States is “fertile ground” for them because of a lack of “procedural safeguards, legal aid or otherwise affordable legal services, and measures to sanction abusive legal practices.”

Repression in Georgia

Both state-level and federal acts of repression have impacted funds of all kinds. ARC-Southeast, a fund that provides access to reproductive care, including abortions, has felt the squeeze of state and federal repression. Britni Ruff, an organizer with ARC-Southeast, shares a bit about how their work has been impacted: “The biggest issues regarding the ever-shifting landscape have been with our capacity to support hotline callers as their plans have to change.”

Ruff also explains how restrictive six-week abortion bans mean that a person calling at five weeks into a pregnancy may have to travel hundreds of miles to get an appointment where they can be seen. As of November 2022, a six-week abortion ban took effect in Georgia. On the legislative attacks on abortion access, Ruff asserts they are “intentional in their efforts to complicate the process, putting up as many barriers as possible.” Bans have also caused increasing expenses for travel, and booking delays affect the cost of the procedure—“cost rises as a person’s gestational age increases,” Ruff highlights.

Earlier this year, Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr threatened to leverage RICO charges against any organization involved in the #StopCopCity movement under the guise that the movement itself represented the threat of domestic terrorism. Movement organizations themselves could be in the crosshairs of some of the harshest charges that can be levied against groups.

Atlanta organizer Bridgette Simpson speaks to the fact that the people empowered to enforce the law (the police) have wide latitude to criminalize actions by individuals or organizations of which they disapprove. Thus, enemies of the state are created and ultimately targeted with violence. The effect is that bail fund organizers, connected to a long tradition of ensuring people can maintain their right to protest, are being framed as enemies of the state. After the arrest of the three nonprofit bail staff members, Governor Brian Kemp falsely accused them of facilitating and encouraging “domestic terrorism.”

Organizer and political strategist Ejeris Dixon talks about recognizing “the strategic difference between organizing under neo-liberalism and neo-fascism.” To counter attacks on mutual aid fundraising, we need to broaden our tactical horizons to account not only for state repression but also compounding wealth inequality and co-optation.

Money Problems

A principal threat to mutual aid fundraising surrounds money itself: how it’s raised, sustained, and distributed.

First, consider the government. Following 2021, the Internal Revenue Service announced a crackdown on money-sharing app transactions above $599 and a broader intention to examine transactions of everyday people with much greater scrutiny. Of course, many people were mobilizing mutual aid via these apps, with needs often going far beyond $600. This additional requirement to report all of these transactions to the IRS, coupled with the end of the COVID federal public health emergency, introduced another layer of complication, another opportunity for policing and surveillance, and even more trepidation among mutual aid organizers about their fiscal processes.

Another money challenge is internal—the constant necessity to raise funds. While bail funds like the Atlanta Solidarity Fund are often self-sustaining in their nature (as the money is returned to the fund after a defendant makes their court appearance), a large part of mutual aid fundraising efforts don’t operate cyclically. For example, providing food, medical, and asylum support often demands perennial fundraising to meet rapid response needs.

Even with bail funds, there can often be a lag between when loans are paid back and when funds are needed to support new people facing trial. Beyond this, many bail funds anchor abolitionist policy campaigns to end practices of cash bail and pretrial incarceration. Such campaigns themselves require spending money that won’t cycle back.

Further, bail funds can struggle with fundraising depending on what and who they’re funding. Bridgette Simpson, a justice-impacted organizer with Barred Business and Free Atlanta Abolition Movement, knows this all too well. At times, bail fund donors specify which charges their bail donations can go toward, creating a hurdle for these organizations to operate without discrimination. In other instances, people are interested in funding bail itself but not mutual aid for formerly incarcerated and otherwise justice-impacted people.

“Mutual aid when it comes to justice-impacted people has been particularly difficult…once you tell them who the money is for,” Simpson says. She goes on to point out how this occurs even within movement spaces: “Everyone continues to talk about police-sanctioned violence, jails and prisons, but they talk around the people most directly impacted.”

The Challenge of Co-optation

Mutual aid has long been prone to co-optation. Today, mutual aid faces threats of co-optation on multiple fronts.

It should come as no surprise that big philanthropy is among those potential co-opting forces. In 2021, the Omidyar Network (eBay cofounder Pierre Omidyar’s philanthropic arm) launched a $475,000 Community Infrastructure Fund for Mutual Aid. MacKenzie Scott also recently gifted an undisclosed amount to the National Bail Fund Network.

Perhaps the most notable threat of co-optation to mutual aid work comes from the nonprofit sector itself.

While Omidyar’s grant decisions were made by a participatory committee of “mutual aid activists and social justice leaders,” such examples underscore the inherent tensions that arise in the partnership between philanthropic foundations and 501(c)(3)-based mutual aid organizations. How to remain accountable to one’s base? How to resist both external movement capture by powerful institutions and internal professionalization of one’s own organizers?

There are also increasing examples of state actors co-opting both the language and practices of mutual aid. In an interview with mutual aid organizer and writer Dean Spade, the Chicago Community Bail Fund highlighted examples of sheriffs welcoming the arrival of bail funds to support unaffordable bonds, city council-supported ordinances to protect bail funds “while continuing to take the money of Black and Brown community members paying bond for their loved ones,” and the city of New York’s own philanthropically backed bail fund created in 2017. As members of the Chicago Community Bail Fund reflected on New York’s system: “In effect, New York was funding the arrest, prosecution, and release of people caught in its criminal legal system instead of not arresting or prosecuting them in the first place.”

But perhaps the most notable threat of co-optation to mutual aid work comes from the nonprofit sector itself. “Solidarity not charity” is one of the most common refrains in distinguishing mutual aid activity from a hierarchical, paternalistic, nonprofit approach that often chills unrest.

Drawing upon INCITE!’s landmark 2004 conference and subsequent book The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, movement lawyer Mike Haber highlights four key criticisms of the nonprofit industrial complex, all of which lend themselves to the co-optation of mutual aid: preventing real community leadership, de-politicizing activities toward service provision and away from organizing, capturing funds, and taking part in a system of tax exemption that has aided philanthropic wealth hoarding.

Nearly all these criticisms can be found in the example of the Colorado Healing Fund (CHF). In the wake of the November 2022 Club Q shooting in Colorado Springs, the fund was lauded by state officials and national nonprofits as the primary medium through which people should donate to support victims. CHF quickly came under fire from mutual aid groups and a network of surviving victims, who cited a lack of community leadership, little financial transparency, and no pathway for moving funds directly to victims themselves. Instead, the funds would move toward nonprofit programs of CHF’s choosing.

Yet while the “solidarity not charity” divide may seem clear in terms of principles and politics, the binary between “mutual aid” and “nonprofit” often melts away when peering deeper. For example, many abolitionist bail funds are themselves either 501(c)(3) nonprofits or fiscally sponsored by one, as is the case with the solidarity fund in Atlanta; and the Bread and Roses Legal Center, one of the key mutual aid organizations supporting Club Q victims is a nonprofit itself.

As Haber puts it, “Making the criticism of the nonprofit industrial complex seriously does not necessarily mean that no nonprofit should exist in our current system, but rather that nonprofits that do exist should structure themselves in ways that are responsive to the serious issues raised by these criticisms.”

Safeguarding Mutual Aid: A Vision for the Future

Protecting mutual aid requires building trust, accountability, and solidarity across organizations, regardless of legal status. In the movement for liberation, finding a way forward is critical, and in that spirit, here are a few recommendations:

• Make clear assessments about the intentions, opportunities, and risks of our in the context of our broader movement goals. If a mutual aid fund operates with a nonprofit structure, does it know why? For how long? To what end? There are many options for handling money as a mutual aid group, and there are just as many questions to be asked about the extent to which a group wants to partner with 501(c)(3) charities and/or foundations.
• Build out grassroots donors and a dues-paying membership base. In 2013, the Sylvia Rivera Law Project released From the Bottom Up: Strategies for Membership-Based Organizations, which makes the compelling case for how instituting a sliding-scale dues structure supports grassroots fundraising, increases “members’ investment in the work,” reduces the likelihood of philanthropic co-optation, and builds leadership skills. And in the Northeast, the Resource Organizing Project offers yearlong cohorts for grassroots organizations to grow grassroots donors while transforming fundraising to be a “form of organizing, power-building, and healing.”
• Bet on and invest in the grassroots by taking risks to move money in ways more aligned with grassroots needs than with institutional convenience. For example, our worker self-directed nonprofit, New Economy Coalition, created the Black Solidarity Economy Fund, which democratically regrants funds to non-501(c)(3) organizers and worker cooperatives. The fund is an intentional, member-led effort to garner unrestricted resources and recruit new members into our coalition from all over the movement.

• Forge a strong defense against both legal and physical attacks on radical solidarity funds in this new political moment of surveillance and repression. The tactics for doing this will depend on the situation. Sometimes, decentralized organizations can help ensure that movements are less vulnerable to repression. Sometimes this might mean supporting parallel underground organizations that are less visible to outside authorities.

With radical organizing, we know better than to promise safety. Nevertheless, it’s on movement organizers to keep us safe as possible while waging a fight that will make future generations proud. Radical solidarity funds, often financed via mutual aid, are crucial tools to expand that zone of safety.

As Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba recently put it: “Mutual aid projects are a manifestation of power that contradicts the state’s primary narrative about what it is, who we are, and whose purpose it ultimately serves.” We keep our communities safe. But the question is—what are we willing to do to keep mutual aid organizers safe, too?

This article originally appeared in the Nonprofit Quarterly. See the original article here.

On the pink carpet at the July 13 Barbie film premiere in London, Margot Robbie made one thing clear: “I’m very much in support of all the unions.” She added that as a member of SAG-AFTRA—short for the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, a union representing around 160,000 media workers worldwide—she was “absolutely” in support of the imminent strike. Just hours later, SAG-AFTRA’s demands had still not been accepted by the Alliance of Motion Pictures and Television Producers (the negotiating body representing the corporations behind the entertainment industry), so the glamorous press tour for the highly anticipated summer blockbuster went back into the box. 

Barbie may be one of America’s emblematic cultural exports, but the toy’s production has only ever happened overseas.

Everything about Barbie’s publicity so far—from Robbie’s referential press tour outfits to the millions being made from brand partnerships—is a profitable testament to the cultural power of the Mattel corporation. The movie seems to be trying to be more than just a toy commercial; reviews call it a “saga of self-realization” and “a picture that both promotes and deconstructs its own brand.” Its status as recycled intellectual property points out how corporations control life not just in Barbieland but in the real-life movie industry and beyond.

Life in Plastic, Not Fantastic 

Barbie may be one of America’s emblematic cultural exports, but the toy’s production has only ever happened overseas. Mattel was cofounded by Ruth Handler and her husband in 1945, and she had already pitched the idea of a grown-up doll to Mattel’s executives when she came across the perfect prototype in Germany in 1956. Mattel began manufacturing Barbie dolls in Japan in 1959 when the country’s economic struggle right after World War II made labor cheaper. 

As Japan’s economy experienced a quick recovery when the government aggressively invested in manufacturing to produce new technologies—in industries including iron, cars, and chemicals—Mattel’s factories moved to parts of Asia where labor was more inexpensive, such as Hong Kong and Taiwan. As those economies also gained ground, Mattel continued its search for the cheapest labor possible to make its plastic toys.

In the 1980s, the company experienced mounting financial troubles after trying to branch out into electronics and other kinds of toys—leaving Barbie to bear the weight as its moneymaker. In 1984, venture capital firms invested hundreds of millions of dollars in Mattel to keep the accompany afloat; three years later, the company hired the consulting firm McKinsey & Company to streamline operations and forecasted layoffs both in the United States and abroad. Squeezing manufacturing labor overseas became a brutal fallback strategy to eke out a profit. In 1988, Mattel closed both Barbie production plants in the Philippines and laid off 4,000 workers in response to a strike by the Mattel Workers Union, which was protesting the first plant’s closure. Just the previous year, the union had successfully negotiated pay raises for workers to around five dollars per day.

Mattel continued to relocate to countries with lower labor costs, including China, and Barbie dolls continued to be its highest-grossing product. In 1996, NBC’s Dateline sent undercover journalists into Mattel’s Indonesia factory, alleging that the company was exploiting child labor. In the decade following, Mattel tried hard to clean up its image, but came under fire again for its overseas manufacturing standards in 2007, recalling 19 million toys—including Barbies—that contained lead paint and strong magnets.

In a book published the same year, Eric Clark highlighted the “unimaginably awful” conditions of the Chinese factories making toys for Mattel and Hasbro, where workers were losing fingers, working 80-hour weeks, sleeping in cell blocks, and making pennies. “The crux of the problem is this: by demanding that their supplier produce goods at ever cheaper prices and demanding deadlines, the toy industry is almost forcing them to act illegally.” 

Discoveries of labor violations in Chinese factories producing Mattel products continued well into the 2010s. The brand, which blamed its performance on the “fickle tastes of children,” also had to respond to plunging demand amidst a cultural landscape that saw its star as an outdated and sexist symbol by offering dolls in different colors and sizes. But the corporate strategy around manufacturing remained consistent: in 2018, the Wall Street Journal reported that Mattel paid a typical worker $6,300 dollars per year in 2017, and was forecasting further restructuring in the following year.

Since bringing on Ynon Kreiz as CEO in 2018, the company has pivoted hard to remake itself: “We used to think of ourselves and present ourselves as a manufacturing company,” Kreiz told the New York Times. “The specialty was: We make items. Now we are an I.P. company that is managing franchises.” The movie deal was inked not too long after, with a string of other Mattel products up for adaptation, including Barney, Polly Pocket, and Hot Wheels. Barbie’s comeback was too good to pass up, and it has yielded millions of dollars in retail partnerships so far: trademarked shoes, ice cream, watches, and more.

The US corporation behind one of the world’s best-selling toys is, like many industries, a horror story of corporate pressures exploiting overseas workers—dependent on low wages, dangerous conditions, and tax evasion to stay profitable. While the film after its most popular product does not represent this history, it portrays a world in which Mattel is all-powerful and in on the joke.

“Blame Mattel, they make the rules.” 

Considering Mattel’s troubled history, Barbie seems to have been released at just the right time for the toy giant. But it’s not easy to read it as a straightforward marketing scheme, as the jump from brand to film changes the nature of Barbie’s story.

Several incisive reviews have seriously looked at what it means to make a movie about a best-selling brand. Vulture’s Alison Willmore writes that Barbie is more “a story about money” than anything else, and Defector’s Nicholas Russell explains that the movie “gently sends up the company it also praises,” speaking to a larger anxiety in contemporary culture about justifying “projects motivated blatantly by capitalistic forces.” It isn’t useful, in other words, to blame or praise director Greta Gerwig for making a deal with Mattel. The point is that we live in a time where corporations are consulting on the movies about the brands they own, allowing just enough self-criticism to seem self-conscious but not too much to break the bank.

Barbie’s story is about the newfound self-consciousness of a commodity. Robbie’s “Stereotypical Barbie” lives in Barbieland, where happy Barbies run society as presidents, doctors, and construction workers. They know that they are Mattel-made dolls and that people in the “real world” play with them, but they imagine that the world outside is no different than their pink utopia. All that changes when Barbie begins thinking about dying and her perfect features begin changing—so she hops in her pink convertible with her Ken in the back seat to find the source of her fresh unhappiness. 

While the film may not be able to criticize Mattel in the end, it reaffirms a central truth: it’s a corporate world—we’re all just living in it.

In the real world, she finds that people are quite unhappy with her in particular: one girl tells Barbie that her brand of “unrealistic physical ideals, sexualized capitalism, and rampant consumerism” has made life worse for women. She objects to being called a fascist, crying that she doesn’t “control the railways or the flow of commerce!” Heavy with this burden, she eventually finds the unhappy woman who is giving her cellulite and making her question her mortality: a middle-aged Mattel employee named Gloria. Gloria grew up loving Barbies—so much so that she got her dream job at Mattel—only to find that life as a grown-up woman isn’t as easy as the one she projected on her doll as a child. 

It’s clear that Barbie wants to leave its audience with some high-stakes messages about feminism, which end up sounding a bit outdated. But wouldn’t it be silly to expect anything else? Criticizing Barbie for its corporatized feminism is less compelling than seeing it for what it is: the tale of a corporate pivot. And all roads in the film lead back to Mattel. From the Mattel corporate executives following close on Barbie’s heels telling her to “get back in the box,” to one character’s quip to “blame Mattel, they make the rules,” the “real world” in the film is still one in which the corporation controls everything—and that’s the whole point. 

The movie’s explicit message, that being a woman in an unfair world is a complicated thing, culminates in Gloria’s suggestion that perhaps Mattel should sell an “Ordinary Barbie,” to tell women that they are enough—which an executive confirms would sell well. “You are enough”—this is not just the mantra for an individualist feminism that Mattel can sell, it’s a version of Mattel’s mantra to itself.

Ultimately, the motivating mechanism of the plot—where a Mattel employee transfers her unhappiness to a formerly worry-free doll—succeeds in making a small suggestion: Barbie is not insulated from the feelings of a worker she doesn’t know, and her existence in the real world is determined by Mattel’s decisions. While the film may not be able to criticize Mattel in the end, it reaffirms a central truth: it’s a corporate world—we’re all just living in it. 

In short, Gerwig’s film is an allegory for the changing cultural economy of the 21st century: how a product can cross from one realm into the other to confront and adapt to a new reality. Filmmakers are grappling with a claustrophobic horizon of what stories can be told, how, and by whom, due to the expanding power of media companies and the corporations that court them. Barbie is a perfect expression of this new era, in which corporations seek to rebrand the nostalgic products of the recent past, and movie studios work with them to repackage old ideas for the mass market. 

When the Stars Align

The changing economy influences the content of the culture industry, and it also has terrible effects on the workers that bring stories like Barbie to life. Studios are scheming to make even more profit by cutting costs as much as possible, using new technology to produce more and pay people less. The actors and writers of the media industry are not only fighting for better pay and pensions but also struggling against the creep of new kinds of exploitation.

Take residuals, for example. These payments, which compensate people involved in making TV shows and films when they are rerun, syndicated, or distributed—were won as a result of SAG’s 1960 strike. In the age of streaming platforms like Netflix, studios have taken advantage of the differences between streaming and broadcast or box office release by setting payment ceilings and changing the parameters of a product’s success. 

The streaming economy has also changed how things are written and produced in the first place. Even though more movies and television are being made than ever before, pay for writers and actors is on the decline, regardless of experience. Writer Alex O’Keefe told CNN that he was “living below the poverty line” while writing the hit show The Bear for FX, and saw very little money while the studios made millions. “We are living in the wildest imagination of a few billionaires who have designed our economy exclusively for themselves.” While the film and television industry used to be a reliable pathway to middle-class stability, reduced budgets and technological advancement have made it impossible to make a living.   

The use of AI is also a major pain point—and one which threatens not just those in the writers’ room, but also on the red carpet. Studios are currently proposing that for a one-time fee, actors will sign over the rights to their image and voice, which the studios could use for any project without further consent or additional payment. You can imagine that even big stars would be threatened by this proposal; if the industry introduces this as a precedent, even someone like Robbie may have to look on as Warner Bros. produces Barbie 4 without her involvement. 

So far, Barbie has cleared $337 million in box offices worldwide during its first weekend in theaters, exceeding its $145 million budget and securing both its place as the biggest premiere of the year and the highest debut for a film directed by a woman. All this record-setting profit only makes a starker case for the people on the SAG-AFTRA and WGA picket lines, as executives of film companies tout the smashing success while coming back to the bargaining table with paltry proposals. 

Solidarity from high-profile stars on press tours just before the July 14 strike began showed in SAG’s strike authorization vote, which had over 97 percent support from its members. The actors’ union joins the Writers Guild of America, whose East and West unions have been on the picket lines from coast to coast since May 2. With help from IATSE and the Teamsters, the WGA was able to shut down productions of high-profile television shows and films. Workers from different unions in Los Angeles and New York are attending each other’s pickets and refusing to cross the lines, lifting up the message that the gig economy, C-suite profits, and technological threats are issues that affect everyone.

Across the film and television industry, the labor movement is unified in a way that the country hasn’t seen in decades—and corporate executives have only themselves to thank. Statements expressing solidarity with SAG-AFTRA cite the greediness of studio executives and their disregard for the talent and wellbeing of the people who make the entertainment industry work. IATSE President Matthew Loeb said: “Our industry is at a crossroads, and the actions taken now will affect the future of labor relations in Hollywood and beyond.” 

Loeb’s warning sums up the stakes of the struggle between labor and corporate power today. The problems plaguing film and television industry workers are not identical to the ones that nurses, schoolteachers, or UPS drivers face. But in healthcare, education, and logistics too, the consolidation of profits to executives and shareholders, the influences of digitalization and technology, and the withering of living wages and job security are the cause of skyrocketing inequality and unbearable working conditions. Corporate power is at the root of widespread insecurity—and even popular movies are telling us some version of that truth.

This article originally appeared in the Nonprofit Quarterly. See the original article here.