Tag Archives: nonprofit quarterly

For some, the defeat of Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election and the prosecution of January 6th insurrectionists might suggest that US democracy has remained strong through years of social and political instability. In this year’s State of the Union address, President Joe Biden claimed that US democracy is “unbowed and unbroken.” However, it would be remiss to believe that the threat of authoritarianism has abated.

While US democracy has always been imperfect, neglecting to defend democratic institutions cedes critical territory to the Far Right, harming efforts to advance justice and belonging (the power to cocreate the society to which you belong). Simply put, this moment calls for renewed concern about the threat of fragmentation and the ways division is being exploited by anti-democratic actors.

How can social justice movements address the threats posed by democratic degradation and populist authoritarianism while advancing their longer-term goals? How can they reorient their work towards an ethos of defragmentation, bridging, and democratic renewal? It is to these questions that we turn.

A Movement Undone by Disinformation and Division

Last September, the New York Times published an in-depth investigation into how the coalition that organized the US Women’s March in January 2017, the largest single-day protest in US history, was undermined as external actors—in particular, Russian government-backed trolls—exploited existing fissures and mistrust between groups working together against racism, sexism, and homophobia. According to the report, “Russian accounts purporting to belong to Black women had been drilling down on racial rifts within American feminism,” posing as “Black women critical of white feminism, conservative women who felt excluded, and men who mocked participants as hairy-legged whiners.” Messages posted included:

“White feminism seems to be the most stupid 2k16 trend.”

“Watch Muhammad Ali shut down a white feminist criticizing his arrogance.”

“Aint got time for your white feminist bullshit.”

“Why black feminists don’t owe Hillary Clinton their support.”

“A LIL LOUDER FOR THE WHITE FEMINISTS IN THE BACK.”

Coupled with the impact of social media algorithms developed to foment conflict, this interference helped fracture the once-powerful Women’s March movement, imprinting, as the New York Times put it, “lasting scars on the American left.”

We are not suggesting that the racial, class, and other tensions present in the Women’s March movement were entirely manufactured by outsiders. Rather, to fully understand the enormous fragmentation happening today requires understanding both existing tensions, how they are being exploited, and how our movements may be playing into this exploitation by breaking further.

Indeed, although fragmentation is at some level organic—with understandable and inevitable tensions between groups with varying concerns, access to resources, positionalities, and points of view—what is happening now between and within groups should not be confused with typical infighting. The weaponizing of division, fueled by traditional media and social media corporations that profit from outrage, is an alarming threat—one to which those working to advance social justice and belonging are inadequately prepared to respond.

Too often, as in the case of the US Women’s March, groups respond to the exploitation by external actors of existing internal divisions by turning inward towards perceived safety, or “bonding,” and “breaking” with those outside their in-group, rather than bridging outwards to expand the “we,” or the coalition united against a shared threat. This breaking into smaller and often more purist “we’s” is helping those who seek to dismantle democratic structures and enact more unequal ones. As Maria J. Stephens and Julia Roig of the Horizons Project write, “Authoritarianism, like any oppressive system, thrives on divisions and disorientation.”

Fragmentation’s Threat to Democracy and Belonging

While concerns around democracy and political fragmentation, on one hand, and those related to social, racial, and economic justice, on the other, are often framed as separate challenges, they are in fact interconnected. The issues around which the global Far Right is stoking division (such as gender identity, demographic change, and migration) are part of a larger strategy to advance anti-democratic ideologies globally. As the scholar Judith Butler has written, movements like the anti-gender backlash “are not just reactionary but fascist trends, the kind that support increasingly authoritarian governments.”

The strategy of maximizing fear and mistrust of perceived others serves to cultivate sympathy for anti-democratic alternatives at work around the world. Authoritarian populist parties in numerous countries have developed from minor, even “fringe,” opposition actors into powerful political players, often by deftly exploiting tensions in the democratic majority and stoking fear-based “us versus them” thinking that suggests minority and marginalized groups are to blame for social and economic woes. Perhaps most concerning, as increasingly intertwined relationships on the authoritarian Right strengthen globally, strategists in Europe, the US, and elsewhere are developing and resourcing this approach.

Today, the US holds the dubious honor of being the only advanced Western democracy to have experienced extreme levels of “polarization” for such an extended period, putting it “in uncharted and very dangerous territory,” according to Jennifer McCoy and Benjamin Press of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. McCoy and Press define polarization as the degree to which society is split into antagonistic political camps and use survey data to support their US findings. The fragmentation that their research documents not only increases mistrust between groups—hindering their ability to work together in diverse coalitions—but also endangers democratic norms and structures.

While it would be naive to say that actors on the Left do not engage in tactics that exploit division, all indications suggest that this is a much more fundamental and well-funded anchoring strategy of the Far Right. The result is a clear asymmetric polarization driven by increasing extremism on the Right.

Inoculating Movements against Toxic Fragmentation

The solution to othering is bridging, not more othering. This is also the case with fragmentation. While many social justice activists may view “breaking” as a way of protecting themselves from external forces who seek to blame, injure, or divide, this response harms movements’ ability to build power. As we know, there is power in diversity, numbers, and transformation—all of which require cross-group engagement, not merely in-group bonding.

Breaking tactics can be strategic and are often successful in the short term. For example, motivation for collective action often requires strong bonds of in-group trust paired with frustration and outrage directed toward a “common enemy.” However, bridging is required to achieve real and lasting social transformation, particularly in moments like today, where populations are highly polarized and mistrustful. An orientation towards bridging, conflict mediation, and repair also helps protect movements against the weaponization of internal tensions by bad-faith actors, like the Russian troll farms referenced above.

The success of Franklin Roosevelt’s progressive (albeit deeply flawed and exclusionary) New Deal programs in the 1930s, for example, hinged not only on support from groups like labor unions, who advocated progressive economic policies, but also a portion of the business community. Such support was made possible by ongoing and sometimes difficult communication between groups that disagreed on many things.

In a recent keynote address to the Stuart Hall Foundation, the writer, Arundhati Roy, powerfully explored authoritarianism and othering in India and around the world, arguing that “sealing in communities, reducing and flattening their identities into silos” only makes it harder to oppose oppression. Ironically, that is the goal of India’s caste system—“divide a people into a hierarchy of unbreachable silos, and no one community will be able to feel the pain of another because they are in constant conflict,” she said. This bonding inward, or as Roy calls it, “siloization,” is not unique to India, however, and indeed has benefited Far-Right populists in many countries who seek to dismantle democratic institutions.

The Challenges of Bridging

Yet, while democratic degradation, heightened fragmentation, and the pernicious othering of out-groups are all alarmingly intertwined, we have found a disconnect between actors working to advance social justice and belonging and those working to strengthen democracy by countering fragmentation.

In the case of some social justice activists, we have found a diminished commitment to democratic ideals. Indeed, a response we’ve heard when talking with social justice advocates about the urgent need to counter toxic fragmentation in order to strengthen democracy is that democracy is simply not an orienting priority in their work. This is because US democracy, such as it is, comes with disillusioning asterisks of exclusion, which is to say that it reinforces structural racism and economic inequality. While this critique is not inaccurate, it ignores the dangerous reality that the Far Right is advancing a clear anti-democratic vision.

In a 2022 interview with Vox Media, Far Right thinker Curtis Yarvin, who is influential with figures like Senator JD Vance (R-Ohio) and billionaire financier Peter Thiel, explained his strategy for dismantling US democracy. He discussed sowing doubt and division in democratic institutions among those on the Left: “He wants to convince elite liberals and leftists to lose faith in the system, believing that when enough of them no longer want to defend it, it will be easier to topple,” the author writes.

We believe that democracy, when rightly conceived and practiced, moves us closer to our aspirational liberatory goals. Of course, many, if not most, justice advocates likewise appreciate the centrality of a functioning democracy to efforts to advance belonging. Nonetheless, we have found real discomfort when engaging with de-fragmentation strategies to counter authoritarianism, as a concern for de-fragmentation and cross-group coalition building may force advocates to consider how their approaches may inadvertently be contributing to exclusion, identity-based breaking, and democratic degradation.

Recently, in NPQ, longtime organizer Maurice Mitchell offered an excellent look at the ways that progressive-Left organizations often fall into these breaking dynamics via behaviors like neoliberal identity politics (“using one’s identity or personal experience as a justification for a political position”), idealistic maximalism (including a “righteous refusal to engage with people who do not already share our views and values”), and disproportionate responses to discomfort (for example, claiming that disagreement or criticism is “violence”). Although Mitchell did not speak to the role of bad-faith external actors in magnifying these conflicts, the breaking he describes heightens the Left’s vulnerability to those who seek to dismantle democratic structures.

A second point of breakage we find is around conceptualizations of “depolarization.” Social justice actors often interpret this to be “a call to the middle”—to cede to majority concerns for the sake of political harmony. Social justice actors resist this frame, as popular responses to polarization misleadingly suggest that the poles are the problem and that the solution is to move to the center. US history is replete with examples, such as the Civil Rights movement, which remind us that this is hardly the case.

Bridging, to be clear, is not about moving to the middle, but about seeing one another’s humanity and being open to learning, connection, and transformation. It does entail some risk, including the risk of one’s own transformation and of engaging with people who may disagree with you—or have more power than you.

We often hear from social justice activists that calls to bridge and depolarize ignore power, and that bridging cannot be possible until power is made equal. One of us (powell) in a recent article acknowledged that extreme power imbalances can indeed distort bridging. Considerations of power are important, but often bridging is politically advantageous, especially when the ideological distance is small (what we have called “short” bridging) and the potential gains from coalition building are large. Too often, preconditions to bridging are piled on to justify breaking, preserving in-group purity at the expense of movement progress.

To be clear, bridging is not appropriate in all circumstances, nor will bridging solve all the Left’s problems. And bridging is not predicated on agreeing or giving up one’s identity or values. But differences, such as those between social justice and democracy advocates, do not mean we should not cross a bridge. To return to the case of the Women’s March movement discussed above, the breaking occurred between groups where the bridge was, or should have been, short and functioned to the detriment of the larger movement—and to the benefit of anti-democratic actors.

Growing Our Bridging Muscle

There are several tensions in the call for bridging and belonging. Some people are sympathetic to bridging only insofar as it is a technique of persuasion, or for “winning.” Bridging is much more than that: when done properly, it amplifies the voices and situatedness of everyone, especially marginalized groups.

This work is complicated. People carry multiple identities and shifting social and structural situatedness. One must be careful to not exaggerate either our individuality on one hand, or the essential nature of our groupness on the other. People are not just one thing. The central goal of bridging should never be to ignore any person’s identities or experiences. 

More broadly, bridging often means moving beyond either/or binaries—in this case, beyond focusing either on strengthening democracy and de-fragmentation or on advancing belonging for marginalized groups. Instead, those of us who are serious about social justice and belonging must bridge lines of difference (political, ideological, cultural, and geographic) to highlight our collective stakes. In this way, movements can build a future that defends the rights of those most vulnerable to attack from anti-democratic actors, while strengthening our democracies and continuing the perpetual work of making social structures more inclusive and just.

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

Alissa Quart, director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project (EHRP), recently authored a book called Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream.  Earlier this year, I had to chance to talk with Quart about her new book, her description of contemporary US social policy as having created a “dystopian social safety net,” and her thoughts about how to build a US society that is centered on mutual caring and economic justice.

Interview has been edited for length and clarity. [SD]

Steve Dubb: Can you explain what led you to write Bootstrapped, and how do you feel that your new book differs from or builds on the work you did in previous books like Squeezed?

Alissa Quart: Definitely, it builds on Squeezed. My tagline for Squeezed was: “It’s not your fault.” By the end of it, I was asking myself: “Why do people think poverty is their fault? And why do other people think that people who are struggling, not just the poor, but the people who are sliding down from the middle class, are themselves the ones to blame for their problems?”

And I felt that there has got to be an ideological undercurrent to this. It is not just human nature. It’s not. So, I started to read many of the early texts around this: Benjamin Franklin, Henry Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horatio Alger—I read a lot of Horatio Alger, Ayn Rand. Also, I re-read Laura Ingalls Wilder, an author I had loved as a child.

I hadn’t realized how much Little House of the Prairie was an angry repudiation of the New Deal and Franklin Delano Roosevelt and was super Hooverian, inspired by [President Herbert] Hoover and other people, and that Ingalls Wilder’s daughter was this fire-breathing, right-wing libertarian. But the books were wildly popular, had come from a certain place, and had spread a message around this—which obviously then got filtered into people’s consciousnesses.

And I went through a lot of political speeches—I was looking at Hoover’s political speeches, Ronald Reagan’s political speeches, Bill Clinton’s political speeches—all of whom spoke about people being responsible for their own condition. The “end of welfare as we know it” is not all that different than the philosophy that Ma and Pa need to be free to farm. And in that story, federal government policies, such as the Homestead Act, had never helped them, even though of course they did.

SD: In Bootstrapped, you describe key aspects of the nation’s social support system—or non-system, as the case may be—as a “dystopian social safety net.”  What led you to come up with that term?

AQ: When I first came up with the term, I just was thinking that there were warming centers that were opening. I guess this was 2017 or 2018. I saw signs for them—places in Northeastern and Midwestern cities. People who are unhoused or between houses could go there to warm up in cold weather. This struck me as something that was really depressing. This is something that shouldn’t need to exist.

Then I started to ask myself: “How many programs are [there] like this?” A lot of nonprofits put on do-it-yourself, taped together programs that have this orientation of a dystopian social safety net. Stuff that shouldn’t exist but does because we have to rely on ourselves and rely on the taped together Rube Goldberg contraption of nonprofits and individual small community efforts to make things work in this country.

Which is not to say a dystopian social safety net is always bad. EHRP is part of the dystopian social safety net. We are here supporting reporters and photographers because publications are no longer doing it. A lot of nonprofits fall into that category.

In Bootstrapped, I wanted to show the ideological underpinnings of some of the ways we help ourselves. It’s almost like a riddle. Most of them shouldn’t exist, but they have to exist, including GoFundMe. Two or three subjects in my book relied on it for school lunches, for medical care, all the stuff that again is not covered by health insurance. Go Fund Me is part of the dystopian social safety net.

SD: Could you define what you mean by a “dystopian social safety net”? How does it function? You gave a couple of examples. But can you build that out?

AQ: It’s like a ragtag network of different social formations. It ranges from warming centers to colleagues using a “Go Fund Me” to support a colleague who doesn’t have maternity leave. It is everything from these micro-community efforts to these way bigger organizations that are providing basic services to people that they shouldn’t have to. And these should be within the ambit of the government—and in many other countries they are.

People funding their colleague’s maternity leave would not need to do that in the majority of European countries, right? The network that is helping get people to out-of-state abortion clinics on Reddit—again, if Dobbs didn’t happen, that wouldn’t be necessary. And nonprofits like EHRP wouldn’t be necessary if we didn’t have rapacious owners of publications who want more than 20 percent, even 30 percent, profit margins. There are different causes. But often in this country it is a lack of a safety net that individuals and groups are forced to come in and make work.

SD: Is gig work also a part of that?

AQ: That hadn’t struck me initially. But when I talked with people who work for Instacart and DoorDash, it became clear that often they are. They are coming to the door. They are carrying groceries further in than they should. If somebody is not doing well, they are calling 9-1-1. They are playing the role of care managers or social workers or medical and disability aides for people. Some of the Instacart workers that I spoke to told me that a lot of their common delivery schedule was with people who are using wheelchairs.

They felt that they were part of the social service system. This is super dystopian. You have to pay a fee and all of this over stuff for your groceries in order to get the aid that, if you’re disabled, you should be getting anyway.

SD: A lot of this dystopian safety net can be described as workarounds. Can you talk about the tension between how these workarounds make life better in one sense, and yet can also undermine systemic efforts to fix the underlying problem?

AQ: Potentially it can. Some of the strategies that I am most excited about are efforts like mutual aid and participatory budgeting, where people are actively pouring energy back into [strengthening] local government. Participatory budgeting is happening in hundreds of cities across the country where groups of citizens vote on how to spend a discrete amount of money, often in the millions of dollars. What I love about these new initiatives is the recognition that there has to be a relationship between elected officials and the people who elect them.

I have also been interested in the organizing. Suddenly, there is an awareness of the power of a labor movement in ways that there hadn’t been in a long time, and how to be in solidarity with other workers.

I am pointing at the positive stuff. These are ways that we can pour back the energy into something more systemic and not just correct what is in front of us.

But I also write about how great volunteerism is, and I talked with some people who were really great volunteers during the pandemic. They recognized it. They told me, “I don’t want to be the person doing this. This isn’t what should be happening. I’m not the person who should be using the test strips or getting people to their vaccine appointments or getting them masks. This is really wrong, and this is kind of letting the local governments off the hook.” I think that was interesting. In the volunteerism section of the book, I was trying to show the nobility of some these folks and how frustrating and angering it is that they have to do this.

SD: Another theme that you have written about is how the red tape in accessing social benefits is not a glitch, but rather is an intended policy design feature that keeps millions of people from accessing the benefits they qualify for. Can you elaborate on this?

AQ: I wrote about this last year for the Washington Post. “Administrative burden” is what Pamela Herd and Don Moynihan call it.

COVID cut that red tape in many areas. It helped with eviction by putting in place moratoria. It helped with Medicaid enrollment. And it also helped with SNAP [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as “food stamps”] enrollment. The requirements for constant reenrollments were slowed down and in some cases were stopped. Those three things were huge.

And what those changes during COVID did was make these programs resemble Social Security, which is easy to access. That is the problem with this administrative burden. It is clearly aimed at people who are lower income—people who are women, women with kids, women of color with kids. I think we need to think about why Social Security is so easy to access, and why we have made these other systems hard, and why COVID made it easier.

During COVID, a lot of people weren’t in the office. There were reasons for it, too, that were institutional. We should ask: “How can we continue some of these things?” The rolling back of these COVID policies is probably already happening, [with potentially] millions of people kicked off the rolls, having to reenroll, going through elaborate processes. Annie Lowrey calls it the time tax. This is just unbearable if you’re a person with a complicated life and children and are working all the time.

During the pandemic, SNAP benefits didn’t require in-person interviews. That’s a thing that would be incredibly helpful for recertification. When you have people who have five children and multiple jobs, and you’re asking them to come in person during the day to a SNAP interview, that’s not going to happen.

SD: Do you feel communities are building lasting infrastructure that might lead to a real social safety net, or are folks mostly patching holes that perpetuate the existing system?

AQ: I think there is a lot of the latter, unfortunately. But for me the labor piece is the most inspiring. I know the numbers are not actually increasing in terms of the percentage of workers who are union members. But people want to be in unions. People I know are talking about unionism who are not political. I think there has been a huge shift. It’s been very powerful. It is systemic and values based. Things like mutual aid, worker cooperatives, or even things like user unions of addicts who are engaging in harm reduction. This is like a broader recognition. The recognition part is a form of infrastructure—the awareness is a form of infrastructure.

When I looked into where mutual aid efforts are today, I found they had dissipated. The sites don’t go anywhere. But the idea of mutual aid is an idea that is out there. It is a meme. It is a way of thinking about helping one other. It is not charity. It is a two-way stream: a kind of equivalence—mutual giving and taking. That notion, like the power of labor, has filtered through to people’s consciousness.

SD: Is there anything else you would like to add?

AQ: I think what I’m hoping to do is some myth busting. The dystopian social safety net is part of this myth busting. The fact that people are providing aid is good. But the fact that these practices need to exist is not.

The other myth I am trying to bust is the story of Horatio Alger—he was a monster. If we look at a lot of the people who made the self-made myth—first, they are not actually self-made. They also had many reasons to want to devalue mutualism and community. And they often possessed huge wealth even though that might be denied. It is worth looking at the origins of these ideologies. And to do some biographical reading, which is not what we were told to do in graduate school. But let’s look more carefully at some of the paradoxes of these people who created these stories that we are all living under.

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

This is the second article from A Green New Deal on the Ground, a series produced with the Climate and Community Project, a progressive climate policy think tank developing cutting-edge research at the climate and inequality nexus. The series examines how Green New Deal initiatives aim to create climate policy that positively impacts everyday life, explores the political coalitions and campaigns centering environmental justice and equity in decarbonization across the US, and champions both broad-based movement building and institutional power to harness resources and push for change.

Last week, the Build Public Renewables Act passed in the New York State Senate. The BPRA would create a public energy option in New York by expanding the ability of the New York Power Authority, the state’s public utility, to finance, build, and operate affordable, reliable renewable energy. In doing so, it would advance the state’s ambitious goal, outlined in the 2019 Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, of reaching 70 percent renewable energy by 2030.

The bill’s passage in the senate reflects a new wave of climate activism that demands the development of renewable energy sources to fend off climate disaster, as well as community control—not corporate control—over the next energy system. Though in her proposed budget Governor Kathy Hochul included a limited version of the bill that reduces its commitments to unions and public control, New York still has the chance to pass legislation that would create equity and ensure that households that need it most get cheap, renewable power.

Expanding the NYPA would help counter decades of privatization of the electricity sector, which has resulted in higher household bills and limited service capacity. In addition to creating thousands of well-paid union jobs across the state, BPRA would provide discounted energy bills to working-class families and could lower rates for one million households, particularly benefitting the state’s Black and Brown communities, who suffer from disproportionate energy burdens.

The core tenets of BPRA—public ownership, climate mitigation, and racial and economic justice—are also core tenets of the Green New Deal and position the BPRA as a model for other cities and states to imitate. A Green New Deal for Electricity requires coordinated industrial policy to deploy renewable energy quickly and democratize control among workers and communities. The BPRA is a model of what this could look like nationwide.

The Myth of “Consumer Choice”

The Build Public Renewables campaign seeks to reverse the utility deregulation that occurred in the latter half of the twentieth century. In 1978, President Jimmy Carter took the first big step to deregulate the US energy sector with the Public Utilities Regulatory Policies Act. PURPA opened electricity markets to “Independent Power Producers,” or private utility companies, and incentivized public utilities to buy from them. It was a classic neoliberal strategy for industry management: deregulation would create a more competitive and efficient energy system, which, in turn, would lower ballooning energy costs and allow renewables to enter the market.

Before PURPA, utilities operated all their generation, transmission, and distribution lines. After the bill’s passage, states, including New York, deregulated their energy systems and forced public utilities to sell off their energy-generation infrastructure to keep up with bloated—and increasingly consolidated—utility companies, like ConEdison and PG&E, which manipulated regulators and extracted exorbitant rates from their customers.

Deregulation brought on decades of crises. Enron infamously exploited the newly deregulated California system in the 1990s, leading to severe energy shortages and skyrocketing costs. More recently, climate-induced Winter Storm Uri exposed the instability of Texas’ highly deregulated utility system, leading to sweeping blackouts and unfathomably high customer bills. As one portfolio manager put it, crises like the ones in Texas created a “Wild West market designed based only on short-run prices.”

Since the 1990s, states across the country have coupled renewable-energy goals with deregulation to kickstart a transformation of the power sector. These “free market” advocates have called for “consumer choice” in energy consumption, even though the market has predictably not improved the sector. Today, customers choose between energy service companies, all of which provide expensive, unreliable electricity. The promise of lower energy bills has not been kept, and wages for workers in private wind and solar, along with unionization rates, remain low.

Without regulation, private utility companies continue to act in predatory and manipulative ways to maximize profits, often targeting non-native English speakers or low-income individuals with deceptive marketing and cost markups. In fact, New York banned such companies from marketing to low-income households in 2016. Public and cooperative ownership are better suited to a just and renewable energy system—but the private sector has a strong grip on the energy system nationwide.

Rewiring the Private Sector Mindset

Public institutions require political will to make the leap to renewable energy. But decades of austerity and the corporatization of public institutions have shifted the ethos of government agencies.

In a recent report on public and cooperative utilities, researchers with the Climate and Community Project found that public utilities increasingly hired managers with corporate backgrounds who were more focused on running the institutions as private businesses and eschewing oversight than providing a public service. The previous CEO of NYPA, Gil Quinones, came from the private sector, and after his tenure at NYPA ended in 2021, he become CEO of ComEd—a private utility in Chicago that recently fought off a municipalization campaign. Justin Driscoll now runs NYPA but has maintained a private-sector approach to a public institution, rejecting BPRA as “unworkable.”

Management by former private-sector workers is only one part of the energy sector’s problem. Taking on debt or shifting operations to improve institutions can intimidate staff operating in calcified, underfunded institutions. NYPA illustrates this bind, as it is hesitant to take on its new proposed role.

Counteracting private sector principles is imperative to building a new public utilities system based on justice, renewables, and democracy. In the case of existing institutions like NYPA, such work requires finding champions in the institution itself who are ready to fight for change. It also requires redesigning the institution’s infrastructure by granting decision-making power to workers outside the management suite, designing in accountability to environmental justice communities, and co-developing transition plans.

Such reforms are already underway. In Colorado, rural electric cooperative organizers passed new accountability measures for that promotes transparency to stop closed-door meetings and deals. Across the Atlantic, Paris brought its water utility back in house, instituting a multi-stakeholder board and a “Water Observatory” as a public education and accountability method.

Not every city or state has an institution like NYPA. As such, not all organizers fighting for public power and a Green New Deal for Electricity have to cater to legacy institutions’ fossilized procedures and infrastructure. Instead, activists in these states have room to reimagine how utilities should work for their communities. Most public and cooperative utilities were launched in the 1920s and 40s by White men and are based on a centralized, fossil-fueled energy system. New institutions should start with a vision of the future we need to build, not the energy system of the past or the structural racism embedded in many institutions.

Lowering Bills, Creating Jobs

Public power campaigns have popped up across the country to achieve a Green New Deal for Electricity at the legislative level. Maine has an upcoming ballot initiative to place the electrical grid under public control, and cities like Louisville and Chicago are considering municipalization to achieve their energy targets. Representatives Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman introduced a federal resolution for Public Power last year, with Bowman stating, “We need an energy system that is of, by, and for the people—not corporations seeking the largest possible profit.”

It’s clear that the market isn’t up to the challenge, as the United States is already in a utility affordability crisis. Electric utilities shut off households more than 3.5 million times from the pandemic’s onset to May 2022. Increasing inflation and the war in Ukraine has further increased energy costs for families who were already on the brink. About one third of US households live in “energy poverty,” among them disproportionate numbers of Black, Latinx, and Native families. In many cases, these same families are paying for our fossil-fueled system with their health; highways, natural gas facilities, and other energy industries are concentrated in low-income neighborhoods of color, where they spew pollution.

Energy bills impact people in visceral ways. Many families must decide between paying their utility bill or paying for medication. A renewable energy system should first benefit those most harmed by the current electricity system—both in terms of high bills and pollution—to ensure that these communities see the impact of the transition and feel that they have a stake in it.

Communities in New York are already moving toward this goal. For instance, Sunset Park in Brooklyn—where 68 percent of the population identifies as Asian or Hispanic and 28 percent live below the poverty line—is home to polluting industry and peaker gas plants, some of the dirtiest high-emission power sources. Uprose, a community-based group, organized the Sunset Park community to install a solar project on the Brooklyn Army Terminal roof, saving subscribers about 20 percent on their utility bills.

A large institution like NYPA could be a public partner in such efforts, working with local organizers and community members to deploy renewable energy, energy efficiency, and electrification statewide while providing capacity and work opportunities. The Build Public Renewables Act not only mandates that NYPA build public renewable energy, but that the energy be sold at a discount to low-income households to alleviate energy burdens.

Thousands of publicly and cooperatively owned utilities across the country could play a similar role. Despite the past four decades of electricity policy, public power has a long history in the United States—with New York as a crucial leader. In 1913, during his term as New York Governor, Franklin D. Roosevelt founded NYPA. He considered it his biggest achievement, describing public utilities as checks against the power of for-profit energy companies and important yardsticks with which to evaluate the sector. NYPA inspired Roosevelt to later organize the Rural Electrification Administration, which increased rural electrification household rates from 10 to 90 percent in 10 years—the type of clip and scale we need to transition to renewable energy and tackle the climate crisis.

By pushing back on a private, market-based approach to renewable energy and providing affordable renewable energy to New Yorkers, NYPA could be the testing ground for a Green New Deal for Electricity. The bill’s high labor standards, democratic oversight, and affordable renewable energy development would not replace Independent Power Producers overnight, but they would enable NYPA to compete with such producers, providing a model for the public to advance decarbonization plans. Just as NYPA ushered in a new era of public power and industrial planning in the 1930s, expanding NYPA today can set the stage for a Green New Deal nationwide.

The Inflation Reduction Act Helps

Public power campaigns have popped up across the country to achieve a Green New Deal for Electricity at the legislative level. Maine has an upcoming ballot initiative to place the electrical grid under public control, and cities like Louisville and Chicago are considering municipalization to achieve their energy targets. Representatives Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman introduced a federal resolution for Public Power last year, with Bowman stating, “We need an energy system that is of, by, and for the people—not corporations seeking the largest possible profit.”

It’s clear that the market isn’t up to the challenge, as the United States is already in a utility affordability crisis. Electric utilities shut off households more than 3.5 million times from the pandemic’s onset to May 2022. Increasing inflation and the war in Ukraine has further increased energy costs for families who were already on the brink. About one third of US households live in “energy poverty,” among them disproportionate numbers of Black, Latinx, and Native families. In many cases, these same families are paying for our fossil-fueled system with their health; highways, natural gas facilities, and other energy industries are concentrated in low-income neighborhoods of color, where they spew pollution.

Energy bills impact people in visceral ways. Many families must decide between paying their utility bill or paying for medication. A renewable energy system should first benefit those most harmed by the current electricity system—both in terms of high bills and pollution—to ensure that these communities see the impact of the transition and feel that they have a stake in it.

Communities in New York are already moving toward this goal. For instance, Sunset Park in Brooklyn—where 68 percent of the population identifies as Asian or Hispanic and 28 percent live below the poverty line—is home to polluting industry and peaker gas plants, some of the dirtiest high-emission power sources. Uprose, a community-based group, organized the Sunset Park community to install a solar project on the Brooklyn Army Terminal roof, saving subscribers about 20 percent on their utility bills.

A large institution like NYPA could be a public partner in such efforts, working with local organizers and community members to deploy renewable energy, energy efficiency, and electrification statewide while providing capacity and work opportunities. The Build Public Renewables Act not only mandates that NYPA build public renewable energy, but that the energy be sold at a discount to low-income households to alleviate energy burdens.

Thousands of publicly and cooperatively owned utilities across the country could play a similar role. Despite the past four decades of electricity policy, public power has a long history in the United States—with New York as a crucial leader. In 1913, during his term as New York Governor, Franklin D. Roosevelt founded NYPA. He considered it his biggest achievement, describing public utilities as checks against the power of for-profit energy companies and important yardsticks with which to evaluate the sector. NYPA inspired Roosevelt to later organize the Rural Electrification Administration, which increased rural electrification household rates from 10 to 90 percent in 10 years—the type of clip and scale we need to transition to renewable energy and tackle the climate crisis.

By pushing back on a private, market-based approach to renewable energy and providing affordable renewable energy to New Yorkers, NYPA could be the testing ground for a Green New Deal for Electricity. The bill’s high labor standards, democratic oversight, and affordable renewable energy development would not replace Independent Power Producers overnight, but they would enable NYPA to compete with such producers, providing a model for the public to advance decarbonization plans. Just as NYPA ushered in a new era of public power and industrial planning in the 1930s, expanding NYPA today can set the stage for a Green New Deal nationwide.

New York State Lights the Way

The private sector and its capitalist logic, prioritizing profits over public priorities, has reigned over the electricity sector for decades, extracting wealth from communities and leaving them with pollution. The transition to renewable energy need not necessarily be a public good. An uncoordinated, private approach to energy could mean a too-slow transition, continued high bills, low-roads jobs, and profits for Wall Street. It will take organizing and structural change to reorder the electricity system.

Over the past two years, organizers in New York state have built a powerful campaign to do just this. The BPRA is a popular policy, supported by the Democratic Socialists of America, the organizers who passed the 2019 landmark Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, environmental justice organizations, like Uprose and WeAct for Environmental Justice, as well as unions, including healthcare, education, and auto workers. Though still hesitant about shifting power dynamics in the energy market, electric-worker union leaders admitted that the bill has “exceptional” pro-union standards. This growing coalition has elected public power champions like Zohran Mamdani and Sarahana Shrestha, who are moving the political game from the inside with activists’ help.

This fight to pass the Build Public Renewables Act is just the beginning of New York’s potential transition to public control. The BPRA focuses on energy generation, not distribution. If the bill passes, the next step is to put the entire power grid in public hands.

The power grid ensures a constant supply of electricity, including during a crisis. New Yorkers are experiencing unprecedented climate emergencies, with oppressive heat waves and more frequent and intense hurricanes. A state-run grid would provide New York with more control over utility bills and shutoffs. The Public Power New York coalition has this goal in sight, designing the NY Utility Democracy Act to transfer ownership of grid infrastructure to the public and build in participatory practices.

Electricity can be invisible to the wealthy. They flick a switch, and their lights turn on. They turn a knob, and their house warms. For many working-class and multi-racial communities, electricity is far more personal. The natural gas peaker plant around the corner gives neighborhood children asthma as it powers the grid. These communities juggle the cost of an inhaler versus warmth in the winter. A Green New Deal for Electricity is powerful when it treats access to affordable, renewable energy as a human right. New York’s campaign has begun to lay a pathway toward a decarbonized, affordable, and publicly owned future.

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

A major shift is happening in which BIPOC leaders are reclaiming rest, and a newly established philanthropic fund seeks to support it.

In Washington state, the BIPOC-ED Coalition—a multicultural, cross-sector collective of nonprofit leaders working to promote community wellness and restoration—has committed $1.37M to fund sabbaticals for BIPOC leaders. Recognizing that rest is essential for healing and social justice, the coalition established a fund, resourced by philanthropic partners, to launch the Sabbatical Leadership Program. This effort enables nonprofit leaders of color to take a break from work and create room for self-care—on their own terms.

The need for rest isn’t limited to Washington state—it’s a nationwide issue that needs to be addressed. Given this, the BIPOC-ED Coalition’s work raises the question: What if every state established a coalition that organizes to create avenues for rest, particularly in communities most harmed by systemic oppression? What if these coalitions were fully funded and backed the collective vision of BIPOC leaders who are drawing from lived experience and are attuned to the reality that communities need to build solutions that inspire healing?

The BIPOC-ED Coalition certainly offers a model for how executive directors can organize to create opportunities for rest and how philanthropy can work in solidarity to fund these efforts.

Normalizing Rest

What if every state established a coalition that organizes to create avenues for rest, particularly in communities most harmed by systemic oppression?Rest is vital to our wellbeing, enabling the body to heal itself on a cellular level.¹ Dr. Merrill Mitler, a neuroscientist at National Institutes of Health, says, “Sleep [benefits] all aspects of our body in one way or another: molecular, energy balance, as well as intellectual function, alertness, and mood.” ² A lack of sleep can have detrimental impacts on our bodies, including increased risk for chronic disease and infection.

Dr. Chandra Jackson, head of the Social & Environment Determinants of Health Equity Group at NIH, warns, “poor sleep is associated with a host of [chronic] health outcomes, including obesity, hypertension, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and certain cancers.” ³ Jackson’s research examines racial inequities in health and notes that disparities in sleep—such as higher rates of poor sleep quality among Black professionals—may contribute to the disproportionate burden of chronic health conditions experienced by people of color.

At the root of these issues are white supremacy and its attendant systemic racism, which burdens communities of color and cause many BIPOC leaders to sacrifice sleep to support the communities they serve.

“We know firsthand how #BIPOCLeaders have been put in impossible situations—responding to decades of inequity, tasked with changing systems from within, increased demands in services—all with limited funding,” says BIPOC-ED Coalition in a Twitter post calling for applications to the Sabbatical Leadership Program. The coalition seeks to create pathways for healing and support paradigm shifts that normalize rest, especially among leaders working to advance social change.

Jodi Nishioka, the coalition’s co-founder, reminds us that we cannot advance social justice without prioritizing rest for the leaders working tirelessly to create change. In a blog entitled “How My Sabbatical Healed Me,” Nishioka describes how rest and self-care can have a ripple effect, benefitting not only individuals, but the communities they serve. She notes,

Having to earn self-care is a common narrative in our western culture. Yet, when we prioritize taking care of ourselves—through rest, therapy, and movement, we can serve others better. An empty well doesn’t provide water for anyone.

The well-being of executive directors is reason enough to support sabbaticals. Physically and emotionally rested executive directors are able to show up as their best selves for their staff, their community, and their families. And, just like an individual person, an organization will be better able to support its community when the people within it are healthy and strong.

Nishioka acknowledges that “BIPOC leaders need rest and restoration in order to heal from multigenerational trauma and years of non-stop working on behalf of their communities, and to recharge for the work ahead.” This was, in part, the impetus for establishing the BIPOC-ED Coalition. The coalition’s recent report, Sabbaticals for BIPOC Leaders, describes how the coalition was conceived and provides a roadmap for others to take similar action.

Nishioka, along with Andrea Caupain Sanderson and Victoria Santos—three BIPOC leaders serving in executive director/CEO roles—joined forces to form the coalition as an outcry against the “immense damage caused by systemic racism.”⁴ The co-founders saw an opportunity for BIPOC leaders to come together and deepen collective efforts underway to build social ecosystems in which communities of color thrive.

Building a Movement of Rest

Recognizing the power of collective action, more than 150 BIPOC leaders responded to the coalition’s first call to convene in 2020. “What we’re doing is movement building. This is an important ingredient in the quest for a just and equitable world,” says Sanderson. To date, more than 240 BIPOC leaders across Washington state have joined the coalition to build a shared vision and work in solidarity to advance healing and wellness in their communities.

The Sabbatical Leadership Program launched in 2022 with awards to 32 BIPOC leaders. Three-month sabbaticals have been awarded to 20 leaders, and 12 leaders received one-month respites. Each sabbatical award comes with financial resources directed to the awardee and the organization they represent. This includes approximately $30,000 to cover the awardee’s salary and benefits, along with $10,000 “in unrestricted funding for the leader to use as they see fit.”⁵ In addition, $20,000 is allocated to support the organizations’ overall health during the sabbatical, enabling organizations to hire a consultant to develop a transition plan while also providing bonuses and leadership development resources to senior leaders who will take on increased responsibilities while the awardee steps away.

“I have never taken a break,”⁶ says Jamee Marsh, a sabbatical awardee and executive director of FEEST—a nonprofit working to support youth to advance social justice by organizing for systemic change in their schools. Marsh continues, “This is an opportunity to look at what I truly need to replenish myself. Having sustained time away would allow me to…(re)establish healthy practices, and actually rest. This is an opportunity to THRIVE, not just survive.”⁷

Having time to focus on self and establish healthy practices is a theme that resonates among many awardees, including Hamdi Abdulle, executive director of African Community Housing & Development, a nonprofit that provides housing, education, and economic development resources to immigrants of the African diaspora. Abdulle says, “This sabbatical will be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for reconnection with my family, and a time for me to cultivate peace. I will also be working on my health… As an elder, I am learning how to take care of my body in this new stage of life.”⁸

Moving forward, the coalition commits to funding sabbaticals for nonprofit leaders each year. It acknowledges the support of a myriad of funders—such as JP Morgan Chase, Black Future Coop Fund, Medina Foundation, Sheng-Yen Lu Foundation, Stolte Family Foundation, and Satterberg Foundation—who have joined forces to make this vision possible.

So many of us sacrifice sleep, doctor appointments, time with loved ones—the list goes on—all in service of our commitment to transforming systems to better serve our communities. It is time to replenish, and we need the infrastructure to support this.

Notes

1. https://newsinhealth.nih.gov/2013/04/benefits-slumber?c
2. https://newsinhealth.nih.gov/2013/04/benefits-slumber?c
3. https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/25/health/racial-inequities-sleep/index.html
4. https://bipocedcoalitionwa.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Sabbaticals-for-BIPOC-Leaders.pdf
5. https://bipocedcoalitionwa.org/sabbaticals-for-bipoc-leaders-capacity-building-healing-renewal/
6. https://bipocedcoalitionwa.org/news/2022-sabbatical-awardees/
7. https://bipocedcoalitionwa.org/news/2022-sabbatical-awardees/
8. https://bipocedcoalitionwa.org/news/2022-sabbatical-awardees/

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

The following is a transcript of the video above, from our webinar on “Remaking the Economy: Black Food Sovereignty, Community Stories.” View the full webinar here.

Brielle Wright: I’m on a couple of food policy councils, and it has been very rewarding. I don’t know that I knew as much about food policy before I got involved in these spaces. And I think this is what kind of pushed me in terms of the advocacy space, not realizing how much is connected to the food that we eat. I don’t think people realize that even when it comes to urban planning and how a community is set up or where certain money is being spent within a community, in terms of sidewalks or what grocery stores are being built, we’re not at a lot of these policy meetings. We’re not—at least people of color. When I have gone to some of the city council meetings or community meetings for whatever it may be, sometimes I’m the only person of color in the room…And depending on the event, I could be the only Black female in the room. Depending on what agriculture organization or workshop it might be, again, I’m going to be one of very few…

There was a situation where an organization helped a family keep their land from a road, a highway, major highway going through their land. And when I saw that, I was like, wow, they put a lot of money behind this. And it was a great thing, right? But would they have done the same thing for me? And when I saw it, I also thought, this was done because people understood policy. Not just food policy, but they understood policy, and they were involved in community meetings. They were involved. They knew what urban planning looked like. They had somebody on the board to advocate for them. They had all of these different things happening in the background that stopped this from happening. They understood the—gosh, what is it called?—the agriculture district. They understood that about their communities. I had never even heard of that before. But there are things where you can set up to have your land put into say, a “voluntary ag” district. I’m part of that. So, before you can bulldoze through my land, there’s got to be a meeting about it. A lot of people don’t know that those things exist. The biggest thing with policy for me is that—or how it relates—food policy, urban policy, all of the above, one of the things I’ve learned is we have to be involved in these meetings. We have to understand what’s taking place, we have to know people, we have to train up our children, we have to train up the people who could go in and represent us in an amazing way for things to happen, for change to be made. So just in this whole food policy—policy period—we have got to educate ourselves, we have got to be intentional, and we’ve got to strategize. That way we can see these changes happen, so that we can see things not just taken from us so easily.

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