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This article is part of Community Strategies for Systemic Change, an ongoing series co-produced by the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) and NPQ. In the series, urban and rural grassroots leaders from across the United States share how their communities are developing and implementing strategies—grounded in local places, cultures, and histories—to shift power and achieve systemic change.

It wasn’t until I was about halfway through serving a 10-year prison sentence for a crime I committed when I was 19 that I began taking college classes. In the prisons where I was held before, access to higher education was limited to people with shorter sentences—under five years—supposedly because such people would be better positioned to make use of that education on the outside. I often say that I could have had a doctorate by the time I was released if my access had been different.

When I was released from prison in 2009, I applied to the University of New Orleans. I checked the box asking if I had a conviction. I was denied admission even though I had excellent grades and test scores. A couple years later, I decided to do it differently: I filled out the application again, same as before, but this time I didn’t check the box. I was admitted, received scholarships, and eventually graduated cum laude from Louisiana State University Health Science Sciences Center New Orleans with a degree in clinical laboratory science. I then became a medical technologist with plans to go to medical school.

But that was me—one person among the 600,000 who are released from prison every year in America. We know that many prospective students don’t apply to colleges or universities after encountering questions about an applicant’s criminal history. They assume there’s no hope, no way forward. And this is just one of the countless obstacles that block incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people from receiving the education that they need. Barring people in prison from access to higher education because their sentences are too long, or barring them from the financial aid, technology, or internet required to engage in educational pursuits—these are all part of the criminal justice landscape.

Avoiding the Recidivism Trap 

We know that there’s an inverse relationship between recidivism and education. A Texas study found that while systemwide recidivism was 43.3 percent, for people who achieved a bachelor’s degree, that rate fell to 5.6 percent, and for those with master’s degrees, it was less than one percent. The Center for Prison Education, reporting national figures, estimates that taking college courses in prison reduces the likelihood of recidivism by 43 percent.

Around 2016, while I was studying for the MCATs, I worked on behalf of the women that I had left behind by speaking publicly about my prison experiences and what needed to change. I began meeting women doing the same kind of work and realized this was something I could do full time.

I decided that medical school would have to wait. Instead, I became the founder and executive director of Operation Restoration, a Louisiana nonprofit dedicated to supporting women and girls impacted by incarceration. Today, we have a staff of 20 people who support justice-involved women and girls. Eighty percent of our staff is formerly incarcerated or otherwise impacted. All our programs have been designed by formerly incarcerated women.

Engaging in Advocacy for Education Access

Everything we do at Operation Restoration is done through the lens of prison abolition, the goal that inspires our work. The US prison system was created by and for affluent white men. Even before it became a primary apparatus for disenfranchising and extracting labor from incarcerated people, especially Black people, it was never designed to serve people of color, poor people, or women and girls. But alongside the overarching goal of abolition, fundamental changes—like access to higher education—can happen within the system and, indeed, are intrinsic to dismantling it.

A big part of our work is breaking down policy barriers. Our organization—with the support of other formerly incarcerated women—wrote the language and advocated for Act 276, which Governor John Bel Edwards signed into law in 2017, making Louisiana the first state in the nation to “ban the box” in higher education admissions. We’ve helped remove the question from college applications in six other states, and we to remove the box from the Common Application for higher education.

Incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people also lobbied to strike question 23, about prior drug convictions, from the FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid). Drug convictions impact people of color disproportionately. Consequently, many of the people who most need financial aid are excluded from it.

Activism has led to other federal policy changes. In 1994, provisions of the so-called crime bill, supported by President Bill Clinton, included a clause that ended Pell grants—federal financial aid for students with exceptional need—for people in prison. Before this law was passed, some 772 schools brought college classes to incarcerated people nationwide. By 1997, when the bill went into effect, only eight remained. The Vera Institute reports that about 375 schools offer college-in-prison programs today, but just 35 percent of state prisons currently offer college courses. Thanks to the work of prison abolition organizers, Pell grants have been restored for those eligible to enroll in college-in-prison programs, beginning in July 2023, as part of the FAFSA Simplification Act. Now, perhaps, programs will be restored and educational opportunities in prison can revive to pre-1994 levels.

Meeting the Unique Educational Needs of Formerly Incarcerated Women

Justice-involved women and girls have an even harder time accessing education than men, both in and out of prison. Women currently make up about 15 percent of incarcerated students, more than double their percentage of the US prison population. But only seven percent of the incarcerated students who earned credentials in the 2020–21 academic year were women.

That’s why programs tailored by formerly incarcerated women are so critical—because we understand the obstacles such women face when seeking education and what their needs really are after release, from childcare to personal health and hygiene. Operation Restoration offers multiple educational approaches, ranging from a re-entry GED program (which includes transportation, childcare, and snacks), to a college-in-prison program—run in partnership with Tulane University’s School of Professional Advancement—that serves dozens of women a year, to a lab assistant program with a local community college that places technicians in health sector jobs immediately upon release.

Changing the Narrative

I can say from experience that the US carceral system is not always invested in making sure people on the inside hear positive reports about their chances for success! All you hear are stories about people who recidivate and, once back inside, tell you how hard it is. Most of the women I know are terrified on their release day, wondering if they will make it.

For this reason, we prioritize getting positive stories back inside. I often visit prisons with my colleagues from Operation Restoration, who themselves have been incarcerated, to inspire the women and show them that change is possible. I used to purposely meet with incarcerated women while wearing my scrubs, and they’d say, “Oh, you work in the hospital? I was told I would never be able to work in a hospital.” My reply is that they can absolutely get a job in a hospital, and if they want to be a doctor, we’ll work on that, too.

In addition to providing benefits such as reduced recidivism, better employment opportunities, and enhanced ability to support one’s family and build wealth, education can have a powerful impact on how current and formerly incarcerated women see themselves and how their children see them. This is part of systemic change.

Moving Toward Systemic Change

The prison abolition movement is fueled by the intelligence, expertise, and insight that currently and formerly incarcerated people bring to the table. In any other profession, experience is lauded, but for legal system-involved people, that experience has been a stigma.

Trauma is what led me, and the majority of the two million people incarcerated in America, to prison. But we are perfectly capable of and willing to work daily on these issues, and more and more people like me are pushing back on what society tells us about ourselves and what is possible in our lives.

Education is central to long-term prison abolition work. When I was in my college-in-prison program, a lot of the people in my housing unit became protective of my education. They asked questions and wanted to be involved and help. They were invested in me; we were a team. It was clear to me that education inside prison changes the prison’s culture and environment and, therefore, can be a powerful tool for change. For this and other reasons, it was important to me that our college-in-prison program was open to people with life sentences.

If people with long sentences are allowed to take college courses, imagine the impact on the prison environment going forward, and how they might participate in the education of others. Think about what that means—to have something to look forward to every day.

As with any far-reaching systemic inequity, it takes more than one strategy to upend mass incarceration. When I first started Operation Restoration, education was the cornerstone. I thought that all the problems of justice-involved people would be solved if such people could get an education. But formerly incarcerated women and girls said, “Hey, listen: How can I go to school if I’m hungry or I don’t have anywhere safe and secure to live?”

That’s when I began to understand that every individual has their own journey. Our role is to support them through that—with housing, job readiness, and direct services. That is why Operation Restoration has so many programs and why we must work to remove as many barriers as possible to ensure that people can be successful. If our goal is abolition—fundamental systemic change—then we will have to work on all these parts, simultaneously, to reach it.

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

This article is the seventh installment in our series co-produced by Bargaining for the Common Good and NPQ, titled Building a Movement for the Common Good. In this series, we learn how and why Bargaining for the Common Good (BCG) is the right strategy for our times of social crisis, featuring extreme wealth inequality and declining democracy as well as a renewed attention to labor organizing and mass uprisings for racial justice. The authors reflect on how organizing in higher education can take on the corporatized university by connecting campus to community.

Rutgers University alumnus Mark Hopkins remembers being cheered on by a group of over 200 higher education organizers when he hopped on stage and delivered an impromptu speech about student demands at the 2018 “Bargaining for the Common Good in Higher Ed” conference at Rutgers, New Jersey. The gathering encouraged participants to reimagine higher-ed contract campaigns as tools with which to win broader common good demands co-developed by student and community groups.

At the time, Mark was one of many students organizing for a $15 hourly minimum wage with Rutgers USAS Local 109 (United Students Against Sweatshops). Rutgers faculty unions, who were advocating for the students’ wage demand, brought the fight for $15 to the bargaining table during their negotiations. In hindsight, Mark says, the conference was his “aha moment” for finding a home in the labor movement.

The conference’s goals resonated with him, he said. “I was being educated about the labor movement, but also not feeling like I have to compromise my social justice commitments to my community and my people in order to join…or contribute to this movement,” he says. “It felt like I was still supporting and contributing to the larger struggle of the fights that are part of my life.”

Today, Mark is a staff organizer with Rutgers AAUP-AFT, the full-time faculty, graduate worker, postdoctoral associate, and counselor union, where he helps design the union’s Bargaining for the Common Good strategy. The strategy brings Rutgers AAUP-AFT together with New Labor, a worker center representing Spanish-speaking communities in New Brunswick and across the state; Cosecha NJ, an advocacy organization focused on the rights of undocumented immigrants; and student groups on campus. This fall, workers, students, and the community will work together in a shared campaign both on the ground and at the bargaining table.

Community, Worker, and Student Power

The corporatized higher education system and the capital accumulation projects embedded in it depend on extracting labor from working-class people, disproportionately from vulnerable backgrounds. Historian Davarian Baldwin has described this “modern-day company town” effect, where colleges and universities control everything from wage ceilings to housing prices at both the campus and city levels.

To respond to these systemic issues, the Rutgers-based coalition has embraced a guiding vision for forging a strategy—crafted by and for workers, students, and the community—to create a socially just university. Such a vision not only invigorates campaigns, but builds alignment across what Baldwin has called higher education’s new “shop floor,” which extends from our campuses into our communities. “When we see higher education not as a place cut off from the rest of society, but as an institution embedded within cities,” Baldwin explains, “then we can begin to offer some materialist analysis that connects the campus to the city, to city hall, to the statehouse, to the shop floor. The campus is the shop floor for the city.” Only via an alignment of higher ed workers, students, and the community can we harness the power to re-imagine our public universities.

The 2018 conference at Rutgers, which brought together community and racial justice leaders from 50 campuses across the country, was a critical step toward organizing across the new shop floor. Professor Deepa Kumar, then president of Rutgers AAUP-AFT, worked to commit the union to the fight to protect DACA students and organize against Trump’s travel bans. But there were limitations to the traditional model of union organizing. The union was primarily reacting, rather than proactively integrating community needs into its contract campaign strategy. “While we had built relationships with community-based organizations, we had yet to make community demands part of our contract negotiations, and we wanted to learn from the experience of others,” says Kumar.

Kathleen Brower, Organizing Director for Bargaining for the Common Good and a fellow at Rutgers’ Center for Innovation in Worker Organization, argues that bargaining for the common good in higher education starts with the knowledge that everyone is being hurt by the increasingly corporatized management of universities. She sees bargaining as “a nexus of power” and “a legal mechanism that can be leveraged beyond workers and their own issues to actually win improvements that communities and students have been fighting for for years.” The key to winning is to bridge fights—from students fighting against sweatshops, to workers fighting for higher wages, to tenants fighting for lower rent—which are less powerful when separated. “When we see our interests as aligned—when we see that we do have the same interests and that the same people are holding us back—then we can work together and have real power to win more.”

Interconnected Fights

Labor and social justice coalitions must grapple with the many ways that universities govern far beyond campus walls. Universities in the US took shape in a settler-colonial environment, and axes of privilege based on class, race, sex, and country of origin have long determined whose interests are represented at the bargaining table. These connections mean that higher education organizing cannot be separate from larger liberation movements.

As with any union organizing, the first step in building a campaign is to have conversations about people’s concerns and desires and craft demands around them. Shortly after the 2018 conference, New Labor, Rutgers AAUP-AFT, and a coalition of student organizations called Rutgers One launched a survey of students and community members in New Brunswick.

From April through August, students and New Labor members knocked on hundreds of doors, reaching some 100 short- and long-term New Brunswick residents. The survey revealed that better, more affordable housing was a top concern for most residents and that many landlords preferred student over non-student renters. It also highlighted other concerns, including low wages both on and off campus, lack of free parking, and high rates of parking tickets near Rutgers.

It became clear that, as the largest landlord in New Brunswick, Rutgers has an immense impact on the city’s cost of living. When Rutgers set high prices for room and board, other landlords also raised their prices, and developers were encouraged to build housing complexes that were unaffordable for many.

The summer 2018 survey was critical in highlighting housing as an issue and suggesting a foundation for the coalition to build on, in tune with renters across the nation who are mobilizing against astronomical rent hikes. Coalition members took on an issue shared by most people who live, work, teach, and study in the region. In so doing, they prepared themselves to mobilize alongside housing justice organizers across the country.

Lincoln Annex is NOT for Sale

While the coalition was gearing up its campaign, a battle erupted that forced everyone to change focus. In the fall of 2019, Rutgers University, Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, and DEVCO, a real estate firm with a nonprofit designation, announced a $750 million expansion of the Rutgers Cancer Institute. A new facility would be built across the street from the hospital, necessitating the demolition of Lincoln Annex Middle School, one of the region’s best-performing schools. Displaced students would be located to a makeshift facility housed on a contaminated, toxic warehouse site. The fight that ensued between community members and the political elite was a classic illustration of community disenfranchisement and unmovable corporate agendas.

Rutgers professor Lilia Fernandez said she learned about the plan through her community organizing and immediately felt it was important for her union and the larger Rutgers community to get involved. “The New Brunswick student population is almost a hundred percent Latino children, mostly low-income, working-class children of immigrants, many of them undocumented,” Fernandez said, “I knew that this was a very marginalized population that did not have a whole lot of power or rights here locally.”

In the months that followed, parents, students, faculty, and community members formed the Coalition to Defend Lincoln Annex School. Rutgers AAUP-AFT and student coalitions joined to protest the proposal, and in late January 2020, people rallied during the public comment section of the Rutgers Board of Governors meeting. Many parents of Lincoln Annex students spoke out, along with Rutgers students and faculty.

However, as the fight began to pick up steam, the COVID pandemic struck, making it increasingly difficult for the community to successfully oppose Lincoln Annex’s destruction. That didn’t stop the grassroots organizing. In May 2020, a caravan of vehicles and socially distanced activists marched and rode through New Brunswick, insisting that “¡Lincoln Annex no se vende!” (Lincoln Annex is not for sale!) Throughout spring and summer 2020, Zoom emerged as a new battleground; at virtual Board of Governors meetings, the administration muted participants and restricted speaking time.

With Rutgers students demanding a reduction in tuition fees during the pandemic and faculty and staff reeling from mass layoffs and budget cuts, coalition and community alignment stayed strong. A September 2020 masked rally under the slogan, “March4RLivesRJobsRSchools,” drew connections between increased precarity and vulnerability for lower-income Rutgers students and part-time faculty and the ongoing fight to defend Lincoln Annex.

Despite these efforts, the fight to save the school was ultimately lost. But community pressure forced the New Brunswick Board of Education to allocate an extra $25 million to the development of a new school in a more suitable location. The coalition that formed to spread the word, create art and documentaries, and mobilize for both New Brunswick Board of Education and Rutgers Board of Governors meetings had a long-lasting impact on all the communities involved.

In reflecting on the campaign, Lilia Fernandez says, “I think one of the most important lessons that I take away from all of this is the importance of union members being responsive to and taking an interest in the local communities where they operate…We have a responsibility to our neighbors, the least among us, those in our communities who do not have as much power or privilege as we do, to be strong allies, support local struggles, and help defend people’s rights at really critical moments.”

Next Steps for a Growing Coalition

When the 2022-23 academic year begins, members of Rutgers AAUP-AFT will be working without a contract; their previous contract expired on June 30, 2022. The union is organizing a critical contract campaign whose central goals are focused around the problem of contingent work and include demands for pay parity, job security, and health care access for adjunct faculty; a pathway to tenure for full-time non-tenured faculty; and guaranteed funding and support for grad workers. The union will continue its fight for faculty pay equity across race, gender, campus, and other categories, while demanding salary increases that keep up with inflation.

These contract demands will move in tandem with an adjacent fight that centers the needs of community members and students. It makes three key demands: an excluded worker fund for workers who were ineligible for COVID support; a rent freeze for all Rutgers rental properties for the life of the contract; and forgiveness of internal fines and fees owed to Rutgers by undergraduate and graduate students. This set of demands, when pieced together, begin to articulate a healthier, more accountable university and community model.

Lou Kimmel, executive director of New Labor, explained why this campaign is important to New Labor members. “Now we are at the point where we want the university to support the well-being of the community, and we can fight for it at the bargaining table,” Lou says. “The community’s voice and the community’s demands are a part of the union’s demands, too, and there’s a lot more power if it’s not just one group but a collective.” Oscar Villar, a student organizer at Rutgers who has spoken out against tuition increases and the university’s lack of financial transparency, made a similar point. “We should do everything in our power to change this university,” Oscar says. “If not as students and faculty, it should be as humans that we organize for a better university.”

This summer and fall, in preparation for the campaign, New Labor, Cosecha, Rutgers AAUP-AFT, and student groups will knock on doors to reach more people living near the Rutgers campuses in New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark. Canvassers will not only learn about the issues that concern residents but will also have organizing conversations about housing, working conditions, student debt, and the pandemic’s long-lasting economic and social impacts.

Direct and relational organizing is a core aspect of the bargaining for the common good strategy, says Mark Hopkins. Incorporating the community into the labor movement is the only way to make sure that a contract does more than speak to wages and benefits. With a good contract, he says, “we’re able to live, feed ourselves, survive and then do our work. We know that’s a contract for our well-being, and we want the well-being of the community to be incorporated into that, because the community also contributes to the well-being of the university.”

The BCG model that developed at Rutgers can be adapted to almost any university setting—public or private—to build a movement based on love and solidarity on the new shop floor of higher education. BCG provides a means of connecting with people across campuses and communities around issues that they might feel alone in dealing with, issues that are often presented as individual problems: paying the rent, finding funding for school, making a living wage, dealing with debt. With this vision, we can challenge the corporate drumbeat of our universities and cities and secure dignity and justice for community members, students, and workers alike.

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

Darnell Adams: So, one is, my article is long. I didn’t expect it to be that long, you know? I was writing about a thing, and then it was connected to the next thing, which was connected to the next thing. So, I, too, am unclear who’s sitting down and reading the whole thing. And my sense is, so for people who are in my close network who have read it, because they probably were like, well, we love Darnell, we should read it. They’ve said they needed to read it about three times. Because there’s so much in it. It’s complicated, with a lot of different ideas, some of which people are not familiar with. Because I am speaking about the cooperative model, they may not know about that. But then I’m also speaking about lots of different things: history and trauma, and it goes in lots of different directions. It’s complex. So, I’m not sure who’s going to sit down and take the time.

So, I don’t know if—when I think about the field, I’m not sure who the field is. Who’s gonna sit and really read it, and then have it speak to them whatever way it is, and then reach out. It might be a kind of a slow burn, perhaps, that over time, as people work their way through the material or it comes to them, that then I might share more. I’m unclear.

But what I do know is, I was at a conference last week. And there was a hotel bar, and I sat down next to a guy—turns out he was at a law school, like, policy [or] law center. But it was a cooperative conference, and we were talking about something or another and I said, yeah, I actually have some ideas about the thing that you’re talking about in terms of funding and what funders could be looking for, particularly if they’re interested in supporting this work. I wrote a little something about it. You might want to have a cocktail or two, it’s gonna take a while for you to read, but I can send it to you. And so, he’s like, yeah, alright, fine. So, he gets onto his phone, and I see it, whatever window he has up is the cover of this magazine. And I’m like, “Oh, no, what’s that?” He was like, ”Someone sent this to me.” And he’s like, ”Oh, this article is by someone named Darnell Adams.” And I was like, “Well, I know her.” So, he’s like, ”Oh, yeah, this is being sent around right now at the law center.”

And I’m like, who knew? I wouldn’t think that’s the field. So, I guess it is.

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

The legacy of the civil rights movement to provide economic equality is not lost or forgotten.

Gary Cunningham, CEO, Prosperity Now

Last month, Prosperity Now, a national economic and racial justice nonprofit, hosted its first national in-person conference since 2018. Held in Atlanta, Georgia, the conference attracted over 1,200 people, making it one of the largest gatherings of racial and economic justice advocates since the start of the pandemic.

Historically, Prosperity Now, formerly called the Corporation for Enterprise Development, had focused on promoting tax incentive policies that support individual savings and wealth building by low-income Americans. This is still part of its agenda. However, Cunningham noted, the nonprofit now takes a much broader approach than seeking to “change a little program here and there.” A principal goal of the gathering in Atlanta, Cunningham insisted, was “to reimagine economic justice for all.” This reflects an organization-wide decision “to go bold and big to focus our work exclusively on racial and economic justice.”

The opening plenary—titled “Where Do We Go from Here?”—was an explicit callback to the last book published by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1967—namely, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? In the book, King called for the “total, direct, and immediate abolition of poverty.” King, of course, began his organizing and preaching career in Atlanta, so the callback was appropriate.

Earlier in 1967, at Riverside Church in Harlem, King made explicit the link between racism and economic injustice, noting, “When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

The extraordinary victories of the civil rights movement in the political sphere are rightly celebrated. Passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, for example, marked the first time that the United States approached universal adult suffrage, a “minimum threshold” that, according to political scientists, must be crossed for a country to be considered a “democracy.”

Yet, when it comes to the civil rights movement’s economic agenda, the record of achievement is far less pronounced. Today, for example, the racial wealth and wage gaps remain largely unchanged, and are indeed worse, than they were in King’s time.

So, where does the movement go from here? This question, posed at the conference’s opening session, served as a common thread that helped to connect the conference sessions. Below are some key themes that were raised over the course of the gathering.

The Long March of Institutions

One suggested strategy, offered by Glenn Harris, president of Race Forward, was to gain ownership of institutions. As Harris put it, “We have to own the institutions in our lives.” He particularly emphasized the need to own and control institutions at the local level. “There is so much national noise, and it matters,” Harris noted. “But the real change we are looking for is happening in our neighborhoods, our local communities. You can’t lose sight of that.”

Dr. Manuel Pastor, a longtime advisor of labor and social movement activists based at the University of Southern California, concurred. “How do you become impatient about injustice but patient about strategy?” Pastor asked. Transformation, he contended, will occur through “the long march of institutions.”

Challenging Harmful Narratives Through Data Linked to Activism 

A second plenary session was titled “Our Lives, Our Stories, Our Solutions.” On that panel, Eva Matos, an associate managing director for Ideas 42, a nonprofit consulting group, identified five false narratives that her group aimed to challenge. One is the false notion that poverty is a personal moral failing. The second is the myth that the United States is a meritocracy. A third myth is that welfare cheating is normal. The fourth is fatalism—the myth that poverty is inevitable. And the fifth is the paternalist myth—ie, the pernicious notion that people with low incomes need decisions to be made for them. In short, media discourse reduces poverty to individual behavior, ignoring systemic drivers of poverty that are rooted in structural racism and capitalism.

At a later plenary session on “Using Data to Advance Racial Wealth Equity,” Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist and founding director of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research, argued that research could help challenge the false narratives that Matos referenced. As Kendi emphasized, while some may like to attribute the racial wealth gap in whole or part to Black Americans’ alleged deficiencies, data from the field roundly refutes such claims.

For example, Kendi noted that a common refrain is, “If only Black people would save more,” the racial wealth gap would be less. But Kendi pointed out that the “data have shown that if you control for income, there are no differences in savings patterns. Studies show when you control for income and wealth, there aren’t disparities in financial education.”

During the conference, two large data projects on racial justice were highlighted. One is the Black Wealth Data Center, which aims to be a one-stop shop for racial impact data. The effort is funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies and is being incubated by Prosperity Now.

A second project, led by Alicia Garza, cofounder of Black Lives Matter and a principal of Black Future Labs, is called the Black Census. As Garza notes, this is the project’s second iteration; in 2018, an estimated 30,000 Black Americans were surveyed. This iteration aims to conduct 250,000 interviews. The census is finding that “Economic issues across the board are what are keeping people up overnight. Not having the safety net supports you need. Along with student debt being a huge concern. Unaffordable housing. Quality of affordable healthcare.”

Both Kendi and Garza were clear that data alone is insufficient. It needs to be embedded in larger movement strategies. Kendi called for a four-pronged approach that combines research with policy work, narrative change, and advocacy. For Garza too, policy and advocacy are critical. As Garza put it, the objective of the census is to build “a legislative agenda we are fighting for. We are providing an opportunity for people to win locally and change federal policy.” She added that she envisioned the census as a “vehicle for collaboration and a vehicle for power building.”

The Importance of Historical Analysis

At a plenary session on “Big Ideas for Economic Equity,” Darrick Hamilton, a New School economist and founding director of the Institute on Race, Power, and Political Economy, emphasized the need for historically grounded understanding. “The racial wealth gap is an implicit measure of our racist past,” Hamilton emphasized. “We focus on poor financial choices. That framing is wrong. The directional emphasis is wrong. Meager economic circumstance constrains choice itself and leaves poor borrowers with little or no options other than to use predatory services.”

In another plenary session on “Radical Collaborations: Centering Children and Families on the Path to Justice,” Hamilton’s historical point was driven home by Washington Post reporter Robert Samuels. Along with fellow Post reporter Toluse Olorunnipa, Samuels is the coauthor of the book, His Name was George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice, a biography based on 400 interviews conducted after Floyd’s murder.

Samuels noted that in researching the book, he and Olorunnipa went back seven generations. They learned that after emancipation, Floyd’s great, great grandfather “amassed over 500 acres of land,” making him one of the wealthiest landowners in North America. “If George Floyd were white, he would have been born into wealth,” Samuels observed. “But before a single generation, all that land was stolen.” As a result, the Floyd family enjoyed no intergenerational wealth, instead growing up in segregated communities with inadequate schools. Samuels added, “What George Floyd went through has happened to untold numbers of Black people.… The history of your family and what they went through has an impact in how you live your life.”

The Struggle for Economic Democracy

The closing plenary, titled “Until We All Prosper: The Road to Economic Justice for All,” focused on the intersection of democracy and economic justice. Not surprisingly given current voter suppression efforts, much of the discussion focused on defending the right to vote. Miles Rapaport, who, with E. J. Dionne, Jr., co-authored 100% Democracy: The Case for Universal Voting, laid out the struggle’s different dimensions—including campaigns to enable same-day registration, restore voting rights for the formerly incarcerated, expand mechanisms for voting (such as mail-in voting and ballot drop boxes)—as well as defensive struggles against voter suppression laws and the influence of wealthy donors.

In her remarks, though, Taifa Smith Butler, president of Demos, made explicit the deep connections between political and economic democracy. “Economic and political power are inextricably linked,” Butler observed. She added, “This system was designed to create winners and losers. We have valued the landowner or the land thief. We have valued white skin or the capitalist or the wealthy. We have undervalued folks like Indigenous people from day one.… We have undervalued agriculture, domestic workers, care givers.”

“Unless and until we make sure we center people of color,” Butler continued, “we will continue to perpetuate exploitation and oppression in our economy.”

Early in the conference, Cunningham had challenged attendees to reimagine economic justice for all. What does this entail? For Butler, the answer to this question was clear: “Democracy is everything. It is the ability for us to influence the economic forces that shape our lives.… We want people to have agency and control over the economy.” That, Butler added, “is the work we want to dig into in this next generation.”

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

This article is the first article of Community Strategies for Systemic Change, a series that is being co-produced by the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) and NPQ. In the series, urban and rural grassroots leaders from across the United States share how their communities are developing and implementing strategies—grounded in local places, cultures, and histories—to shift power and achieve systemic change.

When it comes to addressing structural racism, the failure of national politics in the United States is plain to see. The Black-white wealth gap remains unchanged after half a century. The Black homeownership rate is about the same as it was when the National Fair Housing Act was passed in 1968. At 42 percent, it is about 30 percentage points lower than that of whites. Many of the practices used to segregate communities, like single family zoning and the price comparison approach for home appraisals, are still in place.

We assume the power and authority that government and corporate leaders possess necessitate not only their involvement in policy formation, but also their initiation of it. We suppose that rules and laws can easily change with a stroke of a leader’s pen, but the snail’s pace of change suggests that leadership at the top is conflicted and restrained—that most leaders lack the will to eliminate stubborn wealth gaps. In short, change that benefits the majority is unlikely to come from the top.

For change to occur, we should look to civic action happening on the ground. With regards to housing policy, for example, much of existing civil rights legislation was passed in response to organized local pressure. In other words, change came to Washington, D.C., not from it.

Corporations that have announced their support for racial justice have most often backed into such declarations. This was exactly what occurred with the flurry of corporate commitments made after the mass uprising that followed the murder of George Floyd in 2020. More often than not, government and corporate action comes at the end of a process led by civic action, not at the beginning.

How Policy Change Occurs: A Housing Justice Example

The small steps forward that we’ve taken recently to improve access to housing illustrate that civic action is indeed a leading catalyst for systemic change, even if that is not typically how the press portrays social change.

Take housing appraisals, a field in which I have been deeply involved. In the conventional account, the Biden administration is driving new federal policy, starting with an address made by Biden to mark the 100^th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre, during which he announced that his administration would launch “an aggressive effort to combat racial discrimination in housing. That includes everything from redlining to the cruel fact that a home owned by a Black family is too often appraised at a lower value than a similar home owned by a white family.”

Biden’s announcement resulted in the formation of the Property Appraisal and Valuation Equity (PAVE) Task Force, a first-of-its-kind interagency effort to address racial bias in home appraisals. This past March, PAVE released its final action plan, the most wide-ranging set of reforms ever put forward to advance equity in the home appraisal process. The plan lays out 21 actions to be taken by 13 federal agencies, including the development of new rules to remove discrimination from every stage of the home valuation process and efforts to build a more diverse home appraiser workforce.

On the surface, it would seem that the federal government is taking the lead to force an overdue reckoning in the real estate industry. However, this leaves out a critical question: why now?

Certainly, people have been making calls to end racial bias in appraising since redlining first became common practice in the early 20^th century. To understand why, 54 years after the passage of the Fair Housing Act, the federal government is finally taking action to address discrimination in real estate appraisals requires looking to the grassroots organizations and individuals that together forced Biden’s hand.

The Story behind the Story

In 2018, I started researching my hometown of Wilkinsburg, PA—a struggling, small, majority-Black, inner-ring suburb surrounded by Pittsburgh on three sides. At a townhall to announce my research efforts, residents asked me to examine home values in the area. Many felt there were inaccuracies. After responding to inquiries from the community, my colleagues Jonathan Rothwell and David Harshbarger and I co-authored a Brookings Institution report titled The Devaluation of Assets in Black Neighborhoods. The report revealed that, on average, owner-occupied homes in Black neighborhoods are undervalued by $48,000 per home, for a cumulative loss of household wealth of $156 billion.

To put that in perspective, given the average amount of capital Black people use to start their firms, $156 billion would have provided enough capital to found more than 4.4 million businesses. It would have paid tuition for more than eight million four-year degrees from public institutions. The cumulative loss would have covered all of Hurricane Katrina damage and replaced the pipes in Flint, MI, 3,000 times.

After the report’s release, local housing advocacy groups, many affiliated with the National Fair Housing Alliance, trumpeted the research. Word spread. Homeowners had quantitative evidence to back their anecdotal experiences and feelings, and they began doing their own experiments. Black homeowners “whitewashed” their homes—replacing Black art, books, clothing, family photos, and hair products with items that signaled that a white person lived in the house. They got friends and colleagues to serve as stand-ins for a second appraisal.

Collette Duffy, an Indianapolis homeowner, whitewashed her home and got a white stand-in. She strategized with the nonprofit Fair Housing Center of Central Indiana. Her new appraisal came in $134,000 higher than an earlier one. The nonprofit announced in May 2021 that it had filed a federal housing discrimination complaint on Duffy’s behalf.

Local media picked up dozens of these stories from across the nation—ranging from Marin County, CA, which is over 70 percent white and where the median home value exceeds $1 million, to Prince George’s County, MD, once the most prosperous majority African-American county in the country.

These local efforts were part of grassroots movements that were afoot before and during Biden’s presidency and that led to testimony in Congress by national groups, local activists, and researchers (I was among those who testified)—as well as lawsuits in home communities.

Thanks to this movement, biased appraisals became a campaign issue in the 2020 elections. Democratic nominee Biden picked up the housing issue, citing the research and pointing to the impact of devalued appraisals on maintaining housing discrimination across the country. Simply put: PAVE would not have happened without civic action.

Not All Civic Action Is in the Direction of Justice

The PAVE effort’s grassroots origins should not be surprising. Grassroots organizing has always been the force that drives changes to policy—for good or for bad. An example of the latter: for most of US history, it was legal to discriminate against Black people in housing because of grassroots, local efforts—by white people.

Baltimore’s housing policy in 1910, heavily promoted by white homeowners’ associations, became a model for racial housing covenants and for redlining – ie, the denial of home loans and insurance to communities of color. Baltimore’s then Mayor J. Barry Mahool’s negative view of Black people was laid bare in his explanation of the policy: “Blacks should be quarantined in isolated slums in order to reduce the incidence of civil disturbance, to prevent the spread of communicable disease into the nearby white neighborhoods, and to protect property values among the white majority.”

Baltimore was, as a university thesis notes, the “first the first city in the United States to write into law residential segregation ordinances that banned Blacks and whites from living side by side.” From Baltimore, redlining spread across the country. During the New Deal era, the federal government codified and resourced redlining, isolating Black people in areas that would suffer lower levels of investment than white neighborhoods. Again, lasting ideas go to Washington. They do not emerge from it.

Some Principles Behind How to Achieve Systemic Change 

So, what is the connection between community action and systemic change? This question may not have a definitive answer, but some themes are apparent. Here are a few:

1. Durable policy results from empowered civic action. If structural inequality and racial gaps could be eliminated with the stroke of a pen, this would have occurred already. People in power ostensibly don’t have the will, capacity, or wherewithal to make the kinds of radical shifts needed to remove the biases their predecessors created. Elite decisionmakers need ideas and pressure from external sources. We should assume that actions made by those at the top very often are simply a response to the shift in power created by organizing from below. 

2. Research that is grounded in lived experiences can drive structural change. Research can be esoteric. Too often, scholars respond to elite policymakers who don’t experience the issues faced by their constituencies. Policy research that seeks structural change must center everyday people or it will likely reinforce the status quo.
3. Civic action is more likely to succeed if it is validated by fact-based authorities. Anecdotal evidence is good, but it is often insufficient to dismantle biased policy. Universities, think tanks, and fact-based institutions are powerful validators that often sway policy decisions—as has been the case with the appraisal research I described above. However, this is not to deny that many scholars produce shoddy research that supports the status quo. Many of the racist policies of the past were endorsed by researchers.
4. Organize and mobilize. Local nonprofit groups can help organize individuals affected by an issue in order to make the media and politicians aware of the issue, along with organizers who can connect individuals’ concerns with a broader movement.
5. Recognize that not all grassroots organizing is progressive. Grassroots organizers are portrayed as being progressive agents of the so-called Left. Yet, many NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) activists today are grassroots based but aren’t progressive. To pursue structural change in the direction of justice requires combining local action with a social justice vision. Merely being connected to a grassroots movement is not sufficient.

Moving Forward

We are living in a period of heightened social movement. My own work on appraisals would have been ineffective if not for the fact that community organizers took the research my colleagues and I put together and ran with it.

In the stories that follow, you will hear from some of these movement voices. In some cases, the locus of action may seem hyperlocal. In other cases, the connections to national movements are obvious. Regardless, it is in community stories such as these that you will find the fundamental building blocks of systemic change.

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