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The US Is in Free Fall, But We Can Turn Things Around by Valuing Our Neighbors Over Money
The United States’ version of capitalism has systematically failed its population through corporate greed and manipulation of the legislature. But don’t lose hope.
May 11, 2025
The United States is often revered as the most powerful nation in the world. The U.S. has a strong economy; the most equipped military on the planet; a working class of over 130 million people; the biggest GDP of any nation; and large music, film, agricultural, beauty, food, fossil fuel, and technology industries. However, many of these industries are on the brink of collapsing, or are already starting to. Most industries were built on the backs of a marginalized working class, and continue to perpetuate deep flaws in integrity from the wealthiest 1%.
By examining my own life as an impoverished Kānaka ʻŌiwi (Indigenous person), comparisons to socialist ideologies, and through extensive economic analysis, we will find the truth of how the United States’ version of capitalism has systematically failed its population through corporate greed and manipulation of the legislature.
It’s difficult for me to find footing to explain Hawaiian culture to anyone, because most of it has been erased. Hawaiian is a critically endangered language, with only 2,000 native speakers at one point in time. In the few years I lived in Hawaii during my early childhood, I always questioned tourism, and I always questioned what was going into our clear oceans. I questioned why others visiting was so “important,” why the beaches and trails were always overcrowded with not only people but litter, and why the natives always spoke of the “haoli” with such ferocity. I quickly connected the dots as to the negative effects of taking advantage of such a beautiful land, but before I could do anything about it, we were moving, and headed off to Texas.
As financially successful as the United States is, it’s clear this “success” is an illusion that, when looked at more closely, is rampant with corruption.
Growing up raised by a single mother in a poor area off the metropolis of San Antonio, my family faced many struggles. Before we had to leave him, father would come home from working 70 hours a week just to support our family, and the hours took a toll on his mental and physical health. His knees were weak, his voice hoarse, and overall seemed off. Watching my father waste his life away in a society that treated him and his native people ruthlessly instilled in me a strong feeling of injustice.
By the time I was at the age to look for work, I could hardly juggle working for tips after school in the eighth grade while trying to impress my family with my academic achievements. The issues my family faced snowballed and forced their way into adulthood. Not a dime was saved for my sister and me after we finished high school. Learning this, I understood my options were narrow, and I had to work longer hours to get into the college I wanted. Luckily, I was accepted into a great university, but I had to start working as many hours as I possibly could to support myself.
It’s no secret that the U.S. is highly segregated, not only by race, but by income. Want to get the best education? Well, you’d better have enough money for that. Want health insurance? Be sure to pray you don’t turn 26. It’s a constant reminder of “inferiority” that kills the will of impoverished children, marginalizes people of color, and amplifies the richness of those who were born into wealth. It disrespects the time and work the lower and middle class pour into the golden cups of CEOs and investors. According to the American Journal of Public Health: “Neighborhoods ‘redlined’ by the Home Owners Loan Corporation in the 1930s (i.e., neighborhoods with large Black and immigrant populations) experience higher rates of firearm violence today than do neighborhoods deemed most desirable. This past de jure segregation may be related to present-day violence via impacts on education, transportation, jobs, income and wealth, and the built environment.” These same people who were segregated and forced into these disadvantaged, gerrymandered zip codes to begin with, and are often too poor to relocate, continually face the blame for the issues in this country. In other words, we, the working class, bear the pain and consequences of a failing nation that we’ve traded our lives and well-being to support.
Teachers, nurses, janitors, dishwashers, firefighters, truck drivers, grocery baggers, servers, social workers, and many more all comprise the working class. These respectable people are our neighbors, our community, our family. Our families, however, don’t reap the benefits of this work, and it’s easy to prove it. As of 2025, the ratio of the price of the average house divided by the median household income in America is at 7.37, an all-time high. This is even worse than during the housing crisis of 2008, where it was 6.82. In some metro areas, this number exceeds 10 for renters. With education, the price of attending college adjusted for inflation has skyrocketed over 500% in the last half-century, and the average American is spending $14,570 on healthcare per year, a 670% increase from $2,151 in 1970.
One of the main issues that capitalism in America causes when left unchecked is large monopolies that control the market too tightly, which undermine a free economy. Among markets that are “thriving” in the U.S., as discussed before, many of these markets consist of only a handful or less of main corporations controlled by billionaires. As a result, the market loses its flexibility. If the top dogs are struggling, it means everyone is. Most Americans don’t grow their goods. We buy goods from a supermarket that gets their produce and other items shipped from mass production farms and factories, filled with chemicals and human rights violations.
There are, however, alternatives that we can learn from. In other countries, there are creative solutions that will be briefly covered. Our first example, Vietnam, reformed in 1986, shifting to a more “socialist-oriented” market economy, where they implemented reforms in the country that led to positive changes and reductions in inflation. They allowed farmers to sell their surplus crops to private markets, leading small farmers and local businesses to thrive even during a recession. In the case of Cuba, their government established a food rationing system on March 12, 1962, called the libreta, that allowed citizens to purchase necessities and services at an affordable price.
Left unchecked, the prices and quality of life in the United States will continue to dwindle, and soon the country won’t have a healthy population to support itself. Many other countries have already realized this, such as France, Germany, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. They employ similar rules to set price caps on pharmaceutical services and products. For example, in the U.K., they have a price limit on prescriptions. You pay nine pounds and ninety pence, no matter what prescription, no matter how many pills you need. If you need 30 pills or 90, it’s all the same. In Canada, you don’t have to pay anything for healthcare; instead, they’ve all agreed to pay a slight percentage increase to their taxes so that everyone gets free healthcare. As a result, poor people don’t avoid going to the hospital when they get ill or injured, because they don’t dread the hospital bill, or get turned away from a surgery or life-saving care due to insurance or money problems. This is precisely why Canadians live on average three years longer than Americans.
The flaws in the United States’ version of capitalism, such as price gouging, violations of workers’ rights, and the commodification of human lives and experiences, are felt greatest by those who are economically disadvantaged. In the United States, if you are born into poverty, you have over a 90% chance of staying in the same tax bracket you were born in. This is because trends show that over the past 50 years, the poorest 20% of American citizens have seen zero increase in wages (adjusted for inflation). In contrast, the wealthiest 1% nearly doubled their wealth over the same period. Furthermore, these wage issues affect marginalized groups more adversely, such as females, people who have disabilities, people of color, and people who identify with the LGBT community. Fifty-one Fortune 500 Companies have CEOs who make over 840 times the amount of the average worker for their company in wages.
These issues with wages, coupled with the rising costs of living, are causing people in poor communities to either find more roommates than the space can comfortably accommodate to afford rent, or become homeless. Unfortunately, once that happens, it’s mostly game over for most Americans. The U.S. infrastructure provides little to no assistance to those who are homeless or need necessities. Overcrowding in the few homeless shelters that do exist leads to overflow and people being denied rooms, forced to wait in the cold overnight. In Denton, Texas earlier this year, a locally renowned woman named Kimberly Pollock, who became homeless due to personal financial struggles, was turned away from a warming shelter and froze to death outside. She was somebody’s daughter, and she was a close, dear friend to many. These preventable and tragic losses of our local citizens are only the tip of the iceberg.
Once a magnifying glass is aimed at American capitalism, it becomes clear that the system works exactly as intended, to make the most money possible, no matter the means necessary. Ample industries rake in more money than any other country, and since more assets are being put on the table, it’s all positive reinforcement to keep going. The food, drug, and beauty industries are all aware of this. In the European Union (which formed in 1993), over 2,400 harmful chemicals have been banned in food and cosmetics. In contrast, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which oversees the safety of produce, drugs, cosmetics, and other products in the United States, has only banned 11 harmful chemicals as of today.
This disparity in the regulation of our foods, hygiene products, furniture, pesticides, medicines, and more has several key drawbacks. First, the FDA bans only a small number of chemicals because it allows companies to put cheaper, yet more harmful, chemicals in their products. Usually, it’s done to increase shelf life or to heighten the taste of a food. This causes Americans to become overloaded with chemicals and become sick, slowly and chronically. Once this occurs, an American is forced to see if they can afford to deal with their illness for the rest of their lives in their healthcare system. Bloated, high off should-be-banned chemicals, tired from working excess hours with no time off, upset with the cost of living, with a serious illness, but too poor to pay for help. It’s a lose-lose-lose situation, and this is the sad reality for many of our neighbors.
The part of capitalism that I believe makes it unredeemable is the fact that it is in direct conflict with our form of government. The United States is a representative democracy, but to run for office, you have to have thousands, if not millions, of dollars to have a strong campaign. That already excludes any low-income citizens from running for a higher-up position. Secondly, most people in our government can be “bought out” or influenced politically through lots of bribery. It’s the sad truth, but our last hope of reforming the system, through law reversal, is corrupted as well. For example, in 2024 alone, over $150 million dollars were covertly given to the Senate, House, and both presidential candidates by the fossil fuel industry alone. Some of these people include U.S. President Donald J. Trump, with over $2,100,000; former Vice President Kamala Harris, with over $1,300,000; and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), with over $1,000,000. The numbers for food industries in 2024, such as Coca-Cola, exceeded $24 million dollars. These companies are paying our “representatives” to vote in their interests, not ours. This is the reason why no chemicals are being banned, why we keep going to war with countries that coincidentally have tons of oil underneath them, and why we make so much more money than anyone else.
One of the most alarming things about the current state of the United States is that, under its current administration, there seems to be no plans for reform from our government. Despite worldwide protests, public uproar, and the deaths of many innocent citizens, it seems no steps are being taken to address the undeniable inhumanity of the United States. To try and redirect our anger at the lack of change, fingers are often pointed at the most disadvantaged of our population. People of color, gay, or poor communities are blamed for not working hard enough, shooting their kind, stealing, or getting addicted to drugs. It’s the Mexicans stealing our jobs, and the immigrants paying no taxes, or drag queens influencing our children the wrong way. It’s never the 151 mass shootings since 1982, the 26,000 Americans who die each year from not having insurance, or the sad reality that a woman only makes 83% of what a man makes in the same job position.
As financially successful as the United States is, it’s clear this “success” is an illusion that, when looked at more closely, is rampant with corruption. Even though things look unfixable, I encourage you not to lose hope and to look to your neighbor with compassion. We became the country that values our money more than our neighbors, that focuses on productivity, and not connectivity, by taking, and not giving. Figuring out adulthood as a queer, homeless Hawaiian in Texas would have been impossible without my close friends whom I met along the way. They are a constant reminder that even though we live in a country known for its selfishness, that is not a valid placeholder for the average American.
In Hawaii, we have a saying that goes Ua kuluma ke kanaka i ke aloha, meaning, we are all naturally loving people. I believe this is true. We’ve been misguided as a country and as a people, and our values have been manipulated over generations to value material possessions instead of other souls. We must reclaim our administration, restore our poor and middle class communities, and actively fight having to choose between profits and people. Slowly, and with powerful, passionate change, we can dismantle systems that commodify the human experience, and the American dream won’t be something we have to be asleep to live in.
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We Don’t Throw People Away: Why I Support a Harm Reduction Approach in LA
We have a moral responsibility to set an example for the rest of the nation: one that’s rooted in compassion, humanity, and data-driven approaches.
May 07, 2025
If you were drowning, I wouldn’t ask how you got there before throwing you a lifeline.
I wouldn’t tell you to swim harder.
I wouldn’t tell you to make better choices, I wouldn’t hope you sink, and I wouldn’t put you in a cage.
If you were drowning, I would reach for you, pull you up, and do everything in my power to keep you alive.
That’s what harm reduction is: keeping people alive.
We don’t criminalize someone for losing a limb to the effects of diabetes. We don’t arrest them for not taking their insulin or for struggling to manage their blood sugar. We surround them with medical care, support systems, and resources to help them live healthier lives.
The first step isn’t forcing someone into a system they aren’t ready for. The first step is keeping them alive long enough to say yes.
Problematic substance use—a chronic, relapsing disease—is no different. And harm reduction is one of the many courses of medical action we’re taking to address this in MacArthur Park, Los Angeles, where the opioid crisis and homelessness collide in painful, visible ways.
I understand the frustration. I hear the anger. Lock them up, people say—oblivious to the harrowing truth that this crisis is made profoundly worse in our jails.
I want a healthy, accessible, thriving MacArthur Park just as much as my neighbors; a MacArthur Park where hardworking families aren’t forced to live amid trauma and visible substance use. But let me be clear: I don’t throw people away—and I don’t invest in failed solutions.
People don’t wake up one day and decide to become homeless or addicted. They end up there because they’ve been failed by an economic system that keeps people in poverty, by a housing system that makes rent impossible to afford, by a criminal justice system that treats problematic substance use like a crime instead of a disease, by a political system that chronically underfunds mental health, and by a for-profit healthcare system that allowed big pharmaceutical companies to manufacture the opioid epidemic and knowingly steal thousands of lives in exchange for billions of dollars.
We’ve spent over a trillion dollars on the failed War on Drugs, and the availability and potency of illicit drugs have only increased—along with our prison population.
It’s time for a different approach.
Decades of research have shown that harm reduction strategies provide significant public health benefits, including preventing deaths from overdoses and preventing transmission of infectious diseases. That’s why our office partnered with the LA County Department of Health Services and Homeless Healthcare Los Angeles (HHCLA) to deploy an overdose response team in the park seven days a week. Every day, they provide wound care, hygiene kits, naloxone, methadone, and harm reduction tools to people experiencing problematic substance use. They clean up biohazardous waste, picking up and safely disposing of left-behind needles and pipes that put our families in danger. They do the work that Recreation and Parks and LAPD can’t while reducing call volume to emergency responders, and we are all safer for it.
Since launching in late 2024, this team has collected over 14,000 hazardous items and distributed more than 3,600 naloxone kits—totaling over 11,000 doses of life-saving medication—and saved 52 lives. Those 52 people have names and faces and stories and hopes and dreams. They are someone’s child, someone’s friend, someone who now has a shot at accepting treatment, because we know that recovery isn’t a straight path—it takes multiple touchpoints. The first step isn’t forcing someone into a system they aren’t ready for. The first step is keeping them alive long enough to say yes.
I also want to be clear about what our office can and cannot do. The City Council cannot make arrests. What we can do is invest in solutions. We can choose to fund the strategies that actually reduce harm, that save lives, that address the root causes of these crises. Or, we can choose to push people out of sight and throw them away.
The fight for humanity goes far beyond MacArthur Park. We see it happening across the country. We see it in how President Donald Trump treats immigrants like pawns, willing to let families suffer for cheap political points. We see it in how he attacks the LGBTQ+ community, stripping away protections and treatment, denying their very existence. We see marginalized communities degraded and vilified and sacrificed at the altar of power, and we see misinformation peddled at every turn to satiate a hungry, desperate base. It is easy to dehumanize. It is easy to discard people. It is easy to think of human lives as inconvenient. But we have to resist that urge. We are better than that in Los Angeles. We have a moral responsibility to set an example for the rest of the nation: one that’s rooted in compassion, humanity, and data-driven approaches. And since my very first day in office, that’s what I’ve always done, no matter how uphill the battle may be.
MacArthur Park is struggling. Yes, we are frustrated, scared, and sometimes, angry. But I refuse to abandon the people suffering in front of us.
We don’t throw people away. We fight for them.
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How to Fight Back Against Trump’s Escalatory War on the Poor
Poverty will end when poor people and their allies refuse to allow society to remain complacent about the suffering and death caused by economic deprivation.
Apr 15, 2025
The day after Donald Trump won the 2024 election, the 10 richest people in the world—including nine Americans—expanded their wealth by nearly $64 billion, the greatest single-day increase in recorded history. Since then, an unholy marriage of billionaire investors, tech bros, Christian nationalists, and, of course, Donald Trump has staged an oligarchic assault on our democracy. If the nation’s corporate elite once leveraged their relationships within government to enrich themselves, they’ve now cut out the middleman. We’re living in a new Gilded Age, with a proto-fascistic and religiously regressive administration of, by, and for the billionaires.
With the wind at their backs, leading elements in the Republican Party have rapidly eschewed euphemisms and political correctness altogether, airing their anti-immigrant, anti-Black, and anti-poor prejudices in unapologetically broad and brazen terms. The effect of this, especially for the most vulnerable among us, is seismic. During the first two months of the second Trump administration, we’ve witnessed nothing less than an escalatory war on the poor.
The attacks are many-pronged. Rural development grants, food banks, and environmental protection measures have all been slashed in the name of “ending radical and wasteful government DEI programs.” Planned Parenthood and other life-saving healthcare services for poor and marginalized communities have been defunded. Homelessness has been ever more intensely criminalized and Housing First policies vilified. The Department of Education, which has historically provided critical resources for low-income and disabled students, has been gutted, while the barbaric conditions in overcrowded immigrant detention centers have only worsened. Billions of dollars in funding for mental health and addiction services have been revoked. Worse yet, these and other mercenary actions may prove to be just the tip of the spear. Tariff wars and potential cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and SNAP could leave both the lives of the poor and the global economy in shambles.
As the hull of our democracy splinters and floods, the question remains: How do we chart a more just and humane path forward?
This volatile moment may represent an unprecedented, even existential, threat to the health of our democracy, but it is building on decades of neoliberal plunder and economic austerity, authored by both conservative and liberal politicians. Before the 2024 elections, there were more than 140 million people living in poverty or one crisis away—one job loss, eviction, medical issue, or debt collection—from economic ruin. In this rich land, 45 million people regularly experience hunger and food insecurity, while more than 80 million people are uninsured or underinsured, 10 million people live without housing or experience chronic housing insecurity, and the American education system has regularly scored below average compared to those of other nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Amid tremendous social and economic dislocation, traditional American institutions and political alignments have steadily lost their meaning for tens of millions of people. The majority of us know things aren’t well in this country. We can feel it, thanks not just to the violent and vitriolic political environment in which we live, but to our bank statements and debt sheets, our rising rent and utility bills. As the hull of our democracy splinters and floods, the question remains: How do we chart a more just and humane path forward? There are no easy answers, but there are profound lessons to be learned from the past, especially from movements of poor and dispossessed people that have inspired many of this country’s most important moments of democratic awakening.
This is the focus of our new book, You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take: Lessons from the Movement to End Poverty. Drawing on Liz’s 30 years of anti-poverty organizing, we poured over old pamphlets and documents, memories and mementos to gather evidence that social transformation at the hands of the poor remains an ever-present possibility and to summarize some of the most significant ideas that, even today, continue to animate their organized struggles.
Homeless, Not Helpless
In the late spring of 1990, hundreds of unhoused people across the country broke locks and chains off dozens of empty federally owned houses and moved in. Bedrooms and kitchens carpeted with layers of dust suddenly whirled with activity. Mattresses were carried in and bags of food unpacked. Within hours, the new occupants made calls to the city’s energy companies, requesting that the utilities be turned on. They were remarkably disciplined and efficient—single moms who had been living in their cars, veterans, students, and low-wage or recently laid-off workers, and people battling illness without healthcare. They were Black, Latino, Asian, Indigenous, and white, and although they came from radically different slices of society, one simple fact bound them together: They were poor, in need of housing, and fed up.
That wave of takeovers was led by the National Union of the Homeless (NUH), one among many carried out by the group in those years. The NUH was not a charity, a service provider, or a professional advocacy group but a political organization led by and for unhoused people, with close to 30,000 members in 25 cities. Liz was introduced to it on her first day of college. Within a few months, she had joined the movement and never left.
NUH members included people who had recently lost their manufacturing jobs and could no longer find steady work, as well as low-wage workers who couldn’t keep up with the growing costs of housing and other daily necessities. In such dire times, the reality of the unhoused only foreshadowed the possible dislocation of millions more. The NUH emphasized this truth in one of its slogans: “You Are Only One Paycheck Away from Homelessness!” The name of the organization itself reflected a connection between homelessness and the new economy then being shaped. As industrial work floundered and labor unions suffered, there was a growing need for new unions of poor and dispossessed people.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the NUH won a string of victories, including new policies guaranteeing 24-hour shelter intake, access to public showers, and the right of the unhoused to vote without a permanent address. They also won publicly funded housing programs run by the formerly unhoused in nearly a dozen cities. Such successes were a barometer of the incipient strength of the organized poor and a corrective to the belief that poor people could perhaps spark spontaneous outrage but never be a force capable of wielding effective political power.
At the heart of the NUH were three principles: First, poor people can be agents of change, not simply victims of a cruel history; second, the power of the poor depends on their ability to unite across their differences; and third, it is indeed possible to abolish poverty. Those guiding principles were crystallized in two more slogans: “Homeless, Not Helpless” and “No Housing, No Peace.” The first captured a too-often obscured truth about the poor: that one’s living conditions don’t define who we are or limit our capacity to change our lives and the world around us. The second caught the political and moral agency of the impoverished—that there will be no peace and quiet until the demand for essential human needs is met.
Another NUH slogan has also echoed through the years: “You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take.” It’s a favorite of ours because it expresses a crucial argument of our book: that poverty and economic inequality won’t end because of the goodwill of those who hold political power and wealth (as is abundantly clear today) or even through the charitable actions of sympathetic people.
Change on such a scale requires a protagonist with a more pressing agenda. Poverty will end when poor people and their allies refuse to allow society to remain complacent about the suffering and death caused by economic deprivation. It will end when the poor become an organized force capable of rallying a critical mass of society to reorder the political and economic priorities of our country.
Projects of Survival
In the mid-1990s, Liz was active in North Philadelphia’s Kensington Welfare Rights Organization (KWRU). Kensington’s workforce had by then been decimated by deindustrialization and disinvestment. People without steady or reliable housing were moving into vacant buildings or cobbling together outdoor shelters, while tenants refused to leave homes from which they were being evicted. In its actions, KWRU reached deep into this well of experience, taking the spontaneous survival strategies that poor people were already using and adapting them into “projects of survival.”
The phrase “project of survival” was borrowed from the Black Panther Party, which, in the 1960s and 1970s, created successful “survival programs” like the Free Medical Clinic Program and the Free Breakfast Program. In 1969, the head of the national School Breakfast Program admitted that the Black Panthers were feeding more poor children than the state of California. The Panthers, however, were concerned with more than just meeting immediate needs. They were focused on structural transformation and, through their survival programs, they highlighted the government’s refusal to deal seriously with American poverty, even while then spending billions of dollars fighting distant wars on the poor of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.
Today, amid the rising tide of Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s billionaire-fueled authoritarianism, there’s an urgent need for defiant and militant organizing among a broad cross-section of society.
KWRU learned from the Black Panthers. In the late fall of 1995, a cold front swept through a large KWRU encampment known as Tent City. In need of indoor shelter, the group set its sights on a vacant church a few blocks away. Earlier that year, the archdiocese of Philadelphia had shuttered St. Edward’s Catholic Church because its congregants were poor and the drafty building expensive to maintain. Still, some of those congregants continued to pray every Sunday in a small park outside the shuttered church. Eventually, dozens of residents from Tent City walked up the church steps, broke the locks on its front doors, and ignited a highly publicized occupation that lasted through that winter.
On the walls of the church, Liz and her compatriots hung posters and banners, including one that asked, “Why do we worship a homeless man on Sunday and ignore one on Monday?” As winter engulfed the city, residents of St. Ed’s fed and cared for one another in a fugitive congregation whose youngest resident was less than a year old and whose oldest was in his 90s. That occupation ultimately pressured the archdiocese to refocus its ministry on poor communities, while electrifying the local media to report on the rampant poverty that had normally been swept under the rug.
Such projects of survival enabled KWRU to build trust in Kensington, while serving as bases for bigger and bolder organizing. As a young woman, Liz gained new insight into how bottom-up change often begins. While media narratives regularly depict poor people as lazy, dangerous, or too overburdened with their own problems to think about others, there is an immense spirit of cooperation and generosity among the poorest people in our society. Indeed, that spirit of communal care is the generative ground from which powerful social movements emerge.
A Survival Revival for These Times
Today, amid the rising tide of Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s billionaire-fueled authoritarianism, there’s an urgent need for defiant and militant organizing among a broad cross-section of society. As our democratic horizons continue to narrow, we find ourselves operating within a critical window of time. In our work, we call this a “kairos moment.” In the days of antiquity, the Greeks taught that there were two ways to understand time: chronos and kairos. Chronos is quantitative time, while kairos is the qualitative time during which old and often oppressive ways are dying while new understandings struggle to be born.
In kairos moments such as this sinister Trumpian one, it is often the people whose backs are up against the wall who are willing to take decisive action. In every popular, pro-democracy movement, there is a leading social force that, by virtue of its place in the economic pecking order, is compelled to act first, because for them it’s a matter of life-or-death. And by moving into action, that force can awaken the indignation and imagination of others.
Right now, there are tens of thousands of Americans already in motion trying to defend their communities from the growing ravages of economic, environmental, and political disaster. Their efforts include food banks and neighborhood associations; churches and other houses of worship providing sanctuary for the unhoused and immigrants; women, trans kids, and other LGBTQ+ people fighting to ensure that they and their loved ones get the healthcare they need; community schools stepping into the breach of our beleaguered public education system; mutual-aid groups responding to environmental disasters that are only increasing thanks to the climate crisis; and students protesting the genocide in Gaza and the militarization of our society. Such communities of care and resistance may still be small and scrappy, but within them lies a latent power that, if further politicized and organized, could ignite a new era of transformational movement-building at a time when our country is in increasing danger.
Indeed, just imagine what might be possible if so many communities were operating not in isolation but in coordination. Imagine the power of such a potentially vast network to shake things up and assert the moral, intellectual, and political agency of those under attack. Food pantries could become places not just to fill bellies but to launch protests, campaigns, and organizing drives. Ever more devastating superstorms, floods, and forest fires could become moments not just for acute disaster response but for sustained relationship-building and communal resilience, aimed at repairing the societal fissures that worsen extreme weather events.
Last month, the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice, where we both work, published a new report on the theory and practice behind this approach to grassroots organizing, A Matter of Survival: Organizing to Meet Unmet Needs and Build Power in Times of Crisis. Authored by our colleagues Shailly Gupta Barnes and Jarvis Benson, it describes how—beginning during the Covid-19 pandemic and continuing today—dozens of grassroots organizations, congregations, mutual-aid collectives, artists, and others have been building projects of survival and engaging in communal acts of care.
Over the coming months, the Kairos Center plans to draw inspiration from such stories as we launch a new and ambitious national organizing drive among the poor. The “Survival Revival,” as we call it, will connect with and link the often-siloed survival struggles of the poor into a more unified force. Together, we will study, strategize, sing, pray, and take the kind of action that, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., once put it, can be “a new and unsettling force in our complacent national life.” Together, we will lift from the bottom, so that everyone can rise.
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