Writing
Organizers with substantial, direct experience in the field have an entirely different focus than authors who have not been involved in campaigns: we focus on how the work gets done (methods), and how to win.

Fairfield county organizing headlines

Open Democracy: Organizing as Whole People

There are no shortcuts to building the kind of power it takes to win meaningful change. As an organizer in a county with an acute housing crisis, simmering racial tension and little unionization, I learned that I had to help the community to take on the fight themselves. The final article in our “Transformative Nonviolence” series with Waging Nonviolence. Read More

woman cover her breasts

AlterNet: What Angelina Jolie Didn’t Tell You About Breast Cancer and That Gene

Making money off illness is sickening. Depriving the needy of life-saving healthcare should be criminal. Last month, I lost my too-young-to-die sister to a BRCA#1 breast cancer. When I was a toddler not yet in kindergarten, breast cancer robbed me of my mother. I am a BRCA#1 gene carrier, and recently wrote about it in my memoir, Raising Expectations and Raising Hell. Read More

The Nation: Make the Road New York: Success Through ‘Love and Agitation’

Make the Road New York was formed in 2007, when the Brooklyn-based Make the Road by Walking and the Queens-based Latin American Integration Center merged, forming the largest nonunion immigrant membership organization in New York City. Today, with 12,600 dues-paying members, MRNY is a unique amalgam of worker center, legal clinic, citizenship school, mutual aid society, policy shop, protest factory and church. Read More

Filipina nurses put their thumbs up after dropping their strike ballots in the box.

Social Policy: Hard Bargaining in Las Vegas Hospitals

The Desert Springs contract had now expired. This was a big deal. Under U.S. labor law, when a contract expires, four dangerous things happen: workers can strike; the employer can lock workers out; the employer can stop collecting union membership dues from the workers’ paychecks; and the “permanent window” period for decertifying the union begins. Read More