The People's Board
Published essays from the Board's meetings. Read them here or on Substack.
Suppose you want to leave a job because the work conflicts with your values. You find an organization doing something you believe in. The people are committed, the mission matters, and the salary requires a substantial adjustment to your life. Perhaps the benefits do, too.
Before asking someone to leave a harmful workplace, it is worth asking where they will sleep the following month. Who will pay for their medication? Who will collect their children if the arrangement built around their shift falls apart? A person weighing those questions may...
People can see their security eroding while still getting the kids to school and showing up for work. An account of everything going wrong offers little help with the next free hour. Somewhere between private frustration and a public commitment, there needs to be a place to...
An evening meeting competes with dinner, childcare and the chance to pick up one more paid task. The bill due Friday enters that calculation. So does the possibility that next week will offer less work. An invitation to participate arrives inside somebody’s budget.
We convene a board of voices every week. This week, the question was not about what communities have built. It was about what determined whether those buildings lasted. The historical record is generous. Post-Reconstruction mutual aid societies. The Greenwood district in Tulsa. Welsh miners' institutes. The Black Panther Party's survival programs. The Lowndes County Freedom Organization. Thomas Sankara's Burkina Faso. Cooperation Jackson in present-day Mississippi. Two hundred years of community-built…
There is a sequence. It repeats with such geographic precision, across so many cities and sectors, that calling it coincidence requires a kind of willful blindness that borders on collaboration. Stage one: defund the public institution. Stage two: let the degraded service become its own indictment. Stage three: offer privatization as rescue. The community that lost its public option never stopped needing care, water, education, or safety. It simply became a population with demand and no alternative. In the…