YES! Magazine
type: channel
description: Solutions Journalism
date: 2026-06-10T19:03:10Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
generator agent: https://wordpress.org/
items: Resisting Extractivism and Creating a New Commons
items: How Standing Rock Changed Us All
items: Planting the Seeds for a Youth-Driven Antimilitarism Movement
items: What We Do Together Holds Us Together
items: Building a Future When Empire Is Obsolete
items: Rebellions Work — and They Represent a Long Tradition
items: We All Have a Responsibility to End War
items: Hungry for Democracy
items: At What Risk Will We Resist?
items: A Repository of Hope Amid an Authoritarian Moment
items: The World Is Burning—Does the YES! Approach Still Matter?
items: Beyond Criminality in the U.S. Immigration System
items: Lessons From the Māori and Japanese Peoples on Grieving Pregnancy Loss
items: Messages of Fierce Hope From the Global South
items: Boycotts Are Back: Queer Travelers Fight Bigotry With Their Wallets
items: Growing Up On the Migration Route
items: Recovering Lost Stories From Trans History
items: The Freedom to Choose Hysterectomy
items: St. Louis Says “Not Another Nickel” to Human Rights Violators
items: Voters Demand a Bolder and More Progressive Democratic Party
items: Educators Fight Suppression to Teach America’s Real History
items: Colombian Activists Destigmatize Drug Use—and Make It Safer
items: Beyond the Rainbow
items: Indigenous Stewards Reclaim Prison Land
items: Self-Determined: Solidarity in Sovereignty
items: Murmurations: Puerto Rico’s Resilient History Mirrors the Mangrove
items: The Fight to Repatriate Indigenous Students Who Died at Boarding Schools
items: Renters With Pets Organize After Climate Disasters
items: When ICE Comes, the Bay Area Protects Their Own
items: Apocalypse Chow: Street Food Vendors Are Connoisseurs, Not Criminals
items: My Ancestors Knew That a Revolution Must Be Fed
items: Artists Deserve Cash With No Strings Attached
items: A Victory at Bad River
items: The Screenings Saving Lives in Rural Guatemala
items: Murmurations: An Ode to Collective Organizing
items: Educators Resist Trump’s Fascist Agenda
items: LGBTQ Elders Share Wisdom for Survival
items: ‘I’m Still Here’ Fights to Preserve the History of Brazil’s Dictatorship
items: Applying Lessons From the Armenian Genocide to Gaza
items: To Resist the Trump Regime, Look to Iran
items: The Trees Are Speaking
items: Terra Affirma: A Hybrid Wild
items: How Including People With Disabilities Benefits Everyone
items: Self-Determined: Foundations Must Match the Far Right’s Commitment to Systemic Change. Here’s How.
items: Safe Homes: India’s Mixed-Status Couples Navigate Caste and Faith
items: Rebuilding the World through Queer Video Games
items: Why Sanders’ Call to “Fight Oligarchy” Resonates More Than Ever
items: The Fight to Preserve Medicaid for Disabled Children in California
items: ‘Patrice’ Captures the Fight for Marriage Equality for Disabled Couples
items: Resisting Repression: What’s Next for the Student Fight for Palestine?

Resisting Extractivism and Creating a New Commons
type: item
creator: Jared
date: 2026-06-10T19:03:02Z
description: The ruling class is striving to take everything from us – including our future.
encoded: We know you’re excited to read the tenth edition of the YES! newsletter, so we’ll make this appeal brief. Since we launched this newsletter in September 2025, 79 of our readers have stepped up to start monthly donations. We’re incredibly grateful to each of you! If you haven’t started a monthly donation yet, please take a moment to support our work. Even a monthly gift of $5 will go a long way toward helping us produce this newsletter and keeping the legacy of this legendary independent publisher alive. The ruling class is striving to take everything from us – including our future. From the Trump administration’s anti-ecological blitzkrieg against government regulations to the proliferation of gargantuan data centers swallowing up our water and electricity, far right governments and powerful AI corporations are seizing the means of life to enrich themselves. The material of life that sustains us all is not only being concentrated in the hands of a few ultrawealthy people; it is also being destroyed. And these two processes are not just happening simultaneously – they are interlinked. Writing for YES! in 2021, ecofeminist activist Vandana Shiva explained how privatization and extraction are the key drivers of planetary destruction, and that the solution lies in “commoning” – practices that protect the right of all beings to enjoy the Earth’s gifts of life: In the commons, we care and share — for the Earth and each other. We are conscious of nature’s ecological limits, which ensure her share of the gifts she creates goes back to her to sustain biodiversity and ecosystems. We are aware that all humans have a right to air, water, and food, and we feel responsible for the rights of future generations. Enclosures of the commons, in contrast, are the root cause of the ecological crisis and the crises of poverty and hunger, dispossession and displacement. Extractivism commodifies for profit what is held in common for the sustenance of all life. –Vandana Shiva Read the full …

How Standing Rock Changed Us All
type: item
creator: Jared
date: 2026-05-14T16:02:30Z
subject: Newsletter
description: Ten years ago this spring, an Indigenous-led movement against an oil pipeline transformed the consciousness of the country.
encoded: This month we celebrate YES! Media’s 30th anniversary! Since its founding YES! Media has remained committed to seeking new pathways forward in the face of continued social problems and mounting crises. These last few years have only affirmed the urgency of YES!’s mission, and this is where we need your help. Please join us in building the more just world that we all want by becoming a monthly sustainer of YES! Your support will keep alive the dream that Sarah van Gelder and David Korten actualized in 1996, and plant the seeds for YES!’s next 30 years! Ten years ago this spring, an Indigenous-led movement against an oil pipeline transformed the consciousness of the country. The Standing Rock Sioux tribe began protesting in April 2016 against the Dakota Access Pipeline, which threatened to poison the Missouri River. Protests turned into mass encampments of thousands of Indigenous activists and their supporters, drawing crucial connections between Indigenous sovereignty and climate change. They would eventually be cleared by federal agents in February 2017, as Donald Trump’s first presidency began. The pipeline continues to run today. “But this Indigenous-led disruption, the awakening resolve that was cultivated at Standing Rock, did not dissolve after February,” wrote Jenni Monet for YES! in 2018. “Rather, it spread in so many different directions that we may never fully realize its reach”: Americans saw the global struggle faced by the estimated 370 million Indigenous people — the violence, stolen resources, colluding corporations and governments that go hand in hand with protecting the Earth. Sustaining this awakening is the next great task. Climate change poses one of the most serious reminders of why the sacred fires ignited at Standing Rock must continue to burn: Indigenous peoples and their knowledge and value systems matter. –Jenni Monet Read the full article: What Standing Rock Gave the World From the Archives: What We Can Do Now to Defend Voting The Supreme C…

Planting the Seeds for a Youth-Driven Antimilitarism Movement
type: item
creator: Jared
date: 2026-04-15T22:00:26Z
subject: Newsletter
description: We need to build an antiwar movement more enduring, localized, and concrete to bring genocidal attacks to a halt.
encoded: A bolder antiwar movement is desperately needed at this moment to prevent the US-Israeli war in the Middle East from escalating further. While slogans against militarism were heard at the historic No Kings protests, we also need to build something more enduring, localized, and concrete to bring the genocidal attacks on Lebanon and Iran to a halt. Veteran organizing was key to ending the U.S. war on Vietnam. While the movement against the Iraq war did not succeed in preventing the U.S. operation, veteran organizing planted the seeds for long-term efforts to turn youth against war. Writing for YES! in 2023 on the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, Ruben Abrahams Brosbe reported on efforts by veterans “to counter both the narrative and incentives that military recruiters offer young people” and “share the truth about traumatic personal experiences as well as practical information”: “I think it’s super trippy, that there are children who are old enough to be in the military and being deployed to Iraq, who were not born when the war started. That is something that is just devastating and tragic to me,” Damiani says. “It fuels my fire to keep talking to the kids, because they need to know.” –Ruben Abrahams Brosbe Read the full article: Veterans Push Back Against Military Recruitment in Schools From the Archives: Holding Up What Trump Seeks to Destroy Trump has been pledging for months to overthrow the government of Cuba, and he has continued to make these threats despite the unpopularity of his war on Iran, which has killed at least 2,076 people so far. This is a crucial time for progressives to hold up the achievements of the blockaded Caribbean nation that the U.S. administration seeks to destroy. Its health care system, for example, has brought care around the world while forging peaceful ties with other countries. “Cuba’s spending on medical services and training, then, is an investment in its national security,” wrote Sarah van Gelder for YES! in 2017. “They i…

What We Do Together Holds Us Together
type: item
creator: Jared
date: 2026-03-16T20:18:50Z
subject: Newsletter
description: What can hold us together when capitalism, empire, and fascism are ruthlessly committed to tearing us apart?
encoded: The catastrophic US-Israeli war on Iran is weighing heavily on our minds – in addition to the trail of suffering and tragedy ICE leaves in its wake, the genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, the outrageous lack of accountability following the partial release of Epstein files, and the fear of yet another US regime change operation which looms over Cuba. There are so many fronts on which organizers are tirelessly working and where activists are constantly mobilizing. While multitasking between antiwar protests and rapid response, to divestment campaigns and survivor advocacy, it can feel like there is not enough time to even breathe. What can hold us together when capitalism, empire, and fascism are ruthlessly committed to tearing us apart? Writing for YES! in 2018, Ari Honarvar drew upon her childhood experiences in Iran to reflect on how rituals sustained her community through the darkest hours. These kinds of practices support our deeply human need for belonging and shared meaning, and ground us amid troubling times. Shared rituals may be crucial for holding us together in an era of seemingly permanent crises: In this age of isolation, we need nourishing and uplifting means of creating community by bringing together members of different generations as our ancestors did. From my experience in Iran, rituals can be particularly valuable during hard times. In the U.S., we don’t have to worry about bombs and food rations, but we still have challenges to our security that affect our mental and physical health. Rituals can help us, though, by offering our communities opportunities for healing and support. —Ari Honarvar Read the full article: Why Rituals Are Good for Your Health From the Archives: Rescuing Ourselves and the Planet From Oil As airstrikes on oil facilities across Iran produce apocalyptic columns of fire and toxic black rain across Tehran, the terrible war launched by the US and Israel further threatens to raise energy prices to historical l…

Building a Future When Empire Is Obsolete
type: item
creator: Jared
date: 2026-02-11T21:02:09Z
subject: Newsletter
description: A future without successive catastrophes requires solutions that put a culture of care at the heart of relationships.
encoded: As Trump’s unapologetic spectacle of militarism continues to escalate at home and around the world, the historical scale of grassroots resistance on the streets shows not only widespread outrage, but also a collective hunger for change beyond tepid reform – especially when Democratic leaders often seek to accommodate MAGA rather than challenge it at the root. Mass outrage is palpable. The nonstop violence of capitalism and empire in these times is meant to exhaust, demoralize, and pressure us to accept ever more injustice as a new status quo. But will we throw our weight behind temporary truces between the two parties of U.S. empire just to win a temporary reprieve, or will we continue to strive for a deeper transformation – one that seeks to put each and every relation of domination in the dustbin of history? As David Korten wrote for YES! in 2006, a future without successive catastrophes requires solutions that put a culture of care at the heart of relationships with each other and the earth: If we look for the source of the social pathologies increasingly evident in our culture, we find they have a common origin in the dominator relations of Empire that have survived largely intact in spite of the democratic reforms of the past two centuries. The sexism, racism, economic injustice, violence, and environmental destruction that have plagued human societies for 5,000 years, and have now brought us to the brink of a potential terminal crisis, all flow from this common source. Freeing ourselves from these pathologies depends on a common solution — replacing the underlying dominator cultures and institutions of Empire with the partnership cultures and institutions of Earth Community. Unfortunately, we cannot look to imperial power-holders to lead the way. —David Korten Read the full article: How Will Future Generations Remember Our Time? From the Archives: We Can’t Let Them Take Away Our Neighbors Again Mass resistance to the intensified brutality of ICE and other fede…

Rebellions Work — and They Represent a Long Tradition
type: item
creator: Jared
date: 2026-01-14T16:48:42Z
subject: Newsletter
description: Immigration enforcement is now facing renewed resistance across the country as Trump’s agents continue to harm, terrorize, and kill with impunity.
encoded: Thousands of people took to the streets over the weekend to protest the killing of Renee Nicole Good by ICE agent Jonathan Ross in Minneapolis. Good, 37, was shot several times while attempting to drive away from the site of a protest. Immigration enforcement is now facing renewed resistance across the country as Trump’s agents continue to harm, terrorize, and kill with impunity. Will the demonstrations catalyze a larger rebellion against ICE? Historians of Black liberation movements have pointed out that large-scale acts of revolt were key to advancing freedom struggles. When we draw on this history, we tap into a long tradition of diverse, coalitional struggle which developed and advanced some of the most progressive ideas which the left celebrates and continues to fight for today. In the wake of the George Floyd uprising, Jamon Jordan reminded us, “Protest as an act of resistance to oppression is a staple of American culture; the very founding of the United States is connected to protest, which exists in myriad demonstrations”: There were hundreds of rebellions during the period of slavery — some small, some major. Rebellions worked. Today’s protests are no different. They’re modern-day uprisings, or rebellions, and part of every era of U.S. history. —Jamon Jordan Read the full article: Rebellions Work From the Archives: Organizing From the Heart Channeling people’s anger into concrete efforts for change is a perennial preoccupation of the organizer. Newcomers to activism sometimes find that traditions of organizing from the last century lack the compassionate qualities that they are looking for in political spaces. As Sally Kohn wrote for YES! in 2013, “the advice that helped shape modern political organizing [was] not always the most effective approach for alliance building and mass public appeal.” Organizers in recent decades have responded by putting more emphasis on building relationships, community, and solidarity. “The new generation of community organizer…

We All Have a Responsibility to End War
type: item
creator: Jared
date: 2025-12-09T19:53:54Z
subject: Newsletter
description: The testimonies of combat veterans speak to the moral catastrophe of war and the necessity of mass resistance to military conflict.
encoded: In the last 25 years, the U.S. has officially gone to war with Iraq and Afghanistan. But it has also sent troops, launched airstrikes, carried out drone attacks, or provided critical support for military attacks on Syria, Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, Libya, Iran, Gaza, Lebanon, and Russia. These wars have wiped out millions of lives; plunged masses of people into poverty, trauma, starvation, and the status of refugee; and left many U.S. veterans burdened with PTSD and homelessness. Now, the Trump administration is taking the U.S. on a path to war with Venezuela. Writing for YES! in 2020, Nancy Hill profiled dozens of veterans about their experience in combat. Their testimonies speak to the moral catastrophe of war and the necessity of mass resistance to military conflict: War breaks us. It detaches us from our core humanity. War removes us from ourselves and programs us to find enemies in anyone or anything that is unfamiliar. It robs us of our humanity and empathy. War poisons our hearts, minds, and spirits. It reduces us to cold shells — unfeeling, unloving — of ourselves first and then others, and back around. We can break that cycle though. The opposite of war is creation, nurturing, and healing. When we do our work to slow down, feel, and see ourselves in others, we can end wars. But we all have to do it. We all have to do the work to end wars. —Letty Martinez, as quoted by Nancy Hill Read the full article: Combat Veterans Tell Us What We Need to Know About War From the Archives: War Budgets Lead to National Insecurity. What Creates Security? The drive to war turns us away from systems that foster creation, nurturing, and healing. We all want to live in safety, but seeking security through the funding of so-called defense budgets ultimately takes us further away from realizing it. “If we want a healthy Earth, justice, peace, and democracy, we need a 21st-century security agenda that addresses the causes of contemporary conflicts, encourages cooperation and diploma…

Hungry for Democracy
type: item
creator: Jared
date: 2025-11-12T19:31:04Z
subject: Newsletter
description: What if we approached solutions to the worsening food crisis as a struggle for democracy?
encoded: Donald Trump has made history – the federal government shutdown has now lasted over 40 days. Through this perverse achievement, his administration has jeopardized food access for 42 million people who receive benefits through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). This comes months after Congress passed a federal budget with $187 billion in cuts to SNAP over the next decade and after the Trump administration eliminated a crucial U.S. Department of Agriculture survey on food insecurity. While the current administration has certainly made it harder for millions of people to eat, the problem of food insecurity in the U.S. long predates Trump. Previous administrations failed to address inflation, corporate greed, poverty wages, health care costs, housing affordability, and the myriad of other key contributors that force millions to go hungry. Our so-called democracy, whether dominated by Democrats or Republicans, is not delivering the goods. What if we approached solutions to the worsening food crisis as not just a matter of maintaining existing policies like SNAP (however necessary), but as a struggle for democracy? Writing for YES! in 2008, Raj Patel advised us to push for more than evidence-based scientific changes to our food systems to address the global hunger crisis. In order “to feed the world, we’re [also] going to have to develop a taste for more democracy”: Improved farming science alone won’t fix things, though. As much as they need nitrogen in the soil, tomorrow’s food systems need democracy on the ground. The problem of starvation is one not of production — we produce more than enough food to feed everyone — so much as poverty and distribution. —Raj Patel Read the full article: Food From the Grassroots A Note to New Subscribers You are currently reading the third edition of a monthly newsletter produced by Truthout featuring content from the YES! digital archives and new solutions journalism from independent media. Though YES! Magazine cease…

At What Risk Will We Resist?
type: item
creator: Jared
date: 2025-10-20T23:39:34Z
subject: Newsletter
description: With each day carrying the risk of further repression from the state, the pressure to defend our democratic rights is mounting.
encoded: Relentless kidnapping of immigrants by ICE. Universities handing over names to the state for investigation. Steps toward regime change in Venezuela. Prosecution of Trump’s political opponents. Looming military deployment to cities across the country. Threats of mass state repression against the left in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Thousands of workers fired from federal agencies (so far) amid a government shutdown with no clear end in sight. Amid these authoritarian times, a question arises: At what risk will we resist? Fran Korten, the former publisher of YES! Magazine, raised this sobering question after Donald Trump first won the presidency in 2016. Her piece from 2017 perhaps carries more urgency now as the U.S. moves further down an authoritarian spiral: We are entering a time of testing. Much that we hold dear appears under threat. We will be asked in new and sometimes frightening ways, “What do we stand for?” “What do we care about enough to risk ridicule, funding, a job, our lives?” Many of us have not had to face such choices before. Sure, we act for what we believe in. We march. We write letters to the editor. We call our elected officials. We speak up at council meetings. We join committees. We donate. But at what risk? Often very little. That may change. —Fran Korten Read the full article: The Trump Era Will Test Us. What Are You Willing to Risk? A Note to New Subscribers Earlier this year, YES! Magazine, a legendary independent publisher of solutions journalism, ceased regular publication. The work produced by YES! did not merely shine a light on injustice; it emphasized the brilliant and creative ways that people were challenging it. You are currently reading the second edition of a monthly newsletter produced by Truthout featuring content from the YES! digital archives and new solutions journalism from independent media. Truthout is producing this newsletter and stewarding these archives because we believe YES!’s work continues to provide…

A Repository of Hope Amid an Authoritarian Moment
type: item
creator: Jared
date: 2025-09-15T22:07:23Z
subject: Newsletter
description: The past is replete with examples of committed groups of people outside the majority that have changed the world.
encoded: Earlier this year, YES! Magazine, a legendary independent publisher of solutions journalism, ceased regular publication. For nearly 3 decades, YES! provided a crucial platform for organizers, visionaries, and writers to share stories of people striving for real change. In this far-right authoritarian moment, the loss of a veteran member of the progressive media ecosystem is certainly something we at Truthout deeply mourn. But the impact of extraordinary journalism extends far beyond the date of publication. The Truthout Center for Grassroots Journalism is stewarding the digital content of YES! and carrying on the work of solutions journalism precisely for this reason – to ensure that everyone can draw on the YES! tradition to inform their fight for a better world. On this note, we have an exciting announcement: Truthout hosts a monthly newsletter with relevant content from the YES! digital archives and new solutions journalism from a variety of publications. You are reading the first installment of that newsletter! We look forward to providing our subscribers with these curated resources that can help us imagine – and build – movements for transformation. “The stories found in YES!’s archives, along with new solutions-driven reporting, will continue to be urgently relevant, especially in these repressive times — we need examples, models, inspirations,” said Maya Schenwar, director of the Truthout Center for Grassroots Journalism. “We’re honored that the Truthout Center will be stewarding YES!’s archives and creating a YES! newsletter.” As Sarah van Gelder, co-founder of YES! Magazine, writes, “The visionaries and practitioners featured in YES! explored what was possible then, and much of what they contributed suggests ways forward now”: At YES!, we never spoke of certainties about the future — only about possibilities. But possibilities are powerful magnets, drawing us to the hard but deeply rewarding work of creating a world together where people and the planet com…

The World Is Burning—Does the YES! Approach Still Matter?
type: item
creator: Doug Indrick
date: 2025-06-11T15:35:04Z
subject: Political Power
subject: Political Systems
subject: Labor
subject: Activism
subject: Local power
description: A Final Word from YES! Founding Editor on What We Hoped for and What Comes Next
encoded: Note: The YES! approach was developed in the early years over many conversations with board, staff, contributors, advisors, and through a series of retreats we held called “The State of the Possible.” I want to fully acknowledge how many people’s wisdom and experience contributed to developing this approach. Each would have a different nuance on how the YES! approach is best described and how it was practiced. I don’t claim to speak for others, just my own understanding based on the first two decades while I was executive editor. When news arrived on May 7, 2025, that YES! would be closing, I felt shock and sadness at the end of an organization I led as founding editor and at the loss to the progressive media world. But the outpouring of social media comments lifted my spirits, reminding me of the impact YES! had on so many people—some who started reading the magazine as young people, others seasoned activists who were introduced to work that inspired them to creative new approaches. The responses got me wondering: Are there parts of YES! that can have continued life? While the current staff and board are doing heroic work to transition the organization and keep the archives available (see below for details on a new home for the YES! archive!), I want to offer something else—a look behind the scenes at the theory and practice of change we explored during YES!’s founding years and the first two decades, when I had the honor of serving as executive editor. And I want to consider where the YES! approach fits, if at all, during the current rise of fascism. As I worked on this essay, I came to believe that these times call us, with even more urgency, to adapt and evolve the approach we developed at YES! in many different forms. The Secret Sauce People often asked about the “secret sauce” that made YES! Magazine what it was. Because of its exuberant name (including the exclamation point!), some believed our purpose was simply to make people feel good—to counter the doom a…

Beyond Criminality in the U.S. Immigration System
type: item
creator: Evette Dionne
date: 2025-05-30T18:44:13Z
subject: Racial Justice
subject: Immigration
subject: Abolition
description: There is little recourse when a visa application is denied because of a criminal background. In order to overhaul the U.S. immigration system, it is vital for the country to nix the idea of criminality altogether.
encoded: In a world where the U.S. federal government still executes incarcerated people, it’s easy to see the nation-state’s vicious obsession with the idea of “irredeemable criminality.” There are few places in the U.S. where this obsession is more on display than in the immigration system. Though a denied naturalization application can be appealed, there is minimal recourse and no judicial review when a visa application is denied due to the applicant having a criminal background. But the guise of criminality overlooks the nuance and complexity that can influence situations as well as the humanity of all people, especially immigrants. It’s also a notoriously difficult categorization to come back from, though immigrants are no more prone to criminality than those born and raised in the U.S. In a 2017 peer-reviewed paper for the NYU Law Review, Daniel I. Morales, an associate professor of law at the University of Houston who specializes in immigration law, keenly noted: “Every immigrant—like every citizen—poses a ‘risk’ of violence because every immigrant is human. The success with which this human mystery and the fear it inevitably elicits is managed by the legal and political system will to a significant extent determine the degree to which noncitizens are embraced by a society.” The exclusion of individuals labeled “criminals” in the U.S. immigration system perpetuates discriminatory practices, ignores the complexity of human behavior, and reinforces this harmful narrative of irredeemability. Crimes of “moral turpitude”—crimes that have affect the moral fabric of society—define the criteria for exclusion and inadmissibility, and it is through the mask of morality that the nation-state justifies itself. Such descriptions can—and have been—violently appropriated by the ruling class for centuries. While legislators claim these laws enhance “public safety,” the laws ultimately push a racist, classist, ableist, and overall discriminatory agenda that does little for actual safe…

Lessons From the Māori and Japanese Peoples on Grieving Pregnancy Loss
type: item
creator: Evette Dionne
date: 2025-05-30T18:42:04Z
subject: Body Politics
subject: Reproductive Justice
subject: abortion rights
description: Abortion in a world where reproductive justice is realized means allowing each person full autonomy over their pregnancy decision.
encoded: In 1994, after 18 years of providing care for hundreds of women in Tennessee, the Chattanooga Abortion Clinic was shut down. In its place, the National Memorial for the Unborn was born. This site features a 50-foot granite wall adorned with plaques for “unborn children” who were aborted. The National Memorial deems itself a place of healing, tribute, and closure redeemed from “the business of death,” and yet it stigmatizes abortions and the people who have them. Replacing an abortion clinic with a site that mourns the pregnancies lost in abortion is emblematic of the abortion debates in the United States. For decades, these debates have set up a false dichotomy: You either focus entirely on the pregnant person and avoid discussing the concept of loss and death or you emphasize the loss of a baby while ignoring the needs of the pregnant person. In other words, we exist in a “clump of cells vs. baby” dichotomy. What would it look like to marry these two ideas? In 2018, this time in the state’s capital of Nashville, Tennesseans once again pushed the idea of eclipsing abortion access and rights through the grieving of aborted fetuses. After heated debate, the state’s House voted to use private funds to erect a “monument to the unborn” on state capitol grounds. (Of note, this vote turned out to be primarily political theater. Years later, the monument has received $0 toward its creation.) Through this vote, the state’s legislators succeeded in communicating its values loud and clear. Even before the Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade, Tennessee has long been one of the most hostile states for abortion rights with a pre-existing trigger law that made abortion illegal from conception onward. After much controversy, a subsequent lawsuit, and a demand for a recount, Tennesseans voted in 2014 to change the state’s constitution to specifically declare that the right to abortion is not protected. So why did lawmakers once more deem it necessary to put forth the idea of memor…

Messages of Fierce Hope From the Global South
type: item
creator: Evette Dionne
date: 2025-05-30T18:37:13Z
subject: Activism
subject: Political Power
subject: Global South
description: An offering of inspiration from activists in the Global South, including Mexico, Lebanon, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand to help people in the U.S. navigate these difficult times.
encoded: To those of you in the United States, the organizers, activists, community workers, and everyday people of the Global South are writing to you about hope. We do not mean the misunderstood interpretation of hope that prizes optimism or triumphalism. We mean the kind of hope fierce enough to confront the suffering caused by systemic oppression, and one that tactfully and persistently fights to put an end to it. We know your panic because we are no strangers to your fear. We resonate with your anxiety—perhaps even on a greater scale than what most of you have felt. That’s because we are no strangers to authoritarian regimes, human rights violations, and the exploitation of our lands and lineages. And for many of us in the Global South, our wounds are directly caused by the legacy of the United States, down to the everyday decisions of the American people—through taxpayer money and day-to-day capitalist consumptions that are seldom questioned yet passively or actively consented to—resulting in the dispossession of countless communities in the Global South. Yet we are here to encourage you in a pivotal time. Think of the following as a letter, one rooted in the wisdom of the Global South to remind you of an alternative way forward. May you read with reverence, as most of these Global South organizers have written their messages in English, which for most of them is not their first language. Additionally, they offer frameworks, philosophies, and strategies after generations and centuries of resistance. They would like to teach you what has worked for them and their ancestors in the ancient and ongoing fight against autocratic power and state violence. They send you—the organizers, activists, workers, and everyday people of the United States—messages of hope. Keep going, just as they have. To commence, Uganda-based environmental educator and grassroots organizer Darren Namatovu asks you to “keep hope alive—not as blind optimism but as an act of defiance, and remember our G…

Boycotts Are Back: Queer Travelers Fight Bigotry With Their Wallets
type: item
creator: Evette Dionne
date: 2025-05-30T17:39:08Z
subject: Body Politics
subject: LGBTQ Rights
subject: Trans Rights
description: For decades, queer communities have used boycotts to combat erasure and demand liberation.
encoded: At a time when our government is denying the existence of trans people, erasing trans rights, and generally undoing the progress made toward LGBTQ+ equality in the U.S., boycotts are an outlet for collective anger and a means of fighting bigotry. LGBTQ+ history is filled with powerful stories of queer and trans people advocating for our rights by using every tool available, whether it’s seeking justice through the legal system or pushing back against police violence—yes at Stonewall, but also at Compton’s Cafeteria and the hundreds of other, lesser-known protests that came before. Yet boycotts haven’t played as central a role in LGBTQ+ liberation as they did during the civil rights movement. “We’re ultimately a fairly small group,” says Eli Erlick, activist and author of Before Gender: Lost Stories From Trans History, 1850–1950. And since companies haven’t historically valued queer consumers, the impact of a boycott is diluted. Still, boycotts have been an important tool for liberation. “Queer communities have used boycotts to amplify voices when mainstream media and politics ignored them,” says Jay Santana, an LGBTQ+ historian and activist. “These actions created not just pressure, but visibility.” LGBTQ+ Boycotts Build Coalitions and Acceptance In the 1970s, the LGBTQ community and the labor movement united to protest discriminatory labor practices at Coors, where employees were disqualified from being hired if they were gay or pro-union. At that time, homophobia was widespread in the labor movement, but labor leaders also recognized the organizing power within the LGBTQ+ community, and the organizing talents of Harvey Milk and other LGBTQ+ leaders. Bay Area gay bars refused to stock Coors—to this day, many still don’t carry it—and bartenders ceremoniously poured out beer in the streets. The Coors boycott helped broker an alliance between LGBTQ+ people and union workers. In 1977, Miami-Dade County, Florida, passed an ordinance that prohibited discrimination agains…

Growing Up On the Migration Route
type: item
creator: Evette Dionne
date: 2025-05-28T21:05:45Z
subject: Racial Justice
subject: Immigration
description: For many migrant families, shelters near the U.S.–Mexico border are becoming more critical as immigration becomes more fraught.
encoded: Upon crossing the border from Guatemala and into Mexico, 19-year-old Claudia Rivera and her family were stopped by a group of unknown men. “They took us when we crossed into Chiapas and took everything we were carrying, except for [a] cell phone,” says Rivera, who is now residing in Casa Monarca, a shelter in Monterrey, Mexico. “Then, they took us to some bushes and made me undress to see if I was hiding any money.” After the men searched Rivera and her mother for hidden items, they allowed the two women to get dressed again. While Rivera is grateful she and her family did not experience significant harm during their journey north, she says she is still deeply troubled by witnessing the women in her family being separated and treated differently than her male relatives. “It was very complicated,” she explains. Rivera left Honduras with her mother and 15-year-old brother in January 2024, aiming to reunite with their two older brothers in the United States. For more than a year, they have been at Casa Monarca and, instead of migrating to the United States, they are awaiting a residency visa in Mexico. Rivera’s experience is becoming more common as migrant shelters in Mexico are increasingly filled with children and teenagers who run through the rooms or tents, play soccer, or gather to watch TikTok on a parent’s phone. Since Donald Trump began restricting migration along the U.S–Mexico border, families remain stranded in shelters, camps, and other locations as they contemplate whether to stay in Mexico or return to their homes. Father Luis Eduardo Zavala, director and founder of Casa Monarca, said these new, harsher U.S. immigration policies have significantly altered the level of care families need. Children and teenagers journeying through Mexico face heightened risks of trafficking, exploitation, kidnapping, forced recruitment, and sexual abuse. Those risks disproportionately impact women, including girls and teenagers. Oscar Misael Hernández, a social anthropologi…

Recovering Lost Stories From Trans History
type: item
creator: Evette Dionne
date: 2025-05-27T12:00:00Z
subject: Body Politics
subject: LGBTQ Rights
subject: Trans Rights
description: Forgotten or destroyed trans narratives can still foster change for future trans generations.
encoded: The narrative that we are in the midst of the first generation of trans children is so omnipresent as to be ambient. It is repeated ad nauseam in the media, online, by doctors, and by parents. Trans children, these various gatekeepers say in unison, have no history at all. [. . .] What happens if this consensus turns out to be baseless? —Jules Gill-Peterson, 2017 In 1939, the sleepy British town of Great Yarmouth rumbled awake. National media picked up the story of two brothers, Mark and David Ferrow. The trans teens recently returned to their hometown after spending four years transitioning in nearby Maidstone. The siblings were far from extraordinary. Mark, the outgoing older brother, loved fine arts and literature. David, the shy younger brother, joined his father’s book-selling business upon his return. The two grew more comfortable with themselves as they received overwhelming love and support from their small community. Mark and David found a way to thrive decades before the first trans kids were supposed to exist. 17-year-old Mark and 15-year-old David did not have our modern language to describe themselves in 1939. The term “gender” only came into common usage around 1955. Yet the trans siblings were far from alone. They were only a tiny part of the blossoming community defying gender norms. Transgender people are nothing new. What is new, however, is the moral panic around gender identity. After opening up about my own trans identity at 8 years old in 2003, I know firsthand that trans people have existed for more than just a few years. Calling us “new” erases our history. But exactly how much of our transgender past has been lost, forgotten, and destroyed? Who were the first documented children to transition? What means did activists have to resist society’s extreme discomfort in discussing gender before our language developed? How did trans people live their everyday lives before they had terms to describe themselves? Which trans athletes participated in s…

The Freedom to Choose Hysterectomy
type: item
creator: Evette Dionne
date: 2025-05-26T12:00:00Z
subject: Body Politics
subject: Reproductive Justice
subject: Health Justice
subject: hysterectomy
description: This form of care can be hard to access for those who have a uterus in a medical system built for cis women having babies.
encoded: To read about hysterectomy in the news is to read about disaster: emergency hysterectomy after a denied abortion, deadly hysterectomies during war, coerced hysterectomies on detained migrants. A hysterectomy often signals multifold systemic and legal failures, which are then forever written on the body—a body forever changed. Hysterectomy also often indicates a tragedy inflicted by external, malignant forces. Yet one in five people who are born with a uterus will have it removed by the time they are in their 60s, a statistic that was one in three when I began this project and one that never ceases to shock the person who asks why I study hysterectomy. Hysterectomy is at once highly common and yet primarily discussed—if at all—as a devastating event that happens to you. While we rarely read about this in news headlines, many people want a hysterectomy, choose a hysterectomy, and are happy to have had a hysterectomy. People might want a hysterectomy for a number of reasons, whether to find freedom from one of the many illnesses that affect the uterus and ovaries or to affirm their gender. These stories contradict fundamental assumptions we hold not only about hysterectomy but about gender, bodies, and reproduction. A pervasive idea within culture and medicine alike is that all people with uteruses will inevitably want to become pregnant and be mothers. Following this logic, choosing hysterectomy will almost certainly spark regret. And yet, as I found, a hysterectomy can elicit various emotional responses, ranging from delight to grief to something in between. While the assumption is that hysterectomy invariably causes grief, it is not the procedure itself that brings on this grief but rather the degree of agency afforded and the social context in which the hysterectomy is situated—the degree to which a hysterectomy feels choosable. Hysterectomy stories lay bare the dangers of viewing “women’s bodies” as perpetually pre-pregnant, or as existing in the zero trimester of…

St. Louis Says “Not Another Nickel” to Human Rights Violators
type: item
creator: Sonali Kolhatkar
date: 2025-05-26T12:00:00Z
subject: Activism
subject: Political Power
description: A new grassroots effort is challenging the city to strip companies such as Boeing and ICL of tax exemptions.
encoded: A diverse coalition has come together in St. Louis to oppose tax exemptions granted to weapons manufacturers. Launched in March 2025 under the banner “Not Another Nickel,” the coalition argues that tax exemptions for these manufacturers rob St. Louis of funding for schools and infrastructure, contribute to local pollution, and fuel foreign wars. The coalition’s targets include companies accused of manufacturing weapons that have been used to kill tens of thousands of Palestinians since Israel began its genocide in Gaza in October 2023. The campaign is led by the St. Louis Palestine Solidarity Committee, which succeeded in mobilizing the St. Louis Board of Aldermen to pass a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza in January 2024. Elior Berkowitz, a member of St. Louis Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), a coalition partner, says the new effort is “about making a statement that this ceasefire city does not want to support apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide, and also that it won’t give its resources to companies that profit from or participate in human rights abuses and environmental destruction.” Other campaign partners include the St. Louis chapters of Democratic Socialists of America, the Green Party, and CodePink. One of Not Another Nickel’s highest profile targets is Boeing. In March 2025, President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. Air Force had selected the company to build the next-generation F-47 fighter jet. Boeing plans to develop the warplanes in St. Louis County, at a facility about 15 miles from downtown St. Louis. The county granted Boeing about $155 million in tax breaks for the project. Berkowitz says that even before Boeing landed the new contract, the specter of its involvement in the war on Gaza hung over St. Louis. From 2021 to 2023, the company was the top U.S. provider of guided bombs and munitions to Israel. The Israeli Occupation Forces also purchase Boeing fighter jets. “Last year, I broke down crying when I was driving to the airport …

Voters Demand a Bolder and More Progressive Democratic Party
type: item
creator: Sonali Kolhatkar
date: 2025-05-22T12:00:00Z
subject: Political Systems
subject: Political Power
description: Around the U.S., progressive candidates are preparing to run for office and push for a liberal opposition that lives up to its ideals.
encoded: “I no longer believe in the Democratic Party,” says Kylie Sparks, a Los Angeles–based actor, writer, and organizer. Sparks volunteered for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in 2012 and worked on Hillary Clinton’s influencer squad in 2016, drumming up support for the candidate via their personal social media accounts. “I think the Democrats need to evolve or let the progressive wing take over because it’s clear that people want progressive politics.” The Democratic Party suffered major losses in the November 2024 election, which saw Donald Trump elected for a second term and the Republican Party win majorities in both the Senate and the House of Representatives. Since then, the party has seen its popularity sink to an all-time low as voters demand their Democratic representatives take more action against the Trump administration’s overreaches. Instead, much of the party leadership continues to play nice with the president. Still, a new vision for the Democratic Party’s future, backed by organizers like Sparks, seems to be emerging from its progressive contingents. That vision could appeal to voters in the coming elections, after many have grown disillusioned with Democratic Party leadership in recent years. While news headlines following Trump’s election win last year painted a grim picture for progressives, the popularity of progressive ballot measures in Republican and Democratic-led states and the success of left-leaning candidates at the state and local levels tell a different tale. For years, polling data has also shown that a majority of Americans, Democrats and Republicans alike, support progressive policies, such as Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, and getting money out of politics. Anger among Democratic voters nationwide over the Trump administration’s agenda and Democrats’ unwillingness to act as a bulwark against its overreaches also points to a growing desire for alternatives to the old guard. A series of “Hands Off” demonstrations organized to pro…

Educators Fight Suppression to Teach America’s Real History
type: item
creator: Sonali Kolhatkar
date: 2025-05-21T12:00:00Z
subject: Education
subject: Political Power
description: To fill the growing vacuum of history education in the U.S., racial justice organizers are offering truth-based curricula.
encoded: Since taking office in January 2025, President Donald Trump has launched an all-out assault on the nation’s past. He has cut funding and signed executive orders targeting historical programming at public institutions, including national parks, museums, and public schools, to silence or obscure the histories of communities of color and the systemic inequalities and racism those communities have endured since European settlers landed in what would later become the United States. Now, some history advocacy organizations are leaning into community-based education programs to continue teaching a more diverse and comprehensive picture of the nation’s past. “Education doesn’t have to be within school buildings. We need to have outside activities that provide the teachings of Black history. I think that’s crucial,” says Kristi Williams, founder of Black History Saturdays, an organization offering free Black history classes to community members of all ages in Tulsa, Oklahoma. “Whether they be in our churches, whether they be on the sidewalks, or in different spaces, we have to create those spaces.” The need for community-led spaces has become increasingly apparent over the past few months as the Trump administration has sought to stifle cultural institutions dedicated to preserving the histories of communities of color while promoting its white supremacist political agenda. In March 2025, the White House issued an executive order to “Restore Truth and Sanity to American Education,” which targeted the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. While the museum’s mission is to capture and share “the unvarnished truth of African American history and culture,” Trump’s executive order labeled its work “divisive” and “anti-American.” Following the executive order, the National Park Service (NPS) reportedly scrubbed information from its exhibits about the great abolitionist Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad. That network of secret routes and sa…

Colombian Activists Destigmatize Drug Use—and Make It Safer
type: item
creator: Evette Dionne
date: 2025-05-20T12:00:00Z
subject: Abolition
subject: Health Justice
subject: Body Politics
subject: safe drug use
subject: Colombia
description: After a failed War on Drugs, Échele Cabeza is working to protect drug consumers rather than penalize them.
encoded: Before heading on vacation, Esteban Pinzon, a 36-year-old public school teacher, makes a hotel reservation, packs a suitcase, and visits a drug-checking site in Bogotá, the capital city of Colombia, to test a swatch of the psychedelic LSD he has saved for the occasion. In a quiet residential neighborhood near downtown Bogotá, Pinzon enters a graffiti-scrawled building, where he’s led into a room outfitted with a small lab. A mural on the hallway reads: “End the War on Drugs.” A lab technician takes Pinzon’s paper square of LSD and douses a small sample with a reactant. It turns a dark copper color, a sign the drug is not what it appears to be. “There’s no presence of LSD,” Christian Gordillo, the lab technician at Échele Cabeza, the drug-checking site, tells him. “So we don’t recommend taking it.” With drugs banned around the world, substances are manufactured and sold without regulation, putting the health of consumers at risk. Drug checking is a way to protect consumers by testing the makeup of drugs and providing recommendations that help them to make safer choices. Drug checking originates in the ’90s European club scene, where the service was commonly used to test synthetic drugs like MDMA during electronic music concerts. But in Colombia, a country at the epicenter of the war on drugs, drug checking has transformed drug users and those most affected by prohibitionist policies into activists, championing harm-reduction strategies and drug legalization. “Drug checking started as a strategy to care for people’s health and has ended up becoming a social movement that is demanding rights, but also proposing actions to change drug policy,” says Julián Quintero, founder of Échele Cabeza. From Prohibition to Harm Reduction For decades, Colombia, the world’s largest producer of cocaine, has persecuted drug traffickers and targeted the farming of coca plants, the natural ingredient used in cocaine. Colombia has also used its police force to crack down on drug users, who…

Beyond the Rainbow
type: item
creator: Evette Dionne
date: 2025-05-20T12:00:00Z
subject: Body Politics
subject: LGBTQ Rights
description: When we interrogate the symbolism of the LGBTQ flag, we can disrupt the myth that queer communities have always been harmonious.
encoded: When I was a girl, my mama and I would frequently travel to Ohio from our home in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to visit her family. While I loved spending time with my grandparents in their tiny town of Middleton, I would often beg to visit my aunt and uncle in Cincinnati under the pretense of playing in their large and lavish house. Truthfully, I just wanted to see their art. All of the Black art. They had busts, sculptures, and paintings on almost every wall, and I would gaze for hours at every item. There was a particular piece that captivated me each time I laid my eyes on it. The painting, which I found out later was a poster, had a melancholy-faced Black woman sitting in what looked to be a bathroom or subway terminal because of the white-tiled walls behind her. There was a phrase written next to the woman’s despondent face, etched in exquisite rainbow lettering. It read: “for colored girls who considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf.” It wrecked me every time I read it. I would wonder, Why was this beautiful Black woman contemplating suicide? And why was she referring to herself as ‘colored’ when it was 1988 and most Black people I knew called themselves ‘Black American’ or ‘African American’? Prior to seeing the poster, I had never heard of suicide in reference to Black women before. The only knowledge I had of suicide was when it was uttered during a Lifetime movie my mama made me watch during one of our weekend movie marathons. Even then, there weren’t any Black women in that film, or in any Lifetime movie in the 1980s that we watched. Even though I had all of these silent contemplations about my aunt and uncle’s magnificent poster, I never posed these questions to them or my mama. Instead, I would just stare at it in awe anytime I visited. I wasn’t introduced to Ntozake Shange’s work and didn’t learn about the political and cultural significance of for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf until I was a graduate student and had th…

Indigenous Stewards Reclaim Prison Land
type: item
creator: Evette Dionne
date: 2025-05-16T12:00:00Z
subject: Racial Justice
subject: Abolition
subject: Indigenous Sovereignty
description: The Appalachian Rekindling Project purchased land in Kentucky that was designated for a federal prison.
encoded: Activists in eastern Kentucky are forcing the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) to go back to the drawing board mere months after the federal agency signed off on a Record of Decision approving a 500-acre site in Roxana, Kentucky, as the location for a $500 million medium-security prison. On Jan. 22, the Appalachian Rekindling Project (ARP), a community-building and land restoration organization led by Indigenous women, announced that it purchased a section of the site the BOP identified as its first choice for the new prison. With the acquisition of 68 acres of private land, the ARP aims to heal the land and the local community—in part by stopping the prison from ever getting built. “This land has already seen so much harm in the strip-mining industry and has already been out of access [to] environmental care and tending,” said Tiffany, one of the leaders of ARP who declined to use her last name for privacy and safety reasons. “The thought of adding another extractive industry—one that extracts people from their communities and extracts labor out of them—was really horrifying to us.” The land purchase, made with the help of the Institute to End Mass Incarceration (IEMI), comes after 20 years of back and forth between the federal government and residents of Letcher County, the eastern Kentucky municipality with a population of 21,000 where the prison was originally intended. The saga began in 2006, when Republican Rep. Hal Rogers requested that the BOP evaluate the potential for a new prison in Kentucky, citing the need for an economic stimulus. Ten years after, the BOP approved $500 million for a new prison built atop a former mountaintop coal-removal site. In 2018, a small coalition of rural organizers succeeded in forcing the agency to table the project. By then it was clear that the BOP preferred to spend the funds improving aging prison infrastructure rather than on building new prisons. Also concerning to locals was that most of the initial cost for the Letcher County f…

Self-Determined: Solidarity in Sovereignty
type: item
creator: Breanna Draxler
date: 2025-05-16T12:00:00Z
subject: Political Systems
subject: Political Power
subject: Indigenous Sovereignty
subject: Self-Determined
subject: tribal sovereignty
description: Less than four months into the second Trump presidency, we’ve witnessed a barrage of destructive policies, aggressive actions, and increasingly alarming rhetoric driven by greed and authoritarian ambition. While I
encoded: Less than four months into the second Trump presidency, we’ve witnessed a barrage of destructive policies, aggressive actions, and increasingly alarming rhetoric driven by greed and authoritarian ambition. While I am appalled by this, what unsettles me more is the collective response of quiet compliance. It is deeply troubling to witness how quickly so many have chosen to keep their heads down, clinging to the hope that we can simply white-knuckle it through the next four years until another election offers another hollow chance at change. This is a grave mistake that betrays our collective strength as well as our moral and ethical responsibility to resist the coordinated attempt to reshape our social and political reality through further monopolized power and control by a global elite. The reality is that much of what the Trump administration is doing—executive orders, policy threats, pressuring agencies and non-government organizations—is not law. Many of these moves are challenged and even overturned. Yet across the country, too many institutions are falling in line without a fight. Cities and universities are voluntarily cooperating with ICE. Medical facilities are pulling gender-affirming care. Businesses and organizations are scrubbing their websites of anything that might read as “DEI,” along with critical work to address climate change. It’s a preemptive surrender—a reflection of how fragile our so-called progress really is. It also shows how comfortable we have gotten with institutions that never fundamentally changed to effectively protect basic human rights. For Indigenous Peoples, the consequences of this fear-driven obedience are devastating on many levels. DEI backlash and ICE crackdowns are impacting us heavily. This is despite the fact that we are not a racial or ethnic group but rather political entities with collective rights established by treaties. Our tribal sovereignty is defined by a nation-to-nation relationship with the federal government an…

Murmurations: Puerto Rico’s Resilient History Mirrors the Mangrove
type: item
creator: Evette Dionne
date: 2025-05-15T12:00:00Z
subject: Environmental Justice
subject: Climate Justice
subject: Murmurations
subject: Puerto Rico
description: Half of the world’s mangroves are in danger of disappearing. Ensuring their survival is essential to Caribbean resistance movements.
encoded: There is a popular saying among organizers across movements: “They wanted to bury us, but they didn’t know we were seeds.” From the seed, I arrive at the mangrove. According to the Science Museum of Puerto Rico (Museo de Ciencias de Puerto Rico), mangroves are tropical or subtropical forests between water and land that “are formed by trees and shrubs adapted to environmental conditions such as floods due to tides, soils where there is little air circulation, little sand, and high salinity.” The mangrove seed is born suspended in the air and attached to its mother plant. When it matures, it separates and falls into the water where it rides the tide until it finds a place in the ocean depths where it can take root—until it is ready to reach toward the air again. Mangroves remind me of social justice movements in Puerto Rico, serving as a symbol of our histories and our interconnection. The history of Puerto Rico—and the Caribbean overall—is marked by the violence of colonialism, neoliberal capitalism, and more recently, the climate crisis. An archipelago that floods will always have to be evacuated. A people that loses its history does not survive. Creating new memories in this region is a complex process full of opacity and without guarantees. However, much like the mangrove, some of us in Puerto Rico weave the stories that situate us in time, shed light, and sustain us. This is how many of our stories are born. Strengthening Our Roots in the Face of Disasters Half of the world’s mangroves are in danger of disappearing. Ensuring their survival is crucial for the survival of Caribbean resistance movements because mangroves are our first line of defense against hurricanes and coastal erosion. Fighting for the future of mangroves teaches us how to regenerate ourselves. Mangroves cover only 0.1% of the Earth’s surface. Curiously, the Puerto Rican population also represents 0.1% of the world’s population. Most mangroves are found in tropical and subtropical areas. The Pue…

The Fight to Repatriate Indigenous Students Who Died at Boarding Schools
type: item
creator: Breanna Draxler
date: 2025-05-14T23:20:51Z
subject: Education
subject: Political Power
subject: Indigenous Sovereignty
description: On March 31, the Department of Government Efficiency announced cuts of $1.6 million to projects designed to preserve the stories of federal Indian boarding school victims and provide healing to
encoded: On March 31, the Department of Government Efficiency announced cuts of $1.6 million to projects designed to preserve the stories of federal Indian boarding school victims and provide healing to their descendants. These grants—canceled by the National Endowment for the Humanities—included $282,000 that would have gone to the National Native American Boarding School Healing Commission and enabled the digitization of more than 100,000 pages of boarding school records. With this program, Native families researching ancestors who went to government boarding schools would have been able to easily access digitized copies of their relative’s school records, including the cause and date of the relative’s death. It was not infrequent that children died at these schools. An investigation commissioned by former Interior Secretary Deb Haaland found at least 973 children had died and been buried at Indian boarding schools during the program’s 150-year history. Many more are thought to be buried in unmarked graves. The legacy of historical and intergenerational trauma caused by the boarding school era upon victims, their families, and their communities echoes down generations. Only by hearing the stories of boarding school victims can descendant families process and understand what happened to them and hopefully heal the wounds of this country’s tragic experiment in forced assimilation. The National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) issued a statement condemning the Trump administration’s decision. “The action is not just a bureaucratic decision conjured in ignorance,” NCAI President Mark Macarro wrote. “It is a betrayal of our communities, our survivors, and our sacred responsibility to the children who never made it home.” <img data-recalc-dims="1" decoding="async" width="1024" height="606" src="https://i0.wp.com/www.yesmagazine.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/img_5584.jpg?resize=1024%2C606&quality=45&ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-125502" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/www.yesmagazi…

Renters With Pets Organize After Climate Disasters
type: item
creator: Evette Dionne
date: 2025-05-14T12:00:00Z
subject: Climate Justice
subject: Economic Power
subject: Housing
description: Tenant unions can help the growing push for true “pet-inclusive” housing that eliminates breed restrictions and pet deposits.
encoded: “It was a big one-bedroom apartment. It had these beautiful views all the way down, like you could see the entire L.A. Basin,” says Katie Clark of her home of 15 years, which burned in the Eaton fire in January 2025. The Eaton fire, along with the Palisades fire, burned 37,000 acres around Los Angeles, destroying nearly 17,000 structures and dumping renters like Katie into a market “unbelievably hostile under the best of circumstances.” It wasn’t just Clark and her husband who lost a beloved home in Altadena, where they had deep roots—so deep that Katie is a highly active member of the Altadena Tenants Union. The couple also have a terrier, Ginger, a “very good dog,” who constrained their ability to find new housing. Some landlords flatly refused to rent to tenants with pets, while others demanded high pet deposits or monthly pet rents that made already-stratospheric pricing unsustainable. “There’s not a world in which we can go someplace without our dog. She’s part of our family,” says Clark, who goes on to explain she got lucky, comparatively. After a brief time in a hotel, she, her husband, and Ginger found a home in Pomona, 40 minutes away from Altadena, which, Clark is quick to say, is still home to her. “I don’t think of myself as leaving Altadena,” she explains. “I think of myself as temporarily displaced.” She’s not alone: 2.5 million people across the U.S. were displaced by climate disasters in 2023, the most recent year for which data is available. Fifty-five percent of Los Angeles households are renters compared to 35% across the United States. Nationwide, the U.S. Census Bureau found 49.7% of renters, especially households of color, are “cost burdened”; in Los Angeles, that number jumps to 60%. In the immediate aftermath of the fires, rental prices spiked, despite restrictions on price gouging. Amid a national housing crisis that’s exacerbated in disasters such as the L.A. fires, Hurricane Helene, and Hurricane Harvey, there’s a particular slice of rente…

When ICE Comes, the Bay Area Protects Their Own
type: item
creator: Evette Dionne
date: 2025-05-13T12:00:00Z
subject: Racial Justice
subject: Immigration
subject: Abolition
description: Rapid response offers a model of defense grounded in a refusal to let immigrants face harm alone.
encoded: The call came from the Santa Clara County Rapid Response Network (SCC RRN) on Feb. 21, 2025. ICE agents had violently arrested Ulises Peña Lopez, a husband and a father to a 4-year-old daughter, outside of his home in Sunnyvale, California. ICE not only violated Ulises’ constitutional rights during this arrest, but they also put him in the hospital. During his arrest, Ulises invoked his Fourth Amendment rights to remain silent, talk to a lawyer, and review a warrant. Instead of respecting his rights, ICE officers beat his car window with batons to force him out and then physically assaulted him until he lost consciousness. Paramedics rushed Ulises to a hospital, where he presented with symptoms of heart attack and stroke. Ulises’ family contacted their local rapid response hotline, and SCC RRN dispatchers activated two on-call emergency legal responders from Pangea Legal Services. This collective response worked, connecting Ulises and his family to a strong network of legal and community support. Elena Hodges, the on-call lead attorney responder, traveled to the hospital to provide a free legal consult and document ICE’s ongoing violations, with help from remote support and other on-call responders and colleagues. Over the course of the rapid response activation, the legal team averted Ulises’ immediate deportation, mobilized community support, and coordinated referrals to ensure ongoing legal representation. The SCC RRN also connected the family with material and accompaniment resources, including rent support and mental health services to address the trauma of witnessing Ulises’ unlawful arrest and the impact of ongoing family separation. Two months after his unlawful arrest, Ulises remains detained. But his family and community have prevented a deportation and continue to organize for Ulises’ release, so that he can reunite with his wife and daughter and fight his immigration case from home. Ulises’ case illustrates how rapid response is a vital tool for communit…

Apocalypse Chow: Street Food Vendors Are Connoisseurs, Not Criminals
type: item
creator: Sonali Kolhatkar
date: 2025-05-13T12:00:00Z
subject: Economic Power
subject: Labor
subject: Apocalypse Chow
description: New York City’s Street Vendor Project is advocating for more official support and an end to harsh penalties.
encoded: I love street food. I have had superb ceviche on a Tijuana roadside, porky frijoles refritos on a handmade tortilla in the highlands of Guatemala, hot poori and chana masala on a New Delhi sidewalk, baked mussels stuffed with rice on Istanbul’s famed Istiklal Street, and grilled lamb kebab out of a shopping cart in the Paris suburbs. Street food goes as far back as ancient Mesopotamia. Four thousand years ago, city dwellers short on time, money, or cooking facilities patronized street food vendors offering quick, cheap, and tasty meals. In colonial America, the street was the supermarket. City residents shopped at outdoor markets for meat, bread, and produce, according to Cindy R. Lobel, author of Urban Appetites: Food and Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York. By the early 1800s, “hot corn girls,” mainly African American women, sold ears of corn from buckets in cities. In New York City, each wave of immigrants took their turn: Italian women peddled preserves made from scavenged fruit, German mothers hawked bread from baskets, and Jewish men dished out pickled herring and vegetables from barrels. Street food is still a fixture of city life, providing a living to thousands of vendors and affordable food to many more customers. Given the vital role of street vendors, one would expect local governments to ease their path, but nothing could be further from reality. Many cities slap vendors with large fines, criminal penalties, and in the case of New York City, illegally seize their food carts and destroy them. In New York City, the Street Vendor Project (SVP) is fighting back by working with more than 3,000 street vendors to publicize the essential services they provide, advocate for more official support, and end harsh penalties. Criminalization of street vendors has taken on added urgency as many are undocumented immigrants at risk from the Trump administration’s ethnic cleansing agenda. SVP is backing four bills before the New York City Council that would provide st…

My Ancestors Knew That a Revolution Must Be Fed
type: item
creator: Evette Dionne
date: 2025-05-13T12:00:00Z
subject: Food Justice
subject: Racial Justice
subject: Food
description: Food is a vehicle through which Asians in diaspora can see ourselves in futures we have been excluded from.
encoded: For many Asian Americans, food is at once a site of deep joy and connection and an object that articulates a particular kind of un-belonging, a deviance of flavor, smell, and sight under Western standards of “normal” or “good.” This so-called deviance has been crafted for us by colonial and imperial storytelling that renders our food, and by extension, us, as Other. Imperialists and colonizers alike have storied Asian food as strange, revolting, and/or impure, limiting narratives that have persisted through generations of settler colonialism, extractivism, and Western military domination. As Soleil Ho argues in her evergreen article “Craving the Other,” many of us have internalized these stories—especially when the cultural rejection of our foodways is folded into our experiences of racialization—and are also actively refusing them, given the second and third generations’ desire to form new attachments to tastes, traditions, and stories that have been forgotten on our behalf. For me, food has been my strongest anchor in recuperating ancestral relationships in diaspora. A mixed white and South Asian Sikh who is regularly consumed as white, I am the product of my mother’s lineage of white settlers on the Dakota lands and waters of Mni Sota Makoce (called Minnesota) and a Punjabi Sikh settler who moved to the same unceded lands. I only learned about my Indianness when my father and I visited our family farm during childhood Christmas breaks. I do not speak Hindi or Punjabi because it was not spoken to me at home, and I only attended gurdwara in the United States in elementary school. These were not my choices, but they acutely impact how I have been perceived by family, community, and everyone else for my entire life. That said, I, like many children raised in an even obliquely Sikh household, knew that my people were fighters—had been forced by circumstance to become not just warriors, but committed protectors of all who face oppression. Our holidays celebrate the mar…

Artists Deserve Cash With No Strings Attached
type: item
creator: Sonali Kolhatkar
date: 2025-05-09T12:00:00Z
subject: Economic Power
subject: Labor
subject: Wealth
subject: Universal Basic Income
description: Artists contribute to the well-being of our communities. It’s time to give them a basic income.
encoded: In this time of great political anxiety and confusion, it can be hard to see a path forward for ambitious progressive programs like basic income, also referred to as universal basic income (UBI) or guaranteed income. The past few years have seen a wave of hopeful city-led and philanthropic basic income experiments in which thousands of families across the United States received a regular income with no strings attached. There were also government stimulus checks and the expanded child tax credit that slashed poverty by record rates and supported many families through the COVID-19 pandemic’s economic crisis. It seemed as though we were beginning to adopt a new paradigm for assistance centered on efficiency, trust, and dignity. But, as the political landscape is moving to the right faster than ever, could all that progress be lost? Basic income experiments are now facing virulent backlash from several states legislating against the visionary idea of granting individuals cash with no strings attached. And, as the Trump administration pledges to dismantle social programs and make life harder for those on welfare and those who don’t earn an income, it may seem like our window has passed to advocate for the right to a financial floor independent of work. However, giving up on the idea of a world where our intrinsic value is detached from our productivity would be a mistake. Basic income is meant to address the very economic insecurity and anxiety that helped fuel conservative populism. Making a forceful case for a cash program that would benefit the vast majority of American residents is now more crucial than ever. New data from OpenResearch’s cash transfer program, the most comprehensive undertaken in this country, suggests basic income may even ameliorate negativity toward different racial groups. It is time to consider a bold paradigm shift. In the philosophy world, we might call this “normative change”—an opportunity to change not just how we deliver social protection…

A Victory at Bad River
type: item
creator: Breanna Draxler
date: 2025-05-08T12:00:00Z
subject: Film
subject: Environmental Justice
subject: Climate Justice
subject: Indigenous Sovereignty
subject: Activism
subject: Fossil Fuels
description: The Bad River Tribe has taken on a billion-dollar Canadian oil pipeline company to defend manoomin and the fresh waters that sustain it—and us all.
encoded: At the northern tip of Wisconsin, a river meanders northward to the world’s second-largest freshwater lake. As it flows, the river gives life to walleye as well as wolves and medicinal plants. Where the waters reach Lake Superior, abundant—but vulnerable—wild rice grows. This land and this river have been home to the Mashkiigong-ziibiing and their ancestors, the Chippewa, Ojibwe, and Anishinabe, for more than 500 years. The wild rice (manoomin in Ojibwe) that grows near where Lake Superior meets the land is a sacred dietary staple. And it’s why the Chippewa settled near Lake Superior; their ancestors foretold to go west until they found food that grows on water. Today, the Mashkiigong-ziibiing, or the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Tribe of Chippewa Indians, is up against the odds to defend its land rights, sovereignty, and healthy water. The small 8,000-person Bad River Tribe has taken on a billion-dollar Canadian oil pipeline company to demand the removal of an illegal oil pipeline. “Most communities can not afford those legal battles,” says documentary filmmaker and producer Mary Mazzio, who has been filming the land rights battle at Bad River since 2022. “This is not a wealthy community, but this is a priority for them because of what’s at stake for them: Lake Superior and fresh water for the country.” Currently, more than 30 million people rely on fresh water from Lake Superior, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Mazzio released her documentary Bad River: A Story of Defiance in November 2024. It was awarded the best documentary film from the Environmental Media Association as well as being nominated for the Critics Choice best historic documentary and the best political documentary. The film has elevated the Tribe’s efforts and broadcast them across the country—even getting shared on social media by Leonardo DiCaprio with support from Mark Ruffalo, Edward Norton, Channing Tatum, and Jason Momoa. “This is about a very small group …

The Screenings Saving Lives in Rural Guatemala
type: item
creator: Evette Dionne
date: 2025-05-07T12:00:00Z
subject: Body Politics
subject: Reproductive Justice
subject: Latin America
description: A simple, low-cost method is helping impoverished women identify abnormal cervical cells and prevent premature cancer deaths.
encoded: It’s 9:30 a.m. and Juliaticia, a woman dressed in vibrant traditional garments, strolls down a hill in Candelaria, a small village nestled in the remote Guatemalan highlands’ Chimaltenango department. She’s headed to a cervical cancer screening clinic that’s been set up in her village for the day. When Juliaticia, who asked to be referred to by first name only, arrives, a nurse directs her to sit in a green plastic chair situated in front of a pale yellow building with a rusting corrugated iron roof. Within 30 minutes, more than two dozen women have gathered outside the inconspicuous building to wait for a comprehensive educational demonstration on female reproductive health and a potentially life-saving, free cervical cancer screening. In Guatemala, cervical cancer is a stealth predator. It is the primary cause of cancer deaths among Guatemalan women, and silently and disproportionately claims lives in low-income rural communities, where access to basic health care ranges from limited to nonexistent. The World Health Organization’s 2021 cervical cancer country profile for Guatemala reported 872 cervical cancer deaths in 2019 and suggested that this number has remained relatively stable in recent years. However, with more than 60% of Guatemala’s population living in rural areas where there’s a chronic lack of access to health care, there’s a high likelihood that causes of death aren’t properly attributed. “With so much of Guatemala’s population living in poverty or extreme poverty, the cost of traditional [pap smear] cervical cancer screenings is maddeningly out of reach,” says Andrew Raphael, executive director of Nursing Heart, an Antigua-based grassroots nonprofit aiming to address this issue. “Assuming [there’s an opportunity for a pap smear] at all, it could be months before test results are returned from the lab, at which point it might be near impossible to communicate them to the patient and her family,” he continues. “Even if the results come back [positive…

Murmurations: An Ode to Collective Organizing
type: item
creator: Evette Dionne
date: 2025-05-06T19:00:50Z
subject: Political Power
subject: Activism
subject: Murmurations
description: Through block-by-block organizing, we can transform our material conditions—from isolation and fear to care and cooperation.
encoded: In the Kurdish region of Rojava, under the collapsing Syrian state, various forces have been contending for the space to govern culture and economy for decades. ISIS is one such force. Another is the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (DAANES), which contends that people’s liberation must center the autonomy of women and ethnic minorities as well as a restoration of ecological balance. While navigating enormous contradictions in a world where power comes from violence and force, the DAANES was able to organize governance of the historically Kurdish region of what is now Syria. With the fall of the Assad regime and the Trump administration’s recent cuts to U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), change is again creating crises as well as possibilities for a range of futures. Disorganization creates an opening to reorganize. While the MAGA right sows fear, anxiety, chaos, and overwhelm to try to reorganize us around an elevated level of fascism, what does the living world teach us about how to respond? Species that have adapted to change show that stressors can be a catalyst for change: For example, salmon populations have begun migrating earlier to align with temperatures warming up earlier in the year. When we are comfortable, it can be hard to take big actions. And yet, in being complacent, we have become frogs in a pot of slowly boiling water. What we need is a just transition from a “banks and tanks” economy to economies of sacredness and caring. So while those in the White House are disorganizing us to try to reorganize us around heightened fear, isolation, and competition, we must instead use the openings to reorganize around reconnection, rest, joy, and sharing. When we’re alone, it is easy to feel immobilized. Rather than isolating, we need to come together and move together. Looking up at the sky, mesmerized by constantly transforming shapes of starlings murmurating, reminds me that we need to find our way from our hearts…

Educators Resist Trump’s Fascist Agenda
type: item
creator: Sonali Kolhatkar
date: 2025-05-05T21:03:23Z
subject: Political Power
subject: Education
subject: Critical Race Theory
description: Trump’s attacks on public education are prompting people from all walks of life to fight back.
encoded: More than 49 million young people attend public schools in the United States, and they have all been thrust into the center of President Donald Trump’s regressive agenda as he moves to use education funding as political leverage. Critics contend his attacks on public education will hurt disabled students, LGBTQ students, students of color, and those from low-income households the most. “What’s coming out of Washington—it’s whiplash-inducing and tragic,” says one California middle school and high school history teacher who spoke anonymously for fear of being targeted. “To me, the message [has been] that education is unimportant and the needs of students [are] unimportant.” The Trump administration’s highest-profile attack on public education came on March 20, 2025, when the president issued an executive order directing Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to begin dismantling the Department of Education. While the president needs congressional approval to abolish the department, to his supporters, this executive order is the next best thing. Gutting the Department of Education has been a right-wing aim for decades, as conservative groups such as the Heritage Foundation, which penned Trump’s Project 2025 playbook, claim public education is a seedbed of liberal-left social and political action. Over the last several years, Republican administrators and politicians on the state and local levels have advanced policies or legislation to censor teachers, ban books, and roll back support for marginalized students. The adoption of this regressive agenda on the federal level will have even farther-reaching effects. Changes to funding will have an immediate impact on how students nationwide access education—or if they can access it at all. This is because the Department of Education provides crucial funding for public K–12 schools, focusing on districts with the greatest need for support and narrowing gaps between needed resources and state and local revenue. The department al…

LGBTQ Elders Share Wisdom for Survival
type: item
creator: Evette Dionne
date: 2025-04-25T12:00:00Z
subject: LGBTQ Rights
subject: Body Politics
subject: Trans Rights
description: “The Stonewall Rebellion is not over. We are at war, and we are still fighting back.”
encoded: Karla Jay remembers joining the second night of street protests during the 1969 Stonewall uprising in New York City. For her, and for so many other LGBTQ+ people, something had shifted: People were angry. They didn’t want things to go back to normal—because normal meant police raids. Normal meant living underground. It meant hiding who they were at their jobs and from their families. They wanted a radical change. Radical change meant organizing. Jay joined a meeting with the Gay Liberation Front, which would become the incubator for the modern LGBTQ+ political movement and proliferate in chapters across the country. At those meetings, she remembers discussing what freedom could look like. Holding hands with a lover while walking down the street without fear of getting beaten up, one person said. Another said they’d like to get married. At the time, those dreams seemed impossible. Jay, now 78, is worried that history will repeat itself. She’s worried that LGBTQ+ people will be put in the dark again by the draconian policies of a second Trump administration. “Are things worse than they were before Stonewall? Not yet,” she said. “It’s certainly possible that people will have to go back to underground lives, that trans people will have to flee to Canada, but it’s not worse yet.” The 19th spoke with several LGBTQ+ elders, including Jay, about what survival looks like under a hostile political regime and what advice they would give to young LGBTQ+ people right now. Many states protect LGBTQ+ people through nondiscrimination laws that ensure fair access to housing, public accommodations, and employment. Supreme Court precedent does the same through Bostock v. Clayton County. Other states have passed shield laws to protect access to gender-affirming care for trans people. But to Jay, a cisgender lesbian, it all still feels precarious. The Trump administration is trying to make it harder for transgender Americans to live openly and safely, and lawmakers in more than a handfu…

‘I’m Still Here’ Fights to Preserve the History of Brazil’s Dictatorship
type: item
creator: Evette Dionne
date: 2025-04-24T21:12:31Z
subject: Political Systems
subject: Political Power
subject: Academy Awards
subject: Brazil
subject: Fascism
description: The Academy Award-winning film spotlights the ongoing effort in Brazil to ensure the atrocities committed during the country’s dictatorship period are remembered.
encoded: In the late 1970s, the military regime in Brazil was preparing to return the country to democratic rule. Since 1964, the country had been ruled by an undemocratic military government, and after years of popular protest and armed resistance, the military leaders were planning a gradual re-democratization process. In more than a decade of dictatorship rule, the military had imprisoned, tortured, and killed scores of people they viewed as dissidents, and in 1979, a newly passed law gave amnesty to political prisoners and exiles whom the dictatorship persecuted. But the amnesty law also pardoned the murderers, torturers, and leaders of the military dictatorship, setting the stage for a 25-year struggle to get the Brazilian government to recognize the victims and perpetrators of human rights abuses of the regime. With no institutional recognition of human rights abuses committed between 1964 to 1985, the door was open for denial and diminishment of that brutal period in Brazilian history. In right-wing circles, the dictatorship is often viewed as “not that bad,” or as a necessary evil to keep Brazil from opting into communism, a common Cold War talking point. It was only in 2011, more than 25 years after the end of the regime, that the Brazilian government instituted a truth commission to investigate the torture and murder that took place during that era. The success of I’m Still Here, this year’s Academy Award winner for best international feature, might give the appearance that Brazil is a country committed to remembering its past—but behind the film, there’s a multigenerational, ongoing struggle to keep remembering the victims and the perpetrators of harm during the dictatorship period. Families of Victims Insist on Remembering After Rubens Paiva was kidnapped and murdered by the regime in 1971, the lack of institutional recognition of his death left his wife, Eunice Paiva (portrayed by Fernanda Torres in I’m Still Here), without any access to his bank accounts or est…

Applying Lessons From the Armenian Genocide to Gaza
type: item
creator: Breanna Draxler
date: 2025-04-24T19:35:34Z
subject: Activism
subject: Political Power
subject: Palestine
subject: Armenian Genocide
description: Armenians know from experience that genocide is a process, not an event, and they have lessons for those fighting for peace in Gaza.
encoded: My grandmother and her family were driven from their home in 1915 during what Armenians at the time called the Deportations and the Massacres. Later, this brutal and bloody six-year Ottoman campaign of dispossession, ethnic cleansing, and mass murder would come to be known as the Armenian genocide. Today, April 24, is commemorated annually as Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day. My grandmother’s parents and younger sisters died on the deportation route. After that, my grandmother and her younger brother were among 8,000 Armenian orphans herded into a tent camp in the Syrian desert on the outskirts of Ras al Ain. It is estimated that 1.5 million Armenians lost their lives in this mass annihilation, and I have spent most of my career as a writer plumbing this terrible history. Genocide is not an event, but a process. For Armenians, it is a process that never ends and one that takes on different forms, including the denial of historical reality. In 2020, a decades-long struggle with Azerbaijan over the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabagh, which Armenians call Artsakh, turned into a renewed war. Azerbaijan, backed by Turkey, with the aid of Syrian mercenaries, and with drones and arms supplied by Israel, took over more than half of the territory, forcing Armenians to flee their towns and villages. In early 2023, Azerbaijan enforced a blockade and siege on the remaining area, and then in September of that year launched another military campaign to complete the job. On Sept. 19, 2023, aerial photographs of the more than 100,000 Armenians fleeing Artsakh in a snaking convoy of cars resembled the deportation caravans of my grandmother’s childhood more than a century earlier. I watched the ethnic cleansing of Artsakh unfold on social media from afar, as I was on a trip to Greece at the time. I flew home to New York City on Oct. 7, 2023, and when I opened my smartphone upon landing, I saw the news of the Hamas incursion into southern Israel. Before being able to fully register…

To Resist the Trump Regime, Look to Iran
type: item
creator: Evette Dionne
date: 2025-04-24T18:55:01Z
subject: Activism
subject: Political Power
subject: Iran Revolution
description: For more than four decades, Iranians have resisted through underground clubs, labor strikes, and other everyday acts of defiance.
encoded: By now, people in the United States and around the world are accustomed to the current U.S. regime being compared to the rise of the Nazi regime in 1930s Germany. But there is a much more recent example that offers just as many chilling lessons, and it happens to be one I witnessed firsthand: post-revolution Iran. There are many dangerous parallels between the Islamic Republic’s repression and what’s currently happening in the U.S., though this is not a one-to-one comparison. The U.S. isn’t Iran, but for those of us who’ve lived through a shift from a somewhat repressive system to a full-blown authoritarian crackdown, the warning signs are flashing. I have seen what happens when rights vanish overnight, when culture and community are weaponized, and when fear becomes a governing force. I am also amid a chorus of people who have been sounding the alarm for years about the impending return of the imperial boomerang—the same force that has wreaked havoc across the globe, including when the U.S. meddled in Iran, which ultimately forced me to flee. When I moved to the U.S. when I was 14, I never expected to encounter echoes of post-revolution Iran, but the echoes are loud and clear. Amid such political instability, it is time to mobilize, get creative, and resist. Autocracy Is Here. What Now? I was 6 when Islamic fundamentalists seized power in Iran in 1979, launching a reign of terror that began with many of the actions currently happening in the Trump administration. The revolution’s new leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, kept an ever-growing enemies list, systematically dismantled cultural institutions, and rapidly eroded personal freedoms to an extreme degree. Sound familiar? Within months of Khomeini coming to power, my childhood was over. Women’s rights that had been painstakingly built for more than five decades were shredded overnight. As a girl, I could no longer move freely in public, play, or even ride my bicycle. The newly imposed morality laws forced me to cover my…

The Trees Are Speaking
type: item
creator: Breanna Draxler
date: 2025-04-22T18:34:11Z
subject: Environmental Justice
subject: Climate Justice
subject: Indigenous Sovereignty
description: Indigenous scientists are hurrying to learn what they can about intact old-growth forests before they are gone.
encoded: Biologist Teresa Ryan has seen a lot of clear-cuts and loaded logging trucks. But this trucker was hauling logs down the mountain outside the remote logging outpost of Woss, British Columbia, cut from trees so large the tractor trailer could carry only a few. “It’s so sad. I just feel heartbreak, like a piece of me just went down the mountain,” said Ryan, whose traditional name is Sm’hayetsk, as the logging truck roared past her. “The ancestors are there. We actually used to put our people in the trees,” she said, speaking of traditional burial practices of the Gitlan of the Tsimshian Nation. Ryan explained that her ancestors put the remains of their people in bentwood boxes and hoisted them into trees, into the life of the forest. So when she said the ancestors were in those trees, just cut from the mountain where they had lived for centuries, she meant it literally. Ryan is an Indigenous knowledge and natural science lecturer in the Department of Forest & Conservation Sciences at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver. I had joined her and Suzanne Simard, an eminent forest ecologist and professor in the same department at UBC, in these woods for a week of fieldwork. It took 12,000 years to make this [soil], and we have lost it in a snap of a finger.” Ryan and Simard had gone out on this logging road to find their crew. But right now, that was out the window. They had to go see the clear-cut those logs had come from. Ryan jumped in Simard’s battered field truck, and I squeezed into the back seat with their clipboards, batteries, and gear for sampling and measuring trees. Simard bucked the truck up steep, rugged slopes to reach the top of the cut and killed the engine. We got out and looked around at the cutover land, bare and baking in the July sun. A grapple skidder awaited the next day’s haul of logs, and sawdust lay fresh over the ground. “This kind of machinery is devastating to the forest floor,” Simard said, eyeing the carved-up ground, rutted an…

Terra Affirma: A Hybrid Wild
type: item
creator: Breanna Draxler
date: 2025-04-21T21:58:12Z
subject: Environmental Justice
subject: Climate Justice
subject: Conservation
description: Not all bedrock is stone.
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How Including People With Disabilities Benefits Everyone
type: item
creator: Breanna Draxler
date: 2025-04-19T12:00:00Z
subject: Disability Justice
subject: Labor
subject: Body Politics
subject: Accessibility
description: The presence of employees with disabilities can make companies and organizations more collaborative, inclusive, and attractive to job seekers.
encoded: Whether it’s declaring that blindness prevents government employees from doing their jobs or suggesting that hiring workers with intellectual disabilities contributed to Federal Aviation Administration safety lapses, the Trump administration has repeatedly questioned whether people with disabilities belong in the workplace. This stance reflects widespread stigma and misconceptions about what people with disabilities can and do accomplish. Negative stereotypes and exclusionary practices persist despite the fact that people with disabilities are the largest minority group in the United States, representing nearly 30% of the population. Whether or not you identify as disabled, most people live or work in close proximity to others with a disability. For years I have researched how people with disabilities have been kept out of efforts to guarantee equal access for everybody, particularly in higher education. This exclusion is often due to unfounded beliefs about capacity, intellect, and merit, and the false premise that disability inclusion requires lowering standards. However, studies demonstrate that including people with disabilities is good for everyone, not just disabled people. Schools and workplaces are more collaborative and responsive when people with disabilities are included at all levels of the organization. In other words, disability inclusion isn’t about charity; it’s about making organizations work better. <img data-recalc-dims="1" decoding="async" width="1024" height="682" src="https://i0.wp.com/www.yesmagazine.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/01-GettyImages-1314933629.jpg?resize=1024%2C682&quality=45&ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-125102" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/www.yesmagazine.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/01-GettyImages-1314933629.jpg?resize=1024%2C682&quality=45&ssl=1 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/www.yesmagazine.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/01-GettyImages-1314933629.jpg?resize=300%2C200&quality=90&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/www.yesmagazine.org/wp-co…

Self-Determined: Foundations Must Match the Far Right’s Commitment to Systemic Change. Here’s How.
type: item
creator: Breanna Draxler
date: 2025-04-17T12:00:00Z
subject: Indigenous Sovereignty
subject: Wealth
subject: Indigenous lands
subject: Economic Power
subject: Self-Determined
subject: Philanthropy
description: In today’s hostile political climate, philanthropy must move beyond performative gestures and into authentic partnership.
encoded: It’s common to hear statistics like the $40 billion it would take to end world hunger or the $30 billion to end homelessness in the United States. And yes, a billionaire like Jeff Bezos could single-handedly pay to make sure everyone in this country is fed and sheltered for the next 3½ years—even if he never made another penny. These statistics highlight how wealth redistribution could address major human rights crises, but they often overlook the collaborative, innovative work that could turn a one-time influx of cash into lasting systemic change. With the current freeze on federal funding—and its severe impacts being felt across industries—philanthropists and grassroots organizers have a unique opportunity to join forces and shift the paradigm. In today’s hostile political climate, funders and organizers must defy fear-mongering, reject conformity, and shift strategies—and they must do so together. This is the moment to be bold and to expand infrastructure and sustainable systems for justice. We can’t afford to wait and see just how bad things get, or to hold onto philanthropic resources until the next presidency. Real change demands more than one- or two-year commitments. We need major, sustained, decades-long, trust-first investments in the people who have the experience, courage, and vision to challenge the status quo. Indigenous Resilience Must Be Bolstered Indigenous communities are no strangers to long-term struggle. From the American Indian Movement and Landback efforts like the Klamath Dam removals to the recently successful Free Leonard Peltier campaign, Indigenous leaders have consistently organized with minimal resources against the most powerful and violent systems in the world. Indigenous peoples’ continued commitment to justice, rooted in multigenerational resistance, is a testament to the power of sustained movement work. Meanwhile, the resources Indigenous organizers can access pale in comparison to well-funded efforts like Project 2025. This initi…

Safe Homes: India’s Mixed-Status Couples Navigate Caste and Faith
type: item
creator: Sonali Kolhatkar
date: 2025-04-16T12:00:00Z
subject: Caste
subject: Racial Justice
subject: India
description: India’s social fabric remains hostile to interfaith and intercaste couples. But “safe homes” offer some security.
encoded: “We wanted to be together but are scared of our families, so coming here was the only safe option for us,” Imran, 21, says. He and his partner, Neha, 18, were escorted by a police constable to a cramped “safe home” for runaway couples in the Ambala district of Haryana, India, at around 4:30 p.m. on a sunny day in June 2024. They had been granted police protection that morning at the Ambala district court. The couple—who met in 2023 at a wedding in Konkpur near Ambala before connecting over Instagram—had run away from their homes to marry. After they eloped, the couple, who are interfaith, sought the district court’s protection from their parents and broader society. Imran is a Muslim man and Neha is a Hindu woman in a country that has always frowned upon interfaith relationships, but they are even more vulnerable now due to rising religious extremism. The court instructed police to mediate between the couple and their families, leading Imran and Neha to relocate to a safe home. A similar scenario played out for Suhana Begum*, a Muslim woman who lived with her family in Bharog, also near Ambala. Her parents forcibly confined her to their house in 2019 after she told them she loved a Hindu man named Rajiv Saini* and wanted to marry him, despite the difference in their religious backgrounds. “We met at my aunt’s wedding where he worked as a DJ operator,” Begum, who is 32, says. “He gave me his number through friends, and a few months later we started talking to each other.” But when her family discovered their relationship, they held her captive to prevent her from communicating with Saini. “For two years, we couldn’t speak to each other, let alone see each other,” she says. Since their villages are close to one another, she would hear news of his well-being from mutual contacts. After being confined for four years, Begum persuaded her family to allow her to join a polytechnic school in the village so she could enroll in a grooming and beauty course. That’s when the co…

Rebuilding the World through Queer Video Games
type: item
creator: Evette Dionne
date: 2025-04-15T12:00:00Z
subject: Body Politics
subject: LGBTQ Rights
subject: video games
description: Video games will not fix a broken world, but queering them can show players and non-players alike how to reimagine ours.
encoded: We stand now in a historical moment when we desperately need the ability to build new worlds. This is a moment of immense concern for the future of the world as we know it today—threatened by climate crisis, the ongoing effects of a pandemic, and a turn toward right-wing extremism across the globe—but it is also a moment of immense worldbuilding potential. For marginalized people, the pressure of this moment feels all the more palpable. In the United States, with legal protections for LGBTQ people in jeopardy and violent incidents of racism, xenophobia, transphobia, and homophobia on the rise, it has become clear that the world we currently inhabit is broken and deeply unjust. We now see the world before us more clearly. And this new clarity brings with it an urgent longing to deconstruct and reconstruct the world, to try again, to experiment with radically alternate ways of being, to build the world otherwise. Before we can build the world in alternate ways, however, we need to be able to envision alternate worlds. Works of science fiction and other forms of speculative art have long been at the forefront of efforts to build new worlds through imagination. Worldbuilding of this sort is never a neutral endeavor; designing the world anew always entails resisting or reinforcing (sometimes simultaneously) existing structures of power. The cultural stakes inherent in worldbuilding have been made particularly clear through creative and scholarly work around Afrofuturism and Black speculative worldbuilding. As performance studies scholar Jayna Brown argues in her writing about Black mystics and musicians, structures of white supremacy have placed Black communities into a “bleak and bloody dimension we are taught to call reality.” In response, Brown calls for “build[ing] alternative worlds, in this dimension and in others,” as a way to “practice alternative ways of being alive.” In addition to turning to fiction, art, and music to find the speculative worlds that inspire u…

Why Sanders’ Call to “Fight Oligarchy” Resonates More Than Ever
type: item
creator: Sonali Kolhatkar
date: 2025-04-14T18:59:45Z
subject: Activism
subject: Political Power
subject: Wealth
subject: Bernie Sanders
description: Bernie Sanders is attracting crowds of tens of thousands across the U.S. as he rallies against the growing influence of billionaires within the federal government.
encoded: When friends and co-workers Jennifer Lewis and Tina Siebold heard Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders was bringing his Fighting Oligarchy tour to Tucson, Arizona, they quickly made plans to attend. In a sea of far-reaching political changes, the women needed to hear something that gave them hope. The women, both in their 40s, worry about the Trump administration’s ongoing funding cuts to a multitude of programs and services that they—like many other Americans across the country—depend on. “Trump is taking away everything,” says Lewis, a part-time cashier at a discount store who earns minimum wage. Siebold, also a part-time cashier, delivers air filters at a second job to make ends meet. On Saturday, Mar. 22, Siebold and Lewis took a ride-sharing service to Arizona Republican Rep. Juan Ciscomani’s district to see Sanders speak at Catalina High School’s football stadium. The two women were among thousands of people who braved long lines in hot weather to hear what the self-described democratic socialist had to say. The independent senator launched his nationwide tour in February 2025, in the absence of a united Democratic Party against President Donald Trump’s dizzying dismantling of legally funded federal agencies and programs. Texas Democratic Rep. Greg Casar and New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined Sanders at the Tucson rally. Ocasio-Cortez has partnered with Sanders in several other cities including Denver and Las Vegas. Sanders, 83, has attracted large crowds at rallies in cities across the U.S. as he pushes against the ever-growing influence within the federal government of billionaires—part of the so-called 1% of the nation’s population. “At the end of the day, 99% is a hell of a bigger number than 1%,” Sanders said during his address, noting the huge crowds attending his rallies. “Brothers and sisters, don’t let them divide us up by the color of our skin or where we were born or our religion or sexual orientation,” the senator told an ebullient …

The Fight to Preserve Medicaid for Disabled Children in California
type: item
creator: Evette Dionne
date: 2025-04-11T12:00:00Z
subject: Body Politics
subject: Disability Justice
subject: Health Justice
subject: Medicaid
description: A budget proposal from House Republicans could gut Medi-Cal. Families and advocates want to preserve a more certain future for their children’s care.
encoded: Jessica Pequeño of Napa has been taking breaks from watching the news lately. But when she opens her social media feeds for the support groups she frequents for parents of children with disabilities, they’re full of panicked chatter about the news she’s been trying to avoid. Medicaid—the state and federally funded program that provides health coverage for almost 15 million Californians and about half of the state’s children—could face billions of dollars in federal cuts under a budget proposal from House Republicans. That’s alarmed families like the Pequeños, who rely on Medicaid, called Medi-Cal in California, to pay for medical care and other support for their children with chronic conditions. Pequeño’s 11-year-old son, Xavier, has a rare, genetic immune disorder that undermines his body’s ability to fight disease. Thanks to Medi-Cal, Xavier receives medications that keep him alive and would otherwise cost his family around $100,000 a month. The program also pays for Xavier’s medical equipment such as a wheelchair and portable oxygen tank, antibody and respiratory treatments, and hospital stays when he gets sick. “It’s allowed him to go to school. It’s allowed him to be home and not living in a hospital 24 hours a day,” says Pequeño, who cares for Xavier while her husband works as a forklift driver. “There’s no way right now we can afford his monthly medications, his treatments or his hospitalizations. Without Medi-Cal it would essentially be a death sentence for him.” Parents of children with special health care needs aren’t the only ones alarmed about the potential cuts—disability advocates, health care providers, budget analysts, and state lawmakers have also expressed concern. Although the House proposal, passed Feb. 25, doesn’t specifically call for Medicaid cuts, it does direct the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which oversees Medicaid, to come up with $880 billion in savings over the next 10 years. Achieving that amount of savings would be difficult w…

‘Patrice’ Captures the Fight for Marriage Equality for Disabled Couples
type: item
creator: Evette Dionne
date: 2025-04-10T12:00:00Z
subject: Body Politics
subject: Disability Justice
subject: marriage equality
description: Disabled couples risk losing their benefits when they marry. A new documentary spotlights the fight to change that.
encoded: Since 2015, when the Supreme Court decided in Obergefell v. Hodges that LGBTQ people could legally wed, the United States has been touting its commitment to marriage equality. When conservative legislators hinted at undoing marriage equality in 2022, the U.S. House and Senate even approved the Respect for Marriage Act, which then President Joe Biden signed into law. Though the bill fell short of codifying Obergefell v. Hodges, it forces states without marriage equality laws to recognize and respect LGBTQ marriage licenses signed in other states. However, when considering the concept of marriage equality, there has been one population overlooked and excluded: disabled people. Patrice: The Movie, a “documentary rom-com” streaming on Hulu, takes up this problem, bringing a siloed issue to the forefront in a nation that believes the fight for marriage equality has already been won. But, as the documentary aims to explain, there’s no true marriage equality if disabled people are grossly penalized for falling in love. Patrice follows a mixed-race disabled couple, Patrice and Garry, who desire to get married. But there’s one pesky problem: the marriage penalty. When disabled people who receive Social Security benefits such as Supplemental Security Income (SSI) get married, they are at risk of losing both their monetary benefit and their healthcare coverage, the latter of which is typically provided through Medicaid. That’s the predicament Patrice and Garry find themselves in. Though they love one another, they are unable to live together or legalize their union or they will no longer have access to the critical lifelines of support that allow them to live independently. Unfortunately, the Social Security Administration (SSA) doesn’t know how many disabled people lose their SSI benefits when they marry—they don’t keep track, an SSA spokesperson told NPR in 2024. Patrice’s desire to live on her own stems mostly from her upbringing: She came of age in the 1970s and ’80s when …

Resisting Repression: What’s Next for the Student Fight for Palestine?
type: item
creator: Evette Dionne
date: 2025-04-09T15:27:01Z
subject: Activism
subject: Political Power
subject: Education
subject: Palestine
description: Facing suspensions and threats from the Trump administration, students are evolving their organizing defenses.
encoded: On Dec. 12, 2023, SUNY Purchase College student Cesar Paul walked into an administrator’s office and headed straight for the window, where a pair of “We Stand With Israel” banners hung facing the campus plaza. Then, Paul took the banners down in protest because, he said, Purchase College was guilty of “double standards.” After October 2023, the Purchase campus became a protest site for students like Paul who wanted to raise awareness about Palestinians’ struggle for liberation against Israeli occupation. But Paul says advocating for Palestine on campus was “dangerous.” “Students would put up [printouts of] Palestinian flags, and they would be taken down immediately,” he says. “There were students putting things up about Israel, and it was fine.” But the double standards weren’t just relegated to the materials students hung on walls. Paul says the double standards included an institutional stance that Purchase’s leadership took with Israel. On Oct. 10, 2023, Purchase President Milagros Peña sent a university-wide email stating “New York stands with the people of Israel.” A few sentences following, Peña wrote, “We also recognize that this conflict is devastating to the residents of Gaza.” The word “Palestine” does not appear anywhere in the email. “Why isn’t Purchase talking about Palestine?” Paul wondered. He was certain that Purchase, which “claims to be diverse” and “will always talk about what’s going on in the world” would eventually “do something for Palestine,” he says. But as weeks went by, and the Palestinian death toll skyrocketed, no email was sent to acknowledge the beginnings of a genocide. Then there was the hypocrisy, Paul says. The Purchase administration did not acknowledge that Palestinians have resisted occupation for more than a century—the last 77 years of which Israel has been the primary occupying power. When Peña released a university-wide email on Nov. 21, 2023, honoring “the Wappinger and Lenape people,” whose land Purchase’s campus occupies,…