Heather Haaland wanted children in her twenties, but as time passed into her thirties, she figured she probably wouldn’t. Diapers, clothing, the sheer number of snacks, after school activities. “How on earth would I ever afford them?” she said.

Now in her 40’s, she’s had two kids, and the floors of her Durango, Colorado, house are strewn with toys and books. She shrugs and laughs. “I did have kids, obviously.”

There’s a lot we are wrong about when we are twenty, but Heather wasn’t wrong about the cost of having a family in the United States in the 2020’s. Being a mom is great, even if nothing has been easy: Heather had to take unpaid leave for her first pregnancy, and she didn’t qualify for FMLA. Six weeks after her first child was born, “We dove in and figured it out.”

“Figuring it out” might as well be a motto for most American families. For Heather’s family, the punches haven’t stopped coming. Since starting their family, they have experienced job shifts and lay-offs, dream jobs that turned out not to be all that dreamy, and unexpected medical needs–ouch, the medical costs. “We are middle class, but we still feel the struggle,” she says.

A house with two kids under the age of five is always going to be an exciting place. There’s going to be laughter and chaos, naps too short and baths too long, bedtime passing as little fingers and toes prune in the water. You are going to trip on some LEGO blocks on the stairs. But when you add two working parents, two jobs, and ever-increasing bills to the mix, it all becomes precarious, like a tower of blocks stacked too high.

It’s childcare that threatens to break Heather’s careful balance. With two kids needing it, the cost is extraordinary: At one point, she estimated that about 40% of her income was going to childcare. “We are paying more right now than the cost of in-state college tuition.”

Still, she feels lucky to have even found openings for her children. In La Plata County, there are only 15 spots for infants, and Heather’s family lucked into one because their older child was already enrolled at the same center. In La Plata County, Colorado, only 45% of children under age five have care.

“I knew it was going to be hard, but I had no idea it would be this hard,” she says. “And as we are going through it, I couldn’t help but think: This isn’t just us, right?”

It isn’t just them.

While online pundits hand-wring over why American families aren’t having more children, it costs about $20,000 a year to care for one baby. The US Department of Health and Human Services suggests that a family not pay more than 7% of their household income on childcare, while Colorado families pay so much more than that. In the state, the lowest-cost childcare is in Cheyenne County, where families pay about 10.5% of their wages towards childcare, while in San Juan County, families pay around 38.2% of their earnings. Colorado ranks 5th in the country for the most expensive infant care.

“The overall issue is that we view childcare as a commodity for people who can afford it,” says Heather.

As she tried to balance new motherhood and work, Heather felt uncertain. Was her job secure? Could she find the support she needed through her growing family’s needs? As she fretted, she discovered Mother Forward – a national network of moms who were fighting in their home states for childcare and paid leave. Now pregnant with her second son, Heather joined an online meeting and met other Colorado moms struggling with the same issues.

She also started thinking about how moms– not just policy wonks– could help get things done.

Locally, Heather joined the La Plata Latinx Early Childhood Education Task Force, and soon she learned that her rural county was considering a ballot initiative to levy a lodgers tax for affordable housing and childcare. “It really made me see the potential change I had as an individual to organize and mobilize.” She joined the Childcare for La Plata group. “We thought support for the 2024 Lodger’s Tax would be on the 50/50 line for the initiative, but people overwhelmingly supported it, and it passed.” Enacted, the measure would subject short-term lodging rentals (hotels, motels, and Airbnbs) to a 2% tax, with 70% of the proceeds being used to support local housing and childcare. It was a huge win for local families.

Working on passing the Lodger’s Tax showed Heather what could be done using legislation– and that her neighbors understood the problem and were willing to support measures that increased childcare opportunities.

In 2024, a mom named Jessica Leone, whom Heather had met through Mother Forward, decided to launch a Colorado chapter of the group. Heather was elated and ready to build something in Colorado. “We connected with women all over the state, including many in Front Range and some out in more rural and far-flung places.” Within the group, six women emerged as core leaders, with dozens of other women supporting the work as they could.

The mothers started by researching what legislation had already been proposed in Colorado. “We looked at the Colorado State website to see what had been proposed and what was in session, thinking about the implications it would have on different communities, such as rural and urban, economic class, etc,” explains Heather

“We were learning as we went,” she says, adding that she was eager and grateful to learn from others. “We were reviewing what was in session, how it would or wouldn’t help, and then we were assessing our capacity to support it and looking for opportunities to amplify the work being done.”

“We knew we weren’t huge, and we were all volunteers, so we had to look at what we had. Where can we put our weight? What change can we realistically make?” They figured that while they didn’t have many political connections or much money, they did have what moms are best at: Grind.

Moms volunteered for different roles. They launched phone banks to call other mothers about the policies moving at the statehouse, they fanned out across neighborhoods to knock on doors, and they activated their personal networks to invite more and more moms to get involved.

“One mom might say I don’t feel comfortable navigating a bill, but I do want to get on the phone and call other moms! And another might say I don’t have time while my kids are awake to knock on doors, but I can research after the kids are in bed!”

“Everything for mothers is about availability, so we try to be really flexible. It’s hard for moms to commit to a big role because they have committed to so many roles in their lives.”

But, Heather remembered, that’s exactly why they were doing it together.

From 2025-2026, three of the four bills the moms supported passed, and three of the three ballot initiatives. “It was really exciting,” says Heather. “Not just that these important things around child care passed, but that we saw where we could have an impact.”

But their work wasn’t done. Even after the bills were passed, the moms noticed that no money had been allotted for marketing, so other Colorado parents might not know about the changes. One bill that has passed requires childcare centers to refund waitlist fees to parents after 6 months if no slot opens. “People really need this,” explains Heather. “Wait list fees are expensive and sometimes feel like you’re just throwing money at something that will never happen. Families need that money for so many other things like groceries and housing.” So the group decided to lean in again, this time spreading awareness about the new law that returns wait list fees to parents. Again, they implemented basic organizing principles: Call moms, spread the word, invite people in.

“The bills we have supported aren’t perfect. There are gaps in all of them,” says Heather. “It’s our long-term strategy to have the ability to go in and make decisions on how the policy is formed. Get moms at the table.” To do this, the group knows they need to keep growing, and the more moms who can be involved in the work, the better. Having mothers from all walks of life and all regions of Colorado weigh in on the creation of policy will make that policy stronger in the long run.

Helping to pass legislation can feel like slowly chipping away at a big, brick wall. It’s important– and the Colorado moms have seen real, tangible results– but it can also feel a bit like David versus Goliath. Hundreds of bills are introduced in Denver every year, and who are these moms up against the big, powerful, monied interests who dominate our politics? The Colorado chapter of Mother Forward can’t spend millions on campaigns; Heather isn’t going to negotiate any back-room deals.

But what these moms can do is what moms have been doing for ages: rely on each other. “I think our ‘secret sauce’ is showing moms that small, simple actions can add up to meaningful change,” says Heather about the work. It’s the adding up– the persistence, the follow-through, the understanding that they should grow and reach more moms with everything they do. There’s no shortage of moms in Colorado– and nearly every one of them has a story about childcare.

This year is a big election year in Colorado. The state is largely considered a swing state; some of the most competitive congressional districts are here, and the governor’s race is looming. If they can get the right people in power, the policy they need can pass. Building on their local and statewide wins, these Colorado moms feel determined to make childcare a campaign issue and force it into the political conversation.

“We need to put childcare as a top priority, both for boosting the economy and as a basic need,” says Heather. “There’s a business lens, then there’s a human lens.” The moms are currently planning an online town hall with the leading gubernatorial candidates on childcare on April 30th– they have six candidate campaigns confirmed to attend.

There’s a lot to do before the town hall. The moms will craft questions in advance, making sure they not only solicit the information they need but also don’t let candidates grandstand. That will take some work. They also need to double-check the confirmations, push out texts to moms across the state inviting them to tune in, and connect with reporters watching the gubernatorial races. Heather makes a list and sends out a few messages to volunteers in the group, asking who can take on which task.

Between working full time, making dinners, tidying the house, and reading “just one more book” to two sweet little kiddos each night before bed, and now researching policy, joining meetings, and doing outreach to moms, Heather hasn’t lightened her load. The days are busy, sleep is sometimes scarce, and the to-do lists are long.

Still, the work is worth it. The friendships she’s made while building the chapter are remarkable; the policy wins are irrefutable. “I know I’m helping build a future world where moms might not feel so overwhelmed,” she says, even as her plate keeps refilling.

ICYMI: Gamers across the country are pretty pissed about the ways that big corporations are trying to squeeze every last dollar out of the community gamers have built… and they ain’t going to stand for it. Meet some of the gamers who have been organizing together to push back.

I climbed over the chain-link fence to my neighbor’s yard, a fistful of twenties in my hand. Al, who lived next door, had replaced some rotting boards on my deck while I was at work. Al’s apartment was sort of a lean-to tacked on to the neighbor’s house, enclosed but built with no foundation and flimsy. He worked for the landlord’s roofing company, and I’m pretty sure he got the apartment in lieu of pay.

He was smoking on his doorstep. His big, leathery, tanned shoulders – Al was shirtless for nine months of the year – were drooping, his head hanging between his knees. “Thanks for your help, buddy,” I said, holding the cash out to him. But he shook his head.

I pushed the cash towards him again. He brushed it away.

“Why not? It looks great!” I said, nodding towards my deck.

“Because I pawned your circular saw.” I had left my tools out for him to use.

“Dude, that was my dad’s saw!”

“I know! I’m so sorry,” he said, standing. “I’m going to get it back!”

“Please do.”

Al didn’t move. I realized he needed the money from me to go get the saw out of the pawn shop. I handed it to him, but he still stood there. “What?” I asked.

“I also need a ride.”

We drove to the American Cash and Pawn at the edge of our neighborhood. It stood between Kroger and the laundromat where it cost $20 a week to do two loads, because the half-broken dryers would eat your quarters until you finally just went home defeated with your jeans still wet. Al went into the pawn shop and soon came back out grinning and waving my saw above his head. He’d set things right and I appreciated that.

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I still think about that day and the strange economy we live in. Everything had worked out fine for me: I went to bed that night with a repaired deck and all my tools locked up in the shed. But Al came out ten dollars short of what he could have made that day – the pawn shop charged him a “storage fee” for the saw even though it was only there one afternoon.

I don’t know why Al couldn’t wait until I was home to pay him. Maybe he bought some food, maybe a loan from someone else came due, maybe he bought beer. It’s not my business. But I do know that Al and I lived in a neighborhood where the only places to get cash were pawn shops and payday loan places. The closest bank was miles away—and Al didn’t have a debit card, a credit card, or a job that paid him in checks, anyway.

Most places I have lived have been like this. My current neighborhood has three pawn shops, one check-cashing center where you can also prepay a cell phone, and a dollar store. We’ve been waiting for a Piggly Wiggly to open in the vacant strip mall behind my house since 2020. The sign is up, but the store remains empty, like a fresh-food mirage.

Most of the businesses offered to low-income and working-class neighborhoods – and increasingly small, rural towns – are predatory, scammy, and trap us in terrible cycles. When rent is due, and payday is still a week and a half away, a payday loan can have an APR of 390%. Appraisal fees at a pawn shop could be $50, and a check-cashing operation might charge you 10%. I’ve sat on my porch and watched a neighbor’s Rent-A-Center couch get repoed, her children’s crayons falling out of the cushions as it was loaded into a truck and driven away.

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So when I was recently walking through my hard-up neighborhood with a friend, she commented on the Trump 2028 pinned on a fence, saying, “Don’t they know he’s a scam?”

All I could think was, “Well, yeah. Of course, they know that.”

Trump has bewildered so many Americans with his brazen swindles, schemes, and cons. From Trump University to the Stop the Steal donation funnel to NFTs, crypto ventures, and betting markets, it’s hardly controversial to say this administration is running some pretty stunning grifts. To a lot of folks, it feels shocking that he’s allowed to get away with it.

But to many other Americans, we hardly blink an eye. After all, grifts are what we’ve long been left with. Our bosses, banks, landlords, and even that little kid who knocks on your door selling candy for his basketball tournament are all running a con. I usually shrug and give the kid $5 for a Hershey bar anyway.

Poor and working people are usually the mark of all these scams, and we know it, too. It’s not like we think what’s happening is fair or that we like it, but it is familiar. We’ve long been left to navigate these cons alone, paying “risk mitigation” fees to property owners and overdraft fees to banks. We’ve long been told it’s our problem to figure out. All these cons are perfectly legal, but cons nonetheless.

We also know that us being conned down here helps others up the line; we know that people who have 401(k)s profit when the company my neighbor works at doesn’t give him a raise, and that people who own their homes benefit when the family renting up the street is priced out.

A scam over here makes money across town; we get it.

My neighbor Al was no dummy. Like so many others, he tried to stay one step ahead in the game he was being forced to play. One summer, he had an ever-changing series of cell phones, taking advantage of a “first week free” offer and making sure to return them on the sixth, never the seventh, day. Al was a resolutely good man – I’ll never forget him using some vouchers he had to get newborn clothing for my son when I was pregnant. I didn’t ask him to; he just did it.

So, besides the inconvenience, I never much minded that Al pawned my saw; I know it had more to do with where we lived than it ever had to do with him.

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So, why would someone in a poor or working-class neighborhood support Trump? I wish they wouldn’t, of course, because we will never win against the size and scale of his grift. But I’m not surprised when people try to line themselves up with what they think might be the winning team– when you don’t feel like you have power, it’s not crazy to get in with the bully. A huge percentage of this country has been left to endure systems that skim, squeeze, and extract from us. One way out might be to get in on the hustle, to take your shot at coming out ahead, even when the odds are absurdly long.

If we are going to be outraged by the grift, we need to be outraged by all the grift, not just the spectacle at the top. We need to be outraged at the $60 application fees for apartments that never materialize; the wage theft that goes unpunished; 29.99% APR credit cards and car loans. Let’s get serious about the billionaires scamming our tax system; about Polymarket bets and insider trading; about Congressional stock trading; about the tech and utility monopolies that always stand to win and gain while ordinary people like Al and me and you and, yes, the family with the Trump flag pinned to their fence absorb all the consequences.

In case you missed it: Read about how skaters in New Mexico figured out how to get their city to listen to their demands…

Marvinna Simpson of Davenport, Iowa, works as an Amazon driver and leaves at “o’dark thirty in the morning” to hit the road.

Driving, she has plenty of time to observe what’s around her. Last year, Marvinna watched soybeans die in the fields when the tariff wars left farmers with nowhere to sell them. She’s seen small businesses around town – bakeries, restaurants, taprooms– close. And last year, John Deere– a local economic powerhouse– laid off hundreds of workers from Moline to Ankeny to Ottumwa. These layoffs continue today.

“They call this Trump country, but I’ve started to wonder what people are thinking and how they are feeling right now?” she says. Marvinna is personally feeling the strain of it all– at the local grocery store, a friendly place where people say hello to each other, the prices are going up. Are the other shoppers worrying, too?

Two hours away in Mt. Pleasant, Iowa, retiree Cindy Nesbitt is also watching things shift around her. Mt. Pleasant is surrounded by hundreds of farms, so Cindy has also seen those crops dying in the fields. She hears farmers talk around town– as much as the farmer is heralded as the backbone of America, this is no golden age. Making things even harder, many people in Mt. Pleasant are self-employed and rely on the ACA for health coverage. Because of the recent premium hikes, it’s estimated that 24,000 Iowans will lose their health care coverage entirely this year, including small business owners, farmers, and older adults.

Cindy senses the concern in town but feels unsure whether people are ready to do anything about it. We don’t always connect the stressors in our everyday life to the policies being created half the country away. “There is a lot of talk about who is to blame for things going bad– immigrants, poor people, foreign countries– but my sense is that this isn’t a Democrat or Republican thing, this is a money thing. I think the people in power are laughing at the small people.”

This spring, both Marvinna and Cindy have been trying something new. They’re intentionally reaching out to people in their community, inviting them into conversation and asking their neighbors to step out of the isolating news cycles to talk about how they are doing.

Cindy, who has lived in Mt. Pleasant for a long time and is actively engaged with local nonprofits and the church, is reaching out to people she already knows. She invited people over for a meal (“getting together around a meal is a communal system”) to talk about what’s on their minds and what could be done. “Inviting people personally helps them feel engaged. I’m inviting them to come solve a problem together. And the small group helps people be able to engage and speak up,” she observes. “No one is just a placeholder.”

Cindy made a point of asking people to bring their children, aware that inviting teenagers in particular into conversation will help build the civic muscle that Mt. Pleasant needs in this shifting time.

Marvinna decided to try to bring strangers together. She and her husband picked up big cartons of coffee on their way to the No Kings protest in Davenport, and set up a card table and chairs. There, instead of waving signs, they invited people to sit down and chat about what was on their minds.

“Affordability can sound like a buzzword,” she says, “But that’s what everyone was talking about. Lots of people said they couldn’t afford healthcare and were worried about their kids getting sick. They couldn’t afford insurance or the copay. But then I talked to a group of older women, and they lived on fixed incomes and were worried about groceries– grocery prices go up, but their income never changes.” Marvinna said having coffee, cups, and chairs was a great way to break the ice and invite people in to talk.

States away in Johnston County, North Carolina, father of five Allen Hall is trying something similar. After the One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed, he started reading it: “Yep, all 900-some pages,” he laughs.

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“I grew up on food stamps and Medicaid and now have some pretty serious medical issues– I knew this bill was going to affect me personally.” Allen started writing about this on his blog and began thinking about the thousands of people around North Carolina who are just like him. “I started to have the hunch that other people were worrying and thinking about the same things.”

Allen linked up with some other North Carolinians who had just started a group they are calling Take Back the Dream. He decided to host a conversation online so that people from across the state could participate– he called it “Medicine or Groceries?”

“I made a point of inviting people from all kinds of different places, posting the invitation in conservative Facebook groups, and community groups.” 20 people signed up to join. “There were a lot of Independents on the call, a few Republicans,” Allen says. “We found that we had a lot of similar stories regardless of political affiliation, race, or place. Most people were concerned about healthcare and felt very dissatisfied with the government.”

Allen has scheduled a follow-up call, and more people have already signed up. Cindy is calling the people who have been joining her over meals. “I call and tell them I’m truly calling just to say hello,” she says, “I want to be in constant touch with them. I want to see who is ready to not just complain, but work on it.”

Marvinna says she’s focused on the upcoming elections and making sure people know how and where to vote: “My sense is that people are getting angry enough to want to do something, but need to know basic voting information. They are worried their vote doesn’t count, and that’s something we can work on next.”

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What Allen, Cindy, and Marvinna are doing is simple. They are reaching out, creating space for conversation, and being curious about their neighbors’ lives. But in that simplicity lies something profound: They sense that what we are facing should not be faced alone. When we are counting pennies, fearing layoffs or looking for work, watching crops die, or bills pile up, we often retreat and retrench, close others out. But to stare this down, to build the change we need, there’s no way we can do this but together.

There may be more of us concerned about what is happening than we think. We tend to default to blaming others for “not caring.” But that’s not what Allen, Cindy, and Marvinna are seeing. In my conversations with them, each expressed the sense that politics in their hometowns are shifting, and that the moment to reach out and connect is now. People want “change,” but aren’t sure what that can look like. Allen says it seems helpful to “go local and go personal” to cut through the noise; Cindy says “bringing it back home allows people to talk differently.”

Marvinna says, “I think it helps for people just to be together, see and hear that other people are also struggling and wondering what to do. Once we put all that on the table, then we can say: Okay, what’s now?”

When her grandmother was released from imprisonment, her former neighbors warned her. “Don’t come back here. People still hate us. They’re shooting out our windows at night. We’re sleeping in the hall.”

So she lived in someone’s basement until she found work at a sharecropping camp near San Jose, where Shizue eventually joined her. What Shizue saw there has never left her.

“They worked together in community. They all built the irrigation system out of redwood planks sealed with tar. They dug troughs and laid these things end to end down this whole field. How could they get it to slant just enough that the water was carried all the way? That sense of working together was very Japanese, and Japanese American. Everybody quietly doing their part.”

Doing her part within community—it’s how Shizue has lived ever since.

Her grandmother had immigrated in the early 1900s, and her world in America was close-knit and self-protective. Excluded from neighborhoods and institutions, the immigrants built their own communities with stores, churches, sports teams and scout troops. Everyone pitched in to make things happen.

In contrast, Shizue moved frequently until she was twelve, ping-ponging from segregated Baltimore to occupied Japan to the sharecropping camp and back around. In Baltimore, the neighbors were all Irish, Italian, or Polish Catholics. As the only Asian child in her school, she learned life lessons in these largely white environments.

“They all had their own rules,” she says, “and everyone had different rules. But I always had one or two friends, and that’s what saved my life—that ability to connect somehow and learn about the kindness of strangers.”

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Desperately shy as a child, Shizue was silent unless others reached out to her.

“As I grew up,” she says, “I began to understand paying it forward. When I’d see somebody at the edge of a room, I’d go talk to them. I knew what it was like to feel like an outsider. And I was a teacher’s pet, which insulated me from the bullies, and instilled in me a love of learning and a real hunger and curiosity about all kinds of worlds.”

Shizue sensed at an early age that assigning labels—working class, Irish, Catholic, etc.--can lead to isolation, a sense of not belonging or fitting in.

“As an adult,” she says, “I realized that many people, regardless of class or color, grew up thinking that who they were was not okay, that they had to hide their true selves. I think that still divides and hurts people.”

That insight has shaped Shizue’s community work.

*

Shizue, whom I came to know in the 2010s, today works with tireless passion to address that divide between groups of people, the pain of “difference” she felt as a child, the pain of separation among the strata of humanity. Her approach is deceptively simple:

She brings people together to share their stories.

Discussing her varied work experience over the years, Shizue reflects, “I think all along there was a part of me that said, ‘I want to change society.’ I went to marches and stuff, but in terms of any hands-on real organizing, I just didn’t trust it. It can easily become a war of ideas.

“And it’s not the ideas that matter. It’s what’s being done day-to-day on the ground. I go out of my way looking for people living full lives and understanding that they matter.”

“Go[ing] out of her way” is an understatement; I’m not sure she ever stops moving. Shizue Seigel, born in 1946, founded and directs Write Now! SF Bay, which “builds multicultural community by reflecting the complex diversities among the Black, Brown, Indigenous and People of Color that comprise 60% of the Bay Area’s population.”¹ Since 2015, she has hosted free writing workshops, providing “a safe, supportive space for self-identified writers of color to explore race, class, culture, gender, and identity.”

Her efforts have yielded tremendous fruit; her website lists a dizzying array of community-focused awards, grants, and books that have amplified the voices of over 500 writers and artists of color whose lived realities may have remained unknown without Shizue. She embraces writing and art from educators, healers, activists, immigrants, LGBTQ+ people, the formerly unhoused, and “just plain folks” with roots in Native America, Africa, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and beyond.

One of Shizue’s early books reveals stories of teachers, ministers, and other regular people who stood up against the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII. During a time of crisis, ordinary people became extraordinary advocates for justice.

About the importance of hearing from “regular people,” Shizue says:

“When I read something in the paper, it means less to me than if I hear someone’s personal connection with the news. I reach out to a lot of people and ask them for their stories and perspectives. It’s my way of keeping my ear to the ground.

“The ‘news’ focuses on the quotable soundbite, the influential people, the people with titles after their names, organizations after their names. But sustainable change arises from real people. You have to talk to people on the picket line, not just listen to the leaders’ speeches.”

Driven to share stories of real people, Shizue began applying for San Francisco Arts Commission grants to publish anthologies, each with particular focus. Her first anthology presents prose, poetry and visual art by 34 contributing writers and artists exploring overlapping histories of migration, incarceration and displacement in the city’s Western Addition, a culturally rich hub for Japanese American and African American residents. The area survived the massive 1906 earthquake, but not the city’s move in the early 1970s to eradicate “blighted slums.” Old Victorians were razed, and many thousands of people of color, living together in community, were displaced.

Her next anthology gave a megaphone to people of color.

“It’s hard, because a lot of people of color don’t have that sense of privilege and self-importance that ‘my story matters most.’ Instead, most of us were raised to keep our heads down, and our mouths shut.’”

But Shizue works to convince the overlooked that their life experiences matter. Everyone benefits from a diversity of collective wisdom. Another of her anthologies focuses on civil liberties, and how violations of those liberties disproportionately affect people of color. She’s produced five anthologies so far, each emphasizing the importance of the individual parts that make up the whole.

It’s not surprising that it’s difficult to find photographs of Shizue by herself. Instead, she shows up as just one of many, surrounded by people of different races, ages, genders, cultures, and the myriad other ways that people vary on the spectrum of humanity. Shizue is always there, her brilliant smile lighting the room.

That five-year-old who picked strawberries with people imprisoned for looking like the enemy is today a poet, writer, and painter, organizing people who share stories that break down barriers and build understanding.

A note from Gwen: Sue Granzella is a writer and former long-time (32 years!) teacher living in California. I reached out to her after reading her work on The Teacher Tightrope here on Substack and just simply fell in love with her vivid and descriptive writing style. On The Teacher Tightrope she’s writing about teachers and librarians navigating the culture wars. She also talks about kids in such a clear and tender way that I have re-read a few of her pieces just to absorb again. When we connected, I learned that Sue is also publishing a book TODAY about teachers and the culture wars called Pushed to the Edge—which I just ordered myself! I hope y’all will give her a follow.

Once a quarter, or whenever I think about it, really, I like to revisit past stories to see what’s been happening since I last checked in. I’m usually pretty amazed, and this time I’m absolutely floored. I’ve been saying a long time– long enough to get all blue in the face– that working folks are the folks who get things done, and these updates go to show just that. Guess I’ll keep yelling it from the hilltops!

Greeley, Colorado: Boy howdy, is this town hot! Last summer, I spoke with a bunch of folks up in Greeley, a growing but still small city an hour north of Denver, where most residents work at the local meat packing plant and hospital. I talked to an electrician, a teacher, a caregiver, and a young man who worked at Chick-fil-A, among other people. They were all working together to try to stop their City Council from basically giving away their tax dollars to a millionaire developer who wanted to build a fancy new stadium for his hockey team.

It’s a wild ride of a story: After their local government ignored their protests, the citizens petitioned to get the issue onto the November ballot. While they had more than enough signatures, a judge declined the petition on a technicality. Unable to get the issue on the ballot, residents then launched working-class candidates to challenge the incumbents and nearly won multiple seats, including the mayor. Meanwhile, the millionaire developer started a PR firm backed “community group” and filed lawsuits against anyone who opposed him. The city put up over 40 city buildings, including their city hall and fire station, as collateral to finance the project, and the millionaire steamrolled ahead, clearing the land and getting it ready to build on.

But local residents didn’t give up. They launched a second petition drive, this time to call for a special election so local residents could finally weigh in on the development– and it worked. A special election was held in February, and in one of the biggest special-election turnouts I’ve ever seen, voters voted to HALT the development project. Over 20,000 people turned out to vote (there is something like 60,000 eligible voters in the city)-- showing the City Council just how much people really did care about them forking over their taxes to a millionaire.

What’s more, in the midst of all this, a group of local residents has started their own media outlet, the Greeley Free Press, and you can follow them here.

Bend, Oregon: Speaking of media, Mandy Hodge of Oregon has also started a Substack. As some of you might remember from a story we wrote last summer, Mandy lived out on federal forest land for the better part of a decade, until she and about 100 others were evicted late last spring. Mandy emerged from the experience as a fierce fighter for the rights of people living in China Hat and other forest areas, ensuring that the growing rates of homelessness were understood as a result of extreme housing prices in the region. Mandy’s Substack is really powerful, and I read every single post. It’s called Displaced by a Moment. On it, Mandy has been interviewing others who are unhoused in the Bend area, making sure their voices are heard and that her hometown understands who is living out on federal land and why. It’s worth a follow, I assure you.

Chaves County, New Mexico: For the last year and a half, a group of volunteers have been gathering at Pioneer Plaza in downtown Roswell to serve food to those in need. Last year, we talked to Jocelyn Smith, a local mom who works at a radio station, about this effort. The thing to know about Roswell is that it’s pretty poor. A small city isolated in the middle of the hot desert, Roswell has a severe affordable housing crisis and, as a result, a growing number of people who are living doubled up or without any housing at all. Jocelyn and the other volunteers with Food Not Bombs have been collecting food and redistributing it– trying to ease one burden of many that Roswell residents face. However, the city started to push back and has now demanded that the volunteers obtain (and pay for) a permit to serve food. Last week, the New Mexico Center on Law and Poverty, American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico, and the law firm Smith and Marjanovic called on the city to rescind the ordinance and allow the group to continue sharing food. Stay tuned.

Are you or someone you know organizing to make your hometown better? I want to hear about it! Reach out to me to tell me about the grassroots organizing happening in your neck of the woods!

A few years ago, I sat in the booth of Plaza del Sol in Jefferson, NC, eating enchiladas with Tanya Robinson.

Tanya is a lot of fun. She’s loud, gregarious, and laughs a lot. She was telling me about the used SUV she had bought earlier that day– a bit of a jalopy, but it was going to help her string together the mess of odd jobs she was working to make ends meet.

At the time, Tanya was considering running for Ashe County Commissioner– a seat that had long been considered reserved for the small, elite class of this rural mountain community. While she was born and raised in Ashe County, the name “Robinson” doesn’t carry much weight around here. Tanya isn’t rich (she cleans houses), she doesn’t own land (she can barely afford rent), and she isn’t well-connected (though she did seem to know everyone in Plaza del Sol that day). Basically, Tanya’s a lot like me: A mom concerned about her kids’ education, a woman trying to afford the doctor, a worker trying to make ends meet.

Tanya did go on to run for office. She ran on a platform supporting affordable housing, bringing more living-wage jobs to the area, and improving access to healthcare. She didn’t win. But still, the conversation Tanya and I had that night over enchiladas stuck with me. Before that meal, I didn’t fully realize that people like us– broke moms without a pot to piss in– could even run for office.

Tanya’s audacity got me thinking in a whole new way.

In the United States, elected officials are overwhelmingly wealthy, especially in comparison to the people they represent. This is most true the further up the ballot you go: The median net worth of members of Congress is over $1 million, with a 2025 average estimated between roughly $4.2 million and $6.6 million. The typical member of Congress is roughly 12 times richer than the average American household. These are numbers I can’t comprehend.

The candidates running for state or local office may not all be millionaires, but they still have wealth far beyond the reach of most of the people they would represent. In part, this is because running for office can be expensive. If you aren’t personally wealthy and you don’t happen to rub elbows with wealthy donors, basic campaign activities cost big money. For Tanya, yard signs might have cost $1,000, Facebook and newspaper ads thousands more. And none of this can make up for the money lost when you take time off work to attend an event.

The other reason working-class people struggle to run for office is that it takes a lot of effort. Not just the candidate’s effort, but from all of us who would support them.

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It takes a village to get working-class candidates elected. The other day, I called up Antonio Molina Haro. Antonio is in his early 20’s, works at Chick-fil-A, and ran for City Council in Greeley, Colorado, last fall. He was delivering donated food to striking meatpacking plant workers as we chatted. I could hear the bustle of the strike line behind him.

Antonio grew up in Greeley. His mom worked at the meatpacking plant for years. He’s always known that East Greeley– where he is from– is poor and working-class, with potholes big enough to jam your car and make you late for work. West Greeley is wealthier and better cared for. So when he heard about the City’s plans to build a big entertainment complex on the west side that “me and my parents could never afford to go to” he filed his candidacy. After all, if everyone’s tax dollars were being used to fund projects like this, shouldn’t people from all sides of Greeley have a say?

The buzz around the entertainment complex inspired other working-class candidates to run. Tiffany Simmons, also of Greeley, ran for mayor. It seemed like a long shot of a campaign– Greeley had only had one female mayor previously, way back in 1965. Greeley’s last non-Republican mayor was in 1969. As Tiffany explained in a recent Zoom meeting, she decided to run because “it was always the same good old boys who got into office.”

“No one thought we had much of a chance,” she said. “We ended up raising about $10,000, and they spent $200,000 against us. But still we came in with 45% of the vote!”

While they didn’t win, having working-class people on the ballot created the largest voter turnout in Greeley’s memory. The margin in the mayoral race was the closest it has been in decades.

“We flexed our power and gave them something to worry about, “ says Antonio. Both Tiffany and Antonio credit the massive volunteer push behind their campaigns for their strong showing.

Before we got off the phone, I asked Antonio if he would run again. “Oh yeah, absolutely,” he says, nearly yelling over the noise of the strike in the background. “We saw what we can do– people power is now showing up everywhere around here.”

In order to win, working-class candidates need something to replace that lack of cash and those highfalutin’ connections: Community support. I don’t just mean voters casting their ballots – I also mean a groundswell of community activity: volunteer door knockers, poll greeters, word-spreaders, flyer-hander-outers.

A working-class campaign may not look like billboard or TV ads, but instead look like hundreds of people taking a few hours every weekend to walk through neighborhoods to get the word out. When I asked Tanya what she would need to run again, she quickly replied: “Volunteers, volunteers, volunteers!”

I’ve seen this work in my hometown: Hundreds of volunteers taking Saturdays to walk their neighborhoods, making sure people are registered to vote, and driving each other to the polls. Now, the majority of our city council aren’t sitting up there because they have big money or big connections, but are people I know. They are from my side of town.

In this recent book, The Fundamentals of Electoral Organizing, longtime organizer Tomas Garduno writes:

And who are the people? Most statistics say that only 10% of the American people are “wealthy” or well off. The other 90% of us — more than 310 million hard-working people — are working class. Shouldn’t we be deciding the direction of our neighborhoods, towns, cities, states, and our country? There is no greater majority than the working class in this country. That’s the power we seek: working-class power.

Tomas described the book to me as the book he wished he had had when he was first getting started out in electoral politics. It’s all about the ins and outs of supporting a local working-class candidate and helping them win. It’s handy, brief, fits in your back pocket, and perfect for 2026. I mailed a copy to Tanya the other day.

Tomas has a ton of years of organizing under his belt, and thus a ton of good stories. I could listen to them all day. But knowing all my enthusiasm about getting working-class people to run for office, Tomas made sure to tell me one more story.

He told me about a time he’d been a part of helping a working-class father win a local school board election. Martín was running because he was tired of kids like his not being invested in. The community did everything right, pushed hard for Martín, and – to everyone’s surprise– he won! But once elected, the forces representing the status quo started to get to Martín, telling him what he could and couldn’t do. Martin felt alone and lost, unable to hold his own.

So Tomas and other working-class parents who had worked so hard to get Martín elected realized their work wasn’t done. They formed a policy working group to support Martín, helping him research and create laws. By doing this, they were able to not only get him onto the school board but also help him be successful there. With the support of the community, Martín introduced and passed the “Sunshine Act” in their local district to help ensure that all the local kids were being invested in.

Tomas reminded me that it’s not only important to get working-class candidates elected, but also to support them once in office. Or, as he phrases it in his book, “not just organizing to win, but organizing to govern, too.”

This all brings me back to Tanya and that conversation over enchiladas. Tanya made me feel really hopeful that day– and that hope sticks with me. I always thought she was a great candidate– someone who really understood her community, had good priorities, and the drive and smarts to get things done. I feel the same about Antonio, Tiffany, and the thousands of other working-class people who step up, sometimes against all odds, to lead.

But for them to win– and to then govern– it’s going to take the rest of us seeing ourselves as part of that movement, too.

Last year, I worked on a voter registration campaign from July til October. Like most entry-level voter registration jobs, that one lasted til the voter registration deadline, which in North Carolina is 25 days before Election Day, and then I was back to being unemployed. Looking for jobs was a struggle because I was also in Dental Assisting school all day on Fridays for 12 weeks.

I desperately needed to work though because…bills. I didn’t wanna take just any ol’ job, but I was willing to do just about anything…as long as I could be off every Friday to go to class. I didn’t want anything long-term because I knew that as soon as I finished Dental Assisting school, I planned to start working as a Dental Assistant. So I applied for plenty of jobs that I thought would fit my situation but I didn’t get any of them.

Then one day, I saw a post from a Facebook friend whom I’d met once at a Second Chance Alliance organizer training the year prior. She was hiring drivers to deliver packages in Charlotte and the surrounding areas. She posted a screenshot that looked something like a paystub. It showed $500, and some change was paid, and she said someone on her team had made that much one day. I didn’t know the details, but all I knew was if I could make just half of that every day, I’d be straight. I messaged her to get the details.

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She said I didn’t need a truck or van to make the deliveries; my car was just fine. To get started, I had to send her pictures of my driver’s license, license plate, auto insurance card, and vehicle, and to bring a Sharpie, reflective vest, and bags or containers to sort the packages. I was broke and eager to start work.

This seemed like it would work great. I’d be able to choose which days I worked, which meant I could take off on Fridays to go to school. Perfect!

I started the next day. I didn’t fill out an application or any tax documents, which I thought was lil’ strange but I didn’t pay it much mind because I was just desperate to work so I could pay some bills. My manager, the Facebook friend, told me I’d need to be at the warehouse at 6am to scan and sort the packages before loading them up to deliver them. I showed up on time, was given a quick little training that lasted all of 10 minutes, and got to work. Part of that training was being told that if I lost or misdelivered a package, I’d be fined $100 per package. That sure did sound like an awful lot of money for packages that weigh no more than a few pounds and probably cost no more than a few dollars to make but I didn’t imagine I’d lose or misdeliver a package so I didn’t pay that much mind either.

I was given 100 packages to deliver. It took me about 15 hours from the time I arrived at the warehouse to the time I delivered the last package. By the time I got home, I was exhausted, but I did it again the next day. And the next day. And the next.

Thankfully, I got to pick my own schedule because some days I’d just be wiped out from working more than half that day and not getting enough sleep, so I wouldn’t work those days. About 8 weeks after I started working, I received a message from the guy who runs the warehouse saying that 3 weeks prior, I’d delivered 2 packages to incorrect addresses and one customer says she never got her package.

Let’s say one of the packages was supposed to go to 123 Sesame Street Apt 3B. I took it to 122 Sesame Street Apt 3B. An honest mistake - a $100 fine. I’m not sure what happened with the other package I allegedly misdelivered. Another $100 fine. And the one that the customer says she never received…I’m absolutely positive I left at the leasing office of her apartment complex along with all the other packages I delivered there that day, on Christmas Eve. I’m not sure how all the residents except this one got their packages that I delivered but…the company definitely took the customer’s word over mine, and I was hit with another $100 fine.

My next paycheck was supposed to be $346. It was just $46. I was devastated. I contacted the NC Department of Labor to see if the fines were even legal and…they aren’t. A NCDOL representative told me that I would’ve had to be notified of the fines in writing and would’ve also had to sign agreeing to the fines. That didn’t happen.

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I also had a question of whether I was an employee or a contractor. I was unsure because it all seemed to be “under-the-table” except for the handwritten payroll checks. I’d been told by the manager that all the delivery drivers for the company are contracted workers but I never received a contract or any other paperwork regarding the job. Strange. But according to the same rep at NCDOL, it looks like we are actually employees who have been misclassified. Illegal.

Of course I ain’t wanna make another delivery for this whack company but…I needed money and other than money, I could make cleaning houses, which I cut back on when I developed carpal tunnel. This was the only other thing I knew I could do right now and make enough to pay a bill or two. My car insurance and phone bill were due, so I had to rob Peter to pay Paul.

I felt stuck between a rock and a hard place, but I kept working some weekdays, some weekends. Only once did it take me less than 12 hours, but I did it because…isn’t that what it means to be part of the working poor? To drive my 2013 Ford Escape around for 12-14 hours delivering packages at $2 a pop and then $1.60 a pop when the pay suddenly drops without warning? (Also illegal per the NCDOL). Putting hella miles on my car and burning up my gas that costs almost $3/gallon? Worrying that my old car might not hold up much longer now the transmission slips much more frequently and in much scarier places like on I-85? Ahhhh yes! That was me pulling myself up by my own bootstraps and getting nowhere fast.

Thankfully, I have a couple who rents a room in my house. I was able to get by with their rent payments and the payments from a clinical trial I’m part of for an experimental drug for folks with Narcolepsy & Idiopathic Hypersomnia. If it wasn’t for these “multiple streams of income,” I’d be in rough shape.

Thankfully, I completed my Dental Assistant program on January 16th, went in for a working interview on February 16th and started my new job as a Dental Assistant on February 17th. I’m looking forward to having a career, financial stability and not having to choose whether to leave the gas turned off and go buy groceries or pay the gas bill and go to the food pantry. And luckily, I just started a new clinical trial that pays much better than the last one so I’ll be able to get my transmission fixed and I might even find a roofing company that’ll let me pay half down and finance the rest, so I can stop counting the water damage spots on my ceiling.

It’s easier to breathe now that my head isn’t underwater.

Brandy is a fur baby mama & dental assistant living in Charlotte, NC who loves chasing waterfalls and singing in her spare time.

Tim McCumber was at the front of the room, visibly upset. “There is no actionable item for this board to take tonight! ” he shouted with exasperation into the room. He was standing up, his ID card swinging on a lanyard around his neck as he gestured. He used the gavel in his hand to punctuate his words, shaking it at the crowd before him.

“Now you won! The damn nursing home hasn’t been sold, and it hasn’t been closed!” McCumber banged the gavel on the table in front of him and stalked out of the room.

Not all meetings are this rowdy in rural Sauk County, Wisconsin. Not by a long shot. But tonight, the small room is packed with local residents who had caught wind of the county’s plan to shut down their local nursing home and they had turned out en masse to oppose it. But the meeting never happened. McCumber, the Board Chair, called the meeting to order for only two minutes before gaveling out. Public comment was never heard.

The Sauk County Board of Supervisors seemed taken aback as the room had filled with people, many elderly, carrying handmade signs reading “Save our Nursing Home.”

When the people show up, business as usual can’t occur.

Judy Brey and her sisters took turns caring for their mother in Madison for five years before Judy suggested they move her an hour and a half up I-90 to Reedsburg, which had not one but two five-star rated nursing homes. In Reedsburg, her mother could be in a nursing facility right up the road, so close Judy could walk there.

Her mother, Millie, had dementia, but had also had a long and full life. Millie had raised five daughters and a son, gotten an education, worked. She loved listening to classical music on Wisconsin Public Radio. She and Judy would listen together as Judy put lotion on her mother’s hands.

Having her mother so close for those last 15 months made a world of difference. Judy and her sisters could not only visit, but also get to know the staff and help oversee Millie’s care. Judy had spent her career as a teacher and was now a grandmother, her grandkids living just a few blocks away. She’d never given much thought to nursing homes, but now she was getting a crash course in Medicaid ratings, staff ratios, and care meetings. “I saw how tremendously important the quality of care was, both for my mother and for the rest of us, too,” she said.

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The preciousness of her mother’s last months and the importance of the care she received were still fresh in Judy’s mind when, in 2023, she learned that the Sauk County Board of Supervisors was considering selling the county-owned nursing home to a private buyer. Like the senior care center that Judy’s mother had been in, the Sauk County Health Care Center had a 5-star rating. The building sits on the western edge of Reedsburg, with big windows looking out at a still-rural landscape. This nursing home was well-loved and relied on by so many in the community. It had been built by the county in 2009 for 15 million and was now valued at 30 million, but the Board was offering it to ARIA Healthcare for just 5.1 million.

“Not only did this not make sense,” says Judy. “But I felt it was just plain wrong.”

Judy suspected that the move to sell was purely ideological: “They don’t believe that the government should be involved in healthcare, even when the evidence shows it’s working well and fine.” This is a trend across the state, however. Community-owned nursing homes have been put up for sale, only for profit-seeking companies and private equity firms to grab them up, slash staffing and care, and lose ratings. Lincoln County’s Pinecrest home was sold, and the entire staff was laid off. Portage County is barreling ahead with its nursing home’s sale, even after two county referendums in which citizens voted to keep it. But Judy also knew that in St. Croix County, residents had fought the sale of their publicly owned home– and won.

Judy Brey wasn’t the only person in Sauk County who wanted to save the county-owned nursing home from being sold to a for-profit business. Soon, a small group formed, calling themselves Citizens for Sauk County Health Care Center. Setting up in local parking lots, they circulated a petition opposing the sale. They collected money to run ads in the local paper, hosted “call-in” days, and made t-shirts to wear at Board of Supervisors meetings.

“We had people in every role,” Judy explains. Some people updated the group’s Facebook page, some people laid out the ads, and one man, a retired economist, helped the group muck through pages of budget documents to help make sense of the numbers the Board was throwing around.

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Things were moving fast. The Board of Supervisors started accepting proposals, and a broker was retained to negotiate a deal. One proposal was from Aria Healthcare, which submitted papers to incorporate in Wisconsin, using the Reedsburg nursing home’s address as its business address. Seeing the writing on the wall, the nursing home’s director resigned and, assuming it would only take a few months to close the deal with Aria, the county named a temporary interim director to oversee the facility.

But the people were moving fast, too. Folks from all over Sauk County were getting involved in Citizens for Sauk County. 1,300 people signed the petition, and dozens of signers spoke at board meetings. Members of the group made phone calls, and some even had sit-down conversations with their representatives. When they did the math, the margins were tight. There were 31 Supervisors total, and they were pretty sure they had 15 on board to keep it, and 16 who wanted to sell it.

But when it came to the vote, 18 Supervisors voted to sell. “They didn’t listen to us,” Judy said. “They didn’t care.”

The vote was in September of 2024, and Aria Healthcare wanted to move into the Sauk County Health Center building before the end of the year.

Petitions, public comment, letters to the editor, phone calls, meetings. It felt like Citizens for Sauk County Health Center had done everything right in petitioning their government and making their voices heard. They had demonstrated tremendous opposition to the sale, but nothing had worked. Judy suspected the handful of Supervisors who changed their minds had done so during a closed-door meeting that board members had with ARIA– a meeting local residents weren’t able to attend.

So, the group contacted the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council for help. They were connected with an attorney who helped file a lawsuit regarding the sale and the open-meetings violation. They filed the lawsuit on October 31st, right before Aria was supposed to take over. The case is still pending today.

“The lawsuit was a good tool to use,” explains Judy. “It wouldn’t have worked alone; you have to do all of it– the organizing and the lawsuit together. The lawsuit put everything we had been doing into the public record, so it can’t just be ignored. The lawsuit wouldn’t have teeth without the rest of the organizing.”

By June 2025, the deal with Aria still hadn’t been finalized. The County offered Aria a lease instead, and the company moved into the building. Aria announced the employee packages to the staff. Seeing the unsatisfactory pay and benefits changes being offered by the for-profit company, staff — many of whom had been at the nursing home for years — began to resign.

By July, Aria Healthcare had backed out of the deal. The interim director left the Health Center, and the County hired a permanent director again. Reluctantly, the Board of Supervisors funded the Sauk County Health Center for one more year— just as the taxpayers in Sauk County had always wanted.

It was all this that led to Tim McCumber’s gavel shaking and yelling last summer. The room had been packed with local residents outraged that the board had been making plans without listening to them. People from all walks of life were there- retired farmers, teachers, nurses, doctors, pastors, middle-aged men and women who grew up visiting their grandmas at the nursing home. There were even three residents of the Sauk County Health Center there, lined up in their wheelchairs, ready to speak. McCumber had pointed at Judy and said, accusatively: “You brought these people here.”

And Judy thought: Yes, these are your constituents. They came because this matters. And because this is a public meeting.

Wins aren’t just won; they are worked for. And most wins can’t be kept unless you hold on to them.

Judy and the Citizens for Sauk County Health Care Center have learned that good, old-fashioned organizing– talking to people, calling them up, asking them to join you– can build a formidable base of support even in a small place like Reedsburg.

But they’ve also learned that who sits on their local board matters, or “who holds the purse strings,” as Judy says. That’s why, going into the elections this spring, they’ve recruited nine candidates – each one supporting the health center – to run for the local board. Judy has been spending her afternoons knocking on doors and stamping mailers.

All of this organizing has made the public ownership of the Sauk County Health Care Center a hot election issue. Just last week, the local paper ran candidate responses to a series of questions, including one about their position on the nursing home. Now, Judy is simply asking her neighbors to vote.

But even after long days of canvassing, registering voters, organizing, and meetings, Judy has one more thing to do. She still goes to the nursing home to visit the elderly, even though her own mother, Millie, passed away years ago. Sometimes she interviews the residents and types up their answers on a paper, which is then displayed in their rooms, to document who they are for visitors and staff to appreciate; just little notes about their lives, where they are from, what food and music they like. “I just want the people to remember they had lives before they came here, and that they are worthy humans needing good care.”

It’s been a year since I launched Working Class Storytelling and it’s proven to me exactly what I felt like I knew: We really, truly are the ones we’ve been waiting for.

Like, we say that all the time, right? It’s gonna have to be us. Be the change you want to see. We hold the answers. Or, as my neighbor Cadillac said as he helped me repair my furnace recently: Why do you keep calling the professionals when you’ve got a neighbor like me?

Over the past year, Working Class Storytelling has told real stories about real, working-class organizing being done all over the country. Why? Because I want us to know we can do this. I want people like me– a single mom living in a sleepy Southern city– to know we have what it takes to make the future we want.

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To this end, we’ve told stories about communities working to create third places in towns where little public space exists, about a group of volunteers running a free EMS service, town residents fighting a millionaire from taking their tax dollars, and a neighborhood that organized to reopen a basketball court and, in the process, ending up electing a new mayor. From New Mexico to Colorado to Michigan to North Carolina, working-class people are stepping up to be the change.

Now it’s your turn. Working Class Storytelling is looking for story submissions about the cool organizing that working folks are doing.

Are you and your neighbors working together to build something big? Are you part of a group that is haunting your local city council about an issue that matters to working class people? Are you and your friends doing something to make your town better?We want to hear all about it.

Here’s some basic guidelines on what we are looking for:

• Short stories, written as stories not as opinion pieces, about who, how and why people are organizing in your town

• Stories about organizing success and wins, sure, but that are also honest about what didn’t work and what lessons were learned

• Stories that focus on how your work is bringing in new people and growing a bigger we

• Surprising stories about how people change, where people in your community overlap when maybe you thought they were different from you, and about how working together, not against each other, can bring bigger change

• Submissions should be between 600 and 1200 words, give or take.

You don’t have to be a fancy writer-type to submit a piece to Working Class Storytelling! Plain and simple is the name of the game. I’m here to happily help you craft your story and get it to where you want it.

Got a submission or have an idea you want to toss around? Contact me at gfrisbiefulton@additionproject.org

In my early 20s, I worked in a courthouse. Courthouses aren’t as exciting as you might think; mostly they are places where papers are filed, data entered, callers put on hold. Courtrooms are a depressing parade of people who have messed something up in some fashion or another, having their lives turned upside down by judges, bailiffs, attorneys, and jailers who rarely look up from their desks.

But most of a courthouse’s work isn’t in the courtroom, but in the adjacent office. This is where dozens of people, nearly all women, stamp documents, clack on keyboards, and stand on their tippy toes to retrieve files. It was the office where I met Carla, a forty-something grandma who kept stuffies in her desk drawer, the children who had to wait in the chairs by her desk while their parents were in court.

Carla and I became friends. Everyone loved her. She was generous, gregarious, and good at her job. She’d been working as a clerk for nearly twenty years, and when I met her she had just gotten approved for a mortgage for her first house.

It was 2004, and Carla was building a home. She would report back to us on Mondays on the progress. The lot was selected– it had a view into the corn field that remained next to the development. The cement pad was laid. The framing was up. The driveway poured. The plumbing, the drywall, the bathtub was in.

By the end of that summer, I drove to Carla’s single-wide trailer, where she, her two sons, her mother, and her grandson were all living, and with the help of her neighbors, loaded up a U-Haul and moved her household up the highway, out of the dingy city, to where her new, suburban life was waiting.

Two years later, I was standing in Carla’s driveway, helping her son back another U-Haul towards the garage. Unable to keep up with the high payments, Carla, her mom, her sons, and her grandchildren had been served with a foreclosure notice, and the family was boxing up their belongings to head out again. We packed all day, and that evening, as I drove out of the neighborhood, I noticed waist-high grass in several yards and another foreclosure notice on the door of what was once the neighborhood’s model home.

The following Monday, Carla was quiet at her desk with the drawer full of stuffies, but I overheard another clerk, when she offered Carla a hug, whisper, “I just lost mine, too.”

A year later, the American news media began reporting on the foreclosure crisis. It was yet another year before politicians used the term “subprime,” and longer still before anyone added “predatory.” But that’s the way it is for working people, our skin is the skin that’s exposed, so we always feel the wind first. We are, I suppose, the canaries in the coal mine.

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I thought about Carla last fall when I was shopping in my neighborhood Food Lion. I was in the baking aisle comparing prices on shredded coconut when an older woman driving a motorized cart came towards me. She was smiling really big; I smiled back. Once she had maneuvered up next to me she said, quietly, “Excuse me, Miss, but can you help me buy some food?” I declined and wished her luck.

As I drove home, I wondered to myself why I hadn’t offered at least some help. I’m making decent money, the really hard-knock days of being a single mom with a little kid are behind me. I have no reason to think the woman wasn’t in need; the way she lowered her voice to almost a whisper let me know she was uncomfortable and, sadly, ashamed. But the truth is, I was thinking about Carla and all the other canary’s I’ve known.

I live in a poor neighborhood, there’s no other way to really describe it. It’s a neighborhood of work trucks, double shifts, and roofs that need repair. I’ve lived here for a long time. I know poverty personally and I see it all around me. But right now, the feeling is different. It feels like when you are sitting on the beach and you notice the tide is bringing the water closer and closer to your towel and you know, because of how the earth and the moon both move, it’s soon going to be at your toes. We can feel something coming towards us, here; feel some hardship more than the usual, some blow that’s going to be harder than the last.

Poor and working-class places are always where you see the shadows move first; we know things long before other people do.

It’s been a long time since things were “affordable” here. A lot of us have never really been able to afford much; rent has been eating up more than half of my neighbor’s paychecks for a decade now. Half the washing machines at the local laundromat don’t work, and no one is in a rush to repair them. Healthy food is mostly out of reach; my ability to buy things like blueberries and raspberries is still a novelty. The utter shock of our Duke Power bills this month set off dozens of comments in our neighborhood Facebook group, but as the dad up the road said to me: “I guess it doesn’t matter if it’s a $400 light bill or a $100 light bill, I can’t pay either and it will get cut off the same.”

So, while it’s nice that Washington is talking about the “affordability crisis,” working folks are wondering: Where the hell have you been?

In my work, I talk to working class people all over the country, every day. We see things– not just prices– as they begin to bubble. We feel things as they begin to blow. We have both the intellect and vantage point to see where we are fraying as a nation, to understand, long before Congress or the President, the state of the union.

Yet still, the President talks about the Dow, like he’s taking our blood pressure while we are bleeding out. It’s the mysterious language of the wealthy, this talk of stocks and percentages, when our power is shut off at home. And the opposition meekly counters with “affordability” like it’s a state of being with no cause, like there isn’t someone going to the bank laughing, like we haven’t always been left counting out our change.

Working people see what’s coming– prices will keep going up, programs that ease the pain will keep being shut down, opportunities will continue to dry up, and the number of grandmas needing help with their groceries will continue to climb. It will happen here first, then everywhere. I’m not proud to say it, but that’s why I think I didn’t help the woman in the grocery store: I’m a single mom trying to support my kid going to college, and I’m retreating inwards, protecting my own because it’s clear that people in power don’t– can’t – see what we see. But as long as they hold the power and they make the decisions, then the rest of us, most of us, are their canaries in the coal mine.

Hello Working Class Storytellers,

Every so often, I like to drop some updates from some previous stories– after all, all organizing is a long, rolling process marked by times of fighting and building, winning and losing. Sometimes we rest, but we are never done.

If you haven’t read the original stories on the following updates, I sure hope you will. Nonetheless, here are some updates from around the country:

• Shelby County, Indiana: Last fall, I was driving across the Midwest and exited off the highway to go crash at my old friend’s Indiana farm. Imagine my delight at running into, way out there in the countryside, a strike line! I spoke to Dakota, Tera, and several other card dealers who were on strike outside the Horseshoe Casino. What was most interesting to me is that they were striking for union recognition— a truly risky move since they did not yet have job protections. But it worked! In early December, after seven weeks of being out 24 hours a day in wind, snow, and rain, they received recognition and have now joined the Teamsters Local 135. This story is a good reminder that risks taken by a large group, moving in solidarity, can bring about solid and important wins.

• Bakersfield, California: Last month, Vidi Herrera and I worked on a story together about her journey out of MAGA and into pro-immigrant, Catholic organizing. To date, it’s one of the most incredibly honest and important stories I’ve been entrusted to tell. Vidi has been active with a new group called The Dorothea Project– all Catholic women from across the country who may or may not be entirely politically aligned, but believe strongly in welcoming the stranger. The other weekend, The Dorothea Project hosted public prayer events across the country for the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul. They called on ICE agents to see Christ in the people they seek to detain and deport and, through this Damascus moment, turn away from violence. Vidi helped pray a meditative rosary in solidarity online with the group. You can watch it here.

• Online, All Over: Earlier this year, I talked to Charlie from Atlanta, Georgia. Charlie told me about how he and other gamers went to Washington DC to meet with lawmakers and deliver a petition to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, asking them to block the private equity takeover of Electronic Arts, one of the world’s biggest gaming companies. The takeover, which would turn ownership over to the Saudis and Jared Kushner, would be the largest private equity buyout in history and, Charlie fears, further commodify gaming. Since I spoke with Charlie, the gamers organizing with the Players Alliance have continued to circulate their petition, garnering over 8,000 signatures and counting.

Got a good story about working-class organizing happening in your hometown? Reach out to gwen@additionproject.org and let’s talk!

Masked men were marching up the street. Cars slowed down at the spectacle, but zipped away before the children in their backseats could see. It wasn’t exactly the sort of thing you want to run into on a sleepy Saturday afternoon in small-town Albemarle. Or anywhere, for that matter.

Tiffany Dahle stood in her restaurant’s front door and watched the men swarm the sidewalk. She had her cell phone ready in her hand. They were handing out flyers with Tiffany’s name on them.

The men wore black and yellow gaiters, sunglasses, and hats to obscure their identities--- the trademark colors of the Proud Boys. “It’s just not normal to do that,” Tiffany remembers thinking. “This is a friendly town, a family town. It’s like they were hiding, but trying to frighten us at the same time.”

She wondered if she knew any of the men under those masks. “Are they people who drop their kids off at school with me? Will I recognize them if I am in the grocery checkout lane with them?”

She thought about calling her husband, but he works the next county over and couldn’t make it here fast enough if something happened. Children were in the restaurant behind her– some with guests and some with their parents who work there. Thankfully, the kids were playing a game; maybe they won’t notice the frightening commotion outside.

Tiffany Dahle had decided to host a drag show at her restaurant, Tiffany’s at the Boardroom. It was a business decision, something she would try and see how it went. It was 2022 and her small business was still reeling from the pandemic. She had been getting creative in rebuilding her clientele and bringing people back into downtown Albemarle, which had all but become a ghost town. “We had to pivot,” Tiffany explains about her business. “We had to become creative.”

When she overheard customers saying that they sometimes drove an hour away to Charlotte, North Carolina, to attend drag shows, Tiffany thought: “Why should local people have to drive and bring their money that far away when we could just do that here?” She contacted a few performers and put up an ad for a drag brunch. The event sold out so fast that she had to quickly schedule a second show.

Things were looking up. Tiffany’s at the Board Room was a staple of downtown Albemarle and she intended to keep it that way. Countless locals have made memories at the restaurant, from birthday dinners to first dates to fundraisers for local charities. Tiffany Dahle had run the business for nearly a decade and its West Main Street address puts it at the physical center of public life in the small town. The vibe was a bit like a very southern Cheers.

But then the Proud Boys showed up.

Stanly County is a conservative county, sure. It’s rural and old-timey; it’s Southern and maybe even a little stuck in its ways. But that had always worked fine for Tiffany. Born and raised here– and now raising her own family here — it’s all she knows. “I guess you always hear about ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal, ‘ but I never knew which one I was,” she explains. “People don’t have to see eye to eye to be friends or to respect each other here.”

Nonetheless, she knew a drag show wouldn’t be for everyone. “I figured a few old ladies might not like it, but I figured they’d do what everyone does when they don’t like something around here… they just wouldn’t come.”

Others would be thrilled by the idea of a drag brunch. Stanly County, just like the South, has never been a monolith. There are all kinds of people here, young and old, gay and straight. It has a diverse population, people from different races, faiths, and ethnicities, and it’s customary that you “live and let live.”

Nonetheless, the drag show at Tiffany’s would be, as far as anyone can remember, Albemarle’s first. But drag shows have been around for ages, even in sleepy small Southern towns. From ancient Greece to RuPaul’s Drag Race to Rudy Giuliani dressing in drag and receiving a kiss from Donald Trump, drag has been around as long as gender has. Drag performances are part and parcel to the entertainment circuit of any American town – mimosas are poured at dozens of drag brunches occurring on any given Sunday morning all over North Carolina. So, why not Albemarle?

When Tiffany came up with the brunch idea, she had no idea she’d be in the crosshairs of the rebranding of American extremism. The violence of January 6th had made regular Americans– including many conservatives– think this MAGA movement might be exactly what it is: Violent, extreme, and profoundly un-American. Groups like the Oath Keepers, White Lives Matter, and the Proud Boys were finding it harder to recruit and began looking for ways to inch closer to the mainstream. They first latched onto manufactured outrage issues like CRT, but it proved too abstract to really get people upset, so they looked for something more visible that people felt confused about. That’s where they found a boogeyman in drag.

It wasn’t until 2022 that drag shows became the target of far-right extremists all across the country. The near-synchronized rise in attacks and assaults hint that this wasn’t an organic movement. but something more orchestrated. Something from outsiders, something top-down.

When the phone calls started, Tiffany was taken off guard. Some of them were harassing, others threatening. Some of the callers told Tiffany to “go back where she came from” as if she were the one bringing something from the outside in.

“Where I came from?” she remembers laughing. “That’s like 20 minutes up the road!

Later, Tiffany discovered that most of the masked men were the ones not from Stanly County -- each time they came to picket outside her restaurant, they had driven hours to get there. The one guy who lived in town had only moved to Albemarle a few years before. Most locals didn’t know him from Adam. Tiffany had certainly never met him.

The Proud Boys began posting about Tiffany on social media, distributing the restaurant’s address and phone number. They harassed her relentlessly online. Some posts insinuated violence; others called her a pedophile or a groomer.

Tiffany considers herself pretty tough and unafraid, but it was being called a pedophile that sunk her heart: “That’s a hell of a thing to do to a mom,” she says.

The harassment went on for weeks, months. They would show up at the restaurant, hand out flyers about her, ring the phone off the hook. When they couldn’t convince her to cancel the show, the Proud Boys tried to get the local city council to pass an anti-drag ban. That’s when Tiffany decided she needed to speak out.

She went to her local city council monthly meeting -- something she’d never done before. She was nervous– after all, she’s just a business owner and mom trying to do her own thing. She’s more comfortable spending her days behind a bar, balancing receipts, and cheering at her kids’ sports games.

As she went up to the podium, a group of black-and-yellow-clad Proud Boys sat behind her, leering. She had a sense this wasn’t really about drag or her business or even her-- but about political forces, forces she had never so much as thought about, trying to claim their turf in little ol’ Albemarle. What do you say when you have been thrust into political winds you never asked for?

She took a deep breath and spoke. She spoke about being a mom, about being a business owner, and about being from here– a small town called Albermarle in a small county named Stanly in a great state called North Carolina. And then she spoke about everything she wanted her community to be.

The day of the drag show finally arrived. The performers were getting dressed, and Tiffany opened the doors to the venue and looked out.

The North Carolina Proud Boys had called for a huge protest outside Tiffany’s at the Boardroom the day of the drag show, but in the end, only a few managed to drive by. Instead, East Main Street’s sidewalks were flooded with supporters – young people waving small rainbow flags, old folks in Love is Love t-shirts. Local businesses were jam-packed with customers that day; the line at GloryBeans coffee shop across the street nearly went out the door.

A drag queen, big theatrical wig, pencil-thin eyebrows, and a sequined dress looked out the window on the second floor of Tiffany’s and waved to the crowd below. Everyone cheered.

Tiffany sighed in relief. The pandemic was behind them, the Proud Boys were gone, and Albemarle was going to be alright.

The drag brunch was such a success that Tiffany Dahle booked more shows throughout the fall and winter of 2022 and into 2023, making drag a regular feature in Albemarle. They continued to sell out. The Proud Boys tried unsuccessfully to protest one or two more, but soon dwindled away, allowing things to return to normal in the small town. The next year, the Albemarle City Council voted 4-3 to reject a ban on drag performances that had been introduced.

Unfortunately, the Proud Boys moved on to other towns-- Sanford, New Bern, Winston-Salem, Monroe. Only months after Albemarle’s drag brunch, someone disabled the entire power grid of nearby Moore County just as a drag show was getting underway, leaving the performers to sing by the light of cell phones. That case remains unsolved. In all this hullabaloo, state lawmakers moved in lockstep with the extremist groups, introducing 12 anti-LGBTQIA+ bills that year alone.

Just as Tiffany found in Albemarle, not many people are homophobic or transphobic or against drag shows or personal expression; it’s that the small minority is trying to hold a very loud megaphone. They have created outsized attention on relatively small concerns and forced it into the political arena.

“Things have become political that didn’t used to be and don’t need to be,” observes Tiffany. “People are trying to dictate how other people live their lives, and that to me doesn’t seem like what anyone wants.”

One of the times the Proud Boys marched through downtown Albemarle, Tiffany remembers the look on the face of one of her waitresses, a young woman who is gay. She saw the fear in her eyes when the waitress asked if she could call her mom. It was gut-wrenching.

“The Boardroom wasn’t just a business; it was our home,” she says. “When the Proud Boys showed up on the sidewalk, it was like they were on our front porch.”

“My husband and I attempted to shield our kids from all the Proud Boy crap until a couple of weeks before the show,” Tiffany recalls. However, when Tiffany went to city council and later was on the news, they sat the kids down and explained it to them. “We told them that even adults have bullies.”

Tiffany never wants her kids to leave Stanly County– she’s a mother and always wants them close. But her husband reminds her that the kids might want to leave, maybe to find opportunities elsewhere that they couldn’t find here and she knows she has to be okay with that. So they have agreed that no matter what their children decide to do or go, “we can work to make Stanly County a place they are proud to be from.”

It was only a few years ago now that Tiffany Dahl’s days were filled with ordering, bartending, school meetings, grocery store runs, and camping out at beauty pageants while her daughter performed. She’d never thought much about politics or been particularly outspoken. But since the Proud Boys came to town, she and the community around her have gotten serious about building a future for Albemarle.

So while she still does all the things she’s always done, she’s added more to her daily routine. Three years later, Tiffany has helped launch a PFLAG chapter in Stanly County to support the local queer community, which hosts book clubs and events. She’s also part of the newly launched Indivisible Uwharrie chapter, which has been hosting listening sessions to hear from the community on what concerns local residents have. The volunteers are actively recruiting candidates to run for every seat in the county (so often, candidates in rural counties run unopposed, and voters don’t have a choice on their ballots).

Their goals are big for a small town. “We have a committee formed and are working hard to put on a “Rock the Vote” event in September, and our goal is to register at least half of the unregistered voters of Stanly County,” she says.

If the Proud Boys thought they could come in and claim Albemarle as their own, or scare the town into passing a drag ban, boy howdy were they wrong. This past year, hundreds of Stanly County residents turned out for a No Kings Protest one day, and hundreds more a few days later. “In this community, that’s big!” says Tiffany. “It’s because we make a big effort to put people first and have real conversations. We don’t care about party affiliation or when you voted last.” They just want the community —not the Proud Boys —to come out.

Sometimes, small towns are slow to change. Sometimes they do things the old way. Tiffany still thinks that’s great. All this listening, talking, and showing up for each other is the way Albemarle has always been. “People come before politics every time,” she says. In that way, nothing has changed.

Tiffany’s at the Boardroom eventually closed, but Tiffany has now helped to create a new community and a new way to contribute to her hometown. And, in a roundabout way, she has the Proud Boys to thank for that.

Before December, Charlie had only passed through Washington, DC, with his grandparents one time. They were on a family road trip headed north. He’d seen the Washington Monument, the Potomac River, the Lincoln Memorial off in the distance, but had never been in the city proper or given it much mind.

And Charlie had, of course, also learned about Congress in grade school. He’d known about the three branches of government, the legislative process, and the white marble government buildings on Capitol Hill.

But it was a very different thing to walk through the halls of the Rayburn building, notes in hand, to a meeting with congressional aides; a very different thing to find himself giving a speech on the Treasury Department’s steps.

To understand how Charlie got here, we have to go back a few months and away from DC, back to Charlie’s apartment in Atlanta, and to his computer, logged in and online.

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Growing up, Charlie and his younger brother played a lot of video games together; kid stuff like the Lego games and Marvel: Ultimate Alliance. They immersed themselves in a world of superheroes and supervillains, where Captain America, Black Panther, and Wolverine fought off Doctor Doom and the Masters of Evil.

“My palette is more refined now,” Charlie laughs. He still loves gaming, but has discovered more artistic indie games and turn-based games. As an adult, he’s creative; a writer, artist, and storyteller. “I play games that have a good story, stories that carry over, and the player helps shape that story.” He streams as Captain Diesel: “What can i say? I'm just a big Blerd who loves video games, anime, cartoons, comics, and horror.”

Charlie is just one of an enormous and growing population that plays video games. It’s estimated that over 200 million Americans play regularly. Games are incredibly diverse, and different genres attract different audiences. Cozy games like Stardew Valley, where you grow kale and trade goods, appeal to gamers who want to relax, but epic multiplayer battle royal games like Apex Legends, a fast-paced and squad-based shooter game, require teamwork, strategy, and skill. “People game for all sorts of different reasons,” Charlie explains.

The audience for video games is so large that it’s grown into a $197 billion global industry. The profits of mega corporations —such as Nintendo, Epic Games, and Electronic Arts—are soaring. For years, these companies have been devising more and more ways to extract money from players, riddling games with loot boxes and upgrades that don’t improve gameplay, but do drain wallets.

This extractive model bothers Charlie, whose love for games and their stories feels core to his being. “People know that games are getting expensive, that companies merge and artists and developers lose their jobs, and no one wants that. Everyone agrees it’s bad,” says Charlie. “But we aren’t always making the connection between what’s happening in the games and what’s happening in the market and what’s happening in politics.”

But to Charlie, it’s very clear: The big, exploitative companies are the supervillains, and the situation clearly needs some superheroes.

That’s why when members of the Players Alliance began talking about the dangers of private equity taking over Electronic Arts, Charlie was all in.

He knew that if Doctor Doom is hellbent on world domination, they’d need to gather their people to fight back.

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Electronic Arts (EA) is one of the biggest names in gaming. Nearly everyone who games has played an EA game: Star Wars: Battlefront, The Sims, Plants v. Zombies, Madden NFL, Need for Speed. Last year, EA’s board agreed to be taken private in the largest private equity takeover in history at $55 billion. “It’s being bought by private investors,” explains Charlie. “And those investors include Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund and Affinity Partners, which is run by Jared Kushner.”

“EA was already not liked; they’ve had a shady history in how they move. But to allow them to be bought out by people who might not have the best interests of gaming involved, and people who already have their own humanitarian issues? It sounds terrible for the employees, for gamers, for the industry. It’s like the Legion of Doom getting together to buy a super weapon!”

Charlie and the others in the Players Alliance decided they wanted to see if they could stop the deal from getting approved. They decided to petition Scott Bessent, the Secretary of the Treasury, to block the deal and instead support basic consumer protection, including a guarantee that when you buy a game, you own it permanently and that all in-game purchases be displayed alongside real-world pricing.

Agreeing on their demands and launching the petition was one thing, but the Players Alliance now needed to gather their team. They developed a strategy to distribute the petition across Discord chats, Reddit, Twitch, and other platforms where they knew gamers engaged. Charlie, who had experience in content creation, helped make videos asking gamers to sign the petition. “I became the mascot of the campaign,” he laughs.

“Some are not fully aware of EA but know their games and play them,” explained Charlie. “So we had to first show people how big the company is and then how many games could be impacted.” Charlie found that a lot of gamers had a casual knowledge of the gaming industry, and the Pause EA campaign was helping them connect the dots. “People knew about the games, and people knew about the Saudis and Jared Kushner, but would say: ‘I didn’t know these bad people are connected!’ Let alone connected to something they care about.”

After a few weeks, the Pause EA petition had over 5,000 signatures, and a small group of the Players Alliance headed to DC to deliver it. Charlie came from Georgia, and others came from New York and other towns along the East Coast. This gets us back to the beginning of our story, when Charlie and a bunch of gamers were gathered on the Treasury Department steps.

“I’d talked into a camera plenty of times,” says Charlie. “But now I was in front of people looking back at me. It was different to say the least.” Into the megaphone, he talked about gaming and how gamers should make demands. He talked about how Scott Bessent and the Treasury should reject the deal and instead protect consumers like himself.

The group then met with congressional staffers. They had arranged meetings with aides from Congressman Garcia, Frost, and Sanders’ teams. “I knew you could lobby Congress theoretically,” says Charlie. “But to see it happen and be a part of it was totally different. We found that they really didn’t know much about EA, gaming, or the deal, so we explained it to them and, most importantly, showed them that gamers are a real constituency to pay attention to.”

In a few short weeks, the players had worked together to pull off something big. They hadn’t defeated the Masters of Evil yet, but they were well on their way to gathering their avengers.

“It’s the internet norm to complain about ailments, retweet, requote, and hope it’s taken care of by someone else. But closed mouths don’t get fed. We took action to unify people and then took it to DC to try to fight this thing. Will it work? I don’t know. But we put it on the radar of people with power who can help fight it, and that gave me hope.”

Vidi Herrera and her friends gathered at a Bakersfield restaurant the night after the election to celebrate. They were in good spirits–Donald Trump had declared victory in the early hours the night before. Their prayers had paid off.

The first time Trump ran for president, Vidi had been completely turned off by him. “Absolutely not!” she remembers thinking. He was brash, abrasive, crude. The second time he ran, she still wasn’t sure. His first term had been chaotic and exhausting, but he seemed to stand for many of the conservative values she held. By his third run, Vidi had been all in. She knew he was the “lesser of two evils,” that the world was going crazy, and the stakes were high. And while she didn’t like everything about the man, he was the one who would get things back on track.

But by election night, sitting in the restaurant with her friends, clinking glasses and celebrating, she was feeling uneasy, almost unwell. Normally bubbly and chatty, Vidi was quieter than usual. For a few months, she’d been eating less, sleeping poorly, and, worst of all, when she went to Mass she had struggled to speak with God. She watched her friends’ exuberant faces, people she cared for and had been through so much with, and felt distant and uncomfortable.

Still, she raised her glass. The group quietly started chanting “Trump! Trump! Trump!” Her friends spoke of Trump’s win, the win they deserved.

“Yes,” thought Vidi. “We do deserve this… and it’s not going to be what we think.”

Kern County is a conservative place, red in California’s blue. It forms the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley. It’s hot summers, mild winters, and grape, pistachio, almond, citrus, and carrot farms make it the state’s “breadbasket,” while it’s also called “the golden empire” for its oil and gas. The county is an economic powerhouse. That wealth, of course, doesn’t spread evenly to the people who live there– the county’s median income is below that of the state.

Vidi grew up in and still lives in Bakersfield, the county seat. Her family came to the US from Mexico when she was a baby and set down their roots. Bakersfield is largely Latino, and Vidi is a cradle Catholic, her mom taking the family to church every Sunday. The Catholic Church was both Vidi’s spiritual home and her cultural home growing up. Much of Bakersfield is Catholic, with large, multi-racial parishes, including St. Elizabeth Ann Seton and St. Philip the Apostle Church.

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“My faith growing up was holistic and rudimentary. I had a lot of faith in God, believed He could do anything, and felt like He was always with me, “Vidi explains. “I would write prayers, poems, and talk to God constantly.”

At some point, however, the Herrera family drifted away from the church. Maybe it was because life got busy– jobs, kids’ activities, grocery runs, and home repairs can take up a weekend and get in the way. Regular Sundays can become occasional Sundays, the time between devotions can inch longer, the Rosary by the bedside can get picked up less often, until things have just slipped away.

“Through my teenage years,” Vidi recalls. “I became less and less religious and at some point considered myself agnostic– but I was just never comfortable or sure.”

By the time she was in her mid-twenties, Vidi was still searching. “I said to God: If you are real, you need to talk to me.” This was the beginning of her return to Catholicism.

Baptism, Eucharist, Confirmation, Reconciliation. Rituals in the Catholic Church are the gateway to the divine. Mass is beautiful, with psalms and homily, bread and wine. Rosy light streams in through the stained glass windows, and frankincense hangs in the air.

When Vidi decided to return to the church, she had a lot of catching up to do. “I was embarrassed because I really couldn’t remember a lot of the rituals that are at the heart of the church,” she recalls. To become Catholic again, she needed to go through classes and have a sponsor– a process called Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults– to learn about the faith, prayer, and community life at the local parish.

Vidi dove in at first, but eventually drifted away again, and not returning fully to the Catholic faith until 2014. At that point, she began attending faithfully every Sunday. She took every opportunity to learn and engage – attending social events, gatherings, and study groups, and eventually seeking out more and more Catholic content online. “I consumed everything I could find,” she says. She wanted to do it right. She began teaching Confirmation to high school youth.

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In recent years, especially since the pandemic, there’s been a notable increase in people converting to Catholicism– reversing the decline of the last two decades. Some parishes are reporting double-digit growth. So while Vidi was returning to the church of her childhood, she was also meeting Protestants, Evangelicals, and even former atheists who were converting. Most of them were young Gen Z and Millennials. It felt exciting and vibrant.

“There’s a stigma to being a cradle Catholic,” Vidi say, perhaps because kids who were raised in the church had been exposed to Catholic teachings, but not steeped in them the way those converting were. “I felt like I needed to catch up to my peers who were really zealous and knew so much more than I did.”

Online, she discovered Matt Fradd and his popular podcast, Pints with Aquinas. Matt Fradd brought her to Michael Voris, Tim Gordon, Matt Walsh, and Michael Knowles, which eventually led her to Jordan Peterson, Candace Owens, Brett Cooper, and Charlie Kirk. She became immersed in what she calls “Catholic Instagram and YouTube,” where young Catholics, especially those converting, would discuss and share content.

Vidi noticed that the content wasn’t just religious, but also political– while this was very different from how she remembered church from her childhood, it was also a sign of the times. Much of the content she was consuming was stark and unbending: There was a battle between good and evil, between right and wrong, and that battle was coming to a head here, in America, and it was coming to places like California and Bakersfield, even though she had lived here all her life and nothing seemed dramatically different.

Vidi and I are talking over Zoom from different states, coasts, and time zones. She is funny and warm in a way that makes me wish I were in the same room as her. She’s incredibly earnest; her candor is almost disconcerting. I’m used to people hiding behind their politics and ideologies, constantly referring to the lines that define them, showing me what is in and out of their worldview.

But while other people feel like highly defined boxes, Vidi feels like a warm glow of feelings– no sharp lines, no jagged edges, but with a clear center around which everything orbits. I get the sense that she is on a journey– she’s walking down a path of faith and exploration and stopping to look at every stone, every plant, every bird along the way.

In her journey to learn deeply about Catholicism, she became a great student. She was eager to gather up information, engage with it, study it. But so much of what she was learning about Catholicism was coming to from online pundits, not from church or priests. Vidi now calls these pundits “Catholic talking heads.” The algorithm fed her more and more of this content, and soon she found herself in an echo chamber.

“At first, I didn’t recognize the political undertones,” Vidi explains, not apologetically but as a way of helping me understand. “There was a weird shift in power; a shift in power in the way they were talking. It was small, simple things like preferring the Lady of Fatima over the Lady of Guadalupe, arguments over semantics within the Catholic faith. Over time, I became more and more conservative without realizing it.”

Over years, the podcasts and pundits began to heighten their rhetoric. “Soon, they were calling Muslims Jihadists, atheists were being called heretics and infidels. It started as jokes, but over time, they just dropped the joking part and started saying it directly. That’s how this all works.”

The Catholic Church Vidi had grown up in hadn’t been liberal or conservative– it had been, well, Catholic. It has been a place of serenity, not militancy; calm, not strife; community, not crusades.

The hardline rhetoric and the finger-pointing were new to Vidi– at first uncomfortable for her kind spirit. When she was unsure, Catholic YouTube had an answer for her: “They would say: ‘The truth should feel uncomfortable.’ They said the feeling I was having was part of what needed to be overcome, that it was the devil playing on our heartstrings.” She leaned in and began to agree with the harsh rhetoric. “They said this was spiritual warfare, that I needed to put on my “spiritual armor” and not let them get to me.”

“So I joined them and closed off everything else.” ”

For a long time, Vidi did not question the content and assumed that because it was advertised as Catholic or being in line with Catholic teaching, she did not need to discern whether or not it was true, good, or productive. She strongly felt she was on the “right side of history.”

“And then God tapped me on the shoulder.”

Vidi, a Mexican American who grew up in the California sun, a land of promise, a faithful Catholic with good friends and good family, a Conservative woman who cares deeply about her neighbors, watched the second Trump administration’s first moves. “I watched him sign all those executive orders on the first day, I watched the suffering in Gaza, I saw what happened to Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and I thought: Wait, this isn’t what we signed up for?”

“I think that from my perspective, Trump wasn’t as bad in 2016 as people had said he would be. So I ended up not fearing him so much, and thinking that there was just some alarmism going on. By the end of his first term…I still didn’t like him because of his divisive rhetoric and the way he treated people, but I saw him as not as bad as people had feared/ This did two things: I lost trust for the Democratic aisle of politics and I underestimated Trump’s cruelty and narcissism.”

Like all of us, Vidi has regular, everyday concerns: concerns about the economy, public safety, and opportunities for her neighbors and family. But quickly, the Trump administration’s moves felt vengeful and cruel, which she couldn’t square with her faith or her own experiences in Bakersfield. “I looked around and said, ‘This isn’t right? Right? Not even for us conservatives?”

She couldn’t find answers. Friends skirted the issues, and the pundits only seemed to be leaning further in. She reached a point when she experienced what she calls “spiritual dryness.” The discomfort she had been told to ignore grew greater, and she decided to start listening.

“Gaza, Sudan, Congo, everything that was happening around immigration here was all hurting my heart. I was becoming spiritually and politically homeless.” A debate among her Catholic friends about these issues soon left her shunned. She wanted to be Catholic– she is Catholic– but didn’t know where to turn.

It was about this time that Vidi saw a post on Instagram by the Dorothea Project, a group of Catholic women who are using the Catholic Social Teachings to navigate through this political time.

The women in Dorothea Project don’t have to be liberal or conservative, Right or Left– but they are cutting through the partisan and internet noise to refocus on faith. They use the Church’s guidance on social, economic, and political life, rooted in Scripture to emphasize human dignity and the common good. “I knew there was another way to experience my faith,” Vidi said about connecting with the other women in the group. “I knew the Catholic Church was made for this moment.”

Vidi noticed that her online algorithm was also changing as she found new content, much of it faith-based and Catholic. She was no longer seeing all far-right content but was now seeing a mix of messages she could engage with, sit with, and sort through.

“My heart has softened and expanded a bit more. I found myself becoming unstuck from MAGA. I am so exhausted.”

Vidi’s story is not a dire warning nor is it a victory lap for progressives. It’s just a story of a smart, kind woman who, like all of us, is questioning and seeking. She’s not a leftist now nor a poster child for liberalism. She tells me she feels like a fool, but I don’t agree with her. She’s no more foolish than I am or anyone I know. We all live in this fast-paced, confusing world together, after all.

But where her journey has ultimately brought her is clear: She’s balanced, whole, healthy, and genuinely living in her faith now. She’s once again talking to God… and hearing back from Him.

“I think I’m moderate for the first time in my life,” she laughs. “The pride and the chip on my shoulder have fallen away.” That doesn’t mean Vidi doesn’t have strong feelings or moral guideposts– quite the opposite. She says she rediscovered these things because she has abandoned the ideological boxes that dampened these senses. She finds that she doesn’t fit neatly into “right” or “left” ideology now.

Vidi took a big risk by leaving MAGA. She risked losing her community, her friends– people she really likes and cares about. What she has found, however, is that she can reach out to some of her old friends and find places where they still overlap. “I understand what it is like to mask our pain with something else. I’m not trying to fight with people and go back and forth and debate, that’s just not my sword to pick up right now,” she explains.

Over the holidays, she helped host Advent retreats and invited some of her old group. “I think people are looking for a place to land because of all of the craziness; I think they are reaching for something comforting, normal, healing, and positive.”

“It’s my job not to look away,” she explains. “That’s a hard thing to do, but I feel better. I’m looking at things– the confusing things, the hard things, the incompatible things– head on. This is a healthier way to live.”

Vidi is currently working to launch a ministry in Bakersfield that will provide fellowship and further spiritual formation for Catholic adults. “There seems to be a real need and desire for community right now. I was asked to lead a 90-day spiritual retreat for women called Magnify 90. I had already been toying with the idea of creating a community where I could educate more Catholics on our Catholic Social Teaching, but also minister to them in their spiritual walk with Christ. So when I was asked to lead, it felt like a green light.”

Like all of us, Vidi is on a journey, trying her best in some very, very hard and confusing times. And like all of us, she is looking for – and offering– grace.

My dad usually keeps his emotions close, tucked up under his flannel shirt. That’s one reason why I’ll always remember the day he was playing on the floor with my toddler and looked up to say: “There should be a Grandparents’ Party. You know, like a political party, but for grandparents.”

My dad explained that growing older and becoming a grandparent has made him think about what the world should look like, not just now, but long after he is gone. Embracing this protracted view, he reasons, can change how people think about government and policy for the better.

I was thinking about my dad’s “Grandparents’ Party” as I met with members of the Midwest Senior Empowerment Project—a multi-state group that organizes around senior housing, nursing homes, protecting Medicaid and Social Security, and other issues related to aging well and with dignity. The seniors who run the group are not only doing meaningful organizing, they’re doing it with noticeable clarity and consideration for the decades ahead.

Like my dad, these older organizers have honed in on the future and on building a world that will work for generations to come. But many of the people I spoke with are also thinking about the past.

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Seniors get a lot of flak for harping on the past. We roll our eyes when they say, “Back in my day…” But when it comes to politics and organizing, their memories add important context and meaning to the “long view.”

Sitting in her living room in Wausau, Wisconsin, retiree Dora Gorski, now in her late 70s, told me about leaving home for college as a young woman. “I was able to go to one of the best schools in the nation, and it cost me $125 a quarter. Back then, the county and the state could afford to support the schools. The junior colleges were free, so that when somebody graduated from high school, they had a place to go to get the skills to get a job,” she said.

“I had a wonderful doctor, and we were talking a little bit about this. She graduated with her doctor’s degree… All she owed in loans was about $5,000. We could say that’s just not possible today, but it is possible if it’s done right.”

Up the road in Merrill, Eileen Guthrie also ponders what is possible based on her knowledge of the past. A retired county bookkeeper, Eileen has observed the inner workings of local government firsthand. “I have seen communities work well not just on a local basis, but also federally. I think I took it for granted,” she explained.

Recently, the Lincoln County Board of Supervisors voted to sell their publicly owned nursing home to a private buyer—a choice they rationalized by saying the facility was not making money. Eileen dug through the books and found that the nursing home was in the black, not the red.

To her, the sale was about ideology, not economics. “It’s a philosophy. Instead of believing the most important thing is to care for people, they believe it’s to make money. The new ideology thinks the worst in people instead of the best in people, or won’t give people opportunities that they deserve,” she said. “We used to have no problem ‘affording’ these things, but it was never because we were wealthy, it’s because we were making different choices.”

Today, both women live in small towns in rural Wisconsin. In these places, there’s a shortage of doctors and caregivers, college is out of reach for many young people, good jobs are hard to come by, and schools are being gutted. But Dora and Eileen know better things are possible—because they’ve happened before.

Neither of these women wants to sanitize the past. They know there were problems and that systemic barriers remain. But they hold memories that most of us simply don’t and can’t experience. They’ve lived through times when schools and social support were funded, when the government wasn’t being sold for parts, when immigrants weren’t being blamed—and in their recollections, we can find clues for forward movement.

Long memory and deep knowledge shape how Dora, Eileen, and other members of the Senior Empowerment Project organize. The group is somehow both more calm and more driven than so many other organizers I know; they understand the urgency of this moment, but approach it with resolve and fortitude. It’s as if, because they hold rare muscle memory of different times, they better understand the trajectory we must move along.

If I am hoping things could be better, these seniors know they could be. Their eyes are on the past, present, and future. They move differently because the knowledge is in their bones.

Read more stories about seniors organizing in their hometowns:

When I worked in a daycare, the hours were slow. The minute hand would click click click its way around to 5:30 PM, when parents started to arrive to gather their kids. The classroom would start to bustle with activity– moms and dads would file in, little Cayden would spread out all his paintings on the floor to show his grandma, I’d dig through the toy bin for a lost mitten, Kaleigh’s mom would apologize again for leaving a lunch box in the room over the weekend responsible for the ripe smell we had endured all day. 5:30 was a jumble of hats, gloves, coats, backpacks, prescription forms, take-home folders, envelopes stuffed with late fees, and doctors’ notes about allergies. It was the transition hour for parents between work and home, maybe with a grocery run somehow slid in between.

I remember one mom, the mother of a messy little three-year-old whose braids were always pinned up with a rainbow of butterfly clips, saying to me: “I just don’t have room for even one more thing.”

Working-class people rarely do. Jobs, errands, home repairs. Children, elders, the grass is too long, the oil needs changing. Everything feels like a litany; like we are riding under the crest of a wave. There’s barely enough time to make dinner, let alone catch up with the neighbors. There’s no wiggle room in our budgets; one more bill or flat tire can make everything come crashing down. No room for even one more thing.

Over the last year of writing Working Class Storytelling, I’ve been struck, then, by how many working people are doing more things– many more things. In a year where we’ve all been begging our elected leaders to do something– do something about the economy, do something about healthcare, do something about housing– it’s been working people who have taken on the work.

I think about busy moms like Jeneva and Nicole in Roswell, New Mexico, who used community organizing to get new homes onto the rental market, and about Casey in Three Rivers, Michigan, who harnesses the goodwill of her very poor community to help supplement the local government’s faltering safety net. Casey drives people released from the hospital to shelters in other counties, hours away – and does this in between bouts of chemotherapy. She seems always to be doing one more thing.

The meltdown of our infrastructure and systems is too big to ignore, and working class people feel the urgency. Michaela, living in an RV in the Chaves County desert, went back to school in her 60s to become an EMT so she could create a free EMS service, and Jocelyn, a single mom who works a radio station, collects and redistributes food to her neighbors on her days off, even as her own SNAP benefits are being cut. Moms in Pennsylvania, between the carpool lane, second jobs, and an hour on the phone with the insurance company, are showing up and organizing for paid leave and childcare.

People who work and organize in politics often discount poor and working-class people, saying that we have to make things “easy” for working people to be involved, or they won’t engage. Let them send a form email, sign up for another email list. Send them a mailer telling them who to vote for; hold the meeting on Zoom, not in person.

While I appreciate the recognition of how jam-packed our lives are, I think we are misunderstanding how dire working-class people know things to be– and how ready we are to build the futures we need; how willing we are to do one more thing.

Mandy in Bend, Oregon, was evicted from national forest land and weeks later was already working with her elected representatives to protect another homeless community from the same fate. Instead of spending their retirement years fishing and bowling, seniors in Wisconsin are banding together to protect quality care. Casino workers in Indiana are putting their jobs on the line, picketing for a union (they won, by the way).

Not one of these people had room for one more thing– but they are doing it anyway. They know what’s wrong and have a good idea of how to fix it; they can’t and won’t wait around for the rest to catch up. If you are looking for the heat in America in 2026, I say look at the people who have been forced closest to the fire and follow them. I’ll be writing about them here.

My favorite three working-class stories from 2025

1. One of the most surprising stories of ingenuity was this one I was led to in the southern New Mexico desert.

   2. This story out of California shows the power of organizing and how easy it is if you follow the lead of your neighbors:
   

   3. And finally, this story out of Colorado really defined the moment we are in— and why class-based organizing matters.
   

   
   

There’s a black pickup on the side of the highway, and I hope the keys are in there. Ladders chained to the rack, a blue tarp starting to blow loose in the bed. It’s sitting there, unmoved since this morning, still like someone is holding their breath, and all I can think about is dreams.

Years ago, when my son was little, my sweetheart got his first work truck. It was an old and creaky 1984 Ranger, small but built like a dadgum tank. The night he got it, we went out on a “date.” We couldn’t afford a babysitter, so we sat in the truck in the driveway, Randy Travis on the radio, drinking wine. He lit a candle, and we laughed as it dripped onto the sun-faded dash.

That truck meant new beginnings. We just had one car between us that I used to get to and from work and drop my son off at daycare. He had been begging rides to his job sites. The truck meant he could take on his own jobs, jobs where he didn’t have someone breathing down his neck and where the boss couldn’t skim off the top.

The day he got that truck, everything felt more hopeful.

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A few years ago I lent a friend, one of the hardest workers I know, my old Dodge pickup. His company said he’d make a great crew lead but he’d have to have his own truck. It was a poor man’s Catch-22: he couldn’t get a truck without the job or the job without a truck. So, he borrowed mine until he could buy himself a new one. In the end, he returned that old Dodge to me with a whole new engine built out, new brakes and everything. My son now drives it. We consider it one of our family’s most cherished possessions, next to my great-grammy’s china.

Because we know the meaning of a truck here.

My neighborhood is a work truck neighborhood. Trucks with ball hitches, Weatherguard tool boxes, and, if they are really nice, spray-in bedliners. Trucks with cement sprayed up the passenger side door, dried paint on the bumper, a dent where it rolled into the mixer. If I drink my morning coffee on the porch steps, I can watch my neighbors across the street load up their work truck six days a week. They tie down five-gallon drums and use ratchet straps to secure the pressure washer-- it’s an old ritual, the dance of 6 AM.

Trucks are precious things. American things. Working people things. They are how we leave our homes before day breaks and how we come home to catch cuddles from the kids before bed. They’re how we haul the things our hands will use to trim, build, blow, construct, paint, cut, measure, level, mortar, sand, and lay throughout the day. They are how we keep the lights on, how we plan for our future, how we help our best friend move across town to a new house, a house with more room for the kids, a yard for the dog.

Trucks are how we bring a new playset home for our children, a new grill for our neighbor, a load of mulch for the garden bed. Trucks are how we put in long hours, how we save up to send our children to college, how we dream of the days when we can sleep in a little, rest up a bit, maybe take a cruise, knowing we have worked hard, done well, and put in our time.

Trucks are honest things. They remind us there’s no real difference between a hard day’s work and a hard day’s work; no real difference between men.

But that truck on the side of the highway feels like a ghost; a ghost that will haunt us a long, long time.

I wonder if the family will find that truck; the truck that was pulled over this morning by ICE, an exit away from my exit, its driver taken away, now locked up somewhere.

I wonder what it will be like to get it, seeing those ladders and that tarp, knowing that the day’s work never did get done, that the man driving it never came home, that the idea of it all has been taken.

If it’s towed back to the family’s driveway, will the children dare play in its bed, honk its horn, and holler? Or will sit there, the ladders rusting and the tarp fraying, dark and quiet like a nightmare?

The truck sitting on the side of the highway won’t make me sleep better tonight; on the contrary, it will keep me awake. I know too much, driven too many. I’ve loved too deeply too many men who work with their hands and return home, still covered with the day’s dust, to tuck children in, to be able to rest easy knowing it is out there, abandoned like that.

Greeley’s leadership ignored local residents’ questions about the $1.1 billion plan to build a new hockey rink for Martin Lind, the owner of the Colorado Eagles and a big-time developer. So excited to please their millionaire pal, the city mortgaged its own fire department, recreation center, and even its own town hall to make the deal happen.

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Local residents called foul. They tried just about everything to get their local government to listen. They attended city council meetings, wrote Op-Eds, held protests, and even circulated a petition to get the Cascadia question on the ballot. But they were met with resistance at every turn– the city even managed to get the successful petition drive overturned based on a technicality.

They felt like they were up against all odds. And, honestly, they kinda were.

But the nearly 9,000 people who had signed the petition in this town of just over 100,000 demonstrated that the Cascadia issue was deeply felt by their neighbors. The roadblock they were facing was that the people in power were not listening to their constituents.

So decided to change who is on the council.

For local residents concerned about the Cascadia giveaway, this fall became a crash course on elections. While most were voters, they had often been choosing between “the lesser of two evils” over the years. So they asked a new question: What if they backed up a few steps and tried to change who was on the ballot?

Organizing under the banner of Many Hands Action, they ran a “Run for Office 101” and volunteers talked to their friends and recruited working-class people to run for local office. Rolling into November, for the first time anyone can recall, a working-class person was contesting for every seat on the ballot.

Every. Single. Seat.

As they knocked on doors and phone banked, the residents of Greeley wouldn’t let the city forget that voters had said, loud and clear, that Cascadia is the issue they care about. They held a public candidate forum that pressed candidates on working-class issues, including the billion-dollar development, and every working-class candidate used the idea of a Community Benefits Agreement– a tactic to force Martin Lind and the city to make sure Cascadia benefits working people– as part of their key talking points during the campaign.

And on election night?

They lost. After putting it all on the field, none of the candidates they had recruited or endorsed won a seat on the city council.

So why does it still feel like winning? Why are the people who poured so much time and energy into circulating a petition, speaking out a town council, recruiting candidates, knocking on doors, turning out voters— why are they feeling so good?

Because they put up a fight– which hasn’t happened in Greeley in a long while.

“This year I am so proud that we created a community we didn’t know was there, we brought people together to have better representation, and those people are willing to stay working together,” says Mary Metzger, who was instrumental in knocking on doors during the election, and previously helped circulate the petition about Cascadia.

Voter turnout increased dramatically in Greeley (16.2% higher than in the last decade of general elections), even as it decreased in the surrounding county. The group’s endorsed mayoral candidate, Tiffany Simmons, secured 44% of the vote, more than twice what any other challenger in the last decade has achieved. And most importantly, because the group now knows that there is a base of at least 9,388 voters in Greeley who will and do support worker-centered policies and candidates.

Now that’s something to build on.

“The biggest thing I’ve noticed when talking to people is they didn’t know we were here, and once they do they’re more motivated to get involved,” says Mary. “If we can keep people engaged, we can see change happen. We are growing our group and we have hope.”

These organizers I’ve been talking to – Mary, Brittni, Joel, Antonio, Jennifer, Morgan– and the many other Greeleyites who started this year upset that their city council voted while ignoring public input on Cascadia have, through ups and downs, uncovered a truth about Greeley: Working folks make this town. They did this while a millionaire and his PR firm attacked them, courts ruled against them, and their city did them dirty.

But never mind all that: They’ve come out the other side knowing that nearly 10,000 of their neighbors have their backs.

I think that’s not too shabby.

Sometimes when we meet someone we love, we trace back all the life decisions, all the twists and turns, the happenchances and coincidences, that led us to them. For Prizzo, it’s his wife, and how he found her was through video games.

He laughs a little when he says this. He knows it is not the sappy made-for-TV love story we’ve come to expect. It’s better.

Prizzo had completed his coursework to become an IT professional and mentioned he was looking for work to an online friend he had met through gaming. That friend said his company was hiring for an IT job in Denver and helped him get an interview. Prizzo applied and got the job.

It was at that job that there was a staffing shortage during the pandemic, and a beautiful woman from another department volunteered to help in his department. They became fast friends and, soon, began dating, and now they’ve been married for three years.

He’s even recently gotten her to play video games with him.

Prizzo marvels at this. Games were once his escape. He had been a nerdy kid who had trouble talking to other kids. He loved Tolkien and fantasy worlds. His big brother gave him his old Game Boy. He became obsessed with Pokémon and then, as a young teen, RuneScape and World of Warcraft.

In the beginning, gaming was a way for him to be alone and avoid other people. But soon those same games were the place Prizzo says he learned how to carry on a conversation, become more social, and build relationships– all the way up to the point that his online friendships led him to his job and, eventually, his wife.

Online and offline worlds are both very real. Prizzo plays Tribes 3: Rivals and other first-person shooter games competitively, and also goes to work, walks his dog with his wife, calls his mom, swings by the grocery store to grab pasta sauce and veggies for dinner, and hangs out with friends. Over 3 billion people play games of some sort, meaning that many, many people live out their lives online as well as IRL.

“People who stereotype gamers as loners don’t understand how social the gaming world is. Gamers do go outside,” he laughs. “We do have jobs. We are normal people.”

Still, it’s not unusual for gamers to be regarded suspiciously. When Charlie Kirk was shot and, the same day, a high schooler attacked his classmates in a Denver suburb, online worlds and communities briefly were thrown into the spotlight because of the meme culture and online language that had to be deciphered in both tragedies.

Quickly, a U.S. House committee was formed demanding that the CEOs of Discord, Steam, Twitch and Reddit testify about the “radicalization of online forum users.” This worried Prizzo and millions of other platform users who use these platforms to communicate with friends and family and as hubs to create gaming communities. It felt strange to be put in the crosshairs like that for something so… normal.

A white man on the internet, Prizzo is perfectly aware of the nefarious uses of these platforms. “Of course, there are bad guys on there, just like anywhere.” He has seen white nationalists post content, though he says it can be hard to discern given their use of inside language and graphics. He says that bad actors can show up in communities anywhere, online or offline, and it’s the community’s job to make them not welcome. “There’s a huge amount of push back instantly when someone starts to post like that,” he explains. “It gets shut down. There’s no tolerance for it. So other people see that reaction and know these spaces we are creating are not for them.”

More often than not, Discord, Twitch, Steam, and Reddit are used for healthy and positive community making. Prizzo has seen people cheer each other on, build each other up. He’s seen young, awkward kids come out of their shells, and he’s met people he never imagined he could meet. What other place can you have friends from all walks of life and from all over the world?

Still, online channels are so large, so active, and so influential, Prizzo knows they are ripe for manipulation. While he and his friends have learned to shut out and shun extremists and bad actors, Prizzo is worried that big corporations and even state actors will exploit these spaces. How will gamers be able to mitigate that?

Gaming is big business. Gaming is worth hundreds of billions and is largely understood to be worth more than the film and music industries combined. This has led to intense interest from investors, including private equity firms. “These aren’t people or companies who are in it for the love of the game,” explains Prizzo. “They are here for the money.”

At the same time, Congress was opening inquiries into Discord and Twitch, one of the biggest gaming companies in the world, Electronic Arts (EA), was sold in the largest private-equity buyout in history. The $55 billion deal transfers ownership of the company known for The Sims, Madden NFL, and Apex Legends to private investors, including Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund and a private equity firm led by Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

This worries Prizzo. Not only is he worried about the quality of the games (will smaller game developers be able to compete?), but he’s worried about, frankly, all the attention on gamers and games. It’s not just a handful of lone wolves and extremists, after all, who recognize the opportunity to influence and manipulate these massive platforms, but game spaces seem primed to be where even international propaganda wars might be hashed out.

Private equity, $55 billion sales, political influence. All of this seems a long way from Lord of the Rings, Pokémon, RuneScape, Tribes 3, and the healthy, human-to-human, online and offline interactions that created friendships and led Prizzo to his wife.

Prizzo is thinking about how gamers can protect the games they love and the channels they use to communicate from this hyper-politicization. Just as they don’t want to be blamed for radicalization, they don’t want to open the door to becoming products. “We just want to live our lives,” says Prizzo. Both online and offline.

Over Black Friday weekend, Prizzo and other gamers worked together to “Pause EA” in response to the $55B Saudi + private equity takeover that will destroy studios, raise prices, and flood games with microtransactions. They encouraged other gamers to pause all EA purchases, subscriptions, and microtransactions between November 27th to December 1st as part of a boycott to show the power of their wallets. They also launched a petition to tell regulators to block the deal.

Over Black Friday weekend, Prizzo and other gamers worked together to “Pause EA” in response to the $55B Saudi + private equity takeover that will destroy studios, raise prices, and flood games with microtransactions. They encouraged other gamers to pause all EA purchases, subscriptions, and microtransactions between November 27th to December 1st as part of a boycott to show the power of their wallets. They also launched a petition to tell regulators to block the deal.

The November wind is no joke in Wisconsin, but the people filing into the Holiday Inn in Stevens Point pay it no mind. They hang up their coats by the door and greet each other as if old friends.

Many of them are old friends. They are now men and women in their 60s, 70s, and 80s who have spent most of their lives in the small towns and rural areas of central Wisconsin.

They’ve come for the Wisconsin Senior Summit, and the hotel ballroom is filled with retirees. Judy Brey, a retired teacher, hands out candy to encourage participation. Eileen Guthrie, retired from accounting, keeps everyone on time.

After you retire, Scott Doerr tells me, “It’s time to relax and sit back and enjoy yourself a little bit. You shouldn’t have to worry about things!”

I smile and point out that he and his wife, Linda, have been running back and forth all morning, helping to set this event up. Everyone here is very, very busy. They don’t seem like they are doing a great job relaxing, I say.

“No, I guess not,” Scott laughs. “There are just too many things – and people– we care about.”

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Relaxing and not worrying about things isn’t exactly how things have ended up for most Wisconsin elders. Instead, they’ve found themselves fighting for things they thought were a given. Medicaid and Medicare benefits they’ve paid for across their lives are being taken away in favor of tax cuts for the rich. Threats to Social Security loom like dark clouds. Instead of summer fishing and evening bowling, seniors here are often working part-time jobs to supplement their retirement, selling the homes and farms they’ve owned for decades, and pinching pennies to afford basic needs.

Tom Kriegle drove up to the Wisconsin Senior Summit from Sauk County. He grew up on a dairy farm and had a career as an agricultural economist; he helped family farms navigate new unknowns as large-scale operations began to dominate the landscape. Tom’s a numbers guy; knowledgeable and practical. “Most things can be planned for,” he explains about agricultural economics, “but the weather is always unknown.”

As he talks, it strikes me that most of the people in the room are practical, level-headed midwesterners like Tom. They are no-nonsense people. They may not have ever made a lot of money, but they responsibly planned for their retirements. But they couldn’t have imagined the conditions they retired into — this world of astronomical healthcare costs and a time where a carton of eggs can cost five dollars. They saved and planned, but this weather was not just unknown; it was unimaginable.

“My husband and I have given to society, and we mostly haven’t really had to use it,” says Eileen, reflecting on how they paid their taxes and believed in the system they were paying into. “But when I retired, we used the Affordable Care Act, and that allowed me to retire with less costs. Now they want to take that away, and that’s not how you build a society that is caring instead of mean and grumpy and nasty.”

“One of my biggest pet peeves is when they’re talking about cutting Medicare and Social Security,” says Scott. “My employers and I contributed a lot of money into that fund. You know, that’s money we paid for along the way, and it would be solvent if the richest 1% of people in the country paid their share of taxes, too. I always expected that since we’re paying these taxes, and these are the things we want and we need, and the government should provide some help.”

“The government is supposed to be for the people,” he continues. “And I say supposed to be because it don’t seem that way anymore. I think the government lost its way.”

The people gathering at the Wisconsin Senior Summit believe they can help their government find its way again. They want to lead their local lawmakers down a path that leads to good outcomes for ordinary people, not just profits for stockholders.

Over pastries, ginger ale, and coffee, Summit attendees are here to create a Senior Agenda together —one that will highlight the most pressing needs of the state’s aging population and position them as the changemakers Wisconsin needs.

“A lot of times people think that just because we are retired we no longer contribute,” says a gentleman wearing a sweater with elbow patches.

“Or because we forget things!” laughs his wife, who is rummaging through her purse looking for her glasses.

“But as long as there are needs and we are still here, we can still help.”

One of the day’s speakers, Coach Jack Bennett, refers to this as “the fourth quarter of life,” drawing chuckles from the room. Everyone here recognizes not only the time that seniors have to contribute, but also the skills and knowledge they each hold.

Eileen is widely credited by her peers as the brains behind last year’s tracking of their county-owned nursing home finances, showing that the home was making money, not shedding it as many of the county board members claimed in order to rationalize its sale. Tom is particularly savvy at researching and digging up data. Nancy and Joe Roppe of Portage County seem to not only know everyone in the region but also have their phone number (they are the ones who invited Coach Jack to be here today).

But beyond knowledge, skills, and time, these seniors have something even more important: They have skin in the game.

For many of them, the situation is dire. One man’s wife needs a new brace, which will cost, even with insurance, $38,000. Now they can’t replace their rusting car. Another woman is trying to figure out how to stretch her dollars to cover the cost of housing for her retired years– the table she sits at discusses the concept of “granny pods.”

The room is full of ideas. A group from Walworth County shares how they are campaigning to add childcare to an unused wing of the county nursing home to build intergenerational support of high-quality care. Another group shares an update about how they, so far, have been able to prevent the sale of their county-owned nursing home. Others discuss how they can support the Health over Wealth Act, recently introduced in Congress.

Based on the conversation and enthusiasm in the room, “fourth quarter” seems to be where the action is.

Over the years, I’ve attended hundreds of organizing meetings and listening sessions– from Vermont to Nevada to my home state of North Carolina. I’ve heard working-class people talk about their concerns and needs. I’ve seen working people cut issues and launch campaigns. But in the Holiday Inn in Stevens Point, there is something happening that I don’t get to see everywhere. The seniors in this room have a sense of hope for the future that is grounded in a concrete knowledge of the past.

I grew up in a defunded and gutted America. I barely know anyone of my generation who is in a union; the newspaper that used to connect my neighbors no longer prints daily and is only a few flimsy pages thick. I sent my son to a school with a hole in the gym’s roof and where the most recent civics book lists George Bush as president. The tract homes that were built when I was a teenager are already collapsing, factories from my hometown moved long ago to Mexico, and, regardless of productivity increases, real wages for working folks have been flatlined since I was a baby.

In contrast, the seniors in this room have been a part of a more vibrant– and affordable– America.

Dora Gorski explains that more is possible than we can imagine. “It’s not all pie in the sky,” she says. “When I went to school at UC Berkeley, in Berkeley, California, I went to one of the best schools in the nation, and it cost me $125 a quarter. My books cost more than my tuition, and the state was able to afford to support the schools.”

“So it’s a choice,” Dora continues. “It’s a choice by the government, it’s a choice by the community of what they want to put their money toward, and I know that because I’ve seen us make different choices and I’ve seen the positive outcomes of those choices.”

Like Dora, Eileen remembers a time when things seemed more stable and hopeful. “I have seen communities work well … on a local basis and federally. I think I took it for granted. I think I took being able to find a good job for granted. I worked at it, we all worked hard, but it’s like we climbed this hill. We never got to the peak, but we climbed the hill. And then things started to go downhill.”

Downhill for Wisconsin looks like private equity firms buying up hospitals and nursing homes, social programs like SNAP and Medicaid being stripped of funding, and elected leaders embracing bare-bones austerity that creates scarcity and pits neighbor against neighbor. In Eileen and Dora’s eyes, this is untenable. These conditions are not “just the way things are.”

They’ve seen better. They know better.

Listening to these elders lead workshops on how to fight the privatization of nursing homes, how to organize to protect Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security is powerful. They are each drawing from a deep well of history– they aren’t just starry-eyed. Their vision of a world where each of us can grow old with dignity, with the care we need, and in the communities we choose to live in is attainable; it’s within our reach.

They’ve seen it before, and they have a good idea of how to get there again.

No one is sugarcoating the past– they know things weren’t perfect. Winters have been hard, farms have been sold, and injustices have always been there. But they also know what can work, what we can do, what we can ask of our government — and each other.

“The hardest part is to say: We aren’t done yet!” says Dora. “We can’t be done. We’ve got too much work to do!”