"Leave it better than you found it is a really powerful mantra. It speaks not only to refuse pick up but just as a reminder to breathe deep, listen closely, stop time for just a moment and enjoy the surrounding."
Most people leave doctor visits with prescriptions, but still feel unsure—instructions make sense, but no one asks about their life. In contrast, when a provider knows your name, remembers your story, and explains care in a way that fits you, the experience feels different—and that difference matters.
At his home in Pasadena, high schooler Atticus Jackson frantically shoved his belongings into his car as the sky turned a deep orange. A few hundred feet away, the fire climbed up the mountain and a cloud of red and gray smoke obscured the view.
Most for-profit companies still confine nonprofit relationships to corporate philanthropy. Donations flow through foundations, annual reports highlight community contributions, and nonprofit engagement is framed as evidence of corporate responsibility.
The labor of this kind of organizing was invisible and deeply exhausting. In a precarious workplace, where a so-called 'performance review' could amount to job loss, organizing meant building a bridge while standing on it.
Why do I get to be the runner, and these guys get to be the homeless guys on the corner? Why can't we all be runners? She didn't have an answer. It would've been easy to let that question dissolve with her footsteps. Most people would have. But Mahlum saw something in those men that others had missed.
"Are you okay?" These were Alex Pretti's last words, said to a woman after ICE agents had tackled and pepper-sprayed her. Videos from bystanders show Pretti holding up a phone, attempting to document what was happening before he himself was pepper-sprayed, wrestled to the ground, and killed by those officers. He lost his life not for committing violence, but for documenting it, and stepping in to protect someone facing it.
The change in the administration's tactics in Minneapolis is not a retreat. Instead, they are regrouping and planning another mode of attack, with the hopes that their repression might be met with resistance that is easier to control and contain. People who garner their relevancy and power through the dehumanization and oppression of others will do whatever it takes to cling to their soulless sense of self.
Losing staff could be detrimental to the projects we worked on, and there was a growing dissatisfaction with how meetings were run. These mostly one-sided discussions left the quieter half of us feeling pushed aside, like our thoughts didn't matter much. If things stayed this way, I worried the good people on our team would start quitting one by one.
