Drivers were delivering packages in deadly heat with no air conditioning; part-time employees, the majority of UPS' workforce, have been unable to receive benefits. Wages aren't rising at the same rate as the cost of living.
The only thing worse than making a mistake is keeping it bottled up inside. Learning from the mistakes of others could help you embark on the healing journey of sharing and working through a mistake of your own, with someone you trust.
Thank you...for being able to fight for my freedom. But what's more important than that is that you continue to fight for your land and to continue to fight for your people and all people.
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.
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.
"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.
In the environmental nonprofit sector, "centering frontline voices" has become a familiar slogan, often detached from how decisions are made or resources allocated. It appears in grant proposals, conference agendas, and organizational values statements. And yet, too often, those voices are still positioned as illustrative rather than authoritative-invited to animate strategies already decided, asked to translate lived experience into language legible to funders, or flattened into narratives that travel more easily than the truths they carry.
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.
There's a myth in our society that real change requires force, strength, and domination. We celebrate athletes, CEOs, and politicians who crush their opponents. But history tells a different story. Lasting social change has often been triggered by humble people whose weapons were passion, principle, and an unwavering commitment to justice and the truth - not the truth we see on TV or read in print media, but rather the truth that we feel deep inside ourselves.
