Weekly Roundup: September 23, 2025
Events & Actions
Tuesday, September 23 (8:00 AM – 4:30 PM): ICE out of SF courts! (in person at 100 Montgomery St)
Tuesday, September 23 (6:00 PM – 7:30 PM): Ecosocialist Bi-Weekly Meeting (Zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister St)
Wednesday, September 24 (6:00 PM – 8:00 PM): 
DSA SF Tech Reading Group (Zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister St)
Wednesday, September 24 (6:45 PM – 8:30 PM): Tenant Organizing Working Group Meeting (Zoom and in person at 438 Haight St)
Thursday, September 25 (5:30 PM – 6:30 PM): 
Education Board Open Meeting (Zoom)
Thursday, September 25 (7:00 PM – 8:00 PM): Immigrant Justice Court Action Orientation (in person at 1916 McAllister St)
Friday, September 26 (8:00 AM – 4:30 PM): ICE out of SF courts! (in person at 100 Montgomery St)
Friday, September 26 (6:00 PM – 8:00 PM): Kashmir: Partition, Nationalism, and Global Fascism (in person at 1916 McAllister St)
Saturday, September 27 (11:00 AM – 1:00 PM): Physical Education + Self Defense Training (in person at William McKinley Monument)
Saturday, September 27 (1:30 PM – 3:30 PM): Divestment Strategy Session (1916 McAllister St)
Sunday, September 28 (2:00 PM – 4:00 PM): Market Street Transit History Tour (1 Ferry Building)
Sunday, September 28 (5:00 PM – 7:00 PM): Capital Reading Group (Zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister St)
Monday, September 29 (5:00 PM – 6:30 PM): EWOC Fundamentals of Workplace Organizing Training (in person at 1916 McAllister St)
Monday, September 29 (6:30 PM – 8:00 PM): Homelessness Working Group Regular Meeting (Zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister St)
Monday, September 29 (7:00 PM – 8:00 PM): Labor Board Meeting (Zoom)
Tuesday, September 30 (6:00 PM – 8:00 PM): Immigrant Justice Healing Circle (in person at 1916 McAllister St) Wednesday, October 1 (6:30 PM – 9:00 PM): New Member Happy Hour (in person at Zeitgeist, 199 Valencia)
Thursday, October 2 (7:30 PM – 9:30 PM): “Housing the City by the Bay: Tenant Activism, Civil Rights, and Class Politics in San Francisco” – TOWG Reading Group (in person at 1916 McAllister St)
Friday, October 3 (6:30 PM – 8:00 PM): Social Housing Q&A with Seattle Organizer(s) (location TBD)
Saturday, October 4 (10:30 AM – 12:00 PM): DSA SF x EBDSA: No Space for ICE Canvassing (In person at Portsmouth Square Park, 745 Kearny St)
Saturday, October 5 (5:30 PM – 7:15 PM): HWG Reads “Capitalism & Disability – Selected Writings by Marta Russell” (Zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister St)
Check out https://dsasf.org/events for more events and updates. Events with a are especially new-member-friendly!
ICE Out of SF Courts!
Join neighbors, activists, grassroots organizations in resisting ICE abductions happening at immigration court hearings! ICE is taking anyone indiscriminately in order to meet their daily quotas. Many of those taken include people with no removal proceedings.
We’ll be meeting every Tuesday and Friday from 8:00 AM to 4:30 PM at Immigration Court at 100 Montgomery. We need all hands on deck. The 8:00 AM to 10:00 AM window is when we most need to boost turnout, but if you can’t make that please come whenever works for you. 1 or 2 hours or the entire time! We’re also holding orientation sessions for folks, but that is not required to attend. See the Immigrant Justice Court Action Orientation event for more details.
EWOC: Fundamentals of Workplace Organizing
The Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC) is running a Fundamentals of Workplace Organizing course weekly in September (see below for schedule). Just like we did back in May, we’re getting a group to take the course together and benefit from in-person discussions and activities (at 1916 McAllister). If you’re interested, RSVP here! The goal is to have more people learn organizing skills, both for your own projects and for organizing with EWOC. The final session is from 5:00 PM to 6:30 PM onMonday, September 29.
If you have any questions, reach out to labor@dsasf.org.
DSA SF Homelessness Working Group Reads: Capitalism & Disability: Selected Writings by Marta Russell
DSA SF Homelessness Working Group Reads: Capitalism & Disability: Selected Writings by Marta RussellJoin DSA SF’s Homelessness Working Group as we read through Capitalism & Disability: Selected Writings by Marta Russell. We’ll be meeting every other Sunday evening starting in September for 4 or 5 sessions at 1916 McAllister. The next session is Sunday, October 5. For more info, register here: bit.ly/martacd and check the events calendar for latest details.
Keep Market Street Moving Flyering
Stop the corporate takeover of Market Street! Help spread the word by handing out flyers. All materials provided, just show up!
Join us this Wednesday, September 24th at 5:00 to 6:30 PM at Market St & Davis St. RSVP here!
Tech Reading Group with Kickstarter Union Founder Clarissa Redwine
Come join DSA SF and Rideshare Drivers United on Wednesday, September 24 from 6:00 to 8:00 PM at 1916 McAllister for our monthly tech reading group. We’ll be reading an article by Clarissa Redwine about the Kickstarter Union Campaign that started in 2016. Clarissa will also be making an appearance on Zoom to answer questions about her experience. RSVP here!
Bay Area Palestine Solidarity Reflection and Planning
Missed the People’s Conference for Palestine? Join the Palestinian Youth Movement’s report back on Thursday, September 25th at 6:00 PM at La Peña Cultural Center (3105 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley, CA)
At the end of August, DSA SF sent five delegates to the historic second People’s Conference for Palestine in Detroit. On Thursday September 25th, join Bay Area comrades for Palestine Solidarity to reflect and build on the lessons of the conference.
La Peña Cultural Center (3105 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley, CA)
Thursday, September 25
6:00 PM
This will be an open space of reflection, discussion, and collective planning on how to bring the energy, strategy, and tools from Detroit back home to strengthen our organizing in the Bay Area. Our siblings in Gaza continue to endure bombardment, famine, and occupation. It is our duty to channel the momentum of the conference into action: to confront genocide, challenge imperialism, and grow a movement capable of transforming the conditions that allow this genocide.
Immigrant Justice Court Action Orientation
Come one, come all to 1916 McAllister St for our court watch orientation! You’ll learn how we are resisting ICE , how you can help, and participate in a biweekly art build. Bring questions and anti-ICE slogans! This event will take place every-other week on Thursday’s starting at 7:00 PM and the next one is September 25!
Kashmir: Partition, Nationalism, and Global Fascism
Nationalism is rising all over the world, and violence as always is accompanying it. Nowhere is the genocidal logic of the nation-state more evident than in Israel’s occupation of Palestine, but it is not the only example that we must learn from. The Partition of India in 1947 and subsequent conflicts in South Asia have many similarities, and some important differences. Come join the DSA SF as we investigate the Kashmir Conflict, which flared up violently this spring, and its relationship to Hindu nationalism and the global fascist movement. We’ll be meeting Friday, September 26 from 6:00 – 8:00 PM at 1916 McAllister St.
Apartheid-Free Bay Area Consumer Canvass
Let’s build public support for stores that have pledged to go apartheid-free this Saturday, September 27 from 11:00 AM-1:00 PM! We’ll meet at Dolores Park on 18th St and Dolores St.
We will first train you, and then you will put that training into practice by collecting signatures in Dolores Park. RSVP here!
Emergency Tenant Organizing Training
This month the comrades in the Tenant’s Organizing Working Group have been attending the Fall 2025 Emergency Tenant Organizing Committee (ETOC) training, offered by the DSA Housing Justice Commission!
In the last ETOC session, comrades learned about the specific tools and techniques that could be used to begin organizing a tenants’ association campaign, how to plan escalation actions to get demands met, and how to successfully keep campaigns from losing momentum.
We hope to see you join us for the upcoming ETOC session 4 on Saturday, September 27 11:00 AM – 1:00 PM either remotely via Zoom or at our watch party at 399 Webster St. at the Embassy. There will be snacks! All are welcome! RSVP here.
Please get in touch with us at tenants@dsasf.org if you’d like to explore the ETOC materials.
Market Street Transit History Tour
This transit month, join our Ecosocialist Working Group as we explore Market Street, San Francisco’s main boulevard, through a socialist lens — who controlled the streets, and for what purpose?
We will be meeting at The Ferry Building on Sunday, September 28 at 2 PM. RSVP here!
DSA SF Tenant Organizing Reading Group – “Housing the City by the Bay: Tenant Activism, Civil Rights, and Class Politics in San Francisco”
San Francisco has always had an affordable housing shortage, but solutions outside of the private sector have long been neglected or overlooked. Join us as we learn about the history of one proposed solution: public housing.
Our four-part reading group will meet every other Thursday at 7:30 PM to 9:30 PM hybrid in person at 1916 McAllister and Zoom with RSVP to discuss John Baranski’s book “Housing the City by the Bay”. The next meeting will be Thursday, October 2nd.
If you wish to join please RSVP here!
Behind the Scenes
The Chapter Coordination Committee (CCC) regularly rotates duties among chapter members. This allows us to train new members in key duties that help keep the chapter running like organizing chapter meetings, keeping records updated, office cleanup, updating the DSA SF website and publishing the weekly newsletter. Members can view current CCC rotations.
Interested in helping with the newsletter or other day-to-day tasks that keep the chapter running? Fill out the CCC help form.
Kelly Latimore | Iconography as Resistance
On The State of DSA
Sunday morning of convention before our final block of deliberations, I attended the National Growth and Development Committee’s (GDC) “State of DSA” presentation along with Comrade Brett. In this presentation the GDC went over the history of membership in DSA since the organization’s boost in membership in 2016, as well as what the future of our growth looks like.
Most of what we saw was self-explanatory, but it was still helpful to have depicted in visual form. For example, the biggest drop offs in membership occur exactly one year to the day after the biggest spikes in membership. This is due largely to the (now gone) One Time Dues and yearly memberships where comrades have changed cards. In fact the biggest reason for people falling out of good standing is due to out of date payment information.
Our membership retention is built on experience. Retention of new members in newer chapters is lower than in chapters with organizers with years of experience. As chapters build those years of organizing connections, they are more likely to see sustained growths in membership.
Most new members are not coming from chapter drives but rather in response to national political moments: AOC’s win, Trump’s win, COVID, the Dobbs Decision, Trump’s second win, and Zohran’s win. The GDC is planning a fall membership drive to get some intentional, rather than organic, membership growth.
We’ve seen an evening out of membership tenure since 2016. In 2015, the average DSA member had been in the organization for over ten years. In 2016, less than one. Now we’re seeing an even spread of new and veteran organizers within our chapters.
Looking forward to the future, the GDC is hosting another Leadership Intensive on September 6th and 7th. Building new leaders in our movement is essential both to the work we do and growing our movement. If you’ve considered running for chapter or organizing group leadership, I highly encourage you to attend as much of this course as you can!
As previously mentioned, the GDC is planning a fall membership drive this November to coincide with General Elections, so keep an eye out for details to lend a hand.
DSA is in a good spot right now and our mass movement continues to grow. We can continue building mass working class power with your help!
The post On The State of DSA first appeared on Rochester Red Star.
Statement On the Assassination of Charlie Kirk
Salt Lake DSA condemns the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Since DSA does not advocate political assassination, it was unsurprising to learn that Tyler Robinson is not associated with DSA.
We do not believe political assassinations bring us a single step closer to socialism. Instead, it creates a fearful, retributive, violent political climate which endangers workers and therefore lowers our ability to engage in activism. Charlie Kirk was a racist, sexist, white supremacist supporter of the capitalist class but workers are not convinced of socialism because of his murder.
The kind of transformative political change we need will come about when the vast majority of workers understand the nature of class society—currently dominated by capitalists and their allies in the two-party system—combined with the level of worker organization necessary to take political power from this ruling class. We do this by winning reforms which protect and advance our ability to organize: The right to live without the constant terroristic threat of deportation; to free speech without state persecution; to basic bodily autonomy and gender affirming care; to organize labor unions and bargain fairly; to affordable housing, childcare, healthcare, and education. In essence, reforms to protect workers from the systemic, daily violence of capitalism, the pursuit of profits over people’s well-being, and to show all workers the unjust nature of class society.
Trump extends his political violence on the working class in Utah and nationally with tens of billions of funding to turn ICE into an oppressive force to terrorize migrant communities and eradicate freedom of speech, while simultaneously shredding Medicaid, Medicare, and our remaining social services. Of course Trump wants to distract us from his snowballing Epstein political crisis.
Trump is using Kirk’s assassination as an excuse to crack down on our rights to organize for socialism. To be clear, the oppressors of the working class will use any excuse to do so. What matters is that Utah workers witnessing this crackdown know who their allies are in defending our Constitutional and democratic rights. That they learn, with certainty, that the capitalist class is their enemy, using the flimsiest excuses to try to crush those fighting for a better future.
We recognize that violence will continue in this society with no reasonable gun control and an unaffordable physical and mental healthcare system. Regardless, do not give in to the mindset that there are individual solutions to our social problems. Instead, grow your working class consciousness. You are not alone; together we are the working class that can create a humane, socialist society.
Our organizing will not stop. Socialism is necessary, but not guaranteed.
A better world is possible. Join Salt Lake DSA.
The post Statement On the Assassination of Charlie Kirk first appeared on Salt Lake DSA.
A Weapon of Annihilation Flies Over Montpelier
Note: posts by individual GMDSA members do not necessarily reflect the views of the broader membership or of its leadership and should not be regarded as official statements by the chapter.
GMDSA Co-Chair Joe Moore on the recent B-2 flyover. Photo Credit: Northrop Grumman/U.S. Air Force
On the afternoon of Saturday, September 20, a B-2 “Spirit” stealth bomber flew low over Montpelier on its way to Norwich University. The 2 p.m. flyover was scheduled to coincide with the kickoff of Norwich’s homecoming football game.
The B-2 is a heavy bomber designed to carry a large payload, including up to sixteen 2,400 pound B83 nuclear weapons - each one with a potential yield 80 times that of the Hiroshima bomb. At about $2 billion per plane, the B-2 is the most expensive military aircraft ever produced. In terms of both cost and destructive capacity, the F-35 pales in comparison.
I happened to be standing in the parking lot behind Montpelier’s Christ Episcopal Church when I heard the low roar of the B-2 overhead. It was a terrifying sight to behold from directly below. Its unique angular profile makes it immediately recognizable as a nuclear-capable stealth bomber. With only 19 in existence, the B-2 is a rare sight in most places, not to mention the skies over Vermont’s capital.
A deep sense of unease at finding myself directly below a weapon of mass annihilation quickly turned to anger. At that moment, I was surrounded by the tents and canopies of Montpelier’s unhoused population. Dozens of Vermonters were forced to seek refuge in the Church parking lot following the end of the state's motel housing program on July 1 and Montpelier City Council’s ongoing ban on camping in “high sensitivity areas.” The juxtaposition of the $2 billion B-2 flying low over a cluster of makeshift shelters erected on parking lot asphalt could not have been more stark.
This one plane alone could have paid for the construction of 10-20,000 additional units of housing – not to mention clinics, schools, childcare centers, and other socially useful infrastructure. At $2 billion, one B-2 represents just under one-quarter of Vermont’s entire state budget. Its presence in the skies over our communities is both an affront and a timely reminder that the existence of poverty and homelessness in America – the wealthiest county in the history of the world – is not an inevitability. It is a social choice.
While gratuitous displays of military power have become commonplace at U.S. sporting events, we should remember that those machines that inspire feelings of awe and pride in many Americans are weapons of mass destruction that inspire terror in most other places around the world. For the thousands of refugee families who have resettled in Vermont after fleeing wars abroad – including U.S.-launched wars – low-flying bombers are not associated with patriotic pageantry. They are associated with death and devastation.
Norwich University is a private military college, but its leaders should consider its responsibility to the community and region in which it is embedded. Football is enjoyable on its own. The University doesn’t need to subject Washington County residents to the presence of weapons of annihilation for the purpose of “entertainment”.
Chicago labor’s fight against child slavery in Côte d’Ivoire
The Brach’s factory closure hit working families in Chicago. To fight back, these families took the struggle from the shop floor and made it international.
The post Chicago labor’s fight against child slavery in Côte d’Ivoire appeared first on EWOC.
Fighting apathy and algorithms
We don’t have to do this alone. We don’t have to FEEL alone. Socialize and organize because we’re in this together, fighting for a better world!
The post Fighting apathy and algorithms appeared first on EWOC.
DSA SF Statement on the Recall of Joel Engardio
This week, the residents of the Sunset District removed Joel Engardio from the Board of Supervisors. DSA SF didn’t lead the recall, but we didn’t try to stop it. Engardio is anti-worker, pro-cop, landlord-first, and fully backed by GrowSF and the real estate elite. He ignored the demands of working-class residents and DSA members in D4. He has been a mouthpiece for the owning class, and we won’t be sad when he’s gone. Good riddance.
Joel Engardio never represented the working class. In his three years in office, he introduced a paltry 32 pieces of legislation (DSA SF member and D9 Supervisor Jackie Fielder has already authored 21 pieces in her 10 months in office), none of which addressed the affordability crisis strangling this city’s working families. Instead, he backed a budget that cut funding for violence prevention in the Mission, slashed emergency shelter for survivors of domestic violence, defunded immigrant legal services, and eliminated good, unionized city jobs.
While working-class people are struggling to survive, Engardio pushed for money to pad the pockets of the police. He backed increased overtime for SFPD just months after an independent audit found a pattern of rampant abuse of overtime funds by the cops.
He voted to strip money from Prop C (Our City, our Home), directly undermining the will of the voters and reducing the city’s ability to build desperately needed affordable housing. Capitalism cannot solve the housing crisis, and Engardio’s votes have made it worse.
As Engardio is well aware, the right to recall is not just a procedural tool, it’s a weapon. And like any weapon, it must be wielded with discipline. We believe it belongs in the hands of the working class, and the working class alone.
We’ve seen how recalls can be used as weapons by the right. Just ask our comrades in Seattle, where big business tried (And failed! Three times!) to unseat Kshama Sawant. These efforts failed because she was deeply rooted in labor and class struggle.
A recall against a socialist organizer is an attack on the people, and the people will respond. A recall against a reactionary with no genuine base? That’s a very different story.
Unfortunately, our billionaire Mayor Lurie will not replace Engardio with a champion of the working class. But to whoever does get appointed, may you learn from Joel’s sorry tale: If you stand for nothing, nobody will have your back.
If you want to build a working class movement with substance, join DSA.
Neutrality is a Lie: The Academy Under Siege
by Dahlia Green
American higher education is under assault.
Research funding, whether for sciences or humanities, has been cut off. The thugs of ICE descend upon college campuses, abducting students who dared speak out against the American-backed genocide in Gaza. International students are subject to a campaign of terror and arbitrary restrictions justified on vague “national security” grounds, a paper-thin disguise for racism and a targeted anti-intellectualism.
The most prestigious and wealthy universities, those that can best defend themselves, have responded to this assault by rolling over. Administrators have rushed to gag their students and faculty, to invite the regime to monitor their output for ideological deviation, and fork over whatever bribes the the state demands. In some cases, these lackeys of capital have used the opportunity to settle scores with their faculty, slashing positions and trumpeting the closure or gutting of departments and programs they disapprove of with a malicious glee. They have not used their privileges to stand up to the assault on their staff, students, and supposed values; they have done everything in their power to ensure its success.
The representatives of the loyal opposition have said little in response, barely bringing themselves to condemn the practice of disappearing dissidents they themselves would rather like to disappear. Jeffries and the liberal establishment he represents have decided that the universities are not popular enough for them to defend. They deem this to be another of Trump’s “distractions”, which they should ignore to talk about the more comfortable, “electable” topics of social security or law and order. These heirs to the Copperheads will not save us.
Into this carnage step the gentlemen (and it is almost all men) of the Academy who think they have found the answer to this crisis.
Writing for the Dispatch, Evan D. Morris cries for the sciences to be set free from the humanities. After all, he says, it is the fault of the ideologically astray, “woke” humanities that the axe has fallen upon universities, not the dutifully apolitical sciences! Mr. Morris lets his contempt for the humanities blind him to the reality at hand. He conjures a fantasy in which he can throw the English department to a bear in order to escape, not realizing that he will be next on the menu. In doing so, he becomes a collaborator in waiting, a delusional toadie of the regime. Pity him, for such fools do not tend to outlive their usefulness.
In contrast, Jacob Hale Russell & Dennis Patterson, both humanities professors at Rutgers University, set out to save the university, humanities and all. Writing in the Guardian, that bastion of the British Liberal, they bemoan the assault on higher education, the decline in public trust in universities, and the tendency of administrators to throw their faculty under the bus. They rightly regard this as a crisis – but one which is strictly institutional, rather than political. In their worldview, the problem is not that universities will no longer be spaces of open political struggle, but that they have been so in the first place.
Their solution is for the academy to further retreat into institutional redoubts, to extricate itself from the very field of politics where this battle is now being fought. They propose, in other words, to vacate the field of conflict before the battle has even been fought, retreating behind a shield of legitimating, institutional neutrality.
Such a position is the equivalent of burying one’s head in the sand, of substituting lofty sounding phrases like “freedom of inquiry” for a hard reckoning with the grim realities facing higher education. Russell and Patterson hail the “Chicago Principles” while failing to engage with the fact that the University of Chicago has begun the liquidation of its humanities grad programs and cracking down on “DEI”, executing the program of the regime alongside empty pronouncements of academic freedom.
The “neutrality” they trumpet is a false hope, little more than a smokescreen for the shock troops of the right in their effort to dismantle higher education. Perhaps, as Russell and Patterson say, an error was made in the past regarding the left’s discursive strategies, that “safetyism” was a mistake. Even so, we cannot change the past, and no amount of performative neutrality will stay the axe. Attempting to adopt a position of neutrality will only embolden and strengthen the assault on universities, not stop it.
Indeed, many colleges already adopted so-called neutrality in response to the wave of protests that swept college campuses in the last two years. This supposed neutrality has not coincided with a flourishing of free inquiry, as Russell and Patterson would have us think, but an intensification of the assault on campus groups condemned by the state and right-wing activists!
What then, is to be done?
The true solution lies in embracing the political nature of the struggle now ongoing on college campuses, in fostering consciousness and solidarity among students and staff alike. We must organize ourselves, in unions, in professional organizations, in student organizations, and we must work together to fight. Graduate assistant unions and professor’s associations must create a united front to resist pressure from administrations and the state to curb free inquiry and end the very existence of academia.
Administrations which fight must receive full support in their struggle, while those that capitulate must be fought at every turn, pressured into reversing course. Administrators have generally proven to be cowards, and so we must make it a more unappealing proposition to go to war with their own university than it is to comply with the state’s directives. If they are punished for assisting in the assault and rewarded for resisting, the hope is that some might find some spine.
This will not be easy. It will require hard work, cooperation, and a willingness to endure hardship. Yet the advancement of human knowledge is far too precious a pursuit to abandon without a fight.
Step By Step, We Built a Movement to Transform Our Local Government
By: Zac Bears and Jessica Farrell
This article was originally published in Convergence Magazine in 2024.
MEDFORD, MA – For decades, residents in Medford, Mass have voted many of the same people into office time and time again. City politics was, and in some ways still is, defined by long-standing conflicts between individual elected officials and their supporters. Political leadership roles were passed down to family members across multiple generations. Important proposals were approved or denied for who was supporting them just as often as they were for their merits. Facing the dual impact of incredibly restrictive state laws on municipal finance and lack of comprehensive planning and growth of the city’s tax base, Medford’s public infrastructure crumbled and the local government provided fewer city and school services.
After the Great Recession, the public schools cut dozens of positions, many of which never returned. Huge staff cuts in the Department of Public Works means the city outsources basic maintenance of streets and sidewalks. Many of our recreation, school sports, and arts programs are entirely funded by fees or managed by private nonprofits and donors.
All of this in a city where residents were voting for more progressive officials at the state and national level, where residents were seeing our neighboring communities improve far more rapidly, and where more residents were demanding the basic services, support for public schools, and the safe, well-maintained infrastructure they deserved.
These were, and still are, conditions where a movement for change can grow. Does this sound similar to your community? If so, the potential for change may be closer than you think.
Where We Live
Medford’s nearly 65,000 residents reside on both sides of the Mystic River five miles from Downtown Boston in a historically middle and working-class community. The city has one of the country’s oldest historically Black neighborhoods in West Medford, and a strong immigrant history with large Irish and Italian communities putting down roots here in the mid-20th century alongside fast-growing Haitian and Brazilian communities today.
Unlike neighbors in Cambridge, Somerville, and Everett, Medford has not grown a large commercial tax base to support city services or public schools and is largely dependent on residential property taxes to fund the city budget. Today, residents face skyrocketing housing costs and decades of underinvestment in streets, schools, and city staff. Hundreds of millions of dollars in deferred maintenance is now coming due, and because of Proposition 2.5, a 1980 MA ballot question that limited municipal property tax authority, high property values don’t equate to more tax revenue to fix these major problems.
Starting from the Bottom
Galvanized by the far-right victory in the 2016 national election, a small group of progressive residents founded Our Revolution Medford (ORM) in early 2017 to take action for progressive change at the local level. We developed our own local platform based on city issues, and while we occasionally share invitations and information for statewide and national Our Revolution events, the movement is entirely locally grown and directed and receives no outside funding. Eight years later, ORM has grown from a small backyard gathering to a citywide movement that elected majorities on both the Medford City Council and Medford School Committee.
Our initial conversations in 2017 quickly turned to the need for political analysis, desire to see candidates commit to real policies, and to fill in massive information gaps in a community with little-to-no local news media and scant public space for pre-election discussion and debate. We asked: who can we trust? Who can we influence? We brought together a group of people who could build trust and share the burden of paying attention to city government to help each other analyze what’s going on.
We reached out to lists of local residents we knew supported the Bernie Sanders campaign and movement, community organizations focused on change, and candidates for local office in the 2017 municipal election who seemed to share our values. Our initial membership was deeply intergenerational, from college students to retirees, and stretched across ideologies, including long-time local progressives, young socialists, frustrated parents, people facing housing displacement, and everyday folks who shared our values but didn’t choose a political label.
Three major strategic values soon followed from those meetings: (1) a clear focus on building power, (2) making the necessary preparations for successfully wielding power, and (3) growing our capacity through relationships and trust across the community.
Before 2017, many candidates for local office ran on city pride and local social and family connections. Their campaigns lacked specific policies or opinions on policy. Few discussed strategies to address major long-term fiscal and economic challenges. Our initial efforts to shift power were grounded in information-sharing and transparency, staking out clear policy positions and informing voters about what incumbent candidates believed and supported based on their votes and comments in Council meetings.
Strong support for progressive candidates like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Ed Markey in our community showed us that the majority of residents wanted to see progress and transformative change. We decided early on that the best way to build power was to focus on organizing residents around city policy and government by creating grassroots policy campaigns and having a laser-focus on electing new members of the School Committee and City Council so that we could put those policies into place.
We decided early on that the best way to build power was to focus on organizing residents around city policy and government by creating grassroots policy campaigns and having a laser-focus on electing new members of the School Committee and City Council.
These two tactics took on specific forms. For grassroots policy campaigns, we held public events to educate residents about specific issues (for example, pushing to increase the low Payments in Lieu of Taxes or PILOTs from large tax-exempt institutions like Tufts University), discussed topics in ORM meetings, and held city council watch parties over a group chat. The chats help mobilize residents to reach out to elected officials and attend city meetings and connect residents’ everyday experiences to the actions of local government.
Our direct electoral work was even more focused and ambitious. Adapting a model successfully used in Richmond, CA and popularized by the Incorruptibles, we ran a “candidate slate” to help us overcome the financial and structural barriers progressive candidates face.
In Fall 2017, we formed a slapshot slate of candidates who were already running, pitched in personal funds to get some palm cards printed, canvassed a couple of times, and then stood at the polls on Election Day. Four of five of our endorsed candidates won, including one whose narrow majority survived a recount. This showed us that every single vote really mattered and gave us a wedge to grow in the subsequent years. Start small – with discipline and building a culture of organizing, there’s always room to grow.
Building Cycles of Organizing
Each win built on the ones before, with three School Committee Members and two City Councilors winning in 2019 (one of whom is Zac Bears, co-author of this article and ORM’s first member-turned-candidate), and eight out of nine endorsed candidates winning in 2021, including the first Asian-American person to serve on the Council, and securing majorities on both the City Council and the School Committee. Opponents who didn’t see us coming were surprised. Ten of 11 endorsed candidates won in 2023, including six of the seven who ran for Council seats. Several ORM-endorsed candidates won more than 50% of the vote, a rarity in the past even for long-time incumbents, and the top vote-getters for both Council and School Committee received more votes than the re-elected incumbent Mayor and the most votes for either office in at least 20 years.
While the idea of the platform and slate began with the Richmond Progressive Alliance model, we have greatly expanded it over the past six years. Each election cycle, we conduct an extensive community outreach and editing process to revise the Medford People’s Platform (MPP) and update the endorsement process we launched in 2019. We reach out to dozens of community organizations and major stakeholders, engaging hundreds of residents with surveys and public forums. We hold community workshops on the questions of who is included in decision-making, what are our core values, and what policies we want to see implemented in our city.
The result? A platform that we all agree to work towards, even though most members do not agree 100% with every point. Each successive election, we have expanded the process, engaging more residents and updating the platform to address changing conditions and celebrate hard-won victories. Candidates endorsed by Our Revolution Medford commit to support the platform; the platform shapes messaging and outreach for our coordinated electoral campaigns and provides the basis for a clear understanding of success and accountability after candidates win.
Now in its third iteration, the 2023-2024 Medford People’s Platform is focused on housing justice, racial justice, public health, and a shared vision for a welcoming, vibrant, and forward-looking local government that provides residents with the city and school services they deserve. The two biggest priorities are raising revenue to invest in a new Medford High School and Fire Headquarters and implementing transformative housing production, zoning reform, and economic development plans to fight housing displacement, grow the city’s commercial tax base, and build more vibrant local business and cultural districts.
Our work is purposeful and committed but joyful as well. We have consistently placed a high value on community-building. During each local election cycle, we grow the movement by building stronger relationships and growing our capacity to organize. Each non-election year, we sustain that movement-building through virtual city meeting watches and discussion spaces, and we hold regular general meetings. We focus on city government actions to hold elected officials accountable while supporting the good work done, and we hold social events to be in community with each other.
Historic Challenges
Inauguration day in January 2020 was a celebration of our successes. The months that followed showed the limits of our power, and then the limits of government and society. The COVID-19 pandemic struck Massachusetts and Medford hard. After just two months of Council meetings, we were in lockdown and dozens of Medford residents were getting seriously ill and dying, especially in our senior housing facilities. Shock pervaded the community, with highways and skies quieter than anyone had ever experienced. But in less than a month, Medford was able to implement videoconferencing for public meetings and the City Council began to meet again.
ORM-endorsed elected officials pushed hard for state and federal support, implementation of strong pandemic responses to protect residents from serious illness and death, resources and training for online learning to minimize the unimaginable disruption of the pandemic on kids, protection for residents facing housing displacement, and provisions for public meetings to continue to occur in a safe manner.
From 2017 to 2021, serving in the minority or with a slim majority meant we needed to build coalitions and consensus within the City Council and School Committee, and many of our more ambitious and long-overdue policy proposals were stymied before reaching passage or rejected as too ambitious by the mayor or city and school administrators who hold outsized power compared to the elected legislative bodies under our city charter.
With many progressives now in elected office, we see conflicts between people fighting to maintain the status quo and people who want to see the city grow and change play out constantly, with persistent arguments that people who have lived here across decades and generations and those who own property have more of a right to the city than residents who arrived more recently or who rent.
Transformation is in the Details
The progressive majority elected in 2023 has brought a major change in the tone and approach of the City Council. For the first time ever, the Council has created, voted on, and published a governing agenda for the 2024-2025 term that outlines major initiatives. A new Council committee structure helps clarify when and how the Council develops ordinances and conducts administrative oversight. Meeting agendas, schedules, and files are published through a new online portal. Updated Council rules contain a table of contents, guarantee remote participation by members of the public through hybrid meetings, and no longer contain arcane language to make the rules clearer and more accessible to the public.
Transformative initiatives and ordinances are moving quickly, with the Council voting to create an independent Department of Elections, passing the first Zoning Ordinance Recodification in 60 years, as well as passing ordinances updating snow removal policies to improve sidewalk access, several environmental and civil liberties ordinances, and a new budget ordinance that formally establishes an open and transparent budget process as city law.
We’ve also faced new, unexpected barriers. Our budget cycles lay bare the major short-term and long-term budget crisis facing Medford. Prior to 2023, budget cycles had a similar rhythm. Mayors would submit a proposed budget close to the June 30th deadline, some years riddled with errors. Councilors would demand accountability and attempt to set the facts straight during budget hearings held with less than ideal information to make decisions. Councils would attempt to hold strong and often would win small improvements, but year after year, residents would see service cuts to city departments and Medford Public Schools.
In FY24, the Council once again had serious concerns about the use of one-time federal funds for permanent operating budget positions as well as the lack of a long-term plan to fund the giant liabilities the city faces for school buildings, city facilities, streets, sidewalks, and our water and sewer infrastructure. While a budget plan released by Councilor Bears and supported by Councilors Collins and Tseng did not move forward in its entirety, major pieces were secured by an agreement reached between Mayor Breanna Lungo-Koehn, Council President Nicole Morell, and Councilor Bears and ratified by a June 2024 Council vote to approve the Mayor’s budget.
Since then, the City Council passed the city’s first-ever budget ordinance and in collaboration with the Mayor and School Committee leadership placed three referendum questions on the November 5, 2024 election ballot to raise revenue for the first time in the city’s post-Proposition 2.5 history. If voters approve these anti-austerity ballot questions, they would enable the city to raise revenue necessary to increase funding for the Medford Public Schools, build a new Fire Headquarters, and fund an in-house sidewalk and pothole repair crew in our Department of Public Works.
Planting Seeds of Change in Your Community
You are reading an unfinished story. We have won great victories by bringing together residents in a collaborative, joyful, and values-based political movement, and we also understand that single victories will not automatically create the positive change we want to see in our community.
We hope our model can help you build the progressive community you want for yourself, your family, your neighbors, and your friends. Please don’t hesitate to be in touch with us so we can fill in the gaps and help you learn more about what we’ve built here in Medford.
Zac Bears is a lifelong resident of Medford, MA and a graduate of the Medford Public Schools and UMass Amherst. Public education and the labor movement have been the foundation of Zac’s life–including transformative experiences as a student activist and opinion journalist at UMass Amherst, director of the Public Higher Education Network of Massachusetts (PHENOM), and as a member of AFGE, union staffer at AFSCME, and staff member at Massachusetts Jobs With Justice. Zac has been a Medford City Councilor since 2020 with a key focus on funding public services and supporting working families.
Jessica Farrell is an organizer and archivist. She worked in libraries, archives, and nonprofits for 15 years. Since 2024 she has owned and operated Redstart Works, consulting on library and archives projects that expand the commons. Her commitment to free access to information compels her to fill civic information and data gaps in her communities. Her commitment to the commons compels her to advocate for the expansion and funding of social services, including libraries.
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