In the Spring of 2021, dozens of immigrant New Yorkers, mostly women, launched a hunger strike that lasted 23 days and was the climax of a campaign to win an unprecedented $2.1 billion relief package for workers who had been excluded from unemployment benefits, federal stimulus checks, and rent relief. At the time, many thought the campaign’s demands were out of reach, but as our guests Ángeles Solis and José Lopez of Make the Road New York explain, years of base-building made this seemingly impossible victory a reality — one that spawned similar demands in eleven other states. Founded in 1997, Make the Road New York, as José says, “focuses on the intersecting challenges that working-class and immigrant New Yorkers face every single day” — and with 27,000 members, it has become a powerful force for justice in the state. During the pandemic, a quarter of Make the Road New York members could not afford to pay rent or put food on the table, and ninety lost their lives. But desperation fueled a bold project of relational organizing, recruiting people in food pantries, leveraging mutual aid to build power, and calling out billionaire profiteers and tax cheats. Before the interview with Ángeles and José, Deepak and Stephanie contrast the approach to base-building in the labor movement (as covered in episode 3) with base- building in the community organizing tradition, drawing on four principles from legendary organizer Arnie Graf’s book Lessons Learned: Stories from a Lifetime of Organizing. They also consider how community organizations can find the right balance between radical vision and practical change in the here and now.

Episode 4 transcript