Trippin on the Shoestring

On this week’s episode, Trippin' on the Shoestring comes to you from Pioneer Valley Transit Authority bus R41 and bus stops in Easthampton, Holyoke, and Springfield in an effort to document the daily experience of navigating public transit in the Connecticut River Valley. Many municipal and state leaders have talked about making public transit free for riders by removing fares, but that’s not necessarily the biggest issue those riders are facing. Come take a ride with co-hosts Shelby Lee and Dusty Christensen to hear directly from bus riders about their public-transit concerns and biggest dreams.

Trippin’ on the Shoestring is back from vacation and ready to take on a heavy topic: how we as a society respond to those in our communities experiencing crisis. The police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020 renewed national calls for better crisis response models to reduce aggressive and sometimes fatal interactions that result when police are the ones showing up to the scene. Municipalities locally here in the Connecticut River Valley and nationally have begun to adopt various crisis-response models in answer to this mounting public pressure. 

We sat down with two guests to talk about what is happening at the state level here in Massachusetts around these crisis response models. We were joined by Sera Davidow, an author, filmmaker, and director of the Wildflower Alliance – a national training and peer support organization rooted in harm reduction. We were also joined by Earl Miller, the director of community supports at Wildflower Alliance. He is the former director of the civilian-response department that began operations last year in the town of Amherst, the Community Responders for Equity, Safety, and Service, also known as CRESS. 

It's summer break! As our podcast hosts and producer take some time to recharge, our hosts Dusty Christensen and Shelby Lee look back on Trippin' on the Shoestring's year so far, bringing back clips from some of our favorite guest moments and sharing updates on some of the issues we've discussed over the last six months. From politics to labor organizing to social movements, our guests have shared sharp analyses with us on issues both local and national, and some even seem to have predicted the future. We'll be back with a regular schedule of episodes this fall, so if you, too, have powers of clairvoyance when it comes to predicting how the powerful operate in western Mass, drop us a line: you could be our next guest!

In this episode, we delve into the student-led, anti-war activism that has been building on campus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. It’s a movement that has been around long before the school’s leadership called in the police to break up a protest encampment this spring. That decision resulted in a violent crackdown during which police arrested more than 130 people who continue to face charges. The “Popular University for Gaza Encampment,” as it was known, was aimed in part at drawing attention to the university’s partnership with weapons manufacturers.

Co-hosts Shelby Lee and Dusty Christensen are joined by two guests this week: Kevin Young, a history professor at UMass Amherst, and Max Greenberg⁩, a PhD student in the university's economics department. Young is part of the group Faculty for Justice in Palestine and an elected leader in the university’s faculty union. He’s also part of the multi-union environmental coalition on campus, the Environmental and Social Action Movement. Greenberg is a union member with the Graduate Employee Organization, which represents grad-student workers on campus, and is part of the steering committee of the union’s Palestine Solidarity Caucus. He has also done organizing with the Western Mass Coalition for Palestine.

We have been away, out in the field, working on an important episode about the housing crisis facing western Massachusetts. First, in Easthampton we interviewed 81-year-old resident Jean Frances, who is facing a steep rent increase on a fixed income. She welcomed us into her home to talk about the reality renters are facing. Then, we sat down in Springfield to talk radical action with Rose Webster-Smith, director of Springfield No One Leaves, a grassroots group fighting against evictions and for housing justice. Rose shared her own experience with eviction and discussed strategies and resources tenants can use to fight back.

In every month of 2023, average global temperatures exceeded 1.5 degrees celsius above pre-industrial levels. That’s a first, and it’s a tipping point that climate scientists have raised concerns about for years. The Connecticut River Valley is not immune to those impacts. Last year, western Mass experienced its hottest summer ever recorded, a deluge of smoke from wildfires spreading across Canada, and the devastating flooding of the Connecticut and Mill rivers, which wiped out crops. Many plots at the farming organization Grow Food Northampton were among those that were flooded out. On this week’s episode, Dusty Christensen and Shelby Lee sit down with two guests from Grow Food Northampton: Alisa Klein, the organization’s director, and Piyush Labhsetwar, GFN's farm and land stewardship manager whose work as an agroecologist looks at finding ways to strike a sustainable balance between ecological relationships and agricultural production.

This week on Trippin’ on the Shoestring, cohosts Shelby Lee and Dusty Christensen talk politics in one of our most beloved cities here in western Mass: Holyoke. In recent years, it seems like there have been some big changes happening in the Paper City. Holyoke is often referred to as the most Puerto Rican city on the U.S. mainland, with around half of the city’s residents identifying as Boricuas. In 2021, the city elected its first-ever Borica mayor, Joshua Garcia, and its most racially diverse City Council ever. It was that same year that our guest this week, At-Large City Councilor Israel Rivera, was first elected to office. Izzy sat down to talk about everything from policing to how the newly seated City Council is conducting its business.

Trippin' on the Shoestring cohosts Shelby Lee and Dusty Christensen bring you a dispatch from one of the most important labor struggles happening in western Massachusetts and maybe even the country. Over the past two years, the town of Hadley — best known for its asparagus — has gained fame for another reason: new union organizing. Since 2022, workers at the Hadley locations of three retail giants moved to form the first-ever unions at their respective stores. It all began in July 2022, when employees at Trader Joe's became the first in the nation to unionize at the grocery chain, giving birth to the independent union Trader Joe’s United. And that sparked a nationwide movement to unionize other Trader Joe's. So far there have been three other successful union drives at Trader Joe's stores in Minnesota, California, and Kentucky. On this week's episode, Shelby and Dusty are joined by Jamie Edwards, who serves as the union’s president and has worked at the Hadley store for more than a decade, and Maeg Yosef, who is the communications director at Trader Joe’s United and has been a Hadley store employee since 2004.

Journalists and civic organizations around the country are currently taking part in Sunshine Week, a national collaboration dedicated to spotlighting just how important public records and open government are. So this week, Trippin’ on the Shoestring cohosts and investigative reporters Shelby Lee and Dusty Christensen dig into some of the big stories they’ve broken recently at The Shoestring… and maybe even some of the details that didn’t make it into print.

On Feb. 15, community members effectively occupied the Northampton City Council chambers, ultimately shutting the meeting down as they called on councilors to pass a ceasefire resolution amid Israel’s continued invasion and bombing campaign in Gaza. Jewish Voice for Peace activist Kaia Jackson and radical social worker Lemy Coffin join hosts Shelby Lee and Dusty Christensen to talk about local governments in western Massachusetts debating ceasefire resolutions and what it’s like to be an activist calling for action in front of those politicians.