Reading “When Living on Tips Means Putting Up With Harassment” in the New York Times this week made me reflect on my own brief career as a waitress.

As a student in my late teens and early twenties I waited tables as one of the few jobs I could get. I always expected to do something else in the long term, but was glad to have a skill I could depend on in the future if I needed to. Having my own job gave me the courage and money to take risks – like focusing on my art and community organizing in college rather than the “practical” things my dad would have preferred, like engineering or business or medicine. Having my own job helped me show my mom, who had just divorced my dad after 19 years of marriage, that I would be able to make it, to support myself no matter what. Long after I moved on from restaurant work I continued to see waitressing as my safety net.

Waitressing was different for the women I worked with, women for whom waitressing was a career: They had kids. They were single and middle aged. The restaurant was key to their making it – or not. It wasn’t a launching pad for big visions and risks; it was economic survival for themselves and their families.

For all of us, pleasing the customer was central to the job, even when it meant erasing our own dignity or personhood. Getting “hit on” by customers was part of the job, something we’d laugh about when we could, trying to connect with each other and shed painful feelings of shame and fear.

Over the past five years I’ve worked with Move to End Violence (MEV), a collaboration of people from all corners of the struggle to end gender-based violence and violence against women and girls. Alongside the smart and caring people of MEV I’ve thought a lot about our culture of violence and the deep undercurrents that fuel it. I’ve also had the chance to connect my MEV work with that of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Caring Across Generations, United Workers Congress, Grassroots Global Justice, Movement Generation and others. All of them have helped me to see very clearly how our economy – how it’s set up and how we experience it, each other and ourselves in it – is the fuel that enables a full spectrum of violence to thrive.

Now, looking back, I can see how our sexualized treatment as waitresses – sometimes subtle, sometimes horrific — was part of a culture of violence that is deep and structural. While it was individual men who took advantage of us, it was the situation that made our sexual harassment possible: the reliance on tips, the need to please, the need to perform. As Ginia Bellafante explains in her article,

It isn’t just the notoriously sexist culture of restaurant kitchens that is at fault, but the economic structure that turns customers into shadow employers, leaving servers — so often women — vulnerable to the predations anyone picking up the bill might feel entitled to exercise.

Our culture of violence – alive in restaurants, public schools, and professional sports teams – thrives on shadow employers and shadow employees, on fear and oppression that lurk and loom powerfully beyond the structures that support them. Women, particularly women of color, are often the shadow workers who fall outside of the public eye, those whose humanity and dignity somehow don’t count: the domestic workers, the farm workers, the people without work who have to turn to street and informal economies, the people who work in the prison system and make pennies an hour.

All of us need to make the connections across the shadows and, most importantly, join with others to imagine and build toward the future we want, to understand what it would take to bring forth a world that supports everyone’s dignity, well being, and connectedness. To do this we must profoundly re-envision and redefine our economy, to bring into being what Ai-Jen Poo and others call a caring economy – an economy that supports the well-being and dignity of each person, an economy where there are no shadow workers or employers.

Building a new economy, a caring economy, offers us an alternative to our culture of violence. We can begin with small steps, such as ensuring a fair minimum wage for all workers, along with many other steps that lead us together towards a caring economy and world.

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Feature photo: ROC United

The connections between systemic oppression, health, and healing became clear to me in the summer of 1999 when I was helping to organize a Type 2 diabetes support group at Las Fuentes Health Clinic in Guadalupe, Arizona, a free health clinic that served multiple generations of Guadalupe’s mostly Yaqui and Mexican immigrant community.

I was door knocking every day to recruit participants for our support group and often the community members would invite me into their homes to learn more about our program. Our conversations usually strayed from the difficulties of living with Type 2 diabetes and led to discussions about race, class, gender, food security, and environmental health/racism.

I learned from the Guadalupe community that health and healing were influenced by factors much larger than an individual’s ability to process sugar.  I learned that the community had its own strategies for living with Type 2 diabetes and that the last thing they wanted was a 19 year old college student lecturing them about how to take care of themselves.

I made sure that our support group centered on participants sharing their strategies and stories with one another, without didactic interference from the organizers and “expert” medical folks.

As I ended my time with Las Fuentes and the Guadalupe community I felt a burning desire to practice public health with an awareness of systemic oppression and the intersections of poverty, race, class, gender, environment, and culture. I left Arizona and set my sights on going to graduate school for a Masters in Public Health.

Those plans changed in 2003 when I met Doc, a Barefoot Doctor/acupuncturist and the person who trained me as a street medic in Chicago. Feeling alienated, frustrated and burned out by the Chicago activist world, I went to acupuncture school to see how I might become a public health practitioner using the tools of Traditional East Asian Medicine. I wanted to help keep my loved ones involved and well in social justice and movement work.

Like many others, I had come to the realization that social justice spaces and movement work can be deeply gratifying, invigorating, nourishing, and healing – but also sources of great conflict, violence, isolation, unexamined privilege, and internalized oppression.

By 2010 I was a brand new acupuncturist offering sliding scale services to activists, organizers, and folks who are normally priced out of getting acupuncture at the market rate.

That was also the year that I had the honor and privilege of helping to coordinate the Healing Justice Practice Space at the US Social Forum with a team of truly brilliant and visionary folks from all over the country. Through this experience I found Healing Justice that brings together all the ways healing can be done on individual, group, and systemic levels.

According to Cara Page, Healing Justice is “a framework that seeks to lift up resiliency and wellness practices as a transformative response to generational violence and trauma in our communities.”

Healing Justice gave me a way to identify my felt-but-unnamed desires for healing myself and facilitating healing in others. Healing Justice helped me to further challenge myself and examine my own internalized capitalism and oppression. Now, as a practitioner of Traditional East Asian Medicine and Healing Justice, I see my role as supporting the creation of whole, integrated, inter-generational, abolitionist, actively anti-racist, feminist, queer, and truly liberated movements.

Today I work at Sage Community Health Collective which my fellow co-founder Stacy Erenberg describes as:

… a sliding scale acupuncture and bodywork clinic that works outside the medical industrial complex by providing harm reductionist, affordable, non-judgmental and trauma-informed services at an affordable rate. We are a worker owned collective so we make all our decisions based on consensus and have a non- hierarchal structure.  We are deeply rooted in meeting people where they are at, self-determination of communities and transformative justice. We are trying to create another way outside the system. It’s not perfect but we are always open to suggestions for growth and building with community.

For me, our non-hierarchical worker collective model challenges us to practice all of this every single day. We are regularly discussing ways to consciously navigate within capitalism as anti-capitalists. Our sliding scale forces us to transform conversations about money, which are often rooted in shame. As harm reductionists, we strive to have conversations about money that meet people where they are.

Our work is part of creating our next economy based on mutual aid, mutual accountability, and communities of resistance and care that do not dispose of anyone, do not leave anyone out, and do not fight one another for limited resources: communities that honor the personal as deeply political.

Our work is part of movement building that honors complexity and intentionally creates spaces to heal and bridge where we can and creatively renovate new solutions for the deep challenges we face in our world.

Our work is part of movement building that draws upon a multiplicity of healing and accountability strategies and tactics that creatively responds to our short-term needs and unravels dynamics that are generations old.

In our work we are constantly learning, growing, transforming, and widening the circle of Healing Justice through our organizing with the Chicago Healing Justice Network and beyond.

And every day I give thanks to the Guadalupe community that so wisely guided me toward this path.

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Feature photo: Juliana Pino

As someone working to change policies and practice to bring us closer to food sovereignty, I think a lot about land and how our current systems are built on private property ownership. I dream of a day when we will collectively steward what is common to all of us: our land, air, water, and other resources.

Our friends at Movement Generation remind me that what I’m dreaming of is a different way of understanding economy — that the word “economy” comes from the Greek oikos and nomos  – and translates to “management of home”.

I hear a lot of talk these days about a “new economy” – but many of those conversations seem to start and end with the idea of local ownership of local businesses.

What most of us want and need to talk about is this: How will we love and manage and govern “our home” in our next economy?

Who will control our land, our water, our food, our energy?  How do communities reclaim these resources and move away from profit driven systems towards community stewardship?

I don’t have all the answers but I’m learning from the momentum of local victories that offer new and achievable glimpses of what our next economy can be and do.

I just heard about a win here in Alameda County, where our Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to take the first step in exploring Community Choice Energy.  Community Choice Energy would take our energy systems out of the hands of profit-motivated giant utilities and turn them into transparent, localized, community supported systems that can bring a climate voice to energy systems, create jobs and generate wealth in our communities.

“It’s the same way we’re starting to understand that we don’t have to get our food from grocery stores, or that we can collect our own rain water,” explained Colin Miller and Bobby Fuentes, two activists from Bay Localize, who took a moment to talk to me last week.  In words that warmed my food sovereignty heart, they told me, “This is about energy sovereignty.”

According to Colin and Bobby, Community Choice Energy “is about creating a local system that’s self-empowering that supports our regional economy.”  It’s about “becoming more aware of what’s going on, about using a new public agency to help ground a new kind of culture.”  Colin and Bobby tell me that Community Choice Energy opens the door to localities buying solar energy cooperatively and creating worker-owned energy cooperatives.

This is the “economy” conversation I want to have and the local work I want to see on a grand scale.

Shifting culture and building new collective relationships, that’s how we’ll birth our next economy — our new home.

I am learning how to walk again.

I lost my walk after an intensive yoga training — the third of nine I am undertaking to strengthen my personal practice and my role as a movement builder.  I had just moved into a forward fold when I suddenly felt as if a taut piece of elastic had unhooked within my body. My breath caught as a profound ache spread through my chest and my body shook with sobs. “Grief” is the word that best describes this sensation, but no real thoughts or concepts accompanied the pain. No story rose with the tears, just the sensations of deep release.

For the next few weeks the muscles of my legs and pelvis felt confused. For a while I couldn’t trust my own legs. I found myself taking a step and feeling muscles pull tight for no reason; felt looseness where I expected strength. Sometimes each step was painful as my piriformis muscle fired compulsively. Other times I felt tentative and unsure whether my muscles would even function.

While this realignment was disorienting, it was also instructive. I had to pay careful attention to each step so that I could find another way to walk. I discovered that I had been bracing my body in my old walk, a habit that was actually getting in my way. I had to learn to stand up and use my legs in new ways.

May Day – rooted in modern workers’ struggles against state violence as well as ancient fertility rituals – reminds me that we will all need to learn to walk anew as we face the unfathomable damage of our fossil extractive economy.  Making the transition to “a new economy”, “local living economies,” “solidarity economies,” or “sharing economies” will require us to “let go” of deeply held tensions, releasing what is not serving us and trusting that we will find another way to organize our world. And we will need to walk without the gender definitions that have been baked in to our extractive economy.

I was raised by a single mom, so I learned to question the gender of economics early on. With amazing creativity my mom got by on minimal child support and the salary from her low-paying job. We often shared rent with housemates. More than once we went camping for weeks when we were “between homes.” My mom cooked everything from scratch with simple ingredients, turning us into frugal vegetarians and making sure I knew how to pull food together for family meals while she was at work.

The contrast with the life of my father — who lived in a beautiful home, ate in restaurants, bought new clothes, and took vacations — struck me as profoundly unfair. While my parents did their best to navigate cultural assumptions and legal constructions of family as their marriage dissolved, my mom was still defined as the primary caregiver. And her sense of her own possibilities was limited to roles that fit squarely within accepted definitions of  “women’s work.”

Now, as an adult, I understand how our current economic structure is built on a history of colonialism and patriarchy; how the values of an exploitative social order are embedded into the way we organize our world. This is reflected starkly by poverty statistics showing women, specifically women of color, experiencing poverty at dramatically higher rates than men of any race or ethnic group. These gender statistics are yet another indicator of a financial system that is out of balance, one that will eventually topple and possibly take our planet with it.

To shift to a new economy, we will need more than equal pay for equal work. To remake the economy we will need to fundamentally remake how we relate to one another. Our friends at Movement Generation point out that the roots of the word economy mean “management of home.” Our new economy will mean organizing our relationships within a specific place to take care of that place and each other. We will need to find more cooperative ways of living that affirm the dignity of all people and the health of the planet. And we will need to be open to new ways of expressing gender.

This is a moment of rich creativity around gender. I am inspired by birthing justice circles forming around the country; by the stories told in the Other Worlds anthology on Women Creating Economic and Social Alternatives; by the worker-organizing by leaders with Mujeres Unidas y Activas and similar worker co-ops; by the way the Brown Boi Project is linking masculine-expressing people around a commitment to gender justice; by the work that Family Independence Initiative is doing to draw attention to the way that low income families self-organize to navigate the challenges of poverty; by the World March of Women; by the many people who are teasing gender apart and reconstructing it in new ways. I am encouraged that together we will find a new way of organizing our world.

As I am — quite literally — learning to walk in a new way, I wonder: what will carry us through the collective transformation that is needed? In my personal journey, the practice of yoga is grounding my process of discovery. Trusting this practice has allowed me to continue on even when I am struggling. It has guided me, in tangible ways, to new freedom.

As we move collectively towards a new economy, what practices will ground us as we let go of what is known and open to new ways of walking? What will help us create a world that can actually sustain and nurture us, a world that can last?

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Feature photo: OUR Walmart Campaign. Photo: Aurelio Jose Barrera

Big Leap Series:  Movements must be big to have real impact — and they need to have depth to create lasting and significant change.  This post by Caring Across Generations Director of Organizing Jodeen Olguín-Tayler is the first in our “Big Leap” series inviting movement leaders to reflect on their experiences, struggles, and questions about reaching scale through depth.

Over the course of 15 months, Caring Across Generations engaged a base of more than 1 million people. By our second year we were a leading force in the coalition that won minimum wage and overtime protections for 2.1 million workers. Many of us in the community based organizing field see this scale of engagement and impact as cutting edge for our sector. But, as innovative and exciting as they are, these indicators of scale are an entirely inadequate measure of success.

Our innovations with scale are important. But what is most hopeful about Caring Across Generations is how we situate our work within the entire terrain of social change work. We measure success by the degree to which our “wins” enhance coordination and alignment of progressive infrastructure. In the current political landscape, one goal of all our work must be to transform our scattered, isolated progressive infrastructure into a highly aligned cross-sector fleet.

“Winning” means much more than large scale concrete improvement in people’s lives. “Winning” means transformational and structural change that can be sustained and can birth opportunities for ongoing change and transformation. No social change at scale will be real lasting change if there’s not a movement behind it, demanding and creating that change.

“Winning” — really winning– requires alignment and coordination across multiple social movements in order to create a sea change with the power to reshape the political landscape. Our ability to arrive at a new political landscape — one where we have the power to govern — requires a fleet of well coordinated infrastructure to sustain, lead, and navigate that sea change.

When we launched Caring Across Generations, two catastrophic storms and two tidal waves were rapidly changing our political and social landscape:

The two (corporate sponsored) storms were:

1 Austerity —an agenda masked as an indisputable environmental reality— manifesting in the corporate control of Congress and flooding every aspect of the fiscal and legislative debates in the aftermath of the foreclosure crisis, bank bailouts, and the resulting jobs crisis.

2 The surge of (finance capital-backed) nativism and the eruption of the Tea Party, bringing its manifestation of a Right-wing agenda that yanked the entire American political spectrum to the right.

The two (organic) waves were:

1 The majority minority: People of color and immigrants rising to make our country a people of color majority by 2042.

2 The maturing of the baby boomer “age wave”: In our country one person turns 65 every eight seconds—or 10,000 people every day — an aging rate with the potential to spawn a “silver tsunami.”

These were the climate conditions shaping our nation’s political landscape. Polling data from the 2010 midterm elections revealed deep polarization between two key demographic groups: the moderate to conservative (very powerful) aging white electorate and the growing Latino, Black, and youth voting blocks. The contrived alarms about the “fiscal cliff” fueled this polarization. States with the highest percentages of rapidly growing populations among the elderly and people of color became flashpoints for legislative and legal battles. The magnitude of the polarization was tearing apart our social fabric and paralyzing governance.

Sadly, our social movements and political leadership were failing to provide clear direction. One example: in a country of people desperate for jobs and needing care workers, there was no plan to create care jobs. Instead the potential workforce of caregivers and the skyrocketing population needing care were being pitted against each other.

It was a classic “crisitunity.” Without a campaign and organizing plan, the age wave would create a crisis — a tsunami — that would feed and exacerbate the political storms and demographic divisions within our country. Or, with strategic intervention, the momentum of the age wave could become an opportunity to align diverse leadership into a convoy. Instead of drowning, getting hit by, or fighting the wave, a new convoy of leadership could engage the currents and tides shaping the wave, positioning to get in front of the wave. We could ride at its helm to guide the direction and impact. This strategic opportunity to create an alliance between two powerful voting blocks would require not just highlighting intersecting self-interests, but leading our organizing with values that allow people to recognize their interdependence.

Right now, with 50 years of well-coordinated storms beating down on us, we are in disarray. Our infrastructure — barges, sailboats, aircraft carriers, motorboats, submarines, rowboats — are damaged and isolated. Our institutions and organizations are at different levels of functionality. And, we aren’t aligned. We aren’t moving towards a shared vision, nor creating synergy across our demands. We are not sufficiently coordinating efforts to sustain ourselves or engage the potential of the social movements swelling and brewing in the ocean beneath us.

What we need is a fleet of highly coordinated infrastructure that can lead us out of the storms to a new political landscape.

How do we create that fleet? How do we not just “win” some battles, weather the storms, and keep from drowning — but instead create alignment and vision to lead us to an entirely new landscape? How do we really start to align our different issues and the bases of support we are accountable to?

Caring Across Generations engages previously siloed organizations and sectors by using multi-issue values-based campaigns to catalyze alignment and operationalize new strategic partnerships across sectors. The “age wave” coming towards us impacts care workers, seniors, family caregivers, in different ways. We hadn’t aligned our ships before, but we’ve built a campaign that is helping us to do that now. Values-driven campaigns can transform disorganized ships into a strategically aligned convoy moving towards a shared vision. The most significant contribution of Caring Across Generations isn’t what we’ve won so far. Our biggest contribution is cohering this newly aligned political force: a convoy of ships that consists of diverse state partners, national organizations and networks, progressive foundations, and policy shops from various sectors. It is this alignment and coordinated action brought about through our strategic partnerships that made our scale of engagement and impact possible — and transformed conditions and progressive infrastructure.  Many organizations have been at the lead of our convoy at different moments. It is strategic for us to be in constant assessment about which organization should be most visibly leading at any moment, while always traveling in a formation where every ship is leading a lane.

Cross-sector multi-issue campaigns are catalysts. They set into motion convoys of ships with the potential to cohere and align with other ships across sectors. These convoys can coordinate to animate an entire fleet moving in strategic formation. That fleet is the infrastructure we need to lead and sustain a diverse progressive movement.

We need to ask ourselves to measure success not just by mobilization or policy change victories, but also by how our campaigns turn the disarray of the progressive ships into a fleet.

We need to know where we are going, not just what we are guarding against. We need inspiring vision to steer towards, to get us out of the storms. Vision needs to be articulated into proactive demands and agendas. For Caring Across Generations, our national and state policy agenda demands a comprehensive transformation of our care system so seniors, workers, people with disabilities, immigrants, and our families have access to quality care that allows us to work and age with dignity. We demand economic and policy incentives to compensate reproductive labor and value care as a social good and responsibility. More simply, we envision: creating 2 million quality care jobs (for a workforce dominated by women, immigrants, and people of color) with a pathway to citizenship in order to provide quality care for seniors and people with disabilities. It’s a vision of a care system that values the full human dignity of both care workers and care consumers.

That’s just one small piece of the vision we need. Each convoy must expand the horizon, giving us more clarity to steer towards.

Let’s be honest about the ships we need to get us there. Some of our ships have massive structural damage. Others have outdated navigation. Some move so fast that others don’t even know they are with us. Some need lifeboats and emergency repair. Some need to transform. Others we will need to let sink.

As we repair ships and learn to navigate towards shared vision, we need to support our deckhands and captains to embrace new technologies and replace rusting tools and out-of-date maps.

In fact, this time we won’t be following a map.

We’ll be using innovation tools to iterate and improve as we grow. The trust we build across ships will be crucial. Trust is what allows us to stay in strategic formation, to lead in our own lanes. Trust is what supports innovation and creates conditions where we can be willing, and supported…to jump ship.

A fleet that can effectively navigate out of storms still won’t reach its vision if it’s always moving against the tide. We also need real scale to propel us. We need to be so much more than our ships. We need to count on the movement of water, waves, and currents to power us.

Ready to get into the water?

It’s okay. Let’s take a deep breath and allow ourselves to really internalize that the ships we are familiar with, the organizations and institutions we’ve spent our entire lives building, are important, but totally insufficient. It’s okay. We can admit that our ships will never be enough to hold the entire ocean. They don’t need to be.

Currents and waves are the power scale at a whole other level. Harnessing that power requires trusting movement without trying to control it. We can dive in to create surges and swells by learning to do the pop culture, celebrity engagement, public art, and cognitive research and communications work to shape values-based narratives. In our first experiment with this scope of work, Caring Across Generations engaged over 13 million people. That’s just the start of the kind of scale we need.

Learning to build the scale we need requires broadening who we are willing to recognize as part of the movement. It means dropping some of our worst movement habits, like jealously guarding territory, casting nets to capture resources, or overly depending on membership models focused on trying to haul everyone and everything aboard our ships.

Let’s learn to lose our fear, try new things, and to be okay with — even celebrate — what we learn from failed experiments.

We can start trusting in the vast sea of people and conditions in motion, the waves, the swells, and tides as collective resources that can power all of us, sustainably. We can learn to navigate out of the storms by moving towards clear, powerful values-based vision. We can catalyze moving into the alignment we need by mobilizing convoys of cross-sector multi-issue campaigns that put us in new and deeper practices of partnership. We can learn to recognize, and cultivate, interdependence. We can build our fleet. We can win — really win.

I’m ready for a new political landscape — one with coordinated progressive leadership, fueled by our movement of movements. We’re going to need the fleet to get us there, and our campaigns will have to work together to align the fleet.

Are you with me?

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Feature photo: Moyan_Brenn, licensed under CC BY 2.0