Opportunities to Invest in Community Resilience for COVID and Climate

In this Barr funded study, we looked at how community-led mutual aid and other COVID response efforts were organized, how they operated, and what the network ecology looked like in Boston, Chelsea, and Revere in Massachusetts. The overall goal is to understand how community-focused and community-led responses can be built upon and reinforced to support equity-centered climate resilience.  Building resilience must be people focused, intersectional, institutional, and rooted in anti-racist/ anti-oppressive ideology and practice.  Our findings  include:

• Climate funders need to stop funding and start investing in the grassroots and racial justice movement organizations who are building social resilience.
• Racism and other systems of oppressions are the root cause of vulnerability.
• Funding network building would also contribute to building resilience at the community level.

Read the full report by clicking here.

 The MA Advisory Committee to the US Commission on Civil Rights, of which I am a member, published a first in the nation report on the civil rights implications of water affordability. We urge the state to declare water a human right and to make that right real with much needed regulation and oversight.  

Lack of access to affordable water has created life threatening inequalities. We found that the system is structured to create inequities which fall the hardest on tenants. Because of historic and continuing discrimination and other inequities, tenants in MA are more likely to be people of color, limited English speakers, and low income people.   

Read the full report here.

Read the memo of my original research that informed this report here.

 The realization that policy and law are tightly intertwined dates at least to de Tocqueville’s observation that, in the United States, political questions often become judicial questions. Scholars have shown consistently that courts, both federal and state, play a role in public policy decision making. This is observed in social policy (e.g., same-sex marriage and abortion), environmental policy (e.g., Environmental Protection Agency regulations), economic policy (e.g., New Deal Era decisions), and more. Too often, however, graduate programs in public policy fail to prepare students for the role of the courts in the policy process. This study examines the requirements and core competencies from Masters of Public Policy programs to determine to what extent, if any, judicial policy making is taught. We find that there is a significant gap between the theory about the role of courts in the public policy process and what public policy programs teach their students. We conclude with recommendations for possible changes to curricula to close this gap. 

Read the full article here.

This book describes the history of evacuating and admitting US allies to protect those who work with and for the US government and evaluates the refugee resettlement process for those allies. 

Co-authored with Dr. Jeffrey L Carson. 

More information and where to purchase:

 https://www.promisesmade.org/ 

A description of the halal meal program created as part of Mutual Aid Eastie.

"What this experience has shown me is that mutual aid, for East Boston at least, is not just a feel-good endeavor to help those in need. And it isn’t just crisis management in the face of government failure. Feeding our neighbors is a political act that says: we reject systems that leave any of our neighbors behind."

 What East Boston youth say about their health, happiness, safety, and sense of well-being. This report is a summary of a community based, youth-led research project conducted in East Boston, Boston, Massachusetts, USA. 

Click here to access the article.