Media

Community Voices Heard is leading the charge to hold the New York City Housing Authority accountable to its obligations to low-income residents.

The causes and effects of climate change are interwoven with racial, economic, and political inequity. Groups are building bridges across movements to address these intertwined, wicked problems.

Six years ago today, on April 25, 2012, activists took to the streets to mark the country’s outstanding student-loan debt surpassing $1 trillion. And in the years since, many of the trends that pushed student debt levels to climb have persisted and in some cases gotten worse.

NEW YORK, NY — Bryan Stevenson, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative; Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund; and Heather McGhee, president of Demos released a statement today regarding their participation on the Starbucks Advisory Committee, which is addressing the company’s efforts to prevent discrimination in its stores.

Heather McGhee will develop the Starbucks training plan with the former US attorney general Eric Holder and representatives of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education fund, the Equal Justice Initiative and the Anti-Defamation League.

While no law prevents outside donors, for example, from investing in the campaign of a low-income person, the likelihood that they’ll do so is low. The problem is social capital: Low-income people lack it, and so their personal networks do not often contain millionaires with open pocketbooks.

Activists and researchers have pointed out that the Detroit Water and Sewage Department’s financial woes can’t be blamed entirely on the city, since it stretches far beyond the city itself, serving 40 percent of Michigan’s population.

On Monday, reeling from an incident at a Starbucks in Philadelphia that prompted accusations of racial bias, Howard Schultz, the company’s executive chairman, called the head of a nonprofit public-policy organization to discuss ways to prevent similar episodes in the future.

His idea: provide anti-bias training for his work force.

“Along with the majority of the country, we at Demos found the unjust arrest of two black men at a Starbucks in Philadelphia to be yet another disturbing example of the destructive, pervasive bias that people of color routinely face. This bias becomes a force that can change – or end – a person of color’s life when it is compounded with discriminatory, unaccountable policing.