Routledge
This important volume might have found itself destined for library shelves and obscure seminars. An expensive hardbound edition, released in 2021 in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, left this title little known. But a new paperback edition, combined with an active marketing campaign by both the publisher and the editors has breathed new life into Igniting Justice and Progressive Power: The Partnership for Working Families Cities. The book is edited by David Reynolds, who works at the Center for Labor and Community Studies at the University of Michigan and teaches State and Local Government at Eastern Michigan University, and Louise Simmons, a professor of Social Work at the University of Connecticut and longtime community activist in her home of Hartford, Connecticut. This book is the product of twenty-six contributors, each documenting projects in cities across the United States over the past twenty years.
“A progressive resurgence is happening across the United States,” the book-launch packet reads. “This book shows how long-lasting coalitions have built progressive power from the regional level on up. Anchored by the ‘think and act’ affiliate organizations of the Partnership for Working Families (PWF), these regional power building projects are putting in place the vision, policy agenda, political savvy, and grassroots mobilization needed for progressive governance.”
Igniting Justice and Progressive Power: The Partnership for Working Families Cities
Edited by David B. Reynolds and Louise Simmons
Routledge (Taylor and Francis Group), 370 pages
Release date: June 22, 2021
In the first section, dubbed “Setting the Stage,” Reynolds and Simmons lay out the structure and the goals of the book: “This book aims to contribute to the literature and practice around labor community coalitions, social movement unionism, regional development, and urban regime change.” Throughout the volume, they look at organizing techniques, successes, and questions that still need to be addressed.
The book is filled with case studies from places like San Jose, California; Boston, Massachusetts; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Nashville, Tennessee; and Phoenix, Arizona. Each author looks with a scholar’s eye and an activist’s passion—analyzing and inspiring as they go. The two decades of experience combined in these pages illustrates and elucidates efforts to “transform America.”
Some of the key takeaways? The need for “broad tent” coalitions. The centrality of communities of color. The fact that elections and legislative advocacy do matter. And the importance of working at the city, state, and regional level.
Why cities? In the chapter “Why Cities Matter: Governing for the common good and reclaiming democracy,” Nikki Fortunato Bas, Donald Cohen, and Roxana Tynan explain: “Cities provide great opportunities for action, but they are also concentrated sources of some of the nation’s greatest challenges. Cities have the density, population, and authority that can drive and implement a new forward-looking vision for the country as a whole.”
One example of the nuance of working in labor/community coalitions is found in Penny Lewis’s chapter on New York City. “[C]ontinuing authentic relationships among active groups whose real or perceived interests at times diverge requires work and attention,” she writes. “[These] strategic campaigns and deep relationship building . . . [provide] a hopeful model for progressive forces that recognize that the scope of social change needed . . . requires common struggle and deep connection.”
The people and places chronicled throughout the book are different and unique, but as Reynolds and Simmons point out in the book’s conclusion, they share common themes. The writers of these eighteen different case studies “define community power as the ability of communities most impacted by structural inequity to develop, sustain, and grow an organized base of people who act together through democratic structures to set agendas, shift public discourse, influence decision-makers, and cultivate ongoing relationships of mutual accountability with them to change systems, foster structural equality, and advance health equity.” No small set of tasks, but, the editors remind us, “the chapters in this book have shown the collective work of the PWF affiliates is indeed a core part of the building of a future progressive America.”
With this important volume, we have an explanation and a critique of some of the tools. Now let’s get to work.