Economic Justice Engagement Collaborative
Freedom Riders arrested in Jackson, MI, 1961.
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; it's the only thing that ever has." - Margaret Mead
"Bobby Seale's going through all types of physical and mental torture, but that's all right, because we said even before this happened and we're going to say it after this, and after I'm locked up, and after everybody's locked up, that you can jail a revolutionary, but you can't jail a revolution. You may run a liberator like Eldridge Cleaver out of the country, but you can’t run liberation out of the country. You might murder a freedom-fighter like Bobby Hutton, but you can’t murder freedom-fighting." – Fred Hampton
"Bobby Seale's going through all types of physical and mental torture, but that's all right, because we said even before this happened and we're going to say it after this, and after I'm locked up, and after everybody's locked up, that you can jail a revolutionary, but you can't jail a revolution. You may run a liberator like Eldridge Cleaver out of the country, but you can’t run liberation out of the country. You might murder a freedom-fighter like Bobby Hutton, but you can’t murder freedom-fighting." – Fred Hampton
The Economic Justice Engagement Collaborative exists for one purpose -- to facilitate and resource the movement to finally end poverty. We do for the economic justice movement what groups like CORE (Congress on Racial Equality), UFW (United Farm Workers), labor unions and Fred Hampton of the Black Panthers, Jose Cha-Cha Jimenez of the Latinx Young Lords, and William "Preacherman" Fesperman of the white, southern, Young Patriots -- co-founders of the original Rainbow Coalition in 1969 -- all did. They shifted power to the people, made it impossible for us to ignore normalized injustice and inspired us to be better. If a more perfect union is ever to be formed, then we, the people, will have to do the forming. These efforts are about enabling us to do just that -- starting with poverty.
Campaign to End Rental Application Profiteering - Fair access to a safe, habitable, sustainable place to call home is a basic human right. Yet, we make it all but impossible for the working poor. We allow credit scores and background checks, both of which we know to be inherently discriminatory, to be used to determine if certain people are worthy of paying us to live in our apartments. We allow home rental companies (aka "landlords") to require significant deposits and/or future months' rent in advance in order to rent a home. And, most egregiously, charging so-called "application fees", money for nothing, where home rental companies charge potential customers, often, people in poverty, in order for the company to decide if it wants to do business with them. It's not unusual for companies to charge $50 per applicant for costs the company should cover. For the average household trying to rent a home, it's a $50 to $100 lottery ticket.
Our polling of people in our network found that those most likely to be discriminated against needed to submit an average of 9.5 applications, over four times as many as those unlikely to be discriminated against, to successfully rent a home. That's also over four times more, or nearly $1,000 in fees for a two-adult household. (We also discovered that a core reason so many housing vouchers expire is inability to pay the fees required to submit multiple applications.) Application fee profiteering is largely why, on any given day, an estimated 50% of rental housing listings are fraudulent. The process is a money-making machine; one that's simple to set up, almost foolproof, and, in most places, legal. That's because the people behind the listing aren't promising to deliver the prospective customer anything, and in most states, those potential customers aren't even owed a reply of any kind. So, the company, simply by opting not to go any further with said customer, has fulfilled its obligation.
To get our head around this, we ran a bit of a test. We set up a fake listing and required a $50 application fee for fairly priced apartments in three cities -- Dallas, Miami and San Francisco. In seven days, we received an average of 30 - 50+ applications, depending on the city, resulting in $1,500 - $2,500+ in paid fees per listing, collected through a cash app (we immediately and automatically reversed all payments). All three listings netted more in application fees than what the company would make by actually renting the apartment, and with no effort beyond posting the listing. Money for nothing. Unbelievably, only three states have protections against application fee profiteering -- Massachusetts (which only allows licensed brokers to charge application fees), Vermont (which outlaws application fees altogether), and New York (which caps fees at $20, and that fee must be waived if applicant provides their own screening report).
This combination of practices preemptively disqualifies the already disadvantaged, prevents them from submitting housing applications at all, and makes it easy to take advantage of the poor by collecting fraudulent fees, including for reports that aren't run. This drives people into homelessness, makes it difficult for legitimate listings to attract customers and destabilizes the rental home sector. As the name indicates, CERAP is committed to ending Rental Application Profiteering by first, educating the public about the problem, recognizing socially conscious property owners who voluntarily dispense with application fees, credit/background checks and/or large deposits, providing a searchable database of property owners who charge fees, run credit/background checks and/or require large deposits, and advocate for legislation that outlaws all forms of rental application profiteering.
Inclusion Spoken Here - There are all kinds of policy changes organizations truly committed to inclusion can make. Examples: 1. No longer checking conviction records and letting candidates know that "The formerly incarcerated are encouraged to apply"; 2. Committing to paying your lowest paid worker a full-time salary they can survive on, and telling job seekers "We are a Minimum Viable Wage (MVW) Employer"; and 3. Eliminating policies that require trans people and others to apply using their legal name, and letting applicants know "Name dignity practiced here". Inclusion Spoken Here educates companies on the many ways unconscious exclusion operates in corporate policies, provides guidance on how they can change those policies and promotes both recognition for companies that practice inclusion and fosters accountability for those that don't.
Discredit Yourself - The system is structured so that most of us need loans to buy a home or car. We can't get a loan without establishing credit. And we can't establish credit without going into debt. The project is designed to support a growing community of people opting out of the credit/debt sand trap altogether, and accessing services that help them make important purchases with no credit score needed. They can live a life without going into debt to establish credit. If you're poor, then this proliferation of for-profit companies designed to cash in on credit scoring, from so-called "credit repair agencies" that charge monthly fees to companies like Credit Karma and Self, who further entrench both credit and credit scoring into our lives while capturing even more of our personal data and profiting from it, are not your friend. Discredit Yourself is committed to creating an economy where both credit and credit scores are unnecessary.
Undocumented Worker Economic Emancipation - It's easy to romanticize the efforts of those who aided fugitive slaves, not taking into account the tremendous risk -- especially in a land where doing so was against the law. The 1850 Fugitive Slave Act penalized officials for not arresting anyone accused of being a fugitive slave, including based solely on a claimant's statement of ownership, or any person who didn't have papers that proved, without a doubt that they were free. Escaped slaves who'd fled across the border into free states were that era's "undocumented". Officials who didn't comply could be fined the equivalent of $35,000. Conversely, officers who helped capture accused fugitives were entitled to bonuses and promotions.
The law granted slave catchers immunity to operate in free states, and like being accused of being a slave in Salem, the accused were denied the right to defend themselves in court. Likewise, any person aiding a fugitive -- even by simply providing food -- was subject to up to six months imprisonment and a fine of up to $1,000 ($35,000 in 2023 dollars). This is what it meant, in real-world terms, to stand up against a law that did irreparable harm. But it's not hard to see how laws that prevent employers from hiring undocumented workers essentially do the same thing. Such laws deprive people of legal means of making a living, and as history shows us, eradicating all legal means of survival leaves one only with illegal ones. (It also leaves people vulnerable to all manner of economic predators, from employers who pay poverty wages to entrapment and trafficking.
We’ve been told that the policies we’ve enacted that deprive undocumented immigrants of work opportunities are “for our own security”, but they’re not. These laws don’t lock all immigrants out of work; just working-class ones. Wealthy immigrants can rightfully work here in companies in which they’re significant investors and we make all manner of exceptions for people with knowledge or skills we deem rare and important. But just because we’re not aware of the powerful contributions each person can make doesn’t mean they’re not there. Ultimately, the fix here is the same as with background checks; removing the policing burden from employers. But in the meantime, companies that want to address this can start by celebrating Undocumented Worker Day, committing to employer sponsorship for any qualified employee who needs it, outsourcing work to small firms, and when possible, hiring independent contractors and freelancers, and paying them equitably.
Campaign for Debt-free College - In the late 1960s, public universities, after being written out of state budgets largely due to how college campuses were hotbeds of counterculture revolution, had no choice but to begin charging tuition. In turn, the federal government started offering student aid and private lenders, loans. Sixty years later, our nation's student debt had grown to five times all credit card debt owed. We took public higher education, something that was once free, and that offered immeasurable benefits to society, and turned it into another means of economic enslavement. At the same time, we've made college, and increasingly, an advanced degree, a requirement to be competitive for a job that can lift one out of poverty. This means that most students from lower-income backgrounds have a choice -- take on crippling debt just to have a shot at a good job or remain debt-free and unable to get an interview. This is a perfect example of cannibalistic capitalism. Campaign for Debt-free College is about un-breaking the system -- seeing education as society's investment in itself, removing the profit imperative entirely and making it possible for everyone to pursue as much education as they'd like -- without having to go into debt to do so.
