 I mean, some more people are going to be coming in, so we'll just absorb them as they do. And so I'm Miriam Weisenbaum. I'm the board chair of the Center for Descent Attack. Come on in, let's see. And first of all, welcome to all of you. Thank you so much for being here. I'd like to start by giving a special thanks to Roger Williams University and to the school plot, the Pobono Collaborative for helping make this space available and really helping make the center available and the work that it does. I'd also like to thank the Rhode Island Foundation for providing a grant specifically to support this event. So thank you to the Rhode Island Foundation. And then of course, with respect to Utility Justice, thank you to George Wiley Center for being part of that. And then finally, for the vision for this, I want to thank Rob because this is really a great event that we have together. So I think we all know that there are these means available to help individuals and families make our beautiful, vibrant, and event-battled cities better than they are, organizing people and the tools of the law. And so this is a forum that's going to talk about those coming together and how they do and how they don't and how they might. And that's going to be the subject of this forum. What you might not know is that with respect to that topic, we have rock stars here. This is really an amazing group of people. And we're still lucky. These are people who not only do this collaboration really on the ground and at every level of government and judiciary, but also reflect and think and write and talk about how law and organizing can come together to move more justice into the world. So I really want to thank all of you for being here. And we are just so honored to have this group. Tony Romano is going to be moderating this panel. And let me just quickly introduce Tony. I had a chance to talk with him tonight. And again, we're really lucky to have him here. Tony has been an organizer for over 22 years. He's a union organizing both in shop organizing, I think, and just out there organizing. And more recently, has been with an organization called Right to the City. And I'm going to let him talk about what that is and what its organizing model is. And he is their organizing director. Again, with an enormous depth of knowledge in organizing and bringing together organizing and the law. So I'd like to ask you all to join me in welcoming this panel. And let's have a great conversation. Thank you, Maryam. And it's wonderful to be here. The real reason I'm here is to listen to these rock stars and to learn. But they said the only way they're going to get tickets is if I'm moderated. So it's really good to be here. I am with Right to the City. For those who are familiar with Right to the City, we're an alliance of grassroots groups. We've been around since 2007. And we believe in and fight for a Right to the City. Has anyone, have y'all heard of that before? This new to y'all. For us, a Right to the City is very simple. It's a right for everyone to be able to live and shape their city and thrive in their city. And for each person to be able to reach their full potential. For us, that's what a Right to the City is. And it's not, it's a right that embodies all other rights. So it's very much like the concept of citizenship in this country, where if you're a citizen, you're supposed to have this body of rights. We believe Right to the City is like that and should be for everyone just because they live in a city or a town. That's all you need to have a Right to the City. You just need to be, right? You don't need to have papers. You don't need to be this or that. You just need to be and then you have a Right to the City. We, our main work right now is Right to the City, is to help coordinate and move a national campaign called Homes for All. And Homes for All is a campaign that is rooted in two beliefs. One is that housing is a human right. Y'all feeling that belief? Am I in the right place? So we believe and this belief guides everything we housing as a human right for. And we define housing very broadly, right? Utilities are part of housing, right? Housing isn't separate from utilities. Land is part of housing. Community is part of housing. So think about it holistically. The second belief we believe in and guides everything we do is that housing policy and land policy in this country, historically into this day, is fundamentally interwoven with white supremacy. You can't separate. So if you're going to talk about housing and land justice, utility justice, you're fundamentally talking about a racial justice fight. Fundamentally, you have to take on white supremacy. And we believe not just in our analysis and our narrative, but in our fight on the ground and in our demands. They can't be race neutral. They need to be anti-racist. So that's what grounds Homes for All. We don't just like to have beliefs. We like to see them come true. So our theory of change, of how we believe fundamental change happens in the world is also pretty simple. We believe it takes bottom-up movements. And for that movement to have enough power to bring about fundamental change. So for us, that means big change. It means housing and land and utilities are no longer commodities, principally, that allow certain people to get rich. But utilities, housing, land are fundamentally about meeting the needs of families and communities. That's the first part of it. So when we say we need a movement, we're really talking about organizing the majority of people in your city, in your state, in this country. So the majority of the people have to be involved if we're going to bring about fundamental change. And we believe that that movement must be led by those most impacted. So for us, it's very clear. Working class, people of color. They must be in front. If not, it's going to go awry. So one thing that's exciting about it tonight, and the reason I came up here, is to hear about these very powerful organizing projects because we believe these are key aspects of what's needed to build a broader movement. We all agree we're in the beginning stages of it. So very excited to be here with you and to listen and learn and moderate. I do want to shout out one of the founding members of Right to the City. And part of Homes Fraud is DARE, Direct Action for Rights and Equality, one of your home-grown amazing groups. So we have a lot of respect and love for them. Are they here? They're here, or they're coming. They're coming around. They're in-round. And also, another member of Right to the City and DARE that we love a lot is on the panels. Nobody's left in Hudson from Poughkeeps. So we say sitting. We're talking big cities and little cities. So very good to be here. I want to turn it over just so you have a sense of the agenda. The first thing we're going to do is turn it over to our panelists to share a little bit about what they are, what their context is, where they're coming from, and what their campaign is. They promise to be brief, right? And then after they do that, we're going to open it up for questions. I've got a couple of questions for them, but we really want to hear your questions and your comments and thoughts. My sense is there's a lot of wisdom and experience in the room. So we want to learn from y'all too. So we're going to start out with Spencer and Richard to hear a little bit about who they are in their campaign. And then we're going to move down to the other folks. Good evening, everybody. My name is Spencer Resnick. I'm an organizer for a group called Nobody, Useman Hudson that Tony mentioned and pronounced correctly, which I'm really excited about. In Poughkeepsie, New York, we were founded in 2012 emerging out of the Occupy of Wall Street movement. Originally all volunteer in fighting around the foreclosure crisis, which we swept through our area. So Landon has been right off the job for really important for us. An handful of the members who's coming out of that were a membership organization coming out of that fight mentioned the high-cost of utilities and the shutoffs that came with utilities as a crisis that was affecting the community at the end of 2014. And just really the sort of devastating ripple effects that utilities had in their life and the life of the community. And in particular, and I think Tony has already mentioned it, it's critical to put it front and center. It really disproportionately affected working class people of color in the city of New York City and placed in the Hudson Valley. So since that time, we've talked to thousands of people at this point about their utilities. We've built a small base of people in Poughkeepsie. We've connected to some amazing people who are working on an issue around the country really. We have a lot of assistance and you'll hear about it from the public utility law project to get our heads kind of screwed on straight and figure out what we're up against. And in that time, we've been thinking it out with Central Hudson, which is our local utility, a very greedy, a very powerful vibration for you to ask if my black eye came from them. Which I'm telling you is not out of the question. It came from boxing, so it was intentional. But I think it speaks to the fact that there's really, there's a conflict on the ground there. We think it's an important fight to be fighting in that work we've stopped over 50 shutoffs of families. We've won better policies for working class consumers. We won an investigation this year into Central Hudson's debt collection practices. And specifically into patterns of racial discrimination we've seen over and over again. And we have to fight for that investigation and the results are still, haven't come out yet. We need to touch this. But it's been a step forward for us as an organization, for us as a community to be building this campaign. I want to pause really quickly. I think I'm respecting the time. To just shout out to George Wiley Center for providing some really early on support to help us figure out. So what are utilities, right? We approach it from this idea of the concept of the right to the city and how fundamental that is. When you start getting into utilities it gets complicated real fast. So we really appreciate some of that early support to help us kind of launch and have this New York around the connection that still happens. And I would just close by saying as an organization that's committed to movement building we think this is a really important fight because it connects so many different aspects of this right to the city. Because it connects to racial justice. Because it connects to gender justice if it's another important component. At least our organization is majority black women and it's women who get shut off disproportionately in our context. Or we have to deal with the bills and the thought that comes from a shut off. And it connects to environmental justice struggle. We also see it as fundamental in that it's really important part of this larger community system. So those connections can be intimidating as an organizer. It's like there's so much where you even start. But they also can be powerful because it allows us to be able to move and connect with other folks. So that's why we're part of right to the city. We're trying to do that on a national level. But it's also why I'm happy to represent the organization tonight and connect with other folks that we want to be building a movement. And it seems like we have great people on this panel that are doing that and I'm happy to see you all here. Thank you. Good evening, I'm Richard Berkley. I'm the executive director of the Public Utility Law Project of New York. We incorporated 35 years ago as a not-for-profit public interest law firm with a unique mission in a state in New York. We are the only independent entity in the state that advocates, educates, and litigates on behalf of low and fixed income utility consumers. So we work with low income households. We work with seniors. We work with disabled. We work with returning veterans and everybody who needs a hand when they get behind with their utility. We actually were founded right after the Arab oil embargo and the Arab oil shocks of the late 1970s when the cost of oil went up very quickly. And at the time, a bunch of people got together in a state in New York and decided that the cost of energy was never going to go down after that experience. And so they founded this organization, a fight on behalf of people who couldn't keep up with that increasing cost of energy. So we do a great deal of things. And as part of our mission, we educate. And so in the process of educating, we meet with community-based organizations. We meet with elected officials, constituent affairs people. We go to public interest law firms, legal aid. Everybody who is going to want to intervene on behalf of a household that is about to be shut off or is in a disproportionate bargaining situation with the utility. And so we go to all of them. We train them on utility consumer rights. And we also have a unique reason for doing that. We are the original drafters of something called the Home Energy Fair Practices Act in New York, which is the utility consumer bill of rights. It is such a powerful bill of rights for consumers that it has been copied across the country. We continue to update and improve what we call HEPA. In fact, the most recent time we updated it was back in 2002 to add in something called Energy Service Company, otherwise known as a retail energy sales company. And I'll hopefully I'll get a chance to talk about that a little later on. But plan large, what we do is we get involved in utility rate cases. And so we fight against the utilities when they come in to ask for more money. Central Hudson is one of the ones that we come in to fight against from time to time. We also fight against water utilities. We fight against cable. We fight against telephone. And we act on behalf of low-income households. We go into communities that are experiencing rate increase. And the first thing we do is we pull out the census data and we take a look and we see what is the indicators of unaffordability in that area. For example, we're working on a rape case right now in Brooklyn. The gas utility is raising its rates 40% over the next three years. And on top of that, it's adding an $800 million charge for Superfund Cleanups, which is going to be paid completely by the rape payers and not at all by the utility. And they say that that's only fair. It's what companies do. And we say, it's not fair to suggest that you made the problem, you fixed it. And we actually were able to get that in the newspaper yesterday, so I'm having a good day today. Thank you. One of the things that we found out is that in Brooklyn, which is so famous now for having a brand and being a hipster place, more than 50% of households cannot afford their utility bills. And there are hundreds of thousands of water liens in Brooklyn, despite the fact that New York City has some of the cheapest municipal water in the country. It's been going up more than 8% every year for the past decade. And I can talk about these individual problems over and over again, but at a macro level, what we do is we get involved in impact litigation. We get involved in changing the law, either the legislature or on a local basis when we can. We work with groups like Nobody Leads with Hudson, and we try to bring about better outcomes for everybody who needs it on behalf of them. Well, since this, I'm Marilyn Malan from Mission and Legal Services, but since this work starts and never ends with organizing, I'd like Maureen to start off. And I can then talk about how we support the work that Michigan Welfare Rights Organization does and the People's Water Board and the other organizations that they're connected to in the show. I can do that. My name is Maureen Taylor. I'm the state chairperson of an organization called Michigan Welfare Rights, and I bring you all greetings. I bring you greetings from a city that used to be 1.8, 1.9 million residents, mostly tied either directly or indirectly to automobiles. We either made them, we drove them, we parked them, and as you can see how I look, I'm fly. That's cause some from Detroit and B.B.O. Hartley. People know is that that 1.8, 1.9 million has now dwindled to less than 700,000. More than a million people have left the city of Detroit because Dodge Main, Chevrolet, Gear and Axel, you were having the Foundry Literal Assembly, Cadillac, Cadillac Fleetwood, Cadillac Glass, Kelsey Hayes, and all the rest have closed. The reason they closed is because R2-D2 took over jobs, computers and technology that used to enhance labor now has replaced labor. So with all of the things that have gone on in my beloved city, we are now at the point where there are tens of thousands of water shutoffs, massive water shutoffs that have been happening in the city of Detroit for at least the last four or five years and it just escalates on a regular basis. Our theory at welfare rights is that there are three prongs to the battle. We have to get involved in the legislature, change rules, stupid project because most of the folks we vote for, whether they're Democrat or Republican do not represent anything that's in this room. Second thing, we have to go legal and we try to get lawyers and whatnot, but lawyers are the hardest people in the world to teach. That's so difficult, but you have to get these lawyers, you have to drag them, kicking and screaming, into the room so that they will understand what the concept is. And the driving force for all changes in the nation, all changes in the world is the battle that we manage outside on the streets. I'll say to you that at the appropriate time, I hope to be able to talk to you about the reasons why water is being shut off for tens of thousands of low income people, why democracy was taken away from the folks that lived in the city of Detroit. And the third thing I want to convince you about is that this is no longer about just race. They don't care about white folks. They don't care about Latinos. They don't care anything about Asians or anybody else. The denominator that you're looking for now is if you don't have money, you're the enemy. The army I'm interested in building is not just an army of folks that look like me. I need somebody else in the fight and in the right. At the end of this conversation, I hope to convince you that it's not just race, but class is extremely important in this battle. Again, my name is Maureen Taylor and I bring you all greetings and I hope to share additional information at the appropriate time. My name is Marilyn Malaine. I'm the director of Michigan Legal Services and I am a student of many, many years in many battles. We've been around for 40 years. We are a legal services program that is not Legal Services Corporation funded. That actually is good news because that means there are no restrictions on what we do. The bad news is that because we're not funded by the Legal Services Corporation, we don't have a lot of funding, so we're small. But that also works because we're flexible and we're in a position without being restricted to be able to move in the direction that's needed as the movement moves to support agitation, litigation, and legislation. And that's basically the type of work that we have done over the last four years. We focus on basic human need areas of housing and community development, which includes utilities, public benefits, health, mental health care, and family law. Most recently we've been very involved in the foreclosure crisis as well as in the water shutoffs. And when I say most recently, I was just remembering with Marion that our battle in water go back to 1991. So we'll talk about that a little later, but that's a bit of a point. My name's Camille Bavaris and I'm the coordinator of the George Wiley Center. I appreciate the comments by Brother Tony about us being in the early stages, but I have to start by recognizing some of our veterans on the war on the floor. There was a moment in US history where there was a war against poverty. We've gone past that moment. And for a long time, it's been sisters like Maureen that had been fighting on the forefront of the war on the floor. And the George Wiley Center came out of that struggle. It's been around for 35 years. It came out of that welfare rights struggle, even though we've seen welfare intentionally dwindled and the poor over and over again villainized and criminalized. So I'm excited to talk to people here to figure out strategies to build together. And we need lawyers to be able to fight back on that criminalization that happens, right? When 20,000 people get shut off from their utilities in the state of Rhode Island, some of the same issues that we are struggling against today are the same issues that George Wiley fought against, right? And that Henry Shelton also fought against. What is the role of the government, of law in society where we're the richest country on the planet of the earth and we allow for people to be hospitalized because they can't afford to contribute to the billions of certain utilities, right? That's the fundamental question. And we're convinced from an organizing perspective, the only way we can solve that, the only solution is by bringing poor people, people of color, working class people together to strategize and come up with our solutions. And lawyers are key to that. So I welcome all of you as part of that struggle. If I haven't met you in the past, I look forward to working with you and I have to close this intro in recognizing Henry Shelton, who we recently lost. And instead of a moment of silence, I wanna invite you all to a moment of action. So this Monday we're taking an action at the Public Utilities Commission. Henry Shelton was a founder of the George Wiley Center because when George Wiley passed on, he realized that struggle was not over against racial injustice, against economic injustice. So on the back of Henry's memorial, it said, pray for the dead and fight for the living. I wanna invite everybody here to come at one o'clock to the Public Utilities Commission in war at 89 Jefferson Boulevard to take action on Monday to demand that people in this state be allowed to pay a reasonable amount to get their utilities turned back on. Yellow fly is that you see. Hello everyone, I'm Rod McRain and I serve as the executive director and supervising attorney at the Rhode Island Center for Justice. The Center for Justice is a nonprofit public interest law center. Our mission is to promote access to justice for low income Rhode Islanders. And we do that really in two ways. One is to provide legal assistance that would be otherwise unavailable because of funding restrictions and capacity limitations imposed on traditional sources of civil legal aid in the state of Rhode Island. So for example, our attorneys represent or provide legal assistance to undocumented immigrants who aren't paid minimum wage over time. And that's a legal service that is a form of legal assistance that's specifically prohibited by the Legal Services Corporation that Marilyn mentioned. We also seek to carry out our mission by partnering with community-based organizations like the George Wiley Center, Fuerca Lavaral, which is a worker center based in Central Falls, Rhode Island, and in partnering with community-based organizations we seek to be community lawyers, right? So, and that's really where our work around utility justice starts. Really started, for me, being educated by the George Wiley Center and its members about the reality of the injustice experienced by low income households in Rhode Island whose gas and electric services is terminated. What I learned pretty quickly is that here in Rhode Island there's sort of a perfect storm of factors that contribute to this crisis that this Camille Center results in every year 20,000 low income households having their gas or electric service shut off for some period of time. So, those factors include very high energy costs here in Rhode Island, inefficient heating systems, one of the oldest and poorest low income rental housing stock in the country, and on high poverty rates as well. On top of all that, regulatory neglect, basically. So, the regulatory agency in Rhode Island that's charged with protecting the rights of low income consumers, unfortunately for many years has instead adopted a really anti-consumer policy and just exacerbated the problem. So, our organization, the Center for Justice, were relatively new, we launched in 2015, and when we started out, the George Wiley Center was one of our initial partners and when we sat down to sort of identify what we might be able to do together to address this issue of widespread utility shut offs, we decided to make a strategic decision to focus on one aspect of the issue and that is the impact of gas and electric shut offs to low income medically vulnerable households. And that's really where you see this crisis in Rhode Island most clearly, is households with individuals that are dependent upon respirators, oxygen machines, ventilators, dialysis machines, and are shut off, are shut off and go to the hospital. That actually happens here in Rhode Island. So, we decided let's focus on that and how do we do that? So, we established for the first time here in Rhode Island regular community based legal clinics where low income utility consumers could meet with attorneys and could receive legal assistance including representation at the Division of Public Utilities and Carriers to request relief from utility shut offs. Once we started doing that, what we learned was again, what the George Wiley Center already know and what was telling and had been telling us but it was really hard to absorb until you actually do this work was that the laws that are meant to protect medically vulnerable utility consumers just weren't being followed. They weren't being followed by National Grid and they weren't being followed by the State of Rhode Island and as a result of that and of the really intensive community based legal work and organizing that we did with the George Wiley Center, we documented this systemic illegal practice by both the public utility and the state regulator and we filed a lawsuit just over a year ago on behalf of a group of low income consumers who had serious medical issues had been shut off and on behalf of all other households, a class of consumers in the state that experienced the same problem or were at risk of being shut off. That lawsuit and we'll talk about it a little bit further later on in the organizing campaign that's gone along with it, but we've had success in that for over a year now that for category of households that are represented by the plaintiffs that lawsuit had been protected from being shut off because of the lawsuit and in fact last spring we were able to reach a settlement with National Grid that really overhauled its customer service, debt collection and termination practices. The lawsuit is continuing against the state regulator but we're hopeful now that the governor has responded really to this campaign and to I think the cumulative effect of the George Wiley Center's work over many years and replaced the administrator at the Division of Public Utilities, we're hopeful that this is the end. Thank you. Were we right about these folks being rock stars? Yes. It wasn't, we weren't bragging, you were being honest, right? Thank y'all very much. Now we wanna open it up to y'all for both questions and thoughts, experiences, comments y'all have. We've heard some big issues brought up here. We want y'all to know you can go anywhere you want with the topics. Some of the topics I heard, I just wanna repeat back is people talked about the root causes of what's going on and then in relation to the root causes, you heard you gotta talk about race, gotta talk about class, gotta talk about gender. So root causes is one area we can go. The other thing we heard that was a theme is the attacks that are happening. They may be a little different but we heard about shutoffs. We heard about crazy high rates everywhere, right? Causing tremendous harm and suffering. Next, in terms of the resistance in the fight back, we have here an example of the amazing partnership between organizing and lawyers, right? And often we can share a lot of examples of what shouldn't be happening and how horrible that can be. These are examples of what it should look like and like I think especially our sisters from Detroit said, that partnership is critical and it's very important. I heard that the lawyers follow the lead of the organized and of the impacted residents. And finally, I think you heard more than utility issues come up here. We heard welfare rights. We heard climate justice. So I think there is this question of we understand utility justice isn't a silo fight. It's totally interconnected to many other issues. So those are some of the different areas that were brought up. We want y'all to feel free to take this wherever you want. So we're gonna open it up now for questions and comments. Just raise your hand and we'll call on you. We hope everyone gets a chance to ask or share. Let me just get a sense of how many people have burning questions right now. Okay, okay, let's start with you. Hi, my question is not important. And please introduce yourself, name, organization. My name is Sean Mark. I'm with the Roger Williams Law School, my first year law student. My background is in criminal justice. I was police officer for eight years. And now I'm one of the officers for about four. And my question is about in Detroit, I know there was something that happened with the water. And I wanted to know the demographics of the people who were affected by the water. Not so much a shutoff, but we couldn't drink it because it wasn't clear enough. You know, Detroit is a microcosm of things that are happening around the world. And because of our arrogance, because it's a majority African-American city, Latino-American city, Middle Eastern, outside of the Middle East, the largest number of Middle Easterners live in Detroit. And we work together at all these factories. So we don't bomb each other and that kind of thing. We marry each other's family members. We steal each other's cars. We live together. And we have been living together for a very long time. As things began to change and the economic basis of the city started to change, something happened called an emergency management. And that's when the governor said, you people in Detroit are just too stupid when all these people live in, too stupid to figure out what you need to do and fix yourselves. So what we're gonna do is appoint someone to be the director of your city who reports only to me. That person replaces the mayor of the city council and this person has authoritative powers. And we got that in Detroit. We got that in Benton Harbor. We got that in Pontiac. We got that in E-Course. We got that in Flat Rock. We got that in a lot of places including Flint. And in Flint, it became easier and cheaper if rather than pay for clean water, just put a hose in the Flint River and let it go to the houses. We're looking at three years of people in Flint being poisoned and the first year and a half they didn't even know it. And they're drinking the water and drinking the water. This is a question of economic injustice. But the thing that always stood out to me was that all of America knew that the right to vote was taken away from folks in Michigan and it was okay. It was all right that that happens in Mississippi all the time. It's okay that that happens in Georgia all the time. But the fact that it came up North and folks said this city, this state is going to be ruled by whoever I choose and everybody in this room knew it. Everybody that watches a Rachel Maddow, everybody that's ever seen MSNBC knew it. And nobody came to our aid. We ain't even mad at you. We ain't mad at you. The only message is be warned because this nightmare is coming to a city near you. I'd like to ask, is there any state where you're experiencing the same thing of the state taking over a certain area? Central Falls, Rhode Island. Yeah. Right here, Rhode Island. Yeah. Okay, around what issue? Any case? The whole issue. The whole issue. The whole issue. And what happened in the year? Any other states? One more thing, you know the loaded Jurassic Park. Jeff Goldblum makes this statement in the beginning. First, it's oozing out and then it turns into running and screaming. Let's remember that. And I'll say it from a Georgia, we have a vote coming up in November where the state wants to take over the education system in Atlanta, the school system. So there's a vote around that. So, I'll begin. I have a question. Due to the water issue and the water issue, utilities, that ruins people's credits and it's like most of us are lawyers. Do they ever think about that? Just because they're low income now, because of that situation they're unable to even purchase homes due to them always having bad credit with the utilities or water and heating. So, what the system's doing is just setting you up to fail because you can never get beyond what they're holding down to. So, I think that's some of the issues that I like to raise with the lawyers and the lawyers don't touch when you wanna clean up your credit and the injustice that's on it. They're just wearing the vote, you know, other issues but those are issues because I know in Georgia if your credit's bad it'll let you rehearse and that's spreading throughout. So, that's the fact of where you said land and home is for everyone. Well, when they're holding you back and you're poor and your credit's bad you're still in the same rock in the same condition of being homeless because the landlords won't not let you. If even jobs now won't give you a job, if you have a PhD but if your credit's bad how are you ever gonna get out of any situation if they keep putting out new boundaries on it? You're absolutely right. And that's one of the key areas that you've been focusing on in pushing back against the industry called retail energy service companies. They're basically criminal enterprises. We've said that in a series of proceedings in the case I don't feel any problem with saying that to you here. In fact, I said it in an op-ed in the paper last week. One of the things that we've been able to get some movement from our equity regulators a little bit more from the Blackwood, you know, and Asian caucus in the state of New York which is in the state legislature. And we've told them that these energy service companies come in, they slam you, and probably no one in the room is old enough to remember what long distance was and when it was separate, but they come in. And I talked to people both at the age of 30 who were like, what's long distance? So these companies come in and they come to your door and they say, there's a new law. We're here to save you money. Show us your energy bill and we'll tell you we can save you money. Now the first lie is there's a new law. The second lie is they're gonna save you money. They look at your bill. They write down your account numbers and they go back to their headquarters and they switch you to their service which is due to the three or four times the expense of what you pay to the utility which ain't cheap to begin with. So in New York over the past six years we've gone from across the entire state 300 million in arrears from utility customers 60 days or older to 900 million in arrears. And a lot of that comes from the activities of these companies. So we went to the state legislature and we said, these criminal enterprises are harming your constituents and when their credit gets ruined by this, because it does, they can't rent a car. They can't buy a house. They can't rent a nice apartment. They can't get a job. They can't buy insurance. All these things that they can't do anymore and we challenge the legislature, you gotta do something. So it's my hope and my belief that in 2017 we'll get a new law. I actually wrote the original law back eight years ago called the ESCO that is an interview service company Bill writes. Took a year and they got around that. We're gonna try again this year and write something a little bit more strict. We're gonna put it in penalties that'll essentially issue a hunting license to attorneys who want to go after these companies because we need to do as much as we can to take them out of the business of serving local households, residential households and by the way, we can't have them serve small commercial enterprises because that's where the jobs come from in our city community. So we gotta keep them away from all the most vulnerable New Yorkers and just drive them out of business, plain and simple. So you're absolutely right. I wish you would spread the word around because it's something that everybody needs to know. You know, I just want to say that it's a really great question. It makes me think about as lawyers, particularly when we are providing direct legal assistance in this context to utility consumers, we're oftentimes focused on solving the most immediate pressing problem, right? The crisis, which usually is, my utilities are about to be shut off or they've already been shut off. And so our focus is stopping that or getting your services back on. And what we've found here in Rhode Island is that the right to adequate notice, the right to a fair hearing before your service gets turned off that none of that was really being provided. And so that's a lot of what we focused on, but you're right that getting somebody's service turned back on or preventing them from being shut off doesn't solve this problem of unaffordable utility bills resulting in debt accumulation and then ruining people's credit. And I think that's why, again, the link between providing legal assistance to folks who have immediate emergencies, using that as an opportunity to draw folks in to collective action, right? At the Wiley Center is really critical because it's the Wiley Center that accomplished here in Rhode Island for the first time ever a debt forgiveness program for utility services, right? So the consumer who enrolls in this and makes payments actually can eliminate part of their arrears and that is something that can actually prevent this larger issue of ruining people's credit. Is that the Henry Sheldon program? Correct. Well, that being here, I just find that that was helpful because sometimes that was another program to set people up to fail because when it first came up, came up, it was too high for someone to pay. You had to pay whatever you owe plus an additional. So if you're struggling, and I told you, it set me up to fail. So once you miss one payment, you're done. You can't get debt forgiveness closely if it's over. So let me, so you're right now describing the tension that we all live in in organizing, right? Where we have to celebrate victories, but we have to be real and transparent. And one of my favorite quotes is, I'll make a cabal, tell the people no lives, right? Claim no easy victories. That wasn't an easy victory that Henry Sheldon had. Let me tell you that. It took 17 years of organizing and it did provide people with the ability to pay 10% down, which helped thousands of people get their utilities restored. And we saw a decline in shutoffs from 30,000 down to 20,000, so it did make a difference on the ground. But were we happy with that? Was Henry happy with that? No, no. I'm not saying that. I'm just saying as you report more laws into a wicked way of seeing this perception, we can assist the Sevenths Taylor folks since the 20s to now. If people, it was hard for them to really come up with that and plus an additional. Yeah, no, it's so basically, let me give a little update, because I know we wanna focus on the Lifeline program, but I want, this is important for people to know. If you've defaulted on the Henry Sheldon Act, we've made some changes. It's called the Raridge Management Plan and it's been implemented. It took us a few years to make quantifications and exactly the point you're bringing up is one of the changes, right? So if you go into default and you miss two payments, you have a year to pay back those two payments to get back in a program. It's not a one-time only plan, which was never what the George Wiley Center intended, but we embraced the step forward to allow for people to pay 10% down and the amp program isn't perfect. You know, I would beg to say that probably none of us are happy, right? Where things are, but we need to organize with folks like yourself and everyone here in this room to make improvements, to say, yes, this is given this relief, but you know what? We're not gonna pat ourself on the back and go home and sleep well until shutoffs are dramatically decreased and everybody that shutoff has a way to get restored in a fair way, you know? And I know we've got two questions here, but I wanna have a follow-up question because this is getting to the point of, you know, what I hear as an organizer is, you know, you get what you're strong enough to take. So this win, from my perspective, is indicates how strong y'all are as a fighting force. You're strong enough to get this. This ain't nearly enough. So my question to the panelists and to y'all is, what are the organizing challenges and what are the organizing opportunities that you're seeing where we can go from maybe hundreds of people in Providence that are united to thousands of people that are united for utility justice? Because once you go from hundreds to thousands who are actively involved, who will hit the streets, who will do what's needed, then you're talking the win is gonna be big. So what does it take to get there? Let's celebrate where we are, but we gotta go a lot further. So from y'all, you know, what's working with your organizing, what challenges are there, and let's see what we can learn in terms of what it's gonna take to get to the next level. Okay. We're good, Rob. Okay, all right. I'm in the hot seat here. Well, I think Tony's question is, usually because the challenges are immense, at least in the KFC, and it seems like that's probably gonna be a shared experience as we go down the panel here. The challenges are just overwhelming, but I think the flip side is that there are opportunities. And I think we have to remind ourselves, and I think it's good to be in a room full of people who are fighters to help remind us, that in spite of those challenges, people are putting in the work of already needed and even with their partners. So I think it's a, I just want to shout out to people here for coming out and having this conversation. It's helpful to kind of isolate the KFC a lot of the time, be here and to make these connections that are useful for reminding us that we can work through those challenges. I think the, where we see what's working, I think is partly what brings us into the room with this kind of legal and organizing partnership and I think Rob mentioned, really the goal of so much of the legal work is to connect people to move, to connect people to collective action. And for us, really, that's the essential piece and how we work with PULT is the basic know your rights stuff. We have had this great law, but I can tell you the first time I looked at this fat PDF on the computer, I was like, I don't know how to, I can't wrap my head around this. I think that's true for everybody and it's even worse when you're in crisis. Having folks who helped us kind of distill that, get the, what are the rights that are really contained in this complex up? How do you use them was essential. We call that strategy the sword and shield strategy. The shield is the legal defense, right? It's that ability to know your rights, the ability to avert the crisis yourself, right? People do this when they come to the organization. They learn their rights, they get on the phone, they file a consumer complaint. That initial line of defense and getting out of the crisis which is a shut off tomorrow. Kids won't be able to do their homework tomorrow as the lights are out. That's really essential because I think it opens up space to the organization. We found, and that's why we call it the other aspect, the sword, the shield defends you, but the sword is that you need to go on the offensive to change the structures that are in place, to challenge the corporations that are trying to create utilities. So I think we found what's working is to use both pieces side by side. I think what we found on the flip side is that people are in crisis. The need to meet that, even with the rights education, even with filing a factory consumer complaint, is overwhelmed by the amount of stress and stress in people's lives. And I don't think we found the right, I don't think any single organization can just focus its energies on one issue at a time and think that that's gonna meet people's needs, right? Because our members come in with issues around education, issues around other aspects of housing, around their status, their citizenship status. Those things are swirling all the time. Think of an organization to meet those challenges. We're discovering, we're in the process of discovering that we need to be branching out and fighting on many fronts at once and connecting with the groups and the organizations that are fighting on those fronts as well. So I think we're seeing some success with the Sword and Shield model. We're also seeing some limits. So I'll stop there. I'd like to add on to what Spencer was saying. We have the great pleasure of working with groups like Nellie and Wichita, where we were so pleased at how quickly they picked up this, you know, article two of the public service law, you know, 30 separate pieces of statute that are very complicated, but that are, that are really powerful in protecting people who are at their wit's end. We gain them that space to figure out what the next step is. But as Spencer pointed out, as Tony pointed out before, people don't come to you knowing that their issue is necessarily, but they certainly don't come to you with one issue. There are always a bunch of them. The trick is where we have the ability to help. Where our partners have the ability to help, either in direct partnerships with, like with Nellie Leesman Hudson or with Push Both Buffalo or Canva Legal Services in New York City or with virtual partnerships, we help them to get that space for the family and for the families, because we only get entire high-rise buildings in the city that have no gas for a year or something like that. What you think is impossible in New York City, but happens more often than you think. So we get that space to do the next piece of organizing. As a law firm, we don't do a lot of frontline organizing anymore, although I, myself, like Tony I'm a former union organizer. My number two, my chief administrator, is 35 years in the affordable housing movement. She invented most of the affordable housing programs in the state of New York. My number three attorney, spent 35 years with the welfare rights flights back to the 70s. And so we have all this background, which enables us to work to create virtual partnerships and also to know what the other pieces are that are touching on this one narrow area that we do, which is utilities. But I think for us, working closely with groups, like Nellie Leesman Hudson, finding new groups that can learn that kind of skill and to help push back in the neighborhoods and forth to us too. And then to spread that through virtual partnerships, and we work with groups all over the state. There are only five of us in my organization. We say we're a small organization on a big mission. We're trying to work with a state of 20 million people where they're over a million shut-offs a year. There are eight million final termination notices that we sent out of here. When we talk about water, people are being shut off against their rights every day. When we talk about telephone, people's phone is being shut off at home because they have no money on their cable bill on this bundle package. And so you lose 9-1-1 because you didn't pay for watching, and I don't know what kind of crap you're watching on TV, but you shouldn't lose 9-1-1 for that. And so we're fighting with this kind of thing all the time, and I know we're all the same way. I mean, I would assume that we all have a similar background to some extent. We've all went through the same war, and we're continuing to fight them. And thank you for doing that. I just want to say, I think the other aspect here is to engage the media, and that can magnify the actions that are being taken. And also to continue to poke and poke and prod from this angle and that angle, and to be flexible enough to be able to swing into defensive action. So, for example, to capitalize on opportunities as they were presented. So when there were a group of activists who were really outraged about this wrecking company going from house to house, the water department actually fired a demolition company to terminate water services to 1,500 to 3,000 households a week, which was the goal of getting to 70,000 households by the end of the summer. And they used sledgehammers to basically destroy the connecting mechanism so that it would be much more expensive to reconnect service. That's all. We could help prevent that. What was, there was a group of activists who saw this and decided that they were going to sit down in front of the wrecking trucks at the dispatch center. And they sat there for the first day for eight hours. And legal observers were organized and went out to watch what was going on and to be there for when they were arrested to defend them. The case kept just snowballed. I mean, it got to the point where when some of the activists wanted to represent themselves without counsel and that's important to respect. And other activists had counsel. They actually, the case was actually tried before a jury. And as the jury was going into deliberations after the case had been put in, where these defendants were raising the necessity defense for their civil disobedience, the plaintiffs, the city of Detroit, went, their attorneys went to a higher court and got an injunction to stop the jury from delivering these. Because they did not want to be humiliated with what they anticipated would be the verdict based on how the jury was reacting to the case as it was put in. That's the kind of thing that's just a natural opportunity for the press that we were able to capitalize on. The same was true in Mary. Maureen can talk about her persistent effort to bring in the U.S. We're talking about that in the Vatican. Go ahead. You know, by trade, I'm a master level social worker. And I got to that because I thought there's something wrong in what happens in this country to poor people. I'm traveling around the country and, you know, little children picking tomatoes that look like everybody in this room and seniors at food stamp offices trying to find out how they can raise their food stamp amount from $16 to $20. You know, these kind of fights. And, you know, there's a seeding and a boiling anger. I'm not talking about the Trump and the Tea Party. But there is an anger and an unsettleness across this country about why is it so hard to be poor? Why does it have to hurt to be poor? Why does it have to be a death sentence to be low income? On the back of my Wilbur Wright shirt, it says, you get what you organize to take. And I believe that the problem we have, and why we can't be more successful, is that most of us are afraid. Well, that's my fear. If you have to go out here, and I'm not talking about policemen because we can, you know, co-op them and, you know, they can become our friends. But it's something about this fight for social justice that scares the heebie-jeebies out most folks. If your battle is about the business of making certain that there are minimum standards, and minimum standards mean is a great book. This says, article number 25, everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of, it says, himself, you know, who wrote it. Including food, clothing, housing, medical care, and the necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age, or other lack of livelihood and circumstances beyond that person's control. This is a book called, a little pamphlet called, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Somebody figured this stuff out a long time ago. This is not news. The cost of living is going up. Chances of living are going down. We're fighting from coast to coast about water. In Michigan, we surrounded by the sweetest water on earth. But we can't get it if you can't pay for it. What kind of precedent is this that we're setting? And I tell you, my sisters and brothers, this fight is going on because most of us are afraid. We're talking about laying your life down to say, I'm not taking this. Standing Rock Native Americans, I'm not taking this. The moral majority down south, I'm not taking this. It comes to a point where when I go into a welfare office and I say I'm here to represent somebody on food stamps being shut off or being reduced, and they tell me well the district manager's not available to see you now. I take my earrings off, I always get my clothes off. I take my clothes off and I start teaching. My name is Maureen Taylor. I work with welfare rights. And let me tell you what your rights are in this office right now. Before I can talk about too many things, the district manager poof, suddenly arrived. I'm sorry, but that's because I decided a long time ago, I know where I'm going. Now most of the people in this room at some point, you all are going to die, not me. You all are going to leave this place. But at the moment that I'm called home, there won't be any questions because I know how I live my life. I live my life to make certain that this question of poverty becomes a footnote in the dictionary that people can read used to have. My fight is for this child who I don't know seeing her for the first time. And I don't want her to live ugly. There's no question about it. We can't do better until we decide what kind of country we want. What do you want to do? You want some folks to 1% to have it all? What do you want to do? You want the 5% to have it all? Or do you want to do what Spock and Kirk said? And that's in a discussion on Star Trek. Their boyfriend said, Mr. James Kirk, never forget, the needs of the many must always outweigh the needs of the few. We already got the message. We live this way because we're chicken. I ain't. Most of the people is Roman now. But that's why we can't do it. I'm curious about filing the petition. Would you like to give a background about that? And would you give up that? May I, Mr. Chair, very quickly. I was so disgusted at the lack of attention that the city and the state was paying to these water shuttles. And then I met some folks that said, why don't you talk to the individuals in the union? How are we going to do that? So I started writing letters. And I emailed. You have to come and you have to do something. You have to come and you have to do something. You have to come and you have to do something. And I wrote those letters for months. And I didn't miss a week. I wrote every week and sent a letter. And at the top of the letter, the same letter, they had one. Next week, they said two. They said three. So it was clear what I was doing. After several months, I got a call from the United Nations saying, we're sick of this mail. What do you want us to do? That's how it started. And that's how they ended up coming to Detroit. I started at the same time writing Pope Francis. You got to do something about the water. You got to do something about the water. You got to do something about the water. I wrote that letter for two and a half years. I got a call from the Vatican three weeks ago. They said, we've been looking at that stupid letters you've been writing on those emails. And we would like you to come to Rome. We'll pay for your trip. And we're going to put you up. Of course, I thought it was a great call. I'll leave for the Vatican next Tuesday. And we're going to talk to you. And you have to get to an old roller stand. And just keep writing. This is the best you can do. Thank you. Hi. My name is Steve Fishback. I'm a lawyer, a legal aid lawyer here. I do a lot of racial justice work there. And I have a Google question, which might. Many folks don't feel like you can answer a legal question. I work with a group of lawyers and community folks from the country, including the race of the year, Detroit, on trying to improve the way that the federal government enforces a civil rights law called Title VI, the Civil Rights Act. And to spare with me for a second, it's a legal question, so take a while. The houses of the Civil Rights Act, mostly for the people in the audience, is a law that bars recipients of federal funds from discriminating on the basis of race, color, or national origin. There's also a similar law that protects people on the basis of handicapped. I'm less familiar with that, but I'm more familiar with Title VI. And the people that I've been working with around the country have been trying to increase the number of administrative complaints filed with federal agencies to get them to investigate practices of recipients that have discriminatory outcomes. And I think this is an area right for utility justice work because every single public utilities commission receives federal funds. And the agency, probably for them would be the Department of Energy. I've done a lot of environmental justice work and have lived experience in EPA. I can tell you how bad their Title VI enforcement program is. But they're folks in the Justice Department that are really interested in trying to improve this. So my question to you is, have you considered using Title VI of the Civil Rights Act to remedy, for example, the situation with Laundry in Charlottesville, Detroit, or even just the rate increases? So that's the question. We haven't, in Flint, the EPA complaint is filed with the EPA. But that group of lawyers who are working on that issue there, we have filed three water cases over time. The first case was based on a state appropriations bill statute that provided that the state was to pay a certain amount for water to prevent shutoffs or to restore service. And our governor back in 1991 just decided to rewrite the policy irrespective of what the legislative mandate was. That was a nice, clean, simple, easy case. So that case was based on a clear law. It was filed on behalf of a few individuals whose water had been shut off for mandamus relief or for the court to order the government to do what it was supposed to do. And the policy was rewritten and water was provided. That was now your order. In 2004, we filed an administrative complaint with the Board of Water Commissioners to get the Board to develop a water affordability plan. And it was through that process that Roger Colton, a national, actually international ex-purposed hire, to develop Detroit's plan. And then the push was to push that plan through the city council, which did occur. The problem then was implementation, which got started, fits and starts. And of course, it was a pardon the pun, but a watered-down plan, because that's what happens in this process. You only get as much as you're able to win in a legislative process. But even that watered-down water affordability plan basically went nowhere. And then we're now at the Son of Sam with a massive water shut off. So that was a federal court administrative and anniversary proceeding filed in bankruptcy court, because that's where we were stuck. The city was in a bankruptcy proceeding. And it depends on appeal at this point in the sixth circuit. But we haven't done that. I know that the water lawyers who are looking at the Flint situation have filed complaints with the Environmental Protection Agency on those grounds. So that's the next step. I mean, we really need to push that. I think that does make a lot of sense. One of the important things also to know about is how the sixth is that you don't need a lawyer. That's true. So this is stopped by community people being on their own. Of course, it might make a lot more sense to do it with a public lawyer. But I mean, that's also one of the views of this particular law, is that the legal piece doesn't have to be there as much. And actually, it's very critical to organizers, because the agency doesn't do anything with your complaint, you know what they're having to respond. So this is a challenge to y'all. Anyone else with this topic? I'll just add, we haven't filed any administrative complaints under Title VI. But our litigation was initially focused on these gross violations of the Rhode Island regulations, and also the failure to provide basic procedural due process to consumers facing termination. But once we sort of cleared the initial hurdle and got some traction in this lawsuit, we got an injunction to stop National Grid and the utility in a regulator from shutting off service to these consumers, then we started to develop our wish list. Well, what would we like? And one of the things that seemed really basic was interpretation services at administrative hearings at the Division of Public Utilities, which the policy up until now at the Division of Public Utilities in Rhode Island was if you want interpretation, you can go find somebody and bring that person here. But we're not going to provide interpretation services, even though we get funding from the federal, the US Department of Transportation, and that funding requires us to have a language access plan. So we amended our complaint to include a cause of action under Title VI, and I think we're confident now that that's an issue that we're going to have success on. And we haven't done anything with Title VI really in New York, because every time we bring that up, suddenly someone finds a new right, somebody they're going to hand out in the context of our arguments. But I think it's something to look at, because we're having a problem with National Grid, which is a big part of New York State's utility business. Particularly in New York City, they're the monopoly gas provider for a beating and for coding. And there is a pattern that seems to be arising in the way that they're shutting people off or not giving them an affordable deferred payment agreement, which is an absolute right in New York under the CASP of the Home Energy Fair Practices Act. So we're starting to gather as much as we can in the way of records, and then we're going to do some statistical analysis and see if we can find some kind of disparate impact or something that we can then take a couple of legal hearings and walk into court to see what we can do. So thank you for the idea. I have a follow-up question. I've heard y'all talk about there's a lot of immediate steps we have to take. We have to stop or shutoffs where we can, get interpretation. I think we all know, we all talk about utility justice. So I just want to stop a second and hear from y'all a reminder of what do y'all understand is utility justice and what is the big goal, right? We all know there's going to be multiple fights along the way. But if we aren't clear where we're going, we certainly aren't going to get there. So I just want us to stop for a second and hear from y'all when y'all talk about utility justice and the ultimate goal of what utility justice looks like, what is that? I mean, so there's a long legacy, even a state of Rhode Island, of the idea that utilities should be controlled by consumers. And at the George Wiley Center, we think the people that are most vulnerable can actually be the most powerful, right? That's kind of intuitive to what we're taught. We're taught this individualism type of morality where people feel blamed, right? They come to our meetings. Sometimes they're ashamed to even bring their bill out to share. And we work through that process, the consciousness raising, where people can start talking about the root causes and the immortality of a system that allows for them to be shut off or face shut off, right? So the questions that you're talking about, as far as organizing up to scale, multiplying our movement, we need everybody in this room to help us volunteer, to help us with resources. Because this is a struggle, right, between corporate greed and people's needs. It's between the stockholders' interests and people's right to survive. And how we piece it together, that movement, is by pulling together everybody's skills, right? So Shane Ward is one of the plaintiffs, right, taking care of his mother, who has a lot of health issues, including dementia and Alzheimer's, right? Ed gives rides to people. Ed and Calvin gives rides to people who can't get out of their homes to our meetings, right? Let's see, volunteers with grant writing. Maggie, you know, comes to endless meetings, right? So we all have different skills. We might not all have financial assets to contribute, but if you don't have the time and you have the money, we need resources, right, to fight this struggle. But we all need to figure out our role, what are our skills, who are our network, and help us bring people together to define this issue and redefine it, reframe it, and turn that shame that people are feeling, because we know that most oppressed people are the people that are gonna feel the depress, right? The most depressed, they're gonna blame themself, we're gonna blame ourself, not think that we're smart enough because we don't have the right degrees, but the reality is the people that have suffered under utility injustice the most to the worst degree are the ones that have the vision and strategy that we need to listen to and bring together. So I hope everybody here can think about how we can contribute if it's time, if it's financial, if it's white noise collective, does childcare, right? All of us have a role to play in shift in power. So that way utility customers, especially utility customers that are medically vulnerable, that are shut off, right? They think they're shut out of the system, pushed away, marginalized. They're not shut out of power. We can build power together and we have. We've won some victories, are we happy? No, but we gotta continue to organize, and it's all of you that give me hope that we can build to a bigger level and redefine utility justice, because right now we're in that moment where we have to look at, what are the solutions to climate change? Are they fault solutions that are gonna harm low-income people? We need to make sure that poor people, people of color at the forefront and are listened to as part of environmental issues and climate justice that we do not pick our issues, right? That we become so single issue with environmental issues or climate change that we don't think about the cost and if it's gonna increase shutoffs, right? And harm our neighbors in the sake of saving the world. We can't save the world, right? Without organizing together. So that's a long answer. I think, you know, in Rhode Island, there was an attempt to actually have consumer councils, utility consumer councils. It was the initiative. You know, we have statewide meetings and chapter meetings across the state. It's the nucleus, right? It's like a prefigurative structure where we need to build more power. We need to build more power with workers, the unemployed and everybody, allies, professionals, academics, lawyers, and we need to push back on utilities as a symbol, as a symbol of a system that is benefiting the few at the expense of the many. I will say of a welfare rights position is that human beings need to strive for the same utility rights that are enjoyed by people's pets. If you don't feed a doll, if you don't water the cat and the neighbors find out, they go call ISIS. I will be called. Everybody on earth is going to be called to your neighborhood if you don't give your doll. Or if you don't give your doll or your cat the water to drink. So I, you know, we raise this, you know, of course it's irony. But we raise this that human beings at least deserve the same kind of respect and utility rights as your pets. And for whatever reason, again, you know, it's a question of fear. You know, we haven't gotten to that yet. The narrative's getting in the way. Well, you know, I heard about Marilyn because somebody said that she drinks. Well, I heard about you because somebody said that you use drugs that I heard about you and you know, somebody said you might be gay. And all of these narratives that go on that make people say, well, you know, I heard about that welfare mother who has 10 children by 15 different men. The math doesn't work. But if you denigrate a narrative, the only good Indian is a dead Indian. Say all kinds of things. Welfare recipients, they just not right. Gay people. They not going to heaven. If you say those things, hate feel over and over and over again, then somebody knocks on my door, there won't be anybody there to help me. And that's how this works. This one is not right. This one is not right. This one is not right. Aren't we at least as good as your dog or your cat? So that would be the goal. At least be able to be respected, at least as good as final. Scrapping up now, I want to ask everyone who has a question that's at least here the question, right? And we'll try to get some answers. So you have a question you want to hear. So I want to take multiple questions. So I'll stand up briefly. My name is, I'm a 1L right now at Roger Lynn's Law School. I'm also giving all a clear shot here. I'm the chairman of Providence Water. So my question for you is the challenge that we face running utility is really twofold. On the one hand, when we step above that riskiest demographic that you're all helping right now, you have the middle class who are sort of skating along but are struggling with rates that are increasing very quickly. And the reason that they're increasing is that we are under a substantial number of mandates to make sure that we continue to provide clean, reliable drinking water to the public. We have 500 miles of cast iron pipe which laid some time between the Civil War in 1950. We have thousands of blood service lines. We have daily challenges attacking the system. To what extent are you able to help advocate or do you see your role advocating beyond just that safety net but helping us address the larger rate issue we're facing right now? Okay. Any other questions? Where? The gentleman. Oh, sure. So I'm serving on the member of the province at WWW, where a labor union, a radical labor union. And I guess my question is not necessarily a convoluted but it's a commentary to one of the initial questions that you initially mentioned. Because it sounds like basically my concern is similar to the woman who stepped out earlier about people who don't qualify for the programs that you guys have been able to win. That's where my family and myself are in. Those are the people that I care about. There are a lot of people who just fall through the cracks. I'm worried about those people and the ways in which we fight. And honestly, I don't think the legal route is the way to fight. And it sounds like y'all like knowledge that there are limits to the legal route and do value on the ground organizing. And so that's what I'm wondering about. Like, I personally feel that we need to be connecting our issues that we're facing with utility and connect them to broader issues with housing altogether. And I think that it looked like talking about rent increases, talking about general conditions in a house that impact people's health and all that type of stuff in ways that, again, don't point us to the courts, point to the legal system, but instead can build our confidence to fight where we're at. And we're in our houses, we're in our neighborhoods. And so we need to fight there. We need to fight against the landlord class there. That's the thing I would like to push back against the language that's being used around utility and justice and consumers. We're not simply consumers, we're workers. Even if we're unemployed, we're part of the working class and we're poor. So we need to see ourselves as that and develop a defense that's a class-wide defense. Because otherwise, we're only gonna see ourselves as supposedly rightfully consumers who are rightfully owned systems. Honestly, utility companies shouldn't exist. We don't need capitalism. And that's the problem that I don't think that is being really addressed here. The problem is capitalism is not only greed. So how can we organize beyond moments of defense and move on towards an ongoing organizing that builds a long-term power? And I do think that things like a renters union that's guided by militant tactics is a way to do that. But I also anticipate some challenges because I still see that there's housing justice and then there's utility justice. So I'm wondering, what are the challenges in bringing up utility issues within a broader housing struggle? That makes sense. Thank you, brother. Before we turn it over to y'all for the last comment, any other questions or comments? I just want to make a comment. My name is Jimmy Smith. I'm a first year law student at Argy Woodhouse. I really like what the two ladies said in the middle. I really do think being poor is a death sentence. Part of that is... So you say two ladies in the middle? Yes. Right. And I agree with both of you that being poor is a death sentence. Part of that is actually what you said, that we need to change our perspectives in terms of the media. Let's be clear, there is a one percent in this country but let's also be clear that we can use some of those resources from the one percent. I think part of that would be changing how poor people, immigrants, are portrayed in the media because if they see it as people not just taking a handout that they won't see a benefit from, then I don't think they'll be willing to go up and build those resources. So for me, I think that's a huge change perspective of poor people in the media. That's just my comment. I really agree with your two statements. Thank you. Thank you. We've got some panelists out here too. You can hear y'all's wisdom too. So y'all, we're at the end time. I want to turn it over for our panelists for one brief final comment. And I want to tell you all, obviously this conversation is a dialogue that has to continue. So one is if you want to contact any of these people, their information is on the back of this. Right? So you can direct. If you didn't have questions, you can get another comment. You can put it out there. I think y'all signed in so we can send information out and maybe it can be like a little listserv. But we want to really thank y'all for coming, for participating, for putting out your wisdom and ideas. And I think one thing we all agree on is to win. We have to organize. We have to build our power. We have to fight. And we have to be clear what we're fighting about. So we don't have answers to all these questions, but we've got to get clear on that. So I'm going to ask our panelists, since we don't have a lot of time, I want each of y'all to briefly say, as everyone goes home, what is the one thing you hope people leave this meeting with? Because a lot was said, we go home, we're like, what happened in that meeting? What were they talking about? What is the one thing you hope people here leave with? Yeah, again, thanks everybody for coming out. I think I would like everyone to leave with an idea that utilities are an entry point, right? They're an entry point in that, I think when we start demanding things around our rights, let's say UN, the hope to each other, to our community, to our landlords, our utility providers. When we start asserting things as rights, there's something transformative about that, right? It says there's a problem embedded in the system between this corporate greed and my need. So I don't think we should see it as the only entry point, maybe that speaks to a question that was raised, right? There are many entry points. I think looking at this as a strategic entry point and then trying to find what the transformative demands are to say an end to shutoffs, not less shutoffs, not fewer shutoffs, not easier shutoffs, an end to shutoffs, to make that, to assert that, that all people should have access to water. Those things open up with water conversation against that route. So as an entry point, for us, ideologically, I think it's an entry point for people into the movement, right? You have folks who have started utilities that are fighting around other issues in the community. I think that's a takeaway I would leave us with. See it as an entry point, so let's continue to open it up. Thank you. And let us be a little briefly. Oh, sure. Let me try and do this in four very simple points. First, there's a reason why I have a housing expert and why I have a welfare law expert, why I myself am a union organizer and I was also a community organizer and other people are union officials that are on my staff. There's a reason that we have all these things on my staff because all these elements work together. That's number one. Number two, know your rights because when you know your rights, you have power in your hands. Number three, know what the dialogue of power is and know what your opponent wants. Because when you know what they want, then you can figure out your way to victory. Now, fourth thing, always good to have attorneys around. Sometimes they're funny, but often enough, you can use them in a way that helps you to spread your dialogue into the media, to the people with power in our society that is your elected officials and to the people in your neighborhoods. Five, I lied, I didn't lie. It's supposed to be one. It's probably as broadly as possible to find coalitions that bring power to the various parts of your advocacy. So don't just stick with the people who already know what you know and do what you do, but look for the people that know and do all of the other pieces of your advocacy because we have to win every battle. The guys on the other side only have to win once. And to win every battle means that we gotta have as many people on our side with as much knowledge and energy as possible. And thank you all for having me. It may sound right, but you all heard it said that if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem. So find your place. Find your place into where you fit in. If your lawyers find a method to support the three problems that we have found to be successful in Detroit are agitate, litigate, legislate, and keep agitating. And that goes back to the point where we are now. Capitalism cannot be repaired. It's flawed, and it must die. It will not die of natural causes. It has to be healed. It has to be healed. It has to be healed. It has to be healed. It has to be cured. It has to be healed. I also say, there's too much pain in suffered by lower income benefits. is just too much. And if we care for the country, and if we care for each other, we will find a way to make water accessible, housing accessible, health care accessible, all of the things that people need to survive, we will find a way to make those things successful. The folks in the yachts are doing good, but the folks in the rowboats are in big trouble. We have to lift all ships, and we start with the dispossessed. You cannot put enough band-aids on capitalism. It won't work. So now we have to start thinking about something else. Thank you so much for the invitation to be here, and for this wonderful hotel room that you made for me. So we really need to all be leaders here. We're going to be leaders in different ways. Sometimes it means that we need to organize with other people around common demands. And sometimes it means that we're going to be very lonely. So whether someone's going to law school, or whatever profession, trade that you're going into, whatever skills, whatever vision you have for your life, in order to have integrity and bring the world into a step toward the vision and values that we want to be proud about, that we don't have to feel guilty and embarrassed or shameful, we all need to figure out how we can be leaders together and for ourselves. And sometimes that's going to mean change of professions. Sometimes that's going to mean losing friends. Sometimes that's going to mean making new friends. But I encourage you all, and I want to be part of that movement together, where we all can build the type of movement we need. So in this fundamental question of, what is utility justice? Utility justice is what the George Wiley Center has been fighting for for, I think, over three decades now, which is what you pay for your utility service should be determined by your means. That's a really basic concept of fairness. And as I mentioned before, this really the lifeline project, our campaign for the last two years, has really been an education for me on this issue. And one of the things that I've learned is that we have to reject this, unfortunately, what is a prevailing logic among any regulators that we need to shut off service to people who don't pay their bills, because otherwise the rates are going to go up for everyone else. And that's just not true. That's actually not true. Providing affordable payment plans for everybody, both reduces shutoffs. It brings more revenue into the system, but also dramatically reduces the cost to us as a community and society that result from devastating termination of electric water and gas service to people. So that's the truth about this issue, and we need to let people know that.