OFF-KILTER with Rebecca Vallas

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For this week’s episode, Rebecca sat down with Troy N. Miller, who’s long served as the Off-Kilter podcast’s beloved “man behind the curtain,” aka executive producer. When he’s not producing Off-Kilter, the Zero Hour, Breaking Through, and other progressive podcast/radio programs, Troy serves as West Virginia organizer and special projects director at Social Security Works and at-large member of the West Virginia State Democratic Executive Committee. In what was Troy’s first time crossing over to appear as a guest on the podcast, Rebecca and Troy had a far-ranging conversation about the story behind the “21st Century Economic Bill of Rights” adopted by the West Virginia State Democratic Executive Committee last month; why it matters for states to adopt these kinds of nonbinding resolutions; myth versus fact when it comes to West Virginia politics; Troy’s path to getting involved with West Virginia politics; the role of progressive radio and podcasting in the larger movement for social and economic justice and how Troy’s decade in the progressive radio world has shaped him as an advocate; and lots more.

Links from this episode:

Learn more about West Virginia’s recently adopted economic bill of rights here
Subscribe to Troy’s Substack: The Blue Ridge Breakdown
Here’s the piece by Harvey Kaye and Alan Minsky calling for a renewal of FDR’s economic bill of rights for the 21st century

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Wealth is a word that gets thrown around a lot, especially in economic conversations and spaces. The most basic definition is what you own minus what you owe. But as Aisha Nyandoro—CEO of Springboard to Opportunity and architect of the Magnolia Mother’s Trust—argues in her recent Tedx Talk, it’s time to redefine wealth in the United States. In her words, “for too long, we have allowed financial institutions to define wealth and the process by which we buildi it.” So for this week’s episode of Off-Kilter, Rebecca sat back down Aisha for a far-ranging conversation about how we define wealth and why it matters; Aisha’s own journey to answer the question of what wealth means to her; how the women who are part of the Magnolia Mother’s Trust answer that question; the relationship between wealth and liberation; how guaranteed minimum income can be part of the path to building a society where everyone has access to true wealth; money and spirituality; and more.

Links from this episode:

Watch’s Aisha’s Tedx Talk here: “What Does Wealth Mean to You?”
Follow Aisha on Twitter/X @aisha_nyandoro
Here are some prior episodes of Off-Kilter with Aisha featuring more on her work, including the Magnolia Mother’s Trust: “Your Work Is Not Your Worth” and “Self-Care Is Political Warfare”

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For this week’s episode of Off-Kilter, with October as National Disability Employment Awareness Month, Rebecca sat down with two leaders at JP Morgan Chase (JPMC) who are at the forefront of advancing disability employment within the business and employer community: Bryan Gill, head of JP Morgan Chase’s Office of Disability Inclusion and the firm’s global head of neurodiversity, and Nan Gibson, executive director of JP Morgan Chase’s PolicyCenter. They had a far-ranging conversation about the story behind JPMC’s Office of Disability Inclusion and how it’s working to remove barriers to hiring and successful employment for disabled people at JPMC; why disability employment and inclusion is both the right thing to do and a business strategy; how JPMC’s PolicyCenter is advancing policy and legislative reform to promote disability employment and inclusion across the workforce as a whole; how asset limits hurt JPMC’s disabled employees and why JPMC is engaged in the national push to update SSI’s antiquated asset limits; efforts JPMC has underway to better serve customers with disabilities as a group who’ve largely been overlooked within the financial sector; and lots more.

Links from this episode:

Learn more about Bryan’s work as JPMC’s head of neurodiversity and the Office of Disability Inclusion here
Read JPMC’s brief on how SSI’s asset limits hamper economic opportunity and mobility here
Learn more about the SSI Savings Penalty Elimination Act here
Connect with Bryan and Nan on LinkedIn

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For this week’s episode of Off-Kilter, Rebecca sat down with Jen Burdick, supervising attorney of the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) unit at Community Legal Services (CLS), Rebecca’s legal aid alma mater. They had a far ranging conversation about how “eligibility doesn’t equal access” and other lessons Jen has learned throughout her years as a public benefits lawyer; the human consequences of a decade-plus of defunding the Social Security Administration, from years-long backlogs in disability cases to overpayments that wreak havoc in beneficiaries’ lives; how Jen combines her client representation with policy advocacy and why the perspective of direct service providers like legal aid lawyers is so valuable to shaping public policy and legislative reform; how outdated policies like outdated asset limits lead to inhumane surveillance of poor people’s finances; the toxicity of the collective limiting belief that poor families aren’t to be trusted with their own money, and how that shows up in the SSI program, through “dedicated accounts” that restrict how families are able to spend their benefits; and lots more.

Links from this episode:

Follow Jen and CLS on Twitter/X: @jen_burdick @clsphila and learn more about CLS’s work at clsphila.org
Here’s the Kaiser Health News story on needless SSI overpayments and how they wreak havoc in low-income beneficiaries’ lives
For more on the disinvestment in SSA’s administrative budget, check out this Off-Kilter episode
And for more on how eligibility doesn’t equal access in public assistance programs, here’s the prior Off-Kilter episode that Jen was featured in

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According to recently released Census data, poverty among older adults increased sharply again in 2022, after reaching an all-time low just two years before. One group of older Americans who’s especially struggling is older workers in physically demanding jobs. Contrary to the popular narrative that everyone’s living longer and work is getting easier, a recent task force convened by the National Academy of Social Insurance found that more than 10 million older workers are in jobs that are physically challenging and lack the resources to secure more viable jobs or retire. These workers are disproportionately low earners with lower educational attainment than the average American worker; they predominantly are workers of color and a growing share are women. For this week’s episode of Off-Kilter, we’re bringing you a panel discussion Rebecca moderated at a recent event hosted by the National Academy of Social Insurance about older workers in physically demanding jobs and the policy options the task force identified to strengthen social insurance supports to prevent poverty and hardship among this “invisible” group.

Links from this episode:

Find the NASI task force report here and watch the full event here
Learn more about the National Academy of Social Insurance at nasi.org

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For this week’s episode of Off-Kilter, Rebecca sat back down with Emily Ladau. She’s the editor of the Voices of Disability Economic Justice Project and the author of Demystifying Disability: What to Know, What to Say, and How to Be an Ally. She’s someone who’s done an immense amount throughout her career to shift narratives on disability in the United States and is a master storyteller whose many superpowers also include supporting other people in telling their stories. They had a far-ranging conversation about the Voices of Disability Economic Justice Project as it comes up on its one-year anniversary; why it’s so important for people with disabilities to get to tell their own stories; why storytelling is critical to policy and culture change; how she ended up on Sesame Street; why she wrote her book Demystifying Disability; and lots more.

Links from this episode:

Check out Emily’s book Demystifying Disability: What to Know, What to Say, and How to Be an Ally
Follow Emily on Twitter/X @emily_ladau
Learn more about the Voices project and how to write for it
Here is the Off-Kilter episode feat. Emily with writer Alex Ashley Fox on the harms that come from autistic people being forced to mask at work, and here is Alex’s Voices piece

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For this week’s episode of Off-Kilter, Rebecca sat down with longtime labor journalist Steven Greenhouse. He’s someone who really needs no introduction after spending thirty-one years at the New York Times, eighteen of which he spent covering the labor beat, until 2014. He’s also the author of The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker and Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present and Future of American Labor. And these days he’s a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, where he writes about wages and working conditions, labor organizing, and other workplace issues. In a conversation recorded the day after Labor Day, they had a far-ranging chat about the history of Labor Day in the United States; how he got into labor reporting; the rise of the U.S. labor movement and what’s behind recent declines in union participation; some of the most exciting recent developments within American labor, including successful efforts to organize Starbucks and Amazon workers; why he’s especially excited about worker-to-worker organizing as part of the future of the labor movement; and lots more.

Links from this episode:

Follow Steve on Twitter/X at @greenhousenyt
Check out Steve’s books The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker and Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present and Future of American Labor
Here’s Steve’s piece on worker-to-worker organizing and the future of American labor
Here’s his piece on union-busting at Starbucks and the holes in federal labor law that have been allowing it to happen
And find all of Steve’s writing for TCF here

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Something many of us take for granted, if we’ve never been without it, is how vitally important it is to have photo ID. In this day and age you can’t do pretty much anything without ID—from accessing public benefits to renting an apartment to voting, and so much more. So for this week’s episode, Rebecca sat back down with a dear friend who’s been leading the charge when it comes to ensuring that 26 million Americans have access to the IDs they need to escape poverty, access benefits, vote, and be fully part of American society—and that’s Kat Calvin. She’s the founder of Spread the Vote and the Project ID Action Fund and author of a new book called American Identity in Crisis: Notes from an Accidental Activist. They had a far-ranging conversation about the story behind the organizations she started and her new book; how she got involved in helping people get IDs; who doesn’t have ID in the United States and why it matters; why the U.S. ID crisis is both an economic justice issue and a democracy issue; and lots more.

Links from this episode:

Check out Kat’s new book American Identity in Crisis
Learn more about Spread the Vote and the Project ID Action Fund
Follow Kat Calvin and Spread the Vote/Project ID Action Fund on Twitter/X @KatCalvinLA @SpreadTheVoteUS
Subscribe to Kat’s newsletter, Hot Takes and Applesauce

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For this week’s episode, Rebecca sat down with Cara Reedy. She’s a journalist and the founder of a new organization called the Disabled Journalists Association (DJA)—which she’s spent the past two years setting up to identify the needs of disabled people in journalism and to amplify the voices of disabled journalists across the United States. It’s just getting off the ground and just launched its website this past week. (Check out discojourno.com to learn more, and if you’re a disabled journalist, check out the survey they’re running between now and October 2023 as they work to lay the foundation for DJA’s work.) They had a far-ranging conversation about the barriers to getting into journalism for disabled people today; the discrimination and ableism many face once they do make it into the newsroom and Cara’s own experience at a major news outlet; why inclusion in newsrooms matters to disability media coverage (and media coverage on all issues); how intentional, equitable, and diverse representation in newsrooms fits into the larger picture of disability economic justice; and lots more.

Links from this episode:

Learn more about the Disabled Journalists Association at discojourno.com
If you’re a disabled journalist, check out the survey DJA is running through October
Follow Cara on Twitter at @infamouslyshort
Nominate the changemakers you most want to hear from by emailing us at OffKilterShow@TCF.org

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For this week’s episode, Rebecca sat down with Kate Nicholson, a dear friend and colleague and a policy advocate who’s been leading the charge when it comes to fighting on behalf of people who live with chronic pain. Today she serves as the founder and executive director of the National Pain Advocacy Center. They talk about what it’s like to live with chronic pain; Kate’s path to founding NPAC; the double-edged sword of crackdowns on access to opioids in recent years; how the COVID pandemic has expanded the chronic pain community; why Kate’s work has focused so heavily on storytelling; how spiritual care is core to her self-care; why it’s time to update the archetype of lawyer in the midst of a global paradigm shift; and lots more.

Links from this episode:

Follow Kate on Twitter @speakingabtpain; follow NPAC at @national_pain; learn more about NPAC’s work; and subscribe to their newsletter
September is Pain Awareness Month—join the conversation and share your story using #RealPainStories
Nominate the changemakers you most want to hear from by emailing us at OffKilterShow@TCF.org

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For this week’s episode, Rebecca sat down with Indi Dutta-Gupta, a dear friend and colleague who’s dedicated his career to ending poverty in America and building an economy that works for everyone, not just the wealthy few. Today he serves as president and executive director of the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP), one of the nation’s leading organizations dedicated to advancing economic security and racial equity. They had a far-ranging conversation about the long road to the historic one-year expansion of the Child Tax Credit authorized as part of COVID relief and the road ahead to making a guaranteed minimum income for families with children a permanent reality in the United States; what it looks like to set a north star and work backward to create a strategy to get there; the challenges of balancing family and work as a social justice leader; why he got married with his hand on A Theory of Justice; and lots more.

Links from this episode:

Follow Indi on Twitter @IndivarD and learn more about CLASP’s work
Here’s Indi’s recent Congressional testimony assessing the twenty-five years of the Child Tax Credit; the National Academy of Sciences report on child poverty; and the Center for American Progress proposal for expanding the Child Tax Credit into a child allowance
Here’s the prior Off-Kilter episode with Representative Rosa DeLauro and others on the CTC
Nominate the changemakers you most want to hear from by emailing us at OffKilterShow@TCF.org

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For this week’s episode, Rebecca sat down with Kathleen Romig, a dear friend and colleague who today serves as the director of Social Security and disability policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, one of the nation’s leading organizations that focuses on economic and budget policy for low-income families. To mark the eighty-eighth anniversary of Social Security, they had a far-ranging conversation about the history behind the program, who’s helped by Social Security today, and why there’s no room for cuts; the importance of moving beyond technocratic, budget-focused narratives to put people at the center of policy; the human consequences of bureaucratic disentitlement; Kathleen’s own path to combining heart and head in her work and how that’s made her a more effective policy advocate; and more.

Links from this episode:

Follow Kathleen on Twitter @kathleenromig and learn more about her work at CBPP
Here are the prior Off-Kilter episodes we mentioned about SSI and bureaucratic disentitlement
Nominate the changemakers you most want to hear from by emailing us at OffKilterShow@TCF.org

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For this week’s episode, Rebecca sat back down with Zaki “The Barber” Smith, an entrepreneur, a powerhouse activist, and a criminal justice reform leader whose work focuses on ending the perpetual punishment that comes with having a criminal record in America. They had a far-ranging and emotional conversation about the historic clean slate legislation that passed the New York Assembly earlier this summer and now awaits the governor’s signature; how a criminal record can be a life sentence to poverty; the impact of the criminal records crisis on millions of American families; the economic as well as emotional toll that comes with perpetual punishment; his own path from prison to national policy advocacy; how his years as a barber shaped him as an advocate; his work with murals, film, and other art forms as tools for criminal justice reform; and lots more.

Links from this episode:

Follow Zaki on Twitter @ZakiTheBarber, learn more about of his work as a policy entrepreneur at Next100, and connect with Zaki
Learn more about New York’s Clean Slate campaign and the legislation that recently passed the New York Assembly to clear millions of New Yorkers’ records
Learn more about his #EndPerpetualPunishment mural campaign
Nominate the changemakers you most want to hear from by emailing us at OffKilterShow@TCF.org

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For this week’s episode, Rebecca sat down with Alejandra Vazquez-Baur, an educator-turned-policy advocate whose work focuses on expanding supports for K–12 immigrant students—especially newcomers—and multilingual students. As Alejandra describes herself: “I am a product of resilient Mexican women. A sister. A dancer. An educator. A visionary.” They talk about the National Newcomer Network Alejandra co-founded as a policy entrepreneur at The Next 100; how she’s bringing her experience in the classroom as a high school math teacher onto the national policy scene; the role of dreaming in her work and her path to claiming her role as a visionary; resilience and how to stay rooted; how music, dance, and movement inform her advocacy work; and lots more.

Links from this episode:

Follow Alejandra on Twitter @Ale_VazquezBaur and learn more about her work and her policy entrepreneurship at Next100
Learn more about the National Newcomer Network and follow #NationalNewcomerNetwork to stay up to date
Learn more about ImmSchools
And here’s more about the Obama Foundation fellowship
Nominate the changemakers you most want to hear from by emailing us at OffKilterShow@TCF.org

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Welcome to the summer/fall season of Off-Kilter! We’re excited to be back and up and running with the show after a break, just in time to mark Disability Pride Month. And to kick things off right, Rebecca sat back down with Mia Ives-Rublee, a long-time disability rights and justice activist who today serves as the director of the disability justice initiative at the Center for American Progress. They talk disability pride; what liberation means to the disability community; how Mia’s path as a transracial adoptee and competitive athlete shape her advocacy today; and lots more.

Links from this episode:

Follow Mia on Twitter (and Threads) @seemiaroll and learn more about of her work at CAP
Here’s a treasure trove of PBS Newshour content for Disability Pride Month
And here’s the last Off-Kilter episode with more on why updating SSI is necessary to economic liberation for disabled people
Nominate the changemakers you most want to hear from by emailing us at OffKilterShow@TCF.org

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This week, Off-Kilter is wrapping up our ongoing series digging into why in the famous words of Audre Lorde, “self-care is political warfare. A recurring theme uplifted by several guests throughout this series has been the importance of bringing your whole self to the work—a phrase that, like so much within the topic of self-care, has become watered down enough in recent years that it’s about as likely to spur eye rolls as genuine interest in many circles.

So to dig a little deeper beneath the surface of what it really looks like to bring one’s whole self to social justice work, Rebecca sat down with the brilliant Andraea Lavant, a longtime disability justice advocate, to delve deeply into the subject of claiming one’s identity, and what that looks like as part of self-care. We had a far-ranging conversation about Andraea’s own journey to claim all parts of her identity as a black, disabled, queer woman, and how that ultimately led her to start a strategy and communications firm focused on culture shift and building a society and an economy where disabled people of color belong.

For more:

Learn more about and connect with Andraea’s firm, Lavant Consulting
Follow Andraea on Twitter @andraealavant
Here’s the Off-Kilter episode feat. writers Alex Ashley Fox and Emily Ladau about the harms that come from “masking” to fit in at work, for autistic as well as neurotypical people with and without disabilities
Here’s the Off-Kilter episode feat. Social Security Works executive director and We Act Radio cofounder Alex Lawson about tapping into your own inner weirdo (in the best possible way) and finding the technique that works for you
And here’s the Off-Kilter episode that memorialized Judy Heumann, godmother of the disability rights movement

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As Off-Kilter’s ongoing series continues, digging into why in the famous words of Audre Lorde, “self-care is political warfare,” we’re zooming out for this next episode to explore the goal of ending poverty in the United States—and the broader work of economic and social liberation—as self-care for the larger collective organism of which we are all part.

In this spirit, as Rebecca describes in this episode, she often thinks about advocates and activists for economic and social liberation as healers—healers of a collective organism that today is very sick—with one huge glaring symptom of that illness being widespread, needless poverty in the midst of plenty. Of course healers rely on good diagnostic tools—and this kind of “social justice advocacy as collective healing” framework can then help us understand something like a measure of poverty as a diagnostic tool—a tool that’s only as good at diagnosing social illness as what it measures and how it’s designed.

So to zoom in on what America’s broken official poverty measure has to do with self-care, Rebecca brought back three thought leaders who are deep experts in poverty measurement, all of whom have been working for years to bring attention to how outdated and flawed our leading diagnostic tool on this front (a.k.a. America’s Official Poverty Measure) is—and the importance of rethinking how we measure poverty in the United States. if we are serious about meaningfully eliminating it versus just putting a band-aid on a still-very-sick economy.

Shawn Fremstad is the director of law and political economy as well as a senior adviser at the Center for Economic Policy Research. Shailly Barnes is the policy director for the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice. David Brady is a professor of public policy at the University of California Riverside, where he directs the Blum Initiative on Global and Regional Poverty; he’s also a fellow with the WZB Berlin Social Science Center.

For more:

Check out the last Off-Kilter episode on poverty measurement, feat. Shailly, Shawn, and David
Dig into Shawn’s report on why the U.S. poverty line is too damn low: “The Defining Down of Economic Deprivation: Why We Need to Reset the Poverty Line”
For more on the case for shifting to a relative poverty measure, check out David’s report: “American Poverty Should Be Measured Relative to the Prevailing Standards of Our Time”
Learn more about the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice, CEPR, and David’s work at UC–Riverside
Follow Shailly @shaillybarnes, Shawn @shawnfremstad, and David @DaveBrady72 on Twitter

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This week Rebecca sat down with Kim Knackstedt, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, where she serves as director of the Disability Economic Justice Team and director of the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative, both of which launched a little over one year ago in April 2022. Before coming to TCF, Kim served as the first-ever director of disability policy for the White House Domestic Policy Council for the first year of the Biden presidency.

They had a far-ranging conversation about what it looks like to apply disability as a lens across all economic and social policy making in the United States; the story behind the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative, going behind the scenes on the work discussed in the Collaborative’s one-year anniversary event, which aired on Off-Kilter earlier this month; and the end of the COVID-19 public health emergency and what it means for disabled people in the United States.

And continuing with the “self-care is political warfare” throughline from all of this spring’s episodes for the podcast, they also talked about Kim’s ongoing process of detoxing from the “destroy yourself for the work” culture of the White House and Capitol Hill; how she’s been rediscovering self-care in her own life as a leader within the disability community who also lives with chronic illness; and more.

For more:

Learn more about Kim’s work here and follow her on Twitter @kiknack
Learn more about the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative here and in its one-year anniversary event—and follow the Collab on Twitter @dejcollab and by signing up for its monthly newsletter
Here’s the Collaborative’s Disability Economic Justice Policy Framework, showing how to embed disability as a lens across policymaking
Here’s Kim’s piece (with TCF’s Tara Oakman) on the ending of the public health emergency
You can find Off-Kilter’s episode with The Kelsey about putting disabled people at the center of housing policy here

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Our next guest in this series is Michele Evermore, a longtime leading voice fighting for America’s most marginalized workers, particularly when it comes to unemployment insurance. Michele is a senior fellow at The Century Foundation and most recently served as deputy director of policy in the U.S. Department of Labor’s new Office of Unemployment Insurance Modernization under President Biden. She's also a martial artist and an avid gardener whose tomato list we should all be lucky enough to get on.

Rebecca and Michele had a far-ranging conversation about how the historic, if sadly short-lived, improvements to the U.S. unemployment insurance system went from ideas to public policies early in the COVID era; the story behind the Office of Unemployment Insurance Modernization and where things stand for jobless workers today; and the toxic “moral hazard” narrative that continues to hamper progressive policymaking to ensure workers have protection when they lose a job through no fault of their own. They also talked about how self-care shows up in Michele’s own life as a leader on social insurance, why she got into martial arts and how it informs her policy advocacy, and more.

For more:

Learn more about Michele’s work here and follow her on Twitter @EvermoreMichele
And you can find Off-Kilter’s most recent episode on unemployment insurance and the cliff created by expiring COVID-era improvements here

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This week, Off-Kilter's taking a break from our regularly scheduled programming to bring you a conversation hosted by The Century Foundation's Disability Economic Justice Collaborative, marking its one-year anniversary. Launched in April 2022, the Collaborative is a first of its kind initiative bringing together more than 40 disability rights and justice leaders and leading think tanks and research organizations to work collaboratively to bring a disability lens across all economic and social policymaking in the U.S. Learn more about the Collaborative's work at DEJC.org and by following @DEJCollab on Twitter.

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This week, Off-Kilter continues our ongoing series of conversations with social justice leaders digging into why, in the famous words of Audre Lorde, self-care is political warfare—and the role radical self-care plays in their own lives to sustain them in this work. And this week, Rebecca sat down with Julie Kashen, a friend and a colleague at The Century Foundation who’s a leading voice in the movement to bring policies like universal paid family and medical leave, paid sick days, and child care to the United States, and a senior fellow and the director of women's economic justice at TCF. She's the mother of an almost-nine-year-old, a board member of an organization called Vote Mama Lobby, a certified life coach, and someone who calls herself a "practical idealist" in how she approaches her work.

They had a far-ranging conversation about how the lack of paid leave and other holes in America's social contract show up as some of the biggest structural barriers to self-care and basic dignity in U.S. society, particularly for parents and caregivers; how self-care shows up in her own life as a mom who's also a leader on care policy; what she's learned about self-care and listening to her intuition from her work as a life coach; how she came to host Full Moon circles as a self-care practice that's also building power within the women's community; how a book called Rise Sister Rise has influenced how she understands and approaches her work and what it means to be a woman leader in the modern world; and more.

For more:

Connect with Julie on Twitter @JulieKashen and check out her work at TCF
Read more about the care executive order signed by President Biden this week (and here’s the tl;dr in a great tweet thread by Julie)
Check out Off-Kilter’s last conversation with Julie for more on America’s “house of cards” child care system and the push to strengthen it
Check out Rise Sister Rise by Rebecca Campbell
Learn more about the American Association of Health and Disability’s “nothing about us without us” All of Us research program

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For this week’s episode, Rebecca sat down with Keith Jones, a longtime disability rights and justice activist, cofounder of Krip Hop Nation, president and CEO of Soul Touchin’ Experiences, and a visionary thinker when it comes to approaching social justice work itself as a form of radical self-care for the collective. As Keith puts it: “In order to build a stronger community, there must be a heart and soul commitment to those who need assistance in order to begin caring for themselves and in turn caring for others.”

They had a far-ranging conversation about one of the most significant barriers to self-care for people with disabilities: asset limits and other backwards policies that make “work until you die” the default retirement plan for a huge swath of the U.S. disability community; what it looks like to enter social justice work from the starting point that “everything has a soul”; how Keith has woven together hip hop music into his disability activism through Krip Hop Nation; and more.

For more:

Learn more about Keith’s work with Soul Touchin’ Experiences, Krip Hop Nation, and follow him on twitter @dasoultoucha
Learn more about why “work until you die” is the retirement plan for so many disabled people in this op-ed by Rebecca Cokley

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This week, Off-Kilter continues our ongoing series of conversations with social justice leaders digging into why, in the famous words of Audre Lorde, self-care is political warfare—and the role radical self-care plays in their own lives to sustain them in this work. As we’ve explored a good bit in recent weeks as part of this series, the disability community harbors some of the greatest wisdom when it comes to radical self-care—with disabled people as modern-day oracles, as activist Alice Wong often puts it.

Last week, Rebecca talked with Lisa McCorkell of the Patient Led Research Collaborative and Ryan Prior, author of The Long Haul, about what we can learn from the long COVID and ME/CFS communities when it comes to self-care practices like radical pacing and more. And this week, Off-Kilter is continuing to explore what we can learn from the chronic illness community when it comes to radical self-care.

A concept Rebecca has found incredibly powerful in her own life as someone who lives with chronic illness is something called “Spoon Theory”—a framework that enables thinking about energy management in terms of metaphorical “spoons.” To dig into Spoon Theory and what we can learn from the so-called “spoonie” community when it comes to radical self-care, Rebecca sat down with Dawn Gibson, creator of #SpoonieChat and a board member for the National Pain Advocacy Center. She’s a former Episcopalean minister-turned-health activist who’s spent the last decade creating a powerful online community for “spoonies” and advocating to protect access to pain medications for people who live with chronic pain. They talked about the origins and evolution of Spoon Theory, the story behind #SpoonieChat as it celebrates its ten-year anniversary, what we can all learn from spoonies when it comes to radical self-care, and lots more.

For more:

Join #SpoonieChat at 8:00 pm ET most Wednesdays
Learn more about and get involved with the National Pain Advocacy Center
Connect with Dawn on Twitter @dawnmgibson and subscribe to the free #SpoonieChat newsletter
Learn more about Spoon Theory in these remarks by its originator Christine Miserandino
Check out last week’s episode of Off-Kilter for more on what we can learn from the chronic illness community when it comes to self-care
Learn more about the American Association of Health and Disability’s “nothing about us without us” All of Us research program

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As we’ve explored a good bit in recent weeks as part of this series, the disability community harbors some of the greatest wisdom when it comes to radical self-care—with disabled people as modern-day oracles, as activist Alice Wong often puts it.

And to that end, for this week’s episode, Rebecca sat down with Lisa McCorkell, cofounder of the Patient Led Research Collaborative, a new organization that advocates for folks with long COVID; and Ryan Prior, a journalist-in-residence with TCF’s Disability Economic Justice Team, a board member of ME Action (which works to build awareness about a condition called ME/CFS), and author of The Long Haul.

Picking up on a conversation they had last July for the podcast about the patient advocacy revolution sparked by COVID long-haulers, they had a far-ranging conversation about what we can learn from the long COVID and ME/CFS communities when it comes to radical self-care, with a deep dive on the practice of “radical pacing”; the significance of self-care as political warfare to the chronic illness community; how patient advocacy itself is a form of self-care, particularly for folks with invisible chronic illnesses; the policy and cultural shifts needed to ensure basic practices like rest are universally available; and more.

For more:

Learn more about and get involved with the Patient Led Research Collaborative and ME Action
Get your copy of The Long Haul
Listen to the July 2022 episode of Off-Kilter on the long COVID patient advocacy revolution that comes up in the discussion
Read a piece by Ryan on the World Health Organization declaring burnout an official medical diagnosis

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This week, Off-Kilter returns to our ongoing series of conversations with social justice leaders digging into why, in the famous words of Audre Lorde, self-care is political warfare—and the role radical self-care plays in their own lives to sustain them in this work. As a lawyer and policy advocate who’s also a lifelong student of the magical and mystical, Rebecca thinks a lot about social justice advocacy and activism as their own forms of magic—magic that starts with a vision of a new reality and works backwards to manifest it through intentional individual and collective action. So for this week’s episode, Rebecca decided to take a deep dive into a particular magical practice that’s often relegated to the realm of fantasy and science fiction—and that’s time travel.

And to do just that, she sat down with two expert time travelers who are also no strangers to Off-Kilter’s listeners—Jeremie Greer and Solana Rice. They are the cofounders and co-executive directors of a movement support organization called Liberation in a Generation, whose theory of change focuses on dismantling what they call the “oppression economy” to make way for a liberation economy where people of color belong—a vision that Jeremie and Solana describe as itself science fiction.

They had a far-ranging conversation about time travel as a strategy for social change as well as self-care; what it looks like to think across generations in the midst of a global paradigm shift, by connecting with one’s ancestors as well as future leaders, in recognition that the work of social liberation will never be completed in a single lifetime; and how they fuse urgency with sustainability to stay in right relationship to the work.

For more:

Learn more about Liberation in a Generation at liberationinageneration.org
Follow Solana and Jeremie on Twitter @solanarice and @jeremiegreer
And here’s the conversation with Jeremie and Solana from last fall that comes up in the this podcast

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This week, Off-Kilter returns to our ongoing series of conversations with social justice leaders digging into why, in the famous words of Audre Lorde, self-care is political warfare—and the role radical self-care plays in their own lives to sustain them in this work. Given that the disability community harbors some of the greatest wisdom when it comes to radical self-care–with disabled people as “modern-day oracles,” as activist Alice Wong often puts it—Rebecca has been spending a good bit of this series in conversation with leaders across the disability rights and justice movement. For this week’s episode, she sat down with longtime disability rights and justice activist Vilissa Thompson, founder of Ramp Your Voice!, a fellow with The Century Foundation’s Disability Economic Justice Team, and someone who doesn’t mess around when it comes to self-care. They take a deep dive into the subject of boundaries at work—a practice that, like so much within the realm of self-care, gets talked about a lot at the surface-level, but remains a perennial challenge for a lot of folks engaged in social justice work. Not so for Vilissa, who is so renowned for her mastery of boundaries—at work and throughout her life—that her friends and colleagues lovingly call her the “patron saint of boundaries.”

For more:

Follow Vilissa on Twitter @vilissathompson and learn more about Vilissa’s work including Ramp Your Voice!

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This week, Off-Kilter is taking a break from our ongoing series about self-care as political warfare to honor the life and legacy of Judy Heumann, an iconic civil rights leader and the godmother of the disability rights movement. Judy passed away on March 4, 2023, at age 75.

It was especially important to the Off-Kilter team and to many of us at The Century Foundation to do a tribute to Judy for this week’s episode of the podcast because she was a mentor, friend, and an inspiration to so many of us personally, as is true for nearly everyone involved with the movement for disability rights and justice. Those of us engaged in disability rights advocacy and activism today simply wouldn't be doing this work if not for the trail Judy blazed.

It is with a heavy heart, balanced out with immeasurable gratitude and love, that we dedicate this week’s episode of Off-Kilter to celebrating the life of Judy Heumann. Rebecca was joined for this special tribute by several members of TCF’s Disability Economic Justice Team: Kim Knackstedt, Kings Floyd, and Emily Ladau.

Show notes

Listen to the full Off-Kilter episode with Judy, Rebecca Cokley, Mia Ives-Rublee, and Representative Ayanna Pressley from September 2022 that’s excerpted in this tribute
Here is TCF’s statement honoring Judy; and here are some of our favorite tributes to Judy: Rebecca Cokley’s CNN op-ed; NPR's Joe Shapiro; AAPD’s obituary
And if you haven’t watched Crip Camp yet, you’re doing it wrong.

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As Off-Kilter continues our ongoing series of conversations with leaders across the economic justice movement digging into why, in the famous words of Audre Lorde, self-care is political warfare—and the role radical self-care plays in their own lives to sustain them in this work—Rebecca Vallas had a ton of fun sitting down with her next guest in the series, who’s a dear friend and colleague of hers and who’s been on this show enough times she really needs no introduction. Rebecca Cokley is a longtime disability rights activist who serves as the disability rights program officer at the Ford Foundation (whose support of TCF and the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative makes this show possible week to week). They had a far-ranging conversation about disabled people as modern-day oracles when it comes to radical self-care; the role of philanthropy in supporting self-care across social justice movements; the story behind why she started doing daily Twitter reminders to the disability community to eat lunch; and lots more.

For more:

Follow Rebecca Cokley on Twitter @rebeccacokley to get her lunchtime reminders to eat (and lots more)

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“DEI” (a.k.a. diversity, equity, and inclusion) has become something of a buzzword in recent years, with more and more U.S. employers taking steps to incorporate DEI practices into their workplaces to better enable them to walk the walk when it comes to living their organizational values. Meanwhile, as DEI has taken hold as a north star in more and more American workplaces, it has also evolved to add another letter and dimension to the acronym, becoming DEIA, with the A representing accessibility for disabled people.

But while the push for DEIA has gained greater visibility in recent years, DEIA efforts are frequently discussed at a surface level—relegated to a mandatory employee training after which everyone moves on and checks the box without thinking too deeply about what it’s all about. So as Off-Kilter continues our ongoing series of conversations digging into why, in the famous words of Audre Lorde, self-care is political warfare, our next episode takes a deep dive into the movement to embed diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility into workplaces across the United States, and how DEIA fits into a broader conversation about radical self-care. Rebecca sat down with Leilani Manulu, a DEIA visionary and facilitator, to go beneath the surface and explore why the movement to embed DEIA into our workplaces—including and especially within organizations working towards social justice—is core to radical self-care.

After they talked DEIA, Rebecca and Leilani spent the second half of the episode delving into another critical component of radical self-care that Leilani is also a deep expert on: intuition, and how tuning into and listening to one’s intuition shows up as a self-care practice. Her credentials when it comes to intuition? In addition to working as a DEI facilitator, Leilani is also a practicing intuitive and shaman who supports intuitive leaders in reconnecting with their spiritual truth in service of guiding their organizations to be more intuitive, imaginative, and heart-centered.

For more:

Learn more about her Leilani’s work here and check out her podcast The Intuitive Catalyst and her book Paradox of the Water Bearer
Connect with Leilani on LinkedIn lmanulu and instagram @shamanleilani

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Something that gets talked about a lot in conversations about self-care is the notion of “being your authentic self.” But rarely do such conversations contemplate the structural barriers and discrimination many of us face to being our authentic selves, particularly in the workplace. So when The Century Foundation ran a commentary last month (as part of TCF’s Voices of Disability Economic Justice Project) called “The Economic and Emotional Costs of Autistic Masking,” Rebecca knew it was a conversation she wanted to bring onto the podcast. As author Alex Ashley Fox writes in the piece, “despite the cognitive and emotional costs, masking is a necessity for most autistic people. It’s a matter of social survival in a world that isn’t welcoming of the full spectrum of the human condition.”

So for the next installment of Off-Kilter’s ongoing series exploring radical self-care, Rebecca sat down with writer Alex Ashley Fox and Emily Ladau, editor of TCF’s Voices of Disability Economic Justice Project. They had a far-ranging conversation about the costs of autistic masking, as well as masking more broadly in the context of radical self-care, and went behind the scenes of the Voices of Disability Economic Justice Project as well.

For more:

Read “The Economic and Emotional Costs of Autistic Masking”
Follow Alex on Twitter @followaafox
Follow Emily on Twitter @emily_ladau
Learn more about and pitch the Voices of Disability Economic Justice Project

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As Rebecca’s come to learn over the years, a key pillar of radical self-care when it comes to doing social justice work (and, really, life in general) is—to paraphrase jazz legend Thelonious Monk—finding the technique that’s relevant for you, versus mirroring the status quo for the sake of fitting in. And there are few leaders in the economic justice movement who epitomize this kind of be-your-eccentric-self-without-apology genius to the extent that our next guest Alex Lawson does. As you’ll hear in this episode, Alex wears a lot of hats, including executive director of Social Security Works, which has for years been at the forefront of the movement to expand Social Security; he’s also one of the founders and co-owners of We Act Radio, one of the radio stations that broadcasts this very show over the airwaves. Rebecca and Alex had a far-ranging conversation about what it means to find the technique that’s relevant for you in the context of social justice work—and how this shows up in the context of radical self-care.

For more:

Learn more about Social Security Works and We Act Radio
Follow Alex @alaw202, Social Security Works @ssworks, and We Act Radio @weactradio
And here’s a phenomenal biography on Thelonious Monk for folks who want to learn more about what he meant about finding the technique that’s relevant for you

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Continuing Off-Kilter’s ongoing series of conversations with leaders across the economic justice movement delving into why, in the famous words of Audre Lorde, self-care is indeed political warfare—and the role radical self-care plays in their own lives to sustain them in this work—this week’s episode zooms out to take a look at the “labor of love” ideology underpinning the notion that social justice advocates must “suffer for the cause.” To do that, Rebecca sat down with longtime labor reporter Sarah Jaffe, whose latest book Work Won’t Love You Back surveys a host of structural factors that have conspired to create burnout culture and what Rebecca has come to call “work sickness” in America’s nonprofit sector—which doesn’t overlap perfectly with the social justice movement but which plays an outsized role in employing people who feel called to devote their lives to a particular social justice cause. They had a far-ranging conversation about the origins of America’s “labor of love” ideology; the history of the nonprofit sector and the culture of martyrdom that’s become so deeply embedded in movement work; how “work sickness” has come to be its own cross-class pandemic amidst late-stage capitalism; and why radical self-care requires redefining our relationship to work.

For more:

Read Work Won’t Love You Back (the whole thing is worth reading, but chapter 5 focuses on the nonprofit sector)
Follow Sarah on Twitter @sarahljaffe

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COVID-19 pandemic started nearly three years ago, Rebecca’s been feeling called to take the podcast in something of a different direction this year (you can read more about it here).

So, starting with this week’s 2023 opener, Off-Kilter will be spending the upcoming season going behind the scenes of the economic justice topics and debates the podcast has been uplifting for years and leaning into another dimension of the meaning of the term off-kilter, by digging into why, in the famous words of Audre Lorde, self-care is indeed political warfare—and what it looks like for social justice warriors of all stripes to care for ourselves as we fight for economic justice and liberation for all.

And to help us kick this season off right, Rebecca sat down with her good friend Aisha Nyandoro, CEO of Springboard to Opportunities and founder of the Magnolia Mother’s Trust, to talk about the role radical self-care plays in her life and how she shows up for herself in this work.

For more:

Learn more about Springboard to Opportunities and the Magnolia Mother’s Trust
Follow Aisha on Twitter @aisha_nyandoro
For more on the origins of radical self-care, check out this great Refinery29 piece: “Reclaiming Audre Lorde’s Radical Self-Care”

And for the original context of Audre Lorde’s famous quote, check out her 1988 essay collection, A Burst of Light

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This week, to continue the series of conversations we’ve been having on Off-Kilter about the limiting beliefs we as a collective must release and replace to pave the way for economic liberation, Rebecca sat down with Claire Guzdar—managing director of campaigns and partnerships at an organization called the Groundwork Collaborative—to unpack one of the most salient limiting beliefs hampering economic policy in the United States today: the notion that the stock market is the economy. They had a far-ranging conversation about how Groundwork is working to shift economic narratives in the United States to help us remember that we are the economy, as well as about Claire’s path from theology to social justice advocacy, and more.

For more:

Learn more about Groundwork’s work here
Follow Claire (@clairecmarkham) and Groundwork (@groundwork) on Twitter

And here’s a TCF explainer with more on why the stock market is not the economy.

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With the U.S. midterm elections just behind us, to continue Off-Kilter’s ongoing series of conversations about the limiting beliefs that we as a collective must release and replace to pave the way for economic liberation, Rebecca sat down with Nick Turner—president and director of the Vera Institute for Justice—to unpack two of the most toxic limiting beliefs in American politics that flared up dramatically in the recent midterms: the notion that you have to be “tough on crime” to win political office, and that safety requires tough on crime policies. They had a far-ranging conversation about expanding consciousness around America’s broken criminal legal system in recent years—and how safety and justice can actually go hand in hand.

For more:

Learn more about the Vera Institute for Justice’s work here
Dig into Vera’s polling on crime and safety narratives and the midterms here
Follow Nick (@nickturner718) and the Vera Institute (@verainstitute) on Twitter

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This week, to continue Off-Kilter’s ongoing series of conversations about the limiting beliefs we as a collective must release and replace to pave the way for economic liberation, Rebecca sat down with Stefan Lallinger, executive director of an organization housed at The Century Foundation called The Next 100. They have a far-ranging conversation about a core limiting belief constraining economic and other public policy making in the United States today—the notion that you need an advanced degree from an ivy league school and a Washington resume to be qualified to shape our society’s public policies—and how The Next 100 is working to update the archetype of public policy expert.

For more:

Learn more about The Next 100 and the current cohort of policy entrepreneurs
Follow Stefan on Twitter (@stefanlallinger)
Check out The Next 100’s upcoming event

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This week, to continue Off-Kilter’s ongoing series about the limiting beliefs we as a collective must release and replace to pave the way for economic liberation, Rebecca sat down with Cheryl Green and Thomas Reid, two disabled podcasters who are leading a very cool new project called the Pod Access Initiative, in partnership with the Disability Visibility Project. They have a far-ranging conversation about why it’s so important to diversify the voices out there in media—as hosts and guests and content creators of all kinds—and how the Pod Access Initiative is working to remove barriers to entry for people with disabilities in media, while taking on limiting beliefs around whose voices “deserve” to be driving the conversation when it comes to podcasts and more.

For more from this week’s guests:

Check out Cheryl’s podcast Pigeonhole and Thomas’s podcast Reid My Mind Radio
Learn more about Alice Wong’s Disability Visibility Project and subscribe to the Disability Visibility Podcast
Here is Cheryl’s podcast episode with Alice Wong about “good radio voices”
Follow Thomas (@tsreid) and Cheryl (@WhoAmIToStopIt) on Twitter

To get in touch with the Pod Access Initiative, email thepodaccess@gmail.com.

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This week, Off-Kilter’s taking a quick break from the ongoing series of conversations Rebecca’s been having with leaders around the limiting beliefs we as a collective must release and replace to pave the way for economic liberation, to bring you a discussion Rebecca had last week at a virtual event hosted by The Century Foundation and the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative to mark October 2022 as the fiftieth anniversary of Supplemental Security Income, or SSI—a long-forgotten and badly neglected component of our nation’s safety net.

For more:

Watch the full SSI at 50 virtual anniversary event
Read more from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities about the human consequences of decades of federal neglect of SSI
Read about updating SSI would mean to its disabled and older beneficiaries, in their own words
Learn more about the bipartisan push to update SSI’s antiquated $2,000 asset limit

Dig into the TCF-Data for Progress polling finding overwhelming bipartisan support for updating SSI

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This week, continuing Off-Kilter’s ongoing series of conversations about the limiting beliefs that we as a collective must release and replace to pave the way for economic liberation, Rebecca sat down with two dear friends and leaders within guaranteed income movement—Dorian Warren and Aisha Nyandoro—to continue the conversation we started last week about one of the most toxic limiting beliefs underpinning large-scale oppression in the United States today: the notion that a human being’s worth comes from their work. Dorian Warren is co-president of Community Change and co-chair of the Economic Security Project, and Aisha Nyandoro is CEO of Springboard to Opportunities and founder of the Magnolia Mother’s Trust.

For more from this week’s guests:

Learn more about Aisha’s work and the Springboard to Opportunity and the Magnolia Mothers’ Trust here
Learn more about Dorian’s work with Community Change and the Economic Security Project
Follow Aisha (@aisha_nyandoro) and Dorian (@dorianwarren) on Twitter

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This week, continuing Off-Kilter’s ongoing series of conversations about the limiting beliefs that we as a collective must release and replace to pave the way for economic liberation, Rebecca sat down with two dear friends and leaders within the disability rights and justice movement to talk about one of the most toxic limiting beliefs underpinning large-scale oppression in the United States today: the notion that a human being’s worth comes from their work. They ended up having a far-ranging conversation about why disability leaders know this is not a moment to be seeking to return to “normal,” who the American dream was and wasn’t designed to include, and some of the key limiting beliefs constraining the modern American philanthropic sector. Rebecca Cokley is the program officer for disability rights at the Ford Foundation, and Keith Jones is president and CEO of Soul Touchin’ Enterprises.

For more from this week’s guests:

Learn more about Keith’s work here
Learn more about Cokley’s work as the first U.S. disability rights program officer at the Ford Foundation here
Follow Cokley (@rebeccacokley) and Keith (@dasoultoucha) on Twitter
And get caught up on the permanent economic recession facing the U.S. disability community in this TCF-CEPR report

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Modern-day oracles are increasingly describing this moment in human history as a “battle of imaginations”—in which oppression is what happens when an individual or a whole group of people are living in someone else’s dream, instead of being free to dream their own.

It’s in that spirit that the first episode of Off-Kilter’s fall season kicks off with the words of poet and activist Sonya Renee Taylor:

“We will not go back to normal. Normal never was. Our pre-corona existence was not normal other than we normalized greed, inequity, exhaustion, depletion, extraction, disconnection, confusion, rage, hoarding, hate, and lack. We should not long to return, my friends. We are being given the opportunity to stitch a new garment. One that fits all of humanity and nature.”

To that end, as Off-Kilter steps out of the news cycle this fall to reflect on the broader context of the moment in human history we find ourselves in—and the roles we can all play in shaping our collective future—the pod will be diving deep into the key limiting beliefs we as a society must release and replace in order to realize true economic liberation for us all, which feels in many ways to be the medicine our policy, advocacy, and movement spaces need most right now, as a much-needed antidote to the short-termism that dominates so much inside-the-beltway strategy and thinking today.

So, to kick off this series of conversations, Rebecca sat down with two of her favorite advocates, visionaries, and storytellers—Jeremie Greer and Solana Rice. They’re the cofounders of Liberation in a Generation, which works to build a liberation economy where people of color belong. They’re also the cohosts of the podcast Racism Is Profitable. A core through-line of their work is calling out and tearing down the limiting beliefs upholding what they call the “oppression economy” that defines life in America today.

For more from this week’s guests:

Learn more about Liberation in a Generation and connect with them at liberationinageneration.org
Subscribe to “Racism Is Profitable”
Follow Solana and Jeremie on Twitter @solanarice and @jeremiegreer

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This week marked the thirty-second anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act—or ADA, as it’s better known—the landmark civil rights law that promised equal opportunity and economic security for Americans with disabilities. As we’ve talked about a lot on this show over the years, as important as it is to celebrate how far we’ve come in the decades since the ADA became part of the fabric of American life, every time we hit the month of July, it’s even more important to acknowledge how far will still have to go to achieve the as-yet unfulfilled promises of the ADA.

And that’s why this July, Off-Kilter has been once again spending all month long having conversations with leaders from across the disability community.

To close out that series of conversations, this week we take a deep dive into one of the most egregious and discriminatory disability policies still on the books here in America—known as section 14(c) of the Fair Labor Standards Act. In a nutshell, 14(c) is an archaic loophole in federal wage and hour law that allows employers to pay disabled workers far less than the federal or state minimum wage just because of their disability.

So, as Off-Kilter closes out this series of July conversations for #ADA2022, Rebecca sat down with two dear friends and visionary leaders within the disability community working not just to tinker around the edges of a status quo, wherein disabled people are twice as likely to live in poverty as their nondisabled peers, but to imagine and build a society that recognizes and affirms the human rights and dignity of all disabled people. Together they took a look at the history of subminimum wages for people with disabilities in the United States and their role in devaluing disabled people’s labor and humanity; recent efforts to put 14(c) in the rearview mirror where it belongs; and the future of disability policy more broadly.

This week’s guests: Rebecca Cokley is the program officer for disability rights at the Ford Foundation, where she leads a portfolio she’s been visioning and creating from scratch as the first program officer to oversee a disability rights portfolio at any major U.S. foundation. Before that she was Rebecca Vallas’s partner in crime in co-founding the Disability Justice Initiative at the Center for American Progress—the first dedicated disability project at a U.S. think tank—as well as president of the National Council on Disability.

And Chai Feldblum currently serves as cice cChair of the Ability One Commission, the independent federal agency that oversees the AbilityOne Program, whose mission is to tap America's underutilized workforce of individuals who are blind or have significant disabilities to deliver high quality, mission-essential products and services to federal agencies in quality employment opportunities. Chai is a former law professor at Georgetown University and formerly served as a commissioner at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for several years, nominated by President Obama.

For more on this week’s topics:

Here’s the polling finding just 1 in 3 disabled voters believe leaders in Washington care about people with disabilities
For more on the subminimum wage, check out this TCF report and this documentary by Rooted in Rights
Here’s Chai’s lecture at Yale University on “Transforming Employment for People with Significant Disabilities”
Read this piece in Inside Philanthropy on how Rebecca Cokley is leveraging her post at the Ford Foundation to push other philanthropic leaders to center disability in their grantmaking (and why Ford is partnering with TCF on the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative)
Here’s the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s guidance on community living released this July; here’s the Department of Transportation’s new Airline Passengers with Disabilities’ Bill of Rights; and here’s the Department of Education’s recent 504 guidance on preventing discriminatory use of school discipline
Here’s more from Rebecca Cokley and Rebecca Vallas on the bipartisan threat to the ADA that unfortunately hasn’t gone away

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July marks the thirty-second anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA, as it’s better known—the landmark civil rights law that promised equal opportunity and economic security for Americans with disabilities. As we’ve talked about a lot on this show over the years, as important as it is to celebrate how far we’ve come in the decades since the ADA became part of the fabric of American life, every time we hit the month of July, it’s even more important to acknowledge how far will still have to go to achieve the as-yet unfulfilled promises of the ADA.

And that’s why this July, Off-Kilter is once again spending all month long having conversations with leaders from across the disability community.

To continue that series of conversations, this week we’re taking a deep dive into the criminalization of disability in America—and how we got to a place where people behind bars in prisons and jails are three to four times more likely to have a disability than the general population. And to unpack the intersection of criminal justice and disability justice, Rebecca sat down with a panel of incredible leaders from two organizations working at this nexus: Access Living, a longtime leader in the disability rights and justice space that works to build a world free from barriers and discrimination for all disabled people, and Activating Change, a new organization that recently spun off from the Vera Institute of Justice to center people with disabilities in reforming and reenvisioning the nation’s criminal justice system.

This week’s guests are: Candace Coleman, racial justice organizer at Access Living; Nancy Smith, executive director of Activating Change; Olga Trujillo, Director of Leadership Development, Visibility and Collective Healing at Activating Change; and Keith Jones, President and CEO of SoulTouchin’ Experience and a consultant who works closely with Activating Change.

Editor’s note: The Century Foundation is thrilled to have Access Living and Activating Change as members of the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative, which you can learn more about at dejc.org.

For more:

Here’s a report Rebecca wrote a while back at the Center for American Progress offering an overview of the mass warehousing of disabled people behind bars, including most of the stats the panel mentions throughout this episode
Check out Access Living’s 2019 report on how to stem the flow of disabled people into U.S. jails through pretrial diversion and other tools: “A Cross-Disability Perspective on Reducing Jail Incarceration”; as well as their 2022 “Voices of Reentry” panel series
Learn more about Activating Change—which recently spun off from the Vera Institute of Justice—and how to get involved with their work to center disabled people in the movement to end mass incarceration and criminalization
Check out Olga Trujillo's work on deconstructing the stigma of dissociative identity disorder
And here’s more from Keith Jones about his work, and why building stronger communities requires a commitment from heart and soul

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And that’s why this July, Off-Kilter is once again spending all month long having conversations with leaders from across the disability community. (Catch up with Part One and Part Two in our #ADA2022 series.)

To continue that series of conversations, as we all grapple with the road ahead in a post-Roe v. Wade world, this week, Off-Kilter dives into the intersection of reproductive justice and disability justice—and the impact of the Supreme Court’s recent Dobbs decision on disabled women and people who can become pregnant—with two powerhouse advocates who are also speaking at an upcoming virtual event on “Bridging Reproductive Justice and Disability Justice” being hosted at The Century Foundation next week. Vilissa Thompson is a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, where her work focuses on the intersection of race, gender, and disability and she serves as co-director of the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative; she is also the founder of advocacy organization Ramp Your Voice! And Laurie Bertram Roberts is the founder and executive director of the Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund (MRFF), a reproductive justice organization that reduces barriers for access to abortion care.

You can find part one and part two of Off-Kilter’s #ADA2022 series here and here.

For more:

Find out more about and register for next week’s event, “Bridging Reproductive Justice and Disability Justice,” taking place on July 21, 1:00–2:00PM ET, by clicking here
Read the Supreme Court’s Buck v. Bell decision from 1927, which set the legal precedent that disabled people can be forcibly sterilized—and here’s the TCF Disability Economic Justice Team’s statement on why overturning Roe is so devastating for the disability community
Here’s the National Partnership for Women and Families analysis finding that 15 million women of color live in states that have already or are likely to overturn Roe
Read more about how Laurie became “the abortion lady of Mississippi” in The Guardian
Learn more about and support the work of the Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund
Find and support your local abortion fund using this handy tool from the National Network of Abortion Funds

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And that’s why this July, Off-Kilter is once again spending all month long having conversations with leaders from across the disability community—starting with a two-part special diving into the picture for the millions of Americans now living with “long COVID.”

For part one of that two-part series of conversations, Rebecca sat down with Lisa McCorkell, cofounder of the Patient Led Research Collaborative; Netia McCrery, education director at the COVID-19 Longhauler Advocacy Project; and Ryan Prior, a journalist, a board member of ME Action, which works to build awareness about a condition called ME/CFS, and author of The Long Haul (forthcoming November 2022). They talked about their personal illness journeys, the stories behind these three organizations, and how patient advocates with other chronic illnesses like ME-CFS are teaming up with COVID long-haulers to push for research, policy change, and more, driving a COVID-era patient advocacy revolution.

To continue the conversation into this week—to dig into the U.S. policy response thus far on long COVID, the urgent need for research, how long COVID fits into the larger conversation about disability and disability policy and more—Ryan Prior stuck around for part two of this series, joined by Kim Knackstedt, a senior fellow at TCF whose work focuses on disability economic justice, who serves as co-director of the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative, and who until recently served as director of disability policy at the White House.

Editor’s note: The Century Foundation is thrilled to have the Patient Led Research Collaborative, the COVID-19 Longhaulers Advocacy Project, and ME Action as members of the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative, which you can learn more about at dejc.org.

You can find part one of Off-Kilter’s long-COVID two-parter here.

For more on this week’s topics, Kim and Ryan put together a treasure trove of resources for our listeners (!):

Here’s the 2021 Presidential Memorandum calling for a “whole of government” approach to long COVID, and here’s the fact sheet on long COVID the White House put out on last year’s anniversary of the ADA
For folks looking for related federal agency guidance and resources on long COVID:
Here’s guidance from the Department of Health and Human Services; Department of Justice; Department of Education; and Administration of Community Living
Here are resources on long COVID from the Department of Labor’s Office of Disability Employment Programs
And here’s a fact sheet from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on what you should know about long COVID, the ADA, and other relevant disability employment protections
Here are the three long COVID bills Kim and Ryan talked about:
S.3721, Senator Kaine, Comprehensive Access to Resources and Education for Long COVID Act
HR 7482, Representative Pressley, Targeting Resources for Equitable Access for Treatment for Long COVID Act
HR 2754, Representative Beyer, COVID Long Haulers Act
Check out Ryan’s new commentary for TCF on the need for a short-term disability program to protect long-haulers
Find out more about Ryan’s new book The Long Haul (forthcoming November 2022)
And here’s a recent Washington Post article on how long COVID could change the way we think about chronic illness and disability

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And that’s why this July, Off-Kilter will be spending all month long having conversations with leaders from across the disability community—starting with a two-part special diving into the picture for the millions of Americans now living with “long COVID,” the incredible patient advocacy led by COVID long-haulers across the country, and how patient advocates with other chronic illnesses like myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) are teaming up with COVID long-haulers to push for research, policy change, and more.

And for part one of that two-part series of conversation, Rebecca sat down with Lisa McCorkell, cofounder of the Patient Led Research Collaborative; Netia McCrery, education director at the COVID-19 Longhauler Advocacy Project; and Ryan Prior, a journalist, a board member of ME Action, which works to build awareness about a condition called ME/CFS, and author of The Long Haul (forthcoming November 2022). They talk about their personal illness journeys, the stories behind their respective organizations, why patient advocacy is more critical than ever, and take on some of the myths and misconceptions about long COVID and ME/CFS and more.

Editor’s note: The Century Foundation is thrilled to have all three of those organizations—the Patient Led Research Collaborative, the COVID-19 Longhaulers Advocacy Project, and ME Action—as members of the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative, which you can learn more about at dejc.org.

For more:

Learn more about and get involved with the Patient Led Research Collaborative, the COVID-19 Longhauler Advocacy Project, and ME Action
Find out more about The Long Haul (forthcoming November 2022)
And here’s a recent Washington Post article on how long COVID could change the way we think about chronic illness and disability

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The year 2021 was one for the history books in many areas of American economic policy. And one thing it will be remembered as is the year the United States finally adopted a guaranteed minimum income for families with children. Unfortunately, that policy victory was short-lived, and the expanded Child Tax Credit signed into law as part of the American Rescue Plan Act expired at the end of last year after the historic economic recovery package many of us will forever remember as “Build Back Better” stalled in the Senate—despite widespread popularity with bipartisan voters—for lack of West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin’s support as the critical fiftieth vote.

Advocates for children and for low-income families haven’t given up the fight, though chances of bringing the expanded credit back anytime soon appear dim in the current political climate. Meanwhile, millions of children across the country have fallen back below the federal poverty line—and nearly half of low-income families reported struggling to afford food five months after the lapse of the expanded credit’s monthly payments.

So we at Off-Kilter felt it was time to revisit the topic of the child tax credit on the pod, and to take a look at how kids and families are faring half a year after our elected leaders allowed a policy estimated to cut U.S. child poverty nearly in half to expire. And to help us to do just that, Rebecca sat down with two friends and colleagues who have been leading the charge to bring back the expanded child tax credit: Aisha Nyandoro, chief executive officer of Springboard and architect of the Magnolia Mother’s Trust, a guaranteed minimum income experiment in Jackson, Mississippi; and Elisa Minoff, senior policy analyst at the Center for the Study of Social Policy and co-chair of the Automatic Benefit for Children (ABC) Coalition.

For more:

Here’s more on the millions of kids who fell back into poverty (via Columbia University’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy), as well as the sharp rise in hunger and food insufficiency among low-income families with kids (via CNBC) following the expiration of the expanded credit
Check out the story behind the Magnolia Mothers Trust—and for a deeper dive, give Aisha a listen on this episode of Off-Kilter on the ever-growing case for guaranteed income (with Community Change and the Economic Security Project’s Dorian Warren)
Learn more about how the ABC Coalition is fighting to bring back the expanded CTC
And here’s Elisa and Aisha (with Liberation in a Generation’s Jeremie Greer) on another prior Off-Kilter episode, explaining the racist roots of so-called work requirements and why they’re terrible policy for the CTC or any other income assistance program

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Coming up on Juneteenth, which will for the second year be recognized as a federal holiday in the United States on June 20 to commemorate the emancipation of enslaved African Americans in the United States, Rebecca sat down with Trevor Smith, the director of narrative change at Liberation Ventures, an organization working to fuel the movement for Black-led racial repair, for a sneak peek at a new initiative he’s building called the Reparations Narrative Lab. As he describes it, the lab will serve as a first of its kind creative space designed to build narrative power behind reparations. Trevor is also the creator, curator, and editor of a newsletter titled Reparations Daily (ish) and working on his first book, Lethal Stereotypes: How the Stories We Tell Take Black Lives.

For more:

Check out the National African-American Reparations Commission’s (NAARC) 10 point plan
Here’s Liberation Ventures’ repair framework
Dig into Harmony Labs’ explainer on narrative change: “What’s a Narrative?”
Check out Michael Kraus’s op-ed in the Los Angeles Times: “Deep Racial Inequality Persists in the U.S.—But Many Americans Don’t Want to Believe It”
Here’s Raj Chetty’s research on the myth of the American Dream in the New York Times Upshot: “Extensive Data Show Punishing Reach of Racism for Black Boys”

Subscribe to Reparations Daily (ish) and check out Trevor’s Twitter thread on BIPOC leaders doing narrative change work

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There’s a lot of talk about budgets in Washington—but budget debates are rarely humanized in ways that people can understand in real life terms. And that’s a problem. Because a wide array of critical agencies across the federal government have been getting systematically underfunded over the years, resulting in very real problems for American families. A prime example is the Social Security Administration (SSA)—which oversees retirement, disability, and survivors insurance as well as Supplemental Security Income. Since 2010, SSA’s operating budget has been cut by at least 16 percent, adjusting for inflation. Its staffing is down 13 percent, and all while the number of beneficiaries has gone up 21 percent. Why? Because Democrats have failed to get Republicans to join them in increasing SSA’s administrative budget, which is so lean already it’s just 1 percent of the benefits the agency pays out.

What this kind of systematic disinvestment in a key federal agency means in human terms was the subject of a recent congressional hearing held in response to an outcry from constituents across the United States about customer service challenges in accessing Social Security.

Hour-plus long waits, dropped calls, and an often simply nonfunctional 1-800 phone line; unconscionable delays for disability determinations that leave thousands dying every year waiting for desperately needed benefits; and a huge problem with overpayments or underpayments that occur through no fault of the beneficiaries because the agency just doesn’t have the resources and staffing to process earnings reports on time are just a few examples of how this impacts individuals and families.

So for this week’s Off-Kilter, Rebecca sat down with two of the other witnesses from that hearing—Bethany Lilly of The Arc and Tracey Gronniger of Justice in Aging—as well as two of the other top experts on the issue: Kathleen Romig of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and Kristen Dama of Community Legal Services, for a look at the human toll of defunding SSA.

For more:

Read Kathleen’s new piece on SSA’s funding crisis
Read Rebecca’s, Bethany’s, and Tracey’s testimony from last week’s House Ways and Means Committee hearing
Follow @kathleenromig; @bethanylilly; @traceythomgron; @kristendama on Twitter

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Following decades of failed tough-on-crime policies in the United States, between 70 million and 100 million Americans now have some type of criminal record, standing in the way of basics like jobs and housing for a huge swath of the nation’s citizens. But a policy that’s been gaining bipartisan steam in the states over the past five years, known as “Clean Slate,” has started to chip away at that gargantuan figure, by enabling people to have eligible records automatically wiped after they remain crime-free. In a special episode of Off-Kilter recorded at the Clean Slate Initiative’s first annual convening in Detroit, Rebecca sat down with several of the leaders in the Clean Slate movement to talk recent wins in the states, how people’s lives are being changed for the better, and the road ahead for criminal record-clearing with tough-on-crime rhetoric on the rise. This episode’s guests: Sheena Meade, managing director of the Clean Slate Initiative; Sharon Dietrich, litigation director at Community Legal Services in Philadelphia; Noella Sudbury, executive director of Clean Slate Utah; Josh Hoe, policy analyst at Safe and Just Michigan; and Zaki Smith, one of the leaders of the Clean Slate New York campaign.

For more:

Learn more about and get involved with the Clean Slate Initiative at cleanslateinitiative.org
Here’s a deeper dive on the rise of automatic record-clearing
Learn more about Clean Slate PA, Clean Slate Utah, and Clean Slate Michigan
Learn more about Zaki’s mural campaign for second chances

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Following the rare leak of a draft majority opinion in the Supreme Court case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the prospect of partial or wholesale rollback of Roe v. Wade—and with it, the bodily autonomy of women and people who can become pregnant—now looms larger than ever in the United States. So in the wake of the leak that has everyone shook up, Rebecca sat back down with Ian Millhiser, a senior correspondent at Vox and Off-Kilter’s favorite court watcher for the inside scoop on the leak, what happens if Roe goes down, and how the Supreme Court has become, in his words, “one of the chief architects of America’s democratic decline.” And in the second half of the show, Rebecca talks again with Dr. Jamila Taylor, senior fellow and director of health care reform at The Century Foundation, to unpack why rolling back Roe would be a huge setback for women’s equality and economic justice; how out of step rolling back the clock on reproductive rights is with the will of the American people; what’s on deck in the states if Roe does go down; and the road ahead to fighting back. For more:

Dig into Ian’s essay on how SCOTUS became “one of the chief architects of America’s democratic decline”
Read Jamila’s statement responding to Justice Alito’s leaked draft opinion
Here are tips on how to donate to a local abortion fund (via The Cut)

Note: This is a corrected version of the audio.

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For more than two years, student loan repayment in the United States has been on pause, and interest on those debts has been frozen in light of the pandemic. In April, that pause was extended to August 31 of this year, offering another temporary reprieve for borrowers, many of whom were struggling to make often-crushing payments well before COVID-19 became a household name. Now, after years of calls to cancel some or all of the nation’s $1.6 trillion in student loan debt, federal policymakers are seriously considering finally taking a step in that direction. To unpack how student debt became a $1.6 trillion crisis, what’s being discussed in Washington, and why student debt cancellation must be just the beginning of the conversation on making higher education affordable, Rebecca sat down with two of The Century Foundation’s experts on the subject: Tiara Moultrie, a fellow at TCF whose work focuses on higher education accountability, and Peter Granville, a senior policy associate studying federal and state policy efforts to improve college access and affordability.

For more:

Here are some helpful updates on where the push to cancel student debt stands: from Business Insider, CNBC, The Hill

Check out more of TCF’s higher education work

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This week, we’re taking a break from Off-Kilter’s regularly scheduled programming to share a special virtual discussion hosted by The Century Foundation earlier this week with Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro, and other leaders to mark the official launch of the new Disability Economic Justice Collaborative. Off-Kilter previewed the collaborative’s launch a few weeks ago in a special behind-the-scenes episode with TCF’s new Disability Economic Justice team: it brings together two dozen leading disability groups, think tanks, and research organizations to learn from each other, work in partnership, and finally break the link between disability and poverty that continues to persist in the United States more than three decades after the Americans with Disabilities Act became law. For more:

Here’s the new TCF–CEPR study documenting the economic crisis facing the U.S. disability community (and if that’s tl;dr, here’s a fact sheet).
Check out the new TCF–Data for Progress poll finding that just one in three disabled voters believe leaders in Washington care about people with disabilities.

Here’s the press release announcing the collaborative: you can find the full event and all the materials discussed during it at DEJC.org.

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How would you feel if you found out your elected leaders had voted to hand out huge sums of public money to corporations, with some of them not even knowing who the recipient is, and the rest bound by contract not to divulge its identity or what its specific plans are? Now what if we told you this happens all over the country, all the time, in deals involving wealthy corporations such as Amazon, Facebook, Google, and on and on?

Unfortunately, thanks to a legal tool called a non-disclosure agreement (NDA), this kind of corrupt secret dealmaking has become the norm rather than the exception in economic development deals. These agreements—signed by governors, mayors, state legislators, and other local leaders—prevent public officials from disclosing anything about a corporate subsidy deal they’re working on, including even the recipient, until it’s finished, cutting many key stakeholders, and most importantly the public, out of the process.

But a new coalition is seeking to change that. To learn more about the effort to “Ban Secret Deals”—and why it’s critical to economic justice in the United States—Rebecca sat down with Pat Garofalo, director of state and local policy at the American Economic Liberties Project, author of the book Billionaire Boondoggle and the Boondoggle newsletter, which looks at how corporations are ripping off our states, cities, and communities; and Illinois State Senator Robert Peters, an organizer and economic justice activist who now represents the Thirteenth Legislative District in the Illinois General Assembly, and who recently introduced the first state legislation to ban secret deals.

For more:

Here’s some of the recent coverage of how non-disclosure agreements are enabling corrupt secret dealmaking with wealthy corporations like Amazon, Facebook, and more
For more from Pat, subscribe to the Boondoggle newsletter and check out his book Billionaire Boondoggle
For more from Senator Peters, check out this interview with ABC7 Chicago—and his legislation to ensure transparency in government contracts

Learn more about the campaign to ban secret deals at bansecretdeals.org

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This week, Rebecca hands the mic to Ryan Prior for an Off-Kilter takeover episode. Ryan is a longtime journalist, former CNN reporter, and like Rebecca, someone who lives with invisible chronic illness. They first crossed paths when Rebecca was at the Center for American Progress (CAP) and more recently reconnected in the COVID era because of his forthcoming book The Long Haul—which looks at how COVID-19 pandemic as a mass disabling event has changed the face of disability and chronic illness in the United States. For this Off-Kilter takeover, Ryan sat down with another chronically ill journalist and author of a similarly timely book—Meghan O’Rourke, author of the New York Times bestseller Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness, which Esquire called “at once a remarkable work of scholarship and a radical act of empathy.”

For more:

Dig into The Invisible Kingdom and follow Meghan on Twitter @meghanor
Check out Ryan’s documentary Forgotten Plague, get involved with ME Action, and follow him on Twitter @r_prior

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This week, Rebecca took a break from Off-Kilter’s regularly scheduled programming for a sit-down with the newest members of The Century Foundation’s brand-new Disability Economic Justice Team, which officially launched last month. Kim Knackstedt comes to TCF from the Biden administration, in which she served as the first-ever director of disability policy on the White House Domestic Policy Council, after many years as a staffer on Capitol Hill and before that, as a special ed teacher. Vilissa Thompson is the founder of Ramp Your Voice!, a former licensed social worker, and a long-time thought leader in the disability community at the intersection of race, gender, and disability. For more on TCF’s new Disability Economic Justice Team: * Read more about the team in the press release announcing its launch and follow The Century Foundation on Twitter at @TCFdotorg * Here’s more on Kim, more on her prior role at the White House, and follow her on Twitter @kiknack * And here’s more on Vilissa, more on Ramp Your Voice!, and follow her on Twitter @VilissaThompson

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“We believe that it is possible to create an economy where all Black, Latinx, Asian, Indigenous, and Pacific Islander people thrive—in one generation. To accomplish this we must fight to dismantle what we call the Oppression Economy. Today, elite institutions use racism as a tool to expand their wealth and power and suppress the wealth of people of color through theft, exploitation, and exclusion. Suppressing economic power leads to suppression of political power to influence policies that oversee resources. The elite institutions that control resources use that control to change the rules of our economy in their favor, which continues the cycle of profit.”

This is the vision of Liberation in a Generation, a national movement support organization building the power of people of color to totally transform the economy—who controls it, how it works, and most importantly, for whom. Formed in 2018 by cofounders Jeremie Greer and Solana Rice, LibGen as it’s come to be called, brings together advocates, community organizers, economists, and other proven and emerging leaders of color across the country to build a Liberation Economy within, as the name suggests, one generation.

So as Off-Kilter continues this ongoing series of conversations with economic justice leaders working to turn the traditional think tank model on its head—for this week’s show, Rebecca sat down with Jeremie and Solana for a look at the story behind LibGen and how it’s working to dismantle what they have termed the “oppression economy” by putting people of color at the center of policy change. We also take a sneak peek at their new podcast, called Racism Is Profitable.

For more:

Learn more about Liberation in a Generation and get involved at liberationinageneration.org.
Subscribe to their new podcast, “Racism Is Profitable” and find all of the episodes we talked about here
Follow them on Twitter @solanarice and @jeremiegreer

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Sixty-one million Americans, or roughly one in four, live with disabilities. Yet people with disabilities have at best only been an afterthought when it comes to housing policy in the United States, without a seat at the metaphorical table to inform how it gets made. Now, a new organization called The Kelsey is working to change that.

So, after a great set of conversations with some of the folks behind Next100 about how they’re working to turn the traditional think tank model on its head—we at Off-Kilter have decided to keep the conversation going about what it looks like to put directly impacted communities at the center of policy change.

For this week’s show, Rebecca sat down with three of the powerhouse disability leaders behind The Kelsey—Micaela Connery, Allie Cannington, and Fatimah Aure—for a look at the story behind the organization and how it’s working to change how housing policy gets made… by centering the perspectives of disabled people.

You can learn more about The Kelsey and get involved with their work at TheKelsey.org.

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Over the course of the past few weeks, Rebecca’s been having a series of conversations with some of the folks behind Next100—a think tank that’s turning the traditional think tank model on its head, to create a public policy sector where those with the most at stake are driving the change they and their communities want to see. We at Off-Kilter enjoyed what started as a single episode conversation so much, we decided to turn it into a three-part series.

So, to wrap up that series of conversations with Next100 leaders about what it looks like to put people at the center of policy change in the areas of antipoverty policy and climate policy… for this week’s show, Rebecca sat down with a set of current and former Next100 policy entrepreneurs—Michael "Zaki" Smith, Isabel Coronado, and Vidal Guzman—all of whom are working to transform different facets of America’s Jim Crow criminal legal system, and to ensure directly impacted folks are leading the way.

And ICYMI: Don’t miss the first and second episodes in this ongoing series.

For more:

For more from Zaki, check out his piece on collateral consequences, “A Silent Life Sentence”; his testimony before the New York state legislature on why “New York State Must Pass Automatic Expungement ‘Clean Slate’ Legislation”; the #EndPerpetualPunishment Campaign; his Brooklyn mural campaign; and follow him on Twitter @zakithebarber.
For more from Isabel, check out her report: “We Are Not Collateral Consequences: Policy Solutions for Children of Incarcerated Parents, From Arrest to Reentry”; her piece “The Resilient Children of Incarcerated Parents: Interviews”; and more on her idea for a Flourishing Children of Incarcerated Parents federal grant program; and follow her on Twitter @graduateisabel.
For more from Vidal, check out his essay explaining why “Slavery Hasn’t Been Abolished. It’s Been Reformed”; read more on the Fix the 13th NY campaign to raise wages for incarcerated folks; and follow him on Twitter @iamvidalguzman.

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Last week, Rebecca sat down with some of the folks behind Next100—a think tank that’s turning the traditional think tank model on its head, to create a public policy sector where those with the most at stake are driving the change they and their communities want to see. We at Off-Kilter enjoyed that conversation so much, we decided to turn it into a three-part series.

So, continuing last week’s conversation about what it looks like to put people at the center of policy change in the area of antipoverty policy… for this week’s pod, Rebecca sat down with two more Next 100 policy entrepreneurs—Dan Mathis and Diana Martinez Quintana—who are working to change how climate policy is made in the United States, at the intersections of housing policy, immigration, and racial justice.

And ICYMI: don’t miss last week’s episode, which kicked off Off-Kilter’s series with The Next 100.

For more:

For more from Diana, read her recent essay, “Climate Displacement Gives America the Opportunity to Improve the Record on Immigration” and follow her on Twitter @DianaYMartinezQ
For more from Dan, check out his recent article, “Climate disasters are inevitable. Their disparate impacts—and our disparate responses to them—are not” and follow him on Twitter @dmathis_
And learn more about Next100 in this video on how the organization is working to change how public policy is made by building a more inclusive policy sector

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Last month, the newly launched Congressional Progressive Staff Association published a survey of more than five hundred Congressional staff. The results were damning. Half of Capitol Hill staffers who weren’t in management reported their pay was so low they were struggling to make ends meet. Roughly one in four of those who weren’t managers said they didn't have the equivalent of even one month's rent in the bank in the case of an emergency. And this despite routinely working twelve-hour days and weekends. The survey’s troubling findings come as a viral Instagram account called “Dear White Staffers” has been drawing new levels of national attention to the low pay, poor working conditions, and toxic workplace environment that is often even more pervasive for staffers of color on the Hill. But a critical point that this growing national conversation demands is that the problem isn’t limited to Capitol Hill. Low starting salaries at many of the think tanks and policy organizations that shape public policy only serve to compound an existing lack of pipelines into public policy jobs for the communities most impacted. Another major contributing factor is a hiring culture that continues a cycle of exclusion—including the unstated but incredibly pervasive limiting belief that people with lived experience of societal problems like poverty and rampant inequality couldn’t possibly have anything to offer when it comes to shaping the policies and programs that directly impact their communities.

Meanwhile, a new organization called The Next 100—housed within The Century Foundation—is turning the exclusionary nature of Washington policymaking on its head. Now in its second cohort, the Next 100 has created a model for what recruiting, hiring, and supporting diverse talent in the policy space can look like—and more generally for breaking down deeply embedded barriers to inclusion of diverse perspectives in policymaking, with broad applicability for think tanks and policy organizations across sectors, as well as Capitol Hill.

So for a look at how we create a policy sector where those with the most at stake are driving the change they and their communities want to see, for this week’s Off-Kilter—now that we’re back up and running for 2022—Rebecca sat down with Emma Vadehra, executive director of Next 100, and two of the members of the organization’s current cohort—Lindsey Cazessus and Chantal Hinds—for the first in a series of conversations with the organization’s Policy Entrepreneurs.

For more:

Learn more about The Next 100 in this video featuring executive director Emma Vadehra and several of the organization’s past and present policy entrepreneurs
For more from Lindsey, read her recent essay, “The Myth of the Undeserving Poor Should End with the Pandemic” and follow her on Twitter @lindseycazessus
For more from Chantal, check out her recent article, “A Feature, Not a Bug: The Foster System’s History of Othering” and follow her on Twitter @c_hinds_
For more from Emma Vadehra, read her recent piece in the Stanford Social Innovation Review on reimagining think tanks and follow her on Twitter @emmavadehra

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With the Senate announcing they’re heading into recess without passing the Build Back Better Act, we figured why not get out of the news cycle for Off-Kilter’s last episode of the year and instead have a far more good-news conversation that Rebecca Vallas has been meaning to have for a while with her dear friend Rebecca Cokley about what she’s got underway at the Ford Foundation, in her history-making new role as the first program officer to head a U.S. disability rights portfolio at a major U.S. foundation.

For more:

Learn more about Rebecca Cokley’s newly launched disability rights program at the Ford Foundation
Here’s more on what the Rebeccas mean when they say “disability is a cause and consequence of poverty”
Follow Rebecca Cokley on Twitter: @rebeccacokley

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With the clock ticking on Democrats’ “Build Back Better” legislation, which passed the House last month and now awaits Senate action, West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin has cited yet another in a never ending string of “new” reasons for withholding his support for the bill. This time? Inflation.

On Tuesday, during a Wall Street Journal CEO Council Summit, Mr. Manchin said of inflation to a roomful of corporate CEOs: “The unknown we’re facing today is much greater than the need that people believe in this aspirational bill that we’re looking at and we’ve got to make sure we get this right.” Sen. Manchin, of course, isn’t alone in singing that tune, with Republicans already testing out their attack ads for the 2022 midterms and conservative media outlets blanketing their airwaves for months with baseless claims that rising inflation is due to pandemic recovery spending.

So, to help separate fact from fiction in the inflation debate, Rebecca sat down with two of the leading progressive economic voices working to tell the story about what’s really going on with inflation—and the policies we need to bring down prices, address our failing supply chains, and more.

Rakeen Mabud is chief economist and managing director of policy and research at the Groundwork Collaborative, which is dedicated to advancing a coherent, persuasive progressive economic worldview and narrative. And Matt Stoller is the research director of the American Economic Liberties Project (AELP), which fights to realize economic liberty for all, in support of a secure, inclusive democratic society. He’s also the author of Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly and Democracy, and writes the newsletter BIG, which focuses on the history and politics of monopoly power.

For more on all this:

Here’s a fact sheet from Groundwork and AELP on how unchecked corporate power is driving rising prices—plus a handy roundup of recent press that’s gotten it right on inflation
For lots more from Matt, check out his newsletter BIG—including his recent article on how the FTC is finally taking on big business by cracking down on shortage profiteering
Check out this Bloomberg article breaking down how corporate CEOs have spun the narrative on inflation

And here’s a helpful explainer from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities unpacking why Build Back Better is “unlikely to have any noticeable effect on inflation”

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With the biggest threat to abortion rights in fifty years reaching the Supreme Court this week, in the case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization—which centers around Mississippi’s fifteen-week abortion ban—Rebecca sat down with two of The Century Foundation’s top experts on reproductive rights and health: Dr. Jamila Taylor, director of health care reform and senior fellow at TCF, and Anna Bernstein, a health care policy fellow at TCF. They unpack what overturning Roe v. Wade would mean for women and people who can become pregnant in the United States; why reproductive justice is critical to economic justice and gender equality; and why low-income folks and people of color are likely to face the most devastating consequences. But first, Rebecca sat down with Ian Millhiser, senior correspondent at Vox, author of The Agenda: How a Republican Supreme Court Is Reshaping America, and Off-Kilter’s resident longtime court-watcher, for a recap of this week’s oral argument in Dobbs.

For more:

Read SCOTUSblog’s explainer on what’s at stake in Dobbs: “Roe v. Wade hangs in balance as reshaped court prepares to hear biggest abortion case in decades”
Check out “5 Things to Know about Abortion Access as Supreme Court Hears Dobbs v. JWHO” by Jamila Taylor and Anna Bernstein
And here’s a powerful read from the National Women’s Law Center’s Fatima Goss Graves for SCOTUSblog: “Our equality and liberty are on the line”

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Earlier today, the House of Representatives passed President Biden’s Build Back Better economic recovery legislation—which includes historic and long-overdue investments in child care, pre-K, home care for people with disabilities and seniors, an extension of the monthly expanded child tax credit, and more.

But Democratic leaders caution that the bill still faces immense hurdles in the Senate: namely, West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin. Senator Manchin—who has been wielding outsized influence throughout the entirety of the year’s Build Back Better debate by withholding the critical fiftieth vote Democrats need for the package to pass in the Senate—told CNN as recently as Thursday of this week that he still has not decided whether to even support a vote to proceed with the legislation, a critical first step for the Senate to take up the measure once the House passes the bill.

So for this week’s Off-Kilter, Rebecca sat down with two of the West Virginia moms and organizers behind a movement they call Rattle the Windows for a look at what West Virginia families really want from their leaders in Washington in this critical moment—as something of an open letter to Senator Manchin. Amy Jo Hutchison is a West Virginia-born-and-raised grassroots organizer for economic justice who organizes poor families, primarily single moms. She’s also the founder of Rattle the Windows. And Megan Hullinger is a West Virginia mother of four, former AmeriCorps member, and community outreach specialist who describes herself as an “accidental activist” after getting involved with Rattle the Windows.

Learn more about and get involved with Rattle the Windows at:

RattleTheWindows.com
Facebook.com/rattlethewindows
Twitter: @RattleWindows

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Some twenty months into the COVID-19 pandemic, estimates suggest that between 3 million and 10 million Americans may have “long COVID,” which can bring long-term and, in some cases, debilitating symptoms ranging from chronic pain and fatigue to brain fog, respiratory problems, organ damage, and more.

While experts may still be fuzzy on the exact number of so-called COVID “long-haulers,” two things are clear: this population represents the largest influx of new entrants to the U.S. disability community in modern history, and their ranks continue to grow by the day. But is America’s public policy infrastructure prepared to handle the coming tidal wave? And how was it faring for the 1 in 4 Americans already living with disabilities before the pandemic?

Following last week’s deep dive into America’s house-of-cards child care system, for this week’s Off-Kilter, Rebecca sat down with three dear friends and leaders from the disability community for a look at America’s frayed caring economy from the disability perspective; the policies we need to ensure COVID long-haulers aren’t left out in the cold; and how Democrats’ Build Back Better legislation could begin to make transformational change. This week’s guests include: Matthew Cortland, senior fellow at Data for Progress and cofounder of the #DemolishDisabledPoverty campaign; Kathleen Romig, senior policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities; and Elena Hung, co-founder and executive director of Little Lobbyists, a family-led group advocating for children with complex medical needs and disabilities (and Xiomara’s mom).

For more on all this:

Learn more about the home and community-based services (HCBS) provisions in Build Back Better, via NBC News.
Here’s a good overview of long-haulers’ challenges accessing disability benefits, via the New York Times.
Read more from Matthew and Data for Progress: “The Reconciliation Bill is a Disability Justice Issue;” “The safety net program Congress forgot”
Read more from Kathleen and CBPP: “After Years of Underinvestment, It’s Time to Rebuild the Social Security Administration;” “After Decades of Neglect, It’s Time to Rebuild SSI”
Learn more about Elena’s work and get involved with the Little Lobbyists.
Follow #CareCantWait for real-time updates on home and community-based services (HCBS) in the Build Back Better legislation.

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A major contributor to poverty among U.S. families with children today is the incredibly high cost of child care. Statistics abound, underscoring how unaffordable child care in America has become, left to the whims of the private market: In more than half of states, care for an infant in a child care center costs more than in-state college tuition. For low-income families, child care expenses for children under five often amount to 35 percent of their income. A recent New York Times article by Jason DeParle on the subject was aptly titled, “When childcare costs twice as much as the mortgage.”

Meanwhile, America’s broken child care system has a become a major driver of poverty and racial inequality on the worker side of the equation, as well, with many (disproportionately Black and Brown) child care teachers getting paid as if they were fast food workers despite the fact that their work is complex and specialized, not to mention incredibly valuable.

Making a bad situation far, far worse—as with so many pre-existing gaps in America’s public policy infrastructure—the COVID-19 pandemic has only thrown gasoline on the fire, laying bare and deepening the inequities of a house-of-cards child care system reliant on families shelling out unaffordable amounts, teachers being paid poverty wages, and communities across the United States lacking a sufficient child care workforce to meet demand. Indeed, nationally, the early education workforce has declined by roughly 12 percent compared with prepandemic levels.

These are among the longstanding policy problems Democrats are seeking to solve with the Build Back Better legislation moving through the House of Representatives this week—which includes an historic $400 billion investment in America’s child care and pre-K system that seeks to finally make high-quality child care and early learning affordable and accessible for all families with young children, while creating good jobs and boosting wages for a woefully undervalued and underpaid workforce largely made up of women of color.

To unpack what’s in Democrats’ child care and pre-K plan as the Build Back Better bill inches closer to passage, Rebecca sat down with two of the advocates behind the push to put child care and early learning within reach for all families: Julie Kashen, a senior fellow and director of women’s economic justice at The Century Foundation and board member of the Vote Mama Action Fund; and Amanda Perez, senior advocacy manager at Zero to Three, which works to ensure all babies and toddlers get a strong start in life.

For more:

“The Case for Child Care and Early Learning for All: Economic Prosperity” by Julie Kashen
“The Case for Child Care and Early Learning for All: Healthy Child Development and School Readiness” by Julie Kashen and Halley Potter
“Biden’s Child Care and Early Learning Proposal Could Serve 8.27 Million More Children” by Julie Kashen, Melissa Boteach, Stephanie Schmit, and Jessica Milli
“The Build Back Better Plan Would Reduce the Motherhood Penalty” by Julie Kashen and Jessica Milli
“Care Matters: A Report Card on Care Policies in the States” by Julie Kashen and Amanda Novello
“When Child Care Costs More than the Mortgage” by Jason DeParle (New York Times)
To get involved with the ongoing push for comprehensive child care and early learning reform as part of Build Back Better, visit thinkbabies.org and follow #CareCantWait

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In recent months, a wave of champions of the “tough on crime” approach to criminal justice have been trumpeting a spike in U.S. homicides in 2020 as fodder for rolling back critical reforms to America’s broken criminal legal system, and for scaremongering about the so-called defund the police movement. Meanwhile, criminal justice experts caution that efforts to blame the uptick in homicides on criminal justice reform aren’t just unfounded but are in fact directly contradicted by the very crime data the tough-on-crimers are trying to spin. As Fordham Law professor John Pfaff has put it: the rise in homicides last year actually “by and large took place on the status quo’s watch.”

So, for a look at what we know and what we don’t know about the 2020 crime data—and the shifting politics around criminal justice reform—Rebecca sat down with Ames Grawert, senior counsel at the Brennan Center and Josh Hoe, the policy analyst at Safe and Just Michigan and the host of the Decarceration Nation podcast.

For more:

Here’s an incredibly data-rich rebuttal to tough-on-crimers’ efforts to pin the uptick in homicides on reform—from John Pfaff in The New Republic
Read more on the Office of Legal Counsel memo that will send thousands of people back to prison if Biden doesn’t withdraw it
Dig into Ames’s analysis on how criminal justice involvement deepens inequality
Here’s more on the momentum for “clean slate” automatic record-clearing programs in the states—and a new bill introduced in Congress to create a federal grant program to help states cover the costs of implementing them

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The Federal Reserve, better known as “the Fed,” has been in the spotlight quite a bit in recent weeks, following an apparent insider trading scandal embroiling several high-level officials at America’s central bank. And in the latest shoe to drop, disclosure documents made public in recent weeks reveal that the scandal of stock trading during the pandemic extends all the way up to the chair of the Fed himself—Jerome “Jay” Powell.

With Chairman Powell’s term ending in January 2022, a growing chorus of progressives, climate activists, advocates for racial justice, and economic heavyweights from Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz to Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren are calling on President Biden not to renominate Powell and instead to use what could be as many as four open seats on the Fed’s all-white, seven-member governing board to reshape the agency into an institutional force for racial, gender, climate, and economic progress—and bring some long-overdue racial and gender diversity to a critical institution that’s been run nearly exclusively by white men.

“Is the Biden administration going to fulfill what is at the heart of its agenda? Then it should not be Powell,” said Stiglitz in an interview with Reuters last month. The Biden White House has not yet announced what they plan to do when Powell’s term ends, though a decision is expected any day now.

With an historic debate brewing over what to do with the Federal Reserve, we at Off-Kilter thought it would be useful to pull together something of an explainer on the nation’s central bank, how it operates, and why it’s so important to economic and antipoverty policy—and to go inside the push to remake the Fed in the wake of the wave of recent scandals. So Rebecca sat down with Saqib Bhatti, co-executive director of the Action Center on Race and the Economy, better known as ACRE—and one of the groups leading the charge—to break it all down.

For lots more on this:

Read more from Saqib and his ACRE colleagues Brittany Alston and Vasudha Desikan in “President Biden Must Appoint a New Fed Chair Who Is Serious About Racial Equity.”
Read Vasudha Desikan and Liberation in a Generation’s Solana Rice in Ms. Magazine: “We Need More Women in Leadership at the Fed: Personnel Is Policy.”
Here’s more on the pandemic stock trading scandals, from The American Prospect’s Bob Kuttner.
Here’s why Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz says Powell should go.
And here’s Senator Elizabeth Warren’s speech making the case for new leadership at the Fed.

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Last month, the U.S. Census Bureau put out its annual snapshot of income, poverty, and health insurance in the United States—which serves as something of an annual report card on the economic well-being of America’s families.

One of the most significant takeaways was the effectiveness of government relief at keeping people above the federal poverty line last year at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic: according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 53 million more Americans would have been officially poor in 2020 if not for a critical assembly of pandemic-related economic relief measures, from stimulus payments to boosts in jobless benefits, food assistance, medical coverage, and more.

But while it’s always good news to see the enactment of public policies that measurably move the needle on poverty and hardship, a growing number of antipoverty researchers and advocates are raising a fundamental question: What good are these kinds of data if the way the United States defines poverty doesn’t bear any resemblance to the cost of a basic standard of living in the nation today? Likewise, when policymakers and elected officials commit to cutting poverty—or better, ending poverty—what are our leaders accountable to if the nation’s official definition of poverty amounts to just a fraction of what human dignity and economic stability require?

So, to pull back the curtain on how the United States measures poverty, the problems with the official poverty measure, and the push to reform U.S. poverty measurement, Rebecca sat down with three colleagues and friends who know a ton about measuring poverty to talk about how we can do better and why it matters so much:

Shawn Fremstad, senior fellow at the Center for Economic Policy Research, CEPR, and author of a recent report for TCF, “The Defining Down of Economic Deprivation: Why We Need to Reset the Poverty Line”;
Shailly Gupta Barnes, policy director for the Poor People’s Campaign and the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice, which is committed to building a movement to end poverty, led by the poor; and
David Brady, professor, School of Public Policy, University of California-Riverside and a research professor at the WZB Berlin Sociadmvl Science Center—and author of another report in the same TCF series, “American Poverty Should Be Measured Relative to the Prevailing Standards of Our Time.”

For more on all this:

Dig into Shawn’s report on why the U.S. poverty line is too damn low: “The Defining Down of Economic Deprivation: Why We Need to Reset the Poverty Line.”
For more on the case for shifting to a relative poverty measure, check out David’s report: “American Poverty Should Be Measured Relative to the Prevailing Standards of Our Time.”
And here’s lots more about the Poor People’s Campaign’s demands and why they’re challenging the OPM.

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As the debate over President Biden’s sweeping “build back better” agenda continues in Washington, West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin hasn’t been shy about laying out his demands, as Democratic leadership in the House and Senate and the White House bend over backwards to garner his and Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema’s votes for reconciliation bill that’s been moving through Congress.

High on Senator Manchin’s list: adding so-called work requirements to the newly expanded Child Tax Credit. In a September appearance on CNN’s State of the Union, he derided parents who don’t work outside the home, asking: “Don’t you think, if we’re going to help the children, that people should make some effort?”

Asked what he thought of the West Virginia Senator’s remarks, Child Tax Credit champion and Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown responded as aptly as he did succinctly, declaring: “I think raising children is work.”

Of course, so-called “work requirements”—the policy of using survival benefits as a tool to compel paid work outside the home—is not a new idea. Indeed they were the centerpiece of Donald Trump’s agenda to dismantle the safety net for the better part of his one-term presidency.

But the notion of so-called work requirements dates back a lot farther than Trump—and even a lot farther back than Ronald Reagan’s racist myth of the welfare queen. Indeed, as a recent report from the Center of the Study of Social Policy documents in painstaking depth, the long and sordid history of work requirements in U.S. income policy has roots that trace back centuries to the slave trade.

So given the Senator from West Virginia’s continued interest in keeping work requirements alive, instead of turning the page on this kind of policymaking-by-dog-whistle and ensuring that all families have what they need to thrive—we at Off-Kilter thought it might be helpful to take a deep dive into the racist roots of work requirements.

Joining Rebecca for this week’s show: Aisha Nyandoro, chief executive officer of Springboard to Opportunity and architect of the Magnolia Mother’s Trust; Jeremie Greer, cofounder and co-executive director of Liberation in a Generation; and Elisa Minoff, senior policy analyst at the Center for the Study of Social Policy and the author of “The Racist Roots of Work Requirements.”

Dig into Elisa Minoff’s full report, “The Racist Roots of Work Requirements”
For more on the history and consequences of the 1996 welfare law, check out “TANF Policies Reflect Racist Legacy of Cash Assistance” by Ife Floyd
Read “Work Requirements Would Undermine the CTC’s Impacts on Racial and Economic Justice” by the Children’s Defense Fund’s Emma Mehrabi

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This week in Washington has featured no shortage of drama, with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell saddling Democrats with the threat of both a government shutdown and default on the nation’s debts by withholding Republican votes for keeping the government funded or raising the debt ceiling. Meanwhile, despite months of forward momentum in Congress to craft sweeping “build back better” legislation encompassing much of President Biden’s American Jobs Plan and American Families Plan—austerity politics (or more precisely Sinemanchin intransigence—to borrow a timely term from The American Prospect’s David Dayen) has threatened to derail the president’s economic agenda.

Thankfully, late on Thursday night, House progressives came to the rescue, making good on their promise to withhold their votes for the first part of “build back better”—the bipartisan infrastructure package—until there’s a commitment from the Senate (well, really Senators Manchin and Sinema) on a clear path forward for the second part of the package, the so-called reconciliation bill. That reconciliation bill of course is the piece of legislation that includes the bulk of Democrats’ priorities, from paid family and medical leave to child care to home and community based services, climate, and much, much more. The theory of the case for House progressives? Hold the line to ensure the reconciliation package—the centerpiece of the president’s economic agenda—isn’t hung out to dry.

To pull back the curtain on what’s been going on in Washington this week, the politics driving the drama around build back better, government shutdown, potential default, and more—and a deep dive on why it’s so important that Congress pass both parts of the president’s economic agenda—Rebecca sat down with Lindsay Owens, executive director of the Groundwork Collaborative and a senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and Data for Progress.

Learn more about the Groundwork Collaborative’s work at GroundworkCollaborative.org
Register for “Econ Con,” Groundwork’s annual conference, at EconCon.com

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For all the talk about what’s in “Build Back Better” recovery legislation that Democrats are trying to move through Congress, one thing that’s not currently in the bill, in what many workers’ advocates say is a glaring omission, is anything to do with Unemployment Insurance—which was badly in need of a refresh long before the COVID-19 pandemic, to ensure that when workers lose a job, they have the protection they need.

In fact, workers’ advocates and progressive think tanks have been ringing the alarm bells for years about how few jobless workers were protected by our UI system. The pre-pandemic share of jobless workers actually helped by UI in their time of need? Just 1 in 4, a record low.

One of the most important lessons from the pandemic is without question the structural failings in America’s Unemployment Insurance system—gaps that were in many cases briefly filled by temporary expansions of jobless protections that have since been allowed to expire, leaving millions of still-jobless workers with less than they need to get by, or worse, nothing at all to keep them and their families afloat.

For a look at the state of Unemployment Insurance now that recent expansions have been allowed to run out, what jobless workers are facing right now, and the long-needed UI fixes that workers’ advocates are hoping might still be included in upcoming recovery legislation… for this week’s Off-Kilter, Rebecca sat down with a panel of UI experts and advocates who have been leading the charge: Rebecca Dixon, executive director of the National Employment Law Project; Andy Stettner, senior fellow at The Century Foundation; and Stephanie Freed, a freelancer turned UI organizer who founded and serves as the executive director of Extend PUA, which has organized tens of thousands of jobless workers in the fight to extend federal UI expansions during the pandemic.

Read Rebecca Dixon’s statement on why UI reforms must be included in “Build Back Better” recovery legislation
Read more from Andy Stettner on the 7.5 million jobless workers who went over a UI benefits cliff on Labor Day
Learn more about the story behind ExtendPUA.org—and how Stephanie Freed went from being a freelancer to organizing tens of thousands of jobless workers
Jobless benefits protected 4.7 million people from poverty in 2020, according to NELP analysis
Here’s a deep dive into how workers’ advocates say UI needs to be fixed (by NELP and allies)
And here’s an op-ed Rebecca (Vallas) wrote early in the pandemic about Florida’s broken-by-design UI system

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This week, millions of families across the United States are receiving their third monthly child allowance payment as implementation of the expanded Child Tax Credit (CTC) authorized by the American Rescue Plan Act earlier this year continues.

Meanwhile, as “Build Back Better” legislation continues to come together in Congress, with key House committees marking up their portions of the legislation this week, the future of America’s first guaranteed minimum income for families with children—a policy estimated to cut child poverty in half in the United States—is at the heart of the ongoing debate.

While not the permanent extension community advocates are calling for, the version of the bill currently moving through the House would extend the life of America’s first-ever child allowance by four years to give the expanded CTC time to take root—while making at least one key feature permanent: the credit’s so-called “full refundability” (read: full availability for the lowest-income families).

So, for this week’s Off-Kilter, Rebecca sat down with two dear friends and colleagues who have been leading the way on the fight to extend the child allowance beyond its first year—while also working to ensure the program’s full implementation: Indi Dutta Gupta, co-executive director of the Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality, and Dorian Warren, co-president of Community Change and one of the co-chairs of the Economic Security Project.

But first: Rebecca talks with Representative Rosa DeLauro—the Connecticut Congresswoman who’s spent the past nearly two decades in Congress leading the crusade for what she calls a “Social Security for children”—for a look at how we got here and why she set out to expand the CTC all the way back in 2003, long before the CTC became cool.

Find out how much your family is eligible for with Community Change’s Child Tax Credit calculator: https://communitychange.org/ctccalculator/.
Here’s the link to the CTC easy sign-up tool for non-filers: https://www.whitehouse.gov/child-tax-credit/sign-up/.
And for lots more on the expanded CTC, check out the Economic Security Project’s handy resource page: https://www.economicsecurityproject.org/emergencymoney/resources/.

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Thirty-one years ago, the fabric of America's legal and policy landscape changed dramatically for people with disabilities in the United States when the Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA, was signed into law by President George H. W. Bush, on July 26, 1990. But, as far we've come these past thirty-plus years, we still have incredibly far to go. Even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, disabled people in the United States—who make up one in four Americans—were roughly twice as likely to live in poverty and two to three times more likely to be unemployed. Now, as federal policymakers work to "build back better," the United States has the opportunity to take another set of historic steps towards achieving the ADA's promise of equal opportunity, community integration, and participation in American life for people with disabilities—a promise that remains as-yet unfulfilled.

For this special relaunch episode of Off-Kilter, Rebecca talks with four of the disabled women leaders who've been making history on the front-lines of the ongoing fight for disability economic justice: Rep. Ayanna Pressley (MA-7); Judy Heumann, whose historic activism jumpstarted the disability rights movement over forty years ago; Rebecca Cokley, a lifelong disability advocate and program officer at the Ford Foundation, where she heads the first U.S. disability rights program at any major foundation in the country; and Mia Ives-Rublee, the director of the Disability Justice Initiative at the Center for American Progress.

To take action on home and community-based services and SSI: Text SIGN PXPBNX to 50409
Check out Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution for more on Judy Heumann's activism and the origins of the disability rights movement at cripcamp.com

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This week, Off-Kilter’s bringing you a conversation Rebecca moderated at The Century Foundation earlier this week, on the historic opportunity to make long overdue improvements to Supplemental Security Income as part of #BuildBackBetter—featuring Sen Sherrod Brown, Rep. Raul Grijalva, and Rep. Jamaal Bowman, as well as a panel of disability and seniors’ advocates.

Guests: Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH); Congressman Jamaal Bowman (D-NY); Congressman Raul Grijalva (D-CA); Nancy Altman, president, Social Security Works; Matthew Cortland, chronically ill, disabled lawyer and senior fellow, Data for Progress; Kristen Dama, managing attorney for SSI, Community Legal Services of Philadelphia; Tracey Gronniger, directing attorney, economic security, Justice in Aging; Mia Ives-Rublee, director, Center for American Progress Disability Justice Initiative; and Kathleen Romig, senior policy analyst, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Show notes:

Event video: https://tcf.org/content/event/strengthening-ssi-must-part-building-back-better/

Polling: bit.ly/SSIpolling

Follow #DemolishDisabledPoverty

More on SSI: https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/politics/550027-the-safety-net-program-congress-forgot?rl=1

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Nearly 40 million people in the U.S. live below the official poverty line—which in 2021 is just $26,000 for a family of four. But while poverty is all too often portrayed as a personal failure, it’s actually the result of bad public policy choices. Public policy has purposefully erected barriers that deny access to basic needs, creating a society where people can easily become trapped in poverty—not because we as a nation lack the resources to lift them out, but because we are actively choosing not to. This is the premise of a new book called Broke in America: Seeing, Understanding, and Ending U.S. Poverty, which looks at many of the policy choices conspiring to keep people poor and offers a roadmap of solutions that would eradicate poverty in the U.S. Rebecca sat down with the authors, Joanne Goldblum and Colleen Shaddox, for this week's pod.

Get the book: https://benbellabooks.com/shop/brokeinamerica/

National Diaper Bank Network: nationaldiaperbanknetwork.org

Alliance for Period Supplies: https://www.allianceforperiodsupplies.org/

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The April jobs data released by the Department of Labor last week spurred an avalanche of hysteria and conservative hand-wringing about supposedly widespread labor shortages, with many on the right pointing to pandemic jobless benefits as the bogeyman. In a particularly troubling move, on Wednesday of this week, 12 Republican governors announced they’d be ending access to pandemic unemployment benefits in their states.

To help unpack the state of the labor market as the COVID-19 economic recovery continues—and the role of pandemic unemployment insurance in the recovery—Rebecca sat down with Heidi Shierholz, policy director at the Economic Policy Institute, former chief economist at the Department of Labor under President Obama, for a reality check on the jobs data and what they really tell us about the kind of policies we need at this point in the ongoing recovery.

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