Leading the way in the fight for human rights

Marisa Franco spent years as a community organizer around homelessness and labor issues in New York and California. But now she is back in her home state of Arizona, focusing on how to diversify and expand the power of Latinos.

Too often Latino movements have made women, gay, transgender and other marginalized people feel excluded or unwelcome, she said. The goal of Mijente, which is a play on the Spanish phrase “mi Gente” or “my People,” is to overcome those barriers.

“We need to break down the way silos have been created in our own community,” she said.

Franco, 39, also helps lead the #Not1More campaign, which was started to protest deportations under President Barack Obama and continues to work against what it perceives as unjust immigration laws.

Franco grew up in Guadalupe, Arizona, her father a factory worker, her mother a part-time domestic worker. And she saw firsthand the fear instilled by Joe Arpaio, the former sheriff of Maricopa County, who developed a reputation for hard-line immigration policies.

“He patrolled my hometown. I witnessed year after year what Arpaio was doing,” she said. “Driving around my town was scary, not because it was a barrio but because of the sheriffs.”

Franco was part of the campaign for the New York Domestic Worker’s Bill of Rights, the first in the nation. It went into effect in 2010. But that was also the year that SB 1070 was passed by the Arizona Legislature, which among other things gave police officers wide authority to stop and question people suspected of being in the country illegally.

That drew Franco back to Arizona, where she and others worked to get the law repealed. Ultimately, parts of the law were held to be constitutional, but Franco doesn’t see that as a failure.

“It wasn’t about defeating one piece of legislation,” she said. “After 2010 we took it on the road and started fighting copycat laws. We built a broader movement around the country.” She was involved in the movement to unseat Arpaio, who lost his bid for a seventh term as sheriff in 2016.

But Franco also believes that much more needs to be done.

“It’s not a given that Latinos will be a progressive wave — that’s a fallacy,” she said. “People have to be brought on board and their issues have to be addressed. It’s a really serious miscalculation that Latinos only care about immigration.”

______

From a Toothache to a Statewide Campaign

Edwin Smith

Provider of free dental care through a nonprofit Kids First Dental Services

It all started when Edwin Smith, a dentist, received a call from a local high school in his hometown, Barbourville, Kentucky, back around 2000.

The staff person said, “there’s a kid with a toothache who’s been in here two times — can I bring her to your office?” That one toothache inspired Smith to move beyond his private practice and offer free dental care to students in their schools.

The idea took hold so successfully that in 2005, he invested $150,000 of his own money to create a mobile dental clinic inside an 18-wheel trailer. He now operates two mobile dental clinics, with the help of two other dentists, that travel annually to 20 school districts in Kentucky, a state that has some of the worst dental health problems in the country. His nonprofit, Kids First Dental Services, has treated some 43,000 children throughout Kentucky.

Smith was born in Barbourville, the son of two schoolteachers who instilled in him the value of helping the community, he said. He saw the desperate need for dental care when he did an externship back home one summer while still in dental school.

“Things have gotten better,” he said. “When I first started, a lot of students had never seen a dentist.” Smith worked hard to get state legislation passed, which went into effect in 2010, requiring children entering schools to show proof of a dental exam.

Poor or no dental care can cause severe pain and health problems, but the social cost is also high. “Bright white teeth are everywhere,” Smith said. “How can you get a job if you have a big black tooth in front?”

Education is a big part of the work — such as counseling clients to drink less soda, especially Mountain Dew, which has a lot of sugar and acid (and is popular in the area). The damage it does to teeth is similar to that caused by methamphetamines, he said.

When Smith was interviewed on “20/20” and “Good Morning America” in 2009, he used the term “Mountain Dew Mouth.” PepsiCo, which makes Mountain Dew, was not pleased by that catchy phrase and, to burnish its image, donated a second mobile clinic to Smith’s practice.

Did he have any hesitation in accepting the donation? “We’ll take whatever we can get,” he said.

______

Battling the Death Penalty, Case by Case

Bryan Stevenson

Criminal justice reformer and creator of the Equal Justice Initiative

Bryan Stevenson, who has won numerous national and international awards as a human rights lawyer representing the poor and the incarcerated — including the MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant and 29 honorary doctoral degrees — started his education in what was then a “colored-only” school in Delaware.

The school was not fully desegregated until he was in the second grade, Stevenson said. His father never went to high school and “my grandmother was the daughter of people who had been enslaved.”

This brief history that Stevenson tells is not to show how far he has come, he explained, but how much he sees himself as the beneficiary of the civil rights movement.

“I’m standing on the shoulders of so many people,” he said. “So many have done so much more with so much less.”

As a student at Eastern University in Pennsylvania, “I was learning more and more about how little people knew about the lives of the poor and the burden created by the history of racial inequality,” he said. He was accepted at Harvard Law School, but “I never met a lawyer until I got to law school. The first year was very disorienting.”

He moved to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1989 and began what is now the Equal Justice Initiative, which works for criminal justice reform for the poor and minorities, with a particular focus on death penalty issues and those who were sentenced to life without parole when they were children.

Stevenson and the Equal Justice Initiative — which now has a staff of 60 — have won several landmark cases and saved more than 100 people from the death penalty. His book, “Just Mercy” was published in 2014 and also received numerous accolades.

Last month, the organization opened both a museum on the legacy of slavery and a memorial in Montgomery to address the era of lynching.

Speaking of his organization’s legal work, Stevenson said, “We’ve made progress. Death penalty rates are way down. We’ve won some big cases and got some kids out of prison. I talk on college campuses, and I love to see the energy and activism — the awakening of young people — but they have to be strategic. These are big structural problems we’re trying to address.”

______

Getting Out on Bail Makes a Difference

Robin Steinberg

Bail fund creator who started The Bail Project to help people charged with crimes pay bail.

If there’s one overarching theme that defines Robin Steinberg’s activism, it’s how the criminal justice system treats poor people both on the micro and macro level.

An activist since a young age — she kept articles about the 1970 National Guard shootings of students at Kent State in a notebook as an elementary school student — she said “the sense that the world wasn’t fair made my blood boil.”

Last year, Steinberg launched The Bail Project, a national effort that grew out of a small charity called the Bronx Freedom Fund.

The goal is that through donations, the project pays bail, which, when the defendant shows up, is then released and used again to pay someone else’s bail. While other states, such as Massachusetts, have similar funds, the Bail Project is the first national revolving bail fund, Steinberg said.

The difference in outcomes between people who sit in jail because they can’t afford bail and those who are released on bail is enormous, she said. A decade of data from her group indicates that more than 90 percent of people accused of misdemeanors will plead guilty when they can’t post bail.

“However, when bail is posted, over 50 percent of our clients’ cases result in a dismissal of all charges,” Steinberg said, and 96 percent of people who received funding from her project showed up for every court appearance.

“I want to get as many people out of jail before damage from incarceration happens,” she said. “I want to do something that makes a difference in people’s lives quickly and urgently.”

As a public defender for 35 years, she has waged the day-to-day fight to get clients a fair shake, but she also has worked to change the system. In 1997, Steinberg founded The Bronx Defenders, where she helped develop a model of “holistic defense” which she defined as “a comprehensive model that addresses underlying reasons people are caught up in the criminal justice system and the devastating impact of criminal justice involvement.”

Steinberg, 61, took that model to Oklahoma last year to specifically help mothers in prison, creating Still She Rises, a project of the Bronx Defenders. Oklahoma has the highest number of incarcerated women per capita.

In an example of how politically difficult the work can be, Steinberg was criticized for the appearance by two of her organization’s lawyers in a video made in New York City in 2014 after the death of a black man, Eric Garner, following a confrontation with the police. City officials said the video appeared to endorse retribution for Garner’s death. Steinberg declined to comment on the episode.

The Bronx Defenders, which now has a staff of more than 300, represents more than 32,000 people a year.

______

Carrying On the Fight for Unions

David Rolf

Union organizer

David Rolf comes from a union family — his mother was in a teachers union in Cincinnati where he grew up, his grandfather was a member of the United Auto Workers and his great-grandfather was, at one point, president of a distillery workers’ union.

He attended Bard College, where he was a student leader in organizing building services workers. His senior thesis focused on labor history.

So perhaps it’s no surprise that he has been called “the most successful union organizer of the past 15 years” for his work at organizing long-term care workers and minimum wage employees and is one of the leaders in the “Fight for $15.”

He was hired out of college by the Service Employees International Union and is now an international vice president for the union and the president and founder of the Seattle-based Local 775, which represents 45,000 long-term care workers in Washington and Montana.

The breakthrough campaign for Rolf — and the one he spent a large part of the 1990s working on — resulted in the SEIU’s unionizing of 74,000 Los Angeles County home-care workers in 1999; The New York Times called it the most successful and largest unionizing drive in decades.

Rolf is at the forefront of the shift in the labor movement — from a focus on organizing workers in manufacturing and crafts to those in the service sector, particularly low-income and women of color.

“I’m controversial in the labor movement,” he said. “I believe we need to have the courage to invent something new — something more inclusive and expansive and bolder. It won’t look like the workplace-based unions of old.”

He also was a driving force behind the 2013 ballot measure in SeaTac, Washington, granting airport and hotel workers a $15 minimum wage and pushing for a $15 minimum wage in Seattle.

The labor movement, especially over the past three decades, has faced many setbacks, but Rolf said he saw no option but to keep fighting.

“It was not our choice to be born at this time when the American dream is at its greatest level of risk,” he said. “But it will absolutely be our fault if we don’t do something about this.”

______

How We Picked Our Visionaries

People love lists.

We want to check out the best places to travel, catch up with the best inventions of the past 100 years, be in the know about the best-dressed people, the best books, the best schools. And on and on.

Of course, there is a risk to listmaking. Maybe your choices won’t hold up over the years. Maybe the best book of decades ago seems not so great today.

With the listmaking fervor and its risks in mind, we searched for people who would fit our criteria for visionaries. They had to be people who are forward-looking, working on exciting projects, helping others or taking a new direction. We wanted diversity in gender, race and ethnic background.

We assigned writers who are knowledgeable about the subjects we deemed most important. And we limited the list to 30.

Narrowing down the numbers was a huge challenge. And that’s a good problem to have. It means there are a lot of people out there who are following their visions.

We hope this inspires you to follow yours.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Leading the way in the fight for human rights

Marisa Franco

Enhance Your Pulse News Experience!

JOIN OUR PULSE COMMUNITY!