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West Virginia NAACP wants statewide data center moratorium
Sep 06, 2026
Local chapters of the NAACP in West Virginia have joined together in unanimously opposing new construction of data centers, signing on to a resolution demanding a statewide moratorium.
Data center growth in the Mountain State is on the rise. It is estimated fewer than a dozen smaller centers are currently in operation and around 10 large-scale projects have been proposed.
Loretta Young, president of the West Virginia State Conference of the NAACP, said local chapters in the state and across the nation are worried about how the projects could affect the cost of utilities.
"The water and sewer bills in West Virginia are already among the highest in the country and electricity bills have been increasing in West Virginia due to higher demands on the power grid," Young pointed out.
State legislation now makes it easier for such facilities to be built. Last year, West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrissey signed House Bill 2014, also known as the Power Generation and Consumption Act, into law. The legislation allows high-impact data centers to build and operate independent microgrids to generate their own power, designed specifically to attract massive technology investments.
Young believes data center construction is related to quality of life for people in underserved communities, adding West Virginia residents, especially those in McDowell County, have suffered from a history of resource extraction.
"If a local community doesn't want a data center monopolizing the water supply, driving up utility rates and reducing their quality of life through excessive noise and light pollution, that should be the end of the discussion," Young contended.
State officials recently developed what they called a plan for responsible data center development, which includes proposals to protect ratepayers and direct revenue to local schools and governments.
West Virginia NAACP wants statewide data center moratorium was first published by Public News Service and is republished with permission.
Nadia Ramlagan is a Louisville, Kentucky-based radio journalist, podcast producer, and editor.
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How I Learned Civic Engagement Is Real —It’s How Democracy Works
Sep 05, 2026
Twenty-eight years ago, I was a high school student in Sunnyside, Washington, when I first learned how directly politics could shape the course of a life.
On November 3rd, 1998, the passage of I-200, which eliminated affirmative action in college admissions, made me wonder whether students like me-- First Gen, Rural, Low Income, Chicano-- would still have a fair chance to pursue higher education.
That moment did more than unsettle me; it pushed me to ask why decisions like this happen, who gets to make them, and what ordinary people can do in response. On November 4th 1998, I organized a walkout, and about 170 students walked out in protest of the passage of I-200.
It resulted in real action and change as suspensions were removed from Student Records. It was my first real lesson in civic engagement—and in the power of direct democracy. We as students even received correspondence from the then-Governor Gary Locke, the Democratic governor from 1997 to 2005. It let us know that he supported our peaceful protest.
I learned that democracy is not something that simply happens every election cycle. It is something people practice. We have a constitutional right to speak freely, to gather, protest, and educate the public when policies threaten opportunity for entire communities.
That early experience stayed with me, and in many ways, it would come full circle later in my life.
As primary elections continue now through the midterm elections in November, it is urgent to note why civic engagement matters—historically, in the present moment, and for the future.
I attended Yakima Valley Community College to get my associate degree, and while there, I registered as a poll worker, one of the people responsible for helping voters cast their ballots and ensuring that every vote is counted.
The days were long and started early. You brought your own lunch, a good book, and a willingness to welcome people into the process. We followed thick instruction manuals, set up the polling place, and worked under the guidance of two judges—one Republican and one Democrat. Senior poll workers, many of whom knew the process inside and out, helped keep everything running smoothly.
I was fortunate to work days when I didn’t have class. I was usually the youngest person in the room. Much of the day involved waiting between the morning, lunch, and late-afternoon rushes. During the quiet stretches, I listened to conversations about food recipes, grandchildren, and community life.
At closing time, we counted the ballots and sent them to the county. If a dispute had ever come up, both judges would have worked together to resolve it. In my experience, disputes never happened. What I saw instead was a patient, careful, bipartisan process that gave me confidence in our elections and in the people who make them work.
Years later, while working as a community engagement coordinator in rural California around age 40, I had the opportunity to help young adults learn the same lesson: civic engagement is not reserved for politicians or experts; it belongs to everyone.
The program I worked on, Small Town Allies Against Nicotine Dependency (STAAND), focused on building a young adult coalition across rural counties that often lacked resources.
My role was to support sustainability, coordinate the coalition, and teach participants how to run meetings using parliamentary procedure, often known as Robert’s Rules of Order. We helped young people understand how public decisions are made, how to speak before decision-makers, and how to view elected officials as people responsible for addressing issues that affect the broader community.
The work also focused on commercial tobacco prevention. The young adults learned about the history of Big Tobacco and how commercial tobacco companies spend billions of dollars each year on advertising.
They studied how public relations pioneer Edward Bernays in the 1920s and 1930s helped shape the modern marketing playbook—what he famously called the “manufacturing of consent”—and how those strategies continue to influence communities today.
Much of this history can be found in the UCSF Tobacco Industry Documents, and once young people understood it, they became eager to educate their peers, families, and communities.
That program sunset about two years ago, but its impact did not. Many of the young adults who participated are now in graduate school. Some are on the path to becoming doctors. Their success is not an accident. It grew from the confidence, fellowship, and public purpose civic engagement can awaken when people are invited to take part.
It is not just about voting, though voting is essential. It is about learning how systems work, finding your voice, standing with others, and believing we can shape public life together.
At a time when Pew Research Center shows that more than 62% of Americans feel disconnected from democracy, it is urgent to remember that trust is built through participation. I learned that first as a student, then as a poll worker, and later through the young adults I had the privilege to serve.
Democracy becomes real when people are shown that they belong in it.
Jose Montoya is a senior director for the California Health Collaborative and a Blue Shield of California Foundation Public Voices Fellow through The OpEd Project.
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Men4Choice Encourages Men to Fight for Reproductive Freedom
Sep 05, 2026
Not knowing who to invite to his community conversations, Michael Facey sent an invite link to his fraternity brothers for his virtual meeting without telling them what the conversation was about.
Facey later told this story during one of the virtual meetings, as the programs director, during the summer fellowship of Men4Choice. He inspired the fellows to use an unconventional approach to get other men to join their community conversation, though he added a disclaimer: don't drop an invite link without explaining what it is.
But that’s advocacy!
Advocacy, a word that is repeated to the fellows of the Men4Choice organization. Their first challenge isn't necessarily defining reproductive freedom and its importance, but getting someone to listen and care about the issue.
Over the 10-week fellowship, the organization’s fellows are assigned to host three community conversations. They invite men from their schools, communities, families, friends, or any man willing to listen and engage about reproductive freedom.
It may sound simple, but fellows often run into a question early on: How do you get someone to care about an issue if they may believe the problem does not involve them?
Conveniently, the organization hosts once-a-week virtual meetings that cover advocacy and educate fellows more on abortion so they can be even more informed on the issue.
Evan Fernando, a first-year Men4Choice summer fellow, finds the organization's target demographic interesting and empowering.
"It is quite rare to see an organization as passionate as it is when it is not the target audience," Fernando said. "Women are only 50 percent of the electorate. We need men to be in support too."
Founded in 2015 in Illinois by Oren Jacobson and Ben Head, Men4Choice was created after one of the founders saw too many men being on the sidelines on the issue.
Dewayne Martin, the organization's senior director of external affairs, said one of the founders attended a reproductive health seminar and discovered a major gap between men who supported reproductive freedom and men who were actually involved in advocating for it.
"He came across the stat that said although 61 percent of men supported [reproductive freedom], less than one to two percent took action," Martin said. "Ultimately, that was a wake-up call."
Getting men who support the issue into advocacy to close the gap between belief and action was only the beginning for the organization.
Through the fellowship, fellows learn organizing and advocacy skills and write personal narratives about why they decided to take action by joining the movement.
One of the first-ever assignments the fellows had to do was writing a “Story of Self”, which helps them look inward so they can better communicate to others why the mission of protecting reproductive freedom is important.
Martin believes those stories hold power that statistics and political messaging sometimes cannot reflect.
"In a world where meta-narratives are being attacked, our micro-narratives can never be hacked and propagandized. You cannot make up someone's personal story," Martin said.
The story of self was the first step; the next step was taking those personal narratives into their community conversations. The reason for the community conversations is not only to discuss abortion access or reproductive rights with men who already agree, but it is also to help other guys understand why they play a pivotal role in the issue when they are not necessarily personally the ones affected by restrictions.
Fernando says, "When you raise someone else's quality of life, it raises your quality of life in some area. Because even though America finds itself in being this very individualistic country, we all are connected in a way,".
Throughout the fellowship, fellows have multiple sources of guidance to help them navigate those conversations. They have weekly meetings, and they also have a chapter coordinator based in their home state. The Florida chapter coordinator, John LaFlamme, mentors fellows like Fernando and helps them become more engaged advocates.
"My job is to mentor the next generation of political advocates and teach the necessary organizing skills," he said.
His interest in advocacy began after his mother suffered a stroke, leaving his family to navigate the challenges and financial burden of the healthcare system. That experience eventually led him toward healthcare advocacy and reproductive justice.
"I know that this could happen to anyone. And I want to make sure that healthcare access is given to all," LaFlamme said.
LaFlamme’s story shows that advocacy can begin with something personal, which is why writing personal narratives is important to the fellows' advocacy.
By the end of the fellowship, the summer cohort has hosted three community conversations and gained experience in organizing, public speaking, creating a personal narrative, and community engagement.
The transformation the fellows obtain is supposed to extend beyond the fellowship, LaFlamme mentioned.
"This is designed not just to be a random class but to be a transformative experience," he said.
Four years after the attack on Roe v. Wade, Men4Choice continues its work on getting more men to advocate for reproductive freedom. It reminds them that it is not just a women’s issue, but an issue that requires allies willing to speak up.
Through conversations, personal storytelling, and community engagement, the organization believes meaningful change begins one person at a time.
Kazon Allen is a broadcast journalism student at Florida A&M University and is a member of the summer Fulcrum Fellowship.
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The Country That Vaccinated the World Is Unlearning How
Sep 05, 2026
On August 10, in the Oval Office, Donald Trump signed an executive order telling American parents to break the measles, mumps, and rubella shot into three separate injections and to space childhood vaccines across many more trips to the doctor. He said the change would "align the United States with other advanced and developed nations." That line is the whole argument, and it is false. No advanced country gives measles, mumps, and rubella as three single-disease shots. The vaccines do not exist in that form anywhere. A parent who wanted to follow the new American recommendation could not, because there is nothing to buy.
This is not a small drafting slip. It sits at the center of the case the White House is making, and it falls apart the moment you look past America's borders.
Here is what should worry anyone outside the United States. For a quarter century, the American taxpayer was the single largest force holding measles down on every continent. Now Washington is not just walking away from that job. It is rewriting its own rules to match the people it once spent billions correcting.
The scale of the retreat is easy to miss from inside a domestic argument about autism. Between 2000 and 2024, global measles deaths fell by 88 percent, and the World Health Organization credits vaccination with saving roughly 58 million lives across that period. A large share of that money and logistics ran through Gavi, the vaccine alliance, where the United States was the third largest donor and contributed about 300 million dollars in 2024 alone. In July, the Trump administration cut the WHO out of Gavi and made any renewed American support conditional on reforms it gets to define. Nearly half the low- and lower-income countries the WHO surveyed this year already report moderate to severe disruption to their immunization programs, mostly because donor money dried up.
The virus does not care about any of this. Measles is among the most contagious pathogens known to medicine. It finds the gap and moves through it.
And the gap is now inside the United States. American measles cases have already passed 2,300 this year, the highest count in 34 years, with outbreaks burning in South Carolina and Utah and infections logged across more than 40 states. Canada lost its measles elimination status last November. Mexico has recorded more than 12,000 cases. The North American wall that public health officials spent decades building is cracking, and Washington's response is to make its own vaccine schedule harder to complete.
Splitting the MMR shot is not a neutral choice dressed up as parental freedom. The American Academy of Pediatrics estimates it would take about a decade to develop and license three separate vaccines that don't currently exist. Until then, the recommendation points at a product no pharmacist can hand over. Where separate shots eventually appear, each one means another appointment, another copay, another chance for a child to slip out of the schedule. Every additional visit is a place where coverage leaks out. Health systems in poorer countries learned that lesson the hard way years ago. The United States is now paying to relearn it.
For a reader in Karachi or Lagos or Manila, the useful question is not whether American parents end up confused. It is what happens to the world's defense against a virus when its biggest underwriter starts acting like a doubter. Credibility is contagious too. When the country that ran the planet's measles campaigns tells its own citizens the standard schedule is dangerous, health ministers who spent years fighting local anti-vaccine movements lose their strongest reference point. The rumor that Washington debunked for twenty years now carries a presidential signature.
Even inside the president's party, the science did not hold. Senator Bill Cassidy, a physician, called the order wrong and said the president lacks the expertise to make the change. The American College of Physicians described it as an attempt to overturn decades of transparent scientific review by decree. These are not activist outfits. They define how American medicine is practiced.
The order goes beyond a recommendation. It directs the Justice Department to investigate states that enforce childhood vaccine mandates, treating school entry requirements as a matter for federal lawyers. At home, that is a fight about federal power. Seen from abroad, it is a signal, and a plain one: the United States is now willing to use its own courts to loosen the immunization rules that much of the world modeled on American practice. Governments that copied the CDC schedule for decades will notice which direction the model now points.
The practical damage will arrive on a delay, because the vaccines the order recommends are years from existing. The reputational damage is already here. A measles outbreak anywhere is one unvaccinated traveler away from anywhere else, and the United States has spent this week telling the world that the shot which stops it is worth pulling apart.
The countries that leaned on American money and the American example to keep measles cornered now have to decide, fast, who fills the space Washington is vacating. Beijing has been quietly building health partnerships across Africa and Southeast Asia for years, and it will read this order as an opening rather than a warning. If health security follows the same path as ports and telecoms, the United States is handing away one more form of influence it spent generations earning, and getting a discredited theory in return. The measles will move first. The competitors will move next.
Imran Khalid is a physician, geostrategic analyst, and freelance writer.
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