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Michelle Martinez, the inaugural director of the Tishman Center for Social Justice and the Environment at the University of Michigan (U-M)
At the University of Michigan, Environmental Justice Starts With Who Gets to Decide
Nov 05, 2026
When Michelle Martinez talks about climate change, she does not begin with temperatures, emissions, or models and projections.
She begins with people. For Martinez, the inaugural director of the Tishman Center for Social Justice and the Environment at the University of Michigan (U-M), climate change is already being experienced through the housing, economic, and political crises confronting communities today. And that makes climate justice inseparable from a more basic civic question: Who has the power to decide what happens to a community?
The Tishman Center, established in 2021 at U-M’s School for Environment and Sustainability, was created around a particular idea of what a university can do in that struggle. Made possible through gifts from The NorthLight Foundation and Dan and Sheryl Tishman, the center connects students with environmental justice organizations and community leaders, supports community-led research, and prepares students to work on the problems communities are already facing.
That model grew partly from what Martinez felt was missing during her years working in environmental justice in Detroit.
“What I really needed from the university was a constant and steady support, with actionable research that could result in policy change,” she said.
Communities' needs, however, rarely follow the timetable of academic research. Environmental justice organizations may be responding to air pollution permits, legislative calendars, or the proposed siting of major developments while researchers are still developing a study.
“Communities like mine often need a more engaged and rapid response,” Martinez said, “but also a kind of scholarship that relies on relationship building.”
That distinction is central to how Martinez describes the Center's approach. The goal is not only to bring university expertise into communities, but to change how students and researchers understand their role.
“When we start to see ourselves as researchers, or as students in higher education, as participants in civic society, we can really start to change our orientation towards the expert,” she said.
The Center’s Climate Justice Movement Catalysts Fellowship reflects this idea by placing students in community organizations and supporting them with mentorship, financial assistance, and professional development. The Center describes the fellowship as a way to build leadership while contributing research and capacity to environmental justice organizations.
For Alexandrah Walker, a Catalyst Fellow working with the College of Menominee Nation’s Sustainable Development Institute, that relationship begins with listening. After first visiting the institute in January, she continued building relationships with its staff through summer visits and online meetings. Her work included mentoring undergraduate interns, helping them develop work plans, discussing their goals and troubleshooting challenges as they progressed.
“Working in/for/with community really requires you to cast your ego aside and what you think you know, and instead listen and strive to build healthy reciprocal relationships centered on trust and respect while being cognizant of cultural boundaries and customs,” Walker said.
Her experience illustrates the Center’s philosophy in practice. The work is not only about bringing knowledge acquired in a university into a community. It also requires students to build relationships, understand local contexts, and support people in pursuing their own goals.
In one example Martinez discussed, students worked with a Sikh community whose approach to sustainability was rooted in its cultural traditions. Practices such as energy efficiency and composting became more meaningful when they were connected to the community's existing values.
“Nobody was against those things, but by embedding it into cultural tradition, it had a place. It had a home,” Martinez said.
She described another project in northern Michigan involving tribal knowledge, land governance and technology. The work brought together efforts to reclaim Anishinaabe fire management practices with LiDAR technology and elders' knowledge. The point was not to replace community knowledge with technical expertise, but to bring different forms of knowledge into the same conversation.
That same approach is increasingly relevant as new pressures emerge.
Martinez is now working with roughly a dozen environmental justice organizations around the Great Lakes to understand how communities are thinking about the rapid growth of data centers. Many of these communities already live with the legacy of fossil-fuel infrastructure. Data centers introduce another major demand for energy and land, raising questions about who benefits from development and what communities want in return.
In Minnesota, Martinez recalled, organizers who had previously mobilized around protecting immigrant communities became involved in a fight over a proposed data center. When the city asked what the community wanted, the answer was not necessarily another technological solution. They wanted housing for people experiencing homelessness.
“The sort of intersectional approach, what civil society needs amidst climate chaos and political crises, is far more robust and responsive,” Martinez said.
For Martinez, this is part of what a just transition requires: communities having enough power to articulate what they actually want their future to look like.
“We really are trying to change the priorities of how people vision the future,” she said.
The Center's investment in students also extends beyond their time at Michigan.
Martinez pointed to Dr. Malu Castro, now a postdoctoral fellow at U-M’s School for Environment and Sustainability, as one example. Castro works with Kyle Whyte on Indigenous land restoration efforts and teaches courses on Indigenous sustainability and Indigenous rights. His scholarship grew from work on an ʻāina, or land, back initiative on Molokaʻi in Hawaiʻi, examining the theoretical and practical questions surrounding financing and pricing in Indigenous land restoration.
Martinez added that students with the resources, relationships, and space to pursue community-rooted work can carry those relationships into their scholarship and professional lives. The university becomes less of a place where knowledge is produced about communities and more of a place where people develop the capacity to work with them.
That is also how Martinez measures the Center's longer-term success.
“Over the next 30 years, what I would love to see is students building resiliency inside of communities that are most at risk,” she said.
The measure, she acknowledged, is difficult. Resilience might mean stronger housing institutions, greater capacity to resist criminalization or deportation, or the ability of a community to respond when the next crisis arrives. Those outcomes may take years or decades to become visible.
The difficulty is compounded by the barriers students themselves face. Martinez pointed to tuition, housing, caregiving responsibilities, and the distance many students must travel as obstacles that can prevent people from participating fully in this kind of work.
For her, those barriers raise a larger question about what society expects universities to do at a moment when communities are confronting overlapping environmental, economic and political crises.
That question becomes particularly urgent when climate change is discussed as something that will happen in the future.
For many communities, Martinez said, the crisis is already present.
“The disaster is already here,” she said.
Housing, education, domestic violence, drug use and economic and political instability are realities that are often discussed separately from climate change, according to Martinez. Yet, in her view, they are connected to how communities are equipped to respond to environmental disruption.
“It's not the weather itself; it's the divestment of the political system to respond to the weather,” Martinez said.
The response, then, strips away the idea of a single technological breakthrough and focuses more on investments in public transportation, walkable communities, housing, and local institutions.
It also raises difficult questions about the relationship between universities and the communities they study.
“When we have scholars who aren't taking social or political risks and leave communities to take those risks, that becomes a dual exploitation,” Martinez said.
Researchers can gain intellectual property, professional recognition and career advancement while communities bear the risks of the work, she argued. The Tishman Center is attempting to approach that relationship differently.
“We lock arms,” Martinez said, describing the Center's commitment to human rights, sovereignty and community agency.
The ambition is larger than producing better research. It is to create relationships through which communities can help determine what knowledge is produced, how it is used and what kinds of futures are considered possible.
That makes the Tishman Center an experiment in the civic role of a university. Its work asks whether higher education can become more than a place where students acquire expertise before entering public life. It can also be a place where students learn to participate in civic life while they are still there, alongside communities already doing the work.
For Martinez, the measure of that experiment may ultimately be found outside the university: in whether students leave with the relationships and skills to help communities build institutions, exercise greater control over their futures and withstand the crises ahead.
Val Amiel Vestil is a Graduate student at the University of Michigan and fall fellow with The Fulcrum.
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Scarcity drains mental bandwidth and can depress voter turnout. Explore the research and how human ecology education can build civic knowledge and agency.
AnnaStills/Getty Images
Material Insecurity and the Foundations of Democratic Participation
Nov 05, 2026
The Path From Survival to Citizenship
Access to food, stable housing, healthcare, and socioeconomic security shapes more than daily life. Material insecurity can also limit the time, attention, and stability people need to follow public issues, evaluate candidates, organize, and vote. Research on scarcity and political participation helps explain these connections.
In a 2014 American Psychological Association article, the authors of the book Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, Eldar Shafir and Sendhil Mullainathan, suggest that scarcity consumes mental bandwidth, leaving fewer cognitive resources for planning and problem-solving. The article reports that this cognitive burden can produce ongoing deficits and reinforce self-defeating behavior.
These pressures do not make people deficient citizens. They can, however, make civic participation harder. Legal citizenship and voting rights do not ensure that everyone has an equal capacity to participate. Voting requires time, information, skills, health, and transportation. Unequal access to resources affects civic participation, which also dependson income, education, and an individual’s stability. Disparities in participation can, in turn, produce unequal political representation.
Human ecology education raises a related question: whether practical knowledge can help people navigate the systems shaping daily life and participate more meaningfully in their communities.
Scarcity and the Taxing of Bandwidth
A 2024 article in the journal Political Behavior examines how unemployment, eviction, loss of health insurance, and other personal crises affect political participation. Although people experience these disruptions personally, the authors argue that their causes and consequences are also political.
Across several large surveys, the researchers found that personal crises were generally associated with lower turnout but sometimes with greater participation in other political activities. Highly politicized crises, including those related to COVID-19, were associated with greater participation across all forms measured in the study. As crises accumulated, the associated decline in turnout approached the size of established gaps by race, ethnicity, and education.
Residential mobility can also disrupt civic ties. In the five-city Moving to Opportunity experiment, some families living in high-poverty public housing were offered vouchers to move to lower-poverty neighborhoods. A 2024 article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that adults assigned vouchers voted at lower rates for nearly two decades. The researchers attribute the decline to residential mobility itself, noting that moving can disrupt social ties and require people to register again.
The Hierarchy of Human Needs Provides the Track
Various psychological theories provide context for how material insecurity can influence political behavior. Abraham Maslow’s 1943 theory of human motivation offers a familiar framework, commonly called the hierarchy of human needs, for considering how unmet needs can compete for attention. It identifies physiological needs, safety, belonging, esteem, and self-actualization as basic needs, but they should not be treated as a universal sequence or as indicators for how a person engages with the political process. For this article, it serves only as a bridge to explain the relationship among material security, personal agency, and civic participation.
Self-Efficacy as the Engine of Agency
Psychologist Albert Bandura defined self-efficacy as a person’s belief in their capacity to act toward a desired outcome. He identified four principal sources: mastery experiences, vicarious experiences, social persuasion, and physiological and emotional states. Insecurity involving food, housing, healthcare, income, or physical safety may weaken these foundations by limiting opportunities for successful action, increasing chronic stress, and reducing access to supportive models and encouragement.
Political efficacy has two components: internal and external efficacy. Internal efficacy is the belief that one can understand and participate in politics; external efficacy is the belief that the political system responds to citizens. Both are associated with political participation, although the relationship is stronger for internal efficacy. Successful political participation may strengthen confidence in one’s ability to engage. When people participate but see no institutional response, they may begin to doubt that participation matters and withdraw.
How Human Ecology Education Can Develop Across the School Years
Human ecology education is an interdisciplinary approach to understanding how people live within—and navigate—the natural, social, cultural, built, and technological environments that shape daily life. It connects practical knowledge about food, housing, health, finance, transportation, relationships, and community life with the institutions and systems people navigate to meet those needs.
Human ecology grew partly from home economics, which combined scientific research with public education about food, health, housing, and family life. Home economists at universities, extension services, and government agencies carried this work through World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II. Cornell played a significant role, establishing the New York State College of Home Economics in 1925; it was renamed the New York State College of Human Ecology in 1969 as its academic scope broadened.
Civics education generally focuses on government and citizenship, while career education prepares students for employment. Human ecology complements both by connecting personal, professional, and civic life to the public systems and markets that shape everyday decisions. A continuous K–12 program can deepen that understanding as students mature and their lives become more complex.
Maslow’s categories can help organize a human ecology curriculum without assigning children to fixed developmental tiers. The curriculum would expand as students gain independence and encounter more complex relationships, institutions, and responsibilities.
Early Years: Food, Health, and Home
In the early grades, a human ecology curriculum can examine food, clothing, housing, health, safety, and household routines. Lessons can introduce where essential resources come from, how daily choices affect personal and environmental well-being, and which community institutions help people meet basic needs. The purpose would be to build practical awareness—not hold children responsible for conditions beyond their control.
Middle Years: Relationships and Community
As students’ social worlds become more complex, human ecology education can explore communication, culture, relationships, transportation, public health, and community life. Students can learn how families and communities use shared systems, resolve problems, and create belonging across differences.
Adolescence: Independent Life and Civic Participation
By adolescence, the curriculum can address income, employment, personal finance, housing, healthcare, law, consumer systems, and public institutions. Students can connect daily decisions to career possibilities and public policy while practicing the judgment, communication, and social skills needed to participate in professional and community life.
Material Security and Voter Participation
Human ecology education can strengthen the practical knowledge people use to navigate daily life. Whether that knowledge supports civic participation also depends on material security and responsive institutions.
US Census Bureau data show that 66.8 percent of citizens age 18 and older voted in 2020, the highest turnout of the twenty-first century. In the bureau’s family-income table, reported turnout among adult citizens rose from 47.1 percent for family incomes under $10,000 to 63.1 percent for
30,000–39,999 and 80.5 percent for 100,000–149,999.
Implications for Policy and Practice
Three civic design principles follow from this account:
1. Treat personal security as part of civic infrastructure: Policies that reduce economic volatility may also reduce the cognitive demands associated with material insecurity.
2. Make participation consequential: Participatory budgeting processes, public hearings, and other public forums should provide clear ways for people to influence decisions and see how institutions respond.
3. Create local opportunities to participate: Schools, neighborhoods, workplaces, and community groups can provide regular places for people to address shared concerns together.
Democratic participation depends on more than formal rights. People also need the material stability, practical knowledge, social connection, and confidence to act on those rights. Human ecology education can strengthen practical knowledge and personal agency, but it cannot replace the economic security or responsive institutions that make participation possible.
Sandra Ericson is an author and retired educator. She chaired the Consumer Arts and Science Department at City College of San Francisco for nearly three decades. She is a contributor to the Observatory.
This article was produced for the Observatory by the Independent Media Institute and is republished with permission.
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Close Up Hand of Man Pointing to an I Voted Sticker Place on His Shirt
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Voters Want Results. The Midterms Made That Clear.
Nov 04, 2026
The 2026 midterm elections were never going to be a referendum on one person. They were always a test of whether Americans believed their leaders were addressing the issues affecting their daily lives.
Voters delivered a clear message in the midterm elections. The results were historic. Democrats not only reclaimed control of the House of Representatives, but also captured a majority in the U.S. Senate.
The victories, especially in states long considered safe Republican territory, reflect deeper frustrations that have been building for months. Across the country, Americans have continued to grapple with high prices for everyday necessities while watching an escalating conflict in Iran consume national attention. For many voters, the concerns they carry into grocery stores, gas stations, and monthly budget meetings were not being adequately addressed.
That sentiment appeared to transcend geography and party labels. In North Carolina, former Gov. Roy Cooper's victory offered one of the night's earliest signals that voters were prepared to chart a new course. "Tonight, we told Washington loud and clear that North Carolinians will always matter more than the billionaires and the insiders," Cooper said after his win. Whether one agrees with his politics or not, his message tapped into a broader anxiety about who government is serving.
A similar sentiment emerged in Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley, where Democrat Bob Brooks flipped a competitive House district. Celebrating his victory, Brooks told supporters, "Tonight, the Lehigh Valley made history and sent a firefighter to put out the dumpster fire in Washington, D.C." The line drew cheers, but it also reflected a broader voter frustration with a political system that many Americans increasingly view as disconnected from the economic and kitchen-table concerns dominating their daily lives.
Whether one agrees with their politics or not, Cooper and Brooks' messages tapped into a growing anxiety about who government is serving and whether elected leaders are focused on solving problems rather than fueling partisan conflict.
The election also revealed something that political strategists often overlook: voters are not static. They are responsive. They evaluate results. They reward leaders who address their concerns and punish those who do not.
Some Republicans quickly downplayed the results' significance. An anonymous White House official argued that "President Trump was not on the ballot, and it's proven that Trump voters show up when he is on the ballot." That may be true. But it misses a larger point. Midterms are often less about personalities and more about governing. They offer one of the few opportunities citizens have to express their satisfaction or discontent with the country's direction between presidential elections.
What struck me most about this election was not the partisan realignment. It was the reminder that democracy remains accountable to voters. Despite intense polarization, endless cable news debates, and social media battles, Americans still have the power to alter the political landscape when they feel unheard.
The lesson for Democrats and Republicans should be straightforward.
Voters want leaders focused on solving problems. They want an economy that works for working families. They want transparency and accountability when the nation enters military conflicts. They want confidence that government is listening, not lecturing.
In the coming days, partisans will be tempted to treat these results as either a mandate or an ideological rejection. I see something more fundamental. Americans are demanding responsiveness. They are demanding results.
Whether Democrats can meet those expectations remains an open question. Winning elections is easier than governing. The same voters who handed them victories this week will almost certainly hold them accountable tomorrow.
But for one night at least, the electorate reminded Washington of its most important role in our system. Citizens are not spectators. They are the ultimate decision-makers.
And when enough of them decide that change is necessary, even the strongest political assumptions can disappear in a single election cycle.
Hugo Balta is the executive editor of The Fulcrum and the publisher of the Latino News Network
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Uber drivers participate in a rally outside of the Uber Headquarters on January 05, 2023 in New York City. Uber drivers in NYC participated in a 24-hour strike outside of the company's NYC headquarters
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21st-Century Gig Workers Need Portable Benefits
Nov 04, 2026
In recent years, the US labor force has been undergoing a fundamental transformation. In today’s "Uber economy," gig workers, freelancers, contractors, temps, permatemps, remote workers after COVID, and so-called “independent workers” have been championed by Silicon Valley and Wall Street as the “new way to work”—the wave of the future, especially with AI changing the nature of work itself.
Many US consumers have driven in an Uber taxi, but don’t realize that most drivers earn below minimum wage after accounting for vehicle expenses, gas, maintenance, and unpaid time waiting for passengers. Those drivers are so-called “independent contractors,” so the billion-dollar Uber is not responsible for providing healthcare, Social Security contributions, workers' compensation, or unemployment compensation, not to mention sick leave or vacation pay.
Another type of “gig-preneur” can be found on platforms like Fiverr, an online job brokerage that connects buyers to sellers of numerous tasks and services called micro-gigs. Each gig pays as little as $5 per job (hence its Fiverr name). One worker, after fulfilling 27 orders, made $176 in total. “I’ve seen panhandlers get more money outside of the 7-11,” she complained.
Other workers swept up in this job market degradation don’t work gigs; they have regular jobs. Meet Chris Young, an assembly-line worker at a Nissan manufacturing plant in Tennessee. Young works alongside dozens of other employees doing the exact same job, but he doesn’t work directly for Nissan. Instead, he works as a “perma-temp” for Yates Services, a private contractor that provides a majority of Nissan’s workers. He builds the same Infiniti SUV as Nissan workers, but he and other Yates employees get half the salary, less job security, and far fewer safety-net benefits. Some “temps” have worked at the same company for as long as 11 years—hence the new term "perma-temp.”
How many new economy workers?
America is a wealthy nation, but these drastic changes to the job market have left millions of Americans without access to that wealth. How many of these new economy workers are there? It’s hard to say because they are difficult to count.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics counts about 12 million “independent contractors” (7.4% of 162 million workers in the US) and another 2.8 million (1.7%) on-call workers, over 9 percent of the total workforce. But the BLS uses a narrow definition of “worker,” and broader definitions push total estimates much higher, from 16.5 million to over 30 million workers, depending on whether researchers count occasional side gigs or secondary jobs. Industry trackers like MBO Partners estimate that roughly 75 million Americans (46%) engage in some form of independent work yearly, with 22% treating it as their primary full-time career, more than double the 10% who did so in 2019.
New app- and web-based technologies are making it easier than ever to hire such workers. Employers also have strong incentives to do so, especially in certain industries and occupations, by taking advantage of what is known as the “independent contractor loophole.” An employer can lower labor costs dramatically by around 30%, just by evading contributions for a worker’s health benefits, Social Security, Medicare, unemployment, workers' compensation, lunch breaks, paid sick days, and vacation leave. A McKinsey report also found that independent contractors get paid 20-30% less than employees. So these savings provide a powerful incentive for an employer to hire as many contractors as possible.
To be sure, some businesses benefit from labor flexibility, since they need to ramp up and down in response to fluctuations in demand for their product or service. But hiring a large contractor workforce lets a company greatly lower labor costs by wiping out workers’ safety net, undermining a key component that has made the U.S. economy so successful.
A portable safety net provides the best of both worlds
Fortunately, an innovative solution exists. It’s called a “portable safety net,” or “portable benefits.” It would allow any worker hired by multiple employers during the year to benefit from a robust safety net. Here’s how it works.
Each business that hires an independent worker would contribute a set amount above the worker's wage, prorated by the hours the worker worked for that employer. Those payroll deductions would go into an Individual Security Account for each worker, helping that worker pay for her/his safety net. The ISA accounts would be structured to direct the payroll deductions into existing federal and state safety net programs -- Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance, and workers’ compensation -- as well as other safety net components, especially health care, and possibly paid sick days and vacation (the worker also would have some wages deducted, much like regularly employed full-time workers do).
For example, suppose Donna is a regular employee working 20 hours a week for a hairdresser, then contracts for 10 hours a week with TaskRabbit, and drives 10 shifts for Uber. She would earn 50 percent of her benefits from the hairdresser, 25 percent from TaskRabbit, and the remaining percentage based on her Uber driving wages. Each company would deposit the funds into her ISA.
This is similar to how Social Security and Obamacare work now, where a personal ID number tracks a retirement or health care account for people who work for multiple employers.
A portable safety net for all workers who need it would have several benefits. It would allow some scheduling flexibility for workers and businesses, as well as the health and financial security that workers and their families need. It would also improve affordability for many individuals and families, especially after the Trump administration’s deep cuts to Medicaid, Medicare, SNAP, and other programs.
A portable safety net would also move us beyond labor abuses and lawsuits over who’s a contractor or regular employee and entitled to safety-net coverage, because all workers would be covered. It would also remove the perverse incentive for businesses to use cheaper contractors to undercut competitors, which unleashes a race to the bottom.
Note that requiring all businesses in an industry to pay into their workers’ ISAs would not hurt the competitiveness of any of those businesses, because all employers would be subject to the same rules. Businesses could pass the costs of this kind of “safety net insurance plan” on to customers, since customers are the largest pool capable of absorbing them. Many customers would also be the same workers receiving benefits, so it would be a virtuous circle, “a rising tide lifting all boats.”
Several 21st-century countries already do something like this, and in the US, 40 business, government, labor, and NGO leaders from the right and left have endorsed a portable safety net and agree it is a necessary foundation for the 21st-century economy. President Barack Obama endorsed portable benefits in his 2016 State of the Union address, and Uber and Lyft have supported legislation proposed in state legislatures in New York, Washington, and New Jersey. But the legislation died in all three states when Uber and Lyft made a measly offer: instead of something close to 20% of a worker’s wage to provide an adequate safety net, they offered only 2.5%.
A portable safety net for all workers is long overdue. This has the makings of a win-win solution. We need to ensure the labor force and the broader economy are built on a fair, healthy foundation for the future. All Americans deserve to be enriched by technology and innovation, not made obsolete or impoverished by it.
Steven Hill was policy director for the Center for Humane Technology, co-founder of FairVote, and political reform director at New America. See more of his writing at his Substack newsletter DemocracySOS.
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