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Claiming Contested Values
FrameWorks Institute
How Fairness, Stability and Freedom Can Help Us Build Demand for Transformative, Structural Change
Feb 23, 2026
Claiming Contested Values: How Fairness, Stability and Freedom Can Help Us Build Demand for Transformative, Structural Change, produced by the FrameWorks Institute, explores how widely shared yet politically contested values can be used to strengthen public support for systemic reform. Values are central to how advocates communicate the importance of their work, and they can motivate collective action toward big, structural changes. This has become especially urgent in a climate where executive orders are targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, and some nonprofits are being labeled as threats based on their stated missions. Many civil society organizations are now grappling with how to communicate their values effectively and safely.
The report focuses on Fairness, Stability, and Freedom because they resonate across the U.S. public and are used by communicators across the political spectrum. Unlike values more closely associated with one ideological camp — such as Tradition on the right or Solidarity on the left — these three values are broadly recognizable but highly contested. Each contains multiple variants, and their impact depends on how clearly advocates define them and how they are paired with specific issues.
Fairness is the most consistently effective value for building support for structural change. When framed around system design, power imbalances, and the causes of inequity, it helps people understand how laws and policies shape outcomes. Stability can also support progressive narratives when framed as the goal of system redesign rather than a call to preserve the status quo. Freedom is the most challenging value to use because it easily triggers individualistic interpretations, but it can be powerful when explicitly tied to system design and collective conditions.
Across all three values, the report recommends leading with a shared value, explaining how current systems violate it, and showing how redesigning those systems can better uphold it. This approach helps audiences connect values to policy and understand why transformative, structural change is necessary.
Click HERE to read the report.
About FrameWorks: The FrameWorks Institute is a non-profit think tank that advances the mission-driven sector’s capacity to frame the public discourse about social and scientific issues. The organization’s signature approach, Strategic Frame Analysis®, offers empirical guidance on what to say, how to say it, and what to leave unsaid. FrameWorks designs, conducts, and publishes multi-method, multidisciplinary framing research to prepare experts and advocates to expand their constituencies, to build public will, and to further public understanding. To make sure this research drives social change, FrameWorks supports partners in reframing, through strategic consultation, campaign design, FrameChecks®, toolkits, online courses, and in-depth learning engagements known as FrameLabs. In 2015, FrameWorks was named one of nine organizations worldwide to receive the MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions. Learn more at www.frameworksinstitute.org
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The Case for Social Housing in New York
Feb 22, 2026
New York City’s housing crisis is no longer a slow‑burning emergency. It is a daily reality reshaping neighborhoods, displacing long‑time residents, and testing the limits of what it means to build a life in the nation’s largest city. Nowhere is this more visible than in Brooklyn, where the collision of rising rents and speculative development has pushed entire communities to the brink. This instability has also fueled a sharp rise in “doubling‑up” homelessness—families and individuals living in overcrowded, precarious apartments because they cannot afford housing of their own—a crisis affecting more than 200,000 New Yorkers each year.
This pattern is not unique to New York. As The Fulcrum recently reported in its coverage of Colorado’s housing crisis, “doubled‑up” homelessness is also surging in Denver and across the state, particularly among families who are one rent increase away from losing their homes. In that same report, Denver City Councilmember Sarah Parady mentioned social housing as a solution during an episode of The Fulcrum: Voices of a Nation, arguing that cities must move beyond reactive crisis management and toward publicly owned, permanently affordable homes that insulate residents from market volatility. Her message resonates powerfully in New York, where similar pressures are pushing tenants to the edge.
- YouTube youtu.be
In Red Hook, community organizer John Leyva shows how a personal housing crisis can spark broader collective action. His activism began when the stability he’d known for decades at 63 Tiffany Place—a two‑bedroom apartment in a Low‑Income Housing Tax Credit building—suddenly came under threat. As the building’s affordability restrictions neared expiration, Leyva faced the same uncertainty confronting thousands of LIHTC tenants citywide: the prospect of steep rent hikes and displacement from a neighborhood he helped sustain. Rather than accept the situation quietly, he mobilized. He knocked on doors, brought neighbors together, and pushed elected officials to intervene before the building was lost to the private market. For Leyva, the fight wasn’t just about an apartment—it was about the history and community tenants had built.
"When we moved to this side, nobody wanted to live here. Our building was supposed to be a luxury condo… They never sold ’cuz nobody wanted to live on this side of the highway. This was a seedy area when we first moved in. Now it’s one of the most desirable areas in Brooklyn. We were part of that. And to make us leave now is such an injustice… to say, ‘Okay, thank you. Now you got to go so more affluent people can move in.’ What’s the justice in that?” Leyva asks.
Leyva’s organizing demonstrates a key solution: tenant power works. His building’s tenants secured legal support, met with city officials, and helped push the LIHTC expiration into the public conversation. His experience mirrors the broader truth that when tenants understand their rights and act collectively, they can force transparency and accountability in systems designed to obscure both.
Leyva’s fight is echoed and amplified by organizations working to reshape the city’s housing landscape. For more than 175 years, the Community Service Society of New York (CSS) has been a leading voice for economic and housing justice. Today, CSS is pushing for solutions that go beyond temporary fixes and instead address the structural roots of the crisis. CSS’s research shows how escalating rents and deregulation destabilize communities, and its policy recommendations emphasize prevention—keeping people housed before they fall into homelessness—and deep investment in permanent, non‑speculative housing.
Increasingly, CSS has become one of the city’s strongest champions of social housing, a stance that aligns closely with Parady’s vision for long‑term affordability. Drawing on international examples, the organization points to places like Vienna—where more than 40 percent of homes are social housing. By comparison, New York City has only about 9 percent of its housing in public or socialized forms. For CSS, the lesson is clear: the city must move beyond short‑term tax incentives and build a system rooted in permanent public benefit rather than private profit. As CSS housing analyst Samuel Stein explains, the growing national call for social housing reflects a desire for homes that are permanently affordable, insulated from speculation, and shaped by the people who live in them.
“People want housing that’s permanently affordable and decommodified—not treated like just another product to buy,” Stein says. “They want homes where residents have real control over how the building is run, and where affordability and access are shared equitably.”
These ideas have found champions in Albany, including Assemblymember Emily Gallagher, who represents North Brooklyn’s 50th District—a community deeply shaped by rapid gentrification and displacement. Gallagher has consistently argued that the crisis cannot be solved through market‑driven development alone. She is a strong supporter of Good Cause Eviction, a statewide policy that would limit unreasonable rent hikes and require landlords to provide a valid reason for eviction. She frames the policy not as a burden on landlords but as a baseline protection for tenants.
One of Gallagher’s key housing efforts has been sponsoring the Assembly version of Senate Bill S450 (A659), legislation designed to hold landlords accountable for providing false or misleading information about apartment deregulation—particularly in programs like the Affordable New York Housing Program. For Gallagher, the bill is part of a broader push to bring clarity to a system where tenants often struggle to understand their rights. Representing North Brooklyn’s rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods of Greenpoint and Williamsburg, she sees the consequences of that confusion every day.
"It's (District 50) become one of the most expensive districts in the city and therefore in the state, especially as a renter," says Gallagher. "We are 82% renter. So a lot of what we do is informing people about their tenants' rights and helping them fight in housing court. We actually have it's so, so prevalent that we have a monthly clinic here with housing lawyers."
Beyond immediate protections, Gallagher has become a prominent voice for expanding social housing and converting distressed or vacant properties into permanently affordable homes—an approach that aligns closely with CSS’s recommendations and with the national conversation.
The advocacy of tenants like Leyva, researchers like CSS’s Stein, and lawmakers like Gallagher is converging on a shared vision: a housing system that treats stability as a right, not a privilege. Their work highlights several emerging solutions: tenant organizing that builds power and forces transparency; Good Cause Eviction to prevent arbitrary displacement; accountability legislation like S450 to curb landlord abuses; social housing expansion to create permanently affordable homes; conversion of distressed properties into public or community‑controlled housing; and prevention‑focused policies that keep people housed before crisis hits.
The crisis is real—but so are the solutions. And across the city, New Yorkers are proving that when tenants organize, when policymakers listen, and when the public sector invests in people rather than speculation, stability is within reach.
Hugo Balta is the executive editor of The Fulcrum and the publisher of the Latino News Network,
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Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
America’s Human Rights Reports Face A Reckoning Ahead of Feb. 25th
Feb 22, 2026
The Trump administration has already moved to erase evidence of enslavement and abuse from public records. It has promoted racially charged imagery attacking Michelle and Barack Obama. But the anti-DEI campaign does not stop at symbolic politics or culture-war spectacle. It now threatens one of the United States’ most important accountability tools: the State Department’s annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices.
Quiet regulatory changes have begun to hollow out this vital instrument, undermining America’s ability to document abuse, support victims, and hold perpetrators to account. The next reports are due February 25, 2026. Whether they appear on time—and what may be scrubbed or withheld—remains an open question.
For nearly five decades, the Human Rights Reports have documented torture, corruption, political repression, discrimination, sexual violence, and attacks on vulnerable communities around the world. But new guidance dramatically narrows what can be reported. Categories covering government corruption, rape and domestic violence, racially motivated violence, abuses against LGBTQ people, and the rights of Indigenous peoples have all been stripped from their mandate.
That is not human rights reporting. It’s censorship by executive design.
As a former congressional staffer who worked closely with these reports, I can say clearly that when we discard human rights reporting, we weaken Congressional oversight and public accountability, and we shrink our own capacity to recognize abuse—including abuse tied to U.S. policy.
We must do better.
Since the mid-1970s, Congress has required the State Department to produce comprehensive human rights reports precisely so lawmakers can decide whether U.S. taxpayer dollars should support governments that torture, repress, or disappear their citizens. These reports were never meant to be window dressing. They were meant to shape consequences. And they do.
Human rights reports provide the factual backbone for sanctions, visa bans, and funding restrictions. Laws like the Global Magnitsky Act depend on strong, credible documentation to target individuals responsible for serious abuses.
In recent years, the reports have helped justify sanctions against perpetrators of violence against women, forced labor, human trafficking, and arbitrary detention—including violent acts against women and girls in Haiti, detention of U.S. locally employed staff in Yemen, and forced labor and trafficking networks in Cambodia.
But if entire categories of abuse disappear from the reporting system, accountability collapses, too. For victims, this erasure is cruel.
Asylum seekers regularly rely on U.S. human rights reports to demonstrate the dangers they face at home. Venezuelans seeking protection in the United States in 2024 cited the 2022 Venezuela Human Rights Report to support lawful claims for Temporary Protected Status. When political persecution is no longer documented, it becomes easier to deny. When it becomes easier to deny, it becomes easier to continue.
At a September 2025 confirmation hearing for a nominee to serve as ambassador to Costa Rica, Senate staff lacked access to reporting that previously documented forced or compulsory labor, including the use of children as drug couriers. That information had appeared in earlier reports. It was absent from the newly “scrubbed” versions. As a result, senators were never pressed to confront the nominee about those abuses.
When reporting disappears, so do the questions.
Defenders of the new approach argue that human rights reports have always reflected political priorities. That is true. No administration has ever been perfectly consistent. Both parties have, at times, softened language about allies, and the United States itself has been credibly accused of serious abuses, from Guantánamo Bay to unlawful detention practices. But imperfection is not a justification for demolition.
In fact, members of both parties have called for expanding human rights reporting. Congress mandated comprehensive country reports because it wanted more information, not less. What is happening now departs from Congress’s intent. Erasing reporting categories is a retreat from documentation itself. And that retreat carries strategic costs.
U.S. officials routinely criticize China, Russia, Iran, and other authoritarian governments for running police states. Those criticisms only carry weight if America is willing to document abuse everywhere—even when it is uncomfortable, politically inconvenient, or ideologically unfashionable.
You cannot champion human rights abroad while deleting them from your own record.
Human rights reports are among the few tools that convert moral values into actionable policy. They translate suffering into evidence. They turn testimony into action. They tell the world what the United States is willing to see—and therefore what it is willing to confront.
A country that trains itself not to see injustice abroad will eventually lose the ability to recognize injustice at home. Because when we erase human rights, we don’t just revise a document. We revise who we are.
Amy Stambach is an OpEd Project student and a recent Congressional staffer who worked on oversight of U.S. human rights policy.
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American flag funnel with money
Illustration provided
Reducing the Influence of Money in Presidential Politics is Within Our Reach, from where we Least Expect it: the Electoral College
Feb 22, 2026
Reducing the influence of money pouring into presidential politics since the 2010 Citizens United decision may actually be possible by addressing the "winner-take-all" (WTA) structure of the Electoral College. By changing how electoral votes are allocated, the incentive to concentrate money in a few swing states could be reduced.
The winner-take-all (WTA) feature of the Electoral College narrows the focus of massive campaign expenditures in a “Funnel Effect”* to a handful of closely divided battleground states. Because candidates have little to gain from spending in states where they are comfortably ahead or hopelessly behind, they concentrate all their financial resources on 15 or 16 states, or in some cycles, as few as seven key swing states. All this could change if the "battleground state" phenomenon were taken away from the wealthy, as the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) would accomplish.
The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) is a pragmatic, state-based initiative designed to ensure that the presidential candidate who receives the most popular votes across fifty states and the District of Columbia wins the presidency. It aims to achieve this without requiring a constitutional amendment, operating instead within the existing Electoral College framework by utilizing states' constitutional authority to appoint electors. If enough states join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) to reach 270 electoral votes, the United States will effectively shift from a winner-take-all (WTA) regime to a national popular vote system for electing the President.
Among the independent-minded organizations supporting the NPVIC is the League of Women Voters, promoting the principle of "one person, one vote". They view it as a necessary reform to eliminate the "winner-take-all" system, which makes votes in non-competitive states irrelevant and causes candidates to ignore most of the country.
As of early 2026, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact has been adopted by seventeen states and the District of Columbia, which collectively hold 209 electoral votes. The compact requires 270 electoral votes (a majority of the 538 total) to take effect. It currently needs sixty-one more electoral votes to become active.
Legislative elections will be held on November 3, 2026, for eighty-eight state legislative chambers in forty-six states. In 2026, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) will be a relevant issue in several state elections, particularly in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. As the compact needs 61 more electoral votes to hit the 270-vote threshold, these purple or contested states are key battlegrounds where legislative control could determine whether they join the 18 jurisdictions already signed on.
Battleground states are fertile ground for the influence of money in U.S. presidential politics because the Electoral College (WTA) option concentrates the entire election's competitiveness into a small number of closely divided states. Because these states can "swing" to either party, campaigns and outside groups focus 75% or more of their spending there to flip a small number of votes, with in some cases over 96% of TV ad money in an election directed at only ten states.
Without the "battleground state" phenomenon, the effectiveness and strategic deployment of money in U.S. politics would shift from concentrated, localized spending to a more diluted, nationalized, or purely proportional approach. Some models suggest that if a national popular vote replaced the Electoral College, overall spending on advertising could decrease in typical elections, as the "winner-take-all" incentive to tip a single state with massive ad buys disappears. Instead of tailoring messages to specific regional interests in swing states, large donations would fuel national campaigns focusing on broad, national policy, potentially diminishing the ability of localized interests to use money to influence policy. In future presidential elections broad national policy, it is likely to include affordability.
Recent polling of independent voters, now representing a record-high 45% of U.S. adults, on the Electoral College is limited; however, they tend to favor structural reforms that increase inclusion, such as moving away from partisan-driven systems. Polls consistently show that independent voters, along with broad majorities of Americans, believe that money has too much influence in presidential elections and that wealthy donors/corporations hold excessive sway.
Hugh J Campbell, Jr, CPA, is a Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC) professional and a student of W. Edwards Deming, the American Statistician, often credited as the catalyst for the Japanese Economic miracle after WWII.
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