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Not only is it adding new members, but the League of Women Voters Minnesota says it's getting interest from people around the state to launch new chapters.
(Photo courtesy LWV MN Facebook)
Retooling democracy work in MN, post 'Operation Metro Surge'
Apr 22, 2026
The midterm elections are seven months away. A well-known nonpartisan political group hopes Minnesotans won't take democracy for granted when contemplating whether to vote – especially in light of the recent federal immigration crackdown.
The League of Women Voters Minnesota just launched an online survey to find out why some voters skip elections, even in a high-turnout state. Executive Director Amy Perna said the quest for feedback is due in part to the Trump administration's Operation Metro Surge.
She said it stoked fears about feeling safe heading to the polls. She added that community resistance to controversial ICE enforcement has revived enthusiasm for civic engagement.
"We're trying to meet that moment because a lot of people, they want to do something – they don't know what to do," said Perna. "And it's really our job to help funnel that energy and, you know, teach people how they can plug in."
She said in the past year, the Minnesota League has added more than 1,000 new members. They're being trained to help facilitate candidate forums and similar outreach work.
The League of Women Voters never endorses candidates or political parties. But Perna said they're outspoken on policy or government actions that might be seen as a threat to democracy.
She acknowledges pushback from GOP politicians unwilling to take part in forums.
Leagues around the country, including in Minnesota, are also carrying out Action Alerts – amplified messages for people to take notice of a specific issue and share thoughts with their representatives.
Perna said they're careful to separate their candidate forums and voter guides from the stance they might take on a policy matter.
"Issues have become more and more partisan over the years," said Perna. "But what the League says about those issues is based on study and consensus."
Before taking a formal position on a bill in Congress or the Legislature, Perna said League members decide together on their stance.
Ultimately, she said they remind folks that voting is one of the best ways to shape community outcomes.
In condemning Operation Metro Surge, the League said, "Democracy is built by the people, not imposed through fear or force." Some federal leaders acknowledged mistakes with the enforcement, but the White House has consistently defended the operation.
Mike Moen is a producer with Public News Service.
Retooling democracy work in MN, post 'Operation Metro Surge' was first published by PNS and was republished with permission.
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As the 2026 election approaches, doomscrolling and social media are shaping voter behavior through fear and anxiety. Learn how digital news consumption influences political decisions—and how to break the cycle for more informed voting.
Getty Images, gorodenkoff
Americans Are Doomscrolling Their Way to the Ballot Box and Only Getting Empty Promises
Apr 21, 2026
As the spring primary cycle ramps up, voters are deciding which candidates to elect in the November general election, but too much doomscrolling on social media is leading to uninformed — and often anxiety-based — voting. Even though online platforms and politicians may be preying on our exhaustion to further their agendas, we don’t have to fall for it this election cycle.
Doomscrolling is, unfortunately, part of daily life for many of us. It involves consuming a virtually endless amount of negative social media posts and news content, causing us to feel scared and depressed. Our brains have a hardwired negativity bias that causes us to notice potential threats and focus on them. This is exacerbated by the fact that people who closely follow or participate in politics are more likely to doomscroll.
A 2024 report found that 31% of adults in the U.S. who use social media indicated they doomscroll “a lot” or “some,” and a 2026 study found that more than one-third of Americans doomscroll before bed. Meanwhile, 21% of Americans get their political and election news from social media, and 53% of people get at least some of their general news from social media, which will undoubtedly impact their 2026 election choices.
Our social media timelines are filled with stories about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the war in Gaza, military strikes on Iran, inflation, the high cost of housing, and every other problem in the world. When we see these potential threats, we keep scrolling to learn more about them; it is part of our natural fight nor flight response to threats, evolutionarily ingrained in us as a form of self-protection and survival.
Social media companies know this, and they inevitably benefit from it. When we endlessly doomscroll, we see advertisements that make enormous profits for these companies even at the expense of users. Recently, a California jury determined that social media companies often put profits over people.
For politicians, our doomscrolling provides a different but related opportunity. Politicians take advantage of our fears and anxieties by offering themselves as the remedies to all the threats in the world. They tell voters that they alone can prevent the danger, and that we neither need to fight or flee; instead, we only have to vote for them.
Social media has led to our fears growing deeper than any specific news topics and right to the very issue of our survival as a country. According to an American Psychological Association survey, “The future of the nation” was the most common source of significant stress for 77% of Americans in 2024, followed closely by the economy and the presidential election.
With this in mind, politicians campaign on solving all of our problems and offer themselves as the release for the pent-up anxiety caused by our doomscrolling. They don’t assert their candidacy as a form of statesmanship and governance, but rather as the way to protect us from the world’s instability.
Still, just as it always has been, the world is a dangerous place. Our ancestors knew that, only they didn’t spend hours each day scrolling on social media, constantly looking for those dangers like so many of us do now. That is where doomscrolling has gotten us.
Social media companies make billions of dollars, and politicians who offer true governance often get ignored. We instead elect politicians who promise to do the impossible of alleviating all the threats we see online, despite the fact that they know — and we should also know — that they cannot.
So how do we stop this? The standard advice to “put down the phone” is no longer enough. We need a strategic refusal to quit treating the ballot box like an anxiety-release valve. To break the cycle, we need to apply a “scroll-check” to every candidate. We need to ask ourselves: “If the digital threat this candidate is shouting about disappeared tomorrow, what would be left of their vision?” If the answer is an empty room, they aren't a leader; they are a symptom of the news feed.
While the dangers of the world cannot be eliminated, we can at least lessen some of the anxiety by remembering that politicians can’t fix everything, despite their empty promises. As Carl Jung said, “The man who promises everything is sure to fulfil nothing.”
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a one dollar bill with a button on it
Photo by Marek Studzinski on Unsplash
The Salary Cap That Doesn’t Exist
Apr 21, 2026
More than 17,500 people fall into homelessness for the first time every week in this country. The workers who help them find their way out earn wages that make it hard to stay in the job. Now the federal government is proposing to cut nearly a billion dollars from the programs that fund that work. The people closest to the crisis are being squeezed from every direction.
The nonprofit sector runs on mission. But it is sustained by people, and right now, the people are leaving.
Nonprofit workers coordinate housing for families in crisis, support survivors as they rebuild their lives, and ensure public dollars are used responsibly. They carry caseloads that would overwhelm a corporate team, navigate complicated rules, respond to trauma daily, and hold programs together through moments most people never see. Many workers are a few paychecks away from housing instability.
Here is something most people do not know, including many nonprofit leaders: there is no salary cap on nonprofit work.
Organizations that receive government funding widely believe the government limits what they can pay their staff. That belief shapes budgets, salary conversations, and hiring decisions across the sector. But it is not accurate. Federal rules require that pay be reasonable and consistent with what similar organizations offer for similar work. That is a standard of fairness, not a ceiling. Under 2 CFR 200.430, compensation must be reasonable and consistent with what similar organizations pay for similar work. That is a reasonable standard, not a ceiling. The regulation does not prohibit wage increases. It does not set a maximum. It requires documentation and justification, both of which responsible organizations produce routinely.
The salary cap lives in assumption, not in law.
So why do wages stay low? Because the system sustains itself. Funding administrators develop salary guidelines based on surveys of what nonprofits already pay. Those surveys reflect a sector where wages have always been low. The result is a loop: guidelines stay modest because the data is modest, and the data stay modest because no one questions the guidelines. Nobody designed this to be exploitative. But the effect is the same.
Inside organizations, the same problem takes a different form. When workers raise concerns about pay, a common response is that raises must apply equally to everyone in the name of equity. The intention sounds reasonable. But equity does not mean treating every situation identically. A worker who manages crisis cases, tracks federal compliance, and absorbs other people's trauma every day is carrying something different than a colleague in a lower-stakes role. Applying the same flat adjustment to both is not fairness. It is a way of avoiding a harder conversation.
I know this from personal experience.
During the pandemic, Los Angeles City launched Project Safe Haven, an emergency program that placed victims of domestic violence in hotels and ran them as full shelters. What was meant to keep people safe at home exposed a more dangerous reality for many. The calls we received were more desperate, more aggravated, and more lethal. Clients needed help from the moment they fled, through intake, case management, peer counseling, and eventually finding permanent housing. Many had children. The work did not stop.
I ran that program for my region. Alone. While keeping up with my existing job. Other agencies staffed teams for this work. I built the process myself, onboarded clients, conducted assessments, and provided counseling. Working from home during a crisis made it hard to draw any line between work and everything else. I felt like I was going to have a nervous breakdown every day.
The funder secured a stipend for everyone working on the project. For managers, that was $1,000 a month. I ran the program for eight months. My former agency determined I was not eligible. I lost $8,000.
When I asked why, the answer was equity. The same principle meant to protect workers had been used to deny one. I had built the program from nothing, managed it solo for eight months, and absorbed the kind of sustained stress that doesn't leave when you close your laptop. The stipend existed precisely because of work like that. I did not receive it.
When organizations say there is no money to raise wages, that is sometimes true. But it is not always the whole story. When the government decides something is a priority, it finds the money. When a foundation decides a program matters, it funds it. The question has never been whether resources exist. It is whether the people doing this work are considered worth the investment.
This is not sustainable. And it does not have to be this way.
The first step is transparency. Organizations should clearly explain how pay ranges are developed, what data was used, and what assumptions shaped the numbers. When that process is visible, it becomes possible to ask whether salaries reflect what the work costs today or what the sector accepted decades ago.
The second step is honesty about what the work involves. Crisis response, emotional labor, administrative compliance, and long-term accountability are not soft additions to the job. They are the job. Compensation should reflect that.
The third step is treating retention as a measure of program success. When an experienced worker leaves, the cost is real: recruitment, lost institutional knowledge, and disrupted relationships with clients who had finally learned to trust someone. Stable staffing is not separate from quality services. It is what makes them possible.
The fourth step belongs to funders. Salary reviews, cost-of-living adjustments, and market corrections can be built into funding structures without violating compliance requirements. What has been missing is not permission. It is clarity. When funding entities provide explicit guidance that reasonable, documented wage increases are not just allowed but expected, organizations will have the confidence to act.
Finally, nonprofit leadership must change the story it tells about compensation. Low wages are not an unavoidable feature of mission-driven work. They are the result of policy choices and organizational habits that can change. The mission does not require workers to go without. It requires leaders willing to make different decisions.
The people doing this work are not replaceable parts. When skilled case managers leave because they cannot afford to stay, their clients do not get a smooth handoff. They get to start over with someone new, rebuild trust from scratch, and absorb yet another reminder that the system was not built with their stability in mind.
Without staff, there is no program.
This moment of financial uncertainty is not just a budget challenge. It is an opportunity to rethink how we sustain the workforce that makes these programs possible.
The nonprofit sector never set out to underpay its workforce. But somewhere along the way, the mission became more important than the people carrying it. That is not sustainable, and it is not right. The families in crisis who depend on these services deserve workers who can afford to stay. And the workers who show up every day, absorbing what most people will never see, deserve more than gratitude. They deserve to be paid for it.
Stephanie Whack is a survivor of domestic violence, an advocate at the intersection of victimization and homelessness, and a member of The OpEd Project Public Voices Fellowship on Domestic Violence and Economic Security. In 2024, she was awarded the LA City Dr. Marjorie Braude Award for innovative collaboration in serving victims of domestic violence.
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Libraries drive community impact, literacy, and access to information—but face funding cuts and censorship threats. Why protecting libraries matters now.
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Stand Up for Libraries: During National Library Week and Always
Apr 21, 2026
Libraries spark joy, sometimes in surprising ways.
As the director of the top-ranked MSLIS program in the United States, I have a news alert set up for “libraries,” and every day I learn about some surprising, deeply needed effort that libraries are doing for their communities.
In spite of this, all 17,000 libraries in this country are under attack by the federal government.
April 19-25 is National Library Week, an annual event sponsored by the American Library Association to celebrate and promote that libraries are reaching out to the communities they serve to encourage their members to “explore and discover what sparks joy in them at the library.” The ALA reports that people visit libraries more than 800 million times a year.
And yet, President Donald Trump says he does not believe in building libraries or museums. Last year, Trump issued an Executive Order intended to dismantle the only federal agency dedicated to funding library services, the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
Through an ensuing year-long battle waged by state attorneys general and library advocacy organizations, the closure of IMLS was staved off and then rescinded. Recently, the Trump administration withdrew its appeal of the reinstatement. Libraries won. For now. The Trump administration's proposed FY 2027 budget, released in April 2026, once again allocates no funds to IMLS.
Threats aren’t just to funding.
The core work of libraries in promoting and supporting intellectual freedom and access to information is also under government threat.
House Bill 7661, “The Stop the Sexualization of Children Act,” now making its way through committee in Congress, is intended “to amend the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 to prohibit the use of funds provided under such Act to develop, implement, facilitate, host, or promote any program or activity for, or to provide or promote literature or other materials to, children under the age of 18 that includes sexually oriented material, and for other purposes.” Providing literature is, after all, the core work of school libraries.
The bill reports that sexually oriented material “exposes . . . children to nude adults, individuals who are stripping, or lewd or lascivious dancing.” It then details exceptions, such as classic works of art and literature, as well as texts of major world religions. It concludes with what may be the heart of the matter, underscoring that sexually oriented material includes any material that “(ii) involves gender dysphoria or transgenderism.”
Of course, people know libraries are places to get books. Most people know they can also get help finding information. People are less aware that they can go to the library for a trowel or hoe, or to join a poetry reading or a cookbook club where they can share recipes, experience, and sometimes a dish or two while they learn about historical food traditions.
People do love their libraries. And they love their librarians.
People get married in libraries. From toddler story times to help in elementary school classrooms, to a place for the bridal altar or tax help for seniors, libraries offer something for all ages.
The Dartmouth Public Library in Massachusetts is one of many that hosts a seed exchange library, promoting food security and environmental sustainability.
The Johnson County Public Libraries in Kansas provide a program called “Justice Involved” that supports individuals who are currently or previously involved in the justice system, as well as a program for Language Learners.
In Illinois, the Bellwood Public Library hosts a Banned Book Club, encouraging its community to read and engage in constructive dialogue about controversial books.
School Librarians support young learners, helping them achieve higher literacy rates than students who attend schools that do not have a librarian.
For many years, libraries distributed tax forms with a “tax forms, not tax advice” warning. Many now offer help in navigating the IRS site, or host verified IRS volunteers who help people complete their tax forms. It’s a good use for library space when that space isn’t being used for things like adaptive Tai Chi classes intended for people with limited mobility.
If you want to go to a library to borrow a clam rake, or to do some yoga or have access to resources that might help you or your child understand questions you have about sexual identity, it’s time to speak up for libraries.
Despite all the ways in which libraries serve their communities, some Congressional leaders express that they are skeptical that libraries deserve our respect or funding. Policymakers need to acknowledge, fund and speak up for libraries and the work that they do.
Any consideration of HR 7761 is unacceptable. Especially during National Library Week, it is crucial to support the right to read and the library workers who help anyone read. That is how joy arrives.
Maria Bonn is an associate professor of Information Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where she directs the masters of science in library and information science degree program. She is a Public Voices Fellow of The OpEd Project.
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