We can’t rely on the Constitution or the courts to deliver for the people—but from rent-striking tenants to movements defying empire, everyday Americans are rewriting the relationship of political engagement to democratic norms from the ground up.

Join us to hear how local tenants unions are forging a national campaign against some of the most powerful players in the global economy, how political education is central to our freedom, how movements are shifting culture, and how past freedom struggles are helping today’s organizers reimagine a better future for all of us.

A link to watch the video will be emailed to all registered participants on the day of the event. The video will be available to view for 24 hours.

Speakers:

Dr. Carmen Rojas is the president and CEO of Marguerite Casey Foundation. Under her leadership, the foundation launched the prestigious Freedom Scholar award, and since starting in 2020 granted more than $252 million in funding to dozens of organizations doing the hard work of shifting power to those people who have long been excluded from having it. Prior to MCF, Dr. Rojas was the cofounder and CEO of the Workers Lab, an innovation lab that partners with workers to develop new ideas that help them succeed and flourish.

Aziz Rana teaches law at Boston College, where his research and teaching center on American constitutional law. In particular, his work focuses on the role of race, citizenship, and empire in shaping American legal and political development. He is the author of two books: The Two Faces of American Freedom and, most recently, The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them.

Daniel Denvir is a fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute, host of the Dig, a podcast from Jacobin magazine, and cochair of Reclaim Rhode Island, a housing justice organization. His journalistic work covers criminal justice, the drug war, immigration, and politics and has appeared in the New York Times, Jacobin, Vox, the Nation, the Guardian, and elsewhere. He is also the author of All-American Nativism: How the Bipartisan War on Immigrants Explains Politics as We Know It.

Tara Raghuveer is the director of the Tenant Union Federation, a national union of unions organizing tenants to wield power at a massive scale, to bargain for protections, to disrupt the flow of capital to those who commodify homes, to secure alternatives to the housing market, to guarantee housing as a public good, and to establish tenants as a political class that cannot be ignored. Tara is also the founding director of the 10,000+ member Kansas City Tenants Union, responsible for the city's Tenants Bill of Rights, Right to Counsel, Source of Income Discrimination Ban, and Office of Language Access.

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This event is part of the 2025 Marguerite Casey Foundation Summer School, in partnership with Haymarket Books.