Building Multiracial Feminist Democracy in the Complexity of California

Demographics and Regions

California, the most populous state in the union, has seen increasing racial and ethnic diversity since 1980, with its population almost 40% Latine, 17% Asian, and 7% Black; and almost 19% of residents identify as two or more races. Nearly 44% of households speak a language other than English at home. Income inequality — the gap between low- and high-income families — that has multiplied throughout the country is among the most extreme in California, and wealth is even more unevenly distributed than income.

Diversity is not limited to race or ethnicity; there are also significant geographic and regional differences, such as the more affluent urban coastal metropolises contrasting with the more rural inland, northern, and Central Coast areas, and the more agricultural economies contrasting with the technology focused hubs. Like many states, California has conservative strongholds, such as those in the Central Valley, the Inland Empire, parts of San Diego and Orange counties, and parts of the Central Coast. And these regions are not static, they are shifting due to changing demographics and people being pushed out of urban areas as the real estate industry drives housing prices sky high.

Challenges and Opposition

Despite its national image as the left of the left, California remains what one partner called “a neoliberal hellscape,” with corporate forces driving agendas for the state. The state has deep-seated structural inequities similar to those across the country, holds a long history of conservatism, and is often the incubator for regressive policies that find their way to the national stage.

From 1978’s Proposition 13 that decimated funding for public services to 2020’s Proposition 22 that took away protections for app-based workers, to multiple attacks slated for 2024 (on the ability to raise taxes and fees, enforce labor laws, keep oil and gas wells away from homes and schools, and a narrowly-avoided attempt to undo fast-food worker protections), consolidated corporate power at the ballot box has opened the door for corporations to drive more inequity and labor practices that harm working people.

Corporate interests hold influence over public policies that displace communities or change how “work” is defined. Newer and tech-driven industries (think Amazon and Uber) are changing the nature of employment and are also making it harder for workers to organize. California is of vital strategic importance to a number of the country’s and world’s biggest companies — from Google to Amazon to real estate giant Greystar — tying the fate of the nation to the outcomes of fights in this state.

Corporate interests are pushing back on working people’s gains. Each of the 2020 and 2024 corporate ballot proposals mentioned represents a counterpunch to a recent major campaign to rein in corporate dominance. In Proposition 22, corporate backers utilized the language of equity, leaving 40% of “yes” voters believing they had voted for a living wage for gig workers. Fanning the public’s economic anxieties is another favorite tactic. During the “Great Resignation,” and more recently with inflation, businesses blamed their difficulties recruiting staff on the unemployment safety net and higher minimum wage — ignoring that working people have been making a choice to prioritize their wellness and safety during a pandemic.

Opportunities and Uprisings

Precisely because of the relentless neoliberal assaults in California, the state has also been a site of resistance for activists and communities to hone new organizing strategies. Notably, there have been several statewide power building tables, although prior to the establishment of the California Coalition for Worker Power (more below) none that led with a worker justice lens. There is also growing interest among these formations to collaborate across sectors and issues, through intersectional organizing that understands, for example, how unaffordable housing, low-wage jobs, displacement through gentrification, and environmental injustice are all inextricably linked. 

The labor movement has seen an increase in organizing with high-profile action by workers across industries (from Amazon and Starbucks to hotel workers, actors, and screenwriters). Even as California’s union density rises and falls, labor unions play an important role in the state, able to muster significant people power, resources, and political influence. Within the state’s labor movement there is a diversity of approaches: some unions prioritize collaboration with fellow unions and other aligned worker and community organizations, whereas others prioritize services and representation for the base of workers in their own membership. The newer leader at helm of the California Labor Federation is also bringing a new vision and perspective to this institution’s statewide strategy for workers.  

Movements for justice more broadly have been pushing for and winning demands that were not politically viable a few years before. Recently, despite some notable losses (such as Proposition 22 described above), there have also been some impressive victories at the ballot box and in legislatures. For example, early pandemic-era advances like eviction moratoria and increased access to paid sick leave were both the result of years of work to shift narratives and build movement capacity to react in moments of crisis. Other significant wins for worker protections and benefits are highlighted below in our findings.

The confluence of conditions in California — a state with diversity in race and regional political economies, corporations driving an agenda of inequality across a breadth of issues, and active contestation for co-governance by people-powered organizations — not only elevated its importance for PowerSwitch but also shaped the strategic questions for the evaluation (shared in the introduction). With neither corporate impacts nor people’s lives isolated to single issues like work, housing, or clean air, PowerSwitch launched its California program grappling with how to coalesce affiliates and allies with sufficient breadth, scale, and vision to meet these challenges.

How do California Affiliates Move Together?

The California program seeks to build worker power and organizing for a broader set of shared goals while pushing back on corporate power and strengthening co-governance in regions and the state. It envisions democracy that is both multiracial and feminist, where people govern and steward labor and land toward a regenerative economy — one for the many, not the few. The shared work of the PowerSwitch affiliates in California is based on some fundamental strategic values and analyses:

1. The power of workers can be a keystone in the broader movement to shift our political economy toward racial, gender, and climate justice. 

2. To tap into this power, workers must be organized as whole people through strategies that lie at the intersections of identities and issues (see box below). 

3. Network building must better connect to base building and organizing, not only policy advocacy.

4. A networked approach is essential for the affiliates to bolster each other’s local organizing while moving together to build collective worker power statewide in a way that honors the unique political history and reality of each region.

5. Working people must directly engage with corporate interests, not only with government decision-makers who are at times a proxy in the fight with corporations.

Forging Multiracial Feminist Spaces

Our interviews revealed that the leadership approach of PowerSwitch’s California team is valued, respected, and recognized as an important and impactful contribution to the movement. PowerSwitch has intentionally developed a model for shaping and managing power building spaces (such as campaign coalitions, statewide tables, and the network of California affiliates) in a multiracial and feminist way.

This model is undergirded by an analysis that coalitional movement work has often been hindered by top-down leadership practices that may work in corporate or military contexts, but which are ill-suited for aligning and sustaining alliances that draw power from a diverse set of constituencies and organizing approaches. The default for statewide and national efforts focused on cities is typically to create cookie-cutter models of local policies or campaigns and then expect local groups to run them, or the state or national campaigns create conditions on the ground that are detrimental to local power building. These might achieve quick easy wins, but since they don’t meaningfully tap into the power of local organizations and their allies, they rarely address root causes or set up bigger future victories. Moreover, approaches that fail to equitably manage power dynamics and surface shared wisdom frequently lead to fractured alliances, transactional relationships, ineffective strategy, and little lasting success. 

Since weaving coalitions and coordinating among autonomous local affiliates are core to PowerSwitch’s work, the team takes a systems leadership approach. Grounding in trusted relationships and alliances allows them to work together more effectively, and when necessary (like during a crisis such as the pandemic), it allows them to move forward in sync without having to run every decision through the full network. 

PowerSwitch focuses on relationship building for longer term systems change, broadens leadership definitions to recognize a broader spectrum of styles and contributions, and relies on collaborative approaches. This approach:

• Develops structures and practices to sustain lasting alliances. By explicitly considering power dynamics, PowerSwitch helps manage the challenges that often tear apart coalitions, such as raising funds, setting strategy, and taking credit. This is especially critical when some partners come to the table with more resources, political power, and experience than others. As described in the case studies below, PowerSwitch has guided coalitions to consider these issues and devise structures to hold the tensions. It has structured its own network with similar considerations in mind, such as by having a board of directors comprised entirely of affiliate leaders. The staff have also led work to develop clear, transparent, and intentional processes that support access and appropriate engagement, such as agreements around how decisions will be made and conflicts worked through. 

• Emphasizes trust and authentic relationships. PowerSwitch recognizes that building trusting relationships between leaders from different backgrounds and organizations helps create the conditions for effectively developing strategy and addressing conflict before it gets toxic. To that end, PowerSwitch runs a Transformational Leadership program that trains staff and affiliate leaders in skills and techniques for connecting authentically, having difficult conversations, and grounding in shared values. PowerSwitch incorporates these practices into its coalition work and supports partners in implementing them as well.

• Lifts up and leverages diverse forms of power and leadership. It recognizes that leaders are not always the loudest voices at the forefront, that the work that sustains coalitions and movements often happens behind the scenes, that shared leadership will take the work further than relying on charismatic individuals, and that the smartest person in the room is the collective. By prioritizing relationships and noting that different individuals and organizations bring different assets to the table, this approach builds a bigger bench. It brings more power, especially by equitably engaging organizations that are smaller, have less funding, are led by BIPOC and gender-oppressed folks, and emphasize developing small but deeply engaged bases in local geographies. It also brings more voices (especially those of people of color and gender-oppressed folks) into decision making, making our movements more inclusive, authentic, strategic, and effective. 

In addition to sustaining effective coalitions, this approach brings a number of additional benefits. Appreciating whole people as they show up in movement spaces encourages building bridges between diverse communities and sectors. Valuing collectivity and being open to change, vulnerability, and reflection promotes learning and emergent strategies. And creating moments where people (especially those who have been excluded from leadership) can engage in equitable decision making provides lived experience doing something different and difficult, but very rewarding — building a vital muscle for the network’s north star of multiracial feminist democracy.

Crafting Braided Strategies

The way PowerSwitch Action leads is reinforced by its interwoven strategies. In contrast to more siloed, issue-specific, or geographic-based organizations, the PowerSwitch California program ties together issues and places. Supporting bi- or multi-directional approaches rather than more singular or disconnected ones, the network is positioned to bridge between local, translocal, and statehouse-focused campaigns through mutually reinforcing strategies and capacities. This method creates what the program calls “braided strategy,” where strands combine to form a stronger, more impactful, and more sustainable force than any individual thread. 

These mutually beneficial strategies reinforce each other with shared narratives, enabling the alignment of local strategies across vastly different political and economic dynamics. Statewide wins can be used to bolster local organizing, and statewide campaigns can draft off of local power and organizing. For example, in advocating for state-level policy change that is too challenging or too inefficient for any one local affiliate to take on alone, the braided strategy allows multiple affiliates to “roll up” their local victories to change the political discourse at the state-level about what is possible and to influence legislation and policies in a way that benefits multiple locales. At the same time, statewide and national campaigns help to create beneficial conditions for local power building by shifting narratives, changing policy, providing funding, and helping to create new venues for local leaders to exercise leadership and exert influence. 

Braided strategies also reinforce the larger goal of the California program to build a more connected and powerful network — as additional threads are added, the braid grows stronger. This requires alignment among the regional affiliates so that as a network, they can be nimble and responsive to quickly evolving political realities. California program staff play multiple roles by supporting peer learning, identifying emerging opportunities for bigger and quicker wins, and coordinating strategies and communication at both local and statewide levels. 

Working from a Long Term Agenda

For immediate policy and corporate campaigns to create lasting change across geographies and beyond the limits of current politics, there have to be shifts in power that move beyond short term tactical wins and transactional relationships. As PowerSwitch Action knits together networked campaigns, it is guided by the network’s long term agenda to contest corporate power and advance multiracial feminist democracy. To shift more power to working people, PowerSwitch Action carefully crafts campaigns that disrupt the status quo, helping to make corporations contend with the people most affected by corporate practices demanding safer working conditions, improved wages and benefits, and more healthy and vibrant communities. 

For a long term agenda to bear fruit, organizations must not only adopt long term goals and strategic pathways to pursue them but shift the way that they work. Rather than choosing near term goals and campaigns based on what is winnable given current conditions, working from a long term agenda means naming the reforms that could achieve deeper structural transformation, then identifying the conditions that would be required to make these reforms possible, and then prioritizing interventions that could create these conditions — even if those interventions do not constitute wins as conventionally conceived, such as passing legislation.

Crafting interventions to move the needle on conditions — and make possible bigger change and wins tomorrow than are achievable today — requires various capacities, such as:

1. Deeply investing in leadership development so that campaigns bring forward new leaders that reflect the vision and diversity of the movement. 

2. Conducting research in order to ground their strategies in an understanding of specific leverage or reforms to move a target (like a divestment campaign) that may be out of reach now but could have high impact with new conditions, such as building a coalition with major influence on investors.

3. Using multifaceted communications and narrative strategies that not only support campaign goals, but do so in ways that expose corporate malfeasance and show what’s possible when communities come together to win innovative solutions (rather than inadvertently reinforcing popular oppositions narratives about individualism and scarcity).

PowerSwitch has adopted this long term agenda as a network and brought it to coalition spaces for organizing, campaigning, and collaboration. The staff have been described as “systems thinkers and leaders,” able to foster collective leadership, see what long term change looks like, and understand what is required to get there. Keeping the eye on the long term agenda gives direction and guideposts, while offering an alternative vision for a more equitable future for workers.

Amazon

Amazon touches virtually all aspects of our economy, communities, and democracy, impacting everything from job quality and the environment to public surveillance, land use, and public revenues. Amazon’s influence on regional economies also gives the corporation significant sway with local elected officials. The presence of an Amazon site dramatically changes local economic and housing patterns and contributes to larger environmental degradation. Yet many cities have welcomed the Amazon facilities as development opportunities — while overlooking the damaging effects on their communities and residents.

Beyond this pattern of local impacts, Amazon’s role as a giant player across multiple sectors is fast reshaping how we shop, how we work and do business, how we live in communities, and how we are surveilled and policed. It is a main sales platform — and competitor — for hundreds of thousands of small businesses and content creators. It runs the world’s largest network of cloud services and other vital communications infrastructure technologies, including those undergirding essential government functions, as well as non-essential ones, such as immigration enforcement. Amazon’s direct control over markets allows it to punish millions of individuals and companies almost at will, as it did when it cut off sales by the book publisher Hachee in 2015. Amazon is now moving fast into the business of “managing” purchases by city and state governments, and even those of the Pentagon in Washington, giving it new and direct power over public, local, and national officials as well as public dollars. Amazon has built a spy system that assembles vast troves of secrets on the interests, actions, and political leanings of almost every American. As such, Amazon embodies (perhaps more than any other corporation today) the threat that massive concentration of wealth and political power present to both democracy and an economy for the many, not the few.

Due to its national profile and geostrategic location, California is a critical space in which to bring Amazon to heel. The megacorporation is ever-present in different regions of the state with dozens of import, distribution, fulfillment, and transportation facilities. In fact, Amazon is California’s largest private employer with over 150,000 employees. And while its business practices make it more challenging for workers to organize, Amazon also presents opportunities for linking across industries on local, state, and national levels through the goods movement (distribution, retail, logistics) and other sectors (particularly cloud computing and digital surveillance). Home to the ports that handle over 40% of all goods entering the contiguous United States, including the largest port in the country, California is key to the goods movement across the nation.

A campaign engaging Amazon is a good match for PowerSwitch’s strengths, approaches, and long term agenda. Taking on Amazon is clearly connected to the fight to contest corporate power, to the larger struggle against threats to democracy, and for the future of the planet. It also centers workers and builds power among the most impacted. The multilayered scale gives PowerSwitch a chance to flex its muscles around the braided strategy — with local campaigns creating statewide momentum and establishing state policies that couldn’t be won at the local level. Getting beyond traditional issue-area silos by connecting workers’ rights, environmental justice, housing, surveillance, and more also opens up the potential to connect worker organizing with policy efforts that call into question Amazon's unchecked growth and insist on greater accountability. By aligning across multiple issues, strategies, and geographies, the campaign has the potential to build a more diverse, powerful, and robust worker movement.

Power Building and Policy

PowerSwitch Action has been a leader in campaigning in multiple states and localities to transform Amazon's impact on workers and communities, both through its own campaigns and as a co-founder and core leader of Athena — a broad coalition of local and national organizations representing working people, small business owners, people of color, immigrants, and neighbors, along with activists, advocates, policy experts, and academics. As part of Athena, PowerSwitch is committed to changing the role of this company in our economy and democratizing economic power while limiting the concentration of power held by this one corporation. Only by changing the distribution of power can we reverse the ever-growing inequality in our country.

Campaigning on Amazon in California not only reflects this commitment but also presents strategic opportunities for PowerSwitch’s approach and key questions in the state. The evolving Amazon campaign serves as a testing ground for using multiple levers across multiple regions to build power. Exposing Amazon as the poster child of exploitative labor creates a counter narrative to Amazon’s public relations campaign and relates well with narratives about climate and racial justice. Organizing has led to the formation of coalitions that tie neighborhood and health impacts of the warehouses to working conditions and standards. And the local data generated from the California program’s research on labor conditions and health impacts have been useful starting points for conversations with goods movement advocacy groups, labor, and other coalitions.

Amazon has become fertile ground for worker organizing, garnering national attention.  Amazon’s air hub (also known as KSBD) in San Bernardino, California is one of few major air hubs for the company. The facility opened in 2021 amidst community concerns about job quality and environmental impact. By the next year, workers were signing petitions and walking off the job, demanding more robust safety measures and a $5-per-hour pay increase. PowerSwitch affiliate WWRC supported the workers in forming a new group, Inland Empire Amazon Workers United (IEAWU). WWRC and IEAWU also produced a briefing paper documenting the extreme heat in the facilities and its threats to worker safety. Since raising these issues, there have been more (but still inconsistent) cool down breaks and increased access to water and fans, and workers are more frequently rotated between indoor and outdoor assignments. In September 2023, workers at the air hub received among the highest pay hikes of any Amazon warehouse.

The workers also took their concerns to Washington DC. In the fall of 2022, the Executive Director of WWRC, representing the Athena coalition, testified at a hearing before the House Subcommittee on Workforce Protections to examine the unsafe and untenable conditions warehouse workers face. He also described the surveillance that pressures workers as well as retaliation practices that contribute to these poor conditions and inhibit organizing.

In California, workers have also had notable success turning to state policy to address unsafe working conditions and create more opportunities for worker empowerment. By exposing harmful labor practices — including unsafe work speeds, surveillance and retaliation —  with partners like the Los Angeles County Labor Federation, WWRC, LAANE, and PowerSwitch, they won AB 701. In 2021, Governor Gavin Newsom signed the law, which gives warehouse workers broadly (not just those at Amazon) tools to fight quotas that risk workers’ health and safety. This legislation also created rebuttable presumption, which ensures that if an employer takes “adverse action” against a worker within 90 days of that worker complaining about any failure to comply with AB 701, the burden of proof falls on the employer to show that the action was not retaliatory.  

Now local organizers and workers are working to implement AB 701 to not only protect workers from the severe health and safety impacts of quotas but to also grow their ability to stand together. With retaliation being a major determining factor in whether workers organize and labor laws get implemented (huge percentages of CA workers report experiencing retaliation and that the threat of retaliation keeps them from speaking out about violations), rebuttable presumption is also key for building worker power on the ground. Nationally, fellow warehouse workers across the country are using the precedent of AB 701 to push for similar changes in their states, leading to the passage of worker protection bills in Minnesota and New York.

Affiliates have also looked to regional regulations and legislation related to public lands to address the harmful effects of Amazon’s development and business practices. In some regions, they have been experimenting with city, county, port, or airport authorities to raise standards for workers and communities. Some have explored and even tried to leverage land use and environmental policies governing privately owned land, such as California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) regulations or subsidies like the zero emission vehicle tax credits. 

Though it is still unfolding and emerging, the Amazon campaign shows how having national solidarity and attention can support worker organizing in the states and localities. And in California, we have already seen how a braided approach is building more power to take on a juggernaut corporation like Amazon.

Housing Justice

As PowerSwitch aims to transform the way that corporations shape and dictate power in California, another networked campaign the program is developing focuses on the real estate industry.

Real estate developers not only sway housing policy in the state, but they also influence many other issues and are major political donors to candidates who then shape every other area of policy. This reflects both an overall national trend driven in part by the offshoring of manufacturing that leaves real estate as one of the biggest corporate interests in local politics in many cities, as well as global trends making urban real estate central to capital’s growth strategy.

Nationally, the housing justice movement sees the long term solution as land being held in community stewardship rather than commodified. This is often talked about as social housing. If land is to be stewarded together by communities, communities must form the vehicles by which they can hold land together as well as the relationships and practices that will allow them to do so. 

PowerSwitch is supporting affiliates nationally, including across multiple regions of California, to build strong tenant or resident associations. Such tenant groups can directly negotiate with landlords over rents and conditions, advocate for renter protection public policy, work to preserve existing affordable housing stock, and push for the production of more housing that promotes diverse neighborhoods rather than gentrification.

Just as importantly, such groups are developing the capacity to steward land together (such as through land trusts or tenant co-ops). They are developing robust tenant organizing models that build the necessary capacity and leadership. California affiliates are engaging in exchanges about tenant organizing models and tenant leadership development to bring renters together across geographies to build solidarity and learn from each other. The collaboration has a particular focus on the strategic necessity, challenges, and promising practices for organizing tenants in the suburban and rural parts of the state.

PowerSwitch is also building power to challenge corporate landlords and expose their role in blocking tenant and resident priorities by aligning demands across housing, something along the lines of a tenant bill of rights. To widen their reach and educate tenants, they employ creative cultural and narrative strategies, such as the children’s book Alejandria Fights Back and the video game Dot’s Home, which PowerSwitch worked with the network’s Detroit affiliate to turn into an interactive play.

California is among the early adopters of the growing national work for residents to take power over their homes and land from the real estate industry. The California program continues to evaluate strategies and approaches to leverage their unique strengths — while complementing the very full and complex California housing justice movement — in a way that can unlock power for the movement as a whole. PowerSwitch seeks to both push back on the real estate industry and inspire others facing the industry’s opposition to do the same.  

Capacity to Meet Complexity

With the complexity of systems, relationships, and a changing environment comes strategies that need to be regularly tested and adapted. The California program has purposely developed as a nimble and responsive assembly bringing together and supporting the affiliates, while also serving as a vehicle for collective statewide power building. It has been a generative and supportive space for the affiliates where they can strategize together, make meaning, and experiment. 

The affiliates and program staff are plugged into many issue areas and moving external campaigns, while also building infrastructure and internal network alignment. A growth edge for the program will be to balance multiple demands and strengthen its infrastructure without losing this agility and responsiveness. There are always campaigns vying for attention, which raises difficult choices about where the California program should prioritize its strategies, time, and energies — and when to let go of spaces where the network’s contribution is not as essential.

This has been particularly difficult during a pandemic when affiliate and network staff had to divert time and energy for rapid response. Coming back to the long term agenda will guide this prioritization: helping to ensure that each campaign or effort is tied to advancing one or more strategic imperatives and creating conditions that open future possibilities for bigger fights.

Through evaluation and experimentation, the program team is learning how to focus and best mobilize network staff and the affiliates to optimize and amplify the network’s impacts. PowerSwitch and its affiliates are investing in growing leadership capacity and pathways in the movement. There is a critical need for the affiliates to increase their capacity for corporate campaigning and networked strategies to grow statewide power. This will require affiliates to bring along all their staff and leadership, as well as their board and local allies. 

Another complex area that is always evolving — and therefore demands ongoing attention and capacity — is the battle over what worldview will have dominance. Narrative interventions can have huge effects, such as holding corporations accountable by creating acute public relations, operational, or financial crises, or shifting perspectives over time to change what’s recognized as common sense. Corporations and their lobbyists, front groups, and allies devote major resources to shaping public narratives about how, in an uncertain economy, equitable policies would kill jobs, place undue burden on businesses, make private ventures too regulated and less efficient, and even increase crime. As one advisory committee member pointed out, “these narratives come from decades of a neoliberal drumbeat.”

The success of the corporate-backed Proposition 22 in 2020 is a clear example of this challenge. The opposition co-opted the workers’ narrative so that voters believed they were supporting workers by voting for the proposition. Similarly, the Schools and Communities First initiative (Proposition 15) failed because the corporate opposition was able to smear it with the tried-and-true narrative about over-taxing the middle class. At the same time, the pandemic created a narrative opening to redefine who essential workers are, the value of work, the disparity of wealth, and the role of government.  

Shifting worldviews takes time, expertise, and discipline when faced with immediate and competing demands. PowerSwitch will need to chip away against corporate-driven ideologies, but, more importantly, it will also need to uplift alternative and worker-centered narratives so that they become conventional wisdom. Above all, this kind of narrative change relies on base building. Worker-centered narratives cannot be developed, let alone advanced, without the alignment and collective power of the people whose experiences and interests they center. Returning to the long term agenda reminds us of the strategic imperative to grow civic organizations and leadership for building a more authentic democracy — which leads us to the next area for further development.

Co-Governance for Stronger Democracy

The California program is still evolving, including future considerations about which networked campaigns to focus on. What is clear, however, is that achieving the network’s goals requires connecting the program’s campaigning and organizing with the co-governance approach that affiliates are using at the local level. 

Creating and supporting co-governance is broader and bigger than getting sympathetic leaders elected or engaging in big public planning processes (though both have important roles). Even with policy wins, limited state enforcement and corporate-aligned elected officials in local regions often dull the impact of these victories. Corporate interests have been successful at using their financial muscle to effectively run cities.

Broader co-governance helps shift power into the hands of residents and working people, requiring greater transparency and making elected officials and civil servants more accountable to impacted communities. Co-governance requires a level of comfort with both inside and outside strategies; it is based on an agenda that is set by directly affected people, who guide the work of those inside and hold them accountable. To stay true to this agenda requires changes in the practices and structures of governance to implement open planning and decision making processes for ongoing input and real-time collaboration on policy development from the outside. True co-governance does not only play lip service to impacted community participation, it is a fundamental driving force.