Bold Ideas, Emerging Leaders: Roosevelt Network Emerging Fellows Journal 2026

Environmental justice means ensuring that all people, no matter their race, ethnicity, gender, or socioeconomic position, have equal access to a safe and healthy environment (EPA 2020). As a resident of Altgeld Gardens, a public housing project in the south side of Chicago, Johnson gained an interest in environmental health and justice in the 1970s after becoming increasingly alarmed by patterns of illness in her community, including recurring bad odors and widespread asthma among children (Beth 2018). She quickly discovered that Altgeld Gardens—a 97 percent Black community—was surrounded by 50 landfills and built on top of stored chemicals that were leaking. At the time, the community had the highest cancer rates in the country (Cosier 2017).

Through grassroots movement building and breakthrough policy victories over the past 10 years, Virginia has moved quickly to build a cleaner economy. The Virginia Clean Economy Act and Biden-era federal investments are driving visible change, from offshore wind and solar build-out to flood protection and grid modernization. Virginians want this work to continue; in 2023, 66 percent of registered voters supported the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative and 62 percent supported the Virginia Clean Economy Act (CNU 2023). But broad public support is not a blank check. If the climate transition generates displacement, low-wage work, or a new round of extraction, legitimacy will erode. A transition that is not just will not last.

Esmeralda Nolasco stood in her apartment in Houston, Texas, staring at the mold spreading across her dining area right next to the gaping hole in her ceiling. Nolasco and her apartment complex neighbors had been living in terrible conditions for months while management had repeatedly ignored their maintenance requests. After the property changed hands following a foreclosure, she and over 100 families received mass eviction notices from a new owner listed only as “Cabo United LLC.” Trapped between an uninhabitable apartment and the threat of eviction, Nolasco wanted to know who was deciding to evict her, with the hope of negotiating and holding someone accountable for the deteriorating conditions. However, her search hit a wall. Texas Housers, a nonprofit housing advocacy organization, spent months investigating who actually owned the property and found that the beneficial owners (individuals who own 25% or more of an asset or exercise substantial control over an asset or equity) remained entirely hidden behind layers of shell companies. The LLC’s “governing person” was listed as Sheridan Capital, a Florida bridge loan company that typically does not own property. Nobody could determine who was making decisions about these families’ homes.

Tenure is often framed as the benchmark of academic success, a system that is designed to reward excellence in research, teaching, and service while protecting academic freedom. In theory, the process is structured and fair. Faculty meet clearly defined expectations, move through multiple levels of review, and are evaluated based on the quality of their work. That is the version of tenure universities promote: It suggests a system rooted in merit and consistency.

Based on the per capita cost of crime, St. Louis was the most dangerous city in the United States in both 2022 and 2023—now it’s number three, behind Oakland and Memphis (Bloom 2025). St. Louis has also experienced record levels of homelessness, blight, and population decline in recent years (McDermott 2023). In North City, a historically Black area of St. Louis that was influenced by decades of redlining, many houses are abandoned. Countless historic schools and churches are for sale, without enough residents left in the city to keep them open. There are simply not enough police officers to patrol the geographically large but sparsely populated city: When doorknocking for a political candidate, I spoke to a woman who said she is on her third car in three years after the first two were totaled by reckless drivers speeding down her street.

Many communities across the country, particularly in the South, have become disgruntled with the recent boom in data center construction ushered in by tech firms, utilities, and a slow-to-change policy landscape. This boom has become parasitic in nature, primarily because the danger data centers pose to communities is increasingly disproportionate to the level of community investment that residents see as a result of housing them in their backyards.

Georgia has long been at the center of the nation’s struggle over voting rights, serving as both a battleground for expanded democratic participation and a testing ground for new forms of suppression. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 fundamentally reshaped this landscape by placing Georgia under federal preclearance, ensuring that any changes to election laws could not be enacted without federal review. For decades, this safeguard prevented the reemergence of the discriminatory practices that had defined the Jim Crow era and helped maintain a more equitable system of participation. However, the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder ultimately dismantled this framework, removing the very oversight mechanism that had kept Georgia’s elections accountable.

Guaranteed Income (GI) and Universal Basic Income (UBI) programs provide citizens with basic financial packages that can be used toward expenses of their choosing. UBI is paid out to all individuals within a society unconditionally, while GI is paid out to a targeted population (Lewis and Noguchi 2025). Case studies from around the world show that basic income leads to lower inequality, poverty, infant mortality rates, healthcare costs, and crime rates, as well as better education outcomes and even increased economic growth (Bregman 2014).

“They wanted to make this whole place a coal mine, and now that we’re realizing that won’t work, we don’t know what to do.” This quote from Mark, a farmer I interviewed in McDowell County, West Virginia, perfectly describes the broken promises of extractive industries in the state. Industries such as timber, coal, and natural gas have dominated West Virginia’s economy for generations with guarantees of economic prosperity; however, those guarantees have not been realized (Stump 2021). Instead, those same extractive industries have left West Virginia as the fourth poorest state in the nation, with a poverty rate of 16.7 percent (WVCBP 2025) and a median annual income just over $33,000 (US Census Bureau n.d.).These same industries have poisoned West Virginia’s landscape, ranking 47th worst in the nation (EPA n.d.), about 250,000 West Virginians lack access to quality drinking water (Hanson 2025).

Northern Virginia currently hosts the world’s highest concentration of data centers, home to a region in Loudoun County fittingly nicknamed “data center alley.” These massive facilities—some stretching across millions of square feet—have become the engine of the artificial intelligence (AI) technology boom, both in the United States and globally. They are not simply single buildings, but are sprawling industrial campuses, often adjacent to residential neighborhoods, historical landmarks, and natural reserves. These data centers require staggering amounts of energy, leading them to draw on significant amounts of water, much of which is clean drinking water that is not properly recycled. From every generative AI cartoon image prompt to intensive computer coding inquiries, servers must use water to process information and then to cool down machinery from these heat-generating commands at a rapid rate. It is estimated that by 2027, global AI demand will reach between 4.2 and 6.6 billion cubic meters of usage, a staggering number that has been largely kept under the radar (Li et al. 2025).

Algorithmic pricing has deepened the structural legacy of deregulation and privatization that has long defined Chicago’s housing market. As landlords consolidate power through shared technology, tenants face rising rents detached from local realities, and the public has lost visibility into how those prices are set. Federal antitrust law, built to pursue human conspiracies, has proven poorly suited to the forms of algorithmic coordination that researchers and regulators have identified in rental markets.

At a moment when many Americans have lost faith in the capacity of institutions to deliver material improvement, labor relations will soon need to choose between an institutional path of reform and a path of political upheaval. The core purpose of a labor-adjudicatory body, and institutions broadly, has always been to negotiate this tension: to secure better conditions for workers while avoiding the destabilizing disruptions that accompany large-scale political change. Yet the United States’ current labor adjudication framework is too ideologically fractured, too practically unstable, and too structurally exclusionary to perform this function. Additionally, federal reform remains stalled while state experimentation is both underdeveloped and legally constrained. This article therefore offers an institutional framework for understanding the scope of permissible state action and proposes a practically structured, ideologically coherent, and inclusive state-level adjudicatory model capable of addressing the NLRA’s most entrenched failures.

Detroit was once one of America’s most prosperous cities. The city created Motown, produced civil rights figures such as Malcolm X, nurtured corporate giants like General Motors, and even hosted one of Martin Luther King Jr.’s early renditions of the “I Have a Dream” speech (Detroit People’s Platform 2015). During the mid-20th century, Detroit ranked among the nation’s wealthiest cities, powered by the Ford Motor Company and the booming auto industry (PD&R Edge 2025). It once had the highest Black homeownership rate in the country and was known as a “15-minute community,” where residents could access schools, grocery stores, jobs, and neighborhood businesses all within walking distance.

The New York City subway is a unique social setting where people of all backgrounds maintain a fragile social ecosystem by abiding by unspoken rules: Don’t make eye contact with other commuters; do let people off the train before getting on; don’t interact with the homeless person at the end of the car. (I often bend this last rule.) Perhaps, like me, you fumble with your wallet and give this person some cash, or fish a gift card out of the bottom of your purse, or hand them a snack you’d packed for the afternoon. Perhaps you wish you could do more for them beyond that single interaction, that our legal and social service institutions were better prepared to assist this person in the ways they need. These institutions can be improved, and the state’s reliance on incarceration with marginal gains in public safety is proof they should be. It is of utmost importance to pass public policy that facilitates the building of better, more sustainable lives for those who need them the most. Holistic defense will be able to improve the circumstances of marginalized communities through increased funding for and hiring of support staff in public defense offices to make defense teams more effective and compassionate. Holistic defense is extremely well positioned to both address the socioeconomic determinants of crime and to improve public safety.

At 6:00 am ET, police officers bang on the door of a small apartment in Miami-Dade County. A young Black boy wakes up frightened as officers rush inside and pin his father to the ground in handcuffs. His mother cries while trying to calm him down. Neighbors watch from outside as flashing lights fill the street. Within minutes, his father is taken away. His mother is left looking at her child, his cries cutting through the otherwise eerily silent atmosphere. Her body freezes as the full weight of what just happened sets in—her husband is gone, and now she faces unpaid bills, emotional trauma, and the inescapable uncertainty of how she will keep her family afloat.

The consensus among criminal justice advocates is that the prison industry unjustly and disproportionately impacts historically marginalized groups. When considering issues that plague the prison industry, telecommunication policies are not usually front of mind. Telecommunication guidelines allow for incarcerated individuals and their loved ones to be unfairly and intentionally exploited by exorbitant costs. These policies are the product of decades of capitalism, privatization, and neoliberal policy, which have turned prisons into markets and people into sources of revenue, with rehabilitation as an afterthought. Corporations like ViaPath and Securus profit from these prison/inmate calls, while the state itself takes a share through commission-based contracts, often referred to as kickbacks. Every minute a mother spends talking to her son, every time a child hears their father’s voice, the state earns money. The allegiance between the state and corporations has demonstrated the state’s loyalty to those corporations rather than to its constituents.

While the climate crisis is one of the most urgent and complex challenges of the 21st century, it is, ultimately, a failure of values. Global temperatures have already risen about 1.2°C above preindustrial levels, fueling record-breaking heatwaves, wildfires, and floods across every continent. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), even limiting warming to 1.5°C—the goal set by the Paris Agreement—requires cutting global greenhouse gas emissions nearly in half by 2030 (IPCC 2022). While most climate policy focuses on decarbonizing energy and transportation, a growing body of research shows that the global food system alone could make it impossible to meet those targets. Food sits at the center of this crisis because every meal reflects both consumer and producer choices about land, labor, equity, care, and public responsibility.

Atlanta’s rapid growth has long been framed as a national success story of urban revitalization driven by collaboration between government, business, and philanthropy. Yet for many longtime residents, particularly low-income Black Atlantans, this growth has coincided with rising housing costs, displacement, and declining access to political and economic power. These tensions are most visible in the neighborhoods surrounding the Atlanta Beltline, a flagship redevelopment project that has reshaped land use, real estate markets, and demographic patterns across the city.

A warehouse worker receives an automated performance alert designating her pace of work as substandard. Her handheld scanner counts the seconds between each completed task, logged against a productivity requirement no one has explained to her, set by people she will never meet and published nowhere she can find. When enough seconds accumulate, the system generates a written warning automatically, and then another (Lecher 2019). Today, these systems of minuscule calculations increasingly add up to the operating conditions for American labor. The term “algorithmic management” initially described the software used by gig-work platforms for managerial functions including allocation of work, performance evaluation, and informational support (Lee et al. 2015). A decade later, algorithmic management is in use far beyond the platform context. Across warehouses, call centers, retail stores, and offices, automation shapes scheduling, performance evaluation, task assignment, and termination decisions (Jarrahi et al. 2021; Parent-Rocheleau and Parker 2022).

Since the civil rights era of the 1950s and 1960s, Americans have looked to Washington, DC, as the primary source of rights expansion and protection. That assumption is harder to sustain today. As federal courts narrow constitutional protections and major labor reform remains stalled at the national level, advocates increasingly have to look to the states for new paths forward. Labor policy is an especially important area for this shift because statutory protections are often vulnerable to repeal and federal law leaves major gaps in coverage and organizing power.

At a moment when many Americans have lost faith in the capacity of institutions to deliver material improvement, labor relations will soon need to choose between an institutional path of reform and a path of political upheaval. The core purpose of a labor-adjudicatory body, and institutions broadly, has always been to negotiate this tension: to secure better conditions for workers while avoiding the destabilizing disruptions that accompany large-scale political change. Yet the United States’ current labor adjudication framework is too ideologically fractured, too practically unstable, and too structurally exclusionary to perform this function. Additionally, federal reform remains stalled while state experimentation is both underdeveloped and legally constrained. This article therefore offers an institutional framework for understanding the scope of permissible state action and proposes a practically structured, ideologically coherent, and inclusive state-level adjudicatory model capable of addressing the NLRA’s most entrenched failures.

Intrinsically woven into the fabric of New York City are the street vendors who feed and create the vibrant culture of the city. From halal carts to the women selling tamales and fruit cups, street vendors are among the most visible representations of the city’s immigrant identity. Yet despite their cultural and economic significance, street vendors are routinely excluded from policy conversations that directly impact their liberty and livelihood. Since the 1800s, immigrant populations have relied on street vending as an entry point into economic stability, particularly when formal employment pathways were inaccessible due to language barriers, immigration status, or lack of capital (Ferrara 2024).

Every year, from October to May, billowing black smoke rises with disturbing frequency in the Everglades Agricultural Area (EAA), a sugarcane-producing region in South Florida, located about 40 miles west of Palm Beach in the Miami metropolitan region. The fumes, nicknamed the “Black Snow” by residents, are a result of a pre-harvesting method that involves setting fire to the fields to eliminate the outer leaves of the cane. Removing the outer leaves, also called “trash,” from the stalks is a crucial step in preparing the fields for harvest. The burning, however, has serious health consequences for the over 30,000 people who live in communities where the practice occurs. Harmful levels of particulate matter (PM) are released during the burns, and research ties higher levels of PM to asthma, heart and lung disease, and premature death (Ramadan, Ngu, and Miller 2021).

When questioned on the rising labor shortages in rural healthcare during his Senate confirmation hearing in January 2025, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. responded buoyantly, “Our nation made a commitment over 100 years ago to put a hospital within 30 miles of every American . . . It’s absolutely critical. It’s life saving, and rural hospitals are closing at an extraordinary rate right now” (Finnegan 2025). Kennedy then declared that President Donald Trump had tasked him with a critical objective—stemming the “hemorrhaging” of hospital staff by introducing artificial intelligence (AI) and telemedicine into rural healthcare. Cleveland Clinic “has developed an AI nurse you cannot distinguish from a human being that has diagnosed as good as any doctor,” he claimed, going on to say that it would now be possible to provide “concierge care to every American in this country, even the remote parts of Wyoming, Montana, and Alaska” (Finnegan 2025). On the face of it, RFK Jr.’s vision of an AI nurse delivering care “just as good” as a human nurse appears to be a compelling solution to fragmented care systems. However, the drive to create a quick profit out of a public health crisis is indicative of the very market-driven motivations that have pushed industry toward collapse.