Just Transition: The Bay’s Next Chapter?

It’s a new year and North Gate Radio is asking what it would look like to level up our goals, not just for ourselves, but for our communities. In this hour-long episode, we’ll break down “Just Transition” — a roadmap built over decades to move from an extractive economy to one that regenerates resources and centers community and collective wellbeing. We take you inside what that looks like on the ground: solar access programs for low-income home owners, formerly unhoused people shaping solutions to homelessness, and free fridges feeding people through mutual aid.

 

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Lenéa Sims: You’re listening to North Gate Radio from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, ON KALX. I’m your host, Lenea Sims.

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It’s a new year! 2026! Whatever your thoughts about resolutions, we can all agree that the new year offers a natural reset button. It’s a time when we can’t help but think about our goals, our values, our priorities. And this year, we’re offering you something new to consider – a set of goals, values, and priorities not just for transforming yourself but for transforming your community! And the best part? It’s already underway across the Bay.

Lenea Sims: When you hear the phrase just transition, what comes to mind? 

Brad Baum: I have got no clue.

Nora Willis: Um, I don’t really know. Nothing comes to mind initially. 

Clara Bass: I have never heard that term before.

Lenéa Sims: Okay so Just Transition is clearly not a term most of us are talking about all day, every day. But, Just Transition advocates think we should be if we care about our future and the future of the planet.

So, what is Just Transition?

It’s a roadmap honed over the last four decades by organizers whose goal is to shift away from our extractive economy – one that extracts wealth from people and the planet – to a regenerative economy where resources are replenished and collective wellbeing is the priority. 

Mateo Nube: Just transition really is the process of doing two things, of being both visionary and oppositional.

Lenéa Sims: That’s Mateo Nube. Mateo is one of the founders of Movement Generation Justice and Ecology Project – an organization based in the Bay Area that focuses on political education and community action around ecological justice. Mateo worked on Movement Generation’s framework for Just Transition which is the framework that is most widely used by advocates today.

Mateo Nube: Organizing ourselves and, and, and exercising our, our, our, our collective power to dismantle the extractive economy, while simultaneously building in place, in real time, those life-affirming economies, those regenerative economies that we all need and that all the living creatures in the ecosystem that we’re part of need

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Lenéa Sims: In simple terms: it’s a framework for building a world that supports both healthy ecosystems and healthy communities, emphasizing that we can’t have one without the other. 

Mateo Nube: Eco literally means home as it, it comes from Greek. Economy literally means management of home. There are ways of managing home and you can do it well or you can do it poorly.

Lenéa Sims: Advocates like Mateo say we are currently living in an extractive economy. The worldview of an extractive economy is focused on consumerism and its purpose is to generate wealth and power by any means necessary.

Alexis Frasz: An extractive economy, I think we all kind of intuitively can feel into it in some ways. You know, it’s one where you’re being maybe paid for your labor, but you know, you’re tired all the time. Maybe you don’t even make enough to make a living and pay for what you need to survive and thrive. 

Lenéa Sims: Alexis Frasz, an Oakland based consultant works with artists to create what she calls a “more just and sustainable future.” Alexis also writes about the intersection of just transition and cultural change.

Alexis Frasz: We don’t have the things in our communities that we need, like good public schools and enough food to eat and good roads but we do have CEOs driving around in fancy cars, or we have, you know, we have the tech sector in San Francisco that’s thriving, but it doesn’t reflect how most people are living on the ground.

Mateo Nube: We all know in our bones that the system is broken.

Lenéa Sims:  Mateo, again.

Mateo Nube: We all know that it’s incredibly damaging to our bodies and our souls. the dominant system. The extractive economy is literally suicidal.

Lenéa Sims:  An economy based on limitless resource extraction on a planet with limited resources will collapse, he says. 

The just transition advocates I spoke with say we are already in transition…

Alexis Frasz: The question is whether we’re gonna transition to something better or not.

Lenéa Sims: Which brings us to the other side of the just transition model – the regenerative economy. According to the Movement Generation framework, a regenerative economy is marked by resources that are regenerated, a cooperative labor force, and a government that is collectively run. Its main purpose is ecological and social wellbeing. Alexis and Mateo say there are examples of regenerative economies all around us. 

Alexis Frasz: You know, anytime you volunteer your time or you take care of a child or an elder, or um, you give a gift to a friend, I mean, all of that is regenerative, right? It’s something that keeps on giving and is outside of the monetary system.

Lenéa Sims:  Mateo says community responses to ICE raids are another great example of regenerative economies in action.

Mateo Nube: Many of us are contending with this reality that now we have these paramilitary forces running amuck in our neighborhoods, kidnapping people. And in that context, people are self-organizing in highly sophisticated ways towards protecting each other be it through advanced warning systems or be it through, providing food and care for folks who are too scared to leave their homes.

Lenéa Sims: Just Transition asks us to embrace a commitment to managing home in a way that centers reciprocal relationships and responsible resource sharing. And if this sounds like a big concept – it is! Which is why, in this episode, five reporters take you inside local projects built on Just Transition principles.

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Our first stop. The corner of Ashby and Sacramento in Berkeley.

If you’ve ever walked around the East Bay, you’ve most likely seen a fridge or two on the streets. Some are cast out on the curb, destined for the dump. Others are fully functional and hold free, homemade meals. Owned by no one, open to everyone – these “Town Fridges” first popped up during the COVID pandemic and have continued to be a lifeline for those struggling under Trump-era cuts to programs like CalFresh. 

Reporter Caly Luna Plowman takes us to Berkeley’s first ever town fridge and introduces us to the community that powers it.

Caly Luna Plowman:  I met up with Susan Ireland and her partner Charlie Vincent at the Berkeley Town Fridge right before Halloween. The pair brought 20 sandwiches to stock the fridge.

Susan Ireland: We do peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that I’m putting in. And I decided – Charlie and I decided – that we would put Reese’s peanut butter cups in, you know, for the Halloween spirit. We’re all kids at heart.

Caly Luna Plowman:  This distribution is the latest installment of items from Love Bites Bakers, an Oakland community-led group Susan helped create. As she carefully organizes the sandwiches in the fridge, Susan says she is more than happy to use her own time and money to do this.

Susan Ireland:  One thing that, um, I like about this refrigerator and other refrigerators that are, um, part of the Town Fridge system is that it’s available to anyone who’s hungry.

Caly Luna Plowman: As of September 2024, 22% of households state-wide were experiencing hunger, and 5 million people were receiving CalFresh food stamp benefits. 

But then, in July, President Donald Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill, which targeted free food assistance and included the most severe cuts to CalFresh in program history.

Susan Ireland:  If we can take the load off in one area of essential expenses such as food,  then we’re helping someone afford to pay rent and stay in their homes.

Caly Luna Plowman:  Kim Wilson helped get the Berkeley fridge up and running.

Kim Wilson:  It’s similar to the free little library.   The community owns this thing and the community is getting helped by this thing. 

Caly Luna Plowman: She’s a volunteer for the Chaos Community Cooking Club, an organization that works directly with Community Kitchens, which serves up to 4,000 free, homemade meals each week. She told me a story about one of the town fridges in Oakland that she was trying to re-stock, but…

Kim Wilson:  I was noticing wasn’t very cold. And I kept putting food in there, and sticking my hand in there and closing it and being like, you know, there was a fun dance with this fridge. Is this working? And then when it wasn’t, I was trying to figure out who I could ask, ‘Can we replace this fridge for you’. And I was tiptoeing around the building, I was checking with the neighbors, and it was slowly dawning on me: you know, community kitchens doesn’t own this. Nobody owns this.

Caly Luna Plowman: She says this  was a conundrum that made her realize while special, there are challenges when an entire community owns something. So, Kim and her husband donated a fridge to Urban Farm Oasis on Ashby Avenue in Berkeley. Solar panels power it and Community Kitchens stocks it twice a week.

Novella Carpenter: I love the fridge because that stuff can last for like three to four days.

Caly Luna Plowman: Novella Carpenter is one of the co-owners of Urban Farm Oasis.

Novella Carpenter: And people also can just come by when they want it, instead of like that soup kitchen model where it’s like, you gotta come and they might make you pray and then you’re just there receiving the charity.

Caly Luna Plowman:  She has been involved in the urban farm and food sustainability scene for over a decade. We discussed the fridge in relation to the community-centered approach of just transition models.

Novella Carpenter: People can be two things, they can take food out of the fridge and then the next time they might have an extra bunch of apples from their tree. And we’re trying to get more into that solidarity moment where we’re all just trying to support each other.

Caly Luna Plowman:  Deleicia Alston, a Berkeley local, frequents the fridge. Her favorite things so far have been the beans, rice and chili.

Deleicia Alston:  When I’m starving and hungry late at night and don’t have no place to go, I go look in that refrigerator and there’s something in there. It’s wonderful.

Caly Luna Plowman:  Deleicia is currently unhoused, but this new Town Fridge has helped ease the constant anxiety around where she’ll find her next meal.

Deleicia Alston:  Yes, it’s helped me not to have to ask people for food ’cause it’s right there – free. Don’t cost me nothing.  

Caly Luna Plowman: For North Gate Radio, I’m Caly Luna Plowman.

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Lenéa Sims: Our team of reporters went all around UC Berkeley’s campus and asked people about Just Transition. Many –  like the people you heard at the beginning of the show – had never heard of it. But, reporter Lizzy Rager ran into someone who had.

Lizzy: So what does the phrase just transition mean to you?

Hyeyoon Cho: I learned about the concept when I was interviewing a worker from a South Korean coal power plant. Um, He was leading a just transition movement in South Korea. 

Lenéa Sims: That’s Hyeyoon Cho.

Hyeyoon Cho: South Korea is very heavily reliant on coal plants specifically, and that’s how I got to learn about the concept of just transition because of his activism.

Lizzy Rager: What’s one way that you can see just transition in practice?

Hyeyoon Cho: I guess like building a system that can, that can really lead to expansion of renewables, um, even to like lower income communities to really assure that everyone can afford cleaner energy.

Lenéa Sims: Hyeyoon’s understanding of Just Transition is rooted in the framework’s foundation. The idea first emerged in the 1970s but gained traction a decade later through the work of labor leader Tony Mazzocchi, who organized oil, chemical, and nuclear workers and argued that as we moved away from fossil fuels, workers shouldn’t be left behind.

In collaboration with environmental justice leaders, Mazzocchi pushed for what he called a “Superfund for workers,” insisting that people whose jobs were tied to extractive industries deserved training, support, and pathways into safer, more sustainable work.

The idea was that they would move from fossil fuel jobs into what we now call “green jobs.”

Which brings us to our next story –

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  North Gate Radio’s Patricio Provencio introduces us to a solar engineer in the Bay Area whose day-to-day work sits at the intersection of renewable energy’s promise and the push to make that promise accessible to everyone.

Patricio Provencio:  It’s a cloudy morning in this San Pablo neighborhood of single family homes. And, it’s quiet…except for the noise from the installation of a solar battery storage system. The solar storage system is for Miguel Coss, a Mexican-born local butcher.

Miguel Coss:  The workers today are running the cable to install five batteries in my house, which should be enough for plenty of my power.

Patricio Provencio:  This installation is being led by Cavyn Simon,  the Construction Operations Manager at the non-profit organization GRID Alternatives Bay Area. 

GRID provides solar and battery storage systems to low-income households and job training programs for individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds. And, it’s been doing that for 25 years.

Cavyn was driven to this type of work by his experience growing up in Los Angeles.

Cavyn Simon:  Being born and raised in LA, the smog and the cars and the traffic’s an issue that has to do a lot with air quality. That’s what inspired me to get into renewable energy, because of the fossil-fuel based society and the damage it is doing to our environment.

Patricio Provencio:  This led Cavyn to get a degree as an environmental engineer, specializing in renewable energy, at Cal Poly Humboldt. That’s where he was first introduced to GRID. And after graduation – he moved to Oakland to join GRID’s workforce development program. He was shocked at how expensive life was in the Bay Area.

Cavyn Simon: I had to work a second job at that time to make ends meet for, you know, basic rent and food. That opened my eyes to the struggle that people are living day to day.

Patricio Provencio:  In spite of this, Cavyn went on to become a solar engineer at GRID, and the system that he and his crew are installing today will enable Miguel’s family to store energy generated from their solar panels.

Miguel Coss:  What made me go for solar is the high prices of PG&E. 

Patricio Provencio: For Miguel, applying for the program was a direct response to rising energy costs on top of the Bay Area’s already high cost of living.

Miguel Coss: Since I see prices going up and up and up, I was wondering when we’re gonna go to the point of not being able to pay PG&E. 

Patricio Provencio: And, when Miguel received a flyer in the mail, advertising GRID’s free solar program…

Miguel Coss: I thought it was a scam at first. It made me investigate if it was really free solar and find out if it’s a real company.   

Patricio Provencio: His investigation uncovered that this was real. But, Miguel says the application process was stressful.

Miguel Coss: They require a lot of paperwork. It took a long time, probably more than a year for me to qualify for all that process.

Patricio Provencio: As a qualifying low-income household, Miguel’s family benefits today from a free solar system from GRID. 

Miguel Coss: When the panels came, we felt free. And I’m still feeling it.

Patricio Provencio: But, for every success story, there are people like Miguel’s neighbors who don’t qualify and can’t get past the massive upfront cost of solar energy. So, they stick with PG&E.

Miguel Coss: It is better than put, 20 or 30 or $40,000. Most people live check by check.

Patricio Provencio:  Labor and climate policy expert Carol Zabin says the challenges are not just about personal finances; they are structural. 

Carol Zabin: Locally generated rooftop is expensive and the payback periods are really long, so the subsidies aren’t providing huge economic benefits for low-income people.

Patricio Provencio: Carol prefers utility scale solar, big solar farms that generate power for entire communities or municipalities. 

Carol Zabin:  A lot of low income people don’t own their homes. They’re renters. 

Patricio Provencio: Whether you’re a homeowner or a renter – you have access to the power that solar farms generate.

Carol Zabin: Utility scale solar is more cost effective because there’s all kinds of economies of scale when you build a solar farm that you just can’t get when you’re designing a custom solar panel for every house that has a different rooftop, a different connection system, etcetera.

Patricio Provencio:  Carol raises one final concern. Working conditions for rooftop solar employees like Cavyn are much more precarious than for those who work at big solar farms.

Carol Zabin: We have this kind of bifurcation, these two paths. The big utility scale solar farms in California, that’s all done at union labor, they’re making middle class wages with full benefits and pensions. In the residential rooftop solar industry, what we’re seeing is cash pay, no benefits, none of the government, social insurance programs.

Patricio Provencio:  Despite the conditions that make rooftop solar access hard and expensive, the broader goals of this work remain vital. Carol points out the collective benefit that underpins the entire energy transition.

Carol Zabin:  The more we get off fossil fuels, you know, the more health benefits there are, so switching from fossil fuels to solar is a benefit for everybody. 

Patricio Provencio: The work of the just transition might be difficult and much needs to be improved. But for Cavyn, the chance to  put his energy towards a better future, one roof at a time, is what keeps him going.

Cavyn Simon:  Pushing for a just transition is what makes me love my job. It feels like I have that impact for not just the ones that I love, but the people that have nothing to do with me. Just being a part of that is all I really need in order to help me feel fulfilled and keep my flame going.

Patricio Provencio: The sun finally comes out at midday and the work to bring solar energy to low-income communities goes on, as those leading the way navigate the challenges wrought by economic and political barriers to ensure that the solar energy future shines on everyone. 

For North Gate Radio, I’m Patricio Provencio.

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Mijin Cha: We’re producing more renewable energy than ever before. This is undoubtedly good. My name is Mijin Cha, and I’m an assistant professor of             Environmental Studies at UC Santa Cruz. We are also extracting record levels of fossil fuels, and the truth is that there’s just no way that we can address a climate crisis without ending fossil fuel use.“

Lenéa Sims: Mijin published a book called A Just Transition for All: Workers and Communities for a Carbon-Free Future. In the book, she calls on us to recognize that if we want to avoid the most devastating impacts of climate change, we need to transition away from fossil fuel use and we need to do it quickly. But we can’t leave anyone behind. 

Mijin Cha: What is the role of  the worker in this changing world? And that doesn’t really get talked about a lot but it is really important, like not just, you know, what are the jobs of the future, but also what happens to the people who do the work of the past? 

We don’t do ourselves any favors by pretending like everything will be fine, and all we have to do is generate a bunch of renewable energy. And so the idea of just transition really looks at kind of like, how can we transition in a way that is just for workers, for communities, for the planet and for society. 

Lenea Sims: And, what’s the answer?

Mijin Cha: Uh, well I think, you know, in this realm, again, there are folks that think we have an emissions problem. And so if you just capture emissions, it doesn’t really matter. You can burn fossil fuels as long as you capture emissions. Um, and then there are folks like myself who think that climate change is a natural consequence of the systems and structures that we have. And so unless you change those systems and structures, you actually will not only not address the climate crisis, but you will not create a more just future. So you really have to change the systems and structures. And for me, I think the root cause of climate change is capitalism, which means that capitalism, green or otherwise cannot solve the problem. So we have to think about a post-capitalist post carbon world.

Lenea Sims: What does that post-capitalist post carbon world look like to you? 

Mijin Cha: The kind of framework that is needed when we think about what is a post carbon, post capitalist world is, what conditions do people need to thrive, and how do we move away from this idea of work as just maximizing resource extraction, maximizing labor extraction, and maximizing profit to one that is based on cooperation and building a society where everybody can thrive. We should have a much higher minimum wage. You know, heat should be an OSHA consideration. Like all these things would make work safer and better for people. But instead the whole thing was like, we just have to build as much renewable energy as possible and as quickly as possible. And the answer is no, you don’t, because now you’re just replicating the same injustices of the fossil economy. 

Lenéa Sims: In addition to leaving fossil fuel workers out of the conversation, Mijin says that the mainstream climate movement falls short in another way too.

Mijin Cha: There was all this pushback against ‘just transition’ when it came out as a phrase. Same thing happened with the Green New Deal. And so then all these people were like, okay, let’s call it just equitable and fair transition. I’m like, now you’re just adding more words, Fine, Just energy transition. I was like, that is, this is not the point. The point is that you’re not doing the organizing from the ground up to socialize the term. And you know, the left I think is too quick to be like, “Okay, let’s just stop talking about it.” And I’m like, the words are not the problem. Right? It’s like you’re not doing the organizing to bring people along with you. If you think about more diverse working class communities, you know, and just ask them like, what would make your life easier? And then the stuff that comes out is so clear, right? 

It’s like, yeah, I mean, my commute is killing me, right? Or like, 70% of my paycheck is going to childcare. Right? Or like I would just, I just wanna take my kids out for a meal and have a nice day out. But we can’t because it’s too expensive, right? Like asking them what would make their lives easier just comes up with the same problems that we all know that are actually, to be honest, pretty easy to solve, is just that we have to take on the capital class

Lenéa Sims: Building in partnership with communities on the front lines of the fossil fuel economy — including workers and their families — has always been central to the Just Transition framework.

Our next story takes us to one of those frontline communities where a new generation is learning how the extractive economy is affecting their lives and how to organize against it.

[Chanting: Oakland, youth Rising Strong. We’ve been here all along here Oakland youth rising strong. We’ve been here all along.] (Fade under) 

North Gate Radio’s Steffi Puerto reports on Frontline Catalyst, a community organization in East Oakland putting the Just Transition framework into practice. 

The young organizers are raising their voices for climate justice in hopes of changing the world they’re set to inherit.

Steffi Puerto: Frontline Catalyst’s founder, Xochitl Cortez, is from Oakland’s Fruitvale district. 

Xochitl Cortez: I decided that it was very important that I come back to my community to organize with the youth in my community.

Steffi Puerto: We met in the Fruitvale at Peralta Hacienda Historical Park. Not that far from where  Xochitl grew up, and only a block away from the Frontline Catalyst office. Like the youth she works with today,  Xochitl came from a working-class, immigrant family and grew up in a rough neighborhood.

Xochitl Cortez:  I lost friends and family members to whether it was prostitution or homelessness. Or substance use. Yet they had their gifts, and there were not enough programs in the community that really informed the intersectional issues we see every day. Frontline Catalyst was born just for that reason, to really be able to lift the capacity of youth.

Steffi Puerto:  The first cohort for Frontline Catalyst started in 2021 at United for Success Academy, where a group of sixth-graders conducted a community science project around lead testing. AND, the results were shocking. To give you a sense, 400 parts per million is considered hazardous in residential areas and the students found levels much higher than that all over their neighborhoods. And,  Xochitl says they took action.

Xochitl Cortez: They emailed their city councils, they put the flyers, they door knocked.

Steffi Puerto:  The youth created a “Fruitvale Bill of Rights.” Their demands: the right to clean air, water, and safe playground areas. And, they were just getting started.

Xochitl Cortez: Sometimes you don’t know how thirsty you are until you start drinking the water. And that’s what it felt like. The youth didn’t realize what they were missing until they started doing this work. And then those same youth leaders the following year wanted, like, what are we doing next.

Alejandro Tovar-Montaño: Growing up, I never really knew about what climate change was. There was not really much education about it. 

Steffi Puerto:  You’re listening to Alejandro Tovar-Montaño, a junior at Castlemont High School, making a speech at the Youth Climate Walk-Out March & Rally. It took place this past October.  

Alejandro Tovar-Montaño: I remember when I was younger, waking up one morning, and the sky outside was orange. The sun was hidden behind smoke from a wildfire miles away. I had asthma. So a bunch of toxic smoke caused asthma attacks. That was the first time climate change stopped being something I read about and became something I breathed in 

Steffi Puerto:  Alejandro is here with a bunch of Oakland students, ranging from middle school to high school. Their purpose, speaking out about the “Polluters Pay Climate Superfund Act,” which would hold large fossil fuel companies financially responsible for damages caused by climate change.  

(chanting: Climate Action’s What we need, We say no to corporate greed!Climate Action’s What we need, We say no to corporate greed! Fade under)

Steffi Puerto: Alejandro says he didn’t understand how he could be a voice for change until he got involved with Frontline Catalysts – Catalysts Action Leadership Institute.

Alejandro Tovar-Montaño:  Well, I was in Cali. I learned about what climate change really was because when I first arrived, I couldn’t tell you anything about global warming or greenhouse gases. I learned more about what affects our environment, what affects our atmosphere, so I definitely learned a lot.

Steffi Puerto:  Alejandro says learning about the effects of climate change in “CALI” has inspired him to push for action to stop the environmental injustices he sees all over his community. He gives speeches, attends marches, and has gone all the way to the state capitol to get legislators to pay attention to climate change.

Alejandro Tovar-Montaño : We went to Sacramento to fight for a bill called SB 332, basically to replace PG&E with new, renewable energy sources. Even though there were some legislators who were like, Oh, I don’t want to talk, or I couldn’t talk, it still made an impact, ’cause it still showed how Oakland showed up, you know?

Steffi Puerto:  Xochitl says it’s the MAGA politicians in Washington, DC, who are making Frontline Catalysts work even more challenging.

Xochitl Cortez:  This administration has taken us back and has also depleted the financial support that was needed

Steffi Puerto:  She says the Trump administration’s rollback on environmental protections and cuts to programs that center environmental justice work are hitting close to home. But, instead of giving up, that’s making  Xochitl want to double down on the work her organization is doing.

Xochitl Cortez: We’re experiencing the impacts, but what we’re doing is what we need to do to be informed and to take action, to bring our own solutions. So this is what sixth graders through 12th are learning. They’re learning about what got us here and how do we then build this climate resiliency in a justice way where we’re going from extractive to regenerative.

Steffi Puerto:   Xochitl Cortez’s goal is to take Frontline Catalyst statewide, empowering even more students to use their voices to fight for environmental justice.

[students chanting: When the air we breathe is under attack. What, what, when is under attack? What do we do? STAND UP Fight back. What do we do when the people we love are under attack? What do we do? Fade under…] 

Steffi Puerto:  For North Gate Radio, I’m Steffi Puerto 

Lenéa Sims: Stand up, fight back – that’s exactly what just transition asks us to do.

But where do we find the time, the energy? Let alone the courage? How do we, as every day people, actually begin to participate in a just transition?

Mateo Nube: The extractive economy has left us no wiggle room. Again, that is by design.

Lenéa Sims: Mateo Nube, again

Mateo Nube: That’s not your fault. So I would invite folks not to individualize it too much and go like, what did I do wrong or what am I doing wrong? 

Lenéa Sims: While the extractive economy may not be our fault, participating in a Just Transition asks us – at some level – to take responsibility. Creating regenerative economies, Mateo explains, will require us to take on the daily practice of collective governance.

Mateo Nube: One of our key responsibilities is to break out of this other illusion that’s been fed to us, which is that governance is something that happens once every four years versus what is our daily practice of governing together.

Lenéa Sims: This community-governance, Mateo says, means  not only thinking about how we will manage things like our water, food, housing and energy supplies, as a community, but also about how we show up for each other with care in the face of adversity.

Mateo Nube: Whether you’re on a foot patrol in your neighborhood for two hours a week to help folks know if ICE has entered the neighborhood or whether you are part of an informal soup kitchen that is now cooking food, not only for your home, but for five other households. I think there’s so many ways of practicing solidarity as a verb.

Lenéa Sims: Alexis Frasz says that practicing this solidarity will require us breaking another illusion: the illusion that we are stuck and we can’t do anything about it.

Alexis Frasz: The way that we live today is a choice. It’s not necessarily my choice or your choice but it’s the product of collective choices over time. And so just as we made it the way it is, we can make it a different way, that maybe works better for us. 

Lenea Sims: What do you think stops people from being able to do that imagining? 

Alexis Frasz: I think the system is set up to tell us that we can’t. I think we don’t spend a lot of time encouraging people to be creators in our world. And that’s intentional. It’s a way to make compliant citizens, and compliant workers. 

You know, I think there’s a class element of that where, you know, certain people are given permission to be creators and be leaders, and other people are not supposed to do that, and they’re supposed to stay in their place.

Lenea Sims:  Now we’re heading to two organizations in Richmond, California to show you what community governance looks like on the ground — and what happens when people society writes off step into their power as creators, leaders, and, in the case of our next story: peacemakers.

In North Richmond, nine young men talk about how it’s hard to walk away from a fight. 

Fellow #1: You choose to walk away, but they don’t choose to walk away. 

Fellow #2: They’ll kick you right in the butt

Fellow #1: There was no way out of that situation.

James Houston: There’s always a way!

Lenea Sims: Reporter, Lizzy Rager takes us into Richmond’s Operation Peacemaker Fellowship, designed to curb violence in the city. The program works with men most at risk of committing violence and trains them to become leaders and peacekeepers in their communities.

Lizzy Rager: James Houston is facilitating a life skills workshop for a group of Peacemaker fellows. Workshops like these take place nearly every day of the week and are led by people with similar backgrounds to the fellows. Many, like James, have first-hand experience with the justice system and don’t want the same fate for the young men they mentor.

James Houston: I was actually incarcerated. Everything geared me to do this type of work, so I just felt like this was my purpose, my calling. 

Lizzy Rager: The workshops help teach the fellows healthy problem solving, anger management, and life skills. On this day in late October, they’re talking about a fight that broke out at a Lil Yachty performance at Sacramento State.

Archival Newscast: It started with hundreds of people swarming the football field creating a mosh pit in front of the stage 

Lizzy Rager: Some of these operation peacemaker fellows were there, and got involved in the fighting.

Fellow #1: We had a regular little scuffle. Like, you disappointed in that man? 

James Houston: Yeah I am. We still fighting and it ain’t nothing to fight for.

Lizzy Rager: They continued to talk about what it means to be a man, how to get out of a fight, and what matters most at the end of the day.

James Houston: Every day, my goal is to make it home to my family safely.

Lizzy Rager: That’s what James also wants for the Peacemaker fellows. 

It’s a program run out of Richmond’s Office of Neighborhood Safety. The office has been working on violence intervention and prevention since 2007. When it started, the city had the highest homicide rate in over a decade. And, most of the victims were young Black men between the ages of 25 and 34. 

Chucky Newsome: It was a horror. There were shooting practically everyday. 

Lizzy Rager: Charles “Chucky” Newsome is one of the Office of Neighborhood Safety’s change agents. He’s from Richmond, and used to be part of a drug-trafficking ring called the Peanut Gang. The FBI busted the gang in 1988 and he spent 8 years in prison.

Chuck Newsome: When I came home, I more or less engulfed myself into a new life for myself opposite of what led me to prison.

Lizzy Rager: Chucky first worked as a reverend. But losing his nephew to gun violence was a turning point.

Chucky Newsome: He was one of those innocent bystanders. That’s when I left my job and just started working on the street trying to utilize the reputation, the former reputation that I had, to try and quell the violence and stop the homicides. 

Lizzy Rager: In the early years, Neighborhood Change Agents, like Chucky, responded to crime hot spots and mediated conflicts. In doing that work, they came to discover that a small number of people, approximately 30, were responsible for most of the violent crime. What if Richmond took these people, who many assumed to be “beyond saving,” and gave them resources, mentorship, and opportunities? 

That’s how the idea of the Peacemaker fellowship took root in 2010.

Rasheed Shephard: This program gave folks access to a blueprint, to do things the right way. 

Lizzy Rager: Rasheed Shephard was part of that inaugural class of fellows in 2010. He now works with the fellows as a mentor for the Office of Neighborhood Safety. 

Rasheed Shephard: I was invested in, had the proper investment, which gave me the blueprint to be able to invest in my kid the right way and the curse stopped then.

Lizzy Rager: Today, there are more Peacemaker fellows than ever before, 138 this year, thanks to a $6 million grant from the California Violence Intervention and Prevention program, set to expire at the end of 2025. The grant money funds groceries, haircuts and work training for the fellows. It allows them to engage in what mentors call transformative travel, a way of exposing fellows to other fellows from rival neighborhoods. It can look like going to a bowling alley together, or even out of the state to historic landmarks. 

All things that mentors, like Chucky, say are crucial for violence prevention.

Chucky Newsome: It helps tremendously to be able to show them some other sides of life that should be common for any child growing up in America particularly, but otherwise would not be there for them, without these grants. 

Lizzy Rager: From 2007 to 2018, gun violence in Richmond fell by 73%. But, ONS leaders say that success has made it harder to secure funding for violent crime intervention.

Chucky Newsome: My fear is that less of a grant will not allow us to reach out and engage as we have been over the past couple years. We’re that life raft going out there to grab ‘em up out of the water. 

Lizzy Rager: Back at the lifeskills workshop, one of the peacemaker fellows tells program manager James Houston that someone who wants to fight doesn’t care if you have a family and children to get home to. 

[sound from the workshop: Fellow #1: You know what I’m saying? They ain’t trying to hear nothing about them kids

James Houston: You don’t know. I want y’all to explore the possibility that there are options. Right. It’s not just one way to handle a situation.]

Lizzy Rager: James says open conversations like these are working. But, it’s not a quick fix. He says transitioning from punishment to prevention and redemption takes time, but it gives these fellows a different picture of what their lives can look like.

James Houston: When you have a person who changes their behavior and comes back and supports that community in doing the right thing, uh, it creates another image where I can achieve those same goals, I can make those same changes no matter how much I’ve did negatively, I still have a chance and opportunity to change.

Lizzy Rager: For North Gate Radio, I’m Lizzy Rager. 

(music transition)

Lenea Sims: California has some of the highest rates of homelessness in the country, and Bay Area cities are near the top of that list. A Just Transition framework asks what it looks like when people most impacted by a crisis lead the solutions. 

In Richmond, a small nonprofit called SOS Richmond is putting that idea into practice. The homeless outreach program credits its progress to the lived expertise of its staff — the people doing the work have also experienced being unhoused. 

Reporter Zoe Meyer has our story. 

[AMBI: Sounds of construction work and train horn]

Zoe Meyer:  I’m across the street from SOS Richmond’s Warm Hands Wellness Center. The Center offers hot showers, blankets, tents, food, peer support, job readiness programs, housing navigation, acupuncture, and massages.    

Zoe Meyer:  “Look at her in there.”  

Zoe Meyer:   Leyla Williams is holding her friend’s tiny puppy, Yuki. We’re plopped down on a rock large enough for the three of us as she lets Yuki snack on her Mac and Cheese. But when Leyla pulls the cup away mid-conversation, Yuki protests. 

Leyla Williams:  “Um…uh…because that’s [Yuki whimpers]–what, fussbudget?”  

Zoe Meyer:  Leyla, raised in the Bay and a regular at Warm Hands, has been homeless on and off since 14. For the past 9 years, she’s lived in a van and trailer near an encampment in Richmond. She used to work at SOS but a recent car crash, and injuries from it, made that impossible. 

Leyla Williams: ”If I need something, I could call anybody probably from SOS and they’ll help me. And that’s a–a huge security blanket that not everybody has, you know? It’s a family. 

Zoe Meyer:  What she loved about the work and still strikes her most while living on the streets, is the human connection. The community. 

Leyla Williams:  “it’s like–even in apartment complexes that I’ve lived for 10 years, um, there wasn’t the community connection as much as there was–is–in an encampment.  You couldn’t knock on your neighbor’s door and say, ‘Hey, I need help.’ But in an encampment you can.” 

Zoe Meyer:​​Angelina Pena, with four and a half years at SOS as a coordinator for the laundry program, says Leyla’s not alone in that feeling.

Angelina Pena: “Living in an encampment, I’m–I sometimes miss it. I don’t wanna go back to it. But we were all struggling. We were all hungry. We were all needing for something. And we just all became, like, a family, living at that encampment, rather than just strangers. 

[OUTSIDE BACKGROUND SOUND FADES OUT COMPLETELY.]   

O’Neill Fernandez: “I think the last total was roughly 85% of my staff are lived experience.”

Zoe Meyer: That’s O’Neill Fernandez, SOS’s Director of Wellness and Programs, who says he values that people who work at SOS know what it’s like to be unhoused. We’re talking at a table inside Warm Hands.

O’Neill Fernandez: “The person I want to talk to is someone that understands me, that’s lived it, that–that, that doesn’t understand me ’cause they read it, understand because they felt it. We like to call it lived expertise. You know, so you may have come in with lived–lived experience, but now you’re wa–now you’re walking out with a vest with lived expertise because what you’re bringing to that vest is actually  what makes SOS.”

Zoe Meyer:   The vest O’Neill is talking about is the one SOS staffers and volunteers wear while out at encampments, providing mobile showers, laundry services, food and clothing. 

O’Neill was homeless himself for years in several states including Hawaii, New York, and California. He first started volunteering for SOS in 2022 for the Earth Day encampment cleanups. That day, he ended up cleaning an encampment where he had previously lived and made life-long friends. 

O’Neill Fernandez: “It was one of those beautiful moments because when we drive–drove away to go do a different spot, we had already pulled one or two encampment people that were like, yeah, I’ll come with you guys and volunteer.  Had we not been from that encampment, we might’ve got them to help us load the trash, but they were willing to ride with us the rest of the day and come clean the neighborhood.” 

Zoe Meyer: At SOS, experience equals knowledge. O’Neill says that power shift matters.

O’Neill Fernandez: “It’s not just going, ‘Oh, poor you, you’re homeless. No, oh strong you, you can do this. You got the strength to do that. You got the whatever you need to get to the next step.”

[outdoor sounds of construction work and truck backing up]

Zoe Meyer: Leyla says people can do hard things when they’re reminded that what they’re currently surviving is something that requires strength and fortitude. She recounts a story that she’ll never forget. An example of how this work changes lives. 

Leyla Williams:  “ I’m a cry baby, sorry. Um, but there was a gentleman who, um, he was his–he is–Hispanic and he was an older man and–um–he–I didn’t know him before, and he–he was–uh–he was one of the first people that came into our Warm Hand when we first opened, and he barely spoke English and I barely spoke Spanish.” 

Zoe Meyer: But they managed to communicate. And, Leyla learned that he had recently been released from jail and was trying to turn his life around. He was homeless, fighting to stay clean, and fighting to regain custody of his young daughter.   

Leyla Williams:   “Sometimes he would come in and have such a rough day, you could see the tears that he was holding back and–uh–And now he has his daughter. And–um–and he fought that battle. And–um–I’m really proud of him and I–I don’t, I don’t see him anymore, but it’s cool and he’s off the streets.”  

(transition music up)

Zoe Meyer: For North Gate Radio, I’m Zoe Meyer.

(more transition music here…)

Lenéa Sims: When we started this project, our reporters set out to understand what the people around us already knew about just transition. You’ve heard some of their voices throughout this show. Here’s another —

Zoe Meyer:  So when you hear the term just transition, what comes to mind?

Clara Bass: I would guess if I’m just like guessing, I would assume it has something to do with like…(long pause) I…(pause) just transition maybe like, like social change in a way that like includes everyone and doesn’t leave everyone be, leave anyone behind. 

Lenéa Sims:   Clara Bass is a first year undergraduate student at UC Berkeley. Clara had never heard the term Just Transition before meeting us, Once we shared more…she was quick to grasp the idea…

Zoe Meyer: the final question I have for you, Clara, is how do you see just transition playing out in your day-to-day life

Clara Bass: Um, I mean, I think by building communities, like among ourselves and having support systems, like people that we can go to when we need help is like a just transition I guess in everyday life. Like, you can create that for yourself and you can create and find community for yourself without having to rely on some outside change to create community for you.

Lenéa Sims: It seems that even people who have never heard of a just transition can intuitively understand how we might practice it. But how do we continue to push for something that feels so far away? 

How do we hold on to hope for a more just future?

I asked Mijin Cha.

Lenea Sims: What gives you hope that this vision of a regenerative economy can really take hold? 

Mijin Cha: Yeah, you know, I used to be like a real anti hoper. Um, but then I thought, well, you have to have hope to fight for a more just future because you have to believe that it can exist. Maybe what gives me the most hope is seeing that everywhere you look, people are fighting.Maybe we don’t always win, but people are always fighting, which means that a lot of folks want a better world and that’s kind of what we need to just keep going.

Lenéa Sims: Mijin says having hope also requires us to look beyond this time and place.

Mijin Cha: Maybe you don’t need hope that change will happen in your lifetime. I think about like people who are enslaved. They never really thought they’d see emancipation in their lifetime, but they still fought. And so I think that’s what we have to do. We have to fight.

Lenéa Sims: Mateo Nube also invites us to look towards our ancestors for inspiration.

Lenea Sims: What gives you hope that we are gonna be able to do this work as a society?

Mateo Nube: Um (long pause) I’m pausing because it’s a beautiful and important question.

My mom passed this year.She was a tremendous fighter. She was a Holocaust survivor. She was fiercely committed to the full, dignified rights of all Palestinians. Often, when she was out in the streets, she’d have a sign that said Survivor of the World War II Holocaust, and she was indicating, it’s not the only one.

She lived not only through that but through multiple dictatorships in multiple South American countries. I grew up in South America, and yet she had the tenacity to believe that we can take care of each other. And I think all of us have people in our lineages that went through tremendous adversity and came out still able to love and care and willing to be vulnerable, even if they often also had to be very guarded.

Or if they’re alive are still, you know, are, are living that duality. So that gives me a lot of hope and it also gives me a tremendous sense of responsibility. We owe it to folks like her to not shy away from this important and necessary challenge.

(music transition up)

Lenéa Sims: And, that’s it for this episode of North Gate Radio. 

Special thank you to Chris Hoff for technical instruction and to Rick Johnson for technical assistance. 

Thanks also to Eli Cohen for help with mixing.

This show was produced in the audio program at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism under the editorial supervision and guidance of professor Shereen Marisol Meraji.

I’m your host, Lenéa Sims. Thanks for listening. 

(music transition into coda story)

Shereen Marisol Meraji: Hey KALX listeners, this is Shereen Marisol Meraji, I run the audio program at Berkeley Journalism. And, I wanted to wish you a happy new year and say thank you so much for listening to my student’s stories. I know I’m biased but I think they’re pretty awesome. And, I wanted to close out this hour of radio with one last fabulous student feature. 

It’s about a band that has provided a soundtrack for Bay Area protests for nearly a quarter of a century. They’re called the Brass Liberation Orchestra and they’ve been working non-stop these days!

(Chant: We want ice in our drinks, not in our streets We want ice in the freezer, not in our streets – fade out…)

Shereen Marisol Meraji: The Brass Liberation Orchestra or the BLO plays at picket lines, parades and arrest actions all across the Bay Area. And, they’ve been especially busy since PresidentTrump’s second term began. 

North Gate Radio’s Renée Bartlett-Webber explores what it means to have a soundtrack to resistance: 

Renee Bartlett-Webber:  It’s the No Kings protest, October 18, 2025.

The Brass Liberation Orchestra kicks off the march with a chant to the song “You Move, Ya Lose.”

 “No Trump! No KKK! No fascist USA!” They shout.

Nearly [00:01:00] seven million people are marching across the country.

Here in Oakland, it’s about 20,000.

It’s also huge turnout for the BLO with roughly 30 musicians in black-and-pink outfits. — Polka-dots, pink fedoras and glittery bandanas.

Josh Sperry: The second Trump administration, we have seen people coming out of the woodwork

Renee Bartlett-Webber: That’s longtime band member, Josh Sperry.

Josh Sperry: Like regularly over 20. Musicians, which used to be like, like enormous.

Renee Bartlett-Webber: Musicians take turns conducting the band, using the hand signals Josh created years ago

Josh Sperry: Tapping the top of your head, that means back to the top my favorite ones is like when you stick your hand up in the air with your thumb pointing down, right? Thumbs down everybody stop playing except for the bass.

(music up: just the bass)

Josh Sperry: I really love these moments that we create where people are chanting and then we’re like drumming with them and then like the music kind of swells and it’s building up.

And like you could just see everyone’s like, holy, this is really cool.

(music crescendo…clapping and cheering, fade under)

Jamie Spector: My name is Jamie Specter. and I’m one of the founding members of the Brass Liberation Orchestra.

Renee Bartlett-Webber: She and her sister, Ali, founded BLO as what she calls, a political project in 2002.

Jamie is a social worker and organizer. As with many activists, she was conflicted on where to put her energy.

Jamie Spector: Do you focus all of your time on climate justice work or is it prison abolition work, or is it housing rights work, or is it women’s justice work, you can be at a different meeting and a different protest every night of the week and be running yourself ragged,

Renee Bartlett-Webber: So she wanted to create a political project that bridged many causes, And…

Jamie Spector: instead of draining all of our energy, could actually [00:03:00] be life giving and fill our buckets.

And playing music does that for us.

Renee Bartlett-Webber: The brass band idea came from her sister, Ali, who spent years living in Italy. She was inspired by the long tradition of political street bands there. A Milano brass band sent BLO their very first music sheets. It was a collection of European anti-fascist songs, like this one you might recognize.

(Bella Ciao music in the clear)

Renee Bartlett-Webber: Bella Ciao, meaning “Goodbye Beautiful” has become known as part of Italy’s liberation from fascism in the 1940s. BLO now plays this song at almost every gig.

(more Bella Ciao – going faster)

Jamie knows it on the trombone, an instrument she only learned after starting the band.

Jamie Spector: I picked up the trombone at age 30.

Renee Bartlett-Webber: She’s played with BLO on picket lines and direct actions supporting those [00:04:00] risking their livelihoods to make a difference. Jamie remembers one action when longshoremen at the port of Oakland stopped working in opposition to the Iraq war in 2003.

Jamie Spector: There were huge, huge actions down at the Oakland docks.

Renee Bartlett-Webber: They chanted “war is for profit, workers can stop it!”

(Bella Ciao up and out!)

Jamie Spector: …Insert brass band, you know, just really lifts everyone’s spirits.

Michael Mark Cohen: I think that music is an essential component of protest sound.

Renee Bartlett-Webber: That’s Michael Mark Cohen. He’s an associate professor of American Studies at UC Berkeley with an expertise in social movements.

Michael Mark Cohen: Because you’re not just trying to sort of take up space in terms of streets or public parks but also take up audio space to draw people’s attention, uh, to express a kind of message sound is one of the ways in which protests get, uh, their [00:05:00] purpose, their agenda across

Renee Bartlett-Webber: But Michael also says some types of protests are more effective than others.

Michael Mark Cohen: So, the King’s thing is a, it might, is a, is a kind of a clever hook, but it’s. Politically analytically toothless. It would be the kindest thing I could say about it. There’s a difference between marching through an empty city and having fun signs and directly confronting the repressive state apparatus,

Renee Bartlett-Webber: That’s called a direct action. It’s a way of achieving a very specific goal to make gains for a movement. Like how Black protesters sat in segregated public spaces during the civil rights movement.

Michael Mark Cohen: This was: we had been building a campaign for months, we had been organizing in the local churches and the schools and the communities and the unions in a city like Birmingham or Memphis. We have built coalitions with the people who are there and then Martin Luther King is gonna show up and bring the national spotlight to a place where on the ground organizing is happening, in which not only are we prepared to confront the police, but we expect to confront the police

Renee Bartlett-Webber: Michael goes on to say those types of direct actions are supported by all kinds of groups involved in the organizing. And today that looks like:

Michael Mark Cohen: Migrant rights organizations, of Jewish Voices for Peace Organization, all of these various groups

Renee Bartlett-Webber: and having a band like the Brass Liberation Orchestra, at a direct action plays its own role as one of those groups — adding a bit of joy, humor or endurance to a tense situation. Before joining the BLO, one member stacked up nearly 30 arrests as part of his direct actions.

(saxophone music in the clear)

That’s him on the soprano saxophone.

(more saxophone…)

His name is Dress Wedding, yes that’s his legal name. He’s wearing a black dress and lacy sunhat with flowers along the bring and Marijuana leaf socks. 

(music up and out)

Dress: The first place I got arrested was at, University Hall,

Renee Bartlett-Webber: In January 1983, Dress blockaded UC Berkeley to protest their work developing nuclear weapons.

Dress: And once I did one, I kind of caught a bug,

Renee Bartlett-Webber: Dress kept going to direct actions and on his fifth one he…

Dress: …came up with this concept of Edward Teller’s Forgotten bride, Edward Teller being the father of the hydrogen bomb and white being the color of grief and mourning in Japan.

Renee Bartlett-Webber: He was arrested in a $20 wedding dress and jailed for several days with hundreds of others.

Dress: And then my dear departed friend Moore Downing a wonderful witchy [00:08:00] woman, dubbed me Dave Wedding Dress, which I took to immediately. And after I started wearing dresses, she dubbed me Dress as well.

Renee Bartlett-Webber: He now wears dresses everyday.Dress spent years participating in what he calls arrest actions, a type of direct actions. But there came a point when he wanted to stop — for his children.

Dress: it was my afternoon to pick them up and we got transferred to the San Francisco jail just in time for me to call at three o’clock to call the school and say, hi, I’m in jail. I’m not gonna be able to pick ’em up.

Renee Bartlett-Webber: So when he found the Brass Liberation Orchestra at an action in 2002, he …

Dress: decided I would be better off doing a lot more actions with music and not so much arresting.

Renee Bartlett-Webber: Dress has played with the BLO for 23 years and as a member, helps decide what causes to support.  In recent months, they played at No Kings, but they’ve also supported actions like the West Contra Costa teachers’ strike,  a protest inside a Home Depot and for one group ready to confront ICE agents directly at one of the two immigration courthouses in San Francisco.

Ernesto: (sound from courthouse protest) Hey Everybody… We have a presence here at court every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday from when the court opens to when it closes!

Renee Bartlett-Webber: Some protesters in this group have blockaded courthouse doors to stop ICE agents from bringing detainees to their vehicles.

Ernesto: I am so thrilled to welcome the Brass Liberation Orchestra.

Renee Bartlett-Webber: On this day, September 30, they celebrated one month since any arrests at that courthouse.

(BLO playing music in front of the courthouse)

They brought in the band to keep protesters energized. And disrupt the hearings in the courtroom with music and chanting.

(chanting: We want ice in the freezer, not in our streets. We want ice, ice baby!!! Fade under)

The group has recruited circus, drag and other street performers to keep protesters coming – including regular appearances from the BLO.

(more BLO music in the clear, ends with cheering, fade under.)

Renee Bartlett-Webber: Since that day, there were two more arrests at that courthouse, both when there were no protesters outside.

For Northgate Radio, I’m Renée Bartlett-Webber.