Green dream or whatever
An addendum to a post from two weeks ago about applying for IRA money: here's the EPA's website for the Inflation Reduction Act planning and implementation grants whose deadline for local government entities (like school districts) is 4/28.
The website provides exact information and even template emails. Again, this planning and implementation grant is noncompetitive and establishes a connection between public entities and the EPA to use other IRA programs.
Make sure to tell your school districts about this deadline and how easy and important it is to get this grant!
All it takes is one email. Now on to this week's post.
***
Something interesting happened the other day in my relatively recent journey to understand and participate in transforming how school facilities are financed in Philadelphia and elsewhere, particularly in a time of climate change and racial capitalism.
This moment caused a sudden, unexpected perspective on what I've been up to with a bunch of other people in this campaign to make Philly's toxic buildings an opportunity to uplift the city and mitigate carbon emissions.
First, it made me think about how so much is involved in this project.
You have to work out the theoretical premises of the analysis, then understand the policy details in various laws, financial practices, and tendencies; then you have to apply the former to the latter and understand it all ideologically, delousing it of neoliberal and conservative and liberal premises to see what makes sense as a socialist.
But then you have to know about the terrain, or the context in which you're living and organizing, to see who's doing what and where and when and why and figure out who to talk to. You can't think about this individually. There are movements, institutions, committees, coalitions, with all kinds of different power and goals and resources at their disposal that have existed for generations. But then the terrain shifts and you have to change gears, improvise and, sometimes, get lucky. That's what happened to me the other day.
MLF and GND
When I started this newsletter I was super focused on trying to change the eligibility criteria and terms and conditions of the Federal Reserve's Municipal Liquidity Facility (MLF) so it (1) let school districts apply and (2) provided no-cost, long-term loans to them for their facilities.
I worked with a socialist group called Lilac, who in turn worked with the Action Center on Race and the Economy as a coalition partner (and we were both members of a larger coalition, Our City Our Schools). We did political education and a pressure campaign where we emailed Philly Fed President Patrick Harker and Board Member John Frey to demand that they support those two demands.
I was also working with a big group including the climate+community project (which Daniel Cohen and Akira Rodriguez got me involved with), Jamaal Bowman's office, and others on the Green New Deal for K-12 Schools which, instead of loans, provided more than a trillion dollars of grants to school districts around the country for all kinds of things involved in a big green transition for public education.
But then conservatives killed the MLF and moderates killed the GND for Schools. So back to the drawing board.
Successful failure?
Maybe that's not right. These initiatives didn't die exactly. They failed, but as Eve Weinbaum writes in To Move a Mountain, maybe these were successful failures (which was the title of her dissertation). The initiatives around the MLF and the GND for Schools put policy language together and shifted some of the tectonic plates of economic ideology on public spending.
I say that because when the Build Back Better legislation went through its epic budget reconciliation process in the first two years of the Biden Administration, while the GND for Schools got left out, there were residues of it in the resulting Inflation Reduction Act--brought across the finish line by, it seems, Joe Manchin's maneuvering around Mitch McConnell?--where there are various kinds of financial programs available to school districts to green up their buildings.
Reconciling with the IRA
It wasn't the GND we wanted. It wasn't the direct lending program out of the Fed we wanted. But it does some of that stuff. While the price tag of the Inflation Reduction Act is smaller than the GND, I've heard that the novel direct pay tax incentive structure of its investment tax credits (ITCs) are actually unlimited because they depend on the number of projects that apply for them, which conservatives have recently discovered. In principle, it could pay out in the trillions. That's ultimately grant money, even though it might rely on some bridge loans at first.
And in the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund we find a version of the creative monetary policies were pushing for with the MLF demands. By capitalizing green banks, the GGRF provides an alternative path to public infrastructure lending that is more public than not. Rather than a public-private partnership, the public has more of a shot at being in the driver's seat to get better terms and conditions on their programs since green banks are the ones capitalized and leading the lending.
After struggling with it (despite the regular challenges, like this from Dylan Riley), I've come to think of this array of financing policies as a sliver of a chance at a non-reformist reform, which are reforms that you won't have to undo after a revolution. After a socialist revolution, I think we'll probably need some kind of loan provision. We'll need some kind of public government for this. And we'll definitely need to reduce carbon.
So something like the GGRF is maybe something socialists should support. It might be state capitalism that just bribes the capitalist class to capital formation. But it inches towards a change in the relations of circulation at least, taking power away from the private bankers in structuring these deals with school districts.
Alongside the IRA's tax incentives and its green bank capitalization, the IRA gets the federal government to flex more and confront all the local tyrannies that constitute the cell structure of our racial capitalism, at least in education.
Okay, so: I decided to push for the IRA stuff even though I have doubts. That involved organizing.
Check with movements
To organize around the IRA I first had to understand it, which was hard to do. I connected with people who knew more about it than me--UnDauntedK12, Coalition for Green Capital, Philadelphia Green Capital Corporation, Public Banking Coalition, Philly DSA, 350 Philadelphia, various heterodox political economists like Yakov Feygin, Robert Hockett, Saule Omarova--and I got the best kind of working knowledge I could get.
Then I consulted with movement comrades.
I didn't want to go forward without talking to people involved in school facilities finance justice on the ground. It makes some sense to keep these things in mind as we do our Safe Air campaign in Philly DSA (where we build Corsi-Rosenthal boxes with teachers, students, and community members and put them in classrooms), because the IRA can be a medium-to-long-term demand for the district's facilities financing. We haven't made it an explicit demand yet, but it's in the air.
As the Safe Air campaign swims along at an inspiring clip, the technical complexity of the policy demands coupled with the need to build our list before making big asks, makes it less obvious that we should be talking in our materials about the IRA.
I also asked Dan Reyes, who was at the center of a successful campaign to get air conditioning at Robeson High School in my neighborhood. I asked him if the IRA, so far as I understood it, could be part of a broader campaign to get resources for Philly's toxic schools, maybe the financial basis for a Green New Deal for Philly's schools.
He was skeptical and I agreed. It's hard to help people understand what this is all about. It's not obvious that flying the banner of Green New Deal for Philly Schools over the IRA's capitalization for green banks and direct pay investment tax credits was going to be energizing, galvanizing, and successful for a grassroots campaign.
Reyes recommended that I try an inside strategy first. Maybe the district is doing something already, he thought aloud. We also had to figure out exactly who holds the levers of power to apply for the IRA grants? Would they do it if we just asked them? If they won't do it, then maybe we could put together a campaign to pressure them to do it.
Due diligence
Dan's suggestion made sense in another way too. Something I've learned over the last few years of doing technical policy organizing is that due diligence is important, takes a long time, and sometimes will surprise you.
You have to figure out who exactly has the power to make the policy change you want to see. Then you have to check that they haven't already done this in some way. Then, if they haven't, you have to go to them directly and ask them if they will do it. At that point, you can escalate into petitions, demonstrations, marches, etc.
In 2021, a group of us were surprised when, in our campaign to ban the box on undergraduate applications to the PASSHE system in Pennsylvania--the box asking students to say whether they have a felony--the person in charge of doing this told us "yes, that's a good idea" and did it when we asked. It wasn't exactly that easy, but that was the outcome of six months of work. We had a petition ready to go, but we didn't need it because it happened without the escalation.
So I started the due diligence of figuring out whether the School District of Philadelphia was thinking about taking advantage of the IRA programs. I had a connection to someone in the finance office, and he said he'd bring it to a meeting to see what people thought. Then the terrain shifted.
Who's in charge here?
Josh Shapiro got elected governor. When a governor gets elected, they have to put together an entire administration, hiring hundreds of new people, from cabinet secretaries to every other position within the executive branch of the state. (I actually got a couple emails from groups that I've worked with asking if I knew anyone who wanted to work for the governor.)
The governor hired people from the SDP into his administration, changing the leadership structure at the top levels of the district's operations and finance offices. My contact left the district. Not only that, but a new superintendent came in and a new president of the school board came in as well. A whole new regime!
So I didn't know exactly was in charge of figuring out who would get this IRA process going. I wrote direct emails to a couple people who I thought might be in charge and didn't hear back. Meanwhile, I was in touch with comrades working on various aspects of this problem. The trail went cold for awhile.
Doldrums
I got a little bummed about the IRA since there was no new information and I started doubting whether socialists should support it. I kept writing about it and tweeting about it, staying in touch with contacts, and attending informational events relevant to the legislation and schools. The doldrums are a very real part of organizing and there's a particular kind of policy doldrums that I was experiencing.
The district's facilities crisis entered a new inflection point recently when they found damaged asbestos in two schools and the district office decided to sue the city for threatening to take some control over determining safety standards for school buildings, making it seem even less likely that they'd have the bandwidth or interest in thinking about the IRA.
But then things got moving again.
Testify
Two contacts both independently sent me the link to an event put on by the U.S. Green Building Council where there'd be specific information presented about IRA programs for public infrastructure. The presentation was very helpful and there was a slide I found particularly interesting: there was a grant that local governments could apply for that would provide resources for making a plan to use IRA programs.
That planning and implementation grant--that I wrote about two weeks ago--would establish a connection between the payee of reimbursements and the EPA, positioning it better to get new information about how to get the other resources when that information came out later. They said that local governments should write an email to the EPA by 4/28.
I thought: cool! Writing an email is a simple thing. The deadline was coming up. It's a concrete strategy to get clarity later. There happened to be a school board meeting coming up, and comrades in the DSA safe air campaign said I should submit testimony about the 4/28 deadline.
So I tweeted about this, wrote the testimony, and submitted it. I also got in touch with some local education journalists to see if they'd want to pick up on the story of the approaching deadline. Here's where I got lucky.
Dumb luck
Actually, I think the technical term for what happened next would be dumb luck. I'd never submitted testimony to the board before, aside from signing up for a spot to speak at one. So I went to the district website, uploaded my statement, and hit send. Later that day I got a message from the Board of Education email account saying that I should get in touch with the district's Grants Development office, providing the relevant email address.
This was surprising because I thought I was submitting testimony, but apparently I didn't say that in the subject line (which is protocol), so whoever reads incoming messages from that page interpreted my message as a direct message to the Board of Education.
Anyway, I was like okay, why not! I made sure my testimony would be in the meeting's record (they said it would) and wrote to the Grants Development office. I got an email in response from the head of that office pretty soon after, saying they were interested but wanted more information. We set up a time to talk the next day.
I emailed some of my contacts to get the right kinds of resources to recommend to this person. Once I got those links, I emailed the Grants Development office again laying them out in advance of the call. We talked on the phone and it was good. They were appreciative that I was trying to help and reiterated how difficult things have been at the district in terms of facilities. It was only the second time I'd actually talked to someone who works at the district office on the phone about these issues.
After I explained some basics, they were interested and then connected me to the district's Office of Sustainability. They also said to ask whether the Pennsylvania DEP was pursuing the application at the state level. I also got some good information about certain initiatives on the district side, which I'm being vague about intentionally.
After I got off the phone with them I contacted a friend in Senator Nikil Saval's office, who helped me track down the right departments at the state level to ask. So I wrote to those departments. A day later I got confirmation from the DEP that they'll be applying for the planning and implementation grant. I texted everyone and thanked them, doing a little wearied fist pump.
We'll see how this all shakes out but at least it feels like things are maybe almost kind of happening?
It was my dumb luck around submitting the testimony and the resulting phone call with the district that got me thinking about this whole experience over the last few years.
Long haul
Myles Horton is one of my organizing heroes. His autobiography, one of the best education/organizing texts I know, is called The Long Haul. The basic idea is that when it comes to organizing you have to dig in and be there for the long haul, particularly the slow periods, keep your eyes and mind open to possibilities, and basically keep on keeping on.
While I was writing this memoir-ish newsletter about the last three years of organizing around school facilities finance justice in Philadelphia, I thought of Horton's concept of the long haul. His book is an amazing account of decades of his work, the slow moments, the failures, and the big successes (like founding the Highlander School that would be the educational hub for both the CIO and civil rights movements in the 20th century).
For Horton, keeping that struggle going is essential, particularly when it seems like everything is impossible and there's nowhere to go next. I also thought of what Nancy Pelosi said about the Green New Deal: she called it a "green dream or whatever." At the time this comment came across as glib and derisive, but in reflecting on the last few years, I kind of like it.
Yeah, we've got a green dream or whatever, and we're in it for the long haul!