Wall Street and big corporations target communities of color to extract profit from every facet of our lives. Through their investments, loans, donations, and other financial tools, corporations and financial institutions back candidates, campaigns, and projects that threaten the health, safety, and freedom of our communities. At ACRE, we fight back against predatory financial institutions and anti-democratic actors across a range of issue areas with a wide array of partners.
Bargaining for the Common Good
The Bargaining for the Common Good Network is made up of unions, community groups, racial justice organizations, and student organizations that work together as equal partners to win bigger and broader demands at the bargaining table and in the streets. In these campaigns, labor and community groups work with stakeholders to demand that corporations and the wealthy pay their fair share so that our communities have what they need to prosper.
Crescendo: Taking on Anti-Muslim Corporations
The Crescendo project takes on corporate complicity in Islamophobia and anti-Muslim bigotry as part of a commitment to building the power of Muslim communities in the United States until it reaches a crescendo.
Climate and Environmental Justice
Everyone deserves to live in a safe, healthy, and thriving community free from extraction and pollution. The fossil fuel industry and its Wall Street financiers have polluted our communities and fuelled climate chaos, wreaking havoc in frontline BIPOC communities. ACRE builds power with these communities to oppose the fossil fuel industry and its Wall Street financiers in order to avert further climate catastrophe and a climate change-driven financial crisis. We are fighting for frontline communities to have full self-determination as we transform our economic system from one built on extraction and exploitation to one that promotes regeneration and sustainability.
Financial Services
Equitable access to high-quality financial services is a fundamental right. However, the U.S. financial sector functions largely to extract wealth from public budgets and our communities. ACRE is working to build a financial system in which high-quality financial services are provided to all communities by publicly-owned and -controlled utilities run in the public interest.
Healthcare
The U.S. healthcare system is rooted in racism and our current healthcare policies perpetuate systemic inequity by creating and maintaining conditions that lead to adverse health outcomes for communities of color. ACRE is fighting for a system of free, comprehensive healthcare for all that enshrines healthcare as a fundamental human right rather than a source of profit.
Housing Justice
From the 2008 foreclosure crisis through the COVID-19 pandemic, corporate landlords have seized on disasters in our communities, especially communities of color, to squeeze renters, neighborhoods, and cities for maximum profit. ACRE partners with tenant-led housing justice organizations to fight back and win quality, truly affordable housing for everyone.
Policing and Incarceration
Public safety should never be for profit. ACRE works on campaigns to move power away from carceral systems and into communities. We understand that abolition is not simply the absence of policing, prison, and surveillance but the presence of fully funded public services and a transformed justice system that prioritizes care over punishment. We support local divestment and anti-surveillance campaigns, lead narrative shift work, and sit at national tables dedicated to intervening in federal police funding.
Public Services
For decades, ultra-rich billionaires, corporations, and Wall Street banks have engaged in a systematic effort to rig the economy to avoid paying what they owe in taxes. When these entities don’t pay what they owe, Black and Brown communities bear the burden. ACRE works on campaigns to resist austerity budgets and fight for moral budgets that invest in Black and Brown communities to repair harm. We fight for our communities to have fully-funded, equitably distributed, publicly-owned, and locally-controlled public services, paid for by mega-corporations, Wall Street, and the wealthy. We work with grassroots partners to ensure every community has the public service resources to recover, thrive, and survive the next crisis.
Worker Campaigns
For decades, corporations and their financiers have pushed to roll back labor protections, stifle wages, and pass laws that protect the unsafe and abusive workplaces they’ve created. Black and Brown workers are bearing the brunt of this broken economic system, as the powerful and privileged continue to maximize their wealth. ACRE fights to create an economy and political system that are beholden to our communities, not corporations. We support grassroots groups in challenging corporate power by enacting comprehensive campaigns that center racial justice, build worker power, and set the stage for more significant structural wins.