Fine Print

The price of telling the truth Even as we celebrate three years since the unveiling of The Embrace and yet another MLK weekend, we can’t ignore our country’s accelerating slide into authoritarianism—and the lives already lost to it.

Last week, we talked about what we wanted to remember from 2025, and what the memories we cherish as a nation say about us. In less than a week, January 2026 has already become a month of both memory and moment.

2025 has been a trying year for anyone in the business of fostering belonging. But community leaders across the country, including in Boston, continue to choose persistence over retreat, collaboration over isolation and imagination over fear.

Every year, tens of millions of Americans struggle with food insecurity, many not knowing where their next meal will come from.

Words aren’t neutral. Voting maps aren’t neutral. Monuments aren’t neutral. What we say and do, who we choose to remember, are not idle, meaningless actions. They reflect who we are and what we value. They always have.

There has always been a war on people considered “poor” in America. It is a quiet war, fought with red tape and policy, with silence and forgetting. Its casualties do not lie in foreign fields but on city corners, food lines and in empty refrigerators.