Fine Print

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.

While millions of Americans gear up for Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping sprees, Isaiah Rucker Jr. isn’t buying it. Instead of big spending, he says it’s time to make a statement this holiday week.

There are moments in life when you can almost hear the hum of democracy, when the air itself feels charged with the belief that the people might yet be sovereign. We have lived through such moments before. I remember one not too long ago, when a tall, deliberate senator from the South Side of Chicago told us that “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”