report
2025 Year in Review
“The only way to prove to yourself that you have power is to use it.” — Octavia Butler
Last year, our network met one crisis after another, while adjusting our course to navigate drastically changed conditions.
While we entered 2025 knowing the Trump regime would inflict pain on our communities, the violent invasions of our cities, tearing apart of our civic institutions, and authoritarian power grabs have been far worse than we anticipated. Together with our partners, our network jumped in to counter these assaults: going door-to-door educating tens of thousands of small business employees and owners on their constitutional rights if ICE shows up, supporting lawsuits against racial profiling and warrantless raids, organizing mass mobilizations that put a spotlight on illegal gerrymandering efforts.
At the same time, we assessed how our work needed to shift. We brought together leaders of our affiliates to share learnings and plan together. We spoke with scholars like Maria Stephan and Tarso Ramos, read the work of Erica Chenoweth and Zoe Marks, and looked to historical examples like the civil rights movements and ACT-UP NY, exploring how people have successfully refused, resisted, and ridiculed authoritarians. We took all this analysis and pivoted our strategy.
The task of our movements right now is to halt the drive towards autocracy, and to dig in on our efforts to put our country on a path towards a multiracial feminist democracy that uplifts care, culture, and community. There are so many people and groups stepping into courageous and creative roles in this task. For us at PowerSwitch, our role is threefold:
We must significantly increase the number of people prepared to defy the autocrats and build a civic participation renaissance. In 2025, our affiliates began or expanded over a dozen organizing and leadership development programs. This year, we’re gearing up to launch a new model for training and activating hundreds of regular folks at a time — equipping them to organize their neighborhoods, take nonviolent mass action, and lead strategic campaigns.
We must pull cogs from the authoritarian machine: challenging the corporations powering it, insisting our elected and civic leaders refuse to cooperate, and making the stakes clear to those who are tuned out or conflicted. In 2025, we put a spotlight on corporate actors like Amazon and Tesla complicit in the power grab. This year, we’re driving targeted local campaigns responsive to the rapidly changing dynamics we face.
We must counter doom and division with hopeful alternatives that meet people’s needs. Even amidst all the pain of 2025, our network demonstrated what’s possible when communities come together — from passing a green social housing ordinance in Chicago to raising the minimum wage for tourism workers in Los Angeles. This year, our focus will be on organizing around immediate everyday issues, while connecting these to the larger fight for our democracy.
Amidst all this work, we must keep one eye on our ultimate goal. We are not trying to walk back to an old system that failed far too many of us (and created conditions that were ripe for the authoritarians). We are building people power to lay a new road: one leading to a world where our communities are powerful, in control of our lives, and cherished by our institutions and each other.
In solidarity,
Lauren Jacobs
Executive Director
This year, our network:
Engaged & organized over
88,000
people
Developed the leadership of
2,700
working people and community members
Led or co-led
78 coalitions
made up of over 2,000 organizations
Our scope and scale:
397
staff across our network
$59 million
total 2025 network budget
Over 1/3
of the US population lives in regions where our affiliates organize
Explore the report:
Network highlights
Explore the map to see some of the highlights from our affiliates’ work in 2025:
Pivoting to defy the authoritarian power grab and defend our communities
Autocrats rely on fear, violence, and compliance. Our network jumped into action to challenge brazen attacks on our democracy and to support brave people and communities responding on the ground.
![WWRC press conference in Los Angeles]()
Responding quickly when ICE invaded Southern California
As the Trump regime ramped up its deportation machine, Southern California was the first region to face mass deployments of ICE agents and national guard troops. Our affiliates and coalition partners sprang into action to support the families of abducted folks and show the harms caused by federal agents bringing violence to our streets.
In the chaotic first few days in Los Angeles, our affiliates and coalitions supported the families of people who were targeted and abducted at carwashes, fashion warehouses, and other businesses in telling their stories. Through a series of high profile press events, relatives and community members spoke about the pain and harm caused to their families, demanded the release of their loved ones, and shed a light on the cruel and inhumane conditions in detention facilities.
When ICE agents plowed through agricultural fields and farms on the Central Coast, a robust rapid response network — the 805 Immigrant Coalition and 805 Undocufund — that our affiliate Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy (CAUSE) helped establish sprang to work. Through press conferences and protecting legal rights, community members, farmowners, and advocates were able to prevent more workers from being unconstitutionally abducted.
Across the region, ICE agents conducted warrantless raids at homes and worksites, stopping and detaining people based on their perceived ethnicity and language, oftentimes without evidence or due process. As part of the Los Angeles Worker Center Network, the Warehouse Worker Resource Center (WWRC) joined the class action lawsuit Vasquez Perdomo v. Noem against the Department of Homeland Security over racial profiling, warrantless raids, and denying detained immigrants lawful access to their attorneys.
In Southern California, WWRC stood strong in 2025 united with our community, steadfast in our values and in our principles against political and corporate greed. In collaboration with PowerSwitch, WWRC partnered to hold Amazon, the largest employer in the state, accountable for its deep business relationships with DHS, ICE, and the Trump administration. As Amazon continues to support tech infrastructure for DHS, communities are challenging these ties that harm regular people. Profit should not come before people and we are uniting communities in the Inland Empire who stand with us.
![SAGE organizers in the Chinatown Neighborhood]()
Keeping our communities informed and our neighbors safe
As federal agents continued bringing fear and violence to our cities, our network developed a larger-scale response. Drawing on our experience running civic engagement canvasses and know-your-rights trainings, our affiliates spun up outreach programs to educate tenants, workers, and local business owners about their constitutional rights and what to do if ICE shows up:
Through the California Coalition for Worker Power, we coordinated with affiliates and partners from across the state as they mobilized and defended their communities. In Los Angeles, Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE) ran an eight-week, cross-industry field program with dozens of canvassers going door-to-door talking with both small business owners and the people working for them about their legal rights. Warehouse Worker Resource Center joined LAANE to expand the program to the Inland Empire, with an organizer from PowerSwitch leading the team. In Northern California, East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy hosted Know Your Rights trainings and family preparedness workshops for renters, and also canvassed local businesses, connecting with employers and workers about their rights and responsibilities during a raid in the workplace. Working Partnerships USA drew on their experience leading the Fair Workplace Collaborative to build an outreach program in the South Bay. And the Center on Policy Initiatives trained volunteers and launched an outreach effort in San Diego. PowerSwitch’s national team provided strategic support, narrative guidance, and messaging research.
When news of ICE deployments to Seattle broke, many restaurants and businesses — particularly those in the Chinatown-International District — closed out of fear of what was to come. Puget Sound Sage’s organizing team went door-to-door across the neighborhood, checking in with small business owners, workers, and residents to share resources about their rights and safety.
In Texas, New Economy for Working Houston developed their Fearless at Work Initiative, engaging local businesses around ICE raids, educating them about their 4th and 5th Amendment rights, and building a squad of employers who have pledged to protect the rights of the people working for them.
We reached over
115,000
businesses and workers with education about their constitutional rights in an ICE raid
![Board members taking notes during the Board Retreat]()
Supporting our network in adapting and gathering strength
In parallel to frontline work, our national staff refocused on navigating our network through rapidly changing contexts. The Trump regime was warping and dismantling our laws and civic institutions. Previously unthinkable events became weekly occurrences. Many of our assumptions and approaches no longer held true.
To adapt, we leaned into our strengths: our relationships across the movement ecosystem, the collective wisdom held within our network, our position linking knowledge from the ground with a bird’s eye perspective:
We created spaces to share analysis and learnings: in-person gatherings where affiliate leaders could step away from day-to-day demands and think more expansively, regular network calls to make sense of evolving moments, conversations with researchers and strategists.
We provided affiliates with tools and resources, from training and support on critical organizational issues to message testing to landscape research. We also made sure they were connected with the latest guides, toolkits, webinars, and other materials from national allies.
We deepened our connections with other networks and partners to grow the united pro-democracy coalition. We seeded new relationships between our affiliates and broader movement allies, and collaborated on joint trainings and strategy development.
I cannot state enough how essential being a PowerSwitch Action affiliate is to our rapid growth and success. From being able to tap into leadership coaching and support for implementing administrative best practices to strategic analysis to help us meet the moment on both the national and local level, PowerSwitch Action ensures we are ready to build power for working people.
Challenging the corporations fueling autocracy & harming our lives
Corporations are a key cog powering the authoritarian machine. We’re building the people power to make them reconsider their complicity and support healthy democracy.
![MWC marching down hallway]()
Mobilizing to spotlight those attacking our freedoms
For reasons both self-interested and ideological, corporations and billionaires are fueling autocratic power grabs nationally and at the state level.
Our network is focusing attention on the corporate actors complicit in these assaults on our democracy and fundamental freedoms:
Amazon and Jeff Bezos are key enablers of the Trump regime — from providing tech infrastructure ICE uses as it kidnaps our neighbors and family members, to silencing criticism of the regime in The Washington Post, to investing $50B in computing power for the federal government. In a report with Athena and the Institute for Policy Studies and an op-ed in The Nation, we connected this collaboration to the tax breaks and federal contracts at stake for Amazon and Bezos.
On the ground, our affiliates are also drawing connections between Amazon and the authoritarian project — bringing Bezos puppets and Amazon signs to May Day marches, pointing out how Amazon developed its surveillance acumen by monitoring the every move of people working in its warehouses, and sharing information and resources with everyday folks in their neighborhoods.
Our affiliates took action in nerve centers of corporate collaboration. In Boston, Community Labor United brought the spotlight (and a giant inflatable puppet) to BlackRock, which invests billions in GEO Group and CoreCivic, the private prison corporations operating ICE detention centers. In Silicon Valley, Working Partnerships USA co-organized rallies outside Palantir’s office and nonviolent Tesla Takedown marches.
At the state level, corporations have developed a playbook to overturn the will of the people. They buy, bully, and bamboozle state politicians into banning anything they don’t like. In 2025, this kind of interference in democracy became increasingly brazen. When Tennessee lawmakers sought to deny public education to immigrant kids, Stand Up Nashville leaders joined weeks of protests and the bill died (for now at least).
In Missouri, industry representatives from the Missouri Restaurant Association and other corporate lobbyists made the rounds among state legislators to weaken a landmark ballot measure passed by the majority of Missourians in 2024 that would have increased the state’s minimum wage to $15 by 2026 and guaranteed up to seven days of paid sick leave per year. Ultimately, their playbook repealed the paid sick leave component and weakened the reach of the minimum wage increase. Then the politicians made it harder to pass constitutional amendments and gerrymandered the state’s congressional districts. Missouri Workers Center built a broad grassroots coalition that’s fighting back: mobilizing over 8,400 people, holding the largest demonstrations at the state Capitol in recent history, and gathering over 300,000 signatures (twice the number needed) for a ballot referendum to stop the gerrymandered district map.
We are shining a light on these corporate allies to authoritarianism, but we need to do more. We need more people uniting in lawful, nonviolent action that makes it clear to these corporations that complying with authoritarians is a worse business decision than standing for a healthy democracy. More on that below.
By gerrymandering our voices away, they're trying to take away our freedoms and our political representation, and that ain't right. But we're the Show-Me State, which means we have a mandate to show our elected leaders what democracy looks like.
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Equipping working people to confront big tech’s AI play
Thanks to years of campaigning, in 2025 Uber and Lyft drivers won big organizing breakthroughs: the freedom to form a union in California, an agreement for similar legislation in Illinois, and an independent union-run legally-designated driver support organization in Colorado.
At the same time, the AI-driven management and surveillance tactics pioneered by corporations like Uber are being adopted by other industries — and by the Trump regime for everything from ICE kidnappings to firing federal workers.
That’s why we’ve been bringing people working as Uber drivers, in Amazon warehouses, and other jobs at the forefront of AI and surveillance together with researchers and campaigners from many different sectors:
We conducted a first-of-its-kind survey revealing how Uber’s AI-driven Inequality Machine manipulates driver pay, and joined drivers with Gig Workers Rising to bring a giant inequality machine to Uber’s front door.
With Data & Society, Coworker.org, and a council of worker leaders, we warned against the trap of focusing on individual-level privacy while ignoring how surveillance can harm us collectively, and outlined new principles for policymaking.
We brought together over 500 advocates and organizers to explore how we can take apart the AI Surveillance Pipeline.
Addressing the harms of AI and surveillance will require people power, not just policymaking. In 2026, PowerSwitch and our partners will organize a multi-issue, multi-movement base to challenge the broligarchy, call the moral question on how this tech is being used, and build a broadly shared vision of AI that puts people, our planet, and democracy first.
Our life depends on our data. At Gig Workers Rising, we exchange information with other drivers and make them aware of what goes on in this industry. Every action that we do, it makes us stronger. We’ll keep fighting for the dignity we deserve.
![MWC members at capitol]()
Building our numbers to turn up the heat
To make corporations reconsider their complicity in the authoritarian assault on our communities and build toward healthy democracy, we need many more people organized, trained, and taking lawful nonviolent strategic action.
In 2025, our network launched, expanded, and refined basebuilding and leadership development programs to grow our cadre of committed and effective grassroots leaders:
From organizing with college students in San Diego, to Chinatown residents in Seattle, to immigrant communities in St. Louis, our affiliates are developing new basebuilding programs to bring more people into our movements. In Colorado, United for a New Economy is leading a deep canvassing project where volunteers are having 15-minute conversations with their neighbors about the ways that corporations and the wealthy few have rigged Colorado’s tax system. In Arizona, Worker Power Institute equipped hundreds of community members with the skills to take nonviolent direct action. In California, Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy is bringing in the next generation of young leaders through a summer organizing fellowship and work on community campaigns.
For those ready to go deeper, our network strengthened training and leadership development programs. In Long Beach, Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy relaunched their Spanish-language Adelante leadership program that provides participants with organizing, advocacy, power analysis, and storytelling skills. In Pennsylvania, POWER Interfaith brought together 70 leaders from across the state for a camp digging into the mechanics of organizing. Missouri Workers Center gathered a cohort of new organizers from across the state for an in-depth dive into organizing in challenging industries. Georgia STAND-UP’s Policy Institute built the capacity of Black women elected leaders to go toe-to-toe with big developers. And the California Coalition for Worker Power held a five-language session where worker leaders shared their experiences with authoritarianism and the power of multi-racial solidarity as a powerful strategy of resistance.
To support our frontline leaders in the network, our national team refocused our Transformational Leadership Retreat. Over 4 days in Colorado, new executive directors and organizing staff from across the network took time to reflect, recharge, and deepen relationships. They explored new leadership tools for building resilience in challenging roles, and developed organizing practices adapted for the environment we are navigating.
We’re also laying the groundwork to launch an exciting new basebuilding, popular education, and campaigning model in 2026. Look out for more on that soon!
The PowerSwitch Transformational Leadership Retreat came at exactly the right moment in my leadership journey. It gave me the tools, clarity, and space I needed to think strategically about the road ahead. I walked away grounded, renewed, and better equipped to lead. For any leader, especially those stepping into new roles, this experience is truly life-changing.
Creating hopeful alternatives to meet people’s needs
Authoritarians peddle a story that the only way life gets better for some is to exclude others. Our network is demonstrating a better path: showing that when people come together to fight for a future that meets our collective needs, we all thrive.
![WPUSA members rally in support of Measure A]()
Securing public resources at the local level
This year brought new attacks on public goods and the public sphere. The Trump regime has dramatically cut funding for health care and other basic needs, slashed environmental and public health protections, and incentivized the privatization of our shared resources.
In this challenging landscape, our network took important steps to secure public resources for our communities:
In San Jose, California, Working Partnerships USA convened labor and community partners to save the county’s public hospital system. The county’s four public hospitals faced closure after the Trump administration slashed funding for Medicaid and other critical healthcare programs. Working Partnerships led the push to place sales tax Measure A on the November ballot, winning with an overwhelming 57% of the vote. This victory generates $330 million annually for five years, closing the funding gap and protecting the local hospitals and healthcare system.
Building on over a decade of organizing around water rights in Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh United successfully won landslide support (78%) for a ballot referendum ensuring the city of Pittsburgh will maintain public control over its water and sewer system in perpetuity. This successful referendum is the result of years of campaigning to shift public conversations about the need for clean, affordable water and the value of green infrastructure to protect public health and our environment.
We want the next generations to have guardrails. It's very tempting for a mayor to agree to taking the debt burden off of the books, and that’s what ends up happening, they end up privately owned and then the customers end up having to deal with higher rates and lower water quality. We want to strengthen our water authorities by organizing a base of people who continue to put advocacy in the forefront for our municipal water authority.
![Rally in front of LA Colliseum]()
Winning groundbreaking wage standards
Left unchecked, corporations have shown time and again that they will hold down wages while jacking up the cost of living. A decade ago, our network helped kickstart a string of municipal minimum wage increases in cities around the country. Now we’re organizing with workers and community partners to push the needle once again — winning landmark wage standards for people working in hospitality:
As Los Angeles prepares to host the 2028 Olympics, Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy drew on years of grassroots organizing and coalition-building in partnership with the members of UNITE HERE Local 11 to push for higher standards for workers in the tourism industry. Together, they won a historic Olympic Wage Ordinance guaranteeing that roughly 36,000 people working in LA’s airports and hotels will be paid a minimum of $30/hour by 2028. That’s the highest minimum wage in the entire country, and the law also includes crucial health care protections. And when big airlines and hotels tried to trick voters into repealing the ordinance, LAANE and partners gathered 120,000 forms to revoke signatures of community members misled by this attempted corporate veto — enough that the repeal failed and the groundbreaking law went into effect.
Already, this win in LA is generating momentum for similar action. In San Diego, the Center on Policy Initiatives (CPI) partnered with UCSD Labor Center to release a new report documenting the precarious and unjust workplace conditions faced by the city’s hospitality workers. Building on these findings CPI, UNITE HERE Local 30, and local workers successfully campaigned for a new citywide hospitality wage. This new law ensures people working at large hotels, amusement parks, and event centers will be paid $25/hour by 2030 — a big improvement from the city’s current $17.75 minimum wage.
![SAGE members rally in support of housing justice]()
Shifting housing towards community control
The escalating corporate takeover of housing is a key driver of affordability and eviction crises in cities across the country. Corporations are buying up homes, jacking up rents, and kicking out working families and people of color.
This year, our network won key milestones on the journey towards greater community control over our homes:
In Illinois, the multi-year partnership between Grassroots Collaborative, the Illinois Green New Deal coalition, and PowerSwitch Action led to the passage of the Green Social Housing Ordinance in Chicago. This is pivotal legislation creating a green social housing developer — a public agency tasked with taking the $135 million social housing revolving fund approved last year, and turning it into housing that is deeply and permanently affordable, environmentally sustainable, and governed by the people who will actually live in it.
It meant a lot to have support from PowerSwitch that respected our member’s leadership while pushing us to think bigger and act bolder. What started as guidance and capacity building turned into a campaign we actually won, with a model for Green Social Housing now moving in Chicago.
In Washington, Puget Sound Sage led a coalition campaign to win a $10 million fund to purchase land for community stewarded housing projects across King County. Sage also co-launched a data project to learn who owns King County, documenting corporate ownership trends, while identifying problematic landlords and priority buildings for renter organizing.
In Silicon Valley, Working Partnerships USA kicked off an exploratory initiative for Working Families Housing: cheaper, faster, union-built, mixed-income social housing in Santa Clara County. They convened a broad array of experts and stakeholders, from labor unions and pension fund trustees to elected officials and business groups.
In Tennessee, Stand-Up Nashville (SUN) made major strides towards building social housing into the city’s long term housing plans. Through grassroots organizing, leadership development, and policy advocacy, SUN helped make social housing an official priority in the city’s development plans, and identified three council members who are interested in piloting social housing projects on public land in their districts.
