The East Side Garden Walk brochure strikes me as a rich primary source on cultural politics, nonprofit orientation, and community power in Buffalo. I’m a historian, so I imagine this brochure being useful to a young scholar in 2050, when she’s trying to understand how the Buffalo Renaissance of the early 2000s transitioned into the re-urbanization of the city.

In this article, I seek to go beyond simply presenting statistics to illustrate the scope of poverty or economic insecurity in the North Country. I want to show how the limited understanding of poverty, as a threshold defined by institutions, obscures our awareness of people’s struggles to cover their necessities and of the systemic issues causing economic insecurity. Beyond this, I explore the intersection of social class with other identities such as gender and race while also highlighting the importance of grassroots work. Overall, I hope to generate more empathy for our neighbors and encourage support for the people working to improve their communities.

On January 22, Weave News hosted a live panel discussion focusing on the January 6 attack on the US Capitol and its implications for struggles for justice in the United States. The panelists were Damon Berry, Nicole Eigbrett, Thahitun Mariam, and Steve Peraza.