S2E3: Devan Spear on forcing universities to pay their fair share

In this episode, we’ll hear about a multi-year fight to get some of Philadelphia’s largest property-owners – nonprofit universities and hospitals – to make voluntary payments in lieu of taxes to fund local public schools. Devan Spear describes how the campaign gained momentum by investing in basebuilding (27:05), created action teams on different university campuses (28:18), and used the momentum of the 2020 uprisings for racial justice to quickly move new supporters into action and push their campaign over the finish line (31:06). 

Check out a writeup on this campaign at The Forge

Devan joined Philadelphia Jobs With Justice as director in 2017. Under her leadership, Philly JWJ collaborated with the National Domestic Workers Alliance to launch the NDWA-PA chapter, won a $100 million commitment from UPenn to remediate lead and asbestos in public schools, and launched a new campaign for safety protections for Philadelphia warehouse workers. Devan is the communications vice president for the Philadelphia Coalition of Labor Union Women and a member of the PhilaPOSH board of directors.

Transcript

Andrew Willis Garcés: Welcome to the Craft of Campaigns. I'm your host, Andrew Willis Garcés. In this podcast, we go behind the headlines and hashtags, inviting movement storytellers to share lessons from social justice campaigns. Campaigns are a series of collective actions, focused on winning a concrete demand, beyond one-off mobilizations or election cycles. They have villains and heroes, teams that make plans to win, and activate people on the sidelines. In each episode, we explore one campaign, through firsthand interviews, for key lessons, principles, and practices for organizers today. 

Imagine you’re the new leader of a small organization – with a paid staff of exactly one person – and you’ve decided to kick off a campaign that successfully mobilizes teams of volunteers to take on some of the most powerful institutions in the country’s sixth-largest city. To raise the level of difficulty, imagine yours is a labor organization and this campaign for public school funding has to deeply engage dozens of activists who aren’t parents, current students or public school employees. And it will launch publicly in February 2020. 

Sounds like a walk in the park, right? 

We’ll hear from that organizational leader, Devan Spear and Philly Jobs with Justice, in a minute. First, I want to share why our team found this campaign so compelling, 

We think this story speaks to many of us in 2024 because so much local organizing is ultimately about how to raise and spend public dollars. When it comes to public schools – which are perennially under-resourced – it can be difficult to know what to fight for first. The organizers identified a winnable demand that would make a meaningful impact on public school finances – not everything they wanted, but a significant, permanent new funding source – and framed it not as an education issue, but as an urgent, lifesaving measure, given the lead pipes that were literally sickening the city’s school children, who were overwhelmingly Black and brown. 

It also feels relevant, because sometimes the unanticipated, sudden end of one campaign can set the stage for the next. A friend of mine once referred to this as the “oh-shit-we-won” problem. The organizers of the campaign preceding this one, which fought to win back local control of the school system, succeeded more quickly than anticipated. They had to figure out where to go next, and fighting to get the largest universities to pay more in taxes wasn’t the obvious next move.  

Sometimes, the next move requires revisiting old demands, or a constituency you haven’t thought about for a while. The somewhat nerdy but hugely impactful demand at the center of this campaign spoke deeply to a small constituency: University of Pennsylvania staff, students and alumni who wanted to be organized, eight years after this same campaign demand had first inspired direct actions targeting the university’s president. 

This story also shows the importance of slowly and diligently building campaign structures and containers. A few months after launching, JwJ found themselves in a whirlwind moment during the pandemic summer of 2020, with thousands of Philadelphians newly activated around racial justice demands. The campaign responded with  distributed volunteer-led leadership teams that were able to quickly absorb new members. 

And this campaign calls back to our second episode this season, when a union organizing janitors who cleaned downtown office buildings realized they needed to make their fight also about underfunding public schools, broadening a workplace campaign into a broader fight. More and more, framing one relatively simple campaign demand as an issue relevant for multiple constituencies seems like a winning formula for nearly any political geography. 

Here’s the backstory to this campaign, which was about getting some of the largest institutions in Philadelphia to pay more payments to prop up the city's public schools. 

In 2001, Pennsylvania Governor Mark Schweiker took control of the city’s public schools, ostensibly because too few students were mastering reading and math skills, replacing the elected school board with an appointed body called the School Reform Commission. This became central to many fights around the city’s schools over the next fifteen years. 

One of the fights was around taxes. When public school supporters demanded more funding, elected officials would say, “we don’t have more to give.” And sometimes they would point out that much of the highest-value land was exempt from property taxes, as it was controlled by tax-exempt institutions – universities and hospitals. Penn alone owns over $3.2 billion in tax-exempt property. Public schools are funded by property taxes, but the biggest landowners then are nonprofit universities and hospitals who are exempt from those taxes – leading to severely underfunded public schools. When the city briefly had the power to revoke an institution’s tax-exempt status, in the mid-90s, forty large nonprofits contributed $9 million a year in what were optional, or voluntary payments – called “payments in lieu of taxes,” or PILOTs as the acronym goes. But by 2011, after the state took away the city’s regulatory power, the donations trickled down to just $300,000 annually. 

So in 2012, University of Pennsylvania students, journalists, and a few local labor unions reignited the issue of universities not paying their “fair share” for public services. A few one-off protests drew attention, but no campaign emerged for mandatory payments.  

In the years that followed, the local public schools’ organizing ecosystem – which included student organizers, basebuilding hubs like the 215 People’s Alliance, the Movement Alliance Project, the Caucus of Working Educators and Philadelphia Jobs with Justice – launched a shared campaign in 2016 to end state control of the city’s schools and abolish the so-called School Reform Commission that had instigated massive school closures. Jobs with Justice and its member organizations were clear about their stake in the fight: public school conditions are also working conditions, and working people need high quality, safe public schools. The Our City Our Schools Campaign achieved its goal more quickly than many in leadership had anticipated; they won key endorsements and a final victory all within the last three months of 2017. 

As Devan recounts in this interview, some campaign members followed that unexpected win by exploring demands to raise revenue for public schools. School underfunding had become even more apparent when a budget shortfall led to the closure of thirty-six public schools over two years, and later a local investigative journalist exposed school facilities badly in need of repair. 

In 2018 a newly-elected school board member unexpectedly published an op-ed calling for universities to make mandatory payments, as organizers were looking at possibilities for campaigning to raise revenue. Jobs with Justice also started hearing from UPenn alumni and staff who wanted to organize around PILOTs. 

With other Our Schools coalition members already building power with students, teachers and parents, Philly JwJ calculated that in order to win, they would need to organize within the largest institutions that hadn’t been paying taxes. Their plan was to build an organizing committee at each of the three primary tax-exempt institutions: UPenn, Drexel University and Jefferson Hospital, anchored by volunteers who would be supported by one full-time organizer. They shaped a campaign strategy and timeline with those volunteers in 2019, and had finally scheduled their first in-person mass meeting in February 2020, where our interview today kicks off. 

Devan joined Philadelphia Jobs With Justice as director in 2017. Under her leadership, Philly JWJ collaborated with the National Domestic Workers Alliance to launch the NDWA-PA chapter, won a $100 million commitment from UPenn to remediate lead and asbestos in public schools, and launched a new campaign for safety protections for Philadelphia warehouse workers. Devan is the communications vice president for the Philadelphia Coalition of Labor Union Women and a member of the PhilaPOSH board of directors.

Andrew Willis Garcés: Welcome to the Craft of Campaigns podcast. Really excited to hear about this campaign in Philadelphia, where you are right now.

Can you give us the trailer, if this was a movie, what's the trailer for this campaign? 

Devan Spear: PILOTs stands for “Payments In Lieu Of Taxes.” It is a broad umbrella term for payments made to a city or other government entity to make up for a tax exemption that is impacting revenue in some way. 

In 2020 Philly Jobs with Justice launched a new phase of a campaign to make mega nonprofits - so the wealthiest nonprofits in Philly-  make these payments and lieu of taxes, PILOTs in order to address a toxic school crisis in Philadelphia. We had a teacher die of mesothelioma. We had a student with lead poisoning so bad he forgot how to do math. The toxic school crisis was really severe and extreme crisis, and we thought that this was an intervention that could help fund the remediation of lead and asbestos. 

In November, 2020, after some escalating public action, good grassroots organizing with both directly impacted folks and stakeholders at these nonprofits, we did win a $100 million commitment from the University of Pennsylvania over 10 years to remediate lead and asbestos in public schools.

The fight at other nonprofits is ongoing, but you know, Jobs with Justice, our role was to get to move this campaign forward and to win that initial.

Andrew Willis Garcés: We gotta claim those wins, even two years later. We'll also get to hear how it wasn't a full win, how there's still a sort of implementation stage of even getting that win. And also another interesting thing about this story to me is it's actually also a way bigger demand that you won than when you initially started this campaign - when you all started like seven or eight years ago, the demand was actually much smaller. Which is not usually how this goes. 

I'm excited to get into it. But first, can you tell us a little about who you are in the relationship to this campaign? What's your connection to it? And then help us set the stage for how you guys got going and when, when the first phase of this campaign started. 

Devan Spear: Like I said, my name is Devan. I grew up in central Florida.

I actually came into this issue, into PILOTs, as a student at Penn. When I got to Penn, I joined the organization of students, which was at the time known as the Student Labor Action Project, and the first campaign was working with dining workers on campus to unionize. When I had been in the organization for a couple years and we were looking for a new campaign, there was this new issue that was percolating to get Penn to pay PILOTs.

We wanted Penn to contribute to our public schools, Philadelphia's public schools, because as a tax exempt institution, despite having a $15 billion endowment, Penn was not paying property taxes.

At the time of an extreme funding crisis, we had this huge drain on our public school revenue because of nonprofit institutions like Penn, despite owning billions of dollars of property in Philadelphia, were not actually contributing anything to property taxes, which the majority of local funding for public schools comes from property taxes. At the time this campaign was being coordinated by Philadelphia Jobs with Justice before I was ever directly involved with JwithJ. 

The first way that we broke into this was we had a die-in at the university president's holiday party, which landed us in the news. And of course this was in no way coordinated with Jobs with Justice, but that action did push the issue forward. And on the other side, Philadelphia Jobs with Justice was really moving with a sort of advocacy angle; passing a resolution in city council, that kind of thing, not really building a grassroots effort with a diverse base essentially. So when I graduated school, Philadelphia Jobs with Justice was kind of in a transitional period.

The funding had declined. The board was more or less disengaged, and the former director was leaving. This was really a point at which Philadelphia Jobs with Justice needed to sort of figure out what the direction was to move forward.

I took on the challenge of the director position at Philadelphia Jobs with Justice, and it took a couple years just rebuilding board relationships, rebuilding our partner relationships, re-engaging with the labor movement, re-engaging with community organizations.

Philadelphia Jobs with Justice is a coalition organization rebuilding our coalition before we were really ready to take on a campaign. 

Andrew Willis Garcés: Excellent. So that was more or less the first phase. Is that a correct way to describe that?

Devan Spear: Yeah, I think there is some additional context that might be helpful. So, like I said, payments in lieu of taxes, PILOTs, kind of an esoteric policy intervention and not always, to be fair, the most radical. But this concept was introduced in Philadelphia in the ’90s when the city itself was going bankrupt. The mayor at the time, Ed Rendell, had a closed door deal with the major nonprofits in the city to make some payments in lieu of their property tax exemption in order to make up a little bit of that massive funding gap that the city was facing at the time. So the mayor essentially used his power to threaten these nonprofits tax exemption. But because this was not in any way a grassroots effort, as soon as he wasn't mayor anymore, they totally dropped off.

I think the total that was contributed was like $9 million over four or five years. And after that PILOTs was sort of done in this form in Philadelphia. And so fast forward to 2012, the first phase of the JwJ PILOTs's campaign, which I at the time was called the Good Neighbors campaign and was only targeting the University of Pennsylvania. 

In 2012, there was this extreme funding crisis in the school district of Philadelphia. So the Republican governor at the time scrapped the funding formula that gave poor school districts like Philadelphia their fair share of funding. So it was called the Fair Funding Formula - that went out the window.

Because of that, the school district's funding crashed, dropped precipitously, and it was a huge emergency. We saw 36 schools close over three years. Children were being shuffled from school to school. Class sizes became unmanageable. Nurses were getting laid off. Students were experiencing health crises that couldn't be addressed because there was no nurse on campus. A student died of an asthma attack in a school with no nurse on campus. So this was a really extreme crisis. And at the time the leadership at Jobs with Justice wanted to sort of address that with a version of the PILOTs campaign.

But like I said, it was really more of an advocacy effort. The sort of major public event was getting city council to pass a resolution in favor of PILOTs, but city council didn't actually have any power there. So it was symbolic support of PILOTs and the only public direct action that was taken was this student action that I had been a part of.

I didn't really know very much about what was happening over at Jobs with Justice. I only knew what we were doing as students knowing that, to us, it was absolutely mind boggling to think about the University of Pennsylvania, this incredibly wealthy institution around us, not making these payments, not paying property taxes.

So I think that whole context I would consider the first act. 

Andrew Willis Garcés: Sure. And so common, I think, as far as, here you are, the rebels in the streets, really the students on the outside trying to be disruptive, playing your role, without any awareness that there was an inside game happening, whether or not it was effective. And so the issue kind of goes away. It's like the momentum around it peters out as is so often - it's not uncommon at all. 

How did Jobs with Justice get on your radar? How did you get recruited? Why did you join? What moved you in that way? Then doubling back to like, so we heard all about how the schools were a big deal and then the school and this, and there was a coalition that won a big victory, but where does Jobs with Justice and where do you come in with that coalition and starting up into the next phase of this campaign?

Devan Spear: I guess the first question, how Jobs with Justice came onto my radar. After we did this, like public action, I did become aware that JwithJ was coordinating the campaign. So I wasn't totally like, screw you guys, we're doing whatever we want. We did wanna make a good faith effort to plug in. I did know about Jobs with Justice at a certain point. And I was asked to testify at that city council hearing, actually, that passed the resolution. 

And then, you know, the public schools angle. We do think that students’ learning conditions are teachers’ working conditions. I knew this other organizer, Arielle, and so we started attending meetings at the Our City, Our Schools coalition. I was mostly there to learn and offer what resources I could. But this coalition won the end of the school reform commission. They had to figure out, what do we do next, now that we have won the victory that we convened to win.

Andrew Willis Garcés: So the School Reform Commission had taken away local control of the public school system for fifteen years, leaving the working and learning conditions for hundreds of thousands of Philadelphians in the hands of a board appointed by the governor. The board made it nearly impossible to organize to change those conditions, as there were no local officials to hold accountable. Finally, in 2017, the coalition Jobs with Justice is part of wins the campaign to abolish the commission. Can you tell us how that set the stage for the next act in this story?

Devan Spear:  Okay. Yeah. So I think that this middle part, the second act was really when things started to coalesce. So I will say Our City, Our Schools was looking for a next fight. A priority was public school funding. I'd say 2018 is when this process started to look for new organizing opportunities. The biggest priority was still not PILOTs. So another terrible tax exemption that we have in Philadelphia is called the 10-year Tax Abatement.

If you are a developer, and you wanna build a highrise, it is tax exempt, it is exempt from property taxes for 10 years. All the land and improvements that you are working on, so when you build this building, you - presumably a multimillionaire developer - do not have to pay property taxes on this property.

PILOTs was a big issue. The 10-year tax abatement was also a huge issue. Our City, Our Schools was looking for these funding opportunities. One of them was PILOTs. The sort of bigger issue that more folks were focused on was the 10-year tax abatement. So that was sort of the next big campaign. And I was not at the center of this campaign, so I could not tell you every detail.

But essentially Our City, Our Schools did get a bill passed to abolish the 10-year tax abatement. But as the 10-year tax abatement was nearing its end, we were thinking, well, what do we, Jobs with Justice, have to offer?

And at that time, this was 2019, we started to really think about what are the signs that this campaign might be ready for another phase? So there were a few little things. 

Someone released an op-ed in the Inquirer - that we had nothing to do with - in favor of PILOTs. One of the members of the new local control school board made a statement in favor of PILOTs. We had some new progressive members of city council and it started to look like there was more of an opening there for real intervention than there had been previously. 

Andrew Willis Garcés: And when you say that there was an op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer calling for these payments by universities, were they naming specific universities? Were they putting a specific dollar figure? 

Devan Spear: Something that I didn't say is that the original version of this campaign was asking for like $6.6 million a year for “public schools and essential services.” It wasn't even entirely public schools. It was trying to mirror what property taxes fund, generally. Something that we found in our research is that if you wanna win a lasting PILOTs program, you need to be really specific about what you're trying to win, not just what you're trying to take away from your target.

So there wasn't floating around a concrete demand until we decided to launch a new version of the campaign with new demands, totally new strategy, new stakeholders, new everything basically.

Andrew Willis Garcés: So it's 2018 and the coalition is looking for a new campaign, a new fight to pick, and a new way to fund public schools. Other people outside the campaign, with influence start to name, hey, you know what is a problem, these universities are deadbeat taxpayers, and we should do something about that.

This phase is into 2019. At what point do you all have enough where you think, you know what, it's time to bring this campaign back and maybe we won't set a dollar amount this time, but this is kind of our theory of how we’ll shift from “this is not a non-issue that really no one's talking about” to “we're gonna make it seem like the most urgent thing” and shift the balance of power, shift the pillars of power, so that the status quo that they can get away with paying nothing is untenable.

How do you do that and what goals do you set? Especially as the convener, the leader, of a new campaign coalition around PILOTs, as Jobs with Justice, going from 2019 to 2020?

Devan Spear:  I guess the missing piece was, I didn't think it was a winnable campaign with one staff person at Jobs with Justice. And at the time I had built a functional board, stable funding for, for one person full time, but we didn't have multiple staff to make a campaign happen. Looking at these signs that there would be an opening for PILOTs, I went to the board and said, we can do this if we can hire someone for a year who is full time on this campaign, and that's all they're doing.

The next step was cobbling together the funding; asking some funders who had already been contributing to our budget to add a little bit more to make this campaign happen. Another source of funding was an alum of Penn whose family had donated to Penn over the years. And for whatever reason, he was really pissed off that they didn't pay property taxes. So we sort of cobbled together funding, like nobody came to us and said, we'll fund this for you. We had to pull it from as many places as we could. And we got the money to hire someone for one year. 

We hired someone who had existing relationships in the Our City, Our Schools coalition to be lead organizer on the campaign. And to be clear, I was still really involved in the day to day of the campaign, but it's just not something that was winnable for one person who also had to do operations and coalition management and all the other things that come with an organization.

Andrew Willis Garcés: So you have buy-in from the Our City, Our Schools coalition. You hire someone with relationships within that coalition to be the organizer on this campaign. And what's the theory of how you all are gonna shake things up? You only know that you for sure have an organizer to hold down the work and anchor it for a year.

So what were the goals and what else was the conversation coming in from 2019 to 2020 about what we're planning to do in order to win this fight? 

Devan Spear: So what I sought to do was move the campaign forward as much as we could in a year with a real concentrated strategy. So instead of coming at it like, oh, we're just gonna try a bunch of things for an undefined amount of time. We built a timeline that centered around base-building so that we were not moving in an advocacy direction.

Obviously we did wanna have relationships with some, you know, elected officials who could also apply pressure, but that was not our main source of power. The core of our initial strategy was to build action teams at three major target nonprofits. 

Andrew Willis Garcés: Nonprofit universities, you mean? 

Devan Spear: It's complicated. The University of Pennsylvania and Drexel University are both nonprofit universities. Jefferson is both a university and a hospital and I will get to this later. It's really hard to target a hospital. It is really hard and we're not the first to do this. The University of Pittsburgh medical center is the largest employer in Pennsylvania. And other folks in PA have been targeting them for PILOTs payments. They're a nonprofit hospital, but with huge, huge amounts of revenue that has been a fight forever, especially in Pittsburgh. So we're not the first to target a hospital, but it's really hard. 

But those were the biggest nonprofits. It's not like the museum, et cetera. It's like, we're going for the top three. We can't do it all in a year. So Aiden, the organizer, the lead organizer, spent most of their time building these action teams.

And this was at the very beginning of 2020. We were just starting to put together our action teams. And we had our first meeting of the Penn action team in February, 2020. We got one in person meeting together. And then obviously things changed significantly in March of 2020.

I would say that's sort of act two and act three is really gonna be the rest of the campaign. 

Andrew Willis Garcés: Phase two is really, it's sort of gathering forces and doing a lay of the land, doing some analysis about how the terrain has shifted. We thought this issue was gone, wait, maybe it's back. And another thing, it sounds like political geography has shifted too, because now you have a new city council member representing the area around two of these nonprofit universities who are not paying taxes. Which probably shaped some of your thinking about this could be a winnable campaign if some of our targets have shifted. If city council is movable, you've also had other city, progressive city council members, I think, elected during this time. And so February, 2020 happens, you have one in person meeting. And then what? 

Devan Spear: We moved our meetings to zoom like everyone else. And at the beginning, you know, in like March, April, 2020, we were figuring out how to move this campaign virtually and trying to, you know, bring together folks over zoom when that wasn't something that was normalized at the time.

So those two months we really just spent reorienting. We had another meeting of the Penn action team on zoom. We had our first meetings of the Drexel and Jefferson action teams. And people wanted to be involved in something at that time when they felt kind of helpless. So there was this accessibility of here's a zoom meeting that you can join to be part of organizing.

So those two months, we're building, we're building towards a campaign launch. And we launched our campaign officially with a, I think a lot of people were doing events on Facebook Live at the time. It's not quite as much something now, but people were really leaning into Facebook Live. So we did our launch on Facebook Live. We had some speakers. And this was May, 2020. 

So we have this launched campaign. And that was obviously the beginning of the uprisings for racial justice. So we had always had, you know, it was very clear to us. We'd always been really forward with our racial justice analysis of this campaign. The vast majority of students in Philadelphia's public schools are students of color, majority Black students.

It was really clear who's being poisoned and it wasn't the students in the wealthy suburbs. It was the students of color. Mostly poor and working class students who were literally being poisoned. So that was, that analysis was something that we already had. And I think, during the uprisings, it was not our goal to say this campaign is the most important thing that's happening right now.

You know, like there were, there was a lot of really incredibly important organizing that we wanted to support, but we were in this unique position that we had this really clear demand, a really clear way to get involved, and a really clear racial justice analysis. People wanted to participate in something.

A lot of us went to marches. I was going to marches and getting teargassed, but also like some people that's - either they wanna do something else or in addition to, or whatever. So we also had this really clear way to get involved on zoom meeting regularly, meeting other people, moving towards a really concrete goal.

In the summer of 2020 people started to get more comfortable with some in-person masked outdoor actions. So because of the history at Penn, Penn really had the most attention and our most sort of established action team. So we started to move towards a public direct action at the University of Pennsylvania. In July, we had our first direct action. We turned out 50 people to Penn's campus in front of the building where they were having a meeting for the board of trustees. We called it a week of actions.

We had other actions that were happening at the time. We had an online photo campaign that was targeting the chair of the board of trustees. And that's something that changed on the University of Pennsylvania side. So the Drexel and Jefferson teams had never existed like that organizing had not existed.They were not targets previously. So there was a lot more groundwork that had to be laid over there. On the Penn side, like, this previous iteration of the campaign had really focused on Penn's president Amy Gutmann. And we wanted to sort of pull the curtain back on who has power at this institution.

So we made sure that David Cohen, the chair of the board of trustees sort of entered the scene as one of our villains. And during this week of action that built up to this direct action at a board of trustees meeting, we had another thing that people were doing earlier in the pandemic. We had a photo campaign that we called dear David Cohen, and we had people take photos with signs that started with dear David Cohen. That was their personal reason why they wanted Penn to pay PILOTs. So we got a fair amount of news coverage for this action. 

And after that, we sort of continued building and a player in this version of the campaign that really changed things at Penn specifically sas that faculty got involved in a way that they had not before, because you know, the first iteration of the campaign, like I said, was really an advocacy campaign. So there wasn't really an effort to engage directly impacted folks. There also was not really an effort to engage the like stakeholders who realistically do hold power to pressure their institutions.

So the Penn action team was largely alumni, students, and staff at the university. And this faculty group emerged that wanted to sort of work with us. They were, they were born out of the campaign, like they identified as being under the umbrella of the Jobs with Justice campaign, but they sort of wanted to set their own faculty specific priorities and strategies. 

So they really focused hard on the press. We were over here doing direct action. They were doing faculty positions, op-eds, really, really focusing on getting as much press as possible about, faculty want Penn to pay PILOTs. And I think both are effective. It, you know, I don't think there would've been a lot of traction without direct action, but this press moved us forward a lot.

It was a novelty. Like people had never before heard faculty saying, I want my employer, the university, to make these payments. 

Andrew Willis Garcés: And to what extent is the Schools coalition involved or visible at all in this? 

Devan Spear: So at this point, Our City, Our Schools had moved into becoming sort of a broader issue-based coalition.

So it was a hub, a home, for all of these organizations wanting to further justice for our Philadelphia's public schools. And so there were a number of campaigns moving within the Our City, Our Schools coalition at the same time. So at that time, essentially, we Jobs with Justice were anchoring the PILOTs's campaign, And then we would come to Our City, Our Schools and we would report back on what was happening. And we would, you know, get feedback from other groups and get their support on our actions. 

And the other thing that happened is, this was something that Aiden was grappling with. We realized that for a lot of folks who are most directly impacted by public school underfunding, they wouldn't necessarily gravitate towards any one action team.

Aiden started building what we called a Philly action team that gave folks a place to plug in. If they didn't feel directly impacted or it didn't resonate with them to be part of one particular institution's action team. The way that it evolved is ,we had some overlap between the Our City, Our Schools coalition, and the Philly action team.

You know, the folks who were members of organizations within Our City, Our Schools, that were organizations of like people who are directly involved in public schools, so student organizations, parent organizations, teacher, organizations, cetera, the folks who are most excited about PILOTs from Our City, Our Schools became involved in the Philly action team.

And then we had some other folks who weren't necessarily coming out of Our City, Our Schools, but were invested in PILOTs.

Andrew Willis Garcés: It sounds like there were a lot of people that when the pandemic hit, who ended up joining the campaign action teams, who were looking for something to give their time to in March in April and sort of helped build that initial momentum for the first, for the virtual action that you all launched with. And then eventually the first in person rally in July, but also after the George Floyd uprisings, there were all kinds of new formations, existing formations who were recruiting tons of people who were looking to support racial justice fights of different kinds. And this was one of them.

Devan Spear: Yep. 

Andrew Willis Garcés: And that sort of gave you all extra momentum and visibility. And I think so did the fact that the University of Pennsylvania police were involved in cracking down on some of the post George Floyd murder protests. And so when you have faculty getting engaged, you have students engaged, you have alumni, and you all are heading into the fall.

It sounds like really focusing on the board of trustees and the chair of board of trustees, as the people who can make this happen, as opposed to - sounds like there wasn't really a way that you all could find for filing a lawsuit or for having city council pass a law. Although I think you're about to tell us about some city council members, or at least joining in spirit, or at least trying to figure out how to bring some of their persuasive power, if the point was to persuade the board of trustees to cave to your demands.

Devan Spear: Right, exactly. So at this point, we weren't looking for like consensus among city council, because if somebody is indifferent to PILOTs, it doesn't really matter. And there wasn't a whole lot of organized opposition on city council. So what we were looking for was champions. We also had a really supportive newly elected state representative, and  his district included both Penn and Drexel.

We had a lot of support from Rick Krajewski, the state rep. We had a lot of support from a new progressive at large city council member, Kendra Brooks. And we also had some support from the new district council member, Jamie Gauthier. She actually turned out to be a really, really strong, progressive advocate for her district. I think it was much more important to have those champions putting really public pressure on these institutions than it was to get some kind of bland consensus from city council.

Andrew Willis Garcés: So what starts to happen? You've got these protests, you've got letters from faculty, you've got petitions and, September, October; what starts to happen that makes you think you guys are having some traction moving the board or not. 

Devan Spear: I mean, as happens frequently the board of trustees was not interested in negotiating with us. I guess I never thought that it would be the case that they would want to negotiate with us directly.

Obviously that was part of our messaging, but I think it was in their interest to pretend that they were not ceding to our demands, that they were just doing things at their own accord. 

Andrew Willis Garcés: And how were they responding? 

Devan Spear: They had a few defenses of why they wouldn't pay PILOTs. One was that they already contribute to the city via the wage tax, which is ridiculous because everyone has to pay the wage tax. Like they don't particularly have to pay the wage tax more than anyone else. And the wage tax doesn't fund public schools. 

The other major one is that they contribute a lot of funding to one specific public school, the Penn Alexander school. But people had sort of soured on that as a positive contribution, because what happened is that wealthy people moved into the catchment zone for that school because it was the highest quality public school around.

It just fundamentally changed the neighborhood. Those houses cost a million dollars. Like it is no longer a school for working class and poor children. So I think at that point, you know, they could say, oh, we do so much for public schools, but I think people were buying that a lot less at the time.

They just had the most bland little statements in the press. Like, we do so much for public schools. There's no reason for us to pay PILOTs. We already contribute through the wage tax go away. So it's not like there was a lot of public dialogue, which I think in some ways worked in our favor because all of the messaging out there was from us.

And so, you know, this was all happening behind closed doors. We were not at the table for these negotiations. But our public demand had been 40% of foregone property taxes. At a certain point, the numbers are kind of arbitrary. Like the, the only, the only real demand would be a hundred percent of foreground property taxes that wasn't gonna happen with PILOTs that's gonna happen, that would have to happen on the state level. 

This was sort of like the first phase of the campaign asking for 6 million, the second phase of the campaign, we're up here with 40% of foreground property taxes, which is a lot of money. 

Andrew Willis Garcés: It's like $30 million a year for a Penn alone, something like that.

Devan Spear: Yes, it was a really high, we like escalated. And to me as an organizer, I was thinking, we're not gonna get what we asked for. Like, that's not how it works. So we are gonna shoot way higher so that when they come down, you know, my fear was like, they give us $2 million and it totally zaps our momentum. And then we're left with this kind of terrible in between place where they've given us this tiny bit of money, but we've theoretically won a victory.

So we shot really high. They didn't give us a call to tell us because they wanted to pretend it wasn't PILOTs. So we found out like everybody else through the media, that they had committed to $10 million a year for 10 years to remediate lead and asbestos. It is pretty funny that they wanna pretend that those aren't our demands, because we were the ones who were demanding the lead and asbestos remediation.

But we found out through the media, like everyone else. 

Andrew Willis Garcés: It was a big victory. I mean, it was more than you all for sure thought. And a thing you told me earlier was that actually you all didn't overwhelmingly respond immediately with, thanks, University of Pennsylvania, for doing what we exactly what we wanted.

This is actually more than we thought we would get. Instead. It sounds like your campaign leadership had already inoculated yourselves against any kind of low ball offer. And what was the vibe, what did they end up saying? 

Devan Spear: Our messaging was really strong about how much we deserved and our inoculation that we would be low-balled was pretty thorough. So me personally, having had the context that basically no one else has, like, I am the only person who was doing this from, I think 2015 to 2021 was my span. I was the only person with that perspective. So to me, my context stretching back to the beginning, I was like, yeah, $10 million, I didn't think we'd win that, so that's great. 

Our base was pissed. They were like, that's not 40%. You didn't give us what we demanded. Which I had to be like, you know what? This tells me that there's a future for this campaign. And there's a lot of fire in people and a lot of fight to keep pushing. I had only committed to a year and I really could only commit to that year. And we only had the funding for that one year. 

From my perspective, my job was to set up these action teams and everyone who was involved in this campaign to keep organizing autonomously after we were no longer coordinating. 

And so our final action, our final big action was a march, our biggest march ever, funnily enough, that took place in March 2021, that we spent a lot of time preparing for A) as a way to sort of make sure that our members were seeing the ins and outs of organizing a direct action and taking on leadership themselves. And B) because we wanted to symbolically move this march from, we started at the University of Pennsylvania and we ended at Drexel. Sort of like, symbolically we won this victory. We are moving forward, we're gonna keep going. So we had like 200, 250 people at that march. It was really great. We had really good speakers.

It is funny to me, it was the most well-attended public action that we ever had, which, you know, people get excited when you've won something. And then after that, we, Jobs with Justice, moved back, stepped back from any public action. And we really just had Aiden spending all of their time supporting our action teams working with them to make sure that they were building their own agenda-writing skills, facilitation skills, strategic planning skills, all of those things.

And then Aiden left at the end of June and we moved on to different projects and all of the action teams are still functioning. They've sort of expanded. I think it's really nice. There was this perspective on all of the ways that ordinary Philadelphians are being cheated out of the revenue that is owed to us.

So there are action team members who have been super involved in a wealth tax that has been introduced by council member Kendra Brooks, who is one of our strong supporters. And I think that one thing that I'm really proud of is that I think that we were a really nurturing space for people to become organizers.

I think that we just were a real nurturing learning environment for people who had never organized before to build their own skills and take that into the future with PILOTs and with other things.

Andrew Willis Garcés: So we're starting to get into the current phase, if you will. So you all wind down your commitment and your anchoring of the campaign in March 2021. And ironically you're winding it down, but it's also the largest action public action that you all have had and specifically targeting Drexel. And so maybe just help wrap up the story in terms of it's March 2021 to today. What's the status of that $10 million a year? Where is it? Is it going to fix the schools, but also what's the status of the fight with Drexel and what are the other action teams focused on today, if not winning PILOTs? 

Devan Spear: Yeah, it was really difficult to target three universities at the same time. And I honestly don't think that Drexel and Jefferson are gonna be paying PILOTs in the near future. Because I think something that I learned from this campaign is that you need to have the strategy in place that you can meet a moment, to move something forward so quickly. So I don't think that we could have generated the same momentum without the organic public political consciousness that was happening at the time. And we wouldn't have won that issue if that moment had happened without a campaign in place.

I don't think that this campaign is continuing on an upward trajectory. You know, when Jobs with Justice stepped back, I don't think that's how I expected it to work. And I will say, Drexel and Jefferson had unique challenges. Like the Jefferson action team actually had some really, really intense retaliation against the medical students who were involved.

They were threatened with disciplinary action fordoing their own week of action with a photo campaign and wearing Jefferson like sweatshirts and hats. They were threatened with discipline for that. There's a lot of leverage over them as medical students who need a lot of resources to graduate.

So it was really difficult to target three at the same time. I do know that Penn has made their payments. I know that specifically from the faculty organization, which is still meeting really regularly. Also the action teams have coalesced under a new umbrella, which is called the Philly Revenue Project. That's why they've been working on the wealth tax. 

Like when Jobs with Justice was anchoring the PILOTs campaign within Our City, Our Schools, now the action teams are anchoring their own PILOTs campaigns within the Revenue Project. So I think there's just gonna be another period of, PILOTs isn’t at the forefront of the work that they're doing. The wealth tax is the big revenue project right now. But I think that there's definitely a future for Drexel and Jefferson to take up the torch of a lot of sustained public direct action for PILOTs.

Andrew Willis Garcés: That makes a lot of sense. There were other lessons that you feel like are especially relevant. You said having a strategy that meets the moment. And it makes me think about the way that you all structure those action teams and took advantage of the moment and moments of 2020.

Can you share more about that and, and how we might use more of what worked for you all? 

Devan Spear: It's a really hard moment right now because I think we're seeing a lot of the wins that we had from that period being rolled back. It feels right now, like a tough moment to remember that sometimes there are organic political moments that move us forward.

My lesson, I guess, is that when you have a moment like that happen and you are trying to pick demands and organize afterward, it's really, really hard to grab onto something that has staying power. 

Andrew Willis Garcés: Can you walk us through, how did that play out for you all in terms of coming up with demands with staying power afterwards?

Devan Spear: We just had this really clear demand and a really clear strategy to make it happen. And so when this moment did happen we had all of these ways to bring people in and move them into action in a really precise way.

It is not at all a critique of mass movement, organic organizing, which I also very much participated in. But I think that we just need ongoing lasting structures. And we are not gonna necessarily build sustained power without strong healthy organizing structures and ongoing relationships that will be sustained before and after the big moment, 

Andrew Willis Garcés: You all had these action teams in place, you also figured out a way to basically help effect the faculty group, start their own action team, all under the umbrella of we have a focus on a specific demand, and we think that there's the board of trustees led by this one guy who can implement that demand, who can say yes or no to it can make it happen.

And there are people who can put pressure on them, who were trying to activate - that was all sort, the overarching strategy. And you had structures to bring people in. Do you think this campaign would've won when it did, without both the pandemic giving you all some momentum and volunteer energy, and then the George Floyd uprising, especially.

Devan Spear: No, I don't think either would've won without the other. I don't think the strategy would've won without the moment in a year, maybe in a few years, but not in a year. I don't think that we would've won PILOTs without the strategic plan and the structure, they both needed each other.

And the only thing we control is the structure. So, you know, we can't wait. Like, I guess what I'm saying is in some ways we do have to wait for the moment to happen, but we also cannot afford to wait because if we are scrambling to build something, when it's already happening, in a lot of ways, it's too late.

Andrew Willis Garcés: For sure. Well, and I appreciate also that you had baked into this campaign that, we can make a commitment for a year to either change the story about this or make it a story, make it a demand that resonated with the public or with a wider group. Or maybe get it now put into more candidates’ for elected offices platforms, but that you knew ahead of time, we just wanna get to the next phase or the next rung up the ladder. Not necessarily that we're promising to win this campaign in one year. And I wonder if there's more - that there's a lesson in there for us, also given where we are - progressive movements, grassroots organizers this year.

Devan Spear: We're moving forward with really different projects. We just have to keep building strong structures and wait for a time when they can really take off and move us.

Andrew Willis Garcés: By “other projects,” do you mean other campaigns, and what are some of those things that you think, well, we're just kind of building a structure and we're waiting for a moment to lift our sails. 

Devan Spear: We actually hired, there's three of us now. And we have been working on the launch of a campaign called Philly Fair Warehouses that really came out of the sort of conditions that logistics warehouse and delivery workers were working under during the pandemic. I think if we had had this idea before the pandemic and there was all this focus on essential workers, we could have moved forward a lot more quickly in a way that it's just not gonna happen right now.

All of our work right now is on base building. We need a powerful base of organized warehouse workers who are developed as leaders who can be ready to meet a moment.

And something else I'll add is that we worked really closely with the National Domestic Workers Alliance on the Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights here in Philly. And the Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights was won really quickly prior to the pandemic. But the membership didn't explode until during the pandemic.

And now they have like hundreds and hundreds of members who are gearing up for new projects. It's not that you'll wait for the moment, and then you have it, and then you lose it. You can use it to move you forward if you're ready for it.

Andrew Willis Garcés: Definitely seems relevant for us right now what you're saying. By us, I mean, organizers here in the south where I am, and in other places, where depending on our position we're neighborhood organizing, we're workplace organizing, wherever it is. We may be watching over our shoulders at the Starbucks worker union or Amazon or other places that are taking off. And then in our neighborhoods, it might feel really slow and really hard to get a lot of attention around the issues we're organizing around. 

Devan Spear: And it also is the flip side that like, we cannot wait to meet a moment like the Dobbs ruling and be like, oops! guess we should have had stronger structures. What are we supposed to do now? 

Andrew Willis Garcés: Yep, absolutely. Stepping back from this campaign. Is there another offering? Is there another wish that you have for us on the left, trying to build power with millions of people as organizers that doesn't have to be a lesson and doesn't have to be from this campaign, but just something that you'd like to leave as the final offering.

Devan Spear: A wish that I have is that we have more structured ways for people to become organizers, because we don't have a lot of ways for people who don't have experience, who want this to be their life path, to spend their time organizing. We just don't. We have paid full time organizing gigs that are kind of few and far between and competitive and require experience. And then there's not much else. I just wish that we would have more of that. In terms of on the ground, like you get to be an organizer now, even though you haven't done it before is a few and far between, so that would be my wish.

Andrew Willis Garcés: Think it's a wish we can all join you with. Devan Spear, thank you so much for your time, for your stories, for your offerings. Appreciate you.

Devan Spear: Thank you for having me.

Andrew Willis Garcés: The Craft of Campaigns podcast is a project of the Organizing Skills Institute at Training for Change, and made possible by grassroots donors. Visit Training for Change for workshops, training tools, and other resources. We welcome your feedback; if you like these episodes, please consider donating, to keep the show running. This podcast is produced by Ali Roseberry-Polier. I’m Andrew Willis Garces. See you next time.