OUR PROJECT AND ITS AIMS

Millions of lives have been upended by the actions of the Trump administration and its political allies. In every area of the country – coastal, heartland, urban, rural, red, blue, purple – Americans have been fired, demoted, defunded, deported, disappeared, de-legalized, or simply hammered in the pocketbook. The mission of the We Are Your Neighbors project is to gather and call attention to the stories of a broad selection of these people – immigrants and collateral victims of ICE terror, civil servants, veterans, farmers, small-business owners, Medicaid beneficiaries, and others.

Our work rests on the belief, first, that the great majority of Americans possess an instinctive sense of fairness and common decency that would rebel at the inhumanity, greed, and cruelty of the Trump agenda if they fully understood it; and second, that stories, more than abstract, rational argument, have the power to create that understanding. We have set out to build a gallery of portraits of those who have been targeted or punished by the administration in one way or another. Through their stories, promoted in mainstream and social media, in stand-alone videos, and in public story-telling events, we hope to reach and touch some of the many millions of Americans who (even among the anti-Trump majority) are not yet sufficiently alarmed.

We view our project as a valuable, consciousness-raising complement to the more policy-focused efforts of a broad, decentralized, nonviolent opposition movement working to limit the destructive power of the Trump administration and to awaken a national longing for genuine democracy and a more just and equitable society.

In service of that overall goal, our project seeks to:

• Dramatize the worth and humanity of immigrants and government workers – two of the administration’s prime target groups, chosen in the belief that most Americans don’t much care what happens to them;
• Shine a light on the many other categories of Americans wounded by Trump’s policies;
• Supply issue-focused advocacy groups with evidence to support their policy pushback;
• Help shaken people find one another, break out of their isolation, fear and distress, and forge strategies of resilience and resistance;
• Help bring working- and middle-class Americans together in opposition to the political, economic, racial, ethnic, and environmental injustices that Trump and his partners have done their best to reinforce and aggravate.

We don’t expect to convince the MAGA faithful. The audience we have in mind includes the tens of millions of Americans who voted for Trump in 2024 without sharing his ugliest impulses or buying into his cruelest plans, as well as the tens of millions who didn’t bother to vote, in many cases because they had come to view the two major parties, and the whole political process, with disdain. Many such people are already feeling unsettled, and, depending on the course of the economy and other forces, could be open to hearing a deeper case against Trump and his policies. How they respond to that case, however, will depend in no small part on how it is presented to them.

The sociologist Arlie Russell Hoschchild, writing in the New York Times last summer, quoted a Kentucky man’s warning that “people around here will get more pissed at the snarky left than they are at the hurtful right” if Trump’s opponents try to sound clever and speak from on high – if their message comes across as “We told you so” or “You Trump supporters brought this on yourselves.” With that concern in mind, we mean to tell our stories in a matter-of-fact way, without undue political pleading or framing. “These people are your neighbors. Here’s how they’ve been treated.” That’s our simple message.

Although our project is intended to be impactful in the near term, we plan to continue gathering stories, and promoting them, into 2027 and 2028. We are compiling a record of experiences that could easily be overlooked or forgotten by history. If the United States is fortunate enough to recover from its flirtation with one-man rule, our chances of setting ourselves firmly on a path of expanded democracy and respect for human rights will depend in no small part on our ability to remember and examine this period fully and clearly. That, too, is an important part of our mission.

PROJECT TEAM

James Lardner (Project Director) is a longtime contributor to The New Yorker as well as The American Prospect and The New York Review of Books, among other publications. His books include “Up to Our Eyeballs: How Shady Lenders and Failed Economic Policies Are Drowning Americans in Debt” (co-author and editor) and “NYPD: A City and Its Police” (co-author).

Tom Weis (Reporter) is a climate and social justice activist as well as a longtime contributor to HuffPost and Common Dreams, among other online publications. He is president of the mission-driven consulting firm, Climate Crisis Solutions, and the author of “WORLDFIRE: A Climate Journey from the Depths of Despair to a Haven of Hope.”

Lauren Jadotte (Reporter) is a communications strategist and designer who has spent her career amplifying stories that deal with financial justice, culture, and community. She has led storytelling and digital campaigns for national nonprofits and brings a background in journalism and visual communication to her reporting.

Emma Winn (Website Manager) is a communications professional, a 2025 graduate of Shepherd University, and an active member of the veterans’ community in Martinsburg, West Virginia.

BOARD OF ADVISORS

Douglas Lasdon is Executive Director of New York City’s Urban Justice Center, which he founded forty years ago in a burned-out building in East Harlem. Through its many anchor projects, UJC serves tens of thousands of people contending with homelessness, discrimination, and partner violence, among other deep problems.

Bill McKibben is a journalist, an environmental activist and the founder of Third Act, a fellowship of older Americans determined to change the world for the better.  He sounded the alarm about climate change with his 1989 book The End of Nature.

Miles Rapoport is a longtime organizer, policy advocate, and elected official as well as the Executive Director of 100% Democracy, which seeks to reimagine voting as both a fundamental right and a civic responsibility, with every eligible citizen required to participate.

Nancy Rosenblum is a political scientist and political philosopher, Professor of Ethics in Politics and Government at Harvard University, and the author, most recently, of Ungoverning: The Attack on the Administrative State and the Politics of Chaos.

Mike Tidwell is the founder and director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, a grassroots nonprofit organization dedicated to raising awareness about the impacts and solutions associated with global warming in Maryland, Virginia, Washington D.C., West Virginia, and nationwide.

LEGAL COUNSEL

Peter Jaszi is Emeritus Professor of Law at the Washington College of Law, American University, Washington, D.C., and a world-renowned expert on intellectual-property law.

FISCAL SPONSOR

We Are Your Neighbors is a project of the Oil and Gas Action Network (OGAN), an IRS-recognized 501c3 nonprofit.