All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file. When Care Workers Organize Behind Myanmar's Devastating Earthquake Trump's Concentration Camps in El Salvador How Strikes Build Democratic Workplaces Executive Disorder: White House Weekly #12 You can now listen to all Cool Zone Media shows, 100% ad-free through the Cooler Zone Media subscription, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. So, open your Apple Podcasts app, search for “Cooler Zone Media” and subscribe today! http://apple.co/coolerzone Sources/Links: When Care Workers Organize https://www.instagram.com/friendspdxunionnetwork/ https://friendspdx.org/donate Behind Myanmar's Devastating Earthquake https://www.irrawaddy.com/news/burma/up-to-700-myanmar-muslims-killed-in-quake-hit-mosques-weakened-by-neglect.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/30/world/asia/myanmar-earthquake-aftershocks-airstrikes.html https://myanmar-now.org/en/news/myanmar-juntas-aerial-attacks-continue-despite-post-quake-ceasefire/ https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/myanmar-junta-shoots-chinese-earthquake-aid-convoy-rcna199233 https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/world/asia/myanmar-earthquake-aid.html https://www.reuters.com/article/economy/myanmar-lashes-out-at-quotchocolate-barquot-foreign-aid-idUSSP172535/ https://www.irrawaddy.com/news/burma/lives-updates-quake-death-toll-rises-to-3600-junta-suspends-tourist-visa-after-quake-private-us-field-hospital-in-naypyitaw-and-more.html https://www.irrawaddy.com/opinion/guest-column/global-response-to-myanmar-earthquake-shines-light-on-strategic-rivalries.html https://www.irrawaddy.com/news/burma/live-updates-death-toll-exceeds-3500-hundreds-in-urgent-need-of-quake-aid-juntas-airstrikes-still-rage-on-and-more.html https://www.irrawaddy.com/news/world/live-updates-death-toll-rises-to-3471-quake-relief-teams-must-obey-junta-us-pledges-additional-7-million-in-quake-relief-and-more.html https://myanmar-now.org/en/news/resistance-forces-capture-indaw-town-after-months-of-fighting/?sfnsn=scwspmo https://www.irrawaddy.com/news/war-against-the-junta/myanmar-junta-airstrikes-kill-over-30.html Trump's Concentration Camps in El Salvador https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogLw7I2BWO0 https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/14/el-salvador-president-return-wrongly-deported-trump-00289234 https://documentedny.com/2025/04/14/ice-bukele-cecot-tren-de-aragua-el-salvador-new-york-deported/ How Strikes Build Democratic Workplaces https://gofund.me/9ce38160 https://www.instagram.com/urban_ore_workers/ Executive Disorder: White House Weekly #12 https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/14/investing/us-stock-market/index.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/live/trump-tariffs-live-updates-china-signals-readiness-for-talks-if-us-shows-respect-amid-numbers-game-191201017.html https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/04/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-ensures-national-security-and-economic-resilience-through-section-232-actions-on-processed-critical-minerals-and-derivative-products/ https://www.npr.org/2025/04/15/nx-s1-5355896/doge-nlrb-elon-musk-spacex-security https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/16/temu-cuts-us-ad-spend-drops-in-app-store-rank-after-trump-tariffs-.html https://www.reuters.com/technology/us-issues-export-licensing-requirements-nvidia-amd-chips-china-2025-04-16/ https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/dispatch-border-wall https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/interior-department-transferring-federal-land-army-border-wall/story?id=65702870 https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/military-mission-for-sealing-the-southern-border-of-the-united-states-and-repelling-invasions/ https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cwy03j9vddlt?post=asset%3Aaff18753-80c9-4445-963e-03b9438ef121#post https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/national-media-release/dhs-issues-waiver-expedite-new-border-wall-construction-california https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/04/08/2025-05992/determination-pursuant-to-section-102-of-the-illegal-immigration-reform-and-immigrant-responsibilitySee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: Who are the care workers organizing at Friends of the Children PDX?
Thank you so much for having us.
Yeah, thank you. Yeah, I'm really happy to talk to you both because I think this is a very, very unique and interesting union, especially, you know, talk about especially right now. But to get people sort of rolling, can you explain what Friends of the Children is and what it is that you two do?
Yeah. So Friends of the Children is, it's a national organization. It's a nonprofit, but there are individual chapters throughout different cities. We work out of Portland, which is the founding chapter and also the largest one. Some of the language I'll say that is like used from the website and from like the mission statement that really encompasses
what our role is and also how it is told to like our community partnerships and the families and youth that we work with is that we are committing to youth when they are typically around kindergarten age level and they're being paired with a mentor and they will have a mentor until they graduate the program so that usually ends up being a total of 12 and a half years
And that like within that, we were doing a lot of like individualized care and support. We work with them in the schools. We work with them outside the schools. We help them get into extracurriculars. We help them with like social emotional regulation, developing relationships with other youth in the program, and really just like being a consistently reliable human being.
And one of the big like pillars of our organization is the commitment to long term. Which sometimes can be an issue when you are facing a lot of high turnover as an organization. We both have eight kids on our roster as do most mentors. And within that, we have youth.
I personally have youth that have been assigned to me that have just started in the program, meaning that they were like maybe first grade when I was assigned to them. And then I also have youth that are middle school level that have had several different mentors in the past. Some that have stayed there for maybe a few years. And sometimes there's ones that have been there for months.
Yeah. I can add to that. The kids we work with, they're enrolled into the program because they have some risk factors in their lives that would lead them to needing a little bit of extra support and help. So we work with a lot of kids. that come from immigrant families, from families that have, you know, single parent households, foster care, families and kids, kids that like,
unfortunately are likely to face some challenges that our society and the way it's built up will deal to them. And our goal is to help them through those challenges, just be there for them so that they have a chance of, you know, graduating high school or entering adulthood or,
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Chapter 2: What challenges do mentors face in their long-term commitment to youth?
That ideally you're working with the same person and, you know, you're forming really deep emotional attachments because you can't not do that if you're doing this kind of work. But then also... you know, in order for that to work, I think this is, you know, you can see this from the outside, it's like, in order for this to work, this has to be a job that you could stably do for a decade, right?
Like, you have to
Yeah.
Yeah. Which I will say we do. And I want to do, I want to give so many props to one of our mentors who has stayed for, for 12 years and has graduated their youth. But of all of our, of all of our coworkers, I believe it's only one that has currently been able to do that and has stayed there as long as I have.
Yeah, yeah. And the truth of the fact, like, yeah, A, for any job, 12 and a half years is a really long time, right? I mean, six years is a really long time. And with this job, we're an emotional sponge for a lot of things, right? So our kids go through... Everything that you could imagine and within that, like everything good and everything bad that you could imagine.
And our job a lot of times is like we can't solve the things that are affecting these kids, but we can take in some of those things.
negative feelings and and that grief uh that anger we can take it in and almost like dissolve it a little bit right but within that like it can affect us so so much um and that's where yeah the sustainability part of like 12 and a half years in this job like that is a lot um and and you we need a lot for that to like at all be be possible
Yeah, I mean, there's this way in which you're effectively... What this job is, is you're the person who is trying to mitigate the impact of literally all of the structural systems of violence that exist in this entire country. And how they're just sort of targeted down on these kids. And your job is to try to...
protect them as much as possible and that's unbelievable amount of like physical and emotional labor and then also like i don't know it seems pretty bad that there's only been one co-worker who's been able to graduate their kids like
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Chapter 3: Why did Friends of the Children PDX start unionizing?
really talking about this but then when you're dealing with bargaining for 580 days like it's exhausting it is so exhausting we have regular meetings that we attend to that uh our bargaining meetings were specifically scheduled outside of work hours so that like the people on our bargaining team and other union members would have to put in that extra time outside of our 40-hour week uh Yeah.
And within that, the hardest part is when you directly confront your managers and your bosses about the rights and the things that you need. So much of it boils down to respect and your respect as a worker and the value that you have as a worker in your organization. And when there is the pushback on that, it honestly is like for me at times was debilitating, right?
When you're doing this work and your workplace is stretching things out for so long and And you're pouring your heart out on your kids, like really trying to do the best. That response from our, you know, our supervisors and managers, like it really was hard. It was hard for me.
It was hard for other union organizers in our workplace and was hard for all of our workers where we started thinking like, dang, like what is the value that we have? like in this workplace? What is the value that we intrinsically have in the work that we're doing with our kids? It's a lot.
And it's a lot when you're facing all these systems that our kids are facing and like taking those things in and then are trying to change those systems, finally able to try to change those systems. And we learned that like, oh, wait, like the place that we're working is actually part of these systems too.
And it's doing the same things that we're like fighting to have our kids like have better lives. Like we're facing it right now from inside the house. Yeah.
Yeah, I wanted to add in to, yeah, very much realizing that like our management is also in a way operating, you know, maybe like a corporation, which isn't the hope you would have for a nonprofit. And one of the steps we had to take as a union was filing a UOP, so unfair labor practice, which cited, like I had mentioned before, like delays in scheduling and also regressive bargaining issues.
which just means that like the way in which they were presenting things would have lessened our like quality of conditions. So definitely not what you want to be getting. Not what you want to be handed across from the bargaining table. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, within this process, they were currently hourly workers, but they tried to change us to hourly workers. Oh, my God. Yeah.
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Chapter 4: How have the unionization negotiations progressed over two years?
Yeah.
Yeah, thank you so much for having us. Yeah, of course. Honestly, it's been great talking about the work because it is really important work and I'm happy we get to do it.
Yeah, it's wonderful. And yeah, and so this is, yeah, this is what could happen here. And yeah, also go unionize your workplace. You can do it. I guarantee it.
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