“Nobody’s Free Until Everybody’s Free”: The Importance of Storytelling in Reimagining Justice

A Letter from Public Rights Project’s COO on workers’ rights, collective accountability, and our new magazine, THE PUBLIC.

Government of, by, and for the people is a phrase we’ve all heard so many times, and yet the actual experiences of many communities challenge us to consider that many of “the people” have not actually been served or represented by the government at all.

Public Rights Project (PRP)’s mission is to close the gap between the promise of our laws and the lived reality of underserved communities — the protections they never see or benefit from.

We believe local government can and must proactively enforce the rights of its most overlooked and undermined residents — low-income working people, immigrants, people of color — rather than defaulting to responding to the most privileged.

THE PUBLIC is yet another reflection of the vital work PRP has been doing around our core value of Reimagining Justice. Through this publication, we aim to center the voices of people least served by government and capitalism and those moving the needle within the establishment itself—people like Kimberly Fayette, a Justice Catalyst-Public Rights Project Fellow doggedly pursuing racial justice for the New York City Commission on Human Rights.

By lifting up their experiences and voices, we are working to close the enforcement gap by closing an empathy gap as well, one that stands in the way of our understanding — of feeling on a visceral level — that our country’s economic viability is at stake along with our collective humanity.

Our values as a nation and the lives that comprise it are decidedly on the line.

Every day it seems we are confronting choice points to decide who we want to be as individuals and as a country — who we are holding accountable, for what, and how. And we need to make our choices clear: Are we a nation that only supports people’s right to fair wages and safe working conditions conceptually or one that gives meaning to those rights and brings corporate abusers to task?

Are we a country that believes all working people deserve access to justice? Or are we a people that will gladly consume services and products but sideline, silence, and all but dispose of the lives that make that consumption possible?

Remaining disconnected from working people’s experiences alienates us not only from our own humanity, but prevents us from generating the collective will to prioritize the economic security and safety of regular people over the interests of corporate oligarchs.

Through our daily work, and amplified by THE PUBLIC, PRP is fostering a bridge between community organizing and government enforcement — getting at the essential connective tissue in a representative democracy — of governments fighting for their people, for the humans they represent. And authentic, representative, first-hand accounts and storytelling from the people most impacted are a vital piece of that puzzle.

Stories connect us when we hear them. Stories heal us when we share them. And perhaps most importantly?

Stories move us to action when they expose the gap between what we say and what we do.

While I was trained as a lawyer, I have not formally practiced for years; now working with lawyers again, I sometimes find I have no idea what my colleagues are talking about, the jargon can feel opaque, the legislation discussions wonky. But I always understand real stories — I can immediately grasp what’s at stake for individuals, families, and communities when government fails to act.

Make no mistake, the working people sharing their stories of harm here in this publication are courageous — raising one’s hand and saying, “this isn’t right” can be accompanied by very real fears of retaliation. But the more people raise their hands and the more platforms that publish their stories, helps build momentum and visibility.

THE PUBLIC will serve as one of those platforms — shining a light on those stories we don’t often hear but need to — a place to help catalyze an ecosystem of partners who, like us, are unwavering in putting people over corporations.

THE PUBLIC is about a determined shifting of power; it’s the workers’ turn to be heard now.

Let’s listen.

Quote from Fannie Lou Hamer in her speech delivered at the Founding of the National Women’s Political Caucus, Washington, D.C., July 10, 1971