Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba argue that sustainable organizing depends on reciprocal care: showing up for each other, metabolizing grief and burnout together, and rejecting the idea that movement work requires self-sacrifice to be legitimate. Their framework was written primarily for organizers operating outside formal institutions in their book, "Let this Radicalize You". This session asks a related question. What does reciprocal care look like for people doing equity work inside government, where the pace is slower, the wins are smaller, and the "movement" is often a committee meeting?

Drawing on my work with the Human Rights Commission, I'll talk candidly about what it actually looks like to push equity focused policy through a system that often sees this work as excessive or as a burden to a more streamlined approach. Both functions illustrate a tension that Hayes and Kaba name directly. Institutions are often built to move quickly toward efficiency, and that efficiency can come at the expense of the people who need the most support to access services in the first place. Almost everyone involved shares the same stated goal, ensuring services are accessible to all. But in practice, people tend to avoid the extra steps required to make services genuinely accessible to the most impacted populations, because those steps slow things down.

I'll also talk about a voter registration and education drive I'm pushing to get off the ground, not as a separate initiative, but as an example of how work inside and outside government can reinforce each other. Voter registration is one of the few places where civic participation and government infrastructure meet without much friction. It's a low barrier entry point for people who want to act but don't yet see themselves as organizers or policy experts.

This session isn't a how to guide for navigating bureaucracy. It's an honest accounting of what it costs to do equity work inside institutions, what reciprocal care looks like when your "movement" is a handful of colleagues and a public comment period, and how attendees, whether they work in government, alongside it, or entirely outside it, can find their own leverage points. We'll spend real time in breakout conversation, because the point isn't just to hear my experience. It's to compare notes. Where do participants see the push for efficiency working against accessibility in their own context? Where have they found, or lost, reciprocal care in their work? And where might a voter registration effort, or something like it, create connective tissue between people working on the inside and the outside?