Some of the important things happening in this country right now do not make the news. They happen in Slack conversations, in phone calls, and during community meetings that start with three people and grow to fifty. Convincing people that change is possible, and that they have power, is hard work. This Women’s History Month, we are highlighting two women who are doing that.
“You bring two people together. Suddenly, you have a movement.”
Two years ago, Michelle, a Childcare Changemaker organizer with Community Change Action, was not really thinking about Nevada. She did not know much about it. Around CCA’s Day Without Child Care 2024, two people contacted her separately. Both are asking about childcare advocacy. She introduced them to each other. That was the beginning.
Day Without Child care is a powerful national action where early childhood educators, parents, and advocates show how essential and valuable child care is by closing their centers, rallying, and demanding policy changes.
Nevada’s Day Without Child Care event began with those two people. Then, in 2025, more than fifty people attended their event! This year, they are already planning for a bigger event. Michelle will tell that her work repeats a lot of the same tasks: sending a lot of messages on Slack to coordinate with staff, a lot of emails to leaders, and a lot of phone calls to people in states she is organizing, including Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Montana, Arizona, Nebraska, Arkansas, and parts of the south. She also has meetings with her team to discuss strategy and checks in with people to make sure they are still involved. She describes her work as “a lot of talking with colleagues and leaders, always strategizing on the most powerful actions we can take for their needs.”
Michelle’s work is so important. It’s important that each of the leaders with Childcare Changemakers feel heard – especially since, for so long, the childcare providers and parents that she’s reaching out to have been left behind, economically and in conversations about what a childcare system that works for all of us could look like.
There is a lot at stake in all these conversations. At one of Nevada’s outreach events, Michelle and her leaders noticed that 30% of attendees spoke only Spanish. And her team did not have a way to communicate with them properly. Instead of ignoring the problem, she is working to fix it. This ability to notice who is being left out and do something about it is what makes Michelle’s organizing work so important.
Spanish-speaking outreach is essential to effective child care organizing. Latina educators make up nearly a quarter of the child care workforce, while over 50% of providers in high-Hispanic-serving settings speak a language other than English.
“We are not just organizing for the sake of organizing. We are organizing to achieve a goal.”
Tottionna is a Senior Policy Manager at Community Change Action. Her work goes beyond her job description. She spends her days researching how direct, unconditional cash payments can help abolish poverty, supporting partners in advancing their guaranteed income campaigns, and helping people become leaders in a movement that has been growing quietly for years.
The successes she talks about are specific. A community call with artists in New York who want to build enough power to pass guaranteed income policies grew from 30 people to 90 people in just a few months. Every day, people come together as a Union for Guaranteed Income, which helped win $7.5 million for a permanent guaranteed income program in Cook County. Well over 150 temporary guaranteed income experiments have been done across the country, and the research shows that giving people cash directly works. It gives people the freedom to make decisions that work for their families and more space to pursue a future beyond day-to-day survival, especially as costs for housing, childcare, and healthcare seem to be rising.
Tottionna is careful not to exaggerate the benefits of a guaranteed income. Cash alone will not fix systemic failures. But it does help people get by, especially as we do the long work of addressing the institutions that are not working for ordinary people. Her colleague’s words have stuck with her: they are not organizing for the sake of organizing. They are organizing to build enough power to change the policies that impact our lives, and she is not losing sight of that.
She has also been thinking a lot about artists. A group she believes should be at the heart of this movement. A former guaranteed income program called Creatives Rebuild New York showed us that artists, who contribute so much meaning to our society through their craft, are struggling financially like so many other groups. They are freelance workers, many earn low incomes or do not have health insurance, and they are parents and immigrants. In ways, Tottionna says, they are exactly who the movement has always been fighting for. “There is a lot of creativity and potential that we do not make room for in our movements,” she says. “Artists can help us bring more people in and achieve our goals.”
Women like Michelle and Tottionna have always been the backbone of movements. Organizing meetings, building relationships, and doing the hard work that creates change. They are not waiting for permission or perfect conditions. They are showing up, connecting people, and changing policies. That is what the movement looks like. Building the future, one conversation at a time.