How We Build This

Alex T. Tom on California’s Power: Pods, Prop 50, and Parenting

Episode Summary

Host May Boeve welcomes Alex T. Tom, Executive Director for the Center for Empowered Politics.

Episode Notes

Host May Boeve talks with Alex T. Tom, the Executive Director for the Center for Empowered Politics and longtime leader in California. Tom shares about how Bay Area organizers prepared for ICE raids, and why prebuilt infrastructure, “pods,” and non-cooperation trainings, turned people power into concrete wins. Tom and Boeve discuss “movement utilities,” conflict mediation as capacity, and why understanding philanthropy and class is essential to durable organizing. Plus: parenting as political work, and what it means to “hug it out” as a dad while building a bigger tent.