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The Next Move - Season 1

Episode 3: A Homes Guarantee with Tara Raghuveer

Episode Summary

Rent is due and sheltering in place becomes infinitely more difficult if you can’t make rent. In this episode, George talks about our national housing crisis with Tara Raguvheer, Director of KC Tenants and the Housing Campaign Director for People’s Action–and what our world can look like if we detach profit motives from the provisioning of basic needs, like a place to call to home. 

Season 1 - Episode 3

Guest Bios

Tara Raguvheer

Tara Raguvheer is the Director of KC Tenants and the Housing Campaign Director for People’s Action.

Twitter: @taraghuveer Facebook: @taraghuveer

Photo of George Goehl

George Goehl

Host

At age 21, George Goehl walked into a soup kitchen to eat. Over time, he became an employee – first washing dishes and eventually helping run the place. Three years later, he was struck by seeing the same people in line as when he first arrived. He began to organize.  

Today, George is the director of People’s Action, a multiracial poor and working class people’s organization. He leads one of the largest race-conscious rural progressive organizing efforts in the United States. 

Following the financial crisis, George and National People’s Action mobilized more people into the streets than any other organization to demand accountability, help win Financial Reform, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and secure mortgage relief. 

The New York TimesThe Washington PostThe Guardian, CNN, MSNBC and others have covered George’s organizing work.

Season 1 - Episode 3

Learn More

Join our weekly organizing call for a Homes Guarantee.

Season 1 - Episode 3

Learn More

  • Read our briefing book, “A National Homes Guarantee,” a vision straight from the people impacted by the nation’s housing crisis. 
  • Watch our Homes Guarantee intro video.
  • “The mismatch between housing need and costs has been a constant feature of the U.S. economy,” Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor in The New Yorker. “The dynamic is especially acute for African-Americans.”
  • Read more about Tara’s work and the work of the Homes Guarantee team in The New York Times as they re-imagine organizing in an age of social distancing.
The Next Move - Season 1

Other Episodes

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Episode 2: The Care Economy, Employment and a Living Wage with Ai-jen Poo

Overnight essential work has become part of the global lexicon. Ai-jen Poo, founder and Executive Director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, talks to George about forging a new common sense out of this vocabulary--and the opportunity we have to re-examine how we think about work and what work we value.
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Episode 4: Merging Race and Class with Ian Haney Lopez

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Episode 6: Building a Coalition with Robert Kraig

Because the pandemic has intensified the unequal, dangerous structure of our healthcare system, we need to establish healthcare as a guaranteed right for everyone. Which means now is the time for bold mandates and the creation of a new common sense that centers on a coalitional government. George talks with Robert Kraig, Executive Director of Citizen Action of Wisconsin, about lessons we’ve learned from the New Deal and the Works Progress Administration, and even the Great Recession, about building a healthier, more equitable future.
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Episode 7: Make a F*@&ing Play with Marisa Franco

We are becoming an America we’ve never been. The Latinx community has been hit hard by COVID 19. Marisa Franco, director and co-founder of Mijente, talks with George about organizing infrastructure to support progressive leadership in the immigrant rights and broader Latinx and Chicanx community. This brutal moment of recovering, unlearning, and remembering is teaching us that we are only as safe and healthy as the most vulnerable among us -- and that through inclusive collectivity, we can move from respectability politics to strong, multiracial alliances and people power.
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Episode 8: Onward with George Goehl

In our final episode, George expresses his hope that we can organize the most people to create long-term, transformative change for America.
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