What is Co-Governance?
For more resources on Co-Governance, read more at: https://dignityandrights.org/resource... http://newsocialcontract.org https://dignityandrights.org We all have the same needs: a safe place to live, fair working conditions, a good education for our kids, and medical care when we need it. We want a say in how government affects our lives. But every day, the far right is passing legislation that strips us of our basic democratic rights. Our right to teach our kids the truth about our history. Our right to have an abortion, to vote, to protest, to make a livable wage, to be who we are. It doesn’t have to be this way. We can build an inclusive multiracial democracy that gives us a meaningful role in the policy decisions that affect us: decisions not just about which candidate to vote for, but about how the key institutions in our lives–like housing, employment, wealth, income, schools, and health care–should work for all of us. This is called co-governance. Different forms of co-governance have existed for centuries. Before colonial take over of the Americas, some Indigenous nations had already created participatory democratic systems. Co-governance breaks down the boundaries between government and the public to bring people who are directly impacted by policy decisions– like workers, parents, students, tenants, and patients–into direct roles in helping make public policy decisions and making sure they’re implemented effectively and equitably. Co-governance has the potential to shift decision making power over the laws, policies, and public budgets that shape our communities. Across the country, co-governance efforts are reshaping the ways government works. In Jackson Mississippi, a city marked by centuries of racist politics, the People's Advocacy Institute has built people’s assemblies to give local residents a voice in setting the city governments’ agenda, as residents grow their leadership and build community power. In Paterson, New Jersey, local parents and grandparents in the Paterson Education Fund and the Parent Education Organizing Council have worked closely with the school district to shift school policy from harsh discipline toward restorative justice for kids. And in San Francisco, the Chinese Progressive Association has fought for—and won—strong worker-centered enforcement laws, legal processes, and working relationships with the city and the state, enabling low-wage immigrant workers to enforce their own labor rights in restaurants, garment factories, and other industries. These models are powerful because they draw on the strengths of both communities and government. They recognize us as experts on our own workplaces, neighborhoods, schools, hospitals and other institutions, and respect the deep, personal stake we have in making sure these institutions work for people. They also draw on the unique powers of government: the ability to raise taxes, fund public programs, create and enforce laws, regulate private industries, and coordinate collective action. We can have a more just, democratic, society. We need one. And we can build it together.
We must rewrite the rules of power that have led us to the current crisis of rights and democracy our country is facing. A significant part of the answer to that challenge lies in communities, workers, and their social movements at the frontline of injustice. If we face a democracy in peril, who better to guide us toward a different future than those with the most at stake who also have the boldest solutions.
Partners for Dignity & Rights builds power to bring about a transformation in our country where all people live free and fulfilling lives. Because our current systems and structures breed inequity rather than human rights and democracy, we create and advance solutions and strategies for systemic change that address the intersection of racial, economic, gender and other forms of injustice.

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Partners for Dignity and Rights works with youth, parents, educators and advocates to transform our public school systems to end school pushout and create learning environments that protect the human right to dignity and support the full academic, social and emotional development of every child. We support national and local coalitions—led by the youth and parents most impacted by school pushout—to end punitive discipline and policing in schools and implement restorative and culturally relevant approaches to education.

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Partners for Dignity and Rights works with the worker center movement to build the power and participation of workers to enforce their right to work with dignity. So long as retaliation, intimidation, and discrimination are the standard way of doing business, low wage workers are stripped of any power to determine their conditions of work and, by extension, the conditions of their lives and that of their families. We seek to support workers to grow their power and to self-govern by putting workers at the center of enforcing existing workplace laws, as well as raising and shaping standards. Based on a successful, long-term partnership with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and development of the Fair Food Program, which has dramatically transformed conditions for workers throughout the U.S. tomato industry, Partners for Dignity and Rights now anchors the transnational Worker-driven Social Responsibility Network. Through the Network, we partner with workers’ organizations to advance enforcement models, like the Fair Food Program, the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh, Milk with Dignity and the recent Agreement on Gender Justice in Lesotho Apparel that effectively ensure the human rights of workers at the bottom of product supply and labor contracting chains.
Partners for Dignity and Rights works with grassroots partners to build a powerful people’s movement dedicated to winning a universal, equitable health care system. We envision a health care system that is publicly financed, prioritizes health over profits, is democratically controlled, equitably meets communities’ needs, and guarantees health care as a human right and public good to everyone. With our core partners in the Healthcare Is a Human Right Collaborative—Put People First! Pennsylvania, Southern Maine Workers’ Center, and Vermont Workers’ Center—we support broad-based organizing led by communities who are directly impacted by the commodification and denial of health care, including poor and working class people, people of color, immigrants, women and LGBT people, people with disabilities, and rural communities. Together we are working to transform the health care system and to simultaneously use health care as a strategic issue around to build a much larger working-class human rights movement bringing people together across lines of division including race, nationality, geography, and age. In Vermont we won the first legislation in the country putting a state on the path toward universal, publicly financed health care, and are now working to win policies to guarantee dental care to everyone on Medicaid and to ensure that states’ health care systems are governed accountably, transparently, and with meaningful participation by patients, residents, and health care workers.