Carlyn Cowen (they/them) has been agitating for change their entire life. As someone who is queer, Jewish, and Filipinx, none of the aspects of Carlyn’s identity place them in the white supremacist heteronormative patriarchal privileged paradigm. Carlyn’s official career has been providing social services to marginalized communities in New York City, including the Black community, the LGBTQ community, and the Asian-American community. Read on to learn more about the amazing work that Carlyn has accomplished!

Where are you based?
I live in West Harlem, in New York City .

What inspired you to get involved in activism?
I think I had a sense of activism from a young age. My mom immigrated from the Philippines, where she was politically active under the Marcos dictatorship. She had friends and family members that were "disappeared," the nice term the government used for extrajudicial killings. When she married my father and moved to North Carolina, they couldn’t get an apartment, because no one wanted to rent to an interracial couple, and I remember watching as a child how differently they would get treated by even the same person. I still remember the first time I went “back home” to the Philippines, when I was five, and I was so struck by the contrast of wealth and poverty, with people living in cardboard boxes right outside enormous gated mansions. All of this gave me a deep sense of injustice and inequality from an early age. The thing that finally spurred me into activism was the start of the Iraq War. I helped organize my high school walkout, because some of my classmates and I were so upset that everyone was pretending that nothing was going on. We raised a lot of attention from the press, the principal and our parents, and that was the first moment I realized the power of direct action to interrupt business as usual and shift a narrative.

You were raised and went to college in North Carolina (where you majored in philosophy). How did that influence you as a queer leftist? How did it inform your views on social, racial, and economic justice?
Growing up in North Carolina as a queer, genderqueer and neurodivergent kid wasn’t exactly the easiest. My high school girlfriend and I couldn’t hold hands in public without being yelled at or someone throwing something at us. I dreamed of moving to New York City, a place that I thought would be a paradise for a misfit like me. I applied to colleges across the country in hopes of leaving NC, but ultimately the extremely low cost of a public university won out, and to this day I am grateful that I left college with hardly any debt.

In college, I didn’t have the vocabulary to describe my sexual, gender, or political orientation. At the time I thought I was a lesbian woman (even though I tried to date boys because it was socially acceptable), and now I don’t use either of those words to describe myself. I also didn’t even know the word “leftist,” I was in a group that protested the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and traveled up to PA to protest the G-8, I was part of a group that protested a campus speaker that was aligned with the KKK (we were later arrested for our protest of hate speech). I probably used the words anti-imperialist and anti-facist more that I used leftist or even anti-capitalist. I actually love having ability to introspect, grow, and shed the labels and identities that don’t quite fit me anymore though, while trying on new words to see how closely they describe who I know myself to be.

There were a few more experiences in college that really shaped me. One was getting to be a teaching assistant for the amazing Professor Sherryl Kleinman in the sociology of race, class and gender. That really shaped my analysis of privilege and oppression, of the kyriarchy (white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, ableism, ageism and all the other isms), but also how to really meet people where they are in learning about these things and help them push past their resistance (which is ultimately a self defense mechanism) to true learning. I still use lessons from that class in workshops I run today.

I also worked in restaurants all throughout college (and grad school and to this day), first as a backwaiter and host and then as a bartender, and being in the service industry taught me so much about economic instability, how to interact with people (I firmly believe I learned more about deescalation, community safety and advocacy working in restaurants than during any years in school), and around the false stigma around so-called unskilled labor (I also believe if you put a restaurant worker in a professional office setting for the day they could probably make it through without causing significant damage to the place, and the reverse is absolutely not true).

And then finally, in my senior year of college, I started working for an organization called the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, as a community organizer as well as a courtroom interpreter. At the time, 287-G had been enacted, which allowed local law enforcement to act as an extension of ICE. Local police were setting up checkpoints in places where they knew immigrants, particularly Black and brown immigrants, were likely to be- like church, the farmers market, the grocery store, and pulling people over for a “routine traffic stop” that often ended in a deportation. SCSJ was providing pro-bono representation for anyone that was detained, and I helped with Spanish interpretation for the cases. What that meant in practice is that I was often the person giving families the worst news they had ever gotten. I will never forget the look on the face of 17 year old Alejandro when I told him he was being deported back to a country he had left when he was only three years old, and the best we had been able to get him was six months before he had to leave.

In addition to seeing the ways our institutions tear apart families, I also got to see the power of organizing. We trained volunteers to monitor checkpoints, warn people about them before they reached the checkpoints, and make sure that anyone that did get caught up by them got their information taken down and the interaction recorded. We ran know your rights trainings in the community and helped people make safety plans. We changed out broken taillights so that no one could be pulled over and possibly deported for it. And we built out a massive communication network (before the proliferation of smart phones) to keep people up to date. Here I learned that we have to take care of each other and organize, and we also have to change the laws that hurt people to begin with.

You then moved to NYC and got your Masters in International Affairs from Columbia University. Did you want to focus on social, racial, and economic justice on a global level?
I thought I wanted to work on social, racial and economic justice at a global level because of my own experiences with the Philippines. But when I moved to New York, I quickly realized how much injustice was in my own new city, and how much work there was to do right here in my own neighborhood. And especially when I learned how messed up New York politics were (did you know that up until 2018 Republicans had a majority in the New York State Senate?!), I decided right then I wanted to work on local and State level public policy and advocate in my city.

You spent time in Zambia after grad school. How did this experience affect your worldview, as well as your view of the US?
I was really lucky to spend a few months working in Zambia for the UN Development Program as part of my graduate degree. My father had lived in Nigeria for six years while he studied for his veterinary degree, and I had family spread across Western and Southern Africa. Doing research and working in sub-saharan Africa taught me two important things- how different the meaning of poverty is on a global scale when you look at imperial and industrialized countries versus countries dealing with colonization and extraction. And secondly, I understood on a different level just how much US imperialism had far reaching negative impacts across the world, and how much any of our fights for liberation, even if they are rooted at home, are actually connected with fights for liberation around the world.

Tell us about your work at FPWA and the economic, social, and racial justice work you did in New York City?
My first jobs in the field of public policy and advocacy were at the Mayors Office of Contract Services under the de Blasio administration, where I learned about how New York City contracts out all of its core social services, also known as human services to community based organizations and nonprofits. It is also where I also learned that even though I loved data, I needed to work with people. When I moved over to FPWA I got to advocate to improve those human services by expanding eligibility for services, pushing for better wages for human services workers- and all workers- through the fight for $15/hr (now we are in the fight for $22/hour).

For the past eight years you’ve worked at the Chinese-American Planning Council. Can you tell us about the mission of the organization as well as the work you’ve done there?
CPC started as a grassroots group that was helping their new immigrant neighbors get settled into New York’s Chinatown at the end of the Chinese Exclusion years and passage of the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965. Overtime the organization has grown to serve over 80,000 New Yorkers across all five boroughs each year. While we remain rooted in our Chinatown roots, we provide services to Asian American and immigrant New Yorkers from over 40 countries, speaking 25 different languages, and we build connection and solidarity across communities. Our services include childcare, senior services like senior centers and delivering meals to homebound seniors, afterschool programs and LGBTQ+ youth programs, career and college support, adult literacy classes, benefits enrollment, housing assistance and much more.

I started at CPC eight years ago with the job of building out an in house advocacy program, with the idea that social services agencies should be directly involved in advocating for social change, and that the most marginalized and most impacted people should actually have a seat at the table when our government makes our budgets and laws. There wasn’t really a blueprint for this kind of work, and I was excited to build something new. I began with a listening tour of frontline staff and the community members we served to learn about the biggest challenges everyone faced, and what solutions they thought we should be fighting for. From there I built out an advocacy agenda that included immigrant justice, affordable housing, universal public benefits (including childcare and homecare), workers rights and more. When I tried to get staff and community members to talk to their legislators about it, or come to City Hall for a rally, I realized how many people didn’t feel like their voices mattered, and how I’d have to change that before we really began to advocate.

We began by running workshops in multiple languages about how the government even worked and how everyday people can have an impact on it. We would practice skills like speaking at a rally, writing a letter to your representative, or telling your story in a legislative meeting. The first year we held a State Advocacy Day, 35 people came to Albany to talk to their legislators about our policy priorities. This year, over 400 people came to Albany. It took a long time and a lot of patience, but that’s exactly what organizing is.

In the last eight years, we’ve helped win some key investments and laws for our Asian American and immigrant communities: drivers licenses for all, expanding childcare in NYC from pre-K to 3-K and even a pilot 2-K program, passing the NYS Voting Rights Act to expand voter protections, make it easier to vote and ensure language access. We fought hard for and won $1.2 billion for excluded workers who were left out of federal relief checks during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. We won a $30 million a year investment in community based organizations that serve Asian American communities. We won a nearly $5/hour wage increase for home care workers. We won a commitment and funding to ensure that all NYC government documents are translated into the ten most commonly spoken languages. And yet, there is still so much more to fight for.

The best parts of my job are when people realize their own power. Alex, an adult literacy student at CPC, was invited by his teacher to our City Advocacy Day, where he saw people advocating for programs like his own adult literacy classes. He learned more about how the government was threatening to cut funding, and was inspired to help fight so that he could keep taking classes, and so could every New Yorker that needed them. Less than a year after he moved to the United States, he bravely signed up to testify at a City Council hearing about the importance of adult literacy classes for immigrant New Yorkers, and he made his whole speech in English. That was an incredible movement for all of us.

We now have a fellowship where frontline staff can spend three years getting a stipend to learn about advocacy, important policy issues and get hands-on experience becoming advocates for their program participants, their colleagues, and themselves. Last year we launched a youth version of the fellowship for our high school programs. Our youth wrote letters to City Council members about the issues that were important to them, prepared folders with information and stopped City Council members on their way into work to tell them about why they needed to fight for them.

Right now under the current federal administration, it feels like all of our critical services are under attack. We have been fighting back against the SNAP and Medicaid cuts and trying to help community members understand how they might be impacted. We have been running know your rights workshops and helping immigrant families make safety plans. We’ve started up our own legal services program so we can help community members get legal support in language. And we continue to do the slow, deep work of building power among immigrant communities and shifting the narrative to one of solidarity, not scarcity,

As a Filipinx person, how did you become involved in Black Lives Matter, and how does your own background influence your work here?
This is very simple to me, my liberation is tied up in the liberation of all marginalized people, and it is my duty to fight for myself and for all marginalized people. I take inspiration from Asian Americans that fought alongside Black leaders in solidarity during the Civil Rights movement like Yuri Kochiyama and Grace Lee Boggs.

Its also worth noting here that the Philippines, a triple colonized country, has a long history of solidarity with other colonized countries and marginalized peoples. For example, even as Filipinos protest corruption in their own country, there have been mass marches in support of Palestinian liberation.

You serve on the steering committee of The Jewish Vote, a political project of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ) that aims to build political power on the Jewish left. Can you tell us more about this?
I began organizing with JFREJ in 2017, when I joined their Jews of Color caucus. It was the first time I didn’t have to pick between being a person of color and being a Jew, and I felt so at home. In 2018, JFREJ was starting its 501c4 electoral arm, with the goal of shifting the narrative on what Jewish values were and electing progressive leaders that would fight to make New York a place where all of us can thrive, not just a playground for the wealthy. We helped elect a slate of progressive leaders who toppled the Independent Democratic Caucus (a group of supposedly Democratic senators who caucused with the Republicans, giving them control of the Senate), and in 2020, we were the first local organization supported Jamaal Bowman, a high school principal who shared our values of affordable housing, childcare for all and ending corporate greed. That race really tested our vision of the Jewish Vote, because we supported Jamaal against Eliot Engel, a hawkish pro-Israel Jew. It staked our claim that Jewish values were actually about taking care of all of us — police reform and abolition are Jewish values, getting ICE out of our city is a Jewish value, fighting for universal long term care is a Jewish value. In 2020 and 2021 we helped elect a slate of socialist legislators at the State and City level, and this year we helped a socialist mayoral candidate win the primary (and hopefully the general in two weeks).

We see you are an advocate for Zohran Mamdani! We are very hopeful about him becoming NYC's next Mayor. What changes do you hope he will bring to the city?
JFREJ first endorsed Zohran during his 2020 run for State Assembly, because he shared our vision for a New York that cares for all of us, not just a wealthy few. We fought alongside him for a free and fast MTA, for taxi workers facing crushing debt, and for an end to State dollars supporting genocide. Soon, we hope to fight alongside him as our next Mayor. In particular, I hope Zohran will make the city a true sanctuary for immigrant New Yorkers, and implement universal free, high quality childcare, which would be transformative for families, our littlest New Yorkers, and for the entire city.

What advocacy work and activism have you done for the LGBTQ+ community?
As a queer and trans New Yorker, I have been so lucky to be in community with and support incredible LGBTQ+ leaders like Qween Jean, Elisa Crespo, Marti Gould Cummings, Cecilia Gentili and many more in the fight for queer liberation. Together we fought to pass the Gender Expression and Non Discrimination Act (GENDA) and establish a trans equity fund for New York City. We fought to get cops and corporations out of Pride and establish our own alternative Queer Liberation March. And perhaps most importantly, I have learned the importance of chosen family in the queer community, where we always take care of each other and can count on each other, even when our own government is attacking us.

How do you believe we can bring about radical systemic change? What kinds of changes do you think we need to make?
This is such a great question. I believe a couple of things. First, that we have no choice but to bring about radical systemic change if we want to survive. It is a must, and it is up to all of us to make it happen. Second, I believe that means we need to envision the world that we want, not just fight against the world that we don’t want. Of course we want a world free of racism and capitalism (I hope), but what does that actually look like? Sound like? Smell like? What do people do everyday in that world? People in power want us limited in our imagination, and fighting each other for the smallest scraps of dignity rather than fighting together for everything we deserve and more.

Lastly, I also believe that we all have our own role to play in the movement ecosystem, and we need all parts of that ecosystem to bring about radical systemic change. Sometimes I’m an advocate, pushing to pass laws for single payer healthcare and universal rent control. Sometimes I’m an organizer, agitating my neighbors to fight for a city that works for all of us. Sometimes I’m an activist, engaging in direct action to push our targets to give us our demands. And in the last several years, I’ve really leaned into the mutual aid part of our movement ecosystem. During the start of the pandemic, when we really realized that our government wasn’t going to save us, mutual aid networks began popping up across the city, and I co-founded one in my neighborhood to give out food, PPE and information to neighbors in need, and we are still operating today. Every time I feel a little hopeless about seeing radical change in our lifetime, I go to a mutual aid distribution, and remind myself how we have the power to take care of each other right now.

Aside from English, you speak four languages. Which languages do you speak and why?
I grew up speaking English and Tagalog, one of the languages of the Philippines. Although my Tagalog plateaued and I’ve been taking lessons the last couple of years to get my ability beyond that of a five year old, my early exposure helped me love languages. I learned to speak Spanish through working in restaurants, living in Costa Rica, and working as an interpreter and I still use it frequently for work. I studied Farsi in college, and I got pretty decent at French too, although I’ve let both of those languages lapse so much I am pretty sure all I can do is order food in a restaurant.

It has been a crazy past few years, and we suspect at least four more. How have you been staying positive?
I try to stay focused on making my own corner of the world a little bit better, rather than despairing about all of the problems in the world I cannot fix, because my fight for liberation is connected to the global struggle for liberation. Our brains are prone to the negativity bias, where we focus on all the bad things that are happening instead of the progress we are making. So I try to really catalog the wins and reflect on them. For example, we’ve had a lot of our program participants at CPC detained by ICE recently, and every time I hear about it feels like a punch in the stomach. But we were able to stop the deportation of one community member by filing a habeas for him, and its so important to celebrate what that means for him and his family, and nurture that flame to sustain ourselves in the fight.

What is your motto in life?
That we have to create the world that we want right now. If we want a world full of care, we have to take care of each other, even in the smallest ways, today. If we want a world full of joy, we have to make an effort to experience joy every day. We cannot just fight for a distant future, we have to prove to ourselves every day that what we are fighting for is real.

And, full disclosure, my second motto is “if its not a right angle, its a wrong angle.” My neurodivergent brain craves straight lines and perpendicular angles, and you’ll often find me adjusting everything in my apartment accordingly.

Where can we find out more about you?
Instagram: @carlyn.cowen

Carlyn Cowen - Organizing All the Time