Our WOrk

Our Climate Justice programming is centered on Just Transition framework at the intersection of labor and workers rights. This means honing in on our expertise to build up capacity for workers and labor unions to engage in bargaining strategies for a regenerative economy. With the passing of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA,) we as CF-JWJ plan to work with partners through our cohort table and with our Climate Action table (CFCA) to build the political and operational vehicle to create programs that will fund careers in green jobs for thousands of working people and for communities that are historically excluded from these opportunities to benefit from the green works that will be created because of these new funding streams.

Base Building throughout the region (in Hillsborough and Orange County) of energy burden communities – which are people who have a higher percent of what they spend on energy costs relative to their gross household income – to take action on holding both TECO Energy and Duke Energy accountable for putting rising energy costs back on consumers/working people and not providing energy efficient solutions to begin with. We want to disrupt the narrative of Governor Ron Desantis’s anti-corporate approach with new framing that shows how his administration is looking away while utilities companies are raking in record breaking profits.

CFJwJ holds statewide leadership on Medicaid expansion work with partners including Florida Voices for Health, Florida Policy Institute, and SEIU 1199. CFJWJ’s role is building coalition partnerships across sectors in the state and again growing our base of healthcare supporters through online to offline strategies. Our current advocacy campaigns are educating people on the Public Health Emergency wind down and pressuring the state to do more in reaching the 900,000 cases of people in the state who will lose coverage, and to work with local elected officials in Orange County to allocate funding received from the American Rescue Plan to provide solutions to clear medical debt for Orange County residents.

We have successfully built and led a table aligning teachers, parents, and student organizations to advocate for policies that will protect public education from being divested and privatized in the state. We are also strategic advisors to the Florida Education Association on doing the same in Lake and Hillsborough County. In the backdrop of legislation led by Governor Ron DeSantis to defund public education and remove collective ownership and funding from parents in their communities, we plan to use digital and traditional organizing methods to develop and mobilize parents to take action with teachers and students on protecting public education funding and fighting back on the culture wars.