For 22 years, the Democracy Center, located at 45 Mount Auburn Street in Harvard Square, has been a hub of community activism and the arts in Cambridge. The COVID-19 pandemic has made the center even more important. On April 6, the Civic Leadership Foundation, which financially supports the Democracy Center, suddenly announced a unilateral decision to close the center on Monday, without any input from the community members and organizations that have called the center home for years. The Cambridge Day has reported on the potentially devastating impact of the proposed closure on arts, activism, and community cohesion. But the closure would also be an immeasurable blow to the participation of people with disabilities and chronic illnesses in civic life.
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and government responses to it have destroyed the ability of marginalized communities to effectively organize for change. To put it bluntly, many people who were fighting for change have died. Many more people’s lives have been forever changed by the incapacitation of Long Covid, an umbrella term that describes hundreds of symptoms, many of them debilitating, that often mean the inability to work paid or live independently. The number of people with Long Covid grows every day. COVID-19 and Long Covid have disproportionately killed and incapacitated people of color, people with disabilities and immunocompromised people, older people, trans and queer people, and poor and working-class people.
Many of the methods organizers have long relied on, such as in-person meetings, are fraught with new risks. The damage to social fabric has been immense, and many arts and social change organizations that once held vibrant weekly meetings are struggling to attract attendees and activate their membership in the ongoing epidemic. With systematic protections against COVID from governments and social institutions (free vaccines, free masks, universal mask wearing in healthcare, universal mask wearing on public transportation, direct cash transfers to people, etc.) now gone, it has become increasingly difficult to work for social change in the midst of an ongoing pandemic, let alone participate in public life as a disabled person. Millions of people in the United States have been left behind, including here in Cambridge.
The Democracy Center is an oasis, with a mission to protect community members from the ongoing ravages of COVID-19. The Center has allowed community members to continue making art and making change together, which they could not do without risking undue virus exposure to every organ in their body. The Center has not always been an accessible place, and there is still room for improvement, but the Center remains distinctive in today’s climate, when too many institutions have succumbed to denialism, preferring to pretend the pandemic is over while it kills and incapacitates our loved ones.
The Democracy Center was one of the last community spaces in Greater Boston to mandate mask wearing and offers free masks at the entrance. Event bookers are required to include a COVID mask and vaccine policy in all promotions, along with all other accessibility information, allowing attendees to make an informed decision about participation based on their access needs. Upon entering the Democracy Center, air purifiers are operational. The Fan Club is a lending library of air purifiers and CO2 monitors that event organizers can borrow to keep the air clean and manage COVID risks. In 2022, the Center provided training for organizers to facilitate virtual and hybrid events, preparing civic leaders to make their events accessible to all.
Keeping the Democracy Center open to our entire community is critical to public health.
I am a COVID-safety and disability rights advocate who has worked with the Massachusetts Health Equity Coalition and the City of Somerville-funded push for free (K)N95 masks and COVID-19 testing this spring. Since moving to Cambridge in 2021, I have become involved with Democracy Center events, primarily through the organization Cambridge Heart. To those who talk about how harmful the foundation’s hasty, top-down closure of the Democracy Center is, I would add that this is a huge loss for the fight against ableism and pandemic-related mass deaths and disabilities.
When I attended a meeting about the closure hosted by the foundation online on April 11, I was impressed by how well the hybrid operation was done (that training paid off!), with all the community members in attendance wearing masks. At a later meeting on April 25, Foundation Chairman Ian Simmons explained the reasons for closing the Democracy Center, listening to a unified chorus of community members who said that things were not okay. “What gives me hope is COVID,” he said. He went on to explain that the community (which community?) had endured COVID with resilience and adaptability, and they would surely endure it again. He told the assembled community that they had enough office space now, and would be able to get by. I was shocked. Regardless of our politics or our views on how best to respond to COVID, I think we all look at the pandemic as something that we would have prevented by any means if we had known it was coming. But Simmons flippantly compared his decision to evict the center’s nonprofits, small businesses, and community organizations to COVID-19, as if the pandemic was a good thing.
After this strange logic became clear, one of the community members in attendance asked us to raise our hands if we belong to an organization that has become smaller and weaker since the pandemic began, and if we know anyone who should have been in this room but couldn’t make it because of COVID-19. Nearly everyone raised their hands. If the foundation’s reason for closing the Democracy Center is that our community is fine “even with COVID-19,” I want the foundation to think long and hard about which communities it values. While my disability and chronic illness community is certainly resilient, resilient, and wonderful, we are struggling and suffering unnecessarily. I tend to agree with Simmons that the sudden, unilateral closure of the Center, like COVID-19, will be devastating, disproportionately harmful to already marginalized communities, and will be a death knell for so many valuable community organizations already struggling to survive.
From start to finish, the Foundation’s decision-making process regarding the Democracy Center was undemocratic, with less than three months’ notice given to tenants and delayed consultation with the community-formed Democracy Center Advisory Committee despite six weeks of good faith requests to meet. In fact, the Foundation Board agreed to meet with the Advisory Committee on Thursday, just one business day before the scheduled closing date, and refused to postpone the closure to make time for a more inclusive decision-making process. In a subsequent statement, the board said, “It was clear that the democratic process must begin with pausing the July 1 closure. We cannot work together as equal partners with eviction looming.”
The Democracy Center was a window into a better world where people didn’t have to risk disproportionately getting sick to participate in public life, and I urge anyone who has had the pleasure of looking out of that window, or who has ever longed for it, to take action to save the Democracy Center.
Oliver Wilson, Springfield Street, Somerville