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Over the past year, Engaged Defenders for Democracy (ED4D) has grown from its start as an email to fifteen people after the 2024 election, to an organization that holds up to twenty-five weekly protests of hundreds of people in both red and blue areas in and around Durham, North Carolina. They hold monthly bridge protests with activists from ten states, and coordinated demonstrations at airports with fourteen other states to boycott Avelo Airlines until they terminated their contract with ICE. The founder, Kathryn Pollak, writes a daily Substack and tells ED4D's story here:
I want to publish this story in ROOM to reach others to promote more activism. We currently have folks on the ED4D Substack from three-fourths of the US states, and we hope to reach the entire country.
Throughout the years, I have worked for many candidates, both local and national. Connecting to people is one of the things that energize me. Empowering people energizes me even more. I love to tell them that we have the power to put people in office, and if we don't like them, we have the power to elect somebody else.
Including this last presidential election, I only worked around election time. But the day after Kamala lost, I felt differently. I had felt a difference when canvassing for Harris. People were disengaged, and some even responded quite negatively to me. This had not happened before. I emailed fifteen of the folks I'd been canvassing with to say we needed to do something, and we needed to do it now, not in two or four years.
I found myself on an Indivisible call with 8,000 other people at 9 p.m. the day after Trump was elected. There's something powerful about feeling a part of something. We held a meeting at my house on December 8, 2024, and about thirty-five people showed up to talk about next steps. Soon after, ED4D was born.
Harvard political scientist Erica Chenworth states that no authoritarian regime in history has withstood 3.5% of the population's nonviolent calls for change.1 N