On Saturday, Sept. 17, 2011, upwards of a thousand people drawn by the social media tag #OccupyWallStreet, arrived by foot or subway in lower Manhattan to rally in front of Chase Manhattan bank. Finding police barricades already set up against them, they shifted to nearby Zuccotti Park, a bland public plaza soon to become world famous. After an afternoon general assembly, they bid au revoir to 200 people who remained to camp out overnight. In the crowd were a handful of Vassar students in the city for the day.

At first the world took little notice of this scruffy encampment with a radical message. But a week later, the NYPD arrested dozens and pepper-sprayed women in the face. Then on Oct. 1, those Vassar students returned for a massive blockade of the Brooklyn Bridge at which 700 were arrested. Thus was born the defining protest of a generation, Occupy, which soon spread from Wall Street to hundreds of locations across the country. On Oct. 15, the Vassar students along with 200 others launched Occupy Poughkeepsie in Hulme Park at the corner of downtown at the top of a hill rising up from the Mid-Hudson Bridge. Some 20 campers spent the night under blue tarps. For almost two months, the park provided an open-air forum for dissent, drawing not just students but seasoned activists, trade unionists, the troubled, and the curious. On Nov. 13, Vassar held an Occupy Teach-In joined by striking works from Verizon.

A Quaker activist stopped by on the second day to find the young protesters living on pizza. She began cooking big hot dishes for the crew and posting blog reports with recipes and photos of hungry diehards bent over paper plates outside their blue tarp headquarters. (One day she made sesame noodles for 34 on a budget of $14.) Late October brought the first snowflakes. For Thanksgiving they laid out white paper on tables and heated the serving trays with sterno cans. Some of the neighborhood kids, after playing on the basketball court, took home plates to their families. To complete the holiday, the protesters brought a large tray of leftovers to the police station. To the Quaker activist, Occupy represented "a celebration of the death of apathy" even if a passing driver yelled out, "Happy Thanksgiving, Hippies."

Occupy was not to last. The NYPD closed down Zuccotti Park in the wee hours of Nov. 11. Three weeks later on Dec. 7, the Poughkeepsie police cleared the Hulme Park encampment at 3 a.m. Given advanced warning, some 80 protesters had waited and shivered in a sort of vigil. The Quaker activist wrote, "My friends — these are people I've never seen in a meetinghouse and frankly, I'm surprised I even knew them at all — teenagers and young adults who attend the local community college and work at a nearby gas stations or fast food joints, homeless immigrants, people who struggle with serious addiction problems, people who live in the 'projects,' one guy who seems to channel the ghost of John Brown in way that worries me, and even a retired middle-class Republican." For six weeks, they had bonded, laughed, argued, carried each other's protest signs. She'd learned lessons about "living in this empire we call the United States of America" such as "baby shampoo is for pepper spray. Maalox is for tear gas." Yet she concluded, "Getting involved in the Occupy movement is dangerous, but the real danger is not pepper spray, getting arrested, or being struck by a baton. The real danger is falling in love. Love has filled my heart where there was cynicism. I have found concern. Where there was despair, I have found the healings of Spirit."

Fifteen years later, we might ask what was Occupy? Leaderless, agendaless, was it ultimately vaporous, a deeply personal experience for thousands of people but not a cohesive movement that left any lasting legislative legacy? The one obvious accomplishment was the reframing of the rich/poor divide into "We Are the 99 Percent," emphasizing the stark fact that since the 1970s the concentration of wealth in the top 1 percent had grown to 30 percent of our nation' s total. Since then, inequality has only gotten worse. Forget the one percent. Now, it's the top 0.1 percent (about 130,000 families) who own 15 percent of our nation's total wealth compared to the bottom half (about 68 million households) with 2.3 percent. Occupy identified the problem but didn't stop it. To be sure, since then we've seen two Bernie for President campaigns, the rise of AOC and Zohran Mamdani, and the rapid growth of the Democratic Socialists of America, but the pandemic followed by the return of the Orange One has turbocharged the concentration of wealth at the top.

It makes me wonder. Was Occupy but a fever dream, a massive gathering that felt righteous in the moment but failed to change the course of history? (See global warming for further massive marches that have accomplished what?)

And yet.

Later in the day on Dec. 7, 2011 some of those Occupy Poughkeepsie protesters reconvened in front of the Dutchess County Sheriff 's Office to call for a halt to the sale of foreclosed homes. In the open-air forum of Occupy, the foreclosure crisis in the wake of the 2008 subprime mortgage banking collapse had become a galvanizing issue. A working group from the protests would soon evolve into Nobody Leaves Mid-Hudson, which found a new home in a church basement. At the time, foreclosures in Dutchess County had shot up from 500 in 2004 to 1,628 in 2009 but still remained over 900 for 2011. A week before the park was cleared an Occupy activist called upon the county legislature to enact an eviction moratorium. Maybe not the wealth gap, but here was an issue where local activism could make a difference.

Does the name Nobody Leaves Mid-Hudson ring a bell? It sort of did for me. In Sept. 2021, it renamed itself For the Many (much better choice) which has become a force for progressive politics in our region. In 2022 they campaigned hard for Sarahana Shrestha's upset primary victory over Kevin Cahill for a state Assembly seat. Earlier this year they persuaded/shamed Congressman Pat Ryan to forsake campaign donations from Palantir, previously his second largest donor behind AIPAC, which he subsequently quit as well. In this year's elections, they endorsed 16 progressive candidates and they continue to organize citizen's lobbying campaigns for such bills as the New York Health Act to change over to public healthcare and the REST Act to make it easier for upstate cities to enact rent stabilization as Kingston has done. I myself have ridden their chartered bus to Albany for a "Tax the Rich" rally. I've given money and attended community meetings. (Free pizza is served.) They have offices not just in Kingston, but in Poughkeepsie and Newburgh. A staff of 18. A budget of $2.7 million. What I didn't know, until sitting down with executive director Jonathan Bix, one of those Vassar students, was that all of this grew out of Occupy Poughkeepsie.

In the early years, several Vassar students drove the efforts. Along with Jonathan Bix, Spencer Resnick helped launch the Vassar Young Democratic Socialists and later worked as a paid staffer at Nobody Leaves Mid-Hudson before moving on to Baltimore then Los Angeles. Margaret Kwateng, who was the group's first paid employee along with Bix, returned to Brooklyn to organize among nurses. (At Vassar she was a rugby star later inducted into the college's Athletics Hall of Fame.) As the one who has remained to be the executive director, Bix is the unofficial keeper of the history, although he doesn't have a granular memory for all the details. What he recalls of his night in Hulme Park at Occupy Poughkeepsie was "REALLY needing coffee in the morning and being thankful someone brought it."

The summer before his senior, year Bix spent three weeks in Boston studying a tenant’s rights group with 40 years of experience, City Life/Vida Urbana, which used a strategy that it called "The Sword and The Shield, La Espada and El Escuda." The shield was legal defense services for tenants threatened with evictions. The sword was collective protest against the banks and landlords trying to push them out. Bix brought this strategy back to Nobody Leaves Mid-Hudson, where upon graduation he became the first employee along with Kwateng. By then, Poughkeepsie had some 700 foreclosed houses sitting vacant.

The group's first "policy" accomplishment was to get the city to impose $5,000 foreclosure bonds upon the banks. If the banks neglected their foreclosed properties, the city would spend this money on repairs. Yet in its first years Nobody Leaves Mid-Hudson primarily championed individual cases. There was a disabled man in Wappingers who faced foreclosure after losing his job of 17 years in the school district. His son was serving in the Army in Afghanistan. The group held a vigil for him and organized a call-in campaign to his mortgage holder at Fannie Mae. Then a Jamaican immigrant in Wappingers Falls victimized by a predatory loan. The group organized an Occupy the Courtroom appearance at her hearing, then staged a sit-in the lobby of her Bank of America branch. Within several months she was able to renegotiate her loan to be able to stay in her home. For legal help, "the shield," the group relied on an independent lawyer, Jolanda Jansen.

Canvassing revealed that the foreclosures weren't the only problem, maybe not even the worst. For a decade, Central Hudson had been raising raises and shutting off those who couldn't keep up. "From mid-2013 to mid-2014, the company cut off more than 10,000 households … for lack of payment," In These Times reported. One active member of Nobody Leaves Mid-Hudson had lost power four times. On one occasion it meant the food in her fridge spoiled. In winter it meant she saw her breath in the kitchen. As often happens among those in need, one problem cascades into the next. "You get pneumonia," she told In These Times. "And then you've got a doctor's bill, too." Another woman interviewed for the article carried around a $12,882.26 Central Hudson bill in her purse. She'd dutifully paid the utility $100 or $200 a month for 16 years. No more. Now she lived with her three children in a dark house and charged her phone at the laundromat.

Nobody Leaves Mid-Hudson organized a protest at Central Hudson's headquarters, then public testimony at a rate hike hearing. They wanted Central Hudson to offer more support to bill payers in need. Ultimately, they wanted the utility transferred to public ownership, a campaign going strong today with the proposed Hudson Valley Power Authority Act sponsored by Sarahana Shrestha in the state Assembly and Michelle Hinchey in the state Senate. By the time of the In These Times article in October 2015, Nobody Leaves Mid-Hudson had forced Central Hudson to restore power in nearly a dozen cases. More than a decade later, though, we might call these baby steps for an organization destined to grow and grow.