Working the Three Earths Framework: a Conversation with Michelle Morales and Ai-jen Poo
Ai-jen Poo’s Three Earths Framework offers a way to align on our current conditions, what has been lost, and the world we’re working toward. In this conversation, Poo and Woods Fund Chicago President Michelle Morales talk about finding hope, grounding collectively, and the urgent need to organize for this moment.
In July of this year, care advocate and organizer Ai-jen Poo co-wrote a piece entitled, “Three Earths: A way of understanding our present moment.”
The essay proposed a framework for organizers grappling with the tumult of 2025 and the sense that our collective response was buffering, that we couldn’t grab hold of our current circumstances firmly enough to see and build a way forward together. The Three Earths of the title provide a scaffold to work from, the idea that we’re working in three intertwined political realities: Earth One, the world of liberal democracy that has been ruptured; Earth Two, the authoritarian breakthrough we’re in now; and Earth Three, the future world we can fight for together.
This fall, Ai-jen presented the framework to a gathering of Chicago philanthropic leaders, including Woods Fund Chicago President Michelle Morales. Many of those leaders have since found the Three Earths framework a critical tool, and in November, Michelle and Ai-jen sat for a conversation on Zoom to talk about using the framework to align and move forward, the internal reckoning required on organizing working people, and the fierce power of community in this moment.
→ Michelle Morales: My colleagues and I — ever since you walked us through it, we’re all still talking about this framework. It gave us language; it gave us a container. That’s the first thing that struck me. I could envision specific people: colleagues who are stuck on Earth One, allies in Earth Two, trying to figure this moment out together, grantees who are already working on Earth Three. It’s an incredible way of making sense of everything right now.
→ Ai-jen Poo: It was really practical for me, because I needed a way of helping my team actually plan forward, and it had to be grounded in an assessment of the conditions. And it was so hard to assess the conditions [laughs].
It also offers different lanes. Some people have to do Earth Two work, in the short term, with a totally different sense of urgency and time horizon. And we do need some people working on Earth Three solutions and vision, because part of how we get out of Earth Two is offering a very clear vision for Earth Three that acknowledges there's no going back to Earth One: that movie's played and the credits are running. And it acknowledges that this could be an opportunity, because Earth One was profoundly imperfect. So many of the Earth One policies that we rely on as foundational; we need them because it's all we have, and they're not what we deserve.
Being able to offer a vision that gives us a reason to fight for the future amidst so much despair feels like necessary work for now, too.
→ MM: I think we tend to whitewash things when we're in traumatic moments. I loved that you named that Earth One wasn't perfect; we just knew how to maneuver within that system. And what we're experiencing now is a moment of not knowing the levers to pull, in this political moment. How has this lived in your organization and conversations as a tool?
→ AP: One of the things that's great about the framework is that it's very sticky: it's very easy to adapt it and metabolize it. So you can be in a meeting, and somebody could propose an idea, and if everybody's in the same story and in the same language, you could actually just say, shorthand, "That feels a little too Earth One." Or you could ask, "Who's working on Earth Three for structural democracy reform?" That's something we can just shorthand now, in a way that feels really helpful for doing strategy, which requires that you have, to some basic extent, the same assessment of conditions, of opportunities, of challenges, of strengths, of weaknesses. It's become a way for us to reference and accelerate alignment and assessments.
→ MM: When you say, “It’s a little Earth One,” — can you draw that out for me?
→ AP: It refers to a world that is disappearing. Tactics that don't account for how dramatically the media and attention landscape have shifted, things that don't account for the reality that liberal democracy, especially at the federal level, is not functioning the way that it has.
You can still use some Earth One tools, like legal strategies — we've got to use the courts, we've got to have legal strategies, but an Earth Two legal strategy might be education of everyday citizens who could be called into jury duty, to let them know that protesters might be charged unfairly, and what they need to know as a potential juror on one of these cases.
And where Earth One still exists, where democracy is functioning, it’s so important that we breathe life into it. For one example, New Mexico just became the first state in the country to make childcare free for everyone in the state. And they're financing it through a tax on fossil fuels. It is really important that the New Mexico childcare initiative succeeds, because it is also the seed of Earth Three, even as it was won in the context of Earth One.
We just have to be very agile and be clear about which context we're operating in at any given moment. I think the gift of the framework is being able to very quickly align with others, in the movement, in our ecosystems, internally to our organizations, about what it is we're doing and why. It helps us focus our goals in the right context.
→ MM: For Woods Fund, and a handful of philanthropic CEOs that are trying to organize the philanthropic ecosystem, it’s given us language for potential co-conspirators and allies. Which of our colleagues do we think are still operating and living in Earth One? What will it take for them to move to Earth Two? How many of us are operating only in Earth Two, without thinking about what space we need to build toward Earth Three?
→ AP: It's so interesting, because in the moment that the framework got put on paper, which was months ago, the urgency of articulating it was really about getting enough of us focused on Earth Two, really trying to help people move into this new reality and show up powerfully in this new context of so much uncertainty and disruption and upheaval. And it's a little different now, because I think a lot more people are grappling with the reality of Earth Two, especially in a city like Chicago. I think a lot of people are very clear that this is not normal.
There was a period earlier in the year when it felt like things were stuck. Money wasn't moving; not a lot of action was happening. I think for a time, people couldn't see the path to winning. And the fear was that you would take this huge risk, and you might fail, and you would be alone. I think once we started to realize that you can still find ways to win in this time, that's when I think you started to see institutions being more courageous. The more we can create the context for everyday people to feel like they're taking action that's gonna be impactful, that's really gonna make a difference.
And I think in Earth Two, community is more important than ever.
→ MM: Absolutely
→ AP: Because fear is such a predominant energy of this time.
→ MM: And an exhausting energy.
→ AP: An exhausting energy. People's nervous systems are shot. Community is more than a fuzzy feeling. It's a lifeline, it's survival, it's being able to have groceries, being able to get your kid to school. You see it in Chicago, with people coming together: community is a commitment in Earth Two, to stand together and walk together through fear.
→ MM: For someone whose body is limited, so I can't get out in the same ways I used to, the joy that I would find was watching Chicago residents pouring out of their homes and apartment buildings to confront ICE. Regular, everyday people confronting ICE.
But the challenge now is, how do you capitalize on that? Because now you have people who have been energized, maybe in that confrontation they were able to get ICE away, or maybe not, but being in community with others and confronting a known enemy, if you will, does something to you. It's a transformative moment. How do you keep that energy moving forward? That's something that, as a foundation, we're paying attention to: how are we using this moment for basebuilding?
→ AP: I think basebuilding looks different from how it did in Earth One. The fact that so many neighborhoods are now organized by Signal threads; that's new organizing infrastructure. These are new networks that are forming that are not going to be undone. And they're going to be deployed for all kinds of purposes. And I think that that's actually quite powerful and exciting. I know people who are organizing people off of Reddit: we are finding new technologies of movement and of organizing and of basebuilding, and I think that's very good.
→ MM: In the framework, you talk about how our tactics need to shift, both in terms of the technical and attention economy that we're in now, and then also in this moment of authoritarianism. I'm curious if you can articulate the gap that you see there, and some ways we can bridge it.
→ AP: It's interesting, because I think the fundamentals of organizing are still true: we have not done enough to organize working-class people at scale in our country. The pain of inequality and the cruelty of this economy are just intensifying, and we don't have enough people who are rooted in the fundamentals of what it means — online or offline — to bring working-class people together and build power.
The population of people who earn just enough to not be eligible for means-tested programs, but not enough to pay for basic needs, like childcare, like home care: that's the majority of the country. And that is who feels isolated, unseen, unheard, completely forgotten and left behind. And our job is to see and hear and be of service. And offer a path to power.
In this media and attention environment, we are so out-resourced: we don't control the algorithm, and we don't own much of the infrastructure. And so we have to use every bit of capacity we have to get attention and sustain attention, long enough to build a relationship with people. That is a huge challenge when the world's most powerful corporations are throwing billions, trillions of dollars at capturing every second of our attention every day.
So I think we need to adapt in this attention economy to finding new ways of getting and sustaining attention. We need to not fetishize in-person, old-school, basebuilding, at the same time that we stop searching for short cuts or short-hand. We need to think about how to meet people where they are, including in their social media feeds. Wherever they are putting attention, how are we showing up there in ways that are meaningful? And figuring out how to do that with a quickness — real, old-school base-building takes decades, you know, to get to scale, and we have to do that work, but we have to figure out how to do it, and do it meaningfully, and authentically, but faster.
→ MM: And giving language, I mean, I keep going back to that, right? The person you described, the person who can't qualify for certain things but doesn't make enough — that's my family. When I became politicized, part of it was that I was in some class in undergrad, and it gave me language for what I had been experiencing. And that is so powerful.
→ AP: If we think about the 90 million people who didn't vote in the last election, a lot of the people in that bucket are people who are on the frontlines of the affordability crisis, who are going to be hit hardest by cuts to programs,whose healthcare costs are skyrocketing right now, who can't afford housing. Life in Earth One was not good for those people, right? A lot of people feel like the bottom has been falling out for a while. And so it's not a message, it’s not a tactic, it’s a process of building trust and relationship to be able to help make meaning of what's different now.
And to do it in a way that helps people find their agency. I think that's the biggest challenge. How do you talk about the fact that the bottom is falling out in democracy without people feeling totally depressed and demoralized? And that's where Earth Three comes in, where you can actually start to point to, 'it doesn't have to be this way: it doesn't even make sense that it's this way. And the only reason it's happening is because there's been a really toxic consolidation of power away from everyday people, and that's what we have to reclaim. And it's worth it because we can change our economic realities if we can restore democracy.
→ MM: I'm also realistic that we're not going to move everyone from Earth One. Thinking about the first six months of this new administration, sitting with the lack of a cohesive response, we talked — internally at Woods Fund and as a sector — about why the sector and our institutions aren’t responding as they did with COVID. COVID impacted everyone in some way or another. This is not impacting everyone, and in fact, some people are benefiting from it. Some people do not want to challenge or change Earth Two because they’re benefiting from it. And so then it becomes even more important for me and my team to be thinking about, "Who are our co-conspirators in this?"
And then with grantee partners, as a funder, how are we helping to create space for them, so that they can really think about what they need to put Earth Three in motion?
→ AP: Last month, my organization Caring Across Generations and I hosted a conference in New York called "CareFest," which is a gathering of caregivers, care workers, people with disabilities, older adults, and leaders across business, philanthropy, tech, entertainment, and government to talk about Earth Three solutions. And we almost didn't do CareFest again, because our team was a little bit like, “Earth Two is so urgent, there's so much coming at us, we're fighting for our lives to save Medicaid and to keep people from getting disappeared in our workforce and communities — does it really make sense to spend three days in a conference?” And so we almost didn't do it. And then we realized that there is no space for the care movement to talk about Earth Three solutions, and that there was going to be a limit to how much we could grow our movement, and even sustain the Earth Two work, without creating the space for dreams, and imagination, and the sense that we can design the future on our terms.
One of our speakers, Krista Tippett, said this very important thing: "Self-fulfilling prophecy is happening all the time." And that's where Earth Three is actually quite important. Because we need prophesies! We need vision! Because the negative, nihilistic, and menacing self-fulfilling prophecies are being articulated all around us. And so, my prophecy is about a future of care where at every stage of life, we have a society, a set of policies, and a culture that supports us to take care of ourselves and each other, to take care of the people we love. From the time that we're born to the moment we take our last breath.
→ MM: I love what you said earlier about community, and I think that that's where my hope is rooted. As someone who's living with a terminal disease, I can't help but hold onto hope. It's my way of moving, my belief system. But I wouldn't have the deep hope that I have without community. I hold this hope and faith that an Earth Three is absolutely possible. And we see glimmers of it every day, all around us, all the time. We saw it in the mutual aid that came to the forefront during COVID; we see it in folks confronting ICE and protecting neighbors. We see these glimmers every day, where our horizon kind of shimmers, and there's another possible reality behind it.
→ AP: There's so much power there. Community is — people throw the word around quite a bit, just like "care," it's one of those words — but it is really, fundamentally, about human relationships and human connection. I think if we make people feel like they have a place with us, we're gonna see them, we're gonna hear them, and we're gonna fight for them, that may be most of what we need.