Stop Bringing Spreadsheets to a Values Fight

At mBOLDen Change, values aren’t what we say or believe. They are what we do. They are the sum total of our collective choices. They show up in what we build, who we center, and what we are willing to name out loud.

This shapes how we work. It also shapes the question we keep coming back to: What do our choices — as an organization, as communities, as individuals — reveal about what we deeply value?

We cannot build a world rooted in dignity by treating policies and structures as piecemeal problems. The work starts deeper — with the values underneath, the ones embedded in the systems we’ve inherited and the ones we’re choosing to keep. Before we can change the rules, we have to be honest about what the current rules actually say about us.

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We often treat the economy like the weather — something that happens to us, unpredictable and out of our control. But the affordability crisis crushing American families isn’t an act of fate. It is a policy and market design.

When gas prices surge while corporate margins reach historic highs, that isn’t a glitch. When a nurse in rural community watches her hospital close because someone decided her patients weren’t profitable enough to save, that isn’t a math problem. When a family pays $27,000 a year for health insurance and still can’t afford their daughter’s insulin, that isn’t bad luck. These are moral choices — made by specific people, protected by specific systems.

If you want to know what a society truly values, don’t look at its slogans.

Look at its safety net: who we catch and who we’ve decided is expendable. Look at its economic rules: who they were written to empower and who they were designed to leave behind. Look at the receipt — the impact tally of our collective priorities, where a trillion dollars in healthcare cuts and a 400% increase in the ICE budget sit on the same ledger as permanent tax cuts for the wealthiest bracket.

Our systems are a mirror. And right now, the reflection shows a preference for consolidated power over common good, and for the comfort of the few over the survival of the many.

For too long, the conversation about our future has been reduced to mechanics — the size of a budget, the wording of a bill, the scoring of a policy. We have brought spreadsheets to a values fight.

We are arguing about percentages, when we should be arguing for humanity. The question has never been whether the wealthiest nation in history can “afford” to ensure its people can eat, heal, and learn. We can afford whatever we decide matters. The question is why we’ve been convinced that we can’t.

We are told that struggle is a natural condition of the free market economy, that scarcity is inevitable, that some must fall so others can climb. These aren’t economic laws. They are choices — choices about who deserves security and who deserves to scramble. About whose children get a foundation and whose get a lottery ticket.

And because they are choices, we can choose differently.

We believe change starts by naming what we’ve been trained to accept as normal. We cannot change what we refuse to see.

This is why we launched mBOLDen Action — a project dedicated to shining a light on the systemic forces that shape daily life. We are starting with the affordability crisis because it is the most immediate receipt of how our current values are failing us, but the work won’t stop there.

Our first project, This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things, connects the dots between consolidated corporate power, the policy choices made in our halls of government, and the cost of living hitting families across every bracket. It traces everyday prices upstream to the companies and decisions driving them, tells the stories of real families navigating the tradeoffs, and puts what got funded next to what got cut — side by side, like a receipt.

We built it to strip away the sense that these crises are inevitable. Whether it is a tax bill that prioritizes the wealthy at the expense of the safety net, or a market designed to reward monopolies over people, these are not acts of fate. They are choices we can choose to unmake.

The shift we need isn’t only structural. It’s personal and communal. Deep social change starts with individual and community decisions — small ones, repeated, until they aren’t small anymore.

That shift is already happening around us. We see it when communities refuse to normalize the displacement of their neighbors. When people stop accepting the “inevitability” of their bills and start asking who set the price. When we collectively stop asking for permission to demand a system built on dignity.

The work ahead isn’t about changing a single policy or winning a single argument. It’s about reclaiming our power to decide what kind of world we want to build — and then building it, in how we work, how we show up for each other, and what we refuse to look away from.

Values aren’t a set of beliefs. They are a set of actions. We’re in that work. We’d like you to join us.