Now is the Time: Our 2025 Impact
Now is the Time:
Our 2025 Impact
A Message from LAANE's Executive Director
Friends,
Early in 2025, LAANE founding board member and my mentor Manuel Pastor said something that has stuck with me. “In some ways,” he said, “we’ve been training for this our whole lives. If now is not the time, then when?”
In June, the ICE raids began en masse. Even after months of warning, our communities were ill-prepared to confront the sheer scale of aggression and cruelty that this administration displayed. With immigrant workers under attack and every known community resource deployed, we looked inward, shifting eight staff members from their campaigns, establishing field offices from South LA to San Bernardino, and launching our Know Your Rights Campaign. There was no time to identify a legislative strategy or a leverage point. Instead, we simply spoke with every immigrant worker we could find. By the end of the summer, we had sent more than 70 organizers to 9,000 worksites and reached about 87,000 workers.
And that’s on top of the work we were already doing to advance our climate, education, hospitality, Long Beach, and grocery and retail campaigns—all of which you can learn more about below.
As I reflect on 2025—the tremendous loss of Kent Wong, a founding member of LAANE and the Chair of our Board of Directors; the unconscionable mass kidnappings of our family members, friends, and neighbors; and the insatiable greed of corporate interests who seek to extract capital at our expense—I am once again reminded of Manuel Pastor’s words. Now is the time to be bold and unwavering in our commitment to build power for working people. Because organized people will always beat organized money.
Saludos y Adelante,
Víctor Sánchez
Executive Director, LAANE
Our Impact by the Numbers
$4.1 million secured in the Long Beach city budget to to support renters and immigrants
2,030 households reached to discuss climate priorities for LAUSD greening projects
Five full-time, fully-funded interns through the Beth & Julia Meltzer Internship Program
40,000 estimated tourism workers will see a wage increase by 2028
600 surveys gathered from parents, students, and community members with feedback on priorities for UTLA’s bargaining for the common good platform
9,140 worksites reached though our Know Your Rights campaign
450 members of our Grocery & Retail Campaign base
Three-to-one self-checkout to worker ratio in Long Beach grocery chains as a result of the “Safe Stores are Staffed Stores” ordinance
Our Shared Victories
Climate
LAANE’s climate coalition, AIRE, worked to advance climate progress, build public and worker power, and create real change for working-class communities of color. Working with parents, community, and union allies, we hosted a press conference at Farmdale Elementary at the beginning of the school year, where a parent leader and SMART Local 105 representative both called for upgrades to current school conditions that make it too hot for students, educators, and workers to thrive. Parent and school leaders additionally built power by providing public comment at school board meetings, reaching out to other parents, and organizing to make sure their schools get more green space and shade. Together, we successfully helped pass districtwide policies prioritizing school green space and responding to extreme weather with comprehensive solutions.
Education
As part of the Reclaim Our Schools L.A. coalition, we supported two cohorts in paid fellowships that trained LAUSD parents, caregivers, and recent alumni to become active leaders in the fight to defend public education. We stood with public school teachers by helping gather over 60 community organization endorsements for UTLA’s Win Our Future Platform, and we joined UTLA members in rallies and pickets demanding better working conditions, uplifting community demands on immigration and housing, and calling on LAUSD to fully fund our schools. As threats mounted against our immigrant communities, LAANE’s education team brought Know Your Rights information to LAUSD parents and caregivers, helping them put together family preparedness plans. We also supported coalition work—driven by Students Deserve and coalition staff—that led to major victories on the LAUSD budget, including $50 million for the Black Student Achievement Plan (BSAP), $5 million for Dream Centers to support immigrant students and their families, and $2 million for LGBTQ+ students for resources and supports.
Grocery and Retail
In our coalition led by UFCW 770, we built solidarity for tens of thousands of UFCW union members as they bargained for new contracts with Gelson’s, Vons, Stater Bros., Ralphs, Albertsons, Super A, and Pavilions. Working families won substantial wage increases, supplemental pension plans, increased health care benefits, and improved workplace conditions. Under the leadership of UFCW Local 324 in Long Beach, we bolstered community support for the “Safe Stores are Staffed Stores” ordinance. This new self-check out policy—the first of its kind in the country—requires large stores to have adequate staffing ratios and puts a limit on the number of items and types of goods that can be rung up at self-checkout.
Hospitality
After years of hard work, the Tourism Workers Rising L.A. coalition—anchored by UNITE HERE Local 11, SEIU – United Service Workers West, and LAANE—declared victory this summer when the L.A. City Council approved the Olympic Wage Ordinance, which ensures crucial health protections and the highest minimum wage in the country for L.A.’s tourism workers. But not long after it was signed into law, a group of airlines, hotel corporations, and industry lobby groups launched a signature-gathering campaign to overturn it. Our coalition quickly responded with the Defend the Wage campaign to get our communities into the street to counter their misinformation campaign and tell the truth about the policy. Over 120,000 Angelenos submitted forms to revoke their petition signatures, disqualifying the referendum campaign. In the fall, in anticipation of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic Games and other mega-events happening across our city, our coalition launched Fair Games: A New Deal for Our Future.
Long Beach for a Just Economy
Long Beach City Council raised the wage for concession workers at the airport and convention center to $29.50/hour by the Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2028. Thanks to this victory, concession workers are now at the same wage standard that hotel workers won when Long Beach voters approved Measure RW in 2024, at the time the highest industry minimum wage in the nation. Additionally, alongside our partners ORALE and LBRE, we launched the “Our Budget, Our Future” campaign. Thanks to our coalition’s advocacy, the next budget for Long Beach includes $2 million for Tenant Right to Council, which will make sure tenants facing eviction can get legal help to stay in their homes, and $1.9 million for the Justice Fund, which provides legal support to immigrant families dealing with deportation and other challenges.
Our Shared Victories
Climate
LAANE’s climate coalition, AIRE, worked to advance climate progress, build public and worker power, and create real change for working-class communities of color. Working with parents, community, and union allies, we hosted a press conference at Farmdale Elementary at the beginning of the school year, where a parent leader and SMART Local 105 representative both called for upgrades to current school conditions that make it too hot for students, educators, and workers to thrive. Parent and school leaders additionally built power by providing public comment at school board meetings, reaching out to other parents, and organizing to make sure their schools get more green space and shade. Together, we successfully helped pass districtwide policies prioritizing school green space and responding to extreme weather with comprehensive solutions.
Education
As part of the Reclaim Our Schools L.A. coalition, we supported two cohorts in paid fellowships that trained LAUSD parents, caregivers, and recent alumni to become active leaders in the fight to defend public education. We stood with public school teachers by helping gather over 60 community organization endorsements for UTLA’s Win Our Future Platform, and we joined UTLA members in rallies and pickets demanding better working conditions, uplifting community demands on immigration and housing, and calling on LAUSD to fully fund our schools. As threats mounted against our immigrant communities, LAANE’s education team brought Know Your Rights information to LAUSD parents and caregivers, helping them put together family preparedness plans. We also supported coalition work—driven by Students Deserve and coalition staff—that led to major victories on the LAUSD budget, including $50 million for the Black Student Achievement Plan (BSAP), $5 million for Dream Centers to support immigrant students and their families, and $2 million for LGBTQ+ students for resources and supports.
Grocery and Retail
In our coalition led by UFCW 770, we built solidarity for tens of thousands of UFCW union members as they bargained for new contracts with Gelson’s, Vons, Stater Bros., Ralphs, Albertsons, Super A, and Pavilions. Working families won substantial wage increases, supplemental pension plans, increased health care benefits, and improved workplace conditions. Under the leadership of UFCW Local 324 in Long Beach, we bolstered community support for the “Safe Stores are Staffed Stores” ordinance. This new self-check out policy—the first of its kind in the country—requires large stores to have adequate staffing ratios and puts a limit on the number of items and types of goods that can be rung up at self-checkout.
Hospitality
After years of hard work, the Tourism Workers Rising L.A. coalition—anchored by UNITE HERE Local 11, SEIU – United Service Workers West, and LAANE—declared victory this summer when the L.A. City Council approved the Olympic Wage Ordinance, which ensures crucial health protections and the highest minimum wage in the country for L.A.’s tourism workers. But not long after it was signed into law, a group of airlines, hotel corporations, and industry lobby groups launched a signature-gathering campaign to overturn it. Our coalition quickly responded with the Defend the Wage campaign to get our communities into the street to counter their misinformation campaign and tell the truth about the policy. Over 120,000 Angelenos submitted forms to revoke their petition signatures, disqualifying the referendum campaign. In the fall, in anticipation of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic Games and other mega-events happening across our city, our coalition launched Fair Games: A New Deal for Our Future.
Long Beach for a Just Economy
Long Beach City Council raised the wage for concession workers at the airport and convention center to $29.50/hour by the Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2028. Thanks to this victory, concession workers are now at the same wage standard that hotel workers won when Long Beach voters approved Measure RW in 2024, at the time the highest industry minimum wage in the nation. Additionally, alongside our partners ORALE and LBRE, we launched the “Our Budget, Our Future” campaign. Thanks to our coalition’s advocacy, the next budget for Long Beach includes $2 million for Tenant Right to Council, which will make sure tenants facing eviction can get legal help to stay in their homes, and $1.9 million for the Justice Fund, which provides legal support to immigrant families dealing with deportation and other challenges.
Shifting the Balance of Power in Long Beach
Long Beach for a Just Economy’s Adelante Program
In the summer of 2025, LAANE’s Long Beach for a Just Economy (LBJE) campaign re-launched the Adelante program after a two-year hiatus. A leadership training program for monolingual Spanish speakers in Long Beach, Adelante aims to cultivate a strong base of local leaders to expand community organizing efforts across the city. Program participants learn how to use organizing tools and build confidence by practicing public speaking, power mapping, and learning the political context in which LBJE operates.
The 2025 program had 30 participants and, for the first time, was co-led by two local leaders, Laura and Andrea*, alongside one of LBJE’s community organizers. After getting involved with LBJE’s 2024 Measure RW ballot initiative, Laura and Andrea were eager to grow as organizers. In preparation for the program, the LBJE organizer trained Laura and Andrea on how to develop project plans, lead one-on-ones, write talking points for public comment, and speak with community members. They prepared and practiced presentations to be given during the Adelante program, and helped to grow LBJE’s base in the process: as co-leaders, Laura and Andrea met one-on-one with over 50 community members, sharpening their own leadership skills while also building grassroots power in Long Beach.
This year, the program was focused on housing. In collaboration with our allies at LiBRE, participants learned about the history of housing and redlining in Long Beach, developed power analyses on the Long Beach housing landscape, roleplayed how to organize their buildings, and practiced giving public comment.
Laura, Andrea, and the LBJE organizer became a solid team of three over the course of the Adelante program—collaborating workshopping ideas and talking points, and leaning on each other. As the LBJE organizer who co-led the program shared, “The dynamic we had together was one of the best things. Having each other’s backs, helping with turnout. It was a really nice experience.”
After the 2025 Adelante program ended, Laura and Andrea remained actively involved with LBJE. They continue to help with turnout for Long Beach District 9 committee meetings and hold one-on-ones with community members to broaden LBJE’s base. Laura and Andrea have emphasized that whatever the LBJE team needs, they will be there to help; and the LBJE team is continuing to build Laura and Andrea’s leadership. As LBJE seeks to create a Spanish-speaking committee on the Westside of Long Beach, organizers want Laura and Andrea on the planning committee.
At the heart of the Adelante program is the understanding that organizing provides people with opportunities to become aware of their own potential to change their own communities. In this way, by pushing people to take action, the Adelante program is a model for grassroots training programs that can help us to grow our movement at large.
*Names changed for privacy
Beating Back Corporate Power in the Tourism Industry
From Tourism Workers Rising to the Fair Games Coalition
In May 2025, after two years of organizing and advocacy, the Los Angeles City Council voted to approve the Olympic Wage ordinance—guaranteeing tourism workers a $30 an hour wage by the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games and access to family health insurance. As soon as the ordinance was signed into law, corporations including Delta, United, and the American Hotel and Lobbying Association—whose members include Hilton and Marriott—launched a $3 million campaign to overturn it. LAANE and our allies immediately launched a program educating Angelenos about the corporations’ attempts to line their pockets by eliminating workers’ gains in wages and benefits by waging a misleading petition campaign. Together, we gathered an unprecedented 120,000 forms revoking signatures on the referendum petition, which led to a full hand count.
After months of waiting, we received confirmation that, because of our far-reaching and innovative outreach and signature revocation campaign, the industry did not collect enough signatures to qualify the referendum as a ballot measure, meaning that Los Angeles hospitality workers will finally get the wages and healthcare they deserve: $30/hour by 2028, making it the highest minimum wage in the country. As the industry’s failed referendum bid illustrates, corporations are determined to erode the gains that our movement has won in the struggle to level the playing field and ensure that all workers have access to high-quality, family-sustaining careers. We must be persistent and creative in the pursuit of securing and protecting union jobs and power, which is why we aren’t backing down.
We demonstrated that the organizing power of cooks, hotel room attendants, airport workers, and regular Angelenos can beat back corporate power—creating a blueprint for resisting future corporate ploys. Central to this work is the importance of building worker power, as illustrated by Janet,* a SEIU-USWW member who has become a fierce leader in the fight for an Olympic Wage. When she first started going to City Council meetings in support of an Olympic Wage, she was the quietest person there. A proud union member, Janet knew the importance of standing in solidarity with her coworkers, but she hadn’t yet found her voice. Working closely with one of LAANE’s community organizers who trained her on delivering public comment, sharing her personal story, and organizing her coworkers, Janet gained the confidence to demand that our elected councilmembers fight for workers like her, not for corporate bosses. As one of LAANE’s community organizers shared, “She went from being incredibly quiet at all of our City Council meetings to then being the worker that would go up and respectfully talk to councilmembers to let them know that fighting for the living wage was the right thing to do.” Janet’s story illustrates the importance of shifting the balance of power towards the working people who are the heart and soul of our economy.
Currently, as LA prepares to host the Olympic and Paralympic Games, LAANE and our broad coalition—including our labor partners at UNITE HERE! Local 11 and SEIU-USWW—are working to generate long-term regional prosperity and stability for workers who will welcome visitors to our region, and who will be here long after these events leave town. The coalition’s demands include union jobs that support families and healthy communities with living wages; funding for 50,000 units of housing for working families; a moratorium on short-term rentals to protect our homes; and the safe and dignified treatment of immigrant communities. As LAANE Executive Director, Víctor Sánchez, shared at the Fair Games campaign launch, “Let’s fight for our future, let’s fight for our democracy. Because together we can hold LA28 and the [International Olympic Committee] accountable.”
As our region prepares for these upcoming megaevents, we are determined to ensure that the 2028 Olympics and Paralympics provide material benefits for working Angelenos, instead of devolving into an extractive cash grab for billionaires and corporations.
*Name changed for privacy
Educating Our Communities & Building Our Base
The Power of LAANE’s Rapid Response Know Your Rights Program
Los Angeles is home to 3.5 million immigrants, comprising nearly 35% of the entire county population. Immigrants, and immigrant workers, are the heart of our economy. Since June 6, 2025, federal agents have targeted immigrant workers—making workplaces a primary site for the deployment of violence, harm, and fear. In the City of Los Angeles alone, private-sector employment dropped 3.1% in the week following the June 6 onset of mass ICE raids—a loss of work comparable only to that experienced during the COVID-19 lockdown and the Great Recession. As a powerbuilding organization with organizers working across multiple sectors, we realized LAANE was uniquely positioned in this moment to provide our communities with information and resources so that they would know what to do if and when they encountered these often masked enforcers.
From July to September 2025, LAANE launched a Know Your Rights (KYR) outreach program to train our communities on their constitutional rights—empowering small businesses and workers to protect themselves and their families. LAANE pivoted eight full-time staff members to create the largest field-based KYR program in Los Angeles last year, providing critical rights education to 9,140 worksites and training 1,300 workers with a team of 78 canvassers that spanned across four different offices in Los Angeles and San Bernardino County. As one LAANE organizer shared, “We have seen the community come together—people are hungry to learn how they can protect their families.…We consistently get people asking for extra packets or resources so they can share it with people at risk.”
As a result of this outreach program, 730 small businesses requested KYR trainings, which LAANE is continuing to provide. In partnership with our allies at Organized Power in Numbers, UFCW Local 770, and Warehouse Worker Resource Center, we also gained deep insights into the economic and political needs of small business corridors and immigrant workers across the region—information that will inform our organizing moving forward.
As one KYR training participant shared, “events like these remind us of how important unity and shared purpose are to the future of our industry and our people.” By giving workers and small businesses the tools to exercise their rights, together we can turn the anger and fear of this moment into a strategic movement to build the power of working people.
LAANE in the News
Labor has been more overtly embracing immigrant workers because they’re a larger part of the work force,” said Victor Sanchez, the executive director of the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy. “More often they’re in low-wage sectors of the economy. The intersection of that fact as well as immigration status is very clear.”
"Time and again, workers and business owners alike shared that they felt helpless about the attacks prior to receiving information from us on how to plan, prepare, and prevent unlawful ICE activities."
Weathering the Storm: Private Fundraising in 2025
At LAANE, we treat private fundraising as organizing. Our core group of fundraising leaders, LAANE’s Advisory Board, are the ambassadors of our work: they reach new supporters in new sectors, helping us to grow our base and deepen our relationships. The dedication of our Advisory Board—and of you, our base of individual supporters—is the reason we can weather challenging fundraising years. In 2025, while our federal funding was being suspended by the Trump regime, private unrestricted giving gave us the capacity to pivot when the ICE raids began and our Know Your Rights campaign launched, and again when we suddenly had to defend the Olympic Wage from a corporate-led misinformation campaign.
In addition to helping us stay nimble, private fundraising is also paving the way for the future of our work: in 2025, we surpassed our Beth and Julia Meltzer Internship Program fundraising goal by $10,000. Every year, we fundraise for the internship program, which builds a pipeline of well- trained, passionate young progressive leaders ready to take on the big challenges facing our communities. Our donors recognize the value of these future leaders to building a city where all of us can thrive.
In 2025, between our two marquee events—the Women for a New Los Angeles Luncheon and City of Justice Awards Dinner—we raised over a million dollars and honored the leadership of:
- Lourdes Garcia, Secretary-Treasurer of Teamsters 572
- Linda Lopez, founder of Impact Strategies
- Jennifer A. Abruzzo, former NLRB General Counsel
- California Teachers Association
- and the Legacy of Steve Schapiro, the late American photojournalist.
At the City of Justice Awards, we also awarded past LAANE Executive Director and Senior Advisor Roxana Tynan with the inaugural Kent Wong Labor Legacy Award, recognizing the visionary leadership that has become the foundation of our work. With you, our supporters, we can ensure that the circle continues to be unbroken.
With Gratitude,
Jaimie Carlos
Director of Development
Thank You to our Foundation Funders
Thank you to our 25 foundation funders, many of whom have committed multi-year grants in support of our work. Without their dedication and movement-building vision, none of the impacts in this report would be achievable.
Our 2025 Financial Snapshot
Our work is made possible by the generous support of our foundation, government, and individual partners.
At the core of LAANE’s mission is the understanding that building power and resourcing our communities creates the material change we are seeking. We are proud that more than 80% of our funds go towards our staff, who are building relationships, sharing resources, and helping to transform our region. Together, with your support, we are building a new economy that works for all.
