Military spending around the world is soaring, while spending on meeting social needs is on the chopping block. Governments often justify spending public money this way by saying it will create jobs, but what if the workers had a say? Fifty years ago, employees at Lucas Aerospace, a military contractor in the United Kingdom came up with an alternative plan. Laura heads to the UK to investigate.

When Hurricane Helene hit western North Carolina in September 2024, it came as a shock. But it's the mutual aid networks that responded with creative, effective strategies to distribute water, medicine and help communities rebuild. Laura Flanders heads to some of the hardest-hit areas in western North Carolina and speaks with community activists to hear the lessons to be learned for the future.

Hurricane Katrina was one of the deadliest hurricanes ever to strike the United States, killing 1,833 people, displacing hundreds of thousands more and causing more than $100 billion in damage. Louisianans wanted change and climate action, but 20 years on, a state ravaged by climate disasters is now ground zero for a whole new kind of storm: liquified natural gas facilities.

What lessons can Spain give us about the value of cooperation in an authoritarian time? A vicious civil war followed by decades of rule by the dictator Francisco Franco led the country to respond to its authoritarian challenges by encouraging various cooperative efforts. Host Laura Flanders travels to Spain to report on the growth of cooperative models and speak with citizens involved with them.

Laura Flanders interviews two performance artists whose work illustrates how difference and neurodiversity make art and society richer and more interesting. Alice Sheppard is a wheelchair dancer and esteemed choreographer, and Jess Thom is a performer and comedian with Tourettes. In this episode, they question the role of art in society and our attitudes towards disability and what is normal.

Host Laura Flanders visits Newark, New Jersey, to look in-depth at one city where decades of police reform efforts failed to stop violence and crime. There she speaks with members of the Newark Community Street Team, which leverages residents' relationships to prevent violence before it starts. What does it look like when more responsibility for public safety is put in public hands?

In Preston, England, they're experimenting with investing public money in locally-owned businesses and cooperatives, and encouraging local "anchor" institutions to buy from, or train, local vendors. They're calling it the Preston model of community wealth building, and it's inspired by a model in another formerly industrialized city: Cleveland, Ohio, home of the Evergreen Cooperatives.

Laura attends an historic gathering at the School for Labor and Urban Studies at the City University of New York (CUNY) to explore how a city like New York might change its economic model, so as to share wealth and power more democratically. This episode also features a report on Cooperative Home Care Associates, the largest worker-owned cooperative in the U.S., based in the Bronx.

Laura visits "He Sapa,'' the sacred Black Hills of South Dakota where NDN Collective is reclaiming ancestral lands to address homelessness, addiction and violence against Native Americans. In this special feature, she reports on Camp Mniluzahan, a tipi village built on tribal trust land that welcomed hundreds of unhoused Indigenous people and others in the Rapid City area in the dead of winter.