Throughout North Carolina and across the country communities are finding that, in the face of corporate exploitation, they don’t have full authority to protect public health, safety and welfare, economic and environmental sustainability, property values, and overall quality of life.

With help from the courts, corporations have constitutional rights they wield against communities to subjugate local rights that interfere with corporate profits and expansion. Our structure of law elevates corporate rights above the unalienable rights of citizens. Similarly, state law prohibits communities from passing a higher living wage than state law provides, to protect corporate profits.

Democracy School explores the limits of conventional regulatory organizing and offers a new organizing model that helps citizens confront corporations’ usurpation of the rights of communities, people, and the earth. Democracy School covers the history of people's movements, the rise of corporate power, and the dramatic increase in organizing by communities confronting fracking, GMOs, workers’ rights, agribusiness, sewage sludge, mining, and other corporate projects.