Interview with tenants' rights organizer Luke Melonakos-Harrison
What's love got to do with housing justice? (A whole lot, actually)
My guest on the podcast today is Luke Melonakos Harrison. Luke, whose pronouns are he/him, is an organizer with the Connecticut Tenants Union (@cttenantsunion), an organization he has helped build since it began in 2021. Like labor unions fighting for dignity and power in the workplace, tenant unions do the same but at home — for renters and anyone else without control over their own housing. Luke is an ecumenical Christian on a nomadic journey with God, and a recent graduate of Yale Divinity School.
The below excerpts are just a few of the highlights of our inspiring conversation, which you can find on A Soulful Revolution, as well as Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Lauren Grubaugh Thomas: What does it mean to you to be a soulful revolutionary? Could you tell a story about how you came to live at this intersection of spiritual transformation and social change?
Luke Melonakos Harrison: I come back again and again to how my inner life and the life of my soul is so intrinsically intertwined with my outer life as a public person who is representing an organization, attempting to represent a movement, who is trying to engage in social change, which means having this public persona.
Those two aspects of myself — my inner and outer life — are deeply tied and connected, and one informs the other. I can think of so many moments in my life as a community organizer in which I have needed to draw deep on internal spiritual resources… to meet the moment. Whether it’s a moment of moving through fear and needing some courage, or moving through insecurity and self-doubt and needing confidence and trust, or moving through despair and what feels like overwhelming odds, and needing to dig deep for some faith and some hope. It’s that cyclical process of engaging in action in the world, and then realizing that I need that spiritual foundation… to meet that moment.
In movement-building work, interpersonal conflict is just part of the process. Emotions run high, stakes are high, people are putting everything on the line. That brings up all kinds of anxieties that can easily spill out onto each other, the people that are closest to us. When we are going up against enemies that are hard to tackle, it can be easier to unleash that anger on someone closer to home.
(Describes a conflict experience)
In that interaction, I found myself needing to be really grounded again in who I am and who I know myself to be….I’m OK at a really fundamental level, because I have peace with God and peace with myself. Engaging from that place of groundedness allowed me to approach the conflict with a lot more grace.
Lauren: What has it meant to you to be at home in your own body, and how has that informed the work that you now do as a tenant organizer of helping others have a home to call their own?
Luke: I’m a transgender man, which was something I had an inkling about myself pretty much as long as I can remember, but for many, many reasons could not confront until my early twenties. It was too terrifying to consider the implications of confronting that inkling that I had.
But when I got to a certain stage in my life, and a certain stage in my spiritual and theological journey where it felt like it was on the table, in a way that it wasn’t when I was younger. The core thing that happened was me coming to believe that doing what I needed to do for myself, to be OK with myself, to be at home in my body, to get a need met, was OK. And not only OK, but good. And important. And worth doing. That my own wellbeing and happiness was worth fighting for. Which was a pretty significant shift in how I thought about myself. It was a real moment of self embrace and self love.
…to be OK with myself, to be at home in my body, to get a need met, was OK. And not only OK, but good. And important. And worth doing. That my own wellbeing and happiness was worth fighting for.
That changed my orientation toward so many things in life, and was very transformative in seeing other folks… to fight for their right to have a home, and not to accept their fate to be oppressed. Or accept that the current winners are always going to be the winners and we’re always going to be the losers and the best thing we can possibly do is try to cope with that. That mentality of despair and fatalism that holds so many of us back from taking action.
It was the same thing I had experienced realizing that transition was actually something that I could embrace and that I actually deserved. I deserved to feel at home in my body. That wasn’t something I had to apologize for.
I find that organizing for me now is about encouraging people to embrace their right to a higher standard of living. As a human being, they can and should embrace their own wellbeing. And that that’s not selfish. It’s actually liberating for others. It liberates everyone when we embrace our own liberation.
Lauren: It sounds to me like that’s something you have learned from your own experience of attending to your own wellbeing, is to be deeply listening to your neighbors and to what they need to be whole, to be well.
Luke: It is. My Christian faith taught me to be self-giving and self-sacrificial, and to reach out in compassion to others. Embracing my gender and asserting my right to be the gender I knew myself to be taught me to love myself, and to embrace my own person.
Organizing is the exact intersection of those two. It is reaching out to the other in compassion, but it is also my own self-interest. I want a world that is different for my own sake, as well as for my neighbor’s sake. The deepest truth is that those are one and the same. It’s not charity. It’s solidarity. We are both going to lift each other up and walk hand in hand.
Lauren: To be invited to explicitly name what we want is such an empowering thing. When it comes to our communities, to justice, to joy, to what brings wholeness to ourselves and our neighbors, those are not questions we’re typically asking or asked. That’s why it’s such a gift to have a leader like you who’s asking these questions, and to have you being the kind of person taking responsibility for your own desires, and what it means for you to flourish in your community.
Luke: Often in a tenant meeting, it will start with, “What I want is not to be cleaning up rat feces. What I want is not to be paying 50% of my income toward rent.”
Under those material desires, come words like, “What I want is dignity. What I want is a home I can invite other people to and not be embarrassed by. What I want is stability. I want to know that I won’t have to move in six months. I want to feel like I can envision the next few years, the next few decades in this place. What I want is to stay next to the neighbors that I know because I trust them and I feel like we have community here.”
These are fundamental human desires for what constitutes human flourishing: dignity, stability, community, hospitality. Values that I learned from my faith first.
Listen to the whole interview here!
Follow Connecticut Tenants Union on Instagram @cttenantsunion.
What captured your imagination in today’s interview? Join the conversation!