Join veteran organizer Stephen Meacham and successful tenant organizers, Laura Frost, Yvette Moore, Zafiro Patiño, and Melonie Griffiths, as they share about the “sword and shield” approach to tenant organizing and other strategies through which Boston area communities have held onto their homes. Stephen Meacham started in organizing as a union welder at the Quincy shipyards and spent decades as a tenant/community organizer at Vida Urbana/City Life before founding STOP. Laura Frost is a lead organizer in the Arlington property where she has rented for decades and defeated developer-led evictions. Now she’s working to get the building sold to a non-profit. Yvette Moore fought evictions for herself and her neighbor and hung on to their homes in Dorchester until the Boston Neighborhood Community Land Trust was able to purchase the property. Zafiro Patino fled Argentinian dictatorship in the 1980s and is a long-time tenant organizer in Boston as well as a co-founder of Spontaneous Celebrations building cultural life in Roxbury and Jamaica Plain. Melonie Griffiths is a long-time community and labor activist with extensive experience on the sword and shield model.