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Voters in Providence, Rhode Island, are set to become the first in the nation to decide on a binding initiative to divest their tax dollars from countries or companies complicit in genocide, war crimes, occupation, or apartheid.
The groundbreaking measure will be on the ballot in November thanks to a years-long organizing effort launched in response to Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
“We are seeing that across almost all demographics, divestment is popular, and there is broad support for human rights and Palestine solidarity,” says Jackie Goldman, who became the Democratic nominee to represent Providence City Council Ward 5 following a primary win this month. Goldman was previously a member-leader with Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP).
Justin Marlowe, director of the University of Chicago’s Center for Municipal Finance, says that the effort reflects growing popular interest in how tax dollars are collected and used.
“There’s been a realization of just how much money is at stake and just how opaque the decision-making can be sometimes,” he tells Next City. “That has caused a lot of people on all the different sides of this debate to really bear down and study these processes and learn where the points of influence are, and as they’ve done that, you’ve seen some litigation, some policy changes, some pressure campaigns.”
A campaign born from Break the Bonds
JVP Rhode Island started the Providence divestment campaign in 2024 as part of a nationwide JVP initiative called Break the Bonds, which seeds and supports local efforts to demand divestment from Israel Bonds. More than $1.6 billion in Israel Bonds are held by state governments, municipal governments, and public pension funds nationwide, with at least $1 billion held by Palm Beach County in Florida and about $360 million held in New York state and local retirement funds. The Development Corporation of Israel sells those bonds to raise foreign funds for the Israeli treasury.
When Providence organizers launched their efforts, the city held no Israel Bonds, so the goal was to prohibit future investment. In 2024, an initial attempt to pass an ordinance barring future investments in the bonds of governments maintaining a military occupation or accused of committing war crimes or human rights violations sputtered out after Mayor Brett Smiley promised to veto it.
A new coalition called Providence for Palestine is now leading the effort to pass a wider-reaching ballot initiative, which would mandate that the city “refrain, to the best of its ability, from investing in ‘complicit entities’ or ‘sovereign debt’ of foreign countries conducting ethnic cleansing, apartheid, illegal military occupation, or genocide.” The new coalition includes members of JVP Rhode Island, Democratic Socialists of America, local labor unions, and Reclaim RI, a housing justice and progressive organizing group.
“The leadership of our campaign since Break the Bonds and in this campaign as well is disproportionately Jewish and very much rooted in our Jewish values and wanting to build a faith and Jewish culture that centers solidarity, and justice, and repair,” says Zack Kligler, a JVP Rhode Island and Providence for Palestine organizer.
He says campaign volunteers collected more than 10,000 signatures in support of the measure.
Goldman was among those who helped collect signatures, often juggling multiple clipboards to gather names for their campaign, fellow progressives running in other districts, and the ballot measure. “My ask was just ‘Hey, we’re collecting these signatures to be able to get Providence to divest from countries and companies complicit in genocide, apartheid, and human rights violations,’” Goldman says. “And people were like ‘Oh yeah, pass me that clipboard!’”
The Providence Board of Canvassers confirmed at the end of July that it had verified the signatures of more than 5% of the city’s registered voters — the threshold needed to get on the November ballot.
Learning from Pittsburgh and Somerville
Organizers in Providence drew inspiration from earlier divestment efforts in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Somerville, Massachusetts. The Not On Our Dime campaign in Pittsburgh tried in 2024 and 2025 to get a divestment referendum on the city’s ballot, but pro-Israel groups opposed it and succeeded in pushing the issue off the ballot through legal challenges. Meanwhile, voters in Somerville passed a divestment ballot question last November. But under local law, it had to be non-binding.
“Somerville and Pittsburgh have been pioneering this pretty new tactic for the BDS [Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions] movement, and we’re very excited to take that to the next level,” Kligler says.
Organizers also drew strength from their city’s own progressive record. In 2006, Providence became the first U.S. city to divest from companies conducting business in Sudan after the genocide perpetrated in Darfur through an action of the city council. In November 2023, the Providence City Council became one of the nation’s first legislative bodies to pass a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.
This November’s ballot initiative in Providence will be the nation’s first binding citizen initiative on the question of divestment, according to Benjamin Case, project lead on the Ballot Initiatives Project at Arizona State University’s Center for Work and Democracy. He says it’s a new step for a progressive movement that has increasingly turned to ballot initiatives to drive change over the last two decades as frustration with the Democratic Party has grown.
Divestment is a particularly fitting issue for a citizen’s initiative, Case says, because “number one, it’s something that is highly popular with voters; and number two, it’s something that, for one reason or another, is not popular with representatives.”
Opposition may be weakening
As in Pittsburgh, the initiative in Providence is facing threats of legal action from Zionist groups who do not want to see the city’s funds divested from companies with ties to Israel.
The Jewish Alliance of Rhode Island wrote to Providence officials ahead of the signature certification process in July suggesting that the initiative could be invalid. Providence Mayor Brett Smiley has also urged voters to oppose the initiative claiming it would violate state law and be unenforceable if passed.
However, recent events in Providence have left advocates optimistic that the initiative has a good chance of passing, and any legal challenges would have to come afterward.
Smiley was among those defeated in September’s primaries in the same progressive wave that saw Goldman win their primary in Ward 5. The new Democratic candidate for Providence mayor, David Morales, is a democratic socialist who has spoken in support of the divestment campaign. Progressives are now expected to hold a majority if not a supermajority on Providence City Council after the general election.
Kligler says many of the organizers whose efforts helped usher in the new slate of progressives are now turning more of their attention to the ballot measure. “We’re continuing to build the movement, and do get out the vote stuff, and hopefully turn a lot of the energy that’s been focused towards these progressive candidates towards this ballot measure now,” he says.
Goldman says they hope this year’s elections, including the historic ballot initiative, will mark the start of a new era for Providence.
“There’s a real energy and thirst for a government that puts people first,” they tell Next City. “There’s only so much power that we all have, but we can choose where our money goes and how we build up the financial health of the city, and we don’t need to do that through the financing of genocide [and] endless wars.”
This story was originally published by Next City. Get Next City’s stories in your inbox: nextcity.org/newsletter.
