Interview with Montague, MA organizers
This month, we are celebrating 900+ Apartheid-Free communities around the world, as well as a seventh municipality that has signed on to the Apartheid-Free pledge. The newest, and Massachusetts’ first, Apartheid-Free municipality is Montague, MA. The Town Meeting of Montague overwhelmingly passed this resolution signing on to the Apartheid-Free Pledge at a Special Town Meeting on October 22, 2025.
We sat down with key Apartheid-Free organizers from Western Massachusetts, Heather Hutchinson and Rich Karsten, as well as Montague Town Meeting Member Maddox Sprengel, to talk about the successful resolution, the strategy behind it, and what’s next for Apartheid-Free in Western Massachusetts.
Would you all introduce yourselves and your work on Apartheid-Free briefly, and share a little bit about Montague, MA for those who may not be familiar?
Maddox Sprengel: I live in the town of Montague in the village of Turners Falls. Montague, MA is a small place with just under 8500 people residents. We have a select board and voting body instead of a city council. I’m one of 126 elected Town Meeting Members, so that was my role in bringing the Apartheid-Free pledge to the town. The pledge felt like a very clear, concrete way to build community against the harms that are happening to the Palestinian people.
Heather Hutchinson: Maddox was our champion for the campaign in Montague. He did a lot of the legwork. He was the go-between with the town administrators and the select board; he knew the inside scoop of the community. It really serves us to have our volunteers living in the municipality, knowing the community.
I live in Leverett, MA, and Rich and I have been involved with community outreach for the last two years. When the opportunity came up to bring a municipal resolution in the town of Montague, our core group of people were really excited about the idea. That’s when it became more than just Rich and I, it was a broader collection of people that could really make something happen.
Rich Karsten: We really initially started off doing listening circles and peace walks. Then we were in contact with the folks working on Apartheid-Free in Vermont, and were turned on by the Apartheid-Free initiative because it really goes after those systems of violence and it ties into the issues that we have back home. It was in alignment with our efforts to build community and help folks locally.
Could you explain the timeline of the campaign and the mechanics of passing this resolution?
MS: About May, myself, Rich, and another resident of Montague went to the town hall together, met with the town administrator, and asked about the process for a group of citizens to bring an important resolution to the town for a vote. He explained that we would have to take around a Citizens’ Petition form and collect 100 signatures from registered town voters in order to get an item added to the Town Meeting agenda. So then we had to strategize about base-building and collecting those 100 signatures.
HH: We were at festivals in Montague, we ran a fundraiser, and we had the petitions in some of the local restaurants so we could get additional signatures. And then as it got towards the Town Meeting itself in the fall, our strategy became focused less on base-building and more on targeting Town Meeting Members who could actually vote on the resolution. That took a lot of time.
MS: The town publishes a PDF of all 126 Town Meeting Members, with our name and precinct and phone number. So our group divided up the precincts into a spreadsheet where we listed every Town Meeting Member. We started by contacting each person and getting a sense of where they stood on the issue, if they were supportive or not, in order to get a sense of how much we would need to get their constituents to try to speak to them. Sometimes folks forget that Montague has a representative town government, so the Town Meeting Members are supposed to represent not just their personal opinion in the Town Meeting, we’re supposed to represent our constituents’ voices. This felt like a really important moment to reorient to that. So we began by calling every single Town Meeting Member and having some hard, or hopeful, or strategic conversations about this resolution.
How did the Town Meeting Members respond to the resolution, and what obstacles did you face in the process?
RK: We did everything we could to have those conversations with the Town Meeting Members, inviting them to outreach events where we could do questions and answers, talk about the resolution, and address any concerns. The real challenge was just how many hours it took. If there was something that we did successfully, it was organizing with the limited capacity that we had. By the time the resolution got to the floor for discussion, I think we had already addressed a lot of the concerns.
But it’s an amazing community. In the time that we spent, we couldn’t have changed Montague, it’s that the people of Montague are good people. They recognize what’s going on is wrong, and they want to do something about it. One of the beauties of this work is that it gets people to do something, and I think it gives them relief from seeing that what’s going on is wrong but not knowing what to do. They can sign a pledge, or go out and speak, or talk to their Town Meeting Member. It empowers them.
What did you as Apartheid-Free organizers learn from this campaign, and what advice would you give to other Apartheid-Free municipality campaigns?
MS: Even for folks who expressed some support, just leaving time for them to flesh that out, ask questions, and share their reaction to the pledge was important. There were many people who ultimately voted yes on the resolution even though initially they got caught up in the language or how it was written, and they just needed space to process that. We created spaces in conversations and events for people to get to a place of clarity over time. So if you can, leave enough time for people to have their reactions, because even the supportive or neutral folks initially had responses that could have deterred the end goal.
Can you speak on the significance of this victory for the Palestine solidarity movement in Massachusetts, in New England, and around the world?
MS: The resolution passing reflects that there’s a majority of good people who care and want to take action in Montague. I got emails from folks who felt proud to be part of a community that would stand so clearly against systems of apartheid and genocide. It also offers some momentum for other local small towns to join, and hopefully it will put pressure on state leadership who are voting in ways that are harmful and don’t reflect their constituents’ voices.
HH: The model we’ve been pursuing is less about a campaign that has a start and a finish, because that will only take you so far. We have to learn how to come back together as a community to assert real change, and find ways to truly support one another. The Apartheid-Free framework has allowed us to keep pulling the spotlight back to what we want in our communities. We’ve been thinking and talking about what the pledge means here and why solidarity with the Palestinian cause is really solidarity in our own communities.
What’s next for Apartheid-Free in Western Massachusetts?
HH: It’s definitely going to be multi-pronged. In Montague, we have town residents and members of the Select Board who want to enact the pledge in some way. Ideas have come up about education in schools, about town finance, about a human rights screening tool or committee for procurements or other issues in town.
RK: We’re also working on an Apartheid-Free shopping guide. We’ll have a first edition coming out in a few days. It’s been taking off more than we thought; a lot of folks want to sign the pledge so they can get their business in there.
Any closing thoughts?
MS: I’m actually thinking back to the question about the victory. This win can teach us that the people who are most directly impacted shouldn’t have to do the labor to move the movement forward. Of course they need to be centered, but this win in Montague represents a shift. People who are not directly impacted have to recognize not only our part in being complicit in this destruction, but also that our freedoms are tied up together. It’s not just Palestinian people who have to take up the cause, but it’s our job, all of us. We need our movements to be big and broad and recognize that our freedom and humanity are tied together.
