The Debt Collective has its roots in the Occupy Wall Street movement. When we first raised the demand for student debt cancellation during Occupy Wall Street, the establishment scoffed. Since then, our relentless organizing has helped secure the abolition of nearly $200 billion in student loans belonging to millions of people.
Just as important, we’ve expanded our movement to include tenants fighting for rent cancellation and social housing, medical debtors fighting for debt relief and universal health care, and community members organizing against school lunch debt and for free school meals.
We have shown that when debtors get organized we can win.
This story starts in 2012, when some of the future founders of the Debt Collective helped write the Debt Resisters’ Operations Manual and launch the Rolling Jubilee, a mechanism for purchasing portfolios of people’s debt on secondary debt markets — and cancelling it. Using crowdfunded donations, the Rolling Jubilee abolished more than $32 million of medical, student, payday loan, and probation debt. We then collaborated with the New Economy Project to ensure that 120,000 judgement debts — worth $800 million — were forfeited and retired as part of a legal case. After a short hiatus, we revived the Rolling Jubilee in 2020 and, over the next four years, abolished tens of millions of dollars of probation debt, ambulance debt, tuition debt, abortion debt, utility debt, and school meal debt for people across the country.
But our focus has always been on organizing to build debtor power. In 2015, we organized the nation’s first student debt strike in collaboration with members who had attended Corinthian Colleges, a predatory for-profit college chain, jumpstarting a movement with repercussions still being felt today. In 2022, the Biden administration announced the elimination of every penny of Corinthian student debt, totaling nearly $6 billion for over half a million people. By then, our organizing had expanded into a broader fight for the abolition of all student debt and was going mainstream. Despite an enraged rightwing taking the issue all the way to the Supreme Court, nearly five million people got their federal student loans canceled between 2020 and 2025.
Our organizing has changed lives and put universal student debt cancellation and free public college on the map. We are continuing to fight for the abolition of all student loans and the provisions of free, reparative public college. But we have even bigger ambitions. We are now busy building power with tenants struggling to pay the ever-rising rent, medical debtors crushed by unjust healthcare bills, and other debtors and allies. The Debt Collective’s vision and goals are laid out in our manifesto, Can’t Pay Won’t Pay: The Case for Economic Disobedience and Debt Abolition, which outlines a strategy for debtor organizing that goes far beyond student debt to include housing debt, bail and probation debt, credit card debt, utility debt, municipal and sovereign debt and more. Join our union and help make this vision a reality!