Howie Hawkins has lived on the South Side since moving to Syracuse in 1991, where he has been active in the community on many issues.
He is currently a Board member and Treasurer for the Eat To Live Food Cooperative and for the Southside Community Coalition.
Howie works at UPS unloading trucks, where he is a member of Teamsters Local 317 and active in Teamsters for a Democratic Union, US Labor Against the War, and the Labor Campaign for Single Payer Healthcare.
Howie has been an organizer in movements for peace, justice, labor, and the environment since 1967.
A former Marine, he helped organize opposition to the Vietnam War. In the 1970s and 1980s, he was a leader in the anti-apartheid divestment movement to end US corporate investment in the system of racist labor exploitation in South Africa.
After attending Dartmouth College in the early 1970s, Howie worked in construction and helped organize a workers cooperative that specialized in energy efficiency and solar and wind installations.
Howie moved to Syracuse to develop cooperatives for CommonWorks, a federation of cooperatives that worked in the 1990s for an economy that is cooperatively owned, democratically controlled, and ecologically sustainable. Today he supports the New York Cooperative Network.
Howie was active in the campaigns to establish a Citizens Review Board in the 1990s and the Living Wage Ordinance in the 2000s.
As the Syracuse Green Party's candidate for Mayor in 2005, Howie's campaign succeeded in putting public power – a city-owned power utility – on the city's agenda.
As the New York Green Party's candidate for Governor in 2010 and 2014, he campaigned for a ban on fracking, 100% clean energy by 2030, a $15 minimum wage, an end to Governor Cuomo's test-punish-and-privatize education agenda, and for progressive taxes and revenue sharing as the alternative to Cuomo's cuts to schools, cities, and public services. In 2014, he received nearly 5 percent of the vote, just behind the record for an independent progressive candidate for New York Governor received by Socialist candidates in 1918 and 1920.
In 2011, Howie received 48% of the vote for 4th District Common Councilor.
When the Socialist Party of Eugene Debs, A. Philip Randolph, Helen Keller, and Norman Thomas re-established itself in 1973, Howie joined and remains a member.
He was a co-founder of the anti-nuclear Clamshell Alliance in 1976 and the Green Party in the US in 1984.
Currently, he is member of the Full Employment Council of the Green Shadow Cabinet that was appointed by the 2012 Green Party presidential ticket of Jill Stein and Cheri Honkala. He is also a contributor to PopularResistance.Org.
Howie's articles on politics, economics, and environmental issues have appeared in Against the Current, CounterPunch, Green Politics, International Socialist Review, Labor Notes, New Politics, Peace and Democracy News, Popular Resistance, Z Magazine, and other publications. He is the editor of and a contributor to Independent Politics: The Green Party Strategy Debate (Haymarket Books, 2006).