Fighting Boston Consulting Group from Philly schools to Palestine

By Hannah Gann

Philadelphia

The following is a talk delivered outside the Philadelphia office of the Boston Consulting Group during a rally on Aug. 10, 2025, demanding an end to the genocide in Gaza. Gann spoke on behalf of Philly Educators for Palestine.

We’re standing in front of the offices of the Boston Consulting Group, and just by show of hands, how many of you have heard of BCG? How many of you knew that in 2013, these Bum-Ass Consulting Goons came to our city and suggested that the School District save money by closing over 60 of our public schools?

Thirty of these schools were, in fact, closed between 2012 and 2013, representing 10% of all our public schools. Furthermore, private donors and companies paid BCG $4.4 million to draw up these fancy infographics about shuttering schools and saving money by privatizing school services like buses, costing thousands of unionized workers their jobs.

BCG did the same thing in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, gutting their public schools and auctioning them off to charter school operations. This is BCG’s business model — Bad-faith Corporate Grifters who swoop in like vultures when communities are in crisis to extract as much private profit and neoliberal accumulation as possible.

I taught at one of the [Philadelphia] schools that was closed in 2013. I witnessed the trauma it caused my students to be forced to transfer to unfamiliar and often unfriendly schools. I saw both the statistical evidence and the personal pain of watching more young people disengage from school, drop out and fall victim to gun violence.

I stayed in touch with students who even a decade later still talk about the negative impact school closures had on their education, and now the district is talking about closing down even more schools next year. But we aren’t going to let that happen, just like we aren’t going to forget that BCG played a key part in starting all this.

BCG behind Gaza Humanitarian Foundation killing sites

But what does this have to do with Gaza, you ask? Well, the BCG doesn’t just target suffering U.S. communities. No, these Bloodthirsty Colonizing Ghouls took their disaster capitalism international, securing a multimillion dollar contract to design a plan for “relocating” Palestinians from Gaza, which we know means continuing the Nakba.

Moreover, according to The Washington Post, BCG played an integral role in setting up the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s “aid delivery system.” As I’m sure you all know, that’s an insulting euphemism for the dehumanizing slaughter fields that GHF is operating. As the population in Gaza — which, let’s remember, is 50% children — faces stage 5 famine, I hear daily from friends about loved ones being murdered simply for trying to feed their families.

And who’s behind this unconscionable savagery? Well, there’s Phil Reilly, an ex-CIA officer who was senior adviser at BCG for eight years until he left the firm six months ago to start a for-profit company that operates the “security” logistics for GHF. They also hired another private security company to “guard” the food aid that includes members of the notoriously Islamaphobic Infidels Motorcycle Gang.

Is it any surprise that, according to Al Jazeera, over 1,500 lives have been exterminated at these so-called aid sites? One of my dear friends recently had a cousin shot in both feet with bullets that exploded shrapnel when he was trying to get food. Although he thankfully survived, he had one leg amputated without anesthesia and now has a long road to recovery with a malnourished body.

I share these stories to once and for all dispel the notion that our suffering is separate. Trying to stop the School District of Philadelphia from the next wave of school closings they are threatening is inextricably linked to demanding our tax dollars stop funding Israeli genocide and apartheid. 

Even if you don’t have children in our public schools or family in Palestine, this is still your fight. Because they are ALL our children, and if we don’t stand up with unapologetic moral clarity to protect them from harm, this violence will soon come home to your children, because we have allowed a world where this kind of monstrosity is acceptable.   

To that end, I want to implore all of us — myself included — to stop siloing our struggles. I was a young organizer when my school shut down in 2013, and I prioritized meetings to save my specific school over citywide actions against BCG. While I will never regret putting my students first, I can’t help but wonder if we had forged a more collective movement back then to shut down these Brutal Capitalist Greed-mongers, maybe they wouldn’t have turned their opportunistic avarice onto Gaza.    

It’s a stark reminder that we cannot afford to wait or waver when we see injustice. In particular, we urge you to take action against other genocides and famines, such as those in Congo and Sudan, when you stand up for Palestine. We cannot rightly decry the famine in Gaza as a man-made atrocity against humanity while at the same time ignoring the stage 5 famine that the United Arab Emirates and its allies have manufactured in Sudan, because we subconsciously see starvation as a more common plight for Africa.

We have to center the precious lives and liberation of Black children as we combat colonialism and empire, because white supremacy and racial capitalism are at the root of it all. We must remember our political prisoners and their resistance, especially during Black August.

And while we can begin by dismantling this company of Boorish Consulting Gangsters, we cannot stop until all our children and all of our communities from Philly to Palestine, from Sudan to Samoa, from the Congo River to the Mediterranean Sea are free from oppression, violence and exploitation. 

Free Palestine means Free Them All!