After winning $23 million in incentives from Arlington County and firming up its plans to establish a campus in Northern Virginia, Amazon is apparently here to stay. But so are the local activists who fought incentives for the tech giant in the first place.

Monday evening, organizers from the coalition For Us Not Amazon held a forum at Clarendon Presbyterian Church in which they laid out next steps in their resistance efforts against Amazon.

The first step, says organizer Angela Peoples, is to inform local residents about impacts the company could have on the region — such as increased housing prices and displacement of lower-income people — and what action they can take to demand more community benefits from Amazon, including funding for education and affordable housing.

“The county board has not even broached [community benefits] as a topic in this process,” Peoples says. “[Is Amazon] actually going to be contributing? What could a tax look like that goes towards making sure that Amazon pays their fare share?”

Arlington’s incentives agreement with Amazon does not require the company to make local investments in housing. But the county is approaching the issue in other ways.

In April, County Manager Mark Schwartz unveiled an umbrella initiative called Housing Arlington, which leaders say will usher in — among other things — updates to the county’s Affordable Housing Master Plan, preservation of moderate-income homes and zoning adjustments to encourage diverse housing types.

That initiative’s rollout was followed weeks later by today’s announcement that Amazon will donate $3 million to the Arlington Community Foundation to “improve access to affordable housing and support services in the region,” according to a press release. The company also plans to match employee donations to housing and homelessness charities through the end of September.

Keeping Up The Pressure

But those efforts may not satisfy some who spoke during Monday’s forum, who maintain that elected officials in Arlington approved $23 million in Amazon incentives despite clear opposition from residents and organizers. Board members unanimously approved the package during a contentious vote in March that led to the arrest of one activist.

“There needs to be a big shift in terms of who elected officials are truly accountable to,” said Danny Cendejas, an organizer with LaColectiVA and For Us Not Amazon.

That’s one reason why, Peoples says, activists plan to canvass Arlington residents this summer to gauge public sentiment on Amazon’s impact and use their feedback in continued efforts to pressure the county board.

But first, Peoples says, For Us Not Amazon has a more immediate goal: Hold a rally outside Amazon Web Services’ Public Sector Summit at D.C.’s Walter E. Washington Convention Center on Wednesday. The summit is geared toward promoting Amazon’s cloud products to government agencies.

Activists here and across the country have raised criticism of AWS, which provides services to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to a 2018 report released by progressive group Mijente.

“Join us to tell Amazon execs, [customers] and their ‘global community’ that these are worst practices,” says an event invitation for Wednesday’s rally, “that they need to put people over profit, and that we don’t want them here.”

This story originally appeared on WAMU.