The Forge: Organizing Strategy and Practice

A Conversation About Blackness and Criminalization with Black Alliance for Just Immigration Miski Noor: Nana, I want to start with the fact that your organizing experience is both deep and wide. And so, I’d like to just start with grounding us there. Please tell us what brings you to this work. Nana Gyamfi: I come to this work because it’s part of the work of Black liberation, which is really important to me.

The three installments of this series follow the first five years experience of The Drivers Cooperative. They will draw out insights that can be applied by other activists in our context today, where the left increasingly wields political power, but faces the challenge of materializing meaningful economic change. In May 2021, the front page of the business section of the New York Times featured an unlikely lead story: the launch of The Drivers Cooperative.

August 4, 2026 We examine how the 1898 Wilmington coup exposed the fatal illusion that electoral victories alone can secure lasting power when the ruling class retains control over violence, wealth, and the institutions that enforce both. As the United States marks its 250th anniversary in 2026, our dominant cultural narrative will receive a brilliant polish. We will be told a comforting fable of linear ascension, the myth that America progress is an unbroken, upward line of gradual correction.

How a worker-led coalition won Philadelphia’s POWER Act (the Protect Our Workers, Enforce Rights Act), and how they’re fighting to make it real. A few years ago, one of our members — a Black Caribbean immigrant nanny working in one of Philadelphia’s wealthiest neighborhoods — asked her employer for a written contract. She had that right under the city’s Domestic Worker Bill of Rights, which domestic workers won in 2019. Instead, she was fired on the spot.

Wealth redistribution, as a relational practice rooted in accountability, has the potential to spiritually transform a person, as shared here by redistribution organizers Brittany Koteles and Morgan Curtis. Koteles, Executive Director of Land Justice Futures, an organization that supports Catholic nuns in engaging in land return, and Curtis, who offers one-on-one coaching for inheritors of generational wealth, both maintain a committed approach to the “how” of land and resource return.

July 2, 2026 Today’s immigration and child welfare systems are the same colonial machinery that ran boarding schools and slave patrols, and no amount of privilege will shield you when that machinery decides you are next. Indigenous, Black, and other communities of color across North America know all too well how quickly civil rights and community safety can be stripped away and violated.

In a country where land has historically been central to wealth and power-building, we must carefully consider how we want to work together towards land reclamation. Kailea Loften in conversation with Nick Tilsen and Brea Baker At the start of 2026, Brea Baker, author of Rooted: The American Legacy of Land Theft in the Modern Movement for Black Land Ownership, sat down for a conversation with NDN Collective’s founder, Nick Tilsen, and Guest Editor, Kailea Loften.

July 2, 2026 We are living in fascist times, which means we must remember history to help us understand the possibilities of our futures. Do we want to subjugate ourselves to the tyranny of a dictatorial leader? Or do we want to struggle for the future that can encompass us all, free of the shackles of racism and colonialism, free from the unequal yoke of living in the heart of empire while our tax dollars fund genocides and conflicts around the world?

July 2, 2026 Where did the concept of American democracy come from? And are we living up to its core values? As we mark 250 years of America, these are pertinent questions to consider. In this conversation, Claire Maracle, Executive Director of Words of the People, and Baratunde Thurston, storyteller and author of How to Be Black, excavate the origins of American democracy to expand and reshape our political imagination. It turns out we’ve been dreaming too small.

If we’re going to work to bring diverse groups of people into conversation and ultimately solidarity, we will need an updated politics of togetherness capable of bringing nuance to intersectionality.