When the police murdered George Floyd in 2020, Kandace Montgomery was unwittingly thrust into the center of a global maelstrom. Minneapolis became the focus of a raging debate about policing in America, bringing national scrutiny to what had been a local multiyear effort to reimagine community safety. In the weeks after Floyd’s murder, City Council members publicly committed to abolition, but then reneged on those promises as national attention polarized the city’s debate.

Kandace sat down with me in April for a candid, reflective conversation about her journey with Black Visions and her experience organizing for abolition. The interview confronts a question that has been at the center of Kandace’s entire career: How do we enable the organizing that we need for the world that we want?

There is no path to revolutionary justice without organizing, so this is a question we must all answer. Yet, as Kandace’s story reveals, the forces mitigating against an organizer’s ability to lead strategically with courage can be overwhelming. We often look back on political failures and mistakenly attribute them to a lack of resources or faulty leadership. But this conversation pushes us all to turn the mirror onto ourselves, to ask what role we each play in reinforcing a system that pushes organizers to seek power everywhere but in their own people, to lead with fear instead of courage, and to minimize strategic risks. Kandace confessed to feeling “anxious” and “tender” when we began the conversation; I felt tender by the end.

— Hahrie Han

Hahrie Let’s start with your story. Where did you grow up? How did you get into organizing? What brought you to Black Visions?

Kandace I spent most of my childhood in rural Maine. I was an angry, uptight young person because so many things in my life felt out of my control. My sister and I were the only Black people in our community for most of the time. Growing up there, experiencing violence, being poor, and watching my mom work 60 hours a week, I was like, I gotta get out of here.

I got into UMass Amherst, where someone literally knocked on my door and said, You should take this class about community organizing. My senior year, I met someone who was paid to organize and thought, I want to do that for the rest of my life. I got a job working for her at an organization in Springfield, Mass., but my little 22-year-old heart was broken after the 2012 election when they ran out of money for organizing. I applied for a job with TakeAction Minnesota, and I got it. A year and a half later, the Movement for Black Lives popped off.

I helped co-found Black Lives Matter Minneapolis in 2014, and in 2016, I worked for the Black Lives Matter Global Network. But in 2017, we were like, We need something here in Minnesota, and it doesn’t necessarily need to be a BLM chapter. We needed infrastructure that could last as opposed to an organizing vehicle that was primarily responsive. So we started building Black Visions.

Hahrie Can you describe the structure of Black Visions — everything from the leadership structure and the constituency to the leadership’s relationship with the constituency?

Kandace We originally started out with a core team of seven founders. As we raised money, we were able to pay some of us. Some of us had fellowships and things like that, and so we began to delegate our roles. As we got more money, we lived into the structure.

We were always clear about being a member- and partner-based organization. From the beginning, we intended to have a staff, and then build a policy board and a strategy team populated mostly by members, along with some staff. In a decentralized way, those member-leaders would lead a set of working groups that held responsibility for key aspects of the organization’s strategy and goals, including campaigns, communications, and narrative. That was how we started to shape ourselves before 2020 and after.

Hahrie How did you define who the members were?

Kandace Young Black queer people and their families. But that included a non-monolithic view of Blackness, especially because Minnesota has so many communities across the diaspora. We also wanted to meaningfully engage their families, even if they were not our primary target for membership but definitely a target in our larger base-building.

Hahrie I’d love to understand more about how you approached member and leader development. How did you identify young Black queer people to recruit? And once you found them, how did you recruit them into membership? How were people chosen for policy and strategy boards?

Kandace We looked at folks like Dream Defenders and BYP100, who have clear membership orientation processes. Because we desired shared governance and decision-making, we knew that we needed to bring folks in intentionally. We had membership orientation processes that you had to attend to become a voting member. A lot of it was led by Ar’Tesha Saballos, one of our founders, who hosted Black Joy Sundays and For the Culture workshops — easy-to-enter spaces for young Black folks to connect. We had game nights, there was a Valentine’s Day–themed one about consent, and we had someone come in and talk about how to flirt in a consensual way. We tried to create spaces that we knew young Black queer people craved in the Twin Cities, and then add our politics and our values into those spaces. Then we followed up with those people to build relationships through one-on-ones and invite them to become members. As young Black queer and trans people ourselves, we knew a lot of the people, so a lot of the original members were folks we had organized with at BLM, whom we were friends with and in community with already. We brought folks in by asking those people to invite more people in.

Hahrie I love that. There are so few organizations left that are truly member-driven. I appreciate you unpacking your structure to make visible the nitty-gritty of these choices, because they make a real difference in how an organization operates. If members are involved in governance, then the organization and its leaders are accountable to them in a way that is different from typical nonprofit organizations.

Can you describe the early years at Black Visions?

Kandace The early years were a response to the Ferguson uprising, when young Black people were hyper active — and reactive — but experiencing conflict and burnout with no sustainable infrastructure to move broader, longer-term strategy. Around 2017 one of the only local Black-led organizations, Neighborhoods Organizing for Change (NOC), closed its doors. I was part of a group of seven Black Visions co-founders, and we were like, Who is going to shape the Black radical response?

Those early years of Black Visions were characterized by an attitude of Let’s just do it! We had to learn a lot about organization building and how to build something that can hold our values even as we navigate challenge and conflict …. It was a lot of work, but a lot of fun. We had to beg for attention. In organizing, that’s a good position to be in because it enables a lot of experimentation. We were only two and a half years old with maybe a $300,000 budget when 2020 happened.

In 2018, folks were pushing the mayor around policing, and we linked up with other organizers to dream up a budget campaign. We started by calling for a 5 percent divestment from the police, knowing we wouldn’t get that. That effort became part of the Reclaim the Block campaign, which eventually got the City Council to vote in 2018 on moving $1.1 million from the police budget to a variety of new programs, including the Office of Violence Prevention, to pilot alternate approaches to community safety. None of us, including the organizers, expected that win.

Hahrie Mainstream media often portrays activists as unreasonable and dogmatic. I think that view misunderstands that a bold animating vision does not preclude subsequent negotiation. Can you talk about how you explained to your members how you started with a 5 percent divestment goal and ending with a $1.1 million pilot?

Kandace It’s not just how the media portrays activists, but even the negative ways that folks inside our movement portray Black queer feminists who are organizing from a strong and clear radical ideology.

We made the call as a founding team to co-lead the budget campaign. In 2019, we hosted political education sessions and got members envisioning what they wanted. People loved being part of the budget hearings and having these politicized moments of being face-to-face with power. I’d meet so many members and think, Your ideology is on point, you can talk about racial capitalism all day, but they had no praxis. Those campaigns let them put their ideology into practice and have an embodied experience beyond social media.

Transparently, some of these choices and our moving so fast might have contributed to the conflict after 2020 because we didn’t build a resilient enough foundation of constituency and leadership.

Hahrie I love the notion of an embodied experience of agency and the way it opens strategic pathways that pure ideology cannot.

Let’s move into a discussion of the George Floyd moment and the summer of 2020.

Kandace That moment was difficult. I was extremely tired and tender the whole time. I live two blocks from George Floyd Square. It was part of my work, and it was happening in my backyard. But there was also this deep sense that we could win abolition. That was an energizing experience.

Folks forget that in 2015 the police killed Jamar Clark, and the BLM Minneapolis chapter led an occupation of the Fourth Precinct for 18 days. After that, Philando Castile was murdered, and we’ve had multiple other high-profile police killings. In 2017 an initiative called MPD150 published an analysis of the Minneapolis Police Department on its 150th anniversary. As part of the report, local leaders led community conversations and art installations to imagine how we could transform the system of safety in the city.

All that shifted the landscape in Minnesota and shaped our ability to respond in 2020 and move beyond, quite frankly, just #BlackLivesMatter. From Reclaim the Block and MPD150, we knew we were going to have to think about structural change and reform the city charter. Our charter says that we must have a police department with at least 730 police officers as part of the city structure. All this organizing politicized more people and helped make the leap from This is not right to We can stop this.

And as organizers, we learned a lot. At a national level, the Vision for Black Lives and Critical Resistance do not get enough credit for educating organizers, sharpening their strategic capacities, and shaping a lot of us, which all helped lead us to a different response in 2020.

Because of the work that folks had done together for several years, different collectives continued to form in addition to Black Visions. All of this structure-building shaped our ability to respond, absorb, and redistribute resources in 2020 — even our relationships with the rest of the progressive movement.

Hahrie Let’s talk through some of the nuts and bolts of 2020. After George Floyd’s murder, what happened in terms of media attention and claims that people were making on your leadership and resources?

Kandace The day after George Floyd was murdered, folks gathered, masked up, at the site of his murder, and then they marched to the Third Precinct. That was where the uprising started. Black Visions and other organizers were like, We need to plan a set of direct actions. We need to make it clear who has decision-making power to shift this. We put out an email and some social media blasts using #DefundThePolice and tried to shape the narrative, which was that the community had been asking the city to divest from policing and invest in alternative solutions for several years. It didn’t. So George Floyd’s blood was on the city’s hands.

Black Visions and Reclaim the Block led direct actions targeting the City Council, including a large march from a park to the police federation building, then to our mayor Jacob Frey’s house. That was a galvanizing moment, because it positioned him as the enemy, and then we, Reclaim the Block, TakeAction Minnesota, ISAIAH, and other organizations started having calls with council members.

Hahrie How did the ecosystem of organizations involved decide who would be on these strategic calls between organizers and elected officials and what the agendas were?

Kandace Part of the story that rarely gets told in organizing is the longstanding relationships that animate some of the work. Before Black Visions, I was organizing alongside these City Council members when I was 22. We were socializing and going to protests and actions together. That’s how folks build trust. So decisions about who reached out to City Hall and joined the calls were based on who had the skills and the relationships.

A lot of those calls were organized by Sheila Nezhad, an amazing strategist who had done a lot of research in 2018 to help us understand the need to change the city charter. On these nightly calls, we strategized with and held the city councilors accountable, and we got the City Council to participate in a public meeting at Powderhorn Park, where a majority of council members agreed to defund the police in front of a huge crowd. That summer, we worked with the City Council to try to pass that charter change through the charter committee and a City Council vote. But we were shot down. So we had to pivot toward a ballot initiative campaign, which we prepared to launch in 2021.

Hahrie I’m struck by the fact that the call to defund the police in Minneapolis was part of a multiyear conversation about alternatives for promoting community safety, a policy proposal that emerged from a process of education and imagination with both the community and city leaders. But when George Floyd was killed, these proposals were vaulted onto the national stage and into communities that had not undergone the same process of education, imagination, and organizing. I can’t help but wonder if the nationalization and politicization of the issue negatively impacted the work in Minneapolis in the end.

Hahrie Let’s shift to money. What happened in terms of fund-raising in the immediate aftermath of George Floyd?

Kandace Black Visions raised close to $30 million within a month. People were dumping money on us because they were inspired or because of white guilt. Donating was a way that people outside Minnesota could participate. People kept asking, Where do we give money? So a volunteer posted a donation link on social media. Someone dropped $10,000 through that link — getting a gift like this without cultivating the donor is unheard of. Of that $30 million, some 97 percent was from individuals and only 3 percent came from philanthropy.

I remember our fiscal sponsor called me saying, Your bank account somehow has millions of dollars in it. We were shocked because nobody had been checking. We were just trying to organize during the crisis. But the outside perception, because so many people saw the link to donate to Black Visions, was that we were actively trying to raise money.

A group of local organizers and youth circulated an open letter asking us to reveal how much money we raised, our plans with it, and to disperse it back into the community. So while we’re trying to build strategic campaigns in the city, we had to address intra-community conflict around money. It was an amount of money that people had never experienced before.

We were also trying to figure out what we do with it, how to give it out. Because of the pandemic, we tried to get people money to buy things like diapers and air-conditioners, and also support other organizations because we weren’t the only shop in town.

And we had to think about our long-term sustainability. This opportunity — unrestricted dollars at this scale to a Black abolitionist organization — does not happen often. We knew that philanthropic investments in abolition were not going to last; in fact, there has been an incredible divestment by philanthropy. So we were clear we were not just going to give it all away because it was a huge opportunity for the long term.

Having to sit inside of some of those hard conversations as founders, and then also with the community, was difficult. Some people called me out by name, especially on social media. Those folks assumed the worst of intentions around how we were using those resources. Given the trauma people were experiencing, I have grace for this reaction. And it felt hard to respond to. We often froze or didn’t reach out for help when we needed to.

Eventually, we were able to shape a plan around the money. We partnered with Nexus Community Partners to launch the Transformative Black-Led Movement Fund, which gave out $7.1 million in six months. We also allocated funds for the organization to develop another chunk of resources to invest in more Black movement ecosystem infrastructure building, organizational and physical. We weren’t perfect, but by the end of summer 2020, we tried our best to be more responsive to community conversations and communicate our plans.

Hahrie There is racism inherent in the assumption that a Black-led organization can’t be responsible for stewarding such resources. How did you experience those dynamics around race, your leadership, and money?

Kandace Racism, misogyny, and misogynoir played a huge role in this. We weren’t just Black people, but Black queer and trans people, Black women. If I’m being honest, the sharpest critiques came from other Black people. That is a trauma response because our communities are so under-resourced that when we do get resources, they are often misused by those in power. Rightfully, Black people don’t trust anybody in a position of power to decide how resources are used. There’s also an internalized racism and a lot of homophobia and transphobia around the questions Can we trust one another enough to steward these resources? Can we even start the conversation from a place of trust versus skepticism? It was such a disheartening and harmful experience for me, even though I knew the immediate distrust was about something bigger.

Folks questioned our Blackness, especially because we are from the diaspora. Folks questioned Miski, another co-founder, as a Black person because they are a Somali immigrant. We have multiple people who are visibly trans on our founding team. I remember one community “conversation” that ended up feeling like a trial. A woman in the audience asked us, “Why should Black people trust trans people?” It was as if she were saying that those things can’t coexist and that if they did, they weren’t part of the broader sense of the Black community.

In retrospect, one of my biggest regrets is that we were not as transparent and forthright about the money at the beginning as we could have been. It helped perpetuate harm. I know it would have been scary to do so, and I understand and have a lot of compassion for this decision. But we could have said, Yep, we have raised this much money. No, we did not ask for it or know what we’re going to do with it. Frankly, that’s not our top priority right now. We carried a lot of resentment because we just wanted to organize. But suddenly, it felt like people hated us and were questioning our motives — when two months prior we were begging people to attend our events. Suddenly we had to walk on eggshells in the community.

Hahrie I want to gently probe your regret that you weren’t more transparent. Why did it feel hard in that moment to be transparent about the money?

Kandace I appreciate that question so much. Fear drove me from being transparent. It’s scary in a moment like that to admit, I don’t have the answers, especially as a Black femme genderqueer person. It almost feels like giving people another reason not to trust your leadership. As Black people, I feel like we always have to have the answers. People were like, If we are going to defund the police, what is the vision then for safety? It was wild that people expected us to deliver the answer for the next 150 years of community safety.

We didn’t have many experiences of being in principled conflict where we treated each other with respect and care. I wish that we could approach things with curiosity and goodwill when leaders are making decisions.

Hahrie What I’m hearing is that you and your co-leaders were unwittingly pulled into this moment of very visible leadership. You were thrown a lot of resources and media attention you didn’t ask for. And then suddenly these structures of judgment were imposed on you that reduced your ability to act with courage and to take risks. How did you experience it?

Kandace The piece around a framework of judgment reducing our ability to move with courage is such an accurate description of that moment. I don’t think we made enough decisions. And that was a symptom of feeling like we had to walk on eggshells. The lack of decision-making meant that we were trying to appease everybody instead of confronting conflict, because it felt scary and unsafe. That is something important that folks will have to wrestle with in future moments.

We said, We’ll get the money out as soon as we can. And we’re going to prove to everybody that we can run a campaign. There’s another thing that we did in 2021 that was, in retrospect, a bad decision. People said we weren’t engaging them enough. So we decided to run people’s movement assemblies in 2021, while also running a ballot initiative campaign, and being a baby organization, and having just given out $7.1 million, and having to figure out our internal governance, membership development, and strategy. We did not make enough tough choices.

Within my own leadership, I didn’t facilitate some of the necessary conversations that could have helped make those decisions and hold the disappointment when we have to say no to certain things, especially when there's an abundance of good ideas. Being able to move with courage and feel like we could take more risks might have allowed us to make some of those hard calls and build a long-term strategy out of that moment.

Hahrie Just to make the implicit explicit, what is the downside of not making enough decisions?

Kandace We spread ourselves too thin. The consequence was that, frankly, we were not tending to our membership, which had always been our top priority. In Black Visions, we leaned into policing because of our earlier divestment campaigns, but the real reason we had created the organization was to build a political home for Black queer people. We ended up deprioritizing that. Spreading ourselves too thin also made us permeable, allowing bad actors who did not have good intentions for the organization to enter. It also created a lot of tension internally, limiting time for shared governance and decision-making, and the emotional capacity to be in struggle without interpreting it as interpersonal conflict. Those things often got conflated because we were trying to build the bike while riding it.

Hahrie The pressure to disinvest in membership is so common. Can you say more about that? What were the pressures that made you feel like you had to be more accountable to the media and the money than to members?

Kandace I’m still cooking on this part of it. First, Miski and I were co-directors at this point, leading the ship and shaping the narrative. A robust Black political elite here did not share the narrative we wanted. So we felt pressured to respond to media because that was our chance to shape the narrative.

Second, there is a lack of understanding, respect, and commitment to the work of building constituency. A lot of the flak that we got was Black Visions is leading but doesn’t even have a base. First of all, I’m like, Bay-bee, we’ve only been around for three years. And two, Tell me how many of you who have been around for 10, 20 years can turn out more than three Black queer people. But because of the resources we had, folks were like, You better perform. I felt a lot of pressure for us to be everything to everyone.

Third, we weren’t just organizing the Black community; we were also trying to pull the progressive movement further left. I don’t necessarily regret this decision because we would be leaving power on the table if we weren’t organizing the left. All these organizations we had asked for years to join our policing coalition were suddenly a part of it — but they hadn’t done the work to understand abolitionist policy solutions. A lot of the organizing I had to do was to explain, That policy is a bad idea, because all of these cities have tried that, and that will give the police more money. I am grateful for Andrea Ritchie and several other abolitionist OGs who coached us and for Reclaim the Block in making sure that the solutions and the strategy were pointed in the right direction.

As an organizer, I carried a lot of shame about people questioning whether I was building a base. But we felt pulled to lead and do all those other things.

Hahrie Now it’s 2024. It’s been four years. Can you narrate the history between that first year and now?

Kandace In 2021, we led the Yes 4 Minneapolis campaign. We, alongside others, built a coalition of over 60 organizations and won 44 percent of the vote [to amend the charter]. But regardless of victory or loss, we did not have clarity as a coalition on the next step. And so we spent 2022 licking our wounds and figuring out what could happen next. Black Visions was also continuing to engage in its own strategic planning process. But a lot of our energy went toward addressing some of the tension around structure and strategy, and how to steward resources to support that work. That conflict led toward a staff-requested process of mediation.

In 2023, after an incident, the staff led a vote of no confidence to ask Miski and me to leave as co-executive directors. There were multiple other resignations in the organization after that. I made a mistake that I continue to try and be accountable to: not intervening in a moment of violence, which was the catalyst for our departure. Out of respect for folks’ ability to choose their own leaders, I resigned from my position last year and began a process of grief and reflection. And a process of accountability to the harm that I had caused in moving fast, avoiding conflict, and not taking care of myself to show up as a grounded leader. I’ve had to go back and tend to a lot of relationships inside of and outside of Black Visions. Much of last year I was also figuring out my commitment to movement: Why am I here? What am I trying to do? And how do I sustain myself? I’m still figuring that out.

Hahrie I appreciate your courage in sharing that. I can only imagine how hurtful that process must have been; you’re describing an incredible process of grief, accountability and leadership to make sense of that experience. But I hear a story of two Black queer leaders who were chewed up by a system that does not give organizers space to do their work.

It's better for our world, I believe, to have organizers at the center of global crises, as opposed to lobbyists or policymakers. But we make it so hard for organizers to be in that place. I know that you’re taking responsibility for your own leadership, and I’m not minimizing your sense of accountability. But I want to understand how we can create systems that don’t chew people up. It can’t just be a story of developing individual leaders. What do we need to do to create conditions or systems so leaders and organizations can meet moments like this?

Kandace A woman named Vicky Chan said to me once that we often forget that holding people accountable needs to be heavy on the holding. I don’t know exactly what the systems are, but I think that needs to be the orientation. We need to hold people with love and care to build relationships and support folks. A lot of this is internalized perfectionism — both expecting our leaders to be perfect, and then as leaders ourselves expecting ourselves to be perfect, because we’re scared of the consequences and the reactions when we are not. That posture needs to be shifted so it feels less scary for folks to take risks, be honest when they don’t know something or mess up, and not be thrown away.

Of course, there are preventive tools. I know in your work you think about how to build strategists, how to support leaders so they have more strategic tools to navigate movement upsurge moments. I wasn’t thinking long term because I was rushing. I needed more skills before the moment of fire. We need to have honest conversations about how we develop leadership over time instead of thrusting people who have good natural instincts into the fire without preparing them. We need to rethink how we build training programs, mentorship, and coaching inside our movements, so people can grow into leadership with self-awareness and resilience to take on high-pressure moments without burning out.

And lastly, we need to be okay with failure. There will always be disappointment when people try new things and don’t get it right the first time, which is most of the time. We need leaders and our folks to understand that, so we can address any harm and figure out what to do next.

Hahrie When those moments descend on an organization, those of us on the outside need to figure out how to form a metaphorical circle around organizers to create the space they need to invest in their constituencies, to act with courage, and to take risks.

Kandace, you have blown my mind and my heart. I’ve learned so much, and I want to thank you for being willing to have a tender conversation that will hopefully create space for other people to learn.