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. 

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

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 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.

Demonstrators confront police during a protest over the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., Aug. 11, 2014. Photograph by Whitney Curtis/The New York Times, via Redux.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

 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?

 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 

 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.

 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?

 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.

A memorial for George Floyd outside Cup Foods, the site of Floyd’s death, Minneapolis, June 7, 2020. Photograph by Caroline Yang.

 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.

 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 

 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 

And as organizers, we learned a lot. At a national level, the 

 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.

 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?

 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.

Minneapolis City Council member Alondra Cano, speaking at the public meeting held at Powderhorn Park where a majority of the council pledged to begin dismantling the city’s police department, June 7, 2020. Photograph by Jerry Holt/Star Tribune via Getty Images.

 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?

 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.

 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.

 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.

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

 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, 

 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.

Flowers and signs left at the site where George Floyd was killed, Minneapolis, May 29, 2020. Photograph by Caroline Yang.

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.

 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?

 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.

Members off the organization Families Supporting Families Against Police Violence march near the Minnesota State Capitol, St. Paul, May 24, 2021. Photograph by Caroline Yang.

 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?

 I appreciate that question so much. Fear drove me from being transparent. It’s scary in a moment like that to admit, 

, 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.

 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?

 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 

 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’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.

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

 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.

Demonstrators marching to defund the Minneapolis Police Department dance on University Avenue, Minneapolis, June 6, 2020. The march, organized by the Black Visions Collective, commemorated the life of George Floyd. Photograph by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images.

 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?

 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

Bay-bee, we’ve only been around for three years.

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, 

. 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

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.

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

 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.

People carrying a Black Lives Matter flag gather at the Say Their Names Cemetery near George Floyd Square on April 20, 2021, the day Derek Chauvin’s guilty verdict was announced. Photograph by Caroline Yang.

 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?

 A woman named Vicky Chan said to me once that we often forget that holding people accountable needs to be heavy on the 

. 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.

Organizing for Abolition in the Spotlight

” secured one of the strongest social safety nets in the country for Minnesota families, made possible through a suite of ambitious policies passed during Tim Walz’s term as governor — despite Democrats having only a one-vote majority in the State Senate. None of it would have been possible without years of organizing that built a multiracial constituency prepared to stand together to fight for a bold agenda, despite counterattacks designed to divide their support. How did that multiracial constituency develop, cultivate, and exercise its power in the policymaking process? In this interview, Doran Schrantz, the former executive director of the statewide faith coalition ISAIAH and current chair of Faith in Minnesota Action PAC, describes what Ella Baker called the “spadework” needed to form such a constituency. It depended on developing a group of organizers equipped to navigate the complexity of building and holding together a truly multiracial coalition in one of the most divisive moments in American history. What does it take to cultivate the kind of leadership needed to negotiate power laterally among different constituencies, and then to use that power to build a shared governing agenda with elected officials? When we talk about the craft of organizing, we often spend so much time on processes of individual leadership development to build power that we are not able to spend as much time on what it takes to wield power. This interview bucks that trend, articulating the core questions and capacities we should be thinking about to wield authentic, multiracial governing power for America.

 Can you start by giving us some context on Minnesota and ISAIAH and Faith in Minnesota, the organization you led for many years?

 For a long time in Minnesota, the big question at the center of politics and movement building has been the question of how we build multiracial democratic power — which has to include white, Black, and brown people. What is the nature of both the practice of politics and the strategy of how we move this state through a dramatic demographic change to embrace multiracial democracy during a period of pretty extreme asymmetric polarization?

Minnesota historically has been a very white state, known for high investments in public education, and, basically, common-good public investments in people being happy. The actual history isn’t that romantic, of course. But over the past 20 years, there has been an influx of mostly immigrants of color, particularly East African, Liberian, Hmong, Vietnamese. There is a historic African American population in Minnesota, but it’s small compared with other states. There is a significant history of Native and Indigenous people in the state. But the state went from probably 90 percent white around the year 2000 to closer to 72 percent now. It happened pretty quickly. Then a conservative reaction seeking to pull up the ramparts of public investments emerged. All of a sudden, people don’t want to invest in public transit or education or any of these things. And I think it has everything to do with race. In 2016, Donald Trump almost won Minnesota.

When I first got to ISAIAH, it reflected the state. It was never a completely white organization, but it reflected Minnesota: it was mostly churches, it was small, it was mostly mainline Protestant and Catholic. There had historically been Black church participation, but there was no practice in place around what it means to do truly multiracial politics.

There was a set of moves from 2013 to 2023 that made our organization into what it is now. Now, ISAIAH and the Faith in Minnesota Action PAC, ISAIAH’s electoral arm, are the most robust, left-of-center political force in the state that’s not a labor union. It’s equivalent to a medium-size labor union in terms of the amount of power that it can wield. And it has a very significant amount of power in the Democratic Party.

Within ISAIAH, we have the Muslim coalition, which is 46 Islamic centers and neighborhood and community organizations that are Muslim, predominantly East African. There is the Rural Organizing Project, which is organizing working-class white rural people in key places around the state. There’s Kids Count On Us, which is 500 community-based child-care centers organizing child-care providers, workers, and parents — kind of a union-type, proto labor formation for child care in the state of Minnesota. We have the church base, with church clusters all over the state and anchored in the suburbs and the cities. We have the young adult coalition, which is 10 college campus configurations along with young adult apartment organizing. It’s become an intergenerational, multiracial, multifaith, cross-geographical coalition.

What holds ISAIAH together is a set of principles that we all agree to. Number one is the rigorous focus on agency-oriented organizing practice, a north star of building multiracial, democratic governing power. We have a majoritarian orientation — we want progressive 

 popular power. We built a strategy together around how we understand what it means to unequivocally be East African and Muslim. Or rural with a rural perspective. No one’s asking you to change any of those things. We are explicitly posing the question about how we can publicly demonstrate, over and over again, the critical importance of multiracial democratic power. We center this question partially to model but partially to protect our movements from being distracted and divided by identitarian or weaponized racialized attacks.

There are lots of ways you can have power in the world, but the currency of our power is organized people — we hold that at the center of our organization. That regulates things internally. Each constituency has its own source of power, and they have to laterally align and negotiate that power with one another. So if you have no base, you’re not going to have that much to say. We’re not going to pretend that a base exists that doesn’t. Our power is collective; we’re all interdependent on one another’s power.

 Can you describe what that coalition has accomplished in relationship to Gov. Tim Walz?

 We built out a very robust political program focused on grassroots organizing in the context of politics rather than just tactical electoral domains — and I think it has been extremely agenda shaping. In 2017 and 2018, Faith in Minnesota took a whole bunch of policies with demonstrable support behind them and made them the center of the Democratic Party agenda in the governor’s race.

In that race, you couldn’t get endorsed as a legislator without having some relationship to Faith in Minnesota’s platform. Often, organizations endorse candidates based on where they’re at on the issues on a questionnaire. We didn’t do that at all. We used the levers in the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party endorsing process — it starts with precinct caucuses, electing delegates to State Senate conventions, where they elect delegates to a state endorsing convention. We sent thousands of people connected to our organization to participate actively in precinct caucuses with the intention of becoming delegates at the Senate and state-level conventions — this made them actors in state legislative and statewide endorsements. This process incentivizes a candidate to win delegates and incentivizes delegates to win over one another. In other words, it is real in-person retail politics. Our members had to learn to deliberate with candidates and other delegates about their positions and get themselves elected as delegates. Our strategy was not to focus solely on issues or litmus tests around ideology or platform; what also mattered was relationships, power, partnership, and governing orientation. Are they responsive to a constituency in their district? Do they evolve? Do they imagine their role as a public official as 

I use you, and you elect me, and then I do what I want

Together we could get a bunch of things done, and I need you, and you need me

? It’s not like everyone was magically like that. It was a process in which we all had to learn how to develop those relationships. And yes, we absolutely pushed an agenda. We stood for paid family leave, 100 percent clean energy, restoring the vote, driver’s licenses for immigrants, down payment assistance for new homeowners, including interest-free capital for Muslims. We summed it up as: We need an agenda that is bold enough to meet the crisis in people’s lives.

Walz was not who we initially endorsed. But I was not very married to any of the candidates. I wanted to shape how they did their campaigns and their governing orientation in the state, and I wanted them to go on the offense against white nationalist authoritarianism. I systematically had built a relationship with Education Minnesota, the teachers union, which endorsed Tim Walz early. We had a backroom space where we strategized on getting all of these candidates to adopt a race/class narrative that went on offense against racialized division and wedge issues. So, once Walz won the nomination, they could help us build a relationship with him. Then the question becomes: How are we going to collectively wield our power?

When his administration came to us to say they wanted universal school meals, we were responsive. We’re going to partner. We brought paid family leave to the table; they’re bringing universal school meals and the child tax credit to the table. So it became a shared agenda. By the time we got into the 2019 legislative session, we still had a divided government. A couple of people who came from the organizing sector were elected and facilitated an internal organizing strategy in the legislature that explicitly partnered with organizations. We used the 2019 legislative session to rehearse a mode of governance where we tried to pass the bills together. Previously, the governing orientation had been that if you’re the House, you shouldn’t send anything over the Senate that you know they won’t pass — why bother? It makes you look like a loser. But the speaker of the House, Melissa Hortman, was like, 

Yeah, let’s shove everything over there, and if they don’t pass it, then that’s on them

. So we negotiated bills, sent people to the Capitol, and participated in district strategy sessions with our legislators.

We have lots and lots of people on the ground that we have to constantly invest in to sustain our power. What is the most strategic way we can navigate and shape conditions on the ground so that we’re sharing responsibility for the governing conditions we need to maintain and wield our collective power?

That’s what happened between us, between actors at the legislature. So when people talk about the Minnesota miracle, part of me thinks about all the layers and layers of infrastructure and work and practice and orientation that made it happen. In addition to Faith in Minnesota, there was SEIU, Education Minnesota, all these amazing legislators, the 100% Campaign, UnidosMN, Restore the Vote coalition, lots and lots and lots of actors. But over time, we did build a really robust shared orientation and practice across all these sectors that I would directly connect to the ethos we’ve built inside our multiracial Democratic power-building practice. It’s relational, it’s experience-based, it’s human centered, it’s about navigating and adapting, it’s about shared responsibility for stewarding our collective power to make more possible. It’s about being honest and transparent and having high integrity — you do what you say you’re going to do, and you’re a reliable actor with others to be constructive while also creating the tension that you need to create and to move change. It’s all the layers of leadership and containers and infrastructure that made it possible to pass that insane agenda in 2023 with a one-vote Senate majority.

 How did the protests following the murder of George Floyd impact the situation?

 Governor Walz had, perhaps, the most eventful first term of a governor in recent history. Trump was president, then there was Covid-19, George Floyd’s murder and mass protests and civil unrest that sporadically erupted over the course of a year. In 2021, Walz worked with state legislators to pass some police reform, and some very good things happened under the radar around criminal justice reform and collateral sanctions and sentencing. The 2023 public safety bill has a lot of extremely progressive stuff in it, such as free phone calls for all incarcerated people, the end of many collateral sanctions, reform of minimum sentencing laws, and expungement of records connected to cannabis use. However, Walz took a beating from both the right and the left on addressing the power of police. It was extremely challenging all around. There’s a risk of losing ground to the right after periods of mass protest and, especially, civil unrest, but that didn’t happen at the state level because of the robust movement infrastructure, which was able to help navigate and share responsibility in that moment. The door to further action on racial justice writ large and police reform, including issues and viewpoints coming from the abolition movement, is still open and being moved forward by organizing and advocacy organizations across the state.

More than 200 ISAIAH leaders, joined by Gov. Tim Walz and Rep. Liz Olson, attend a Clergy and Faith Leader Legislative Summit during the 2023 Minnesota legislative session, Feb. 7, 2023. Photograph courtesy of ISAIAH.

 Let’s back up to your story. How did you get into organizing and how did you end up in Minnesota?

 I grew up in a small town in Iowa. I did theater for seven years after I graduated from the University of Chicago. I was a professional actor in the Chicago theater scene. I was always really interested in politics — not necessarily electoral politics, but political questions, like 

What does it mean to be a citizen or a person?

 or different theories about how people think of organizing society. But I didn’t really get involved in politics until after college. I knew I wanted to do something tangible that was connected to people and democracy, and I thought maybe I’d do labor organizing. My hometown was a labor town, and one of my formative experiences was a massive labor strike that went on for three years while I was in elementary school. But then I kind of serendipitously met a community organizer and started doing community-based, neighborhood-based organizing. My parents moved back to Minnesota after my dad retired. And I was really looking for someplace serious that was going to teach and train me in the craft of organizing.

 How did you know it was a craft? I think a lot of people think, 

Oh, yeah, I’ve knocked on some doors. I’m an organizer

 The organizers I was introduced to in Chicago came at it from a craft-based perspective. My boss, a Black pastor in Gary, Ind., had done faith-based organizing. I wasn’t working for a faith-based organization, but he sent me to a weeklong training with 

, a national network of faith-based organizing organizations, working to develop leadership in faith-based organizations around the country. Two things struck me there. First, it was absolutely multiracial and working-class. Second, I could have conversations about faith, politics, and leadership in ways that helped me grow. I watched people change so much over the course of one week. I didn’t have the language for it at the time, but essentially it was modeling a kind of political community. I was like, 

If we can make this happen, we will change America. This is what people need. I need it.

That was how I ended up at ISAIAH, which was a partner or an affiliate of the Gamaliel Foundation. Long story short, my partner Chris and I moved here and I loved it. I had a profound experience of change in my first year at ISAIAH. My own trauma, my own story, my oppression, my own fears, my own anxieties, my own defense mechanisms were all things preventing me from being the free, public person I needed to be to be able to build and wield power.

The start of any organizing work starts with relationship building on a “defined turf — this means it is scoped. I do not organize people of faith in Minnesota — that is a useless idea unless it is scoped and defined. I was directed to organize five member churches in Brooklyn Park and Brooklyn Center. To start, an organizer does one-to-ones, an intentional conversation rooted in listening and uncovering another person’s purpose and interest. As a new organizer, I did 15 one-to-ones a week with people who attended or who were connected to those congregations and I had to write reports on each one focused on: What is the self-interest and the story of another person? What risks did I take? And most importantly, what did I learn about myself as a public person? I went to my first mentorship meeting after having done 15 or 20. Pamela Twiss, ISAIAH’s then co-director, walked into the room, and she had a file folder with every single one of my reports printed out. Then she started going through them. She had highlighted, she had made notes, and she came in with a set of questions. It was ultimately about me. A labor organizer in Chicago, Kathy Devine, said to me, 

Look, artists paint with paints, and the medium is the paint to the canvas. As an organizer, it’s yourself and people — you’re using yourself as the vessel.

 So if you don’t understand yourself, you cannot channel the practices, skills, rituals, and processes needed to facilitate the cultivation of agency and power of other people. What your politics are, how much you have integrated and made sense out of your own story, integrated what your self-interest is — all those are decisions you have to make before you can have that conversation with anybody else.

I call this process of development crossing the bridge. What are the interventions and experiences a person has to have to move into a place of integrated agency that allows you to be a public leader in the world with others?

 And just to make the implicit explicit here: why is it so important for organizers to understand and experience their own freedom before they can organize?

 Because we’re inviting people into a process of relating to power. Agency starts with me not being in reaction to myself. I have to get into the driver’s seat myself about my own purpose, free from what I have experienced that taught me that I should be powerless. We’ve all had experiences that say to us, 

You should be small, you have to defend yourself

. That means you’re not in the driver’s seat of your life, and your life becomes about protecting yourself instead of living out your free creative purpose. To be clear, there are extremely rational reasons for people to defend themselves emotionally. People have experienced racism, sexism, classism, etc. But an organizer is focused on building individual and collective agency and preparing people to wield power in the real world.

It’s not just self-referential, though. Practically speaking, imagine if I’m in a situation where the mayor yells at me. If my instinct is to appease him to protect myself, then (A) I’m not clearly seeing the actual power dynamic or what’s happening in the world around me, and (B) I’m not able to make public decisions for myself or the collective focused on the power that we’re trying to move. I have to be free enough from my own trauma to be able to take risks that shape power.

I remember Imam Mohamed Omar, director of Dar Al-Farooq Islamic Center, once told me, 

Well, being quiet and letting the public officials sometimes come to the mosque, that’s how we stay safe

Did them liking you stop your mosque from 

 There’s a perfectly rational reason why he’s trying to be safe. Black Muslims are the majority of Muslims in Minnesota. Somali Americans are used as a political weapon by many politicians and conservative media outlets. After 9/11, the FBI infiltrated mosques and community spaces, sowing distrust and division. His mosque became a target online in right-wing blogs, resulting in an overt hate crime committed against his mosque, and, from their account, the first questions asked by authorities indicated they thought it could be an inside job. That is his experience and his context. His sense of uncertainty, fear, and distrust is rational. But as an organizer, I want him to get to a place where he can see that he has the option to make a different decision, that maybe safety depends on building and having power. I have no ability to offer any guarantees or assurance that nothing bad will happen to him or his community. But regardless, I didn’t nurse his sense of victimhood at that moment. In fact, I amplified an agentic choice he could make. Imam Mohamed decided to found the Muslim Coalition of ISAIAH and went public.

A chronic mistake organizers make is basically organizing people around their 

 This is going to become controversial. Do you imagine a leader’s role is to tell and retell their story of trauma in public places, implicitly asking for pity? That sometimes looks like moral suasion, as if we’re going to make these people feel guilty and get what we want by using and exploiting someone’s story of victimhood. It makes me uncomfortable for the person who’s telling that story. The question I ask is: What is being cultivated in that person around their own experience of power and freedom in the world?

Another example would be a person who has experienced public oppression and is starting on their journey of figuring out what it means to be political, to be a leader or have agency in the world. They might think they can’t do those things because they’ve been wronged or have too much pain. So an organizer has a choice at that moment. You can become overwhelmed by their experience of suffering and say, “I’m so sorry. It is true. You shouldn’t or can’t be a leader given that hardship.” Now, sometimes that is true. But sometimes the organizer nurses a person’s sense of powerlessness as opposed to saying, “Actually, what I see about you is that you have an interest that you want realized in the world. And what I think is going on with you right now is that you’re scared. That is OK. But you have a choice to make. You can either invite everyone around you to let you off the hook because you’re scared or you can decide you’re going to take a risk. And I think you can do it.”

It kind of goes back to that old organizing adage “Don’t do anything for somebody that they could do themselves.” Are you nursing someone’s sense of victimhood or are you cultivating their sense of agency? Sometimes things that look like organizing or speaking truth to power are actually retriggering and reorienting people around the sense that they’re outsiders or victims who can’t have power. It can look like almost the right thing, but it’s actually suppressing people’s sense of agency rather than pushing them toward it. And I think it’s quite counterproductive. It doesn’t develop leaders or produce good organizing in the long term. As somebody who cares about the dignity of people, I don’t think there’s anything free about it whatsoever.

 Let’s connect these reflections on organizing practice back to the work you were doing at ISAIAH. How does the way you form people shape their ability to operate in a multiracial coalition, and how do you nurture those capacities?

 You have to constantly attend to formation at the organizer level and the top leadership level. Inside ISAIAH and Faith in Minnesota, all of the organizers and lead organizers have a space to meet together for four hours every other Monday. It’s an intensive space — it’s not 

Here’s your task, and here’s your task

. It’s practical skills training. It’s also political formation. In relationship to each other — the Muslim coalition, the Black barbershop coalition, the white churches — we are negotiating questions like 

What are our politics? What is our base? How do we operate with one another? 

Within that space, there’s a whole set of practices that are rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed.

We also have a central leadership team of representatives from each constituency base that meets once a month for three hours. That is a political space in which their strategic orientation is cultivated. In that space, leaders have the experience of negotiation, working through actual problems, resolving differences, asking power questions. 

What would this mean for you? How are we regulating our orientations with each other so that we viscerally experience our sense of shared responsibility face-to-face? 

It’s not abstract. It’s literally people. It’s a space of constant practice where people’s own self-interest is bridged into the collective interest. We’re constantly working to construct a collective common interest.

 Can you describe an example of a conflict between the constituency bases and how you navigated that?

 To move effectively and wield enough power to shape a state legislature and a governor’s administration, we have to be able to hold our own coalition together. The challenge in holding collectives and constituencies together rather than a list of organizations — often when people say “coalition,” they mean a bunch of organizations, but I am talking about aligned, deep constituencies. Holding constituencies is about politics and political work. So the key leaders of these constituencies have to do constant development, relational work to navigate tensions, conflicts, divergent interests. Imagine if you didn’t do all that work well. The first external pressure would cause the base to reduce itself to the most narrow sliver of everyone who agrees and/or would reduce back to silos by identity, faith, geography, etc. For example, in the middle of our election work in 2022, Roe v. Wade was overturned. My first reaction was a visceral reaction as a human being. My second thought was 

How in the hell are we going to hold our base together through this?

 We have a significant suburban base of primarily white women who are normie to progressive Christians — they are going to want to motivate themselves and others around this issue. But I knew that the Muslim coalition, parts of the rural organizing project, and the Black barbershops and Black congregations would not have the same reaction. So I had to step up as a political leader. I called key people across the organization and built a path to unpack it together.

ISAIAH Prophetic Resistance Gathering of more than 1,500 faith and community leaders, January 2017. Photograph courtesy of ISAIAH. 

We brought a very small group of people together who were the most powerful leaders in each constituency. But other organizers and I had conversations with people separately first, to temperature take and understand their impulses. In the meeting, I had to frame the challenge: 

We have a set of choices to make. But I want us all to look at the big picture about what the source of our power is and the strategic moment in front of us. People who come from very different life experiences are having very human reactions. We have to look at that, and we have to look together at how we’re going to operate in these conditions, how we’re going to take responsibility for each other, for our power organization, for our political community to navigate this together.

In that moment, we were building on the years of work we had done of constantly rehearsing people’s understanding of how their self-interest is tied to a collective interest. How does that play out when it’s hard? In this moment, these suburban white women felt they had an interest that is somehow being thwarted by this coalition: 

I am part of this thing, and now it is constraining me in acting on my actual interest.

I remember a critical religious leader of color saying, 

You need to understand something. My power will be destroyed if the people who are against us in our own community can weaponize against me the idea that white progressives are using me to get more Democrats elected. What I’m doing is actually harm mitigation. Our job is to make sure that we don’t get polarized or used by MAGA based on our more socially cultural and traditional orientations around abortion or LGBTQ questions. So if you want me to play this role in the ISAIAH coalition, in the big picture of stewarding our collective politics — to get child care, to get paid family leave, to end Islamophobia — we can’t let ISAIAH break apart.

 And then a lead organizer actually went into this thing with a key woman leader and asked people, 

Hammer&Hope

Hahrie Han

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