WHAT WE DO
KIN is for any Black person who is doing radical, liberatory work on the frontlines in their communities. We hold space for folx to share organising practise and contextualise what achieving collective liberation looks like within the UK. For KIN, Radical includes those working with an anti-oppressive and liberation centred practice and Black includes anyone from an African, Caribbean and/or mixed race ancestry.
Our programme of activities offer in-person and online gatherings across three areas:
Political Education: Spaces for knowledge-sharing and learning, deepening our understanding of global social, political and historic contexts and strategising. These are black peer-led sites of connection, exploration and learning to help get us in to our power. In these sessions we seek to find a shared analysis of where we are, a collective understanding of where we want to go and to build a shared programme and strategy of how you are going to get there.
In the Community: Everyday activism - creating and deepening connections inside black communities fighting for change. These gatherings help us understand how the political landscape and policies impact our communities and how we can address them locally. Think solidarity economics, relationship-building, listening and collective solution finding. They include community meals and regular online Town hall gatherings.
Kinfolk Annual Convening: Our annual residential is a chance for the Black activist community across the UK and beyond to imagine and plan for Black liberation. It’s a space for audacious visioning and dreaming, to discuss the obstacles and opportunities in order to create the future we want. Here we remember and imagine ways of building beyond what currently is. Through workshops, facilitated sessions, body movement and wellbeing practices this is a space where insatiable hope meets meaningful action.
KIN also seeks to archive the wisdom of our communities and share resources for liberation and sustainable activism. We do this through solidarity mapping, community mapping and recording the wisdom shared at our gatherings for community benefit. Internally, we are working on building out our radical infrastructure by moving towards a co-operative approach that centers people, anti-oppressive practice, solidarity, interdependance and care.
OUR VISION
Collective liberation
Our ultimate vision is for collective liberation: a world in which everybody is able to flourish, along with the rest of the natural world.
We contribute to this vision by supporting our community and Network on their journey to Black liberation, with a focus on holding spaces that centre joy, healing and solidarity.
Collective care
We dream of spaces of restoration, accountability, and transformative justice.
We create spaces that invite us to acknowledge the systems of oppression we have internalised and work to shift them, placing value on dreaming, visioning and compassion.
We seek to share ways of knowing and being that we have inherited from our ancestors.
Uplifting a diverse community of Black activists
We dream of a rich diversity of Black activists being uplifted and celebrated in liberatory spaces, in which those at the margins of our community are centred for the benefit and liberation of all.
Those who are often not visible in many activist and organising communities, and whose voices are undervalued because of it, are at the very heart of our vision: Black migrants, Black children and young people, Black elders, Black trans, non-binary, queer, disabled and neurodiverse folk.
We envision the individuals and groups at the helm of change are nourished, supported and held accountable, in community with shared purpose. This means bringing together a range of activists from abolitionists, educators, migrants’ justice activists to food growers and queer family in solidarity for a stronger and more sustainable movement for liberation.
“If you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”
– Lilla Watson
OUR GOALS
To facilitate our network of activists in coming together to strategise and learn from each other. These are peer-led sites of exploration, celebration, healing and learning.
To amplify, uplift and empower Black activists who are further marginalised by their various intersecting identities.
To build a sustainable organisation rooted in collectivism, solidarity and care, acting as a site of experimentation for the wider movement.
To engage and resource our community and to contribute to the wider archive of Black activism including the creation of accessible, creative, exciting and beautiful materials of joyful pedagogy on transformative organising practice, that heals and sustains (rather than burns out!).