Oct 2022: New Yorkers from all five boroughs convene at Hey Neighbor NYC—an art project created by 2021–2022 Assembling Voices Fellows Kisha Bari and Jasmin Chang that invites organizers from distinct communities to interact across cultural, geographic, and interest-based silos.

Launched in 2021, our Assembling Voices fellowship provides support for artists, writers, cultural workers, and community practitioners in developing compelling public initiatives that bring communities together and catalyze conversations that lead to more just, equitable, and democratic societies.

Since its inception, Assembling Voices has awarded nine fellows, seeded more than $255K to support their projects, and invested hundreds of hours to ensure the success of our fellows and their community work.

We’re excited and proud to introduce our 2023–2024 Assembling Voices Fellows cohort to you. This group of creatives and thinkers are pushing our work forward, with each thinking deeply about how to use storytelling to advance the needs of communities, whether they’re abolitionist thinkers, a historically Black community in Chicago’s Altgeld Gardens, or unhoused artists and creatives in San Diego.

“Our mission is to move knowledge to public action. All three of these projects aren’t just thinking deeply about their communities, they are modeling how to move ideas toward collective action,” said Peter Bearman, Director of Incite. “Since the program’s launch three cohorts ago, we have grown so much alongside our fellows, learning from them and supporting their growth however we can.”

The 2023-2024 Assembling Voices Fellows are Sojourners for Justice Press, Nathan Miller, and The San Diego Unhoused Collective.

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Sojourners for Justice Press
New York, NY

Sojourners for Justice Press is an NYC based micro-press devoted to the creation of print-based publications that engage do-it-yourself, black feminist, and abolitionist philosophies. SJP is represented by Assembling Voices Fellow Neta Bomani, a teacher, zine maker, and 1/2 of Sojourners for Justice Press.

Sojourners for Justice Press’ Assembling Voices project, Binding Our Stories: Black DIY Publishing into the Future, aims to create a series of workshops for Black emerging and established publishers, connecting them with alternative techniques and networks, educating them about counter histories within publishing, and culminating in a collective publication and showcase.

In their own time, Neta makes a lot of zines, enjoys collecting retro electronics, and is an avid eBay user.

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Nathan Miller
Chicago, IL

Nathan Miller is an artist and educator working and living in Chicago. His Assembling Voices project, The Whole in Our Parts: The History and Hopes of Altgeld Gardens, will utilize documentary interviews, aerial photography, and portraiture to document the community of Altgeld Gardens, a historically black neighborhood on the far south side of Chicago from both a macro and micro perspective.

Originally constructed for African American veterans returning home from WWII, Altgeld is geographically situated in what's known as the "toxic doughnut" with an expressway to its east, a water treatment facility to its north, a landfill to its south, and buildings of industry to its west. Through photo-based storytelling, Nathan aims to showcase the resident’s experiences of environmental degradation and the important legacies of community activism that preserve the history and hopes of residents.

Nathan is a proud foodie, recently took up city inline skating (and quickly discovered that it's not for the faint of heart), loves trusting God, and spends his down time searching for new music on Spotify and spending time with his lady.

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San Diego Unhoused Collective
San Diego, CA

The San Diego Unhoused Collective is a collaborative of formerly unhoused artists who create innovative art that centers the perspective of the unsheltered.

The Collective is represented by fellows Jason Ritchie and Frank Kensaku Saragosa, San Diego-based artists who have personally experienced homelessness and have since transformed their experiences into innovative writing, film, theater, and digital media. Together, Ritchie and Saragosa create platforms for people who have been unhoused to tell their stories and seek to empower currently and formerly unhoused people by giving them the skills and tools necessary to tell their own stories and create their own art.

Throughout the Assembling Voices fellowship, the pair will produce an experimental theatrical installation, titled “Street Seen,” to raise awareness about the lived experiences of Unhoused peoples and center the voices of those lived experiences, reflecting the collective’s larger goals of producing public storytelling, art, and advocacy to empower the unhoused community.

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Development Funds

In addition to our three fellowship awardees, Assembling Voices is honored to support two additional community projects through our Assembling Voices Project Development Funds. Each practitioner will receive up to $5,000 to develop associated community projects. Our fund recipients are The Out-FM Collective and Essex Learning Lab and Communal Garden.

Essex Learning Lab and Communal Garden

Jay Grebe represents the Essex Learning Lab and Communal Garden, a Virginia-based community gardening and food sovereignty initiative that provides community programming about reclaiming traditional foodways, culturally responsive education, and community resilience. Incite will provide support as the organization develops a series of workshops presented free of charge aimed at expanding cultural understanding and exchanges between the area’s diverse communities and providing accurate historical frameworks of the Three Rivers. Workshops and presentations will be focused on food sovereignty efforts and foodways as manifested in Black and Indigenous communities, with interactive and hands-on components to encourage community engagement.

The Out-FM Collective

The Out-FM Collective is a multiracial group of queer journalists/activists that produces and hosts the weekly Out-FM program on listener-sponsored, non-commercial WBAI Radio, 99.5 FM and wbai.org. Out-FM seeks to expand and diversify their multi-issue social justice programming particularly covering BIPOC, trans, and youth-led movements. They offer opportunities for community involvement, self-expression (including storytelling and spoken word), and advocacy. Through the Assembling Voices Project Development Fund, Incite will support Out-FM in expanding their programming to a wider audience through the creation of a national podcast.

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We’ll keep you posted on our Assembling Voices Fellows’ initiatives as they develop.

Assembling Voices Fellows attend an archiving workshop with Shannon O'Neill, Curator for NYU’s Tamiment-Wagner Collections.

In November 2022, we introduced you to our latest cohort of Assembling Voices Fellows. For refresher on the program:

Assembling Voices is a year-long Fellowship for artists, writers, scholars, journalists, performers, activists, workers, and others with compelling ideas for public initiatives that bring people together around issues of democracy and trust.

Assembling Voices is part of our ongoing effort to facilitate inventive forms of communication and collaboration between students, artists, activists, and others from outside the academy to arrive at new understandings and practices that advance public action.

To enable our Fellows’ work, we provide them with financial, administrative, and intellectual support. Last month, we invited our Fellows to our office in New York for two days of connection, collaboration, and training.

A central part of this visit was connecting our Fellows to our intellectual network. We collaborated with our Fellows to create a custom workshop schedule, which included sessions with OHMA all-stars Amy Starecheski and Nyssa Chow. We were honored to learn about successful public engagement from the Fellows over shared meals and conversations.

An integral part of this experience was connecting the Fellows to each other. Despite differences in geography, community issues, and methodological approaches, Fellows were energized by learning from each other and finding common ground in their work.

This year’s Assembling Voices cohort poses with Rebecca Feldherr, our program coordinator.

“Being able to exchange ideas on process and experience has helped me reassess and refine my approach to this work,” noted Fellow C. Dìaz. As Fellow Ricia Chansky put it, “[we] not only learned about each others’ projects, but the overlap between them… [which] allowed us to really engage with one another through a shared language of activism and integrated conceptual frameworks that strive to center community voices.”

Fellows Naomi and Mauricio saw this meeting as a jumping off point for future collaboration:

We saw great overlap and points of connection in our work, both philosophically and methodologically, and as a result are now in conversation about ways to collaborate in the long term.

By working with their communities, support at Incite, and each other, our Fellows are furthering new modes of public engagement that advance equity and democracy. We’ll keep you posted on how their work evolves. For more information on the program and our incredible cohort’s work, visit our website.

Want to get involved in Assembling Voices? Next month we’ll start our search for 2023-2024 Fellows by putting out a call for applications—subscribe to our mailing list to be the first to know.

Assembling Voices is also accepting new donors. If you’re interested in supporting our Fellows’ work, send us a note at assembling-voices@columbia.edu.

INCITE and The American Assembly (TAA) are pleased to announce our first cohort of Assembling Voices fellows!

J. Khadijah Abdurahman is the founder of We Be Imagining, an initiative applying the Black radical tradition to developing public interest technology. Through the Assembling Voices fellowship, Khadijah will continue to bridge siloed disciplines and activists, using art, technology, and community networks to combat harmful systems of surveillance, exclusion, and exploitation. Khadijah will organize a series of events in Brownsville, Brooklyn to support political education, organizing, and mutual aid with those most impacted by the New York City Administration for Children’s Services (NYC ACS). These events will support a community-designed mural celebrating Black family life and abolition of the Family Regulation System.

Asha Boston, a filmmaker, and storyteller from Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, has spent her career exploring and documenting the history of Black neighborhoods struggling to retain their culture and self-sufficiency amid gentrification through her film project, A Time Before Kale. With support from Assembling Voices, she plans to expand on this work through a series of peer-to-peer storytelling workshops that teach residents of Bedford-Stuyvesant to digitally collect, preserve, and archive pictures, oral histories, and artifacts of their life in this neighborhood. By gathering residents in trusted spaces, the workshops also provide sites to coordinate resistance against rising rents, predatory development, and other threats to neighborhood stability.

Through the Winston-Salem Portrait Project, JCKB Studios (artist/organizer Jasmin Chang and photographer/ storyteller Kisha Bari) developed a new model for intercommunity exchange: they brought together activists and leaders from across Winston-Salem to participate in workshops, and placed them into pairs to learn one another’s stories and take portrait photographs of each other, which were then displayed in public art installations around the city. Chang and Bari now seek to expand on that model in New York City, by systematically identifying and connecting community activists and representatives across boroughs and issue spaces, creating pathways through which skills, experiences, and resources may flow.

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These fellows’ initiatives combine mediums to meet audiences where they are, identify community-defined needs, and encourage sustained involvement. Through their use of such interactive, accessible mediums and their reliance on community members and trusted messengers, these programs redefine expertise, deepen understandings of pernicious social problems, and refine strategies for action and resilience. Though the programs are based in New York City, they confront issues of national relevance and offer inspired models to replicate elsewhere.

“With this fellowship, we hoped to expand and reimagine notions of who produces knowledge, how trust is built, and why assembly matters. These remarkable fellows and the initiatives they have proposed bring this ethos to fruition through art, education, dialogue, and activism. We couldn’t be more thrilled to assist them in this work, to learn from them in the process, and to see the impact of these community-centered approaches to addressing social problems,” said Peter Bearman, President of The American Assembly.

“The fellows were selected not only for their respective visions, but for the potential for intracohort learning and collaboration. Each member brings unique skillsets and experiences that become assets to all involved, as they seek to bridge communities, preserve histories, and address injustices and inequities here in New York City,” said Executive Director Michael Falco. 

The fellowship will encourage and facilitate these exchanges through regular seminars, designed around the fellows’ own identified needs, in which they will be able to share their initiatives-in-progress, engage in professional and educational development, and build connections between themselves, their communities and partners, INCITE/TAA, and the institutional resources of Columbia University. 

The fellowship will launch officially on September 1 of this year. Keep an eye on our website or subscribe to our mailing list to stay up to date on these projects as they unfold in the coming months!

Application open to artists, writers, scholars, journalists, activists, workers, organizers, performers and any other person with a compelling idea for social change. No minimum educational requirement, no minimum years of experience.

We are pleased to announce the Assembling Voices Resident Fellows program at The American Assembly at Columbia University. Fellowships are open to all. Applications are due May 15, 2021. Fellows receive $25,000 to design initiatives that bring people together, promote trust and dialogue, and facilitate public engagement with the problems we face, the opportunities we have, and the institutions that shape our lives.

We are seeking proposals from any person who has an idea to develop public programming that addresses pressing social justice and human rights issues, especially those relevant to Black, Indigenous, people of color, LGBTQ+ people, and other historically marginalized groups. Proposed initiatives need to bring people together and give renewed attention to the diversity of expertise that exist outside academic institutions. Initiatives should pioneer creative ways to enhance social life and dialogue through public events. We are especially interested in ideas that use engaging and creative techniques to bring people together. 

In the broadest sense, Assembling Voices intends to break down walls that exclude people from institutions and knowledge production. The knowledge, dialogue and relationships that are fostered through each proposed public initiative will ideally have a lifespan beyond a single event series or multimedia presentation. We expect that Assembling Voices—our fellows and their initiatives—will amplify and engage with the talents, abilities, aspirations, hopes, and needs of the communities that comprise our democracy.

Assembling Voices Resident Fellows will have the creative freedom to conceive and execute public programming as they envision, especially addressing communities and topics that require more attention from and dialogue with academic institutions. Fellows will develop their initiatives alongside Assembly leadership and staff, who will provide support from the initial phases of project conceptualization through the initiative’s public launch.

This program is for artists, writers, scholars, journalists, activists, organizers, performers and for any other person with a compelling idea. We encourage people of all generations and nationalities to apply. Collectives will be considered. Participation has no minimum educational requirement, nor do we require a minimum number of years of experience. If you have questions about eligibility based on your visa or immigration status, please contact Michael Falco (mf2727@columbia.edu).