A Solidarity and Narrative Network
Members of BLIS are national and local organizations, cultural workers, artists, storytellers, researchers, and strategists committed to repair, redistribution, and solidarity. All of our members work in and across the movements for reparations, Land Back, guaranteed income, and baby bonds.
As a Collective, we believe movements are strongest when our stories, strategies, and resources are aligned. Together, we’re building a culture of solidarity for our collective liberation.
A shared space for BLIS Collective members to access resources, updates, opportunities, and collaborative tools. Stay connected and engaged across our collective work.
Membership is a network of national and local organizations, cultural workers, researchers, and strategists committed to repair, redistribution and solidarity. Members align their stories, strategies, and resources across the movements for reparations, Land Back, guaranteed income, and baby bonds and gain access to shared research, tools, funding, and each other.
Members range from grassroots organizations to national institutions, filmmakers, comedians, academics, and storytellers. For security reasons and out of respect for member autonomy, BLIS does not publish its full membership list; members who have chosen to be named publicly appear in our Membership Directory.
Access to tools, funding, and resources that deepen solidarity and strengthen collective narrative strategy, including support with applying narrative research, access to our member portal, an annual in-person retreat, and eligibility for the Radical Collaboration Fund.
The RCF is a participatory grantmaking funder. Members decide together how to move money to bold, cross-movement projects across our four movement areas. It’s designed to fund collaboration and solidarity itself, not just individual initiatives.
Membership is currently closed while we deepen relationships and build the infrastructure for our founding members, though we’re always open to new relationships and other ways to collaborate. Fill out our prospective membership form if you’re interested in becoming a member in the future.
BLIS members shift narratives and culture together. Membership is currently closed while we invest in our founding members, but we’re always building new relationships. Tell us who you are and how you want to work together by filling out our interest form.
Membership connects you to more than 40 organizations, cultural workers, researchers, and strategists across Black, Indigenous, and transformative social movements. It’s a community to learn from, lean on, and build with.
The Radical Collaboration Fund is a $1 million participatory and member-only fund that resources solidarity initiatives across the Collective. Members set the criteria, review the proposals, and move the capital.
Every other month, members are invited to gather virtually to practice the art of solidarity at our recurring Solidarity Gym to work through tensions, share knowledge, build strategy, and strengthen cross-movement solidarity.
Once a year, we gather as a full Collective for our annual Grounded in Solidarity retreat for a week of relationship building, visioning, and respite.
Members have direct access to the BLIS team for free narrative, creative design, and strategy support. Whether it’s sharpening messaging, creative elements, applying research, or narrative trainings, our staff is here to help members do their work.
We use our platforms and events to lift up the work of our members. Through our short-form content, publications, and experiences, we support members in telling their stories, sharing their campaigns, and bringing their work to new audiences.
Capital has historically been deployed to foster competition. Our fund deploys capital to foster collaboration.
The Radical Collaboration Fund is a $1 million member-only participatory fund created to resource collaboration, connectivity, and interventions across membership that no single organization or individual could accomplish alone.
The following initiatives have been funded via the Radical Collaboration Fund thus far.
Led by BLIS Collective Member Texas Tribal Buffalo Project, The Women’s Buffalo Collective is a collaboration with INDIGENOUS LED that empowers Indigenous women to lead buffalo and land rematriation, and community healing across the Southern Great Plains. Through circle-based practices, ceremony, storytelling, and relationship-building, the project strengthens Indigenous governance while restoring connections between people, buffalo, and the land. Its first phase includes a women’s buffalo harvest in Texas in October 2026 and the creation of a cross-border network of women buffalo caretakers and knowledge-keepers stretching from Canada to Mexico. By centering Indigenous women’s leadership, the Collective advances Land Back through cultural revitalization, food sovereignty, shared stewardship, and the restoration of buffalo homelands.
Movement focus: Indigenous Land Back
Learn more about Texas Tribal Buffalo Project
A multimedia stage production that is a fantasy-inspired, “Hamilton-style” immersive experience that educates, entertains, uplifts, and celebrates the historic resilience of African Americans, while expanding public understanding of Black freedom struggles and future possibilities as the United States embraces its 250-year anniversary.
Ayanna’s Odyssey imagines a liberated, future-forward Black nation after the achievement of reparations, where historical memory has been suppressed through past censorship and book bans, and must be recovered for the new society to remain whole. Through “story-poem-telling,” music, and visual technology, the narrative explores Ayanna’s journey from historical amnesia to remembrance, understanding, and community renewal.
Ayanna’s Odyssey is a visionary exploration of memory, freedom, and the futures we build when history is no longer erased but reclaimed.
Movement focus: Black Reparations, Indigenous Land Back, Guaranteed Income, Baby Bonds
Learn more about Reparation Education Project
The Rematriation Tour is a national project led by Words of the People that brings Black and Indigenous communities together to educate the public about our perspectives on rematriation and highlight Black & Indigenous women’s leadership in land and culture stewardship. Through talks, workshops, art, storytelling, and community gatherings, the tour promotes the rematriation of ancestral knowledge to both Black and Indigenous communities, including language revitalization, healing and repair, and collective action through inviting participants into the rematriation movement. The tour will culminate in a 2027 Rematriation Retreat featuring public programming focused on Black and Indigenous solidarity, and a dedicated wellness retreat for movement leaders. The project aims to shift public narratives, strengthen kinship, and build collective power for Black & Indigenous communities.
Movement focus: Indigenous Land Back and Black Reparations
Learn more about Words of the People
This project is an effort to build radical unity specifically in California by addressing the scarcity mindset that pits Black and Indigenous communities against one another. This convening, held three years past the release of the reparations task force report, would bring Black & Indigenous Californians together to learn, listen, heal, and strategize together. This gathering focuses on Black & Indigenous organizers and base-building organizations in California rooted in the reparations and Land Back movements, as well as California-based Tribes, with the goal of building relationships that push California to lead the way toward reparations and Land Back.
Movement focus: Black Reparations and Indigenous Land Back
Learn more about California Black Power Network
This convening, led by Dr. Kyle Mays and hosted at UCLA, will explore the intersections of Black liberation, Indigenous sovereignty, Reparations and Land Back by addressing the historical and ongoing impacts of enslavement and dispossession in the United States. Through a series of workshops, participants will examine how Black and Indigenous struggles for justice can be reconciled, particularly around specific and tough questions regarding land, rematriation, and decolonization. The project seeks to foster a shared understanding and develop collective visions for justice grounded in solidarity and equitable relationships to land. Dr. Mays writes, “Land is truly the heart of the matter, and unless we strategize and imagine what a shared land might mean, we can never reconcile and put into practice reparations and decolonization that includes us all.”
Movement focus: Indigenous Land Back and Black Reparations
Learn more about Dr. Kyle Mays
This project supports the infrastructure development of the Women of Color in Guaranteed Income Leadership Collective, a national network created to strengthen collaboration, leadership, and shared strategy amongst Women of Color leading the guaranteed income & baby bonds movements. Led by Springboard to Opportunities and Hummingbird Indigenous Family Services, the project emerged in response to the isolation and increasing pressures faced by these leaders, and the need to support infrastructure to resource these movements. Building on this foundation, the proposal seeks funding to establish sustainable infrastructure for ongoing leadership development, narrative coordination, and strategic collaboration while expanding participation to include more Women of Color leaders across the field.
Movement focus: Baby Bonds and Guaranteed Income
Learn more about Springboard to Opportunities and Hummingbird Indigenous Family Services
This planning grant will support the development of Coumba Lamba Remembered, a healing gathering planned for July or August 2027 that honors the historic 1996 Coumba Lamba USA ceremony, an eight-day African and Indigenous healing gathering inspired by the Senegalese Ndepp tradition. Organizers have received blessing from the original elders and leaders from the 1996 event to plan this event, and are engaging more Native collaborators through BLIS member relationships to co-create a gathering centered on healing, ceremony, spirituality, and solidarity. The core of this event is the central role that healing must play in our liberation and decolonization movements. Planning activities include three regional mini-retreats, workshops, and film screenings on topics such as reparations, Land Back, guaranteed basic income, baby bonds, and ceremony.
Movement focus: Black Reparations and Indigenous Land Back
Learn more about First Repair
We’re inviting partners interested in funding cross-movement solidarity to contribute to the Radical Collaboration Fund and practice trust-based giving that resources transformative narrative, cultural, and policy change.
Start a conversation with us about becoming a funder of the Radical Collaboration Fund.
Our membership spans the spectrum of movement and cultural power, each working at the intersections of economic and social liberation and decolonization. Because of a number of security considerations, we do not publish our full list of members.
The members in the directory have chosen to be publicly acknowledged for their role as founding BLIS Collective Members.
Disclaimer: The positions taken by BLIS or BLIS staff do not necessarily represent the views, opinions, stances, or perspectives of Collective Members, and the positions taken by Collective Members do not necessarily represent the views of BLIS or BLIS staff.
Community deeply rooted together in kindness and love, with shared purpose, vision, and power.Dr. Tiffany Crutcher
Solidarity, to me, is community in action — showing up for one another with care and intention. It’s working together through joy and hardship, listening deeply, and honoring the stories that shape us. Rooted in collaboration and inclusivity, solidarity means creating space where everyone is seen, valued, and supported.Andi Soli
When we see one another as kin, we move toward the possibility of co-belonging and co-resistance.Dr. Kyle Mays
Solidarity is taking the defiant steps toward the reality where love and justice are at home. It is where we are held in closeness, trust, belonging, and care. It is the place that nurtures and equips us to walk hand in hand as our fullest selves, alongside one another.Antonia Belindo
Solidarity is the path to shared liberation.Jane Ama Mantey
Solidarity is deeply rooted in Randi Randi, a Kichwa principle of reciprocity, where the well-being of one is inseparable from the well-being of all. It is the practice of coming together in mutual support, grounded in the understanding that liberation is only possible when we honor the interconnectedness of our struggles.Thalia Cachimuel
Solidarity is both an art and a practice we must continuously work on. It is radical love and altruism in action. It entails constantly placing ourselves in the perspectives of others and forming deep connections to push back against forces of domination, ultimately bringing forth that beautiful and just world that awaits us.Trevor Smith
Solidarity is a concept that embodies unity and support. It can involve mutual aid and reciprocity, which many cultures consider laws of nature. When solidarity happens, especially cross-community, it can be transformational for those involved.Big Wind Carpenter
Solidarity is the coming together of peoples who recognize that our humanity, our survival, and our prosperity are bound in one another, and that we must strive for each other’s rights and protections as much as we strive for our own. It is the spaces we find where we can protect and celebrate one another, for our common traits, as much as our wonderful differences.Justin W. Morgan
To me, solidarity means acting and moving as a unit. I think that solidarity comes from truly seeing and caring for each other, and showing up in ways that build trust.Sennuwy Johnson
Solidarity means standing together in support, understanding, and shared purpose — especially in the face of adversity or injustice. It’s about recognizing our interconnectedness and committing to uplift one another, not just in words but in action.Diana Cournoyer
To keep moving towards each other. For each other. It is the action of keeping our hands at the backs of those who are both alike and different from us.Kailea Frederick
For me, solidarity is bridge-building with a purpose: connecting worlds so that power and resources flow toward self-determination, not just awareness. It means sitting at tables I wasn’t always invited to and making sure the door stays open behind me for the next person. Real solidarity shows up consistently, not just when it’s visible or convenient, and it measures itself by what changes on the ground, not by how good it looks on paper.Jessa Rae Growing Thunder
Solidarity is showing up with your whole chest for people, for culture, and for futures that may not directly benefit you. It is the commitment that holds movements together when stakes are highest and the rewards are uncertain.Yewande O. Addie
To me, solidarity is about both intention and action. It goes beyond surface level or tangential support for struggles, actions, and movements that don’t directly impact you. It also comes with a recognition that all our struggles are connected — that my own liberation is directly tied to another oppressed person’s. True solidarity comes with the recognition that it’s all of us, or none.Jamal Taylor
Solidarity means taking brave and necessary actions to dismantle the barriers meant to keep communities separated and powerless. When we build together across shared and intersecting histories and futures, collective liberation and healing is possible.Kendra Becenti
Solidarity means collectively working towards a common goal, drawing strength and persistence from community.Camilla Griffiths
Solidarity means lovingly carrying out everyday actions that benefit our braided communities, little by little moving us towards the liberated futures we imagine for our future ancestors.Emi Aguilar
Solidarity calls us to dive deep into the depths of life’s contradictions and complexities, where we can discover our shared humanity and build true connection.Savannah Romero
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