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