Join Marguerite Casey Foundation president and CEO Carmen Rojas, PhD, in conversation with the book’s coauthors, Kelly Hayes and MCF Freedom Scholar Mariame Kaba, as well as Toni-Michelle Williams, cofounder of MCF grant recipient Solutions Not Punishment Collaborative, Inc., and abolitionist organizer Asha Edwards as they discuss lessons from the book and how communities are putting them into practice.
The MCF Book Club creates a space for authors, scholars, and organizers to examine the most pressing issues of our time and imagine how we can radically transform our world. Together, the MCF Book Club series offers a course toward a liberated future.
About the Authors & Guests
Mariame Kaba is the founder and director of Project NIA, a grassroots abolitionist organization focused on ending youth incarceration, and co-leads the initiative Interrupting Criminalization with fellow organizer Andrea J. Ritchie. Kaba is the author of the New York Times bestseller We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice (Haymarket Books, 2021), among several other titles that offer support and tools for repair, transformation, and moving toward a future without incarceration and policing. She was named a 2022 Freedom Scholar by the Marguerite Casey Foundation.
Kelly Hayes is a Menominee author, organizer, movement educator, and photographer. She is also the host of Truthout’s podcast Movement Memos. Hayes is a cofounder of the Lifted Voices collective and the Chicago Light Brigade. Her written work is featured in numerous publications and multiple anthologies, including Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? Police Violence and Resistance in the United States (Haymarket Books, 2016), Education in Movement Spaces: Standing Rock to Chicago Freedom Square (Routledge, 2020), and The Solidarity Struggle: How People of Color Succeed and Fail at Showing Up for Each Other in the Fight for Freedom (BGD Press, 2016). Hayes also coauthored an essay with Mariame Kaba in Kaba’s book We Do This ’Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice (Haymarket Books, 2021). Hayes’s movement photography is featured in the Freedom and Resistance exhibit of the DuSable Museum of African American History.
Toni-Michelle Williams is a performance artist, creative director, embodied leadership coach, and the cofounder and executive director of Solutions Not Punishment Collaborative, Inc. (SNAPCO). Toni-Michelle embodies supernatural grace and sacred silliness as tools to tap into joy and satisfaction and bridges her creative arts with activism. She is a celebrated community organizer and empowerment speaker on prison abolition / criminal (IN)justice reform issues and leadership development for Black transgender, LGBQ people, sex workers, people living with HIV (PLHIV), and Black youth. She has co-led city-wide campaigns that have incubated the Atlanta Policing Alternatives and Diversion Initiative, cannabis reform, sex worker protections, closing down the Atlanta City Detention Center (ACDC), and police accountability for the families of Alexia Christian, Scout Schultz, DeAundre Phillips, Tee Tee Dangerfield, and Rayshard Brooks.
Asha Edwards (she/they) is a visual artist and student pursuing a degree in public health at UIC. She sometimes enjoys organizing in abolitionist campaigns that put cracks in the foundations of white supremacy, policing, settler-colonialism, patriarchy, and imperialism. Their art allows her to put rage into new visions of the world she wants to fight for. Such as WeAreDissenterd, CopsOutCPS, and #NoCop Academy.
About the Moderator
Dr. Carmen Rojas is the president and CEO of Marguerite Casey Foundation. Under her leadership, the foundation launched the prestigious Freedom Scholar award, committed to ensuring that a majority of MCF’s endowment is overseen by diverse managers, and since starting in 2020 granted more than $130M in funding to dozens of organizations doing the hard work of shifting power to those people who have long been excluded from having it. Prior to MCF, Dr. Rojas was the cofounder and CEO of The Workers Lab, an innovation lab that partners with workers to develop new ideas that help them succeed and flourish. For more than 20 years, she has worked with foundations, financial institutions, and nonprofits to improve the lives of working people across the country.
Dr. Rojas sits on the boards of Nonprofit Quarterly, Blue Ridge Labs, and Children’s Defense Fund, as well as the San Francisco Federal Reserve's Community Advisory Council and Confluence's Racial Equity Initiative Advisory Committee.
She holds a PhD in city and regional planning from UC Berkeley and was a Fulbright Scholar in 2007.
