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Dear co-conspirator,
Earlier this month I celebrated four incredible, challenging, and hopeful years as the Executive Director of re:power. When I joined this organization, I entered with a burst of passion and excitement for our important work and newly founded mission and vision. I couldn’t believe that I would be the first black woman to lead an organization that was focused on BIPOC communities, especially women of color , something I had been preparing for my whole life.
As I settled into the job, it became clear that while there was enthusiasm behind our mission and vision, we still lacked clarity on what it meant to achieve this. For example, we knew we wanted to center women of color but when I started at re:power, we had no way to measure the number of women of color we reached nor did we have any specific programming to reach our core population!
Over the last four years, my team and I have been hard at work building upon the foundation of re:power that was handed over to me. What I inherited provided some direction: we knew we centered BIPOC folks, especially women of color; we knew that capacity building and strategic support was our lane; and we knew that we wanted to offer spaces and support that felt different and led to different results. But beyond this, there were still so many questions to answer.
Over the last 24 months, re:power has been on an intensive journey to help us answer some of these big questions. Questions like—WHY are we centering women of color and what does that actually look like? WHAT is different about how we operate and WHAT do we hope comes from that? HOW do we believe our work contributes to the larger progressive ecosystem?
Today, as I look back on our collective investment of hundreds of hours of rigorous analysis and strategic thinking; emphatic and impassioned debate; collective learning and growth; and brilliant co-creation, I’m so proud of the way in which our team embodied the principles of liberatory organizing—which we define as organizing practice that is pro-Black and grounded in community, collective action, and abundance–to formulate a strategy with the power to shift our country’s trajectory toward our north star: a liberated, multi-racial democracy, free from the oppressive systems of white supremacy and patriarchy.
And with that, I’m so proud to celebrate my four years as the leader of re:power by sharing with you all our new Strategic Direction which is now available on our website! [[link removed]]
LEARN ABOUT OUR NEW STRATEGIC DIRECTION [[link removed]]
You may notice some additional changes like our new mission and vision and theory of change [[link removed]] . The strategy we describe in this document doesn’t change who we are; it helps us more concretely name and more confidently and unapologetically express who we are, what we stand for and why we matter. It clarifies, for both ourselves and our stakeholders, our intent and direction as an organization. And we’ve been working toward it over the last several years through the intentional and substantive changes we have made: the expansion of our staff [[link removed]] from 11 to 21, our Women of Color Leadership Program [[link removed]] , our Data X Power Fellowship [[link removed]] , our completely revamped Movement Building programming, and most recently the success of our first ever Camp re:power!
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Our inagural camp re:power cohort!
All of this is proof for me—we can achieve a liberated, multiracial democracy, free from the oppressive systems of white supremacy and patriarchy. Let’s build that future together.
- Karundi Williams, Executive Director of re:power
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This email was sent by re:power [[link removed]] , [[link removed]] a women of color-led team of organizers, strategists, and technologists dedicated to building transformative political power. Our work is tied to the belief that by partnering with individuals, organizations, and coalitions across the country, we can uncover leaders within communities to create radical change.
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re:power
2639 Nicollet Avenue Ste 220
Minneapolis, MN 55408
United States