Alicia Walters (she/her) has been the facilitator and lead artist of the Black Future Newsstand project. She is an artist, writer and facilitator committed to transformation through Centering Blackness. She is the creator of the Black Thought Project, which creates sanctuaries for Black expression and the Centering Blackness Fellow at Maven Collaborative. She is the creative director and author of W H O L E, a multimedia vision for abortion freedom. Alicia created Echoing Ida to build media visibility and power among Black women and nonbinary writers, generating narratives that affirm Black people’s humanity. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, The Guardian, Ebony, CNN, and Feminist Press.

Collette Watson (she/her) is a co-creator of the Media 2070 project at Free Press and co-founder of Black River Life studio and collective based in Phoenix, Arizona. She is an award-winning singer, songwriter, filmmaker and strategist currently exploring narratives of Black migratory identity as a portal to justice and wellbeing.

Alexa Morgan Williams (she/they) is a writer, movement artist and facilitator based in Atlanta – and also, the fantastic doer of project management brujería for Black Future Newsstand.

Allen Kwabena-Frimpong (he/him) is a founder of several powerful and influential social entrepreneurship endeavors. Currently, he is a co-founder and principal cultural strategist with ZEAL (www.zeal.coop), a worker owned alliance for Black artists and studio spaces throughout the diaspora.

April September (she/her) is a multimedia storyteller creating still and moving images that immerse viewers in the complex and rich realities of marginalized communities. April is the co-director of the feature-length documentary “Cincinnati Goddam,” and her award-winning art has been exhibited at the Berkeley Museum of Art, the Museum of African Diaspora, and the African American Museum in Philadelphia.

Damaso Reyes (he/him) is the investigative editor at The New York Amsterdam News and founding editor of The Blacklight. He is a multimedia journalist based in Barcelona, Spain, whose work has been published by The New York Times, The Associated Press, The Wall Street Journal, The Miami Herald, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Christian Science Monitor, and Der Spiegel.

Eteng Ettah (she/her) is the Narrative Director at MediaJustice where she leads the organization’s communications and narrative strategies to build power in a digital age. A long-time communications strategist, Black pop culture commentator and cultural storyteller, Eteng’s work is a testament to her belief that pop culture is a rich site for shifting hearts and minds toward social change. Her commentary has been featured and broadcast via Scalawag Magazine, MediaJustice, BlackStar Film Festival, and Free Speech TV. Based in Washington, D.C., Eteng earned her B.S. in Communications from Cornell University.

Trevor Smith (he/him) is the director of narrative change for liberation ventures, an organization working to accelerate the reparations movement. He is a writer, researcher, and strategist focused on uprooting anti-Black narratives, and transforming perceptions of Black people across the world. He’s interested in exploring how we build power within the intersections of culture, media, and policy in service of a more just world.

Alicia Bell (they/she) is the Director of the Racial Equity in Journalism Fund at Borealis Philanthropy, came to this work as an extension of the work they’d been doing to create repair and restitution in our media systems. She brought relationships, insight as a strategist and community organizer, and a willingness to show up for and with a variety of partners across and adjacent to the journalism sector. They also brought with them their lived experiences as a Black, Queer, Non-Binary parent, elder caretaker, sibling to an incarcerated/formerly incarcerated sister, and land steward in Charlotte, NC.

Diamond Hardiman (she/her) works as Reparative Journalism Manager at Free Press. She aims to participate in the creation of a world where freedom is noncontingent — but rather, an inevitable necessity. In service of this vision she has worked as a tenants’ rights advocate and bail abolitionist in St. Louis and as an advocate for people sentenced to execution by the state in Jackson, Mississippi. In her free time, she enjoys pondering womanist and liberation theology, listening to Megan Thee Stallion and admiring beauty wherever it appears.

Venneikia Williams (she/her) is a person whose pursuit of justice is informed by the radical Black tradition. From designing curriculum, graphics, and events to facilitating in-person and virtual trainings on racial, political, and spiritual matters, Venneikia is a lifelong learner and instructor. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a Master of Divinity degree from Covenant Theological Seminary in St. Louis, Missouri.

Unclassified Design Group is a multi-disciplinary art and design practice by Craig Shaw and Andrew Joseph, founded in modern landscapes and the built environment. Their interests are wide-ranging and explore the multitudes of intersections between product design, art, and architecture. The practice operates as both an incubator for innovative and novel ideas, and as facilitator for our collaborators.

The Black Thought Project transforms public and private spaces into sanctuaries for the expression of Black thought. our interactive art installations engage community members to actively honor Black thought as sacred and worthy of protection. we construct experiences in public and private spaces that invite Black people to share their perspectives while others protect, witness and honor what’s shared.

Media 2070 is a project of Free Press, a nonprofit nonpartisan media advocacy group based in Washington D.C. Media 2070 has emerged as a growing consortium of media-makers and activists collectively dreaming reparative policies, interventions and futures to understand and undo a history of anti-Black media harm. We work with community and institutional partners to generate research, cultural arts, policy, grassroots organizing and educational resources geared toward a future where media reparations are real, as part of the inevitable realization of broader reparations for Black people.

The Maven Collaborative centers race, gender and joy in the pursuit of economic justice. From grassroots movement building to grasstops debate, their work pushes progressive movements to properly diagnose economic problems, build new policies, and promote new politics to address the root causes of economic exclusion.