Building Community

The Initiative for Community Power brings people together by organizing reading groups, hosting speakers, screenings and visiting scholars, and organizing convenings on issues and disciplines related to inequality, racial justice, political economy, policy, power and social change. Our work catalyzes high impact partnerships and learning  among faculty, students and leading social justice practitioners. 

Recent Projects 

• The Initiative for Community Power worked closely with the Law and Political Economy Project at Yale and The Action Lab to organize an LPE NYC Chapter. 
  • We hosted a launch event for more than 200 students, faculty and practitioners at NYU Law this past fall, featuring talks by Angela P. Harris, Amna Akbar, Andrew Friedman and Ana Maria Archila.
  • This fall, LPE NYC launched a night school / speaker series in partnership with the New School for Social Research.
• The Initiative organized visits, lectures, and screenings to introduce students and the broader community to inspiring and challenging social justice themes, stories, scholars and practitioners.
  • We hosted a visit from Robeyoncé Lima, a Brazilian lawyer, activist, and politician. She is state deputy for Pernambuco and the first trans woman elected official in the state.
  • We organized a visit from the leadership team of the Immigrant Alliance for Justice and Equity Mississippi, a front-line, membership-based organization building the power of immigrant communities.
  • We co-organized a panel discussion with labor leaders from the Amazon Labor Union and Workers United to discuss emergent labor organizing efforts and the struggle for dignity and respect in the workplace.
  • We held screenings of the documentaries We Still Here about organizing in Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, and Primera about a courageous protest movement that challenged neoliberalism and corruption in Chile.
  • We co-sponsored From Crisis to Horizon: A Discussion Series on Social Housing with the Housing Justice for All Coalition, the Urban Democracy Lab, the Action Lab and the NYU LPE chapter. 
  • Our virtual social justice film series, The Freedom Forward Film Series, brought together social impact storytellers, social justice practitioners, and artists dedicated to imagining a world with freedom, justice, and well-being for all. 
• Dismantling Racial Capitalism brought together more than 100 academics, organizers, policy-makers, students and change-makers to examine how racial capitalism drives inequality, exploitation, and destruction and how we can catalyze change
• Our Law and Power Building convening created space for students, organizers and lawyers invested in progressive social change to grapple with how to effectively deploy their skills and capacities – and, more broadly, law itself – in service of organizing for social, economic, and racial justice. 
• Our Countervailing Oligarchic Power convening brought more than 50 social justice leaders together to discuss how to curtail right-wing, oligarchic power and build a multi-racial and equitable future.