nana fofie amina bashir is a child of migrants from the south & nomads from the east, of the okomfo panyin & sufi sheik, the grand-daughter of gwendolyn & maryan. she is a facilitator, coach/guide/co-consipirator, & expressive arts therapy practitioner. nana fofie connects embodied & ancestral practices, story & strategy in community and movement spaces in the gulf south & across the u.s. an okomfo (spiritual & medicine healer practitioner), water & culture bearer & multimodal artist, nana fofie is firmly rooted in new orleans. in addition to her work through wisdom’s ladder, nana fofie serves as a director of the institute for ashé movement, is a founding partner of the wind & the warrior, a black and queer feminist indigenous healing arts collective, and is the creator of the altar project.

Karimah Nonyameko is a program officer with the Human Rights program at the Heising-Simons Foundation. Prior to joining the Foundation, Karimah worked for the National Alliance on Mental Illness South Carolina (NAMISC) as the Ending the Silence Lowcountry Regional Program Manager. Before joining NAMISC, Karimah worked with Encore.org’s Generation-to-Generation Program designing an online learning community for youth-serving practitioners and supporting a diverse network of communities and organizations experimenting with innovative models for engaging older adults to help children thrive. Prior to Encore.org, Karimah was the Subject Matter Expert in Community Development for Habitat for Humanity International.

Earlier in her career, Karimah lived in every region of the US, working as a community organizer with local, regional, and national nonprofit organizations and networks supporting social change issues and building relationships across differences. Karimah has over two decades of experience supporting nonprofit organizations and movement building work as a community organizer, non-profit senior staff, an organizational development consultant, grantmaking foundation board member, award-winning trainer/facilitator, and skill-building curriculum designer.

As Executive Director of the People’s Advocacy Institute, co-coordinator of the Electoral Justice Project, and campaign co-coordinator of the successful Committee to Elect Chokwe Antar Lumumba for Mayor of Jackson, Mississippi, Rukia Lumumba is a transformative justice strategist and human rights advocate.

For more than 18 years, she has worked within and outside the system to foster justice for all, especially as it relates to criminal justice disparities for people of color. She has served as director of two of New York state’s largest criminal justice nonprofits, CASES (the Center for Alternatives Sentencing and Employment Services) and the Center for Community Alternatives, providing visionary leadership and building community and system partnerships to help break the prison pipeline. During her leadership tenure, more than 4,200 youths received supportive community-based services including housing, education, job, and health and well-being services, in lieu of incarceration. She also served as co-chair of the Anti-Violence and Criminal Justice Working Group and steering committee member of the first Young Women’s Initiative in the United States dedicated to developing gender equitable policies in New York City, particularly for young women of color. Her work contributed to the development of She Will Be, a 144-page report of recommendations from stakeholders across New York City, including but not limited to community-based organizations, advocates, policy experts, and young women themselves.

A graduate of Howard University School of Law, Rukia clerked for the Juvenile Rights Division of the Washington, DC, Public Defender Service where she represented children and collected data on human rights violations at the former Oak Hill Youth Detention Center, one of the nation’s worst juvenile facilities. The data was included in a report that contributed to the closing of the facility. She was program director of Parents Watch, Inc., a Washington-based nonprofit that assists parents in advocating for their detained child’s release. During her tenure, she helped launch the first parent resource center housed within a detention facility. She served on the board of directors of the National Conference of Black Lawyers, an association of lawyers, activists and legal workers who defend human rights and expose the criminal justice disparities for people of color. She served as national coordinator of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, a membership-based organization dedicated to promoting human rights and self-determination. She co-founded Katrina on the Ground, an initiative that organized over 700 college students to participate in post-Katrina relief efforts in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama. She launched the Community Aid and Development Day Camp, an education and cultural enrichment program for over 200 children ages 6-16 in Jackson, Mississippi.

Rukia currently co-chairs the People’s Assembly process in Jackson, Mississippi which works to (1) increase community access to city government and (2) to institutionalize People’s Assemblies as community governing models that enable a deep democratic participation of people in their own governance. She was selected as one of the brightest and most promising women of color by New York University Wagner School of Public Service and she is a 2011 Youth for Justice Leadership Fellow for the National Juvenile Justice Network.

Rukia holds family very dear and is most proud of being a wonderful mother to her son Qadir. She was instrumental in the successful and revolutionary mayoral campaigns of her father and brother. Her assistance to elect her brother, Chokwe Antar Lumumba, as mayor of Jackson united people across generations and cities, moving as brilliantly among the grassroots as it did among the grasstops.

Rukia holds a bachelor’s degree in political science with an emphasis in international relations from Tougaloo College in Mississippi. She holds a Juris Doctorate from Howard University School of Law in Washington, D.C. and has studied law and politics in South Africa at the University of Forte Hare and the University of the Western Cape.

Wesley Morris is a community organizer, facilitator, and Senior Pastor of Faith Community Church in Greensboro, NC. His work centers on addressing the interlocking injustices of systemic racism and systemic poverty. Wesley currently serves as Vice President of the Pulpit Forum and as Associate Director for Southern Vision Alliance (SVA) where he works with emergent social justice organizations to develop racial, economic, and environmental justice solutions for collective liberation in the US South.

Prior to joining SVA, Wesley served as an Intern chaplain at Harlem Hospital and worked for more than a decade as a community organizer with the Beloved Community Center, home to the nation’s first Community Truth and Reconciliation Process.

Through his solidarity projects in Cuba, Barbados, and Brazil he has supported opening cultural and spiritual pathways to bridge the gap between Black, indigenous people of color and the African Diaspora. Wesley acknowledges the pain caused by systems of oppression and has committed his efforts towards achieving a more just and equitable world. Wesley has been a strong supporter and active participant in the national Poor People’s Campaign – a relaunch of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s nonviolent civil disobedience protest in over 40 states addressing voter suppression laws, mass incarceration, and livable wages led by Dr. William Barber.

Wesley earned a B.A. degree from North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University and Master of Divinity from Union Theological Seminary in New York City. He enjoys traveling, listening to his vinyl record collection, and reading.