Kinfolk

✨Celebrate Juneteenth with Kinfolk! ✨

Portals to Freedom, our newest in-app quest, celebrates four visionaries who dedicated their lives to Black liberation through collaboration, creativity, and perseverance—Toussaint L’Ouverture, Octavia Butler, Frederick Douglass, and Fannie Lou Hamer. With the Kinfolk you can explore what it means to build collective power through technology, art, and community.

Find this quest and more in the FREE Kinfolk app. 🔗 in bio to download.

🎞️“TRUE NORTH” is coming to the IFC Center in NYC!🎞️

June 17 - 23 | Daily at 1:45, 4:05, and 6:30 PM

True North is a bold documentary that sheds light on Montréal’s place in the global struggle for Black liberation, weaving never-before-seen archives and firsthand testimonies of the students, writers, and activists who shaped history.

Kinfolk Tech is excited to be co-presenting the 6 PM screening of True North on Friday June 19, with an introduction by Kinfolk Executive Director and Founder Idris Brewster before the screening.

Get your tickets at IFCcenter.com/films/true-north/

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Next week’s teach-in, We The People, is inspired by our AR monument “No Arena Movement”. The monument is a tribute to the “Hands off Chinatown” movement in Philadelphia that began in 2022. The movement was a massive grassroots mobilization to stop the NBA franchise the Philadelphia 76ers from building a privately-funded $1.3 billion basketball arena directly on the eastern border of Philadelphia’s historic Chinatown.

The multi-racial, cross-city coalition argued that the mega-project would trigger severe gentrification, displace marginalized residents, and cripple local small businesses. The campaign successfully embroiled the controversial proposal in widespread public disapproval, ultimately leading the 76ers to abandon the development plan. It wasn’t only a victory for Philly’s Chinatown, but a victory for all working-class people resisting gentrification, displacement, and fighting to preserve cultural identity and histories.

Join us for a discussion on how movements archive solidarity in action, how coalitions preserve the memory of standing together across difference, and how communities document their victories to teach future generations that another world is possible when we organize as one. Through conversations with organizers, oral historians, and cultural workers from cross-racial justice movements.

💻 The People’s Archive: We The People
📅 Tuesday, June 16
🕡 6:30 PM EDT on Zoom
🔗 Link in bio to register

ASL interpretation will be available.

We’re excited to share Kinfolk Tech’s very first impact report, “Building Imagination Infrastructure”, reflecting on a year of building new spaces for memory, storytelling, and collective imagination! In a moment when history itself is increasingly contested, this work continues to remind us that communities deserve the tools to preserve and shape their own narratives.

The report explores Kinfolk’s impact highlights, an overview of our Community Memory Fellowship program, and insights from our inaugural KIN: Festival of Memory & Imagination.

This publication underscores the importance of the artists, technologists, historians, and community members who make the Kinfolk ecosystem thrive.

Thank you for being part of this growing ecosystem!

You can read the full report on our website!
kinfolktech.org/impact

Thank you to .studio for their work designing/laying out this report

Our upcoming teach-in, “We The People”, is centered on our Collective Power Zone of Imagination, and bring up two central questions:

1️⃣ How do we remember coalition-building as intentional practice, not accident?
2️⃣ How do archives capture the hard work of solidarity—the translation, the trust-building, the showing up across lines of race, language, and neighborhood?

Through conversations with organizers, oral historians, and cultural workers from cross-racial justice movements we’ll explore how movements archive solidarity in action, how coalitions preserve the memory of standing together across difference, and how communities document their victories to teach future generations that another world is possible when we organize as one.

This session treats the archive as a site of solidarity itself: when we remember together, we build power together. No one is free until we’re all free—and the archive must reflect that truth.

💻 The People’s Archive: We The People
📅 Tuesday, June 16
🕡 6:30 PM EDT on Zoom
🔗 Link in bio to register

ASL interpretation will be available.

ALL ROADS LEAD TO THE SOUTH 🛣️

In our latest Substack newsletter post, Brea Baker Kinfolk Writer In Residence reflects on recent SCOTUS ruling in the Louisiana v. Callais case. A case in which the court decided to continue a dangerous precedent of eroding civil rights protections and equitable access to the voting booth.

Brea reminds us that while this decision is shocking and disconcerting, it isn’t anything new, and that we can look to work of ancestors like Fannie Lou Hamer who took on challenges like these head on just a few generations ago. There is an example to follow, and light to move towards, and a foundation on which to build our own battles against these injustices.

You can read the full piece on our Substack and subscribe for more inspiring and insightful words from Brea.

🔗 in bio.

Our next teach-in “We The People”, is happening Tuesday June 16. The third and final panelist joining us for this discussion is interdisciplinary artist and organizer, Claire Maracle!

💻 The People’s Archive: We The People
📅 Tuesay, June 16
🕡 6:30 PM EDT
🔗 Link in bio to register

ASL interpretation will be available.

Claire Maracle is a Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) member of the Six Nations of the Grand River, raised as a guest on Muscogee, Osage, and Cherokee land. This experience directly informs their work in rematriation and their conviction that language is the key to transcending displacement. As Executive Director of Words of the People, their leadership is driven by the belief that fluent futures are built not through preservation alone, but through unyielding visibility and the active, creative celebration of living languages.

An interdisciplinary artist and organizer, their leadership spans over a decade of arts activism. Claire’s work bridges storytelling, liberation, and collective care. They co-founded Poetic Justice, bringing literacy and poetry workshops to carceral settings, (now in every prison in Oklahoma) that provided a framework for education as liberation. They served as Creative Director & Lead Educator for Louder Than a Bomb Oklahoma, instrumental in helping Tulsa launch the first regional offshoot of the Chicago program. Claire dedicated their time to mentoring youth in spoken word as a tool for self-determination and collective healing. Their poetry has appeared in This Land Press, Emerge Magazine, New Words Press, Frontier Poetry, Wayfarer Magazine and elsewhere.

Kinfolk will be at this year to celebrate their Quince year with community, joy, and the richness & diversity of Latino culture and stories 🎉

Join us on Saturday May 30 at 11 AM at the Ice Box Project Space for a conversation with Philadelphia based artist Betsy Casañas () for a conversation and Q&A on turning their mural practice into the digital monument “Grupos Motivos” and the transformative power of reimagining public spaces in Philadelphia.

🎙️ Artist Talk with Betsy Casañas
🗓️ Saturday May 30
🕡 11 – 11:45 AM
📍 Ice Box Project Space, 1400 N American St, Philadelphia

Betsy has been working on a beautiful new mural as the backdrop to her “Grupos Motivos” AR monument as well! We’ll see you soon Philly!

Head over to or go to PHLAFF.ORG to find out more about this year’s festival schedule. , is happening May 24 - July 5.

What is Grupos Motivos?

Back in the mid-1980s, a group of local Puerto Rican women, weary of the pervasive presence of drug dealers and the blighted state of the Norris Square neighborhood and park, embarked on a remarkable journey. They undertook the transformation of a vacant lot, christening it as Las Parcelas (which translates to “parcels” in English). Las Parcelas now proudly features a vibrant tapestry of vegetable and flower garden plots. The original collective of women activists has since adopted the name Grupo Motivos.

The garden stands as a testament to the power of community effort and reimagining your local urban spaces. Participants are invited to experience this powerful community story through the augmented reality (AR) monument created in collaboration with Philadelphia-based mural artist Betsy Casañas and Kinfolk Tech. The Grupos Motivos collective and the monument are a testament to what is possible when we dream collectively.