Member Teams

Natasha Shiku
6 hours ago
3 min read

Arts and Culture Organizing • Resourcing Member Team • Coalitions, Policy & Grassroots Organizing • Anchor Institution Organizing • Publications Member Team

The Ujima member teams are self-organized groups of community members that strengthen our participatory governance, build community relations, and help the public learn about Ujima, the solidarity economy, and economic democracy. Each team meets monthly on a rotating schedule and focuses on a different area of community learning and organizing. Learn more about each team below:

Arts and Culture Organizing

The Arts and Culture Organizing team is a learning space that uses imagination to shape alternative futures. Through quarterly classes community members connect with artists and scholars.

Within this team, one of our core learning spaces is the Micro-Learning Pod, an arts and culture workshop centered around a specific theme, facilitated by a member of the Ujima community. These workshops consist of a series of at least three sessions, held once a month on Wednesday nights. Sessions may include group activities, prompting questions, and discussions on various topics such as music/sound, design, visual art, dance, performance, film, archiving/memory work, public art, and political/cultural movements. Previous pods include Sacred Fragments with artist Amira Sheikh; The Portal: Between the Everyday and the Sacred with photographer and artist Tyahra Symone Angus; and Elbow Grease Writer’s Guild with cultural worker Chenoa Baker. Each series offered a unique artistic practice, community storytelling, and collecting making.

Resourcing Member Team

The Resourcing Member Team collaborates with values-aligned partners dedicated to providing unrestricted multi-year support and/or engaging in recurring giving practices. Additionally, the team plays a key role in cultivating resources to sustain the long-term operating costs of the Boston Ujima Project.

As part of this work, the team launched Resourcing Night School, a workshop series for and by our resourcing community. The series offered a rotating learning hub focused on shared resourcing, communal institution building, enhanced knowledge of resource sharing, and building skills needed.

Coalition, Policy & Grassroots Organizing

The Coalitions, Policy & Grassroots Organizing member team is a collaborative initiative committed to actively participating in existing coalitions, prioritizing issues such as community safety, economic and environmental justice, and adopting a multigenerational approach. Recent CPGO highlights include The People’s Salon, an afternoon of food, fellowship, and deep dialogue on food justice, land, and community power.

People's Salon, 2025

Anchor Institution Organizing

The Anchor Institution Organizing member team consists of Ujima members and solidarity members with the primary objective of supporting the Ujima ecosystem by organizing institutions in Greater Boston, focusing on universities, hospitals, and faith-based organizations, to actively support Ujima’s mission.

A recent highlight includes Gotta Have Faith: Ujima Faith Network Gathering, where people from different faith traditions build new and deepen existing individual/communal relationships as a means of building power and connection.

Publications Member Team

The Publications Member Team supports the creation of digital and print media that tell new stories about how power is created and shared through culture, full participation, and economic democracy. Through collaborative processes, this member team provides a platform for members and our wider communities to hone their editorial and design skills to develop programming, books, zines and printed matter for Ujima Press.

Recent events include community zine and album-making workshops in partnership with the Boston Public Library, where participants lifted up neighborhood histories in Roxbury and Mission Hill and created publications that honored family, memory, and cultural lineage.

Across all teams, Ujima members are building power through shared learning, institutional organizing, and community storytelling. Each team offers a different way to engage with Ujima’s mission and participate in our collective work. We invite members to join these teams, attend upcoming sessions, and continue strengthening our community together!