In Volume 12 of the One Million Experiments zine series, we delve into noisemaking in many of its glorious forms throughout time and space. Explore creative tactics for making noise — from the flamenco dancers disrupting banking in Andalusia, to the punks noisebombing Indonesia with speakers attached to their scooters, to the “youth on the bridge” settling in for a month-long drum protest against the military in Sudan. Wherever you are, however you can, it’s a good time to make some noise.

Read the Noisemaking Zine

Browse the first few pages of the zine below. We start in silence and dive right into whistle blowing for community defense. Read about the radical choirs, marching bands, and noise demos happening around the United States and the world — and find the noisemakers near you!

Eva, One Million Experiments Fellow

Thank you for reading the One Million Experiments Newsletter. If you like what you see, please consider sharing it with a friend.

Explore our catalog of projects, podcasts, and zines at millionexperiments.com and follow us on Instagram @millionexperiments.

Making noise can be a remarkably effective form of dissent. It can be disruptive. It can be unifying. It can get stuck in your head. In our upcoming zine, we’ll explore some of the ways that noisemaking has popped up in protest over time and highlight ways in which groups are harnessing the power of sound right now.

Noise is agnostic about its makers, working just as well for those on the right side of history as those who are in the wrong. Still, if the past has taught us anything, the path to liberation will be paved, in part, with sound. Making noise is one of the tools in our toolbox.

Dropping next week, “Noisemaking,” will explore a smorgasbord of auditory tactics. Enjoy this teaser, an annotated playlist of early noisemaking in song form!

From “Sorrow Songs” to “Freedom Songs”

“Sorrow songs” sung by African people enslaved in the United States starting in the 17^th century form the basis of many spirituals, blues, and jazz songs still sung today. Songs sung by people enslaved in Trinidad and Tobago led to the birth of Calypso, and people in Brazil disguised Capoeira self-defense techniques as dance through the rhythmic musical chants that influenced Samba. Music history is rich with dissent.

During the time of chattel slavery, African and African American communities used musical traditions and song to communicate about life, death, emotions, and spirituality — all of which helped cope with the trauma of enslavement, collective survival, and escape. On the Underground Railroad, stories describe conductors who used songs such as “Go Down Moses” to indicate safety and “Wade in the Water” to signal danger.

“Crossroad” Blues

After the emancipation of people enslaved in the United States — during Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the Great Migration — blues music emerged as the soundtrack to the new era, with bluesmen and women singing the concerns of the day — like cotton, levees, boll weevils, sharecropping, and juke houses.

Blues music first detailed the harsh realities of the Deep South and continues to make up the soundtrack of American “blue devils.” From the harshest conditions came enduringly sweet and sorrowful songs.

Bluesman Lead Belly famously recorded “Midnight Special” while in prison at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola in 1933 with the folklorist father son duo Jon and Alan Lomax. (Parchman Farm, a prison farm now known as the Mississippi State Penitentiary, and an infamous convict lease hub, was another epicenter of blues recordings at the time.)

When you get up in the mornin’, when that big bell ring
You go and march to the table, see the same damn thing
Knife and fork are on the table, there’s nothin’ in my pan
And if you say anything about it, havin’ trouble with the man

“Midnight Special” by Lead Belly (Huddie William Ledbetter)

Decades later, Johnny Cash infamously played his first show inside a prison at San Quentin on New Year’s Day 1958. He recorded his first live album at another California prison, “At Folsom Prison,” encouraging a long tradition of stars singing with and for people in prison. (You can hear 1ME co-founder Mariame Kaba talk about her love for Johnny Cash in this fun series.)

Well, if they freed me from this prison, if that railroad train was mine
I bet I’d move it on a little farther down the line
Far from Folsom prison, that’s where I want to stay
And I’d let that lonesome whistle blow my blues away

“Folsom Prison Blues” by Johnny Cash

In 1971, the late “King of the Blues” B.B. King co-founded the Foundation for the Advancement of Inmate Rehabilitation and Recreation, which pushed for improved conditions in prisons and put on shows for people imprisoned across the country. In a 1990 interview, King talked about his practice of playing so frequently in prisons: “I’ve never been in trouble myself but I think about, it could have just as easily been a B.B. King instead of B.B. King going out there to play.“

All That Jazz

At the same time the Delta Blues were emerging, musical traditions in the bouillabaisse of cultures that made up early 19^th century New Orleans was giving birth to jazz.

In 1962, legendary pianist and bandleader Duke Ellington told it like this: “Put it this way: Jazz is a good barometer of freedom… In its beginnings, the United States of America spawned certain ideals of freedom and independence through which, eventually, jazz was evolved, and the music is so free that many people say it is the only unhampered, unhindered expression of complete freedom yet produced in this country.”

Trumpet player Miles Davis, the “Prince of Darkness,” put it more succinctly: “Jazz is the big brother of revolution. Revolution follows it around.”

In 1939, Billie Holiday performed “Strange Fruit,” a tune adapted from a poem by Jewish communist Abel Meeropol, at Café Society in New York City. The song, recorded and released three months after the night club debut, hit No. 16 on the U.S. charts and sold over one million copies. The haunting tune is widely considered the first significant protest song of the Civil Rights Movement, with another devastating rendition recorded by Nina Simone in 1965.

As time marched on, the legacy of “sorrow songs” paved the path to the “freedom songs” of the 1950s and 1960s. Anthems and protest songs became the soundtrack to the Civil Rights movement, with numbers like “We Shall Overcome,” and “A Change is Gonna Come.”

Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me ‘round
I’m gonna keep on a walkin’, keep on a-talkin’,
Marching up to freedom land

“Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me ‘Round” based on the spiritual “Don’t You Let Nobody Turn You Round” and popularized by Reverend Ralph Abernathy

Threads of gospel music wove African spirituals to blues to freedom songs, with jazz threaded in, as in the music of Mahalia Jackson, the “Queen of Gospel.” A child of the Great Migration, Jackson sang “I’ve Been ‘Buked and I’ve Been Scorned” (per Martin Luther King Jr.’s request) and “How I Got Over” at the March on Washington in 1963.

She told to a reporter that, “Blues are the songs of despair, but gospel songs are the songs of hope.” After singing, Jackson shouted, “Tell them about the dream, Martin!”

“We Shall Overcome”

At the start of the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott, thousands of people assembled twice weekly in Montgomery, Alabama churches to sing hymns and spirituals in unified harmony.

In their 2026 report, “The Montgomery Decade That Changed the World: 1955-1965,” the Equal Justice Initiative describes the scene: “The inaugural mass meeting at Holt Street Baptist Church opened with the hymn ‘Onward Christian Soldiers.’ As one congregation, 6,000 people vocalized, ‘We are not divided / all one body we / One in hope and doctrine / one in charity.’”

The Highlander Research and Education Center (formerly Folk School) in Tennessee has been a vital hub for social justice movements since 1932, fostering the development of freedom songs. It served as a training ground for activists and a “singing school” where songs were refined and spread. Sean McCollum writes that:

“On September 2, 1957, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., visited Highlander Folk School in Tennessee… King delivered the main speech that day, honoring the school’s 25th anniversary. As part of the meeting, folk singer Pete Seeger got up with his banjo. He plucked out a song he had learned at Highlander and led the audience in singing it. Later that day, Dr. King found himself humming the tune in the car. ‘There’s something about that song that haunts you,’ he said to his companions.”

The song first appeared as “We’ll Overcome” as a protest song during a 1945–1946 labor strike against American Tobacco in Charleston, South Carolina. African American women strikers seeking a pay raise to 30 cents an hour sang as they picketed.

A new verse was inspired in the late 1950s, when, according to one of the founders of Highlander, Myles Horton: “A group of young people, a youth choir…was at Highlander. …They were looking at a movie called Face of the South. It was dark. Suddenly, raiders came in with flashlights. They must have been vigilantes and some police officers, but they weren’t in uniform. They demanded the lights be turned on, but they couldn’t get anybody at Highlander to do it. They were furious…running around with flashlights. In the meantime, the kids started to sing ‘We Shall Overcome.’ It made them feel good. The raiders yelled, ‘Shut up and turn on the lights!’ Then some kid said, ‘We’re not afraid.’ Then they started singing, ‘We are not afraid. We are not afraid.’ That’s when that verse was born.”

In the summer of 1962, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) workers and several residents of Ruleville, Mississippi boarded an old yellow school bus after attempting to register to vote at the county courthouse in Indianola. They were heading back to Ruleville, twenty-six miles away, when the bus was stopped by local police and the driver was charged with driving a bus of the wrong color.

The SNCC workers and Ruleville residents were overcome with fear. Inside SNCC writes, “Suddenly, however, a voice rose out of the fear. It was Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer, a timekeeper on a local plantation, singing ‘This Little Light of Mine,’ and other freedom songs. ‘Her voice calmed and empowered,’ recalled Charlie Cobb, a SNCC field secretary stationed in Ruleville. The group refused to cow to the police officers, and Mrs. Hamer emerged as a grassroots leader.”

Lor’, there been times that I thought
I couldn’t last for long
But now, I think I’m able to
Carry on

“A Change Is Gonna Come” by Sam Cooke

In the secret schools during the Transatlantic Slave Trade, the juke joints of Reconstruction, the Harlem Renaissance rent parties in the 1920s and 30s, and the Appalachian-style hootenannies popularized in the 1940s, American music has always played a part in fighting for survival and for catalyzing change. From “sorrow songs” to “freedom songs," music connects movements and messages with mass — toe tapping — appeal.

Eva, One Million Experiments Fellow

Thank you for reading the One Million Experiments Newsletter. If you like what you see, please consider sharing it with a friend.

Explore our catalog of projects, podcasts, and zines at millionexperiments.com and follow us on Instagram @millionexperiments.

Black Zine Fair

The Black Zine Fair (BZF) is a celebration of all things Black and independent publishing in New York City! We invite Black exhibitors and educators to gather, trade or sell zines, and exchange knowledge surrounding zine-making, publishing, and do-it-yourself culture. This event is free and open to anyone who wants to support the work of Black zine makers!

May 9, 2026, from 11AM - 6 PM
Brooklyn, New York
RSVP at blackzinefair.org

2025 BZF, courtesy of Sojourners for Jusrice, Photographer Elliott Jerome Brown Jr.

Fire!!

2026 marks the 100-year anniversary of the first and only issue of FIRE!! A Quarterly Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists. The “little magazine” was published in November 1926 by editor Wallace Thurman and an editorial board that included Langston Hughes, Richard Bruce Nugent, Zora Neale Hurston, Gwendolyn Bennett, John Davis, and Aaron Douglas. In his 1982 foreword, Thomas Wirth writes that, “Financed by its creators, a small circle of their friends, and a printer who wasn’t paid, FIRE!! was free from the restraints imposed by the need to please patrons and publishers (who tended to be wealthy and white).” Ultimately, the radical publication did not prove to be financially viable, and operations ceased abruptly when their headquarters burned down after the publication of their first issue.

But it was FIRE!!

Douglas, describing why FIRE!! was different than other publications at the time, remarked that, “We are all under thirty. We have no get-rich-quick complexes. We espouse no new theories of racial advancement, socially economically or politically. We have no axes to grind…We are primarily and intensely devoted to art.” FIRE!!’s depiction of Black youth culture was predictably met with mixed reviews, but looking at the masthead and table of contents in retrospect, they read like a who’s who of major names in African American literature and art. As Wirth writes, “It was a special time and a special place which made the collaboration possible. Hence FIRE!! is, in a real sense, the Harlem Renaissance incarnate.”

Thanks to the POC Zine Project, you can read FIRE!! here.

Self-Publishing

The tradition of self-publishing is the tradition of publishing, and where you find mainstream publications, there is sure to follow self-publishers that history aims to exclude. 1ME co-founder Mariame Kaba entered the long history of Black women self-publishers with her press, Sojourners for Justice, dedicated to Black feminist, and abolitionist philosophies and visions, as well as the organizer of the Black Zine Fair.

Spotlight: Sojourners for Justice Press

Success in self-publishing can open the way to traditional publishing deals. Some Black women, however, self-publish by choice. Educator and organizer Mariame Kaba has published numerous books with independent presses. But she has also created her own Sojourners for Justice Press, co-directed with Neta Bomani. It publishes zines and pamphlets about Black radical activism, prison/policing abolition, and Black feminism by Kaba and others. In their April article, “The City in Our Hands,” Neta and Mariame explain that, “Our name is a nod to the self-publishing and activist legacy that Sojourner Truth blazed for us. It also recalls the Sojourners for Truth and Justice (STJ), a short-lived but influential organization of Black women socialists and communists in the early 1950s who embodied Black feminist thought through manifesto, collective action, and public speech. Several of the founding members of STJ, including Louise Thompson Patterson, Eslanda Robeson, Claudia Jones, lived, worked, and published in New York.

A sojourner is someone who finds their way by passing from place to place temporarily rather than settling permanently. The term acknowledges the ephemerality of publishing: pamphlets lost, newspapers faded by the sun, zines unbound after years of handling. Ideas sojourning, surging, circulating, building power as they move.”

Continue reading about Sojourners for Justice Press >>

2025 BZF, courtesy of Sojourners for Justice, Photographer Elliott Jerome Brown Jr.

Presses like Mariame’s are bright stars in the constellation of experiments that we feature in our database, and they also represent an important and different way of sharing information about experiments — a way that is not dependent on foundation or corporate funding or relegated solely to the intrinsically ephemeral internet. Technofascism looms large in our work documenting, sharing, and archiving experiments, and we’re reminded of the importance of creating and maintaining mechanisms to share information in ways that we can own and control ourselves. (It’s no coincidence that many zinesters started out as pen-pals.) Self-publishing, and self-publishing low-cost zines, continues to be our favorite way forward.

Like the example FIRE!!, we’re also very cognizant of the stories that get left behind, buried, or deemed unpublishable — like the stories of many abolitionists that we feature: people, projects, and collectives experimenting at the margins. Spaces like the Black Zine Fair are critical to the survival and dissemination of stories and strategies that people might otherwise miss out on.

You can subscribe to Sojourners’ mailing list here. You can even send a zine from their collection to an incarcerated reader here.

Spotlight: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press

Professor, writer, and activist Barbara Smith begins her 1989 article, “A Press of Our Own,” saying, “If anyone had asked in 1980 whether books by women of color could sell or whether a press that published only work by and about women of color could survive, the logical answer would have been, ‘no,’ especially if the person who answered the question was part of the commercial publishing establishment. Even less than a decade ago, writing by American Indian, African American, Latina, and Asian American women was barely noticed by the literary and academic establishments, let alone by the general reading public.” Alongside poet Audre Lorde, Smith founded Kitchen Table, a Black lesbian feminist press dedicated to books by women of color, “with good (intentioned) hearts and strong minds.” In addition to the list of influential books published in the press’s 12-year run, Kitchen Table published The Freedom Organizing Pamphlet Series. The collection includes seminal works like, “The Combahee River Collective Statement: Black Feminist Organizing in the Seventies and Eighties,” “Violence Against Women and the Ongoing Challenge to Racism,” by Angela Davis, and “Need: A Chorale for Black Women Voices,” by Audre Lorde.

Zines (and pamphlets) are sold, traded, and given out for free in many independent bookstores, libraries, and local zine festivals across the world: It’s easy to experiment with self-publishing wherever you are! You can explore zine distros for people of color, like Brown Recluse Zine Distro, or shops for projects like A.B.O. Comix that distribute and fundraise for zinesters who are currently incarcerated; zine archives, like the one at the Barnard Zine Library; and zine mail clubs, like Booklyn’s Zine Club.

Zine-making 101

Have you always wanted to make a zine but don’t know where to start? Library guides offer a lot of great resources on zine-making — like this overview from CUNY’s Mina Rees Library, or this collection of templates from Princeton University. Find a library near you and check to see if they have zine resources.

Booklyn, an artist-run, non-profit is another excellent source of materials (and workshops if you’re local to NYC). Their BPL Zine Box has an amazing handbook, which covers zine history, zine-making basics, and program ideas. The Booklyn Education Manual, “aims to provide the basic background, skills and techniques for learners of all ages and experience levels to express their ideas and manufacture their own media while creating a space for the mutual exchange of information and experiences,” also includes lesson plans for zine and junk book journal workshops.

There are a multitude of videos on different elements of zine-making. @brattyxbre has a fun mix of zine tutorials to dive into. And if you want a quick start, watch this 2-minute video on one-page (“mini” or “foldy”) zine-making by Austin, a dad making zines for his son’s lunch. (Dayna shares a few more tips and a downloadable template in this 5-minute video. There are even programs and sites that help automatically arrange your pages.) For longer zines, especially if you’re printing digital work, Dayna also makes a helpful 10-minute overview on technical tips on pagination — setting up the pages to print correctly.

For inspiration, I like this 5-minute time-lapse video showing a student making a zine from start to finish (courtesy of the Barnard College Zine Library), and this 10-minute documentary, “Cut & Paste,” with charming Boston zinesters.

There are also fun programs outside of traditional software and sites (Adobe, Procreate, Canva, etc.) like Nathalie Lawhead’s open-source zine-making tool, the Electric Zinemaker, and online simulators for print-making, like Spectrolite, a desktop app that simulates risograph prints (“digital screen printing”) and zines.

Lastly, if you’re looking for inspiration, Sojourners for Justice co-director Neta Bomani has an amazing collection of zines from their zine archiving project on @netazines, and 100 Days of Zines.

Spotlight: Black Publishers in Queercore

Fertile La Toyah Jackson — 1982-1991

The Fertile La Toyah Jackson Magazine was a queer drag zine produced in Los Angeles by artist and performer Vaginal Davis, named after activist Angela Davis. With columns such as “What Makes Fertile La Toyah Mad?” and “La Toyah Talk,” the fanzine featured gossip, cruising stories, and performance and zine reviews. Emerging from the LA punk scene, Davis was a prolific zinester, Her work celebrates and centers the lives and experiences of queer people, people of colour, and gender non-conforming individuals, unearthing stories of the marginalized, overlooked, and deliberately silenced.

FTLJM was “named after a member of Davis’s punk band Afro Sisters and a play on the name of pop star La Toya Jackson,” Drew Sawyer writes in Mimeograph, Wite-Out, and Full-Frontal Nudity: On the Birth of Queercore Zines. The zine appeared, according to Davis, “whenever Fertile becomes so indignant, so frustrated with the goings on of our critical times . . . that she feels it’s time for her to make comment.” As a student at UCLA in the late 1980s, Vaginal Davis worked in the university’s career counseling office and used their Xerox machine to produce FTLJM: “If you want something bad enough and you’re not really getting your needs met, you just put it out there and pretend that you’re getting it. And then that can lead to it actually happening. That’s what happened to me. But who would have ever thought that something that’s non-slick, that’s non-glossy, could ever get so much attention?” Davis said. “It was absolutely unheard of.” In “The ‘Terrorist Drag; of Vaginal Davis,” Cyrus Grace Dunham recounts a conversation with Davis in 2015, still a prolific creator: “As she told me last week, ‘You can’t change institutions from the inside, as they always wind up changing you.’ This is why she is content with her place as an outsider of the institutional art world, and of culture at large. She does what she wants, makes what she wants, and mocks who she wants; she rejects inclusion, and its limiting factors.”

Thing (“She Knows Who She Is”) — 1989-1993

Thing documented Chicago’s Black queer nightlife scene from 1989-1993. Founded by Robert Ford, Trent Adkins and Lawrence Warren, the first of 10 issues came in November of 1989, a 20-page, photocopied half-letter zine that documented Chicago’s burgeoning house music scene and ballroom culture thriving in underground club spaces. Thing was comprised of interviews, poetry, fiction, reviews, and art highlighting Black queer history, and run out of Ford’s apartment. It covered Black hair-care tips, erotica, book recommendations, best/worst play-lists, a gossip column (“Bunny & Pussy”), and personal essays on homelessness, anti-gay violence, and AIDS. “Robert really took it on as a mission to make sure people were informed about AIDS and knew where to go, how to be safe and about people who were living with HIV,” Thing designer Simone Bouyer said. “And that was almost unheard of at the time.”

In The Life and Legacy of Thing, Solveig Nelson quotes Ford in an interview at SPEW, the first queer zine fest held in 1991 in Chicago at the Randolph Street Gallery: “We knew for ourselves what a rich and important cultural thing gay black men have and share. We wanted to make a magazine that would be a way of documenting our existence and contribution to society. Our idea was not so much [to] radicalize or subvert the idea of magazines as to make one from our own point of view. This was a necessary intervention because there was “so little of us in ‘mainstream media.’” Leor Galil details the history of Thing for the Chicago Reader in Thirty years ago, a Black queer zine captured the scene that birthed house.

For more reading on Black self-publishers in history, we also recommend Mariame’s newsletter, “Prisons, Prose, and Protest,” where she writes about David Ruggles, a 19^th century abolitionist, and the proprietor of the very first Black-owned bookstore in the country: D. Ruggles Books. Independent bookstores and zine fairs continue to be a central rallying point for Black resistance and abolitionist allies. The Black Reading Room at Saturday’s BZF will be a powerful space.

As Neta and Mariame wrote in “The City in Our Hands,” “The reality of Black publishing is not simply a linear timeline or a beautiful spread of publications and presses. It is a complex, decentralized system, and a terrain of struggle where powerful resonances can be found. David Ruggles’s magazine warning of slave catchers’ tactics in the 19th century reverberates in a zine explaining how to report ICE raids today. Gwendolyn Brooks’s chapbook responding to the uprisings after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. sits next to a zine about the assassination of a Stop Cop City protestor. To hold these publications together in one room is to feel and see history, and the city in which history is made, differently.”

I hope that some of you will be able to make it to the Black Zine Fair this weekend!

Eva, One Million Experiments Fellow

Thank you for reading the One Million Experiments Newsletter. If you like what you see, please consider sharing it with a friend.

Explore our catalog of projects, podcasts, and zines at millionexperiments.com and follow us on Instagram @millionexperiments.

Happy Black History Month! While I always look forward to celebrating this month, I remain sobered by the fact that we are living through a time of renewed attacks on Black history and memory. Last year, the Trump administration returned artifacts held at the National Museum of Black History and Culture in accordance with a racist executive order and just last month the administration removed an exhibit about enslavement at the President’s House Site in Philadelphia. As jarring as these kinds of removals are, it’s also true that Black history exists beyond the walls of institutions. So much beautiful, profound and needed documentation and preservation of our culture, liberation movements, and lives is being done by small, community-based archives. Georgia Dusk is documenting Black, queer and feminist grassroots movement work in Georgia via oral histories. Black Bottom Archives is centered on archiving Black life in Detroit and stewards the Sankofa Community Research project, which conducts historical research on the effects of the destruction of the Black Bottom and Paradise Valley neighborhood in Detroit. Heaux History is a collective of sex workers who archive and explore Black erotic labor and history. One of their projects, Red Maps, is a geographic representation of where sex workers have long existed in both Chicago and San Francisco.

Please engage with and support these archival efforts. Projects like these help to ensure that our histories will not be erased, and their work underscores the truth that our history is part memory and part instructive. These archives encourage us to study the past, and take lessons from it, so that we may be better prepared to fight for the world we all deserve.

Erin Glasco, Archivist
Events Coordinator, Interrupting Criminalization

Spotlight: Black Memory Workers

Georgia Dusk

“We have to do the work,” says co-founder Dartricia Rollins. “Archivists have a very unique role in our movements and that is supporting us finding the materials, but also in supporting in preserving the materials so that future generations of organizers don’t have to work so hard to learn these things…We have this long history of struggle and solidarity with one another with the goal of ending oppression of all people. And if we can keep that momentum, that history alive, we can get out of the way of ourselves.” Continue reading…

Black Bottom Archives

“We started off as a Tumblr page,” Co-executive Director Marcia Black explains, “and eventually became a digital publication that published stories that Black Detroiters wrote about a variety of topics…Since 2019, we’ve been collecting oral histories from Black Bottom residents and descendants, and we developed a digital archive that we launched in 2020.” Continue reading…

Heaux History

“Clarifying the reality and asserting our existence and historical relevance is the whole basis of Heaux History. As of today, there’s still so little documentation. A main point for us,” founder Rebelle Cunt explains, “is constantly reminding folks that when it comes to social justice movements, particularly post-slavery, there is no social justice movement that exists that doesn’t involve the contributions and the existence of Black sex workers.” Continue reading…

Overground Railroads

The land we live on is abundant in histories of social, cultural, and economic solidarity. The goal of One Million Experiments has always been to illuminate the ways in which that solidarity shows up so that it may help light the way forward. When we look around at the work that abolitionists are doing, we see a series of people and places that, when viewed all together, form a path to safety. We see the stops on an overground railroad to a liberated world.

Don’t miss our next zine release, “Overground Railroads” on our @millionexperiments Instagram.

In documenting those stops, One Million Experiments is an accidental archive. The snapshots we take are cursory examinations of complex work rooted in people and places with long lineages — lineages collected as often in museums as in boxes at the back of closets, shared in whispers and zines and Polaroids as much as they are in encyclopedias and exhibits. While we want to continue to document the work happening right now, we are also adding some of the north stars we’ve looked to along the way.

To celebrate Black History Month, we’re sharing a few examples of cooperatives in the United States that highlight the ways in which Black communities have pooled their collective resources and knowledge to keep people, places, cultures, and traditions alive. Our co-ops, unions, collectives, and pods are part of a long and largely unbroken line of people whose survival can be summed up in one word: reciprocity.

As Erin writes, “history is part memory and part instructive.” It is not enough to acknowledge there are shoulders that our work stands on: we must engage deeply with histories of solidarity and resistance to carry the legacies of that work forward. I’ll also add that history can be a balm. It can be a place to find inspiration, hope, and joy. This month, we hope that Black history can be a balm for you all, so many of whom are out there making it right now.

You can also view and add to our ongoing Transformative Justice Timeline project here.

A Brief Timeline Celebrating Early African American Collectivity

For an overview of cooperative economic practices throughout African American history, check out Jessica Gordon Nembhard’s book “Collective Courage.”

1780s – The Rise of the Underground Railroad

The network of safe houses, routes, and guides that transported enslaved people to the free North and Canada began to organize among Abolitionist societies in the late 1700s, but Black people paved the path long before that. In “History of Work Cooperation in America,” John Curls writes that prior to the organized resistance of the Railroad, “Mutual-aid and survival cooperation both among slaves and among servants were almost universal.” Religious and cultural camaraderie formed a basis for social and economic cooperation, which in turn laid the groundwork for many Black people to survive enslavement, gain freedom, and advance economically. (Courage, 33)

1793 - Philadelphia’s Female Benevolent Society of St. Thomas

Taking over for the Free African Society in Philadelphia, the Female Benevolent Society of St. Thomas was one of the first Black women’s mutual aid societies. In these societies, Nembhard writes in Collective Courage, “Black women established day nurseries, orphanages, homes for the aged and infirm, hospitals, cemeteries, night schools, and scholarship funds. They pooled ‘meager resources,’ sponsored fund-raisers, solicited voluntary contributions, and used modest dues that even the ‘poorest women managed to contribute’ to meet vital social welfare needs.” (Courage, 43) 1793 was also the year of one of the worst outbreaks in Philadelphia of Yellow Fever, which ravaged the United States throughout the late 17^th and 18^th century. While rich white people had the means to flee, poorer Black communities and enslaved people were forced to shelter in place, providing their own disaster relief networks, including aid societies for the poor and vulnerable.

The Black women’s club movement preceded women’s suffrage by more than a century and would ultimately plant the seeds for the Civil Rights Movement decades after that. (For example, the Woman’s Political Council of Montgomery, a local Black women’s club, was the initial organizer of that city’s bus boycott in 1955.)

1836 - The Société d’Economie et d’Assistance Mutuelle

The Economie was a benevolent organization formed by Creole men based in New Orleans, and uniquely defined by its international reach, cultural influence, and longevity. Like many of the benevolent and mutual aid societies that proliferated during this time in New Orleans and elsewehere, the group collected dues from members to provide financial support for things such as healthcare and funeral costs, provided a social network for entrepreneurial efforts, and maintained a library, archives, and meeting place. Starting with fifteen members, initiation originally cost $25. Events held in the Economie hall are cultural legends.

Today, the legacy of the social aid and pleasure clubs that started in the 19^th century continue to unify communities as they carry on traditions in cultural organizations and with Mardi Gras krewes and their second lines. The jazz musician Sidney Bechet, who played at the Economie hall along with other New Orleans greats like Louis Armstrong, once said that, “One of those parades would start down the street and all kinds of people when they saw it pass would forget all about what they was doing; you stop working, eating, any damn thing, and you run on out, and if you can’t get in it, you just get as close as you can.” (“Sundays in the Streets”)

1863 - Combahee River Colony

The Combahee River Colony in South Carolina consisted of several hundred African American women living in the Gullah Geechee communities and the Georgia Sea Islands who came together while the men from their communities went off to join the Union Army during the Civil War. Nembhard writes that, “they occupied abandoned farmland where they ‘grew crops and cared for one another.’ They refused to work for Whites and were proud of their handicrafts and cotton crop, as well as their independence.” (Courage, 38)

On June 2, of this same year, Harriet Tubman and 150 African American Union soldiers liberated more than 700 slaves in the Combahee Ferry Raid in nearby Beaufort, South Carolina. Over a century later, the Combahee River Collective would release their 1977 statement, a seminal Black feminist work.

1886 - Colored Farmers’ Alliance and Cooperative Union

The Alliance was established by sixteen black men on a farm in Houston County, Texas. Faced with the threat of mob violence, they first operated as a secret organization and would collapse a decade later after the Leflore Massacre, suppressed by white violence. Denied entry by the Southern Farm Alliance, the organization’s economic efforts were ultimately failures, pushing the Alliance in a radical political direction. They “trained members in economic and political governance, promoted character-building programs, supported mutual aid in their community, argued for more schools for African American children, agitated for more humane treatment of black convict farm laborers, and taught members about their civil rights.” (“The Black Populist Movement Has Been Snuffed Out of the History Books”) The Alliance published a weekly newspaper, engaged in boycotts, strikes, and even helped create the independent People’s Party. In 1890 the organization boasted over a million members with exchanges throughout the New South. Though short-lived, it would prove to be an important link in time between mutual aid societies and the new cooperatives that would continue the collectivization of resources throughout the South. (Courage, 58)

1889 - People’s Grocery

At the end of the 19^th century, Memphis, Tennessee was the fifth biggest wholesale grocery market in the United States. On the outskirts of the city in the Curve neighborhood, white grocer William Barrett maintained a monopoly on the grocery business until a small group of Black community members pooled capital to open People’s Grocery. Co-owned by ten Black residents, including pioneering investigative journalist Ida B. Well’s friend Tommie Moss, the cooperative was a beloved destination for Black people near and far, and a resounding financial success. Within three years of opening, primary owners Calvin McDowell, Thomas Moss, and Will Stewart were killed by a white lynch mob and the store was shuttered.

Historian Faron Levesque writes that, “The story of People’s Grocery is a foreboding of future actions of white supremacist terrorism against Black businesses in East St. Louis, Illinois; Elaine, Arkansas; and Charleston, Houston, and Knoxville, as well as the destruction of ‘Black Wall Street’ in the Tulsa Massacre of 1921.” (“Ida B. Wells and People’s Grocery”) “This,” Wells wrote, “is what opened my eyes to what lynching really was.” Wells would build and transform vast networks of political education in her anti-lynching crusade in the 1890s, including publishing the “Red Record,” a book that detailed the history and catalogued the statistical data on lynching. Despite the tragic end to People’s Grocery and many other unnamed stores, cooperatives and buying clubs of all kinds would continue to play a key role in economic survival and advancement of Black communities throughout the South and beyond.

What local, national, and international groups have been important north stars for you?

For more examples of collectivity throughout history, browse the One Million Experiments database, and send us your picks. Submit a project here or email eva [at] interruptingcriminalization.org.

Eva, One Million Experiments Fellow

Thank you for reading the One Million Experiments Newsletter. If you like what you see, please consider sharing it with a friend.

Explore our catalog of projects, podcasts, and zines at millionexperiments.com and follow us on Instagram @millionexperiments.

Relationships are necessary to our survival. Up against the might of capital, technology, and arms, our power lies with each other. Dean Spade said something last year that I’ve been clinging to ever since:

“The best way through fear is through the strength of solidarity.”

Recently, many of us have been called to action in solidarity with our neighbors persecuted by law enforcement: ICE, BORTAC, ATF, the alphabet soup of cops seems limitless. This is not entirely new, just newly unleashed and empowered.

Midwest Resistance Melts Ice

Writer Margaret Killjoy reports, “From Minneapolis: I’ve Never Seen Unity Like This.” On her Substack, “Birds Before the Storm,” Killjoy relates the extraordinary experience of traveling to Minneapolis, MN to find a city wholly activated. (“Half the street corners in the city seem to have people on watch for ICE, ready to call in suspicious vehicles to the decentralized networks that monitor the movements of kidnappers around the city. It’s ICE that moves in secrecy around Minneapolis, while the rebellion wears reflective vests and puffy coats.”) Killjoy’s reporting is a gift for those of us keeping tabs from afar. Minnesotans are unsurprised.

Many of the models of community defense and rapid response we see mobilized in this moment are founded in relationships, community building, and organizing cultures built over many years. Many have sprouted in places where people have established a sense of belonging, shared interests, and connectivity. The places where people were pod-mapping, delivering groceries, and making homemade hand sanitizer six years ago are the places where you see neighbors monitoring school routes and corners, conducting know-your-rights and cop watch training, and organizing court and jail support. In Minneapolis, the people who took to the streets after the murder of George Floyd, Jr. are the same people who are showing up en masse to foil the occupation of their city — even if much of what they’re doing is new and largely decentralized. Organizing runs deep in the Twin Cities. As Killjoy’s friend reassures her: “Minnesotans will be there. ICE will be miserable.”

Spotlight: Community Defense

Protect Rogers Park (Chicago, IL) The Protect Rogers Park model shows the enormous impact dedicated volunteers can have in community, and the value of establishing hyperlocal networks in advance of states of emergency. Protect RP trained up hundreds of volunteers years before the 2025 Trump administration set its sights on Chicago as a target for federal immigration enforcement. Not only did that prepare a core response group for the 2025 onslaught of ICE activity, but the community ties that Protect RP established aided in the groundwork for other work during the 2020 onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Protect RP demonstrates the ways in which focusing energy on hyperlocal relationships can make a huge difference in the wellbeing of people and on the culture of our spaces, and how those efforts can reverberate out through our networks and nationally. Continue reading on One Million Experiments.

Explore other community defense experiments in the 1ME encyclopedia: Powderhorn Safety Collective, Detroit Safety Team, Brownsville Safety Alliance, Little Earth Protectors

Tools for Rapid Response Groups

If you’re working on a rapid response project, we highly recommend a new resource from Kai Cheng Thom, “Flocking Towards Justice: Mutual Aid & Crisis Support Pods in Action.” (You can also subscribe to her Substack, “Letters from an Extremist for Love.”) Cheng Thom adapts The Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective and author Mia Mingus’s “Pod Mapping” model for community-based crisis intervention “explicitly to be useable by individuals who need help but cannot or do not wish to, for all the many reasons, engage with the policing or criminal justice system.” Flocking provides a step-by-step guide to setting up a support pod and lays out clear scenarios where Cheng Thom has used the support pod strategy, and specific examples of times when the strategy has not worked well. Importantly, she includes prompts for practice pods so you that you can skill up before diving into crisis or conflict support.

Deepa Iyer also recently released, “social change roles coordination planner for emerging efforts,” a tool that lays out how Social Change Ecosystem Roles (see social changemap.com) can support coordination in this moment. Iyer recommends the tool as helpful to plan and facilitate meetings, coordinate and keep track of roles and tasks, avoid duplication with similar efforts, center affected communities, and evaluate and grow sustainably.

If you’re not already in formation and are looking to join local efforts, we recommend Mariame Kaba’s 1ME Zine, “Making a Plan.” If you’re ready to dive in with your formation, Andrea Ritchie’s Block It! Toolkit is updated regularly with information and inspiration (and includes customizable posters for your actions by Monica Trinidad to boot).

So You Started An Experiment…

Last year, One Million Experiments launched three “agenda playlist kits,” topical compilations of short videos, slides, and workbook pages drawn from Interrupting Criminalization’s Building Your Abolitionist Toolbox series to support groups getting ahead of the inevitable conflicts that come up in organizing. If you’re starting afresh or looking to brush up on skills, these are great starter kits for meetings and retreats.

Agenda Kit #1: Organization Building & Sustainment

Agenda Kit #2: Self-Accountability & Movement Building

Agenda Kit # 3: Restorative Conversations & Active Listening

Porch Side Abolition

As we come together to defend our streets, our schools, and our neighbors, countless experiments remind us of the importance of maintaining good relationships where we are, right now. Establishing trusted, reciprocal bonds with the people you spend your time with and around forms the basis of most mutual aid work, and scores of successful grassroots organizing projects. The community fridges and meal and yard-sharing projects, the free stores and libraries, childcare and wellness collectives, and back-to-school events and block hangs and parties, are all built on neighbors knowing neighbors, seeing and meeting needs. The people who show up for each other in small, everyday ways are more likely to be the people who show up for each other in times of great need. Racket, an alt-weekly-style publication in Minneapolis, is collecting a “real-time oral history of the ICE assault on Minnesota.” In a post that encapsulates the One Million Experiments spirit, “Just a Normal Mom,” writes:

In October, a neighbor gathered about 15 of us in her home, to get us thinking about how we can fortify our neighborhood to stand up to our authoritarian government. We brainstormed. We dreamed. We started a Signal. We proceeded to meet biweekly in neighbors’ living rooms. We handed out whistles on Halloween alongside our standard candy and hot dogs. (Yeah, we give out hot dogs on Halloween.) We bring cookies to neighbors we don’t know on our block to try to strengthen community. It’s fun. It’s quaint.

On the first Tuesday in December, a neighbor shared on Signal that ICE was on our block. For the first time, I grabbed my whistle and went running down the block. The whistles worked. ICE left…

When you get right down to it, the point of One Million Experiments is that we’re always in a time of great need, and the goal is to be in relationship in ways in which we can build for each other what we all need. Mariame often reminds me that, “the only way is through.” It’s obvious now that the only way through is together.

If, like me, you’re dipping your toes into neighborliness, I’ve created a new zine to help get us started.

To jump-start neighborly relations, try one of the 50 (mostly untried) ways to meet your neighbors. It’s not in there, but if you like “Just a Normal Mom’s” story, there are great resources to make your own whistle kits on Dan Sinker’s blog here — as seen in Mariame’s newsletter, “Prisons, Prose, and Protest.”

50 Ways To Meet Your Neighbor Zine

On the Death Panel podcast episode, “Dispatch from Occupied Minneapolis w/Melissa Gira Grant,” host Beatrice Adler-Bolton shares from her experience to say that, “Terror isn’t just violence. It’s an attempt to reorganize your sense of what’s possible.” The power of strategies like ICE’s Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota, Adler-Bolton says, depends on us believing that we are all alone. “And so even though we have to recite the terribles and talk about the horrible violence that’s going on, we’d be doing everyone a disservice to not contextualize that within the thousands of daily, truly ordinary but also extraordinary ways that people are showing up for each other.

And while Minneapolis is a special place, there is absolutely nothing special about the people who are doing this work or the work that’s being done itself. You can do this. You actually must do this yourself in your own location. And it works.”

Eva, One Million Experiments Fellow

Thank you for reading the One Million Experiments Newsletter. If you like what you see, please consider sharing it with a friend.

Explore our catalog of projects, podcasts, and zines at millionexperiments.com and follow us on Instagram @millionexperiments.

Last year, we kicked off with Making a Plan, a tool for the people who are joining or reconnecting to grassroots movement spaces. Whether you’re starting a new plan, or refining an old one, it’s not a bad time to revisit this tool.

Are you interested in what safety looks like in a world without police and prisons? Are you curious about how we work together to create communities where everyone is secure, healthy, caring and cared for? Co-founder Mariame Kaba put together this zine to bridge the gap between information and action.

So You Started An Experiment…

The third installment of “So You Started An Experiment…” agenda playlists for groups is live.

Restorative Conversations and Active Listening

This month, our “agenda playlist” — a compilation of short videos, slides, and workbook pages drawn from Interrupting Criminalization’s Building Your Abolitionist Toolbox series — focuses on skilling up through practicing restorative conversations and active listening. It features materials from the Restorative Conversations Toolkit by nuri nusrat and the BYAT Active Listening session with Stacy Rene Erenberg, including video clips, slides, workbook excerpts, and a facilitation guide.

This kit will support your group to approach difficult conversations with strategies, commitments, and skills for hearing each other and responding in meaningful ways to support each other and your work together.

Explore the Agenda Playlist Kits

Using the Agenda Playlists with Your Groups

The playlists are meant to be about the length of one or two meetings for organizations or a short retreat or workshop if you don’t have regular meeting times (yet!), coming in at 2-4 hours each.

Each playlist includes step-by-step materials and compact facilitation guides, available in Padlet (an online platform that you can use to step through the playlist) and as a PDF with links to the materials.

2025 Resource Recap

Podcast Season 3: The Crisis Edition

If you’re working on (or curious about the ins and outs of) community-based crisis response, Season 3 is for you. Kiss, Dame, Eva and special guest Deana Lewis were back in the lab with new and familiar voices, including our friends at Relationships Evolving Possibilities and Care-Based Safety, as well as an alum of Cambridge Heart. You can read the Season 3 companion zine here.

Bonus: Check out Stories for Power, a podcast produced by our friends at the Storytelling and Organizing Project and hosted by Deana Lewis.

One Million Experiments Summer

The 1ME Summer Curriculum compiles decades’ worth of abolitionist activities, units, and teaching resources from our parent organizations Project Nia and Interrupting Criminalization, as well as collaborators in their ongoing series, Building Your Abolitionist Toolbox. The 95-page resource was created for youth educators and organizers, but it is a great tool for any group who wants to start conversations around core abolitionist concepts. You do not have to be a seasoned abolitionist, organizer, or educator to use this resource.

Bonus: Explore the companion Padlet to quick start your political education space.

Respair Production & Media: In The Field

In 2024, our podcast partners Dame and Kiss at Respair Media hit the road to screen the One Million Experiments film. While on their travels, Dame and Kiss met with partners featured on the One Million Experiments podcast and took the opportunity to grab some behind-the-scenes footage. The result is Respair Media’s “In the Field” travel show series. Check out what our friend’s at Respair Media and Soapbox Productions cooked up!

Thank you for reading the One Million Experiments Newsletter. If you like what you see, please consider sharing it with a friend.

Explore our catalog of projects, podcasts, and zines at millionexperiments.com and follow us on Instagram @millionexperiments.

One Million Experiments is excited to share the second installment in “So You Started An Experiment…” agenda playlists for groups to start strong and look out for each other for the long-term.

The formations we build to counter the violence of the prison industrial complex — including borders and border enforcement, policing, incarceration, and surveillance — and the things we make to sustain ourselves and our communities, require us to stay clear, listen well, and get (organizationally) healthy. This means learning how to work together, build strategy, and practice showing up well when conflicts happen.

Self-Accountability for Movement Building

This month, our “agenda playlist” — a compilation of short videos, slides, and workbook pages drawn from Interrupting Criminalization’s Building Your Abolitionist Toolbox series — focuses on fundamentals in defining and enacting Self-Accountability for Movement Building. It features materials from Shannon Perez-Darby and from Get in Formation by Vision Change Win, and a facilitation guide (which you can download as an 11” x 17” poster to print for your group, if you’re into paper).

Agenda Playlist No. 2

Playlist No. 2 Poster

This kit will support your group to reflect on individual values, experiences acting within and outside those values, and ways to respond when actions are not in line with values. You will name ways to practice accountability together and talk about how this supports your movement work.

Using the Agenda Playlists with Your Groups

The agenda playlists aim to support groups getting ahead of the inevitable conflicts that come up in organizing. Each playlist focuses on a different key topic and set of skills core to building our capacity to plan for conflicts and know what to do, in our specific groups and local places, when they happen. Last month’s playlist focuses on Organization Building and Sustainment, the next and final one for 2025 will support practice with Active Listening and Restorative Conversations.

Agenda Playlist No. 1

Playlist No. 1 Poster

The playlists are meant to be about the length of one or two meetings for organizations or a short retreat or workshop if you don’t have regular meeting times (yet!), coming in at 2-4 hours each. Each playlist includes step-by-step materials and compact facilitation guides, available in Padlet (an online platform that you can use to step through the playlist) and as a PDF with links to the materials.

Respair Production & Media: In The Field

In 2024, our podcast partners Dame and Kiss at Respair Media hit the road to screen the One Million Experiments film. While on their travels, Dame and Kiss met with partners featured on the One Million Experiments podcast and took the opportunity to grab some behind-the-scenes footage. The result is Respair Media’s “In the Field” travel show series. Check out what our friend’s at Respair Media and Soapbox Productions cooked up!

Watch Respair Media In The Field

Thank you for reading the One Million Experiments Newsletter. If you like what you see, please consider sharing it with a friend.

Explore our catalog of projects, podcasts, and zines at millionexperiments.com and follow us on Instagram @millionexperiments.

Our 2025 1ME podcast season focuses on the concept of crisis and crisis response. In a time of acute crisis across the country, we share wisdom from projects whose progress we’ve been following since 2020.

All three featured organizations center local members with deep roots in long-time community organizing projects. The three models show different trajectories of projects that grew out of the 2020 uprisings, highlighting what’s worked, when things have gotten messy, and what hopes organizers carry into the future. Our guests have worked alongside and around the state and tested different configurations, responder styles, and funding models. You can listen to all Season 3 episodes now.

1ME Season 3 Podcast

New Zine: Peruse the Crisis Edition zine with interview tidbits illuminating lessons learned from Relationships Evolving Possibilities, Cambridge HEART and Care-Based Safety in the One Million Experiments Zine Library.

Crisis Edition Zine

So You Started An Experiment…

Interrupting Criminalization and One Million Experiments introduce So You Started an Experiment, agenda playlists for starting strong and looking out for each other for the long-term.

The formations we build to counter the violence of the prison industrial complex — including borders and border enforcement, policing, incarceration, and surveillance — and the things we make to sustain ourselves and our communities, require us to stay clear, listen well, and get (organizationally) healthy. This means learning how to work together, build strategy, and practice showing up well when conflicts happen.

The first of three agenda playlists, So You Started An Experiment is a compilation of short videos, slides, and workbook pages drawn from Interrupting Criminalization’s Building Your Abolitionist Toolbox series to support groups getting ahead of the inevitable conflicts that come up in organizing.

Each playlist focuses on a different key topic and set of skills core to building our capacity to plan for conflicts and know what to do, in our specific groups and local places, when they happen.

This month’s playlist focuses on Organization Building and Sustainment, in November we’ll focus on Self-Accountability and Movement Building, and in December we’ll practice Active Listening and Restorative Conversations.

The playlists are meant to be about the length of one or two meetings for organizations or a short retreat or workshop. Each one includes step-by-step materials and compact facilitation guides, available in Padlet (an online platform that you can use to step through the playlist) and as a PDF with links to the materials.

Agenda Playlist #1

This October kit will support your group in naming assumptions, principles, and goals for your work while also getting ready to address conflicts before they happen. It includes materials from In It Together, by Interrupting Criminalization and Dragonfly Partners, and from Turning Towards Each Other, by Jovida Ross and Weyam Ghadbian. It features video clips from Project NIA and Interrupting Criminalization’s Building Your Abolitionist Toolbox series, workbook excerpts, and slide presentation excerpts, along with the facilitation guide.

Share Experiments Near You

Do you know of an experiment around community-based safety or wellness that we can include in our collection? We’re looking for a broad spectrum of strategies that communities use to build safety. Share the experiments you see making moves near you!

Share an Experiment

Thank you for reading the One Million Experiments Newsletter. If you like what you see, please consider sharing it with a friend.

Do you know someone doing youth programming this summer? Send this curriculum to them today! The 1ME Curriculum compiles decades’ worth of abolitionist activities, units, and teaching resources from our parent organizations Project Nia and Interrupting Criminalization, as well as collaborators in their ongoing series, Building Your Abolitionist Toolbox. The 95-page resource was created for youth educators and organizers, but it is a great tool for any group who wants to start conversations around core abolitionist concepts. You do not have to be a seasoned abolitionist, organizer, or educator to use this resource.

Bonus: Explore the companion Padlet to quick start your political education space.

Summer Curriculum

Watch The 1ME Film

Through long-form interviews with movement workers across the world, the 1ME film expands our ideas about what keeps us safe and celebrates the transformative work that is already happening all around us. Our podcast partners Kiss and Dame at Respair Media created this beautiful short film with the talented folks at SoapBox Productions and you can now watch it on Apple TV and YouTube TV. Clocking in at 30 minutes, it’s a great discussion piece for community groups, classrooms, and pods.

Apple TV

Making A Plan Zine

We kicked this year off with the “Making a Plan” zine, a tool for the people who are joining or reconnecting to movement spaces and want to organize their thoughts and…make a plan! Summertime is a great time to explore this workbook/zine by Mariame Kaba. Bridge the gap between information and action: dive into an experiment today.

Making a Plan Zine

Podcast Season 3 Coming Soon!

Recording has wrapped for Season 3 of the One Million Experiments Podcast. We’re hopping in the lab with new and familiar voices, including our friends at Relationships Evolving Possibilities and Care-Based Safety, as well as an alum of Cambridge Heart. If you’re working on (or curious about the ins and outs of) community-based crisis response, this season is for you.

Podcast Season 1-2

Help Us Collect 1ME Testimonials

We are collecting testimonials from 1ME listeners to help with ongoing fundraising and we need your help. Have you used 1ME in your life, work, classroom? Share your short reflections to millionexperiments@gmail.com. We would love to hear your stories, and it makes a world of difference in keeping this work going.

Share Experiments Near You

Do you know of an experiment around community-based safety or wellness that we can include in our collection? We’re looking for a broad spectrum of strategies that communities use to build safety. Share the experiments you see making moves near you!

Share an Experiment

Thank you for reading the One Million Experiments Newsletter. If you like what you see, share it with a friend.

In 2024, our podcast co-hosts at Respair Production & Media took the One Million Experiments Film out for a spin. Damon and Kiss popped up in theaters, galleries, classrooms, and even gardens across the US. Audiences in over 20 cities—from the US to Italy to Liberia—met, shared, and expanded our collective imagination for creative community safety. Over the course of 35 screenings, nearly 4,000 people viewed the film. Another 135,000 people have tuned into the podcast to listen along. Did you catch it? Are you listening?

Kiss and Damon with Lewis Wallace, Nhawndie Smith, and Brea Perry in Durham, NC

As part of the tour, we had the privilege to check in with some of the two dozen groups we’ve collaborated with on the podcast. We appreciate all the places that you have welcomed us into—your kitchens, your porches, your block parties, your community spaces. These nooks and crannies that you’ve created are the places where the work that frees us gets done.

Taking this big little film on the road manifested the very thing we look for in the experiments we feature: spaces where relationships blossom. We are reminded of the importance of time spent wrestling with THE BIG STUFF together, and the small spaces and moments that we create for each other —THE LITTLE STUFF that makes up the building blocks of liberatory change. As we continue to tour the film, we would love to work with you to build a screening at your organization, academic institution, or community space! Get in touch by hitting up contact@respairmedia.com.

Watch the Trailer

New Zine: Making A Plan

Kicking off this year, we shared a tool for the people who are joining or reconnecting to grassroots movement spaces. Are you interested in what safety looks like in a world without police and prisons? Are you curious about how we work together to create communities where everyone is secure, healthy, caring and cared for? Co-founder Mariame Kaba put together this workbook, which benefited from the input of many seasoned activists, to bridge the gap between information and action. If you’re ready to dive into an experiment, this zine is a great place to begin.

Making a Plan Zine

1ME Continues in 2025

We’re back in the lab with another season of the One Million Experiments Podcast. This year, we’ll check in with some of our guests that have been working on community-based crisis response since we first began this journey, as well as explore new groups, ideas, and creative solutions that have sprung up since we started documenting experiments in 2020.

25 episodes down, only 999,975 more to go.

If you know of an experiment that we can include in the One Million Experiments collection, submit it here. We’re looking for a broad spectrum of strategies that communities use to build safety. Explore ideas in the collection and share examples from where you are.

Thank you for showing up and thank you for reading the One Million Experiments Newsletter. If you like what you see, please consider sharing it with a friend.

Launched in March 2022, Queenie’s Crew has been an experiment to engage children in learning about building communities of care without prisons or policing. They’ve engaged more than 300 caregivers, educators, and organizers with a monthly newsletter; crew members have taken more than 100 actions to hone their abolitionist imaginations; and they've hosted a number of events, including caregiver circles to discuss parenting with abolitionist values, as well as arts, crafts, and musical spaces with kids.

Interested in transforming the ways you relate to kids in your community? Join us on June 29, 2023, at the Building Your Abolitionist Toolbox session with Zara and 1ME and Queenie’s Crew creator Mariame Kaba (or explore the session later).

As part of this month’s offering, One Million Experiments teamed up with Zara and members of Queenie’s Crew to make a new zine: Caregivers & Kids Building Communities of Care. In this zine, Zara lays out different ways that you can support caregivers and small people in your lives with suggestions for personal, community, and systemwide level actions that we can all take.

Even if you’re not a caregiver, this content is for you. We all have a role to play in supporting the next generation of abolitionists. Mariame breaks it down like this:

In 1996, I attended a restorative justice training. It was my first encounter with this philosophy and practice and it was life changing. During the training, the facilitator told a story that deeply resonated with me. She shared that when the Masai warriors of Southern Africa greet each other, the first question they ask is "Kasserian Ingera" or “And how are the children?” The health of their society is determined by the well-being of their children. While I have since learned that the allegory may not be true, I’ve tried to measure my efforts to transform the conditions of the society in which I live by centering the well-being of children and young people. Over the years, I have organized youth leadership workshops, co-founded organizations with young people, and written books specifically for children. As PIC abolitionists, “How are the children?” is a powerful guide for our efforts and actions. 

Explore the zine—including the excellent resource section—and share with your caregiver friends today.

Share this post with a caregiver!

The good news: we have many examples to learn from, to replicate, and to catalyze more and more efforts of men working with other men against violence.  

• Men Against Sexism groups began in the 1970s in an effort to address male supremacy within social movements. Here is a pamphlet from one of the groups from 1981. 

• The Challenging Male Supremacy Project began in 2008 and while it is no longer active, they created and left many resources for others to pick up where they left off, including a nine-session study into action program.  

• More recent community-based examples include the Uprooting Patriarchy: Healing and Accountability for Men workshops, and the Community Response to Sexual Assault Leadership Course.

Sneak Peek: Explore groups, like Challenging Male Supremacy, who have left a lasting impact on liberatory approaches to violence throughout history by visiting Interrupting Criminalization’s new interactive timeline: A History of Transformative Justice

And there are groups that already exist ready to receive men who want to be in community with other men, to heal, to be accountable, and to transform:

• Creative Masculinity offers drop-in groups, courses, and 1-1 support for men, including a course on shame and accountability. 

• Black Men Build offers men’s circles, national days of service, survival programs, and political and civic education.

• All Kings offers circles and retreats for men impacted by the criminal legal system.

The hard news: there are far too few men working with men against violence, and we need many many more men, and grassroots formations doing this work. It is not easy. Doing this work as men, and growing groups and projects requires thoughtful and relational development rooted in solidarity with women and trans and gender non-conforming people and formations. It requires accountability to others and to the larger movements for justice, and against domination. And it requires moving through the contradictions, the mistakes, and the harm so that we can heal, become accountable, and transform ourselves while we work to transform our world.

More From One Million Experiments

NEW PODCAST: Ujimaa Medics with Martine Caverl

The 1ME squad talks with Martine Caverl of Ujimaa Medics, a Chicago-based crew of organizers, community members, and health professionals who offer training in Urban Emergency First Response, primarily to people who live in or love people who live in communities where shootings often occur. Martine breaks down how historical flashpoints like 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and the murder of Mike Brown built the framework for the organization, the importance of invitation as a tool for building meaningful work, and much more.

The One Million Experiments Podcast is back in the lab with AirGo Radio for season two. Episode 11 features Makia Green, founder of the Black-led community defense hub Harriet’s Wildest Dreams.

Join Kiss, Dame, and special guests for a monthly conversation digging into how we define and create safety in a world without police and prisons by subscribing wherever you get your podcasts.

“I want the folks in the future to know that we loved them on purpose, that we cared deeply for them, that our choices were intentional,” Green shares.

“Harriet's Wildest Dreams is saying, ‘Our people deserve better.’ We actually want to stop and prevent harm, not just show up afterward.

One of our young people — they're doing court watch, they're out in community canvassing, asking people about what safety means for them. They're fully entrenched on the freedom train. This young boy went home to his parents and they reached out to me and said, ‘He came home today and said, “I feel like I have a purpose now.”' For me, I cried. I'm not even going to lie. To be a young Black boy growing up in D.C., and to feel you have a purpose and that purpose is helping your people get free, that's enough for me to jump up for joy.”

Continue Reading the EP 11 Transcript

What would you like to explore in season two? Join the conversation by leaving us a comment. The lab is open, and we want to hear from you!

In our first newsletter, Mariame discussed the driving ideas behind One Million Experiments. Today, we’re asking you to share the projects paving the way toward plenitude in your communities. In 500 years, what will the fruits of our collective experiments look like?

Free Postcard Set Giveaway

The first 50 people to submit a project to the One Million Experiment site will receive a free set of 500-year clock postcards, perfect for spreading your vision of abundance for 2523.

Submit A Project

What counts as an experiment? Submit any project that you know about that is driven by community members for community members. How are people in your neighborhood building relationships? What groups are creatively filling the gaps in resources and services in your area? What models exist in your region that people could use for inspiration in other places?

Organizing On A 500-Year Clock

“Everything that's going on has an origin and a legacy,” Mariame Kaba says. “And if you understand that, I feel like you're a lot more patient.” We don’t know how our actions today will impact the future. "You just do the work now by asking better questions than what you were asking six months before then. That's the best we can do."1

Organizing on a 500-year clock does not mean organizing with only future generations in mind; it emphasizes organizing informed by past generations. Ella Baker put it like this: “One of the things that has to be faced is, in the process of wanting to change that system, how much have we got to do to find out who we are, where we have come from and where we are going.” We are building on the foundation of what came before us, and we are laying the groundwork for the building that will continue after us. Baker explains that “in order to see where we are going, we not only must remember where we've been, but we must understand where we have been. This calls for a great deal of analytical thinking and evaluation of methods that have been used. We have to begin to think in terms of where do we really want to go and how can we get there.”2

500-Year Clock Discussion Guide

Plotting a way forward by taking into account where we have been, as Baker counsels, enables us to move strategically. Hindsight also teaches us how hard it can be to predict the outcomes of our actions far into the future. “The temporality of organizing and the temporality of living,” Mariame says, “should condition you to be humble because you don't know how what you're doing today will impact the future, or if it will impact the future.” At first glance, this thought may seem discouraging, but for Mariame the uncertainty of the future is a source of hope. “You never know what will happen," she says, “Let go of your deep desire to want to control that. Focus on your next right step, and the one after that.”3

It’s challenging to imagine what abolition is going to look like in 500 years because our path is unlikely to be a direct one. “Abolition is nonlinear,” Tiffany Lenoi, a New York-based healer, says. “That’s why we’re able to be changing the present while living in the future now.”4 One Million Experiments is meant to show a tiny fraction of the many different directions developing at the same time. Just like there is no single alternative that will replace police or prisons, there is no single path leading to liberation. Abolition is the roadmap we’re collectively building and liberation is a point where our many paths converge — until everybody’s free. As Mariame says, “We’ve got a hell of a long time before we’re going to see the end. Right now, all we’re doing is building the conditions that will allow the thing to happen.”

When we say we’re organizing on a 500-year clock, we acknowledge the building blocks it took for us to get where we are, and how many building blocks it’s going to take to get to where we need to go. Our hope is that One Million Experiments acts as a source of inspiration for block builders.

To dig deeper into this idea, we’ve created a new discussion guide that highlights three projects in the One Million Experiments collection. These projects explore how small acts can create opportunities for larger changes, and challenges readers to be imaginative and bold in the name of liberation. As Rosa Parks wrote, “to bring about change, one must not be afraid to take the first step, or else it will not be done. I believe that the only failure is failing to try.”5

500-Year Clock Discussion Guide

You can also download our first discussion guide, a great way to bring the One Million Experiments Podcast into classrooms and group discussions, or for anyone interested in activating their abolitionist imagination.

Thank you for reading the second edition of the One Million Experiments Newsletter. If you like what you see, please consider forwarding it to a friend.

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We’d love to hear your feedback. Email us anytime!

As we gear up for Season Two, we’ll be sharing highlights and discussion guides for our past episodes. Follow along on Instagram at @millionexperiments. Download the first discussion guide, a great way to bring the 1ME Podcast into classrooms and group discussions, or for anyone interested in activating their abolitionist imagination.

The Hypothesis with Mariame Kaba

In this lightly edited excerpt, Mariame discusses the driving ideas behind One Million Experiments, a growing encyclopedia of community-based safety projects designed to expand our ideas about what keeps us safe.

For a very long time, I've been asked, of course, because I'm an abolitionist, "Well, what do we replace prisons with, and what do we replace police with?" These are questions that I know are [usually] coming from a good place — a place where people are trying to grasp and understand ideas. What it suggests is that there's going to be one thing that's created that will replace death-making institutions.

I always say to folks when they ask me that question, "Well, nothing will. No one thing will." Part of why we're in the situation we're in right now is because we offer a one-size-fits-all response to every single possible kind of harm in the world through this criminal punishment system (which we're told is actually synonymous with justice). Instead of using a term — for example, like, so-called “alternatives” — let's actually say what we mean.

I think what people are asking, in my opinion, is, “What community-based safety strategies or what community-based responses to harm are we going to employ?” If that's true, I want to say that community-based safety responses and strategies are already the mainstream. That's already what we use. 

The vast majority of people don't actually use the current criminal punishment system as their response when they are harmed or when harm occurs in their communities. 

The issue is that community-based safety strategies and responses are unfunded. We should be calling it the unfunded responses. All the energy and all the resources are being put into a system that very few people actually use, and when people do use it, their satisfaction rates are abysmal.

They're horrendous on the side of the people who are harmed and they're horrendous on the side of the people who are being supposedly "held accountable." That's why I don't like terms like “alternative to prison,” or “alternative to police,” or “replacement” because oftentimes what it also does is it conditions us to keep prison and police constant in our minds. 

Adding the word alternative in front of death-making institutions means that people will start from the question, "Don't we need police to be safe?"

Then what you think to yourself is, “What do we currently use prisons and police for that we now need to replace their use for?” We use prisons and police for a bunch of things that we shouldn't even bother to address, and we don't use them for other things that we should probably address.

I like to really start with the question, “What is safety for our communities? What are the conditions that will increase safety for everyone?” Abolitionists are always trying to ask generative questions that don't actually foreclose possibility and imagination.

I think if we don't start here, it's hard to go to "experiments." It's really hard to think outside of your current structures because those structures are what you're used to. That's the norm. Then to have to rethink everything when people use those terms? Well, how do you do that when you're swimming in the toxicity of the current systems? I think that's why I want us to try to figure out if we can stop holding the things constant that we actually want to destroy. These words have so much cultural meaning and so much social meaning.

The cops are in our heads and hearts, like Paula Rojas says. It's very hard. I want us, especially for this project, to start at the much more expansive level of what safety is for our communities, and then go from there.

We're always struggling over that. Abolitionists are really interested in generative questions. That's a huge part of our, not just our ethos, but our raison d'être. It's, “come up with better questions, come up with better questions” — not struggling all the time with having to come up with the perfect response.

We're asking questions all the time because those questions are what will lead us forward to figure out what we need to know and what we don't know. I always want to be like, "Are you asking yourself the questions all the time about whether you are trying to make reform your end or abolition your end?” That will orient you as to whether or not you're in the right direction of the work. 

Also, actually, cooperating with law enforcement is not going to get us to the point where we're trying to go. Ultimately, we're just trying to dismantle that institution. How are you going to dismantle that institution when you're giving them legitimacy? It's one of the reasons why abolitionists shouldn't be on friggin’ panels with the cops. What are you arguing with them about? Like, "I think you shouldn't exist?" What is the actual point of doing that? I do think there are things that are NOs that are pretty strong. 

That's different from looking at a community organization where some of what they're doing is collaborating with the police. They may be doing other programs that have abolitionist possibilities embedded within them. If you're partnering with those particular projects and programs as experiments, it’s because you want to learn from them to see what could be taken from them to apply more broadly, or taken from them to apply specifically to your context. You can always do that, absolutely.

This is a basic tenet of abolitionist thinking. When we say that somebody else's caging means we are caged too and that other people's freedom is integral to our freedom, we mean that. That's a core tenet of PIC abolitionists' work ambition, vision, and politics.

I don't understand how people are all like, "Well, I need to just care for myself and that is politics,” bullshit. That is not what Audre Lorde was telling you. Stop it. You're just saying it to squeeze all your fucking work onto other people and call it self-care.

I've been in community. I'm committed to struggling in community with other people. That's the only thing I can guarantee here. What is it that Morgan Bassichis said? The very systems were trying to dismantle live within us. That's why this shit is so hard. The very systems we're trying to dismantle live in our communities, everybody. Collective action, collectivizing care, matters a great deal if we are going to end capitalism and create worlds that focus on our livingness — actually be able to sustain a life that has meaning and isn't going to kill us.

We have got to lean into that. PIC abolition, to me, is a vision that we enact through ongoing struggle. It's not actually a blueprint, but it's another world in the making. We're going to make our way collectively through experimentation, organizing, and rebellion. We're always dismantling and we're always building.

I've learned so much over the years from Ruthie Gilmore's work. Ruthie has often said that “What the world will become already exists in fragments and pieces, experiments and possibilities.” That quote of hers is so important, and always resonated with me because I've spent the better part of my life making things. It's not surprising then that I would've found myself attracted to PIC abolition as a vision because abolition ultimately is also about making things. 

I hope that people are going to — in their own communities, in their own spaces, in their hyper-local context — make a bunch of things. See what happens, try things out. Don't be afraid to do that. I'm not saying this to you as someone who writes about making things. I'm saying this to you as somebody who has made a lot of things.

You shouldn't be afraid to start new containers because new containers are needed. Organizations are dynamic and many of them need to die for new things to come in their place. These experiments are the same way. It doesn't matter if the experiment lasted a year — you learned something in that year. It doesn't matter if that experiment lasts ten years — you've learned some things, hopefully, in those ten years.

Download the discussion guide for this episode. Listen on our website or wherever you get your podcasts.

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One Million Experiments Survey

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