Community Defense

Che Johnson-Long is a Queer Community Organizer and Security Practitioner working to build a world without prisons or police. She is the Community Safety Education Coordinator at Vision Change Win where she develops community safety curriculum, coaches left movement organizations, and coordinates VCW’s safety and security programmatic offerings.

She also serves as a board member of Third Wave’s Accountable Futures Fund Advisory Council. Before this, Che was the Director of Decarceration Strategies at the Racial Justice Action Center. She co-created the Policing Alternatives & Diversion Initiative in Atlanta, and was the Program Coordinator of the Safe OUTside the System Collective of the Audre Lorde Project. She holds a Juris Doctorate from Georgia State University, comes from a long line of Blues singers, and calls Atlanta, Ga home.

Kieran was born and raised in Minneapolis MN (one of the neighborhoods Prince lived in) and has been active in anarchist, anti-fascist, and labor organizing for four decades. In the late 80’s Kieran helped found Anti-Racist Action, a direct action youth group that organized against the Ku Klux Klan, neo-nazis, anti-women fundamentalists, and police brutality. Kieran was a member of the Teamsters union while working at UPS for a decade in the 90s and early 2000s where he was an elected steward and picket captain during the 1997 strike. Since 2004, Kieran has worked at a large Telecom call center where he helped build a powerful steward group that has organized countless job actions, including three grievance strikes. In 2020, Kieran was elected President of the Local Union on a radical, “Solidarity Unionist” program.

Kieran also participated in the extremely active Twin Cities IWW branch and General Defense Committee that sought to build revolutionary community defense initiatives that were multi-racial, anti-capitalist, and oriented to the working-classes and oppressed communities. The GDC and its successor group, the Workers Defense Alliance played significant roles in the militant campaigns against police brutality in the Twin Cities, including around the murders of Jamar Clark and Philando Castille and the Uprising that followed the police lynching of George Floyd. These community defense organizing projects also took up strike support, anti-fasicist campaigns, and building community support for survivors of abuse and violence.

Darakshan Raja (She/Hers) is the founding executive director of Muslims for Just Futures (MJF) where she manages the organization’s overall development, programming, administration, and strategic direction. Darakshan leads MJF’s national advocacy and movement-building efforts, local Chicago power-building programming, and the DC Guaranteed Income program.

Darakshan is an abolitionist who made her way to organizing through the anti-violence movement providing crisis advocacy support to survivors in NYC. Her work with survivors on the outside and inside who were criminalized for self-defense has been central to adopting abolition as a theory of change and organizing. She is passionate about building power, bringing organizing visions to life, and figuring out ways to build a strong infrastructure for movement work. Darakshan has developed organizing institutes, frameworks on gendered and structural Islamophobia, narrative projects, civic engagement campaigns, advocacy efforts focused on gender justice legislation, multi-year mutual aid campaigns focused on workers, and MJF’s guaranteed income program.

Darakshan’s research and policy evaluation experience includes working at the Urban Institute’s Justice Policy Center where she worked on a range of projects focused on evaluating government responses to survivors and conditions for youth incarcerated in state detention facilities, including serving as project director on an evaluation of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) and access to SAFE exams for survivors. She was appointed to the DC Government’s Street Harassment Advisory Committee, a body that oversaw the implementation of the Street Harassment Prevention Act.

She has served as a New Leaders Council Chicago Fellow and served as a community fellow at Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Social Concern. Darakshan’s experience in philanthropy includes serving on the nominations committee of the Emergent Fund and as a board of trustees for IF: A Foundation for Radical Possibility in order to support resourcing movements and frontline organizers.

Darakshan holds a MA in Forensic Psychology from John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY), a Nonprofit Management Certificate from Georgetown University’s Center for Public & Nonprofit Leadership, and is currently a part-time MBA student at U of Chicago’s Booth School of Business.

Arthur Pye is a writer and community organizer based in the Pacific Northwest. He spent a year living in North-East Syria studying the Rojava revolution, and is a member of the Emergency Committee for Rojava. His writing can be found in Strange Matters Magazine.