Intercommunalism

ERICKA HUGGINS is an educator, Black Panther Party member, former political prisoner, human rights advocate, and poet. For over 50 years, Ericka has used her life experiences in service to community. From 1973-1981, she was director of the Black Panther Party’s Oakland Community School. From 1990-2004 Ericka managed HIV/AIDS Volunteer and Education programs. She also supported innovative mindfulness programs for women and youth in schools, jails and prisons.

Ericka was professor of Sociology and African American Studies from 2008 through 2015 in the Peralta Community College District. From 2003 to 2011 she was professor of Women and Gender Studies at California State Universities- East Bay and San Francisco.

She currently curates conversations focused on the individual and collective work of becoming equitable in all areas of our daily lives. Additionally, she facilitates workshops on the benefit of self care in sustaining social change.

Ericka is co-author, with photographer Stephen Shames, of the book, Comrade Sisters-Women of the Black Panther Party, published in fall 2022.

JAMES TRACY is a Bay Area native and community organizer. He has 30 years of experience in the politics of housing, economic justice, and social movements. James co-founded the Eviction Defense Network in 1992 which used direct action to stop evictions. He’s been a member of other coalitions, including the Coalition on Homelessness, Mission Agenda, and Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition. In 2004, James co-founded the San Francisco Community Land Trust. He now serves as Vice-President on the Board for the Bay Area Community Land Trust. James is the co-author of Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels and Black Power: Interracial Solidarity in 1960s-70s New Left Organizing (Melville House, 2012) and No Fascist USA! The John Brown Anti-Klan Committee and Lessons for Today’s Movements (City Lights, 2020). He is the author of Dispatches Against Displacement: Field Notes From San Francisco’s Housing Wars (AK Press, 2014). His articles have appeared in Shelterforce, Race Poverty and the Environment, the Italian-American Review, Contemporary Justice Review, and Punk Planet. He is the Chair of Labor and Community Studies Department at City College of San Francisco.

KAMAU FRANKLIN is the founder of Community Movement Builders, Inc. Kamau has been a dedicated community organizer for over thirty years, beginning in New York City and now based in Atlanta. For 18 of those years, Kamau was a leading member of a national grassroots organization dedicated to the ideas of self-determination and the teachings of Malcolm X.

He has spearheaded organizing work in various areas including youth organizing and development, police misconduct, and the development of sustainable urban communities. Kamau has coordinated and led community cop-watch programs, liberation/freedom schools for youth, electoral and policy campaigns, large-scale community gardens, organizing collectives and alternatives to incarceration programs. Kamau was an attorney for ten years in New York with his own practice in criminal, civil rights and transactional law. He now lives in Atlanta, Georgia with his wife and two children.

KAZEMBE BALAGUN is a native New Yorker who has worked for over two decades in public engagement for social, racial, and ecological justice. His work is centered in building spaces for dialogue and education for community development across multiple disciplines. He worked as the Education Director for the Brecht Forum, a progressive arts and cultural center (2008-2013) organizing over 250 forums per year. Recently, he served as the project manager for the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung New York Office, where he focused on racial justice and the right to the city. He appeared and organized programs at Metrograph, Goethe Institute, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Weeksville Heritage Center, and the Black Archives (Amsterdam).