The Action Lab was proud to co-sponsor Beyond the Block: Voices from Sing Sing, a project of Hudson Link, co-developed with a group of their students at Sing Sing Correctional Facility. The Action Lab’s Board Member and Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Aloe Blacc gave a powerful performance with the facility’s men’s choir.
We are excited to announce and introduce our community to the 32 individuals selected as Take A Breath Fellows for 2023 Cohorts 1, 2, and 3. We’ll be hosting them at The Action Lab over the next several months. We look forward to getting to know them and welcoming them to The Action Lab family. […]
The Action Lab provides literal space and a broad set of resources, support, and expertise to allow frontline organizers and other movement leaders to take a step back. Granted this all too rare space and time to reflect, The Action Lab helps our partners to gain a new perspective on our shared work and then […]
2022 was a remarkable inaugural year for The Action Lab. We built a powerful and inspiring Advisory Board and Board of Directors. Our staff team grew stronger than ever. Most importantly, we continued building a dynamic community of learning and action and we have catalyzed a wide range of high impact projects in each of […]
Apply here by the deadline corresponding to your Cohort as shown below. The Gathering Strength Initiative of The Action Lab creates vital space for rest, reflection, and respite—for organizers, leaders, movement artists, and communities to cultivate individual and collective wellbeing. Rooted in the traditions of healing justice which have nourished and sustained resistance and social […]
by Jessica Bauman On a Sunday evening in October, I found myself on a plane to Vienna to join a delegation of people I did not know, spending a week in a city I had never been to, learning about social housing, something I knew almost nothing about. What was I thinking? I am a […]
A few days after the midterms, close to 50 organizers, policy advocates, lawyers, journalists, scholars and funders joined us at The Action Lab to discuss and debate ways to use policy & rules changes to build mass-membership organizations that are able to prevail against growing oligarchic power in the US. What’s a simple way to […]
In October The Action Lab held its inaugural Freedom Writers Songwriting Lab, where Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter and TAL Board Member and inaugural Bellafonte Fellow Aloe Blacc worked with a group of five high school students to write and produce music through the lens of social justice. They’ll be included on an upcoming EP that Blacc is producing for Black History Month.
The Freedom Forward film series is a virtual series which brings together social impact storytellers, social justice practitioners, and artists dedicated to imagining a world with freedom, justice, and well-being for all people. Featuring films which highlight different themes and issues across the social justice landscape, Freedom Forward offers a space for reflection on histories […]
In August, The Action Lab, the Law and Political Economy Project at Yale, and the Initiative for Community Power at NYU hosted students from a variety of law schools across NYC at our inaugural Summer Academy on Law Organizing, and Power Building, which focused on law and political economy and organizing frameworks in the areas […]
We are thrilled that Joo-Hyun Kang is joining The Action Lab in October as the Director of our Innovation and Justice Initiatives. Joo-Hyun is a long-time organizer, trainer and strategist. She was the director of Communities United for Police Reform (CPR) for a decade, where she worked with over 200 local, state and national organizations […]
In partnership with the Housing Justice for All coalition, The Action Lab is bringing a delegation of tenant leaders, housing organizers, policy-makers, and elected officials to Vienna from October 16-23, 2022. Impressively, more than 60% of Vienna’s population lives in social housing. While there, we will tour Vienna’s model of social housing and meet with […]
We are thrilled to announce that Grammy-nominated singer, songwriter and producer Aloe Blacc is The Action Lab’s inaugural Belafonte Fellow. The Action Lab’s Belafonte Initiative envisions a dual purpose: to support artists committed to social justice whose vision will point the way to a new, more equitable world and leverage the tools of artistic practice to […]
The Action Lab, the Law and Political Economy (LPE) Project and the Initiative for Community Power will hold the first ever Summer Academy on Law, Organizing, and Power Building this August at The Action Lab’s upstate retreat center. Amid the escalating and interlocking crises that define our current moment, the work of progressive lawyers must […]
Now in its second year, The Action Lab’s Summer Justice Corps engages students in racial and economic justice work in partnership with community or labor organizations. This year, twenty undergraduate students from CUNY, the vast majority of whom were students of color, participated in this year’s Summer Justice Corps with Instructor Carolina Bank Muñoz, Professor […]
Building a people-centered and -led movement demands care for the well-being of those whose love, imagination, and labor are so deeply invested in our collective future. Rooted in the traditions of healing justice, which have nourished and sustained resistance and social change work in this country since its founding, The Action Lab’s Take a Breath […]
Facebook Live event organized by the Center for Popular Democracy Learn more and to RSVP On June 2nd, The Action Lab co-sponsored Resisting Austerity: International lmpact and Solutions, a live streaming event organized by the Center for Popular Democracy. Communities around the world are resisting the negative impacts of austerity and profiteering at the hands […]
Join our team! The Action Lab is seeking a Director for one or – ideally – two closely-connected core initiatives. The Director will lead and manage several emerging bodies of programmatic work: The Innovation Initiative catalyzes change by generating cross-discipline, cross-movement, cross-generation spaces of study, exploration, experimentation, and shared strategy in action among social justice […]
In her new book, Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands, MacArthur “Genius” awardee and The Action Lab advisory board member Kelly Lytle Hernández upends entrenched ideas about the Mexican Revolution in her new book, putting front and center the role of the magonistas, the motley band of migrant workers, journalists, miners, and others who organized thousands […]
In March and April of 2022, The Action Lab led a learning delegation of some of the most dynamic community and labor organizers in the US and Puerto Rico to build with left and base organizations in Chile around the shared international project of ending neoliberalism and constructing a world based in human dignity and […]
The Urban Democracy Lab and the Initiative for Community Power at NYU Law collaborated with The Action Lab to present an in-person and virtual screening of We Still Here / Nos Tenemos. This documentary follows Mariangelie Ortiz, 24, and Jerriel “Yeyo” Cátala, 19, on a journey that transforms their lives as they rebuild their community […]
In February 2022, The Action Lab welcomed a diverse team of seasoned, energetic and talented new staff to fortify and propel our work of imagining and strategizing new ways forward. Marinieves Alba and Dmitri Holtzman join us as Directors of TAL’s four pillar initiatives. Mari brings her deep experience and leadership to execute, coordinate and […]
