Makani Themba: Our Beautiful Next

Healing Conversations from the Front Lines of Activism

Solstice blessings, friends. Winter is a time for dreaming, to enter the dark stillness and nourish your soul. I hope that this conversation with Makani Themba will both nourish and inspire. She dreams boldly, calling us into a beautiful possible world.

Makani Themba is one of a handful of people whose perspective I seek out when something consequential happens in the world. And I am not the only one. She is insightful, loving, and strategic. Makani will—as the saying goes—call a thing a thing. But she doesn’t stop there. She will offer context, nuance, analysis, an invitation to get quiet and listen inwardly, to imagine beyond the current system, and out of all that, underscore the importance of purposeful collective action.

Makani is a social justice innovator and pioneer in the field of change communications and narrative strategy, supporting powerful vision-based work for collective liberation. She is the principal at Higher Ground Change Strategies, asking “What would our work look like if we planned as if our highest hopes were possible? What if our process and outcomes were rooted in our values and we had metrics to match?”

Makani has published numerous articles, chapters, and case studies on race, class, media, policy advocacy, and public health. She is the author of Making Policy, Making Change, and is currently writing her second book, Our Beautiful Next, which explores how we build power and transform our thinking “to make the world anew.” (She recently soft-launched a podcast by the same title.)

Over the years, she has worked with a number of notable organizations and campaigns, including the Applied Research Center (now known as Race Forward), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Highlander Research and Education Center, and was the founder and executive director of The Praxis Project, a national organization promoting health justice for communities of color.

As we begin our conversation, Makani describes the childhood origins of her activism. “I grew up in Harlem, New York, and the flurry of the 1960s—of the anti-war movement, the Black liberation movement, the feminist movement. My mom was involved in all of those things, and she volunteered me at 6 years old to integrate an elementary school in Little Neck, Long Island. That was a profoundly transformative experience. It was like, the rock throwing—the stuff that you saw in the South that people don't think happens in the North. It brought home for me the viciousness and the cruelty of racism, but also the fact that we can stand up.

“To this day, I feel so honored that my mom would think I had the kind of character that could do it, as a first grader, you know? That's pretty profound. But even though it was very hard and there were times when I would, like, try to get sick, so I didn't have to go to school, and things like that, it really shaped the core of me as an activist. And so, I think my work over the years has been to try to not be afraid to stand in the hard places.”

Makani has stood in the hard places, as an organizer, a facilitator, a policy-wrangler, a cultural worker, and so much more. I’m curious what comes up for her when she hears the title for this blog, “Healing Conversations from the Front Lines of Activism.”

“I think the first thing is healing. I've been thinking a lot about that; what does that mean in the context of activism? There are people who feel like the only way they can be activists is if they're healed, and they can only work with other people who are healed. Some folks are feeling like we need to stop everything we're doing and heal first. And I think some of that is not only unrealistic, and maybe unnecessary, it seems grounded in a Western idea around perfection that serves to keep people from doing this work.

“If we hold it as a process—it's like we're healing, and we're healing the world. Healing isn't necessarily a place of ‘perfection’ and ‘perfect health,’ quote-unquote, but it's a process of being able to regenerate and to renew amidst injury and difficulty. It's a process of being open to being in a different place than you were. It's like you take whatever the wound is, and you decide to do something with it. And I think for activism, that's our work. But it's not just pointed inward at ourselves and our own healing. It's not this linear idea, but it’s how we walk in the world. There's a line in a poem by Kamau Daaood called “Army of Healers,” and he talks about—I know I'm not going to quote it exactly right—but he talks about moving through life like a healer and not a disease.”

I ask Makani if she has experienced healing in the context of her activism. “Oh, all the time,” she replies, “and in both ways. You know, there are times when you're doing work, and it's hard, and people have something really affirming to say to you that helps you remember you're making a difference. Those are always beautiful moments.

“There's also times when you get to say a thing to someone. I remember a young person coming up to me. I was saging a room before I was going to work in it to hold space. It was at Highlander, and I was just in the quiet of that pre-facilitation time, setting my intentions. I'm saging. I'm doing these different things. And this person comes up to me and says, 'Would you sage me?' And I could tell, looking into their face, that they were hoping for something to be removed that they felt was unclean or unsavory. And I just, I put the sage down and said, ‘You know what? You are the sage. Do you know? That's who you are. That's who you are in the world.’ And they literally burst into tears. A young man. We just hugged for a while and were quiet. And I could feel that they actually got what I was saying. I see that person in different meetings now in a whole different energy.

“This is what we do for each other. We find each other in these moments. And when we can be vulnerable, and let go of the sort of testosteronic models of organizing, rooted in the patriarchy, amazing things happen.”

“As an organizer,” she explains, “you got to listen at least twice as much as you talk. And I think that's where it starts. How do we listen? How are we set up for listening? How are we set up for people to really share who they are?”

Given the breadth and depth of her movement work, I wonder what wisdom Makani would share with folks newer to activism that she wishes she'd known earlier, or that might be helpful to them. “There is a thing that I say to younger activists all the time when they ask me,” she begins. “Oftentimes people are like, well, so and so said so and so, and what should we say? And I say, look, family, whatever you say, say it like you're going to be in the room with them 30 years from now, because you will.

“I think a lot of times we forget that we age and move in this work over time. And in the beginning, we can be really cavalier about our relationships. We can say, oh, we're not going to speak to that person. We don't try to fix it. You know, we're like, forget them—actually, we don’t say ‘forget,’ but you know!” she laughs. “The truth of the matter is, I tell you, I've come around so many circles where you are back with that person, and you're going to have to figure it out eventually, so you might as well go ahead and start off right. And so, you know, compassion. Compassion is everything.

“For some people compassion feels anathema to being an organizer, because the way they fuel their organizing is with a certain amount of rage. And I get that. Rage is legit, you know. As is bitterness. All the things, right? I'm not here to judge how people feel, but I want to help us transform what we do with it.”

With the multiple crises we face in the world today, it can be hard to stay in touch with whatever breathes life into us and motivates us in our work for justice and healing. Inviting people to talk about their sources of inspiration and hope feels like medicine for us all. (Aside to readers: I’d love to hear in the comments about what inspires and sustains YOU! … I hope you’ll share.)

Makani smiles as she responds, “I live in Jackson, Mississippi, where people say to me, ‘We are the ones who didn't run. We are the ones who stayed here when other people ran North.’ That is some inspiration for you, right? There's just so many organizers, so many people who work so hard, who are so sincere, and just show up for us, that I get a lot of inspiration from that.

“And from music. Music is everything to me. I'm always making playlists. When I facilitate, I am usually co-creating playlists with people that we're holding space for. But, yeah, music. And the written word. And from the ancestors who hold us. I am so inspired by my ancestors and by the ‘great cloud’ that I know that they are part of. Oftentimes I'm in meetings that feel really pointless, and I feel like, oh, my God, this is so awful. And I will look at a picture of Harriet Tubman on my phone as a reminder. Like, yeah, you're not chest deep in cold river water trying to run from some dogs.” Perspective.

“And the hope?” I prompt.

“There's so many things, you know? The sun shining, the breeze whispering through the trees, all the things that I named. And each morning I wake up, I'm like, I'm here for a reason. We are here for a reason. And whatever that is, it’s a reason to believe that this world is supposed to be here in some shape or form for us to make better. Even in this moment where it feels extra hard.

“You know, I'm a numbers person. I'm a policy person. I'm going through Project 2025 thinking, wow, this impact on Black women is going to be terrible. Oh, we got to get ready for deportation defense. Because I believe in being in a mode of preparation.

“And I also know that this feels like a portal,” Makani affirms.

She recounts one of her favorite short stories, “Evidence” by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, from the speculative fiction anthology Octavia’s Brood. It tells of Alandrix, a young Black feminist from the future who time travels back to study writings and artifacts from “the Twenty-First Century BSB (Before Silence Broke) Era.” Alandrix discovers poems and letters from her ancestor, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, including one “from Alexis after capitalism to Alexis during capitalism,” offering time-bending encouragement to her past self. It describes the beautiful world she now inhabits, and ends with these words:

We did it. We shifted the paradigm. We rewrote the meaning of life with our living. And this is how we did it. We let go. And then we got scared and held on and then we let go again. Of everything that would shackle us to sameness. Of our deeply held belief that our lives could be measured or disconnected from anything. We let go and re-taught ourselves to breathe the presence of the energy that we are that cannot be destroyed, but only transformed and transforming everything.

“What a gift of a story,” Makani says. “Talk about inspiration and hope. I feel like I hold that story in my bones all the time. Like, we are here at the edge of the beginning, at the precipice of the great awakening. What if that's true? I always say to people, we are a millisecond away from liberation. We really are. We literally can blink and be there. We could. I hold that so close in my heart. And I'm like, what do I do? How do I prepare? How do I work? Where do I go? How do I prioritize my energy, at 64 years young, to live fully in that possibility? That's what gives me hope and inspiration every day.”

We’re quiet for a moment as those words sink in. And then I invite Makani to talk about the vision she’s working toward. It sounds a lot like the future described by Gumbs in her story.

“Literally, what I pray for every day at my altar: peace, justice, and restoration everywhere—even my own heart. That we all understand that we are one; that sense of our connection, where we don't harm each other. We share what we have. Where we feel like we belong to this world and that we can fully experience the love we are. And I don't consider that an individual thing. I want to be clear, that's not what I'm saying. I recognize that, as I wrote in my first book, we need neck muscle strategies, yeah, but we have to have boot strategies over and above everything else. And we have to think about this boot, this system, these structural things, and how we change them.”

I ask Makani to explain what she means by neck muscle vs boot strategies. “It refers to the way people tend to focus on how to make sure affected communities are more resilient in the face of oppression—stronger neck muscles to bear the boot of oppression with grace, strength, etc.—while investing less in strategies to get the boot off our necks in the first place.

“And everybody has a role to play for us to practice governing together, because that is practicing liberation. You know, freedom is one thing—we always have freedom. We can choose to have freedom in our heads, even, and our people did that. There are people who are free no matter how many chains are put on them. But that's not the same as liberation. That's not the same as where the systems and the structures support your thriving. That's work we have to do. And we can only do together.”

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To Learn more about Makani’s work visit:

Makani’s website: https://highergroundstrategies.net

Our Beautiful Next: www.ourbeautifulnext.org

Our Beautiful Next podcast: (or on your favorite platform): https://www.audacy.com/podcast/our-beautiful-next-how-we-make-the-world-anew-18ddc

Makani’s articles in The Nation: https://www.thenation.com/authors/makani-themba/

A Spotify music playlist from Makani - Building with Our People

‘Holding Change’ – Makani interviewed by adrienne maree brown (start at 21:08 when sound clears up)