from intersectional human rights to polyversal theory
An innovator and institution builder, Doc has founded more than 5 organizations in metro-Atlanta, including their latest, Lakou Liberation and Liberation Cooperative, as well as the Organization for Human Rights and Democracy (OHRD) where they served as its former co-director and Winds of Change Consulting, where they were the co-principal and managing director. While at OHRD, Doc partnered with members to envision and build radical democratic institutions rooted in intersectional human rights principles and cooperative processes. Under their leadership, OHRD has incubated initiatives such as the West Atlanta Food Cooperative, the Regenerate Atlanta Cooperative Wealth Fund, and the Anana Julia Cooper Learning and Liberation Center (the earliest iteration of Lakou). They also co-founded and stewarded the Metro-Atlanta Mutual Aid (MAMA) Fund and the Free Atlanta Abolition Movement (FAAM), two first-of-their-kind community institutions that continue to serve as vital care infrastructure for Black and Brown mothers and families across the metro-region.
A gathering of social movement liberators, homeschoolers and self-directed practitioners who believe that our children’s education should happen in a non-oppressive, libratory environments where they can express and develop their full personalities and potential.
Our Model
Cooperation
Our cooperative is a democratic organization controlled by our members. Everything is decided upon by the collective of learners, families, and workers.
Self-Determination
We are committed to creating a space where individual autonomy and the collective self-determination of everyone–especially children and youth–are fully respected.
Holistic Transformation
Engagement with self and community, ancestral traditions, sustainable ways of living, and technologies are foundational to learning and growth.
Rapid response now. Alternative systems for the future.
A mutual aid network and fund to support marginalized communities impacted by COVID-19 and its long-term effects.
Centering the most vulnerable.
The Metro Atlanta Mutual Aid Fund was created by community members from metro-Atlanta who have witnessed the needs of their neighbors at this time of crisis. While COVID-19 is a health pandemic, it has crippled economies and interrupted markets, causing wide-spread unemployment. Our concern is not with fixing the economy but instead with meeting the needs of people left with uncertainty and disruption.
Funds are targeted towards Black, Indigenous, and peoples of color. We will give special consideration within these communities to women/femmes, non-binary and queer folks, the poor and working class, people living with disabilities, and undocumented and refugee members.
The Organization for Human Rights and Democracy (OHRD) engages in multi-issue, grassroots, radical, intersectional human rights organizing to transform communities and the world using Metro-Atlanta as the model. We are guided by the lived experiences, the activism, and the knowledge of Black feminists and women of color. We prioritize working class people of color and the conditions they experience to build movements and an institution for change.
HISTORY
In September of 2010, the organization began operating under the name, the Atlanta Public Sector Alliance (APSA). With an expanded vision and a refinement of its goals and objectives, a new organizational name was chosen to better reflect its work. As of March 2015, the organization became known as the Organization for Human Rights and Democracy (OHRD).
Theory
Doc’s institutional work serves as democratic models that prefigure the life-affirming worlds we want and need. A synthesis of their lived realities, Black feminist scholarship, human rights organizing, and movement building work, Doc developed Radical Queer Black Feminism, a movement solidarity theory and framework for nurturing liberatory ecologies and futures. RQBF is a polyrelational model to move through and beyond the polycrises resulting from global white supremacist capitalist cis-heteropatriarchy and its systems and structures of violence and domination.
