Building Networks of Care and Community Self-Defense

Los Angeles has been at the forefront of Pro-Palestinian organizing, housing justice struggles, and the movement against state repression and criminalization of poor people & migrants. Local organizers have responded to the conditions on the ground by creating their own networks of self-defense, mutual aid, and care. This interactive workshop is designed for those interested in building their own networks in the face of rising fascism and state abandonment.

Ndindi Kitonga, Ph.D. is a Kenyan educator, long-time community organizer, and houseless rights advocate. She is the co-founder of Angeles Workshop School, a radical secondary school in Los Angeles with a focus on democratic learning and class consciousness. In addition to her work in K-12 education, Ndindi teaches ethnic studies courses for the California State University system and is a published scholar in the areas of Black feminist abolitionisms, socialist humanism, critical pedagogy, and anti-colonial education. In response to the horrific disparities the COVID pandemic exacerbated in her community, Ndindi co-created a small mutual aid network in her local community in March 2020. The unhoused population in this community is comprised mostly of Black and Latine people, many of who are queer, disabled, undocumented, and PWUD (people who use Drugs). The abolitionist network of care, Palms Unhoused Mutual Aid (PUMA) has grown over the past five years from a small collective where organizers share food, hygiene, harm reduction, and other supplies with their unhoused neighbors, to one where they are organizing popular education clinics, coalition-building, and political mobilization.

Tiny (aka Lisa Gray-Garcia) is a formerly unhoused, incarcerated poverty scholar, revolutionary journalist, lecturer, poet, visionary, teacher and single mama of Tiburcio, daughter of a houseless, disabled, indigenous mama Dee, and the co–founder of POOR Magazine/Prensa POBRE/ PoorNewsNetwork. She is also the author of Criminal of Poverty: Growing Up Homeless in America, co-editor of A Decolonizers Guide to A Humble Revolution, Born & Raised in Frisco and - Poverty ScholarShip -Poor People Theory, Arts, words and Tears Across Mama Earth A PeoplesTeXt which was just released in 2019. In 2011 she co-launched The Homefulness Project - a landless peoples, self-determined land liberation movement in the Ohlone/Lisjan/Huchuin territory known as Deep East Oakland, and co-founded a liberation school for children, Deecolonize Academy. She has taught Poverty Scholarship theory and practice in universities, street corners and encampments from Columbia to Skid Row. In the Covid19 Pandemic she and other poverty skola leaders at POOR Magazine have galvanized folks with race and class privilege and solidarity community so POOR Magazine could increase their already existent street love-work, education, service and support to supply food, masks, gloves, healing and sanitation to over 700 unhoused and no-income housed communities per week across the Bay

Carla Belinda Margarita Orendorff is a working-class writer and community organizer living in the San Fernando Valley. Born and raised in Los Angeles, she is the daughter of a woman who crossed the border without permission. Carla is an organizer with Aetna Street Solidarity and a member of the San Fernando Valley Homeless Union. She believes in the power of neighborhoods and the necessity of organized community self-defense and mutual aid networks to protect our territories.

Sophie Capobianco is a community organizer, social movement scholar, and educator based in Los Angeles, CA. They have worked with grassroots organizations across movements for environmental justice, police & prison abolition, Palestinian liberation, labor rights, and anti-deportation community self-defense. They are currently a core organizer with West Los Respuesta Rápida, a rapid response network and community self-defense organization providing support to migrants on the West side of Los Angeles. Since June 2025, West Los Respuesta Rápida has become one of the most extensive grassroots deportation crisis and migrant aid organizations in Los Angeles. They are also a published scholar researching prefigurative politics in anti-colonial and abolitionist social movements. Sophie is an educator, PhD student, and UAW 4811 department steward at the University of California, Los Angeles. Prior to relocating to LA, they worked with incarcerated students through the Prison Education Project at Washington University in St. Louis.