Our full NPH conference workshop slate can be found here.

Grounding in Historical and Current Realities to Advance an Anti-Racist Housing Movement for Justice and Liberation

10:50AM - 12:40PM PDT | Friday, September 24

This year’s keynote will inspire us all to roll up our sleeves and build an anti-racist, housing justice movement that will go the distance and centers racial equity in our organizations as well as the broader affordable housing industry. We’ll start with a conversation with Nikole Hannah-Jones, where we will get grounded in the historical racist roots and structures of our country’s housing policy so that we can understand what our role as a sector and movement must be to achieve true housing justice. Afterwards, we will dive into a conversation with Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, whose story and leadership will inspire us to strengthen and sustain our  movement as we collectively fight for justice and liberation for all our neighbors and communities. 

About our panel

Keynote speakers and moderator

Libero Della Piana (moderator) is a tech-savvy movement strategist, educator, and writer who is a senior staff person of the Alliance for Just Society. He is nationally recognized for his work for progressive social change and racial justice. Libero was previously the Digital Director, then the Communications Director, of People’s Action. He was the Digital Director and Senior Organizer for Alliance for a Just Society. Libero was on the staff of the Applied Research Center (now Race Forward) for many years and is a graduate of MAAP (Movement Activist Apprenticeship Program). Libero’s writing has been featured in such publications as Common Dreams, Truthout, San Francisco Chronicle, Colorlines, Black Commentator and People’s World. Libero is on the Advisory Council of IllumiNative.

Additionally, Libero and the Alliance for Just Society staff have been working with the NPH staff directly for several years to explore our opportunities to grow our movement, build our power, embed equity, and create change.

Nikole Hannah-Jones is the Pulitzer Prize-winning creator of the 1619 Project and a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine. She has spent her career investigating racial inequality and injustice, and her reporting has earned her the MacArthur Fellowship, known as the Genius grant, a Peabody Award, two George Polk Awards and the National Magazine Award three times. Hannah-Jones also earned the John Chancellor Award for Distinguished Journalism and was named Journalist of the Year by the National Association of Black Journalists and the Newswomen’s Club of New York. In 2020 she was inducted into the Society of American Historians and in 2021, into the North Carolina Media Hall of Fame.

In 2016, Hannah-Jones co-founded the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting, which seeks to increase the number of reporters and editors of color. She holds a Master of Arts in Mass Communication from the University of North Carolina and earned her BA in History and African-American studies from the University of Notre Dame.

Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II is the President & Senior Lecturer of Repairers of the Breach, Co-Chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call For Moral Revival; Bishop with The Fellowship of Affirming Ministries; Visiting Professor at Union Theological Seminary; Pastor of Greenleaf Christian Church, Disciples of Christ in Goldsboro, North Carolina, and the author of four books: We Are Called To Be A Movement; Revive Us Again: Vision and Action in Moral Organizing; The Third Reconstruction: Moral Mondays, Fusion Politics, and The Rise of a New Justice Movement; and Forward Together: A Moral Message For The Nation.

Rev. Dr. Barber is also the architect of the Moral Movement, which began with weekly Moral Monday protests at the North Carolina General Assembly in 2013 and recently relaunched again online in August 2020 under the banner of the Poor People’s Campaign. In 2018, Rev. Dr. Barber helped relaunch the Poor People’s Campaign, which was begun by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, starting with an historic wave of protests in state capitals and in Washington, D.C., calling for a moral agenda and a moral budget to address the five interlocking injustices of systemic racism, systemic poverty, the war economy and militarism, ecological devastation, and the false moral narrative of Christian nationalism. There are currently 45 state coordinating committees across the country, mobilizing around the Poor People’s Jubilee Platform and We Must Do M.O.R.E. (mobilize, organize, register, and educate people for a movement that votes).