What is ABSI?
Jobs With Justice launched the Advancing Black Strategists Initiative (ABSI) in the fall of 2020. We began with a vision to create a cohort of Black economic justice and labor-focused strategists committed to leading, developing, and advancing policies and campaigns that support the collective power-building of working people, particularly in the South.
Labor Institute for Advancing Black Strategies
The Labor Institute for Advancing Black Strategies is a hub for cultivating a national network of leaders through a comprehensive program of courses, seminars, internships, and field experiences. The Labor Institute was co-founded by the W.E.B. Du Bois Southern Center for Studies in Public Policy at Clark Atlanta University and Jobs With Justice in 2024, with an official launch celebration in March 2025 at CAU’s Black Women & Public Policy in the South Symposium.
The program will support student cohorts and worker-leaders alike, offering rigorous coursework alongside hands-on apprenticeship opportunities in worker campaigns. Additionally, the Institute will commission research and foster public discourse centered on Southern worker organizing, especially among Black workers. It will elevate their experiences to inform broader labor theory and contribute to global conversations on building a healthy democratic society.
ABSI Movement Fellowship
With the significant need for Black leadership at all levels of movement work, the inaugural ABSI Movement Fellowship Program kicked off in the Spring of 2022.
This paid apprenticeship program offers a cohort of Black worker-leaders direct experience developing and implementing strategies that seek to expand organizing and collective bargaining power with Black-led campaigns in the U.S. South, and the opportunity to share experiences and advance their understanding of the ABSI ‘School of Thought’ in fellowship with Black academics, labor leaders, and organizers. With focused strategies that seek to expand workers’ direct role in creating, implementing, and enforcing new standards beyond simply passing policy, the Fellows examined the effects of race, class, gender, and power on workers across the South.
Meet the 2024 ABSI Fellows
Calvin Cullen is a Birmingham, AL native passionate about public policy research in the service of working-class households and families. A graduate of the historical Miles College with a BA in Political Science, Calvin comes to ABSI with experience in municipal legislative analysis, policy research, and political campaign outreach. When able, Calvin has volunteered and participated in community support efforts to encourage union efforts throughout Alabama, with the goal of building worker power to advance policies that improve the standard of living and expand the power of organized labor. Through the ABSI Fellowship, Calvin is assigned to Jobs To Move America (JMA) and supports their campaign to organize workers in the automotive manufacturing industry toward securing community benefits agreements (CBA). JMA works to put power back in the hands of workers and communities by organizing coalitions to win CBAs, which are legally binding commitments between coalitions and employers that guarantee living wages, apprenticeship programs, protections for workers’ right to organize, and race- and gender-based equity measures, including commitments to hire, train, and create access to jobs for people who face barriers to employment.
Dr. David Cuna is an Advanced Black Strategist Initiative fellow with an unwavering commitment to advancing the working conditions and well-being of the most vulnerable workers in our community. He is currently involved with the USSW-SEIU campaign initiative for Waffle House workers. The Waffle House campaign aims to promote workplace-based respect, dignity, and fair pay for every worker.
Preliminary concerns for improving working conditions at Waffle House restaurants includes improving employer health and safety plan for their workforce. Additionally, the campaign seeks to put an end to unfair paycheck deductions for workers meals. Waffle House must stop their mandatory meal deduction policy and make it optional for workers to purchase discounted shift meals.
JaDashia “Dae” Mark, born and raised in McComb, Mississippi, grew up in a working-class family and developed an early passion for advocating workers’ rights, inspired by her underpaid and overworked mother. Her journey into labor organizing began in 2021 as a call center worker at Maximus in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, where she encountered union efforts for the first time. Observing the anti-union tactics her employer used to deter involvement sparked her curiosity, leading her to join the Call Center Workers United organizing committee. As a worker leader, she helped secure essential benefits like extended break times, remote work options, sick pay, and reduced healthcare deductibles through collective action. In addition to organizing locally, she and her coworkers traveled to sister Maximus sites in Virginia, Florida, and Louisiana to encourage collective action among employees at other locations, standing in solidarity with them to build a united workforce. Her responsibilities included recruiting workers, organizing and facilitating meetings, facilitating protests and rallies, and fostering solidarity among employees.
Today, Dae is assisting the Laborers’ International Union of North America (LIUNA) on the Build Blue Oval project in West Tennessee. This campaign, focused on the $5.6 billion Ford Blue Oval plant construction, recruits local workers for unionized roles and aims to elevate area standards. As the flagship project nears completion, Dae is helping over 300 workers build long-term careers as skilled, proud LIUNA members, committed to securing better futures for their families and communities. Through her role as a frontline contact for the Volunteer Organizing Committee and her strategic contributions informed by her grassroots organizing experience, Dae’s involvement brings a valuable depth of perspective to the campaign’s approach, advancing its mission of raising labor standards and empowering workers.
Summer Gobern serves as a fellow on a campaign with the United Southern Service Workers (USSW) in Atlanta, GA. Summer has worked as a community organizer for GA STAND UP in Atlanta, as well as served as a postpartum doula. Her focuses include social justice advocacy with an emphasis on building worker power through a research lens. She is a mobilizer often working to increase engagement to form stronger networks and strategies across the South.
Gobern’s volunteer experience includes but is not limited to the A. Phillip Randolph Institute’s food bank, multi-campus clubs through Planned Parenthood Action Fund, GOTV efforts, and Black Lives Matter (BLM). Summer previously completed her WILL Empower Apprenticeship, a “national program jointly housed at Georgetown University’s and Rutgers University’s where she joined Jobs With Justice’s research team as an apprentice developing new knowledge into organizing, research methods and training, framing economic justice policy analysis, examining bargaining strategies, and coalition building.
Summer will begin organizing with USSW in January 2025. Waffle House workers are organizing with USSW to demand a livable wage, improving health and safety at restaurant locations, and assisting with research data collections that addresses abolishing the company’s unfair meal deductions on tipped workers’ paycheck.
ABSI Advisory Committee
ABSI Co-Conveners:
- Jobs With Justice
- Clark Atlanta University
- Erica Smiley, Executive Director, Jobs With Justice
- Jason Tomlinson, National Program Manager, Jobs With Justice
- Sherman Henry, Director, Labor Institute for Advancing Black Strategies
ABSI Advisory Committee:
- Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, President, Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies
- Dr. Algernon Austin, Director, Race and Economic Justice, Center for Economic and Policy Research
- Appollos Baker, Special Assistant to the Secretary-Treasurer at New York State AFL-CIO
- Dr. Sheri Davis, Senior Program Director for WILL Empower with the Center for Innovation in Worker Organization (CIWO), Rutgers University School of Management and Labor Relations
- Kenny Diggs, Assistant Political Director, AFSCME
- Seitu Jamel Hart, Georgia Film Imperative Project: Building Workforce, Economic, Mobility and Racial Equity
- Dr. Alethia Jones, Program Director, Open Society Fellowship Program, Open Society Foundations
- Dr. Joseph Jones, Associate Professor of Political Science, Executive Director, W.E.B. Dubois Southern Center for Studies in Public Policy, Clark Atlanta University
- Dr. Danielle Phillips-Cunningham, Associate Professor, Department of Labor Studies and Employment Relations, Rutgers University School of Management and Labor Relations
- Patrick Scott, Director, AFL-CIO Organizing Institute
- John Taylor, National Field Director of Property Services Division, SEIU
- Dr. Naomi R Williams, Assistant Professor, Rutgers University School of Management and Labor Relations
Support
We’re asking you to join us in this initiative to build power with Southern Black workers and to create an economy where all working people can thrive. Become an ABSI sustaining giver here.
Press
Stacey Abrams delivers passionate speech at Black Women Public Policy in the South symposium
“We live in a moment where we are told that we are not enough. That we are insufficient for this moment, and that’s not true. In this moment, we are exactly where we need to be at the exact moment we need to be here, because now is the time for our voices to be the loudest, and as Black women in particular, we are the canaries in the coal mine.” Read more.
Clark Atlanta Launches labor institute to develop Black strategists for a renewed union movement.
Clark Atlanta University has partnered with national labor rights group Jobs With Justice to launch a first-of-its-kind academic center for training young Black and Brown labor movement leaders, on the belief that the South is the front line for revitalizing the US labor movement as a force in political democracy. Read more.
Clark Atlanta University launches new Black Southern labor institute
Jobs With Justice, a nonprofit network of labor unions, community groups and activists, is partnering with Clark Atlanta on the new Institute for the Advancement of Black Strategists, which was announced in late September. Read more.
Reviving the Southern Black Labor Movement
Southern Black workers have a long record of forming unions to press their demands for justice—we once again need to build power at work as we have in the past. Read more.
Advancing Black Strategists Initiative Reaches New Heights
In the fall of 2023, we convened more than 25 Black foundation executives and leaders at the Ford Foundation to spotlight ABSI and focus funders on the intersections of economic and racial justice. Read more.