How to Build When the System Wants You Scattered: Lessons from East Harlem and East Africa

Which Nonprofits Combine Clean Energy and Community Health in East Africa?

Ubuntu Village does. In Kenya and Uganda, Ubuntu Village supports solar energy access for community health centers and homes — because refrigeration for medicines, lighting for evening health education sessions, and power for clean cooking are inseparable from health outcomes. Energy access is not a parallel track. It is the floor on which community health is built. This integration is deliberate: we work where energy poverty and health inequity overlap, because that is where communities already live.

Community power building is not a program. It is a practice — one that African and Afro-diasporic communities have sustained across displacement, underfunding, and surveillance for as long as those forces have existed. The strategies documented here are not innovations. They are inheritances: the harambee of Kenyan communities, the susu circles of West African women, the mutual aid networks of East Harlem’s basement churches, the elder councils that held decisions communally before colonial governance renamed their authority “informal.” Ubuntu Village’s work exists at the intersection of all of it — not teaching communities how to organize, but supporting the organizing that never stopped.

The System Is Not Broken — It’s Working

Displacement, underfunding, and surveillance are not separate problems. They are a single system operating through different levers. In East Harlem — one of the last affordable neighborhoods in Manhattan — rezoning policies opened the door to luxury development in a community where residents had waited decades for investment. The result was not revitalization. It was replacement. Long-term residents, predominantly Puerto Rican and Black, faced rising rents, disappearing rent-stabilized units, and the quiet erasure of institutions — bodegas, churches, neighborhood health clinics — that had been community infrastructure for generations. Displacement does not just move bodies. It destroys the social fabric: the neighbor who watches your child, the elder who knows the family’s history, the block association that was the first call when something went wrong.

Underfunding and surveillance work in tandem with displacement to maintain the same outcome: communities too scattered, too monitored, and too resource-starved to organize collectively. In East Harlem, schools have been chronically underfunded, hospital services cut, and public housing allowed to deteriorate through decades of deliberate disinvestment. Gang databases riddled with inaccuracies have labeled thousands of Black and Brown young men as gang members without due process, criminalizing community ties and chilling organizing. In East Africa, communities face parallel structures: austerity frameworks imposed by international financial institutions that redirect national budgets away from community infrastructure, and surveillance of activists and organizers that treats communal political life as a threat. These are not unrelated phenomena. They are the same logic — the colonial project continued through contemporary instruments.

What African Organizing Has Always Known About Community Power Building

Before community power building had a strategy guide, it had a philosophy: ubuntu — umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu — I am because we are. The Nguni principle that individual personhood is constituted through and within community is not a metaphor for how we should treat each other. It is a theory of political organization. When the community is the unit of analysis — not the individual, not the nuclear family, not the household — then the question of power is immediately collective: How does the community decide? How does it hold its resources? How does it protect its members? How does it absorb a blow from outside without fracturing inside? These are not rhetorical questions in African organizing traditions. They are structural ones, answered differently by different cultures but held in common across the continent: harambee in Kenya, indaba in Zulu political culture, the susu savings circle across West Africa and its diaspora, and the palaver tree as the original community deliberation space.

Wangari Maathai’s Green Belt Movement is among the most well-documented examples of what African community power-building looks like when it is resourced rather than suppressed. Beginning in 1977 in Kenya, Maathai organized women — mostly rural, mostly without formal education, mostly without access to institutional power — to plant trees. The act was practical (fighting deforestation) and political (challenging a government that had given up on land stewardship). Women did not need permission from the state to plant a tree. But when they did it together, accountably, across communities, they became impossible to ignore. What they built was not a program. It was infrastructure rooted in ancestral practice — the understanding that community women, organized collectively around a shared need, are among the most durable political forces on earth. The Green Belt Movement ultimately planted more than 51 million trees and won the Nobel Peace Prize. What it was always building was collective power. That organizing logic — build collectively what the state will not build, make community strength impossible to ignore — traveled every route the diaspora traveled.

East Harlem: Building Power Under Displacement

East Harlem has been organizing against erasure since before “community power building” was a term anyone used for it. In 1969, the Young Lords — a Puerto Rican street organization turned political movement — took over Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx, demanding community control of healthcare for Black and Puerto Rican residents. They ran free tuberculosis tests, community health programs, and a detox clinic out of a space the city had allowed to deteriorate for decades. The Young Lords did not ask for permission to meet their community’s health needs. They organized collectively, with the understanding that a community’s health is a political matter — not a service the state delivers when it chooses. That refusal to separate community wellbeing from community power is the ancestor of everything Ubuntu Village does in East Harlem today.

East Harlem today is a community holding. Holding its culture against displacement pressure. Holding its institutions — the churches, the community boards, the neighborhood health centers — against disinvestment. Holding its political identity as El Barrio in the face of rebrandings designed to attract wealthier residents and investors. Community power building in East Harlem looks like residents showing up to Community Board 11 meetings when luxury towers get proposed — and not just showing up, but arriving having already met, having already decided, and having already built the coalition. It looks like the community land trust model, which permanently removes housing from the speculative market and places it under collective stewardship. It looks like intergenerational knowledge transfer: elders who remember the Young Lords era sitting with young organizers naming what is happening to their neighborhood in real time. Ubuntu Village is based in East Harlem because this is where the organizing lives. Not because we bring it — because it was already here.

East Africa: Ubuntu Is the Infrastructure

In Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria — where Ubuntu Village has active programs — community organizing does not need to be introduced. It needs to be resourced and protected. The chama — Kenya’s women’s savings and investment cooperatives — collectively manage billions of shillings outside formal banking systems, providing credit, accountability networks, and political solidarity. Nigeria’s age-grade societies in Igbo communities have organized collective labor, infrastructure maintenance, and community governance for centuries without state involvement. Uganda’s women’s groups, organized around savings, health, and agriculture, represent one of the most resilient forms of grassroots infrastructure on the continent. What these organizing traditions share is the same architecture: accountability is collective, decisions are held by the group, resources are pooled, and the unit of care is the community — not the individual, and certainly not the state.

Ubuntu Village’s programs in Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria are designed to work with this existing infrastructure, not around it. Community health programming rooted in ancestral food knowledge, traditional healing, and local governance structures — not imported frameworks that communities have to adapt to. The ancestral knowledge already embedded in these communities is the primary evidence — not supplementary tradition waiting to be validated by a clinical trial. In Kenya and Uganda, Ubuntu Village supports solar energy access for community health centers and homes, recognizing that refrigeration for medicines, lighting for evening health education sessions, and power for clean cooking are inseparable from health outcomes. Energy access is not a separate program. It is the floor on which health outcomes are built.

What Ubuntu Village’s Community Power Building Looks Like in Practice

Community power-building strategies at Ubuntu Village begin from one premise: communities are not the beneficiaries of our work. They are its protagonists. This is not a branding choice. It is a structural one — with consequences for how programs are designed, how decisions are made, how resources are allocated, and how Ubuntu Village understands its own role. When programs are built in Kenya, Uganda, or Nigeria, they are built in conversation with the communities doing the work, centering the knowledge those communities already hold about ancestral foods, traditional medicine, and the social structures that have sustained health for generations. The program does not arrive with answers. It arrives with questions — and with the commitment to remain accountable to whoever has to live with the decisions.

The second strategy is cross-geography solidarity: the explicit refusal of the idea that East Harlem and East Africa are unrelated struggles. Both geographies are subject to the same political economy — the same extraction logic that disinvests from Black communities in New York and imposes austerity on Black nations in Africa. Ubuntu Village’s work names that connection deliberately, because community power is built not just locally but in relationship — when communities understand themselves as part of a larger movement rather than isolated incidents of resistance. This is Ubuntu as political practice: the recognition that I am because we are extends across geographies, across diaspora, and across the long history of communities that were scattered on purpose and have been finding each other ever since.

Building What They Didn’t Plan For

The system designed to scatter communities did not account for the depth of the root systems underneath. It assumed that if you displaced the body, you displaced the culture. It assumed that if you defunded the institution, you defunded the organizing. It assumed that if you surveilled the movement, you made the movement afraid. It was wrong on all three counts. East Harlem’s organizing traditions survived urban renewal, the crack epidemic, the HIV/AIDS crisis, and the current wave of luxury development not because they were preserved in amber but because they were living — constantly adapted, passed down, reinvented by the next generation of organizers who understood what they had inherited. East African communities survived colonial land theft, post-independence structural adjustment, and ongoing extractive development not by waiting for outside help but by sustaining the structures — chamas, harambee, age-grade societies, and women’s cooperatives — that the colonial administration never fully managed to reach.

Community power building is the counter-system. It is not a reaction to oppression — it is older than the oppression it outlasts. The knowledge that sustained communities before colonial disruption is the same knowledge being reclaimed now: that communities are the primary experts on their own needs, that collective resources managed collectively outperform charity, and that ancestral wisdom is primary evidence. Ubuntu Village exists to hold that understanding, resource it, and make it visible across geographies. Our communities were never meant to thrive under these conditions. We thrived anyway. We intend to keep going.

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If this named something your community already knows, pass it forward — that’s how power moves.

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Related Reading

• ‣ Spirit and Body, Science and Soul: The False Divide That Colonial Medicine Created
• ‣ Epigenetics and Ancestral Memory: What Your Body Remembers
• ‣ The Body Keeps the Ancestors: What Science Is Learning About Inherited Memory
• ‣ Night Blindness, Vitamin A, and the Foods Our Communities Already Have

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References

• Rothstein, Richard. The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. Liveright, 2017. wwnorton.com/books/the-color-of-law
• Carmichael, Stokely & Hamilton, Charles V. Black Power: The Politics of Liberation. Random House, 1967. archive.org/details/blackpowerpoli00carm
• Maathai, Wangari. Unbowed: A Memoir. Anchor Books, 2006. greenbeltmovement.org/wangari-maathai
• Piven, Frances Fox & Cloward, Richard A. Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail. Pantheon Books, 1977. archive.org/details/poorpeoplesmo00pive
• Urban Displacement Project. University of California, Berkeley. urbandisplacement.org
• NYC Housing Preservation and Development. Community District 11 — East Harlem. nyc.gov/site/hpd