Kai Newkirk
Nonviolent service to build a beloved community
About Kai
Kai Newkirk is a progressive organizer, activist, writer, and meditation teacher-in-training based in Tempe, Arizona. He is founder and President of For All, a center for nonviolent action and organizing to make America a Beloved Community.
Kai is best known for leading the Democracy Spring mass sit-ins at the US Capitol in April 2016, then the largest American civil disobedience action of this century, and for nonviolently disrupting the US Supreme Court in 2014 to protest it’s role in the corruption of our democracy in an action captured in the first-ever video recording of the Court’s chamber. He has been arrested over 25 times in acts of nonviolent civil disobedience and direct action, led multiple 100+ mile plus marches, and undertaken two extended political fasts, including one while being held in the Washington DC jail.
Kai worked as an aide to a Los Angeles City Councilmember, on multiple electoral campaigns, and as a union organizer. He has organized nonviolent action campaigns in the environmental justice, climate justice, universal health care, immigrant rights, anti-war, labor, global justice, voting rights, and other movements.
Kai's work and campaigns or actions he led have been covered by CNN, ABC, The New York Times, MSNBC, USA Today, NPR, The Los Angeles Times, Democracy Now, The Young Turks, TMZ, Rolling Stone, and other major national and international media. His writing has been published by The Guardian, The Huffington Post, Waging Nonviolence, The Nation, the Arizona Republic and other outlets. He has trained thousands of people across America in movement organizing and nonviolent direct action.
Kai has worked with, learned from, and been trained or mentored by leaders of historic nonviolent freedom struggles, including Dolores Huerta and Rev. James Lawson. His organizing and movement leadership are rooted in and made possible by his spiritual path.
Raised in a nominally Christian family open to spiritual exploration, he first encountered Buddhist teaching and meditation as a high school student and began meditating seriously after attending his first 10 day Vipassana course in 2001. He has sat six 10 day courses in the tradition of S. N. Goenka and served one. Kai has also practiced in the Christian contemplative tradition of Centering Prayer and studied in the Zen and Tibetan Buddhist traditions.
Kai is devoted to what he calls the integral nonviolent liberation tradition, a legacy of spiritually-rooted nonviolent leadership and organizing grounded in an ethic of universal, unconditional compassionate love. He dreams of helping to build a nonviolent army of political bodhisattvas.
Kai grew up in West Virginia and lived for many years in Los Angeles. He is a musician and an avid hiker and explorer of the wild, in which he finds great spiritual nourishment and inspiration. Kai lives with his wife, progressive activist and immigrant rights leader, Erika Andiola, and their beloved dog Luna.
Support
Kai pursues his work through For All, a nonprofit organization established to wield the power of nonviolent action to build a multi-racial social democracy with liberty and justice for all people.
To support For All and Kai's work, donate here:
