A conversation with Dr. Janelle Williams and Tamieka Atkins on wealth, civic engagement, and building the infrastructure for lasting freedom.
A persistent contradiction lies at the center of American democracy: people are asked to participate in systems that have never distributed power, safety, or prosperity evenly.
At Kindred Futures, we believe understanding that contradiction requires resisting the urge to separate its parts. Economic power is connected to civic power. Wealth is connected to choice. Democracy is connected to the institutions, relationships, and resources communities can marshal to determine their own futures.
These connections are at the center of The Freedom Builders Series, a new podcast hosted by Kindred Futures’ Co-founder and CEO Dr. Janelle Williams. In the inaugural episode, Williams sits down with Tamieka Atkins, CEO of ProGeorgia, for a candid conversation about voting rights, economic mobility, philanthropy, movement building, leadership and what it will take to create durable power across the South.
Janelle opens the series with a premise central to Kindred Futures’ work: “I’m on a mission to continue to bolster collective Black wealth with the intent that wealth is used to finance our freedom.”
That idea, financing freedom, becomes the thread running through the conversation.
Atkins and Williams speak to a moment of extraordinary pressure on communities and the institutions working alongside them. But rather than narrow the response to a single strategy, Atkins argues for a much broader understanding of how power is built.
“It’s always bigger than voting,” she tells Williams. “Multiple things can be true at the same time. We need people protesting Delaney in New Jersey. We need people who are honestly caring for our children and keeping them safe from harm so that we’re protecting the next generation. We also need people down at the state capitol. We need the attorneys litigating, and we need our folks to keep voting.”
She continues: “If it didn’t matter so much, they wouldn’t work so hard to take it away from us. So there are multiple ways to build power, multiple types of power. Voting is one of them. I often say it is the foundational one. You start with the vote, and you keep going from there.”
That invitation to keep going is critical.
For Kindred Futures, freedom cannot be measured only by access to an institution or participation in an election. We are interested in the conditions that allow Black people and communities to exercise meaningful choice over time: the ability to build and retain wealth, shape public policy, strengthen institutions, invest in place and determine what gets passed forward.
That understanding is informed by what Black communities have told us directly.
Williams recalls Kindred Futures asking elders, young people, business leaders and civic leaders a simple question: What does wealth mean?
“The number one answer was freedom,” Williams says. “And so, you know, when we think about the role of building collective Black wealth, it is around [asking ourselves] how do we make sure we are able to live in communities that inspire our children fundamentally?”
Atkins pauses on the significance of how that insight was gathered.
“Too many times, reports do not include qualitative data, conversations with people who we are trying to serve,” she says. “It doesn’t actually include real conversations from the most directly impacted community. That’s right. So I hope that gets lifted up. You’re talking about wealth. Wealth means freedom. And you get to say, ‘I actually spoke to the people.’”
Proximity matters because the people closest to our challenges are also essential to imagining their solutions.
That principle shapes the conversation as it turns toward philanthropy and the infrastructure required to sustain movements. Both Williams and Atkins question models that ask organizations to address entrenched structural problems through short-term, restricted, or transactional investments.
Williams interrogates what becomes possible when communities also build the capacity to sustain their own work.
“The opportunity moment for us here is also how do we organize ourselves to self-finance our freedom?” she says. “And that requires multiple shifts.”
Those shifts require an expanded understanding of wealth itself—one that includes purchasing power, ownership, land, commercial property, intellectual capital, cultural capital and the ability to build institutions capable of sustaining communities for generations.
“This is the opportunity moment as we reimagine power,” Williams says. “It demands that we actually have to go beyond assessing the rules of the game and actually rewrite the equation.”
Atkins describes a similar philosophy through ProGeorgia’s investment in civic organizations. Instead of treating community relationships as an asset to be activated around elections, she argues for strengthening the organizations that hold those relationships every day.
“When the organizations are stronger, then that means that their civic engagement work, it means their issue advocacy work, their legislative work gets to grow to scale,” Atkins explains. “And that is the reason for investing holistically in infrastructure. When you invest only in a particular piece of the program, it becomes transactional, and it becomes extractive. Now we are using organizations for their community relationships without pouring back into them.”
It is a lesson that extends well beyond civic engagement: sustainable power requires sustainable infrastructure.
And ultimately, power must serve a purpose.
Near the end of the conversation, Williams asks Atkins what she hopes her children will understand about her work and legacy. Atkins strips the answer down to its most fundamental measure.
“When I think of what it means to build power. When I think of what it means to have freedom. Why do I do this work? I do this work so that my two children have choice, and so that their choices are not determined by their race, their gender, their sexual orientation.”
Williams responds: “They have the ability to be free.”
“That’s it for me,” Atkins says.
That is also where The Freedom Builders Series begins: with freedom not simply as an aspiration, but as the ability to choose, build, belong and author what comes next.
Through this series, Williams will continue conversations with leaders, thinkers and builders grappling with what it means to create the economic, civic and institutional power required for Black communities to thrive—and to finance a freer future.
The first episode of Freedom Builders, featuring Dr. Janelle Williams in conversation with Tamieka Atkins, CEO of ProGeorgia, is available now. Watch the episode, share it, subscribe to the series and join the conversation as we explore what it takes to build power—and what we intend to do with it.
