Ndini Kitonga
Ndindi Kitonga, Ph.D. is a Kenyan American educator, long-time community organizer, and homeless rights advocate. She co-founded Angeles Workshop School, a democratic secondary micro-school in Los Angeles.
In addition to her work in K-12 education, Ndindi works with teacher training graduate programs and teaches courses associated with non-western science education, critical pedagogy, anti-colonial and place-based education. Ndindi is also a published scholar in the areas of revolutionary critical pedagogy, and democratic education. Ndindi is also a published scholar in critical pedagogy and democratic education and has written articles and book chapters such as Black Perspectives & What to Make of Mutual Aid? (2024), Singing to Liberation: Songs of Freedom and Nights of Resistance on Indian Campuses (2023), Addressing Houselessness in California (2023), In A Post-Floyd Era?: Race, Gender, Class, and Black Movements (2022), Where Do We Go from Here? Black Lives Matter as an Ongoing Movement (2021), Race, Class, Gender, and Revolution in Theory and in Practice (2020), Anticolonialism, Africa and Humanism (2019), Angeles Workshop School: An Experiment in Radical Student Voice (2019), Race, Capitalism, and Resistance (2018), The Critical Graduate Experience: An Ethics of Higher Education Responsibilities (2014) and Culturally Responsive and Socially Responsible Research Methodology (2013), Black vs. Black: Solidarity among the Black Diaspora (2010) among others.
In response to the horrific disparities the COVID pandemic exacerbated in her community, Ndindi co-created a small mutual aid network in her local community in March of 2020. The unhoused population in this community is comprised mostly of Black and Latinx people, many of who are disabled and undocumented. The abolitionist network of care, Palms Unhoused Mutual Aid (PUMA) has grown over the past year from a small collective where organizers share food, hygiene, harm reduction, and other supplies with their unhoused neighbors, to one where they are organizing popular education clinics, coalition-building, and political mobilization.
