Setting a Black Economic Agenda

Aug 8, 2024

The Black to the Future Action Fund released a report called “The Black Economic Agenda” on August 8, offering a set of key economic priorities for Black communities across the United States. The fund hopes to guide elected officials and political candidates seeking office on how best to court Black voters ahead of the November 2024 election.

The report comes just months after the release of data from the 2023 Black Census, a poll of more than 200,000 Black people across all 50 states, considered to be the largest such survey of Black Americans in U.S. history. The census results were used to guide the economic road map.

Kristin Powell, principal of the Black Futures Lab, which conducts the census and the Black to the Future Action Fund, spoke with YES! Senior Editor Sonali Kolhatkar on YES! Presents: Rising Up With Sonali about the Black economic agenda.

Sonali Kolhatkar joined YES! in summer 2021, building on a long and decorated career in broadcast and print journalism. She is an award-winning multimedia journalist, and host and creator of YES! Presents: Rising Up with Sonali, a nationally syndicated television and radio program airing on Free Speech TV and dozens of independent and community radio stations. She is also Senior Correspondent with the Independent Media Institute’s Economy for All project where she writes a weekly column. She is the author of Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (2023) and Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence (2005). Her forthcoming book is called Talking About Abolition (Seven Stories Press, 2025). Sonali is co-director of the nonprofit group, Afghan Women’s Mission which she helped to co-found in 2000. She has a Master’s in Astronomy from the University of Hawai’i, and two undergraduate degrees in Physics and Astronomy from the University of Texas at Austin. Sonali reflects on “My Journey From Astrophysicist to Radio Host” in her 2014 TEDx talk of the same name.