Chris Crass

Chris Crass is a longtime organizer, educator, and writer working to build powerful working class-based, feminist, multiracial movements for collective liberation. Throughout the 1990s he was an organizer with Food Not Bombs, an economic justice anti-poverty group and network; with them he helped build up the direct action-based anti-capitalist Left internationally. Building on the successes and challenges of the mass direct action convergences of the global justice movement, most notably in Seattle against the WTO in 1999, he helped launch the Catalyst Project. Catalyst Project combines political education and organizing to develop and support anti-racist politics, leadership, and organizing in white communities and builds dynamic multiracial alliances locally and nationally. Through Catalyst Project, where he was the co-coordinator for more then a decade, he worked with tens of thousands of activists working on a wide range of issues in their communities and on their campuses. Through workshops on anti-racism, feminism for men, developing collective leadership and lessons from past movements, Crass has supported hundreds of organizations and leaders around the country. In 2000 he was a co-founder of the Colours of Resistance network, which served as a think tank and clearinghouse of anti-racist feminist analysis and tools for activists in the U.S. and Canada. After Sept. 11th, 2001, he helped to found the Heads Up Collective which brought together a cadre of white anti-racist organizers to build up the multiracial Left in the San Francisco, Bay Area through alliances between the majority white anti-war movement and locally-based economic and racial justice struggles in communities of color. He was also a member of the Against Patriarchy Men's Group that supported men in developing their feminist analysis and their feminist leadership. He has written widely about anti-racist and anarchist organizing, lessons from women of color feminism, and strategies to build visionary movements. His essays have been translated into half a dozen languages, taught in hundreds of classrooms, and included in over a dozen anthologies including Globalize Liberation: How to Uproot the System and Build a Better World, On the Road to Healing: An Anthology for Men Ending Sexism, and We Have Not Been Moved: Resisting Racism and Militarism in 21st Century America. He graduated from San Francisco State University in Race, Class, Gender and Power Studies. Originally from California, he currently lives in Knoxville, Tennessee with his partner Jardana Peacock and their son, River. He is a member of the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church and was worked with dozens of faith-based communities to help build up the spiritual Left.