Kairos builds leaders and strategies for contending for power in the digital realm so that racial and economic justice is possible now and in the future.

History

Kairos emerged from our awareness of the unacceptable racial, gender, and power gap in digital campaigning; our concern that nonprofit and organizing tech were adopting similar approaches to Silicon Valley; our alarm that tech companies were allowing communities of color to be targeted under the guise of “neutral tech”; and our frustration at the growing inability to influence legislative changes that affect these communities. Kairos’ founders realized that we needed to transform our organizing practices. With a strong belief that leadership development is essential to organizing, the Kairos Fellowship was launched on the heels of the Ferguson uprisings, which were a response to Michael Brown’s murder at the hands of the police.

In January 2016, Kairos recruited and trained 14 Fellows in digital-first campaigning who were placed at state and national power-building organizations. Nearly all of the 200 applicants that year cited the use of digital tactics during the Ferguson protests as their reason for wanting to participate in the Fellowship. In total, Kairos has held four cohorts and graduated 43 people from the program. Many of those graduates remain in the digital field in senior-level digital roles, where they continue to shape and transform the digital realm, while bringing strong values and strategy to their work.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, we knew that organizations would be working hard to get their organizing programs online—and with the most important election of our generation around the corner, the stakes were incredibly high. In response to increasing requests from our network and in alignment with our long-term goal of supporting state-based organizations in building integrated digital organizing programs, Kairos launched a Digital Hotline to bring rapid support to groups that need better digital strategies to tackle the issues impacting their communities. 

After the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police, we launched our Tech Is Not Neutral campaign, which urges tech companies to end their alliances with police departments. Since that first Kairos-led campaign, we have run digital user-centered campaigns that generate both a diverse set of stakeholders to come together, as well as media coverage that is shifting the way people think about social media platforms. In our Facebook Log Out campaign, more than 55,000 people took the pledge to log out of Facebook and Instagram in a show of user power.  

Kairos continues to build capacity for our field and run innovative campaigns – we are  transforming the future of the digital realm for a better tomorrow, while we organize in the digital realm for a better today.