Last month, I went to New York and D.C. to attend two meetings that, on the surface, could not have been more different. The first was a tour of land owned by Black farmers in rural upstate New York, which I was attending specifically to see The Center for NuLeadership’s inspiring project, The People’s Land. The second was a celebration of the 20th anniversary of the similarly inspiring Intellipedia, held in an “undisclosed,” high-security NSA building in Maryland.

The fact that I had been invited to either of these meetings felt unlikely and was reason enough to go. What I didn’t expect was realizing that these two groups had a lot more in common than was evident at first glance. For one, they were all patriots — real patriots, who cared deeply about this country and were trying to make it better for everybody.

They were also all systems thinkers and change agents who fundamentally understood the value of community and collaboration, but were in environments that actively discouraged these things. Despite this, they persist and are succeeding, even if this success continues to be tenuous.

Intellipedia

In 2006, Mark Oehlert, who was then at Booz Allen Hamilton, invited me to participate in a workshop he was organizing for the CIA to talk about the then nascent world of blogs and wikis — how they were being used in companies and the world at large as well as potential hazards and impacts.

A year earlier, CIA analyst, Calvin Andrus, had written a white paper entitled “The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community” that was stirring things up internally. The notion that intelligence agencies (where “need to know” is the mantra and where employees are regularly strapped to polygraph machines to maintain their security clearance) might adopt tools that encouraged openness and trust would have seemed ludicrous at any other time. However, the failures that led to 9/11 five years earlier still weighed heavily on these agencies, and there were rising sentiments — both top-down and bottom-up — that our national security depended on their ability to collaborate more effectively.

In a typical organizational way, the agency sought external “experts” to help them better understand what was happening, even though Andrus’s paper signaled that there were already people internally who understood these tools. Unbeknownst to us, some of these folks had already started actively experimenting with an internal wiki, which they dubbed “Intellipedia” and which ran on the same open source software that ran Wikipedia. Several people had already embraced it, while many others were either mystified or upset about its existence.

During our 2006 workshop. I noticed a few people sitting close to the front who kept squirming or nodding vehemently when we would say certain things. I finally pointed to them and said, “You seem to really want to say something. What are you thinking?” It turned out they were Sean Dennehy and Don Burke, the creators of Intellipedia, and they had plenty of insightful thoughts to share.

I loved learning about the project, how people were using it internally and the challenges they were facing. The conversation was convivial and, at times, combative, and I learned a lot that day. This burgeoning group of internal activists was trying to do what felt impossible — create an open, collaborative platform inside of a necessarily secretive organization — and they were succeeding, despite severe pushback. Because of my roots in wiki culture, I felt a natural kinship to these folks, and they even gifted me a coveted Intellipedia spade, which I still have and treasure.

That was my only “official” connection to the project, a tenuous one at best. I kept in touch with Don and Sean over the years, but I was still surprised and flattered to receive an invitation to the 20th anniversary celebration. They often credited that 2006 workshop with internally validating the work they were doing, which helped them overcome some internal obstacles. Having experienced these kinds of organizational politics many times over the years, I have no doubt that this was true, but I also suspect that they would have found a way to succeed regardless.

Still, the fact that this lone touchpoint merited an invitation showed how much they valued contributions of all kinds, how they saw the whole person behind a contribution, and how much they invested in relationships. I have learned over the years that these attributes are not common. They are not just a mark of someone’s goodness, but an indicator of someone who sees and understands systems and how all the different parts— many of which are invisible to most — contribute to the whole.

The People’s Land

Understanding whole systems and valuing relationships are also signatures of my friend, Kyung-ji Rhee, who along with Chino Hardin, runs The Center for NuLeadership on Human Justice & Healing in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York.

NuLeadership was founded by Eddie Ellis, who also helped launch the New York chapter of the Black Panthers. Like many Black Panthers and other Black civil rights leaders, Ellis was targeted by the FBI’s COINTELPRO. In 1969, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison for a crime he insists he did not commit. His horrific experiences in Attica led him to dedicating his life to exposing and dismantling the historical, economic, and racist foundations of mass criminalization and incarceration, work that he continued until his death in 2014. In addition to founding NuLeadership, he mentored generations of movement leaders, including Kyung-ji.

NuLeadership is a hyperlocal organization, doing real work on the ground in Brooklyn, including forging stronger relationships. For example, in 2017, they brought together the community and the local police to discuss and prototype better ways to handle arrests for minor infractions. One community member and officer play-acted how arrests are typically handled, then walked through possible alternatives. In the process, they found an approach that met all of the different needs and discussed ways to possibly institutionalize them.

A week later, that same community member was arrested as a “person of interest” for a crime that had occurred nearby. One of the arresting officers was the same person who had done the role play with this community member the prior week! While placing the handcuffs on him, the policeman whispered in his ear, “Don’t worry, I got you.” He then proceeded to loosen the handcuffs and stood by his side until the community member was released.

When institutions fail us, relationships can still protect us in the short-term and change those institutions in the long-term.

Over the past decade, NuLeadership has positioned itself beyond responding to harm from incarceration toward the more holistic goal of Human Justice, which for them means Human Rights and Human Development. As part of this shift, Kyung-ji and Chino started thinking about the role that disconnection played in their work — disconnection from each other, our ancestors, how things work, our food, nature. They started imagining how they might fill this void in Bedford-Stuyvesant and what it might look like to own and work their own plot of land out in the country.

Two years ago, their vision became reality. They acquired 20 acres about a four-hour drive from Brooklyn, which they have dubbed “The People’s Land.” A mix of staff and community members are now living there. They have established some basic infrastructure, such as water filtration, and have started growing vegetables and flowers. The larger vision is to build a living, learning, and retreat space where people can reconnect to land, engage in food production, and experience the physical, spiritual, and political healing that comes with learning what it is like to be in right relationship with nature. They are building out every aspect of the space themselves, which is enabling them to acquire professional skills applicable both on the land and back in their communities.

Two Groups That Couldn’t Be More Different or More Similar

Because of my recent gardening and habitat restoration exploits, I was particularly interested in what Kyung-ji and Chino were cooking up. As I was planning my trip to D.C. for the Intellipedia celebration, I learned that The People’s Land was going to be featured on Black Farmers United NYS’s Bridging Land, Agriculture, and Communities Conference (BLACC) 2026 Farm Tour a week beforehand. It seemed too serendipitous to pass up, and I decided to fly to the East Coast early so that I could finally meet the team and see the project for myself.

My connection to The People’s Land was even more tenuous than with Intellipedia. I am not a Black farmer, I don’t live in New York, and I had never worked with any of the organizations involved. I arrived at one of the stops on the tour before any of the NuLeadership team arrived, feeling like an interloper. The weather was frigid and gray, with buds barely forming on the still bare trees, but the participants on the tour made me feel warm and comfortable. Knowing that I was friends with Kyung-ji was enough for them to embrace me as one of their own.

I loved getting to meet different people on the tour, to break bread with them and hear their stories. Farming is inherently hard work. It’s even harder if you’re a small, independent farm, and harder still if you’re Black and are battling deeply embedded systems of racism and a federal government that has declared war on those who are trying to fix these systems. Despite these challenges, this community is finding ways to support each other while doing amazing, important work in the process.

The land was breathtakingly beautiful. Everyone on the NuLeadership team told moving stories about the challenges of living in the inner city and about how liberating it felt to be in nature and to live on and work the land. Listening to their descriptions while standing in the crisp, cool air, surrounded by singing birds and this wonderful community, I not only understood what they were saying, I could feel what they were describing.

The NuLeadership team is just getting started. The soil is rough and compacted, the buildings need restoration, and they had spent the previous few months living in canvas tents through harsh winter conditions. Still, I could see how much they have already accomplished, how seamless they are as a team, and how excited they are about achieving their vision. They are already a model for others trying to do similar work.

One week later, I found myself shedding layers in D.C., where the weather was in the mid-80s and the foliage was lush and in bloom. I hitched a ride with Don and two of his colleagues to the facility, which was about an hour outside of the city. The buildings were unmarked, but the high fences and armed guards suggested that this was not an ordinary place.

The building itself seemed like any other nondescript, corporate space, with signs on the wall reminding people of their organizational values. Only the podium inside the lobby, the backdrop with blue and white balloons, and the large cake on the side suggested that anything out of the ordinary was happening that day.

About 40 people, half of whom were no longer employees, milled around, greeting each other. Once again, I felt out of place coming into the space, but people seemed to accept me as if I were supposed to be there. I suppose the fact that I had gotten through multiple levels of security indicated that I wasn’t just a random bystander, but I think there was more to it than that. One of the core principles in the wiki world is, “Trust by default.” I think that anyone who is drawn to wikis already believes this principle, and I think that we are more inclined to form community as a result. Yes, these were spies and analysts, but they were also wiki people.

Still, I was hyper conscious of where I was and of the portrait on the wall of that grotesque person who is actively trying to destroy everything I believe in. It felt somewhat jarring to hear speaker after speaker come up and extol what made Intellipedia successful and why. It was a celebration, but it was also a subtle admonition. The project has succeeded despite an overarching culture that still fears it and wants it to go away.

The speakers told wonderful, self-deprecating stories, and the word “trust” came up repeatedly. As I heard them say the word again and again, I started having an out-of-body experience. I felt like I was at The People’s Land again, listening to stories from both places simultaneously. These two groups could not have been more different on the surface, and yet they were so similar in so many ways, and I felt like they were talking about the exact same things.

Connecting with Each Other Can Make a Difference

Why we do things matter. We humans are conditioned to accept things as “the way things are.” There is an ease and comfort to routine, especially when our day-to-day lives seem more or less okay. The act of being intentional, much less aspirational, can be an incredibly uncomfortable exercise, because it forces us to get real about the gap between what we want and how things actually are. When we do try to change things, it’s easier to rail against something that feels wrong than it is to try to build something that feels right.

Both the NuLeadership team and the Intellipedia contributors have chosen to build something that feels right. Even when the rest of us claim to want the same underlying things, change threatens comfort, and for many of us, comfort is survival. My friend and colleague, Denise Collazo, likes to call the inevitable response to change as an organizational immune response. Even if something is for the better, if it’s different and uncomfortable, a group’s immune system will attack it.

How things are connected to each other matter. Building something that feels right requires understanding how things are connected, and we live in a world where these connections are harder and harder to see.

There is a mountain of research that shows how immersion in nature results in better health, and yet most of us have trouble believing this, because we don’t have a lived sense of it. Instead, we pour most of our money and energy into programs that are bandages, where the connection between problem and solution is shallower, but easier to see, and hence more comfortable.

In order for public policy to become reality, it takes government agencies to move money and resources to people on the ground, people who often work for hyperlocal organizations like NuLeadership. These groups have miniscule budgets, which means most of us don’t realize they exist, much less the impact they have on our lives. When things break, we know whom to blame, but we rarely see the role that these groups and people play when things are working.

It took a tragedy like 9/11 for many in the intelligence community to viscerally understand how the lack of collaboration could lead to American lives lost, and even this was barely enough to enable a project like Intellipedia to succeed. At the celebration, I heard speaker after speaker proudly point to the project’s impact despite ongoing resistance and minimal support. While those who helped the project succeed should feel proud, the rest of us should feel ashamed or angry when we underresource things that work.

With whom we do things matter. Making positive change in the world is fundamentally hard, but both NuLeadership and Intellipedia reveal a path that can lead to success. It starts with finding your people. When we find each other and lift each other up, the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. I was struck by the role that community continues to play for both of these projects, and I feel blessed to have been able to observe and experience this firsthand.

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