Alicia M. Walters facilitates transformation through her writing, art, coaching, and organizational consulting practice. She is the Creator of the Black Thought Project which transforms public spaces into sanctuaries for the expression of Black thought. The project’s interactive community installations are social experiments exploring what society would be like if we protected, witnessed, and honored Blackness. The project is unearthing new narratives that center Blackness, put us into the right relationship with each other, and reimagine society in a way that honors everyone’s humanity.

Alicia’s work has long been a practice of centering Blackness for personal and political, cultural, and systemic transformation. She is the founder of Echoing Ida which cultivates and uplifts Black women’s thought leadership to shift narratives, as evidenced by the growing collective of more than 30 writers, the publishing of over 500 articles, a podcast, and an anthology of work to be published in Fall 2020. In the policy realm, she authored groundbreaking legislation to prohibit the shackling of pregnant people in California jails and prisons that has since been replicated across several states. She led the multi-state participatory research project that resulted in Who Pays: the True Cost of Incarceration on Families, which influenced a cultural shift in understanding the damage of incarceration on Black women and families. Alicia and her work have been featured in the New York Times and the Together Apart podcast, The Guardian, Ebony, and CNN among other places. She lives, mothers, and builds community in the revolutionary city of Oakland, California.