Innovating at the Margins: Our Thresholds of Liberation
Just before my second birthday, my mother, older brother, and I left the familiar streets of New Delhi, India, to join my father in East Hartford, Connecticut. Like many immigrant families, we arrived with high hopes and little else, seeking a future where opportunities outweighed the sacrifices. We settled in the Burnside Apartments, a small, U-shaped brick building where two-bedroom units cradled the lives of working-class families. Among the 20 units, only three households—ours, my uncle’s across the hall, and the African American family below us—stood as visible minorities in a predominantly white space.
When viewed through the lenses of white supremacy and racial capitalism, those early years were defined by absence. At Burnside Elementary School, I was invisible except when my difference—my skin, my accent, my heritage—invited ridicule or physical harm.
The margins, for me, were a place of lack. A lack of safety. A lack of belonging.
This early experience of "othering" planted seeds of both anger and kinship. By young adulthood, my anger had matured into a fierce commitment to working alongside others pushed to society’s edges. I became an organizer, pouring my energy into amplifying the voices of those marginalized by systems built on the myths of whiteness, individualism, and meritocracy.
Organizing from the Margins
As an organizer, the margins continued to reveal themselves as places of deprivation. A lack of affordable housing. A lack of accessible healthcare. A lack of decision-making power.
My training followed an Alinsky-style model, shaped by three core assumptions:
The margins lack resources and opportunities, and we must fight to secure them.
Mobilizing mass numbers is essential to holding institutions accountable.
Power lies at the center and must be redistributed.
Fueled by these principles, we demanded accountability from financial institutions, policy-makers, and systems of governance. Yet, after five relentless years, I burned out. The constant fight drained me, and I found myself questioning the very framework I had relied upon.
The Margins as a Catalyst for Innovation
In the aftermath of burnout, I turned to Afro-Caribbean percussion, learning from Robertico Arias, a Dominican master drummer. With every rhythm and every lesson, he revealed a history of resilience—how enslaved Africans in the Caribbean innovated from the margins by:
sustaining ancestral traditions while birthing new cultural forms;
building solidarity within fractured communities; and
forging pathways to liberation against the odds.
Through music, I began to see the margins differently—not as spaces of deficiency but as crucibles of creativity.
Reimagining the Margins
Twenty years later, through experiments in cultural organizing with young people enduring incarceration, women of color-led organizations, and small, multiracial gatherings of neighbors, the margins continue to be a crucible of creativity. . And as I look to others who are innovating at the margins, I witness people most impacted by societal inequities continuing to use spiritual and cultural tools - people’s songs, somatic practice, rituals honoring earth cycles, hip hop lyricism, storytelling, creative play and the raising of life-giving food - to plumb the depths of our being and expand our visions in the co-creation of a multiplicity of new worlds.
Today, I see marginalized communities innovating in ways that transcend survival, including
Nurturing relationships of solidarity across lived experiences and identities that sustain and expand visions of liberation.
In profound ways, these courageous new world makers invite us all to recover the marginalized places within ourselves. They encourage us to leave behind centralized forms of extractive and consolidating power. They beckon us to (re)turn to ancient and emergent ways of being.
They invite us to reframe our understanding of the margins—not as spaces of deficiency but as thresholds to new ways of being.
Thresholds to Liberation
What if we stopped defining the margins as places of disadvantage, lack, or weakness? What if, instead, we saw them as fertile grounds for innovation and liberation?
Marginalized communities have always been sources of profound wisdom and creativity. By embracing our people’s practices—be it through people’s songs, earth-honoring rituals, or storytelling—we open ourselves to sustainable and liberatory ways of being.
As courageous world-builders within our lineages and communities show us, the margins hold the keys to recovering the parts of ourselves that centralized power has tried to erase. To step into these thresholds is to step into possibility—to leave behind extractive systems and rediscover ancient and emergent pathways to freedom.
What possibilities might we uncover if we dared to follow their lead?
Practice
Take a moment to reflect on how you are innovating at the margins. What have been some key learnings in the past month(s)? How might you integrate these learnings to deepen your practice in the coming weeks? If moved, please share your reflection as a comment.
If you are not currently innovating at the margins, take some moments to survey your neighborhood and/or community (broadly defined) and identify a person or people who are. What fascinates you about their practices of innovation? What do they inspire you to try on? If moved, please share this aspiration as a comment.
Thank you in advance for sharing your learnings and aspirations!