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FEATURING NOURBESE FLINT - Our nation and our world is overrun with billionaires and bigots, but they are few and we are many. On this series, exclusive to subscribers of Rising Up With Sonali and viewers of Free Speech TV, we’ll hear from organizers in the movements for social justice, and dig into the nuts and bolts of values, strategies, tactics, narratives, and building power.
This week our guest is Nourbese Flint, President of All* Above All, and All* In Action Fund, leading their work to build political power and achieve reproductive justice for all.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: What does All above All mean? I get that it's a reproductive justice organization, but that name, I think, an explanation of it can help people understand where you're coming from.
Nourbese Flint: Yeah. So, it's actually a part of our origin story. All above All was created right after the Affordable Care Act passing I think it was in 2008, 2009?
Kolhatkar: 2010, I think.
Flint: Yeah. Whew, I’m like dating myself. But, when it got passed, the kind of compromise was abortion access. So, we still didn't have any federal coverage of abortion. And we had to segment in state coverage for abortion access. And so, some of us got together and kind of had a conversation like we can no longer have and leverage abortion access, particularly abortion access that really impacts folks who are living at the margins, as a tool anymore.
And so, All Above All really leaned into when people say “All,” it's usually with an asterisk, and it's not really all, it's well ‘all accept women of color or all accept LGBT folks or all accept young people.’ And so, we wanted to lean into the All. And when we say All it means all, so All* Above All with the asterisk saying that we are actually putting first the folks that usually are the asterisk at the bottom.