Ndindi Kitonga, Ph.D. is a Kenyan American educator, long-time community organizer, and houseless rights advocate. Ndindi is also the co-founder of Angeles Workshop School, a radical secondary school in Los Angeles with a focus on democratic education. In addition to her work in K-12 education, Ndindi teaches graduate courses in Black feminisms, abolition, teacher education, critical pedagogy, and anti-racist humanizing pedagogies for the CA public university system.
Ndindi is also a published scholar in critical pedagogy and democratic education and has written articles and book chapters such as In A Post-Floyd Era?: Race, Gender, Class, and Black Movements (2022), Black perspectives & What to Make of Mutual Aid? (2022), Anticolonialism, Africa and Humanism (2019), Angeles Workshop School: An Experiment in Radical Student Voice (2019), and Culturally Responsive and Socially Responsible Research Methodology (2013), Black vs. Black: Solidarity among the Black Diaspora (2010) among others.
In response to the horrific disparities the COVID pandemic exacerbated in her community, Ndindi co-created a small mutual aid network in her local community in March 2020. The unhoused population in this community is comprised mostly of Black and Latine people, many of who are disabled and undocumented. The abolitionist network of care, Palms Unhoused Mutual Aid (PUMA) has grown over the past two years from a small collective where organizers share food, hygiene, harm reduction, and other supplies with their unhoused neighbors, to one where they are organizing popular education clinics, coalition-building, and political mobilization.
Ndindi is also a member of the International Marxist Humanist Organization and the co-chair of praxis Association of Raza Educators, a liberatory education grassroots teacher organization.