The Network Center for Community Change was an organization in Louisville, Kentucky which worked for nearly 10 years on research, community organizing and training. NC3 or the Network as it was affectionately known, laid groundwork which has been fundamental to my understanding of social relationships, (dis)placement, accountability, and resistance. NC3's community organizing and training models Network 101 and 201 were simple in their lessons and approach, and powerful in their ability to transform people and space. The Network built community organizing on the principle that everyone is "creative, resourceful and whole." This concept has been central to my decolonial perspective building and participation in spaces that work from a decolonizing praxis. NC3 was one of the first spaces I was involved in where I consciously understood the subversive power that resides in networks. This project has been build Castell's (2012) idea that the use of networks to overcome social isolation is one of the tactics we can use to create and sustain social movement and change. Hip Hop as a medium of counter hegemonic cultural production which creates a network of producers, creators, fans, sustainers, educators, etc, all of whom are able to connect and generate meaning around space and time.

To full understand the way in which lessons from NC3 has shaped my work, i offer up one of my initial reflections to studying in London, "Entering the Heart of Empire" is a blog post I wrote as we began our journey of migration to London. Coming into the space of the academy I knew resistance and counter narrative were going to be spaces of existence. Within the academy I was given access to knowledge that helped shape my vocabulary and helped strengthen my voice for which I am grateful however, we must be critical of spaces where this process of knowledge acquisition is monetized.




The experiences, power, and connections forged through the Network cannot be represented or fully conveyed to people outside of the space. NC3's impact on persons, spaces and comm(unities) are deeply personal, the tools and resources shared between persons transformed spaces and relational fields. To process the closing of NC3 as a formal organization, people took to social media to express grief, love and gratitude. Below is a compilation of people's public declarations of meaning and being within the Network, the hashtag #BecauseofNC3 was used to create discourse and share stories.

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