Kai Newkirk is a nationally-recognized community organizer who has helped lead fights that have made a difference for millions of people in our country. He serves as the co-chair of the Progressive Council of the Arizona Democratic Party and is the founder of For All, a center for nonviolent action and organizing, and the Salt River Mindfulness Meditation Community.
Kai was born and raised in West Virginia, the son of a carpenter and a child care worker who divorced when he was very young. As a young man Kai was looking for ways to make our world more fair for his working class family, neighbors, and friends and to protect the land and life with which he was taught to feel a deep connection. As a high school student Kai discovered the answer of community organizing and nonviolent direct action in the fight to stop the corporate clear-cutting that destroyed old growth forests and working class jobs. After starting college on a scholarship, Kai became an organizer as a student leader in the movement against corporate globalization and the anti-war movement after 9/11 and never looked back.
In the years since, Kai fought for justice as a shop floor union leader in a hotel and then union staff organizer, helped elect Democrats to local and state offices, served as a deputy to a Los Angeles city councilmember with more constituents than most members of Congress, and was a primary founder of multiple nonprofit organizations and social movement campaigns like Democracy Spring. He has trained thousands of people and organized nonviolent action campaigns in the environmental, climate justice, universal health care, immigrant rights, anti-war, labor, global justice, voting rights, and other movements.
In 2018, Kai moved to Arizona with his then-partner, Erika Andiola, to be close to her family. They have lived in Tempe ever since, marrying in 2020 and buying their first home in 2022, where they live with their beloved dog Luna.
As an organizer and faith leader, Kai is devoted to the tradition of nonviolent leadership rooted in the ethic of loving our neighbors as ourselves embodied by leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., Dolores Huerta, and Mohandas Gandhi. He has worked with and been trained or mentored by leaders of historic nonviolent freedom struggles, including Rev. James Lawson and Huerta, who has called Kai “a nonviolent warrior for justice” who “embodies the Si Se Puede spirit.”
Kai has been arrested over 25 times in acts of nonviolent civil disobedience and direct action, led multiple 100+ mile plus marches, and undertaken two extended political fasts, including one while being held in the Washington DC jail.
Fights that Kai has helped lead have contributed to victories like union recognition for workers making poverty wages, passing the Affordable Care Act, making support for reforms to get big money out of politics like overturning Citizens United and public financing of elections near-universal among Democrats, preventing the repeal of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, defeating Trump’s repeal of the ACA, and blocking Kyrsten Sinema’s path to re-election, opening the way for her her Democratic replacement. These wins have changed the lives of millions of Americans for the better or opened the door to historic change yet to be completed.
Kai has devoted his adult life to leading nonviolent struggles to make our nation and world a Beloved Community, as Dr. King said. Now he’s running for Congress to bring the same fight from the strikes and the streets into the halls of power. He will never stop working to make America finally live up to the promise of liberty and justice for all.
