Tsz Lok Leung, a marketing administrator and volunteer, was at home anxiously checking her spouse’s location when, suddenly, they went off the map. A boots-on-the-ground activist, Wiisagi Ma’iingan (also known as A) had been at a climate action event in Washington DC when they disappeared. On the news, activists at the action were being brutalized.
“There’s no professional way to say that I freaked the fuck out,” she says.
Tsz Lok was informed by a friend of A’s that A had been detained. To remain calm for her son, she went into problem-solving mode. She began brainstorming safer ways to mobilize for causes important to her family. “Outlaw Rising was born out of a panic attack,” she says.
Luckily, A returned home safely. Upon their return, the two further developed Outlaw Rising along with their friends Anna and Alicia. Their hope for Outlaw Rising is to leverage tech to safely support historically marginalized communities.
Edited excerpts from an interview with Lok:
Outlaw Rising serves as a funding vehicle for community organizations and initiatives that are working towards bringing greater equity and accessibility across society’s industrial complexes. In addition, we’re working with several Web3 community collaborators to provide access to onboarding and additional Web3 resources to individuals from marginalized communities, so they have a greater understanding of the ways they can create within Web3, take up space and build generational wealth. We are breaking down barriers and intentionally centering historically marginalized voices in Web3.
We’ve been working on this project for about a year, developing relationships with grassroots, in real life and Web3 organizations to strengthen the foundation of our initiative.
When I hear the word “Outlaw, I immediately think of Robin Hood and wealth redistribution – tipping the scales of economic power in favor of the underprivileged. We focus on challenging dominant power, so I felt it was appropriate. It’s also a word that by definition describes a lot of members of our communities and our activists. By placing the word “Rising” at the end, we’re subverting expectations of the place historically marginalized communities are meant to occupy.
We recognize that the current societal structures in place disproportionately impact marginalized communities in negative ways, with access to technology being among them. Web3 is still in its early stages of development with new ideas and tech emerging each day. We feel it is critical in these beginning stages to ensure a diverse group of people are working together on its creation to embed accessibility, equity and visibility into Web3 culture.
When we as a Queer and racially diverse team take up space in an industry made for and by white men and “bro-types”, we inspire others to take up space too–in big ways, small ways, any way that we can.
As an artist, NFTs were my first exposure to the world of Web3 - it’s an exciting space to be and I wanted to see our communities take part in this space and thrive here. To me, the appeal of NFT projects comes down to storytelling, and historically marginalized communities should have the opportunity to take charge of our own narrative and immortalize our voices on the blockchain (sans censorship).
NFTs also provide an easier entrypoint to the world of Web3. We have to think about the ease in which our community members can start engaging with this technology and NFTs are a lot less intimidating of a concept to grasp compared to DeFi.
We don’t have one because our entire team is neurodiverse. Discord is not an accessible platform to us or our community members, but we encourage people to follow us on Twitter.
The Web3 space has already seen beautiful innovation and still through that innovation, the foundation is the same as Web2. The imprint of Capitalism and Dominant Power have already laid their claim with countless projects claiming expertship in DEI and Accessibility, while only being Diverse, Equitable, and Inclusive to a limited number of ways and types of people. Outlaw Rising is going to challenge that every step of the way. I don’t know about bringing anything to the existing table, because we’re looking to build our own.
Outlaw Rising is projected to launch in Q1 of 2023. They encourage folks who are interested in being early supporters of the project to follow them on Twitter.
Karie Fugett a mother and author whose debut memoir, Alive Day, is forthcoming from The Dial Press.
