The Atlantic Fellows for Racial Equity program has announced the 2021 class of fellows working to end anti-Black racism in the United States and South Africa and build a more equitable world.

Established in 2016, the non-residential program is based at Columbia University in New York City and the Nelson Mandela Foundation in Johannesburg and is dedicated to building the capacity of the racial equity field through leadership development, network building, innovation, and narrative change. Over the next eighteen months, fellows will meet, share, learn, and collaborate with change makers from their home countries and abroad and develop projects designed to make significant contributions to the field of racial equity. Upon graduating from the fellowship experience, they will join AFRE's Senior Fellows Community, which further accelerates and amplifies their individual and collective impact.

This year's twenty Atlantic Fellows for Racial Equity include Aria Florant, co-founder of Liberation Ventures, a fiscally sponsored project of PolicyLink that provides resources and technical assistance to Black-led movement for racial repair; Musa Gwebani, project manager of socioeconomic rights at the Open Society Foundations in Cape Town; Tshepiso Mokoena, founder and executive director of the Tshepiso Mokoena Foundation in Gauteng, which is focused on programs for women and girls; Daranee Petsod, senior advisor at Hyphen, which develops high-impact public-philanthropic partnerships and collaborations to address the most urgent issues facing the United States; Reggie Shuford, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania; and Nazeer Sonday, chair of Cape Town-based PHA Food & Farming Campaign, which organizes smallholder farming communities to protect the farmlands from urban development.

The announcement comes at a time when U.S. communities of color face threats to their voting rights, even as the pandemic continues to send waves of uncertainty across the country, and while South Africa recently saw the most severe and far-reaching unrest in decades.

"Until South Africa and the United States reckon with the legacies of racial injustice and fundamentally transform, we will never overcome the inequalities we see today," said AFRE executive director Kavitha Mediratta. "This fundamentally is a failure of leadership. This moment, and the future of our democracy, requires powerful leadership to advance justice in our two countries and across the world. AFRE has been building a strategically resourced network since 2017 as a response to that need and we are excited to welcome these incredible individuals into our transnational community."