Why subscribe to Labor and Love?

I’m Andrea Faye Hart, a queer chaplain-in-training and long-time media-based organizer from Chicago. I’m writing to make sense of my recovery and community organizing. I’m writing to honor the creativity of my inner-child.

I offer my spiritual and organizing journey as a way of connecting more with like-minded/like-action folks.

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I’m hoping to grow Labor and Love into a radical, grassroots print collective. I want to connect with folks on a similar wave who are interested in providing practical resources for their people. Want to make a zine for your church to talk about racial justice? A resource booklet for queer folks seeking resources? Let’s build.

If you like what you’re reading and want to conspire, email me at lenifaye@gmail.com.

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Longer bio, if you feel so inclined

Photo by Ariel J. Cobbert

Andrea Faye Hart is an award-winning media-based organizer who builds transformative and community-centered nonprofit newsrooms and programming across the United States. Hart has dedicated the past 17 years to experiments using journalism as a tool for liberation. She attributes this approach to her working poor, pro-union Chicago upbringing and to the early part of her career spent in youth media. She currently does resource and political organizing as the Director of Donor Engagement at ARC-Southeast, a leading reproductive justice organization that serves Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee.

While working as a teaching artist for the National Museum of Mexican Art’s Radio Arte,  Yollocalli Arts Reach, and Young Chicago Authors, she learned to foster a leaderful space and to share power with her students, kindred to the work of civil rights organizer Ella Baker. From 2012 until 2016 she served as the civic media instructor for Free Spirit Media, where she developed original youth-led programming, such as The Real Chi, and overhauled the organization’s in-school curriculum to better reflect what political scientist and social activist Cathy J. Cohen deems as youth participatory politics. She carried this praxis and community-centered focus with her as co-founder and the first director of community engagement at City Bureau, a Pulitzer-prize winning, Chicago-based civic journalism lab. 

At City Bureau, Hart helped transform the city of Chicago into a hybrid newsroom and classroom, running weekly Public Newsroom workshop series for three years while building and leading the Documenters training programs that were exported around the Midwest. To paraphrase abolitionist Mariame Kaba, Hart believes in fostering a million people-powered experiments to disrupt and repair how we share news and information. In 2019 she was honored as a catalyst by Northwestern University for their “150 Years of Women” celebration and recognized as one of the Institute for Nonprofit News’ Emerging Leaders.

In 2020 she left her hometown and headed South to pursue a master’s of divinity at Vanderbilt Divinity School (VDS), lovingly referred to as the radical lesbian seminary of the South. While at VDS on a full-ride as a Dean’s Scholar, she taught at the Nashville Women’s prison, served as Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s first chaplain intern for the program for LGBTQ Health, and joined the Tennessee Transformative Justice Collective. She graduated in 2023 with top honors for her thesis “Transformative Recovery, Grief and the Pursuit of an Embodied Abolitionist Spirituality,” and with a deeper understanding of how to combine her own 12-step recovery journey and community care practices with media-based organizing. 

She most recently served as the chief strategy officer for Memphis-based newsroom MLK50: Justice Through Journalism, where she led fundraising, operations, and development efforts. Under her stewardship, MLK50 grew to an annual budget of $2.4 million and a staff of 12. Hart serves as the Board Co-Chair for Scalawag, a journalism and storytelling nonprofit that pursues justice and liberation while standing in solidarity with marginalized people and communities in the American South. She is a proud queer quaker, who is gratefully making the South her new home along with her incredible partner and fur babies Studs and Reba. If you’re looking for a radical guest preacher or an unconventional wedding officiant, she’s your gal.