Ashley Dixon

About

Ashley Dixon hails from a working-class background in rural Kansas. She is the Rural Georgia Campaigns Lead Organizer at Southern Crossroads, part of Showing Up For Racial Justice (SURJ). She organizes poor and working-class people in the rural U.S. South around material issues impacting their daily lives.

Dixon's background includes a decade of base building in the South with labor unions and workers’ centers, in addition to issue-based organizing. Her work includes unionizing a unit of 3,000 contingent faculty members at the largest community college in the nation, resulting in the biggest union win in the U.S. in 2019. After working as a correctional officer at a men’s prison in rural Tennessee, she helped end the city of Nashville's contract with a private prison company in 2020, and gave testimony of human rights abuses that sparked a statewide audit of the Tennessee prison system. Recently, she designed the grassroots base building infrastructure for the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta, Georgia, and wrote about her work in a chapter of a forthcoming anthology titled No Cop City, No Cop World: Writings from the Stop Cop City Movement (Haymarket Books).

She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology from Bard College and a Masters of Education from Vanderbilt University.
 

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Ashley Dixon headshot

Agenda

Apr
26
Democracy in Crisis: The Courage to Re-Humanize One Another
This session will dive into Bridging for Democracy (B4D), a project that is developing strategies through which grassroots power-building organizations meaningfully bridge across racial, ideological, and urban-rural divides to strengthen democratic norms at a time of deep social fragmentation and dehumanization. Over the past decade, movement groups in the U.S. have invested heavily in voter outreach and significantly increased civic engagement. However, our democracy has still weakened and fragmentation is hardening. B4D partners have been conducting pilot projects in Illinois, Georgia...