Identity Is the Root of Belonging

Learning and Wellbeing are Inseparable 

Idris Brewster, co-founder Kinfolk Tech

In 2018, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio floated the idea of removing the Christopher Columbus statue at Columbus Circle. Activists, including Idris Brewster, pushed to reimagine what could stand there instead. When the statue stayed, Brewster pushed forward with a different idea: build a digital layer over the city so communities could place their own monuments.

Brewster, an artist and technologist, co-founded Kinfolk Tech, an augmented reality (AR) platform and digital archive to “preserve and share the undertold and erased stories from communities of color across the United States” and “empower people to tell their own history and contribute to what is deemed history.”

His core question is powerfully rooted in identity and belonging:“How do we build technology that can support a public education that is reflective of our people and is a space where Black and Brown folks can feel represented, contribute to their history, and share it out?” Kinfolk works with communities, cultural institutions, grassroots organizations, schools, and individuals to visualize and create interactive experiences that democratize history and bring it to life. Monuments, Brewster says, are not the end goal, but the spark for conversations about who we honor and “how we dream new futures.”

The problem Kinfolk is addressing is clear. Walk through almost any city in the United States and the plaques on the buildings and the names on the parks and schools announce who matters, whose stories count, and who belongs. For many Black and Brown young people, that story has been brutally consistent: you are not part of this place. Of the 48,000 monuments in the U.S., only about 200 honor Black and Brown people. Meanwhile, roughly 700 Confederate statues dominate significant parts of the landscape.

One cannot engage in civic thriving if the civic story does not name or represent you. Kinfolk’s work celebrates identity and builds belonging and civic thriving through representations in the landscape, inviting authorship, and protection against erasure. 

Kinfolk’s AR monuments are cool visuals but also claims to space. A young person can stand in a familiar square, lift their phone, and suddenly see an 80-foot-tall monument to a Black abolitionist, a local community organizer, or an artist from their neighborhood. If the built environment signals that your people are footnotes, a towering digital monument, paired with audio, oral histories, and music informs and helps to rewrite the story of who belongs.

Belonging isn’t only about being seen; it’s about having the right to speak. Kinfolk’s technology is intentionally built as a “root and a funnel for communities to contribute and have their voices heard within public spaces.” The work aims to transform “place-based memory into a new form of civic power” by enabling historically excluded communities to author, own, and mobilize their collective histories.

“Can we build a tool that allows people to learn about the spaces around them, wherever they are, and that is a tool for learning in public space?” Brewster asks.

And how can young people author their stories as they learn?

Kinfolk’s work comes as book bans, curriculum fights, and attacks on “divisive” histories are intensifying. Brewster is blunt about the stakes: “A lot of our institutions are under fire, erasure is happening in a lot of these spaces, and so we want to build a digital safe space where our histories can’t be erased and actually can be added to by the people.”

To date, much of Kinfolk’s content has been created with artists, historians, archivists, and educators. Now, Brewster is turning toward youth as storytellers in their own right. He wants to build “a swath of memory workers… folks who are in Kinfolk’s community, who are adding to this record of American history.” He wonders how teens might collect oral histories and local stories, then see those histories rendered as monuments, zines, or immersive scenes.

He’s clear that this will require scaffolds: tools, partnerships, and intergenerational collaborations that don’t replicate school-style hierarchies. The goal is a 15-year-old who says, I live here, I know things you don’t, and has a concrete way to turn that lived experience into a shared public memory.

This act of being trusted as an author of history, not just a consumer is essential to civic thriving.