Si Kahn has worked for forty-five years as a civil rights, labor, and community organizer and musician. He began his social justice career in 1965 with SNCC, the student winf of the Southern Civil Rights Movement. During the 1970's, he worked with the United Mine Workers of America on the Brookside Strike in Harlan County, Kentucky, and with the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union on the J.P. Stevens campain. In 1980, he founded Grassroots Leadership, a southern-based national organization that works to abolish for-profit private prisons, jails, and immigrant detention centers, as a step towards establishing a system of justice that is truly just and humane.

Si has previously written two organizing handbooks, How People Get Power and Organizing: A Guide for Grassroots Leaders, plus The Fox in the Henhouse: How Privatization Threatens Democracy, couathored with feminist/public philosopher Elizabeth Minnich, his long-time partner and spouse.