350 Wenatchee Climate Conversations NCW

Beloved Community,

Today, we mourn the loss of George Floyd, and continue to support his family’s efforts to find solace and meaningful accountability. Daunte Wright, Adam Toledo, Ma’Khia Bryant, and so many others who have lost their lives, deserved more.

A guilty verdict for Derek Chauvin did not change what we know to be true: a racist system will never deliver justice for our people. We’re demanding a new approach to keeping us and our communities safe: we must divest from policing and invest in our communities.

If you’ve heard enough, become a community co-sponsor of the BREATHE Act.

We need to see a shift from massive spending on police that don’t keep us safe to a massive investment in a shared vision of community safety that actually works. We’re tired of quick fixes and piecemeal reforms.

Since last summer, we won nearly a billion dollars in direct cuts from US police departments & at least $160m investments in community services. That’s only the beginning — we need to see a massive shift in spending on police to investments that actually work. The time is now to #DefundThePolice

• In 25 cities, such as Denver and Oakland, officials moved to remove police from schools, saving an additional $34m.

• Portland, Oregon, cut $15m from its budget and disbanded a gun violence reduction unit and transit team that had both long been accused of over-policing Black communities.

• San Francisco officials pledged to divest $120m from police over two years with plans to invest in health programs and workforce training.

• The Austin police reallocated over $20m from their police department to emergency medical services for Covid-19, community medics, mental health first responders, services for homeless people, substance abuse programs, food access, workforce development, abortion services, victim support, parks and more.

In every corner of this country we have organized, protested, and voted against wanton police violence, against apathy towards hundreds of thousands of deaths from COVID-19, and for health care, living wages, education – and our futures.

And now we’re bringing the fight to Congress. The BREATHE Act offers a radical reimagining of public safety, community care, and how we spend money as a society. This omnibus legislation divests federal resources from incarceration and policing and invests in non-punitive, non-carceral approaches to community safety that center the protection of all Black lives.

Last year’s uprisings changed what was possible, and what seems impossible today is doable tomorrow. We will be the ones to make it happen. Join us.

In Power,

The Movement for Black Lives

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Special Announcement:

The movement for Black liberation has won media attention. But we have again and again seen our story told for us rather than by us.

In collaboration with In These Times magazine, this summer we are taking over an entire magazine to document our work, speak for ourselves and to build narrative power using our stories.

“To build a new future with power centered in the hands of Black communities, the movement must quickly evolve from defining what we are fighting against to envisioning and articulating what we are fighting for,” writes M Adams, a community organizer, co-executive director of Freedom Inc. and a leadership team member with M4BL.

Writing by Miski Noor, Kandace Montgomery, Kayla Reed, NTanya Lee, Amara Enyia and other leaders and organizers looks back to the wisdom of the ancestors and movements who came before us, reports on the conditions on the ground around the country, and envisions a liberated future.

The Movement for Black Lives Takeover issue of In These Times will be on newsstands July 1.

In These Times is an independent magazine that, for 45 years, has chronicled and informed popular movements for social, economic, racial, and environmental justice. But this summer, they decided to do something new and turn the magazine over entirely to a social justice movement. In These Times’ July 2021 issue is conceived, assigned and written entirely by Black liberation activists and organizers within the Movement for Black Lives.

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