CTPF team members—Briana Stickney, Jeree Thomas, and Maria Alejandra Salazar—stand in front of Normandy High School, the high school Michael Brown Jr. attended and the starting point of Ferguson’s Unity Walk.
On Friday, August 9, 2024, the Communities Transforming Policing Fund team joined Chosen for Change and hundreds of activists and community members in Ferguson, MO to commemorate the life and legacy of Michael Brown Jr., and the uprising sparked by his murder at the hands of the police. 10-years later, the transformative impact of his life and the uprisings that followed, can be measured by the activism, deep healing connections, and interventions birthed from the movement in Ferguson.
Community members lay flowers and mementos at a memorial for Michael Brown Jr. during Ferguson’s Unity Walk.
This week, we are hosting a 10-year reflection, commemoration, and forward-looking conversation on the promise, pain, and healing associated with collective organizing to end state violence. (This event is open to funders, and is being organized in collaboration with our sibling funds, the Black-Led Movement Fund (BLMF) and Spark Justice Fund (SJF), and our friends at Funders for Justice and Movement 4 Black Lives.)
One of the lessons of the Ferguson uprisings was that communities need safety solutions beyond policing. Every community is beautifully unique, and possesses its own assets and safety needs. As a result, across the country we don’t need a one-size fits all model of safety, but rather we need one million experiments to expand our ideas about what keeps us safe.
To that end, we have partnered with our sibling funds, BLMF and the Racial Equity in Journalism (REJ) Fund, to host a virtual funder screening of One Million Experiments (1ME), created by the movement journalism and media hub Respair Production & Media, for our funder partners. A powerful documentation of vision, this film project (and accompanying podcast) ask, ‘What does safety in a world without police and prisons look like? What does it make more possible?’–and puts forward community experiments for safety from around the world.
Members of Chicago Torture Justice Center (CTJC) at an organizing meeting. CTJC is prominently featured in 1ME and will be present at our September donor film screening.
Key Takeaways from Community-Based Safety Experiments
Moving through the planning of this event, and digesting the richness shared in these conversations— including those featured throughout 1ME—surfaced two key takeaways for us:
- Regardless of what programs or services organizations offer their community, a grounding principle across all experiments is that efforts are rooted in harm reduction and harm repair, both of which are essential to creating healthier, safer communities.
- Community-based safety experiments—in particular those that are Black-led—are still vastly underfunded, and require an abundance of resources in order to stand up to our behemoth police and carceral systems, which harm communities through escalating criminalization, discrimination, and violence. Just this week, voters on the other end of Missouri, approved a five percent increase to the police budget in Kansas City.
Call to Action: Investing in Black Community Organizers
At the CTPF, we are proud to do our part as funders in mobilizing resources to this essential, life-saving and -affirming work. This spring, we moved $4.2 million to 37 new grantee partners, who are supporting their communities through transformative experimentation. And last year, we launched our first-ever Healing Justice and Community Care Fund, moving $200k to our current grantee partners. These resources were used by grantee partners to develop culturally responsive, organization-based arts healing practices, send staff to wellness retreats, provide mental health services to those with direct experience of police violence, and more.
As we commemorate the brilliance and wins born out of the Ferguson uprising, as well as long legacy of the struggle towards justice during Black August, we call on our fellow funders to invest in the leadership and wisdom of Black community organizers, and in the millions of experiments towards community safety and healing. They are creating a path towards a more liberated and safe future for us all.
To partner with the CTPF in co-creating this future, email us at ctpf@borealisphilanthropy.org.