2024 Program: Breakout Block 1

In 2014, the St. Louis region was thrust into the national spotlight, as long-term calls for change from activists and organizers reached a fever pitch following the murder of Michael Brown. Multiple commitments were made and new organizations founded to address the historic disparities and targeted disinvestment in communities of color throughout the region. Ten years later, how does the work look today?

This session will explore how grassroots organizers and other community leaders in St. Louis are partnering with funders to sustain the movement for racial and economic justice. We’ll discuss concrete strategies for funders looking to incorporate power-building into their work and highlight opportunities for funders to leverage their influence beyond the check to ensure community has a seat at the table.

We’ll also explore the story of one local family foundation that recently pivoted its strategy to support these efforts and what they’re learning along the way.

Charli Cooksey will share how her organization, WEPOWER, is partnering with local funders to build power in St. Louis and the kinds of effective funder relationships she’s cultivated over the years.

Erica Henderson, who leads Key Strategic Group, will share how her organization works to keep community voices centered at the region’s civic infrastructure and collaborative planning efforts. And Dr. Jason Purnell, President of the James S. McDonnell Foundation, will share how the foundation is honoring community wisdom and expertise as it pursues a new strategy to advance shared prosperity in the local region.

According to state and federal law enforcement officials, May 25th 2020 was the inception of the largest, most organized, and best funded criminal syndicate in America’s history. Tens of thousands of co-conspirators. Rampant violence across the nation. Millions of dollars stolen. Property destroyed. All over the span of four years.

According to police and prosecutors, you’re likely a part of this criminal syndicate to commit violence, racketeering, and intimidation. Court documents suggest that if you have attended a rally, concert, meeting, or protest in support of racial, gender, reproductive, migrant, or climate justice since the death of George Floyd in May 2020, you could be a co-conspirator. If you contributed your talent, your money, or even provided food in support of a ceasefire in Gaza, you could be a co-conspirator.

Law enforcement in at least 12 states, as well as the FBI, are advancing a dangerous legal framework that weaponizes the First Amendment against social movements. It asserts that dissent is the enemy of the state. Association is now conspiracy.

And the problem is getting worse. State legislatures and Congress are advancing bills that increase the use of surveillance, criminalization, and punishment built from the Global War on Terror and War on Drugs to topple decentralized movement formations. We’ll go inside the authoritarian playbook to target and destroy the engine of our democracy and explore what social movements, philanthropy, and government officials must do to stop it.

Preemption is currently being used and abused to disrupt advances in racial justice, health equity, voting, and countless other issues that deeply impact the ability to build power for communities of color. We saw this clearly in Jackson, Mississippi, where the state legislature passed House Bill 1020, mandating the appointment of special judges and prosecutors by Mississippi state officials in majority-Black Hinds County, which includes the City of Jackson.

HB 1020 also permits Capitol Police to take effective control of policing responsibilities in an area of Jackson, increasing the police presence in Black communities. With its enactment, it shifts authority over the county’s criminal justice system away from democratically elected judges and prosecutors elected by Black voters. It also starves revenue from the city by diverting 18% of the tax revenue that should go to Jackson city but will now go to the state to fund the new judiciary arm.

The blatant power grab and preemptive attack by the majority-White legislature in a Black city like Jackson, MS, is spreading across the country. White and right-wing conservative states are attacking our voting rights, education and curriculum, efforts to advance police abolition, living wage ordinances, and the bodily autonomy and healthcare of trans and gender-expansive youth.

Our communities are feeling the brunt of these state attacks. This panel will discuss the impact of state power grabs at the local level and the strategies to combat them, from narrative shifts needed to organizing strategies to protect local victories and community self-determination.

Threats of political violence are eroding U.S. democracy. With upticks in all the major indicators of political violence (PV), communities of color and other marginalized communities are under severe attack. We have to go on the offensive to address these threats and acts of PV, in order to maximize backfire, defections, and extract costs on perpetrators. Defense alone will not cut it.

There is a long history of politically motivated threats and violence being used in the U.S. to restrict the franchise, suppress dissent, and invoke fear and terror in communities of color and other marginalized communities. It was the glue that held together Jim Crow and single-party white rule.

Today, political violence is one of the most viscerally felt aspects of the authoritarian playbook, with real people and communities suffering actual harm. It continues to be one of the greatest obstacles to achieving a multi-racial democracy.

Tens, if not hundreds, of millions of Americans think threats of political violence are unacceptable, and many are concerned about this problem. However, thus far they have not been given much direction or guidance about how they can:
1) Support victims of threats
2) Impose costs on perpetrators and those who incite them
3) Transform fear and threats into resilient and organized multi-racial pro-democracy organizations and communities.

This session will offer training and resources on how to do all three.

What is the role of civic trauma in our political reality? And how can this frame offer us a way to build new coalitions that catalyze the power we have to win and govern in unapologetically progressive ways?

This workshop will start with the concept of civic trauma, how we measure and map its impact, and how it offers a frame to unite communities across different histories. Participants will then dive into two projects that build civic healing to activate community power in elections and governance:
-The first, a voter guide co-created by over 1000 residents who debated hundreds of ideas to center the election narrative on what mattered most to them.
- The second, a community-led budgeting process launched in the midst of the uprisings to disrupt the public discourse pitting residents against each other.

In illustrating these case studies, participants will engage with real-life examples that offer countless adaptations to fuel progressive change and build wider frames of belonging in civic systems. Built and implemented in Chicago, these examples offer lessons that apply to electoral and issued-based organizing in both widely progressive and deeply divided communities across the country.

From Atlanta to Palestine, organizers are facing unprecedented attacks on the right to protest, including repressive laws designed to silence dissent across issue areas. In this session, you’ll hear from:

- Kamau Franklin, the Founder and Executive Director of Community Movement Builders, which has been leading the fight to StopCopCity since its construction was announced.
-Julia Bacha, the director of the documentary "Boycott" and the Creative Director at Just Vision, an organization that fills s a media gap on Israel-Palestine through independent storytelling.

Presenters will share media clips and other compelling visual materials to illustrate this issue and efforts to push back. For years, lawfare tactics have been used to silence organizers for racial justice and Palestinian advocacy across the U.S. and beyond.

For Palestinian advocacy, the trend is especially sharp in local legislatures, where 36 states have laws on the books that aim to silence those boycotting Israel based on its human rights record. Similarly, StopCopCity organizers are facing legislation that penalizes essential organizing methods, criminalizing everything from the use of burner phones to charitable bail funds, impacting the ecosystem of who can protest, dissent, and organize for their communities.

With these laws spreading quickly across the US, the speakers will share about techniques used to push back and the importance of cross-movement / intersectional organizing in these efforts.

We will explore the critical role of psychological safety in enabling everyone – especially those most marginalized – to thrive. Through personal reflection and group discussion, we'll identify what psychological safety looks like and name institutional barriers to achieving it.

In particular, we'll discuss the influence of white supremacy culture as an impediment to psychological safety. We will define white supremacy culture and its implications. As Tema Okun tells us, “White supremacy culture trains us all to internalize attitudes and behaviors that do not serve any of us.”

We will explore these common attitudes and behaviors (e.g., perfectionism, either/or thinking, defensiveness) – how they show up in organizational culture and how we can interrupt them. Participants will leave with a greater understanding of these terms and will feel more empowered to build a more psychologically safe environment in their own institutional context.

We invite Facing Race attendees to join us for a session exploring the creation process and lessons learned from the Reparations Grantmaking Blueprint, a tool designed by reparations movement leaders to guide a donor collaborative in investing in the reparations movement in a strategic, effective, and equity-centered manner. This will include:

- Grounding the session in the three key roles that philanthropy can play in catalyzing the reparations movement and a culture of repair
- Discussing our approach to movement-led strategy development, including reflections from movement leaders that are part of the Blueprint Steering Committee
- Engaging with the draft Blueprint, including some of the strategic milestones, activities, and tradeoffs that emerged in the process
- Discussing and reflecting on opportunities for participants to advance collaborative/movement-led strategy development and/or the reparations movement from their institutional contexts.

Our hope is that session participants feel more prepared action to change grantmaking strategy development practices in their own institutions, in the form of:

- Identifying specific and creative ideas about how they can implement similar frameworks in their institutions (e.g., particular program areas, potential partners, etc.)
- Analyzing their field’s landscape to clarify how and where collaboration will be valuable
- Understanding opportunities to deepen their institutions’ engagement with reparations and racial repair

Since Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, Standing Rock and a resurgent labor movement, our movements continue to expand and grow stronger, but we need to keep sharpening our tactics to build and win lasting power. Organizers are finding creative ways to build governing power that brings BIPOC communities on the frontlines of injustice into direct participation with administrative agencies to shape and implement just, effective public policies. Co-governance between communities and public agencies can help ensure the sustainability of campaign wins, deepen democracy and equity and create transformative policies and more effective governance. However, it can be challenging to build trust and alignment, collaborate across institutions, build capacity and sustain co-governance through ever-changing conditions within government and communities.

In this workshop, we'll share an overview of co-governance strategies between BIPOC communities (anchored by power-building organizations) and local and state government agencies. We will explore lessons learned and hear from Tenants Transforming Greater St. Louis about their organizing to enforce building code protections for tenants while building tenant power. We'll also break out into small groups to enable participants to workshop co-governance scenarios including situations from their own work they want to workshop with others.

Government and other public sector agencies can no longer ignore the ways that antisemitism and misappropriated concerns about it harm Jews of all races and non-Jewish people of color, threatening our racial equity efforts and causing job loss and social isolation. Incidents of and concerns about antisemitism have risen dramatically recently, causing harm to Jews and stoking fear. Simultaneously, there is confusion about differences between antisemitism, legitimate criticism of the state of Israel, and support for equal and human rights for Palestinians. Those seeking to eliminate racial equity and DEI initiatives – from education to policies and practices designed to end racial and gender inequities – are successfully using (often unfounded) claims of antisemitism to achieve their goals. This session will explore these and other reasons why – and how – we need to integrate a proactive, solidaristic approach to dismantling antisemitism into our racial justice efforts. Through interactive presentation and small group discussion, we’ll explore the value of a racial equity strategy for fighting antisemitism through case studies of multi-racial, multi-religious groups of organizers working alongside and within local government and universities in Washington State and New York. We’ll review frameworks and practice ways to notice, name, and intervene in actual or potential incidents. Participants will also receive Diaspora Alliance resources that support their ongoing abilities to visualize, normalize, organize, and operationalize this approach in our policy, practice, decision-making, communications, and trainings.

Government agencies typically design programs for people in need. But what happens when we design programs with people in need?

For the City of Boulder, a new direct cash assistance program, Elevate Boulder, offered an opportunity to engage community members as collaborative decision-makers. The result so far has been a dignified, trusted program with greater power to transform the lives of program participants, and transform other city processes.

In this session, participants will hear about how the city centered the Elevate Boulder decision making process in the lived experience of community members; and established goals for a dignified, equitable process.

Participants will also engage in small groups to explore how the same elements of success could be applied to other kinds of city policies and processes. We will also explore how we can measure trust and transformative impacts to keep doing what works best for the people we serve.

As most organizers and advocates know, books such as Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow can play a major role in changing the national discussion about urgent social issues. A well-written book that makes a compelling argument can be an essential tool to inject transformative ideas into the popular discourse. At The New Press, we’ve found that movement leaders can be best positioned to share a unique vision for a just future.

The New Press’s senior editors will illustrate how a book can help leverage change. Participants will gain practical knowledge about how to move through the stages of book publishing, including: developing a book concept; preparing a cogent, well-informed proposal; drafting a manuscript; publicizing the book; and collaborating with organizations to amplify the book’s impact.

We will share relevant resources, key examples, and case studies, and participants will have an opportunity to practice in small groups and have their questions answered by veteran editors. The New Press is uniquely positioned as a non-profit publisher in the public interest to seek out authors committed to social change, and to develop works of non-fiction that set forth new, paradigm-shifting ideas.

Our catalog includes works from Noam Chomsky and Lisa Delpit, and more recent contributions to conversations in criminal justice and education reform, including Mariame Kaba and Andrea Ritchie’s No More Police: A Case for Abolition and Monique Couvson’s Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools.

We all come from people who have made a way out of no way. Let us reflect on what we have accomplished collectively in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. Whether we’re Black or white, Latine or Asian, Indigenous or newcomer, we and our ancestors have faced insurmountable odds before and continue to make change so that our families and communities are vibrant and whole.

In this workshop, we will focus on two research-backed elements of effective race-forward messaging that counters the huge obstacle of cynicism and inspires people to action: “Vision” and “Victories.” We will discuss how to incorporate these into our messaging and why they strengthen the stories we tell and the campaigns we run.

Frame-breaking narratives shape-shift our collective landscape, offering clues about the value of our past in service of tomorrow. "Rooted: Cultivating Black Wealth in Place" is more than a wealth-building strategy and potential policy innovation. Rooted is an invitation to think and act differently, to step boldly into a new story designed to signal a new way forward, toward a St. Louis where every neighborhood is a chosen place to live, raise children, and grow old.

Join us for a film screening and panel discussion; hear from participants, activation partners, and journalists actively shaping stories of possibility and transformation. Get familiar with "Rooted: Cultivating Black Wealth in Place" by stepping into Invest STL’s innovative approach to narrative reframing and storytelling.

Meet neighborhood residents participating in Rooted through the content and meet the content creators through the panel and Q&A. Invest STL is not only embarking on a three-year journey with participants in the initiative but also developing and producing a storytelling partnership with Missouri School of Journalism professors Ron Stodghill and Alicia Haywood to span the breadth of the initiative.

They will be joined by Invest STL's Narrative + Communications Partner, Michael Pagano, to discuss these emerging stories, what we are hearing, how we are listening, and where we might be heading.

Books have long been an instrument for narrative change in movements, helping shift conversations and awareness to more positive aspects of society as well as providing context and guidance to combat the systemic issues impeding racial and social change. Titles from "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass" to "Borderlands" to "The Sum of Us" have been utilized and referenced in organizing spaces to gain a firmer grasp of the unity between communities, the impact of Western imperialism, and how civil rights continue to be attacked.

Rinku Sen, executive director at Narrative Initiative, and Minal Hajratwala, founder of Unicorn Authors Club, will lead this panel discussion and intersperse their presentation with interactive questions and writing prompts on the importance of books as tools for organizing. The panelists will discuss how they see their work as writers and engaging with organizers/writers to help understand the need for narrative shifts.

The discussion will explore how and what books have provided lessons on organizing by blending historical analysis with personal stories to center diaspora stories. Sen and Hajratwala will also share how their respective experiences led to a partnership on publishing interventions programming.

This session will include writing prompts to engage attendees on how they can frame their writing/work into a resource for narrative and social change.

Contrary to the mistaken belief that Islam in America originated with the influx of Arab and Pakistani immigrants in the 1960s, Islam actually originated in this country vis-à-vis enslaved West African Muslims. Thomas Jefferson and George Washington owned enslaved West African Muslims. These first Muslims were forced to convert to Christianity and relinquish all components of their Muslim identities.

In fact, historians argue that the initial shipping of these individuals while naked served to not only dehumanize and animalize them, but to specifically undermine their Islamic conceptions of modesty, and to thereby initiate the complete erasure of their Muslim identities. They not only retained a myriad of components of their Muslim identities, but in some cases, negotiated their identities uniquely to fit their enslaved circumstances.

They found ways to covertly pray, fast, read and scribe copies of the Qur’an from memory, and establish underground Islamic learning networks. The impact of these enslaved Muslims is far-reaching and continually being discovered. Modern-day musicologists are learning about how the melody of the blues, a musical product of slavery, may be derived from the tune of the adhan, the Islamic call to prayer.

These first Muslims laid a strong foundation for Islam in America. They represent a strong adherence to Islam and the Muslim identity, despite their unimaginably difficult circumstances of being enslaved. They inspire modern-day Muslim Americans to be unapologetic of their identities.

Narrative organizing is more than altering words; it's about shifting power dynamics and constructing systems that empower communities. This session proposes exploring DIY narrative research methods to advance racial justice through narrative organizing. We'll delve into the fundamental question: Whose narrative matters?

In this session, we’ll teach you how narrative research recognizes narrative power and generates research outcomes to build the common good. Recognizing that research is labor, we'll explore the importance of providing stipends and adopting trauma-aware approaches in both group and individual interviews.

Approaching research projects can be overwhelming, so we’ll share our tips on how to design research projects with accountability in mind, select research participants and advisory boards, conduct interviews, and identify deep narratives. To assist in the latter, we’ll also launch the Narrative Index—a reference set of helpful and harmful narratives common to narrative organizing for racial justice, like interdependence and independence.

This session will emphasize the significance of relationship-building and trust in DIY research. While practical skills like selecting advisory boards are valuable, true impact often lies in the micro-interactions that shape our landscaping and analysis work. Acknowledging this, we'll offer insights into fostering genuine connections that drive meaningful change.

Participants will leave equipped with a practical toolkit and a deeper understanding of how DIY narrative research can contribute to their power-building goals through narrative organizing. Join us for a session full of learning how to do the work of identifying narratives and reshaping the future of our communities towards justice.