2024 Program:
Power to Organize

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Equity in education requires stepping out of the box and into the community. Block by block, up, down, and all around their neighborhoods, Neighborhood Reading Captains are fostering a love of literacy in St. Louis.

Systemic racism has negatively impacted trust in institutions and has erected barriers in accessing accurate information for communities of color. In an effort to revise the narrative, Reader Readers is striving to shift power back to community members who were already actively hitting the pavement, books in tow, reading and handing out books in clinic waiting rooms, laundry mats, and barber shops through the Reading Captains program, modeled from Free Library of Philadelphia’s initiative as a part of their Read by 4th Campaign.

As trained and compensated members of the community, Ready Readers Reading Captains have engaged with over 500 children and families and distributed over 2,400 books throughout two targeted neighborhoods in just the first six months of pilot programming.

Ready for expansion into our next neighborhood, we encourage conference participants to join us as we reflect on the journey and elevate the voices of our Reading Captains and their experiences promoting literacy. Join us for a joy-filled panel conversation about how to leverage the collective power of those working to improve their own communities.

At the end, walk away with a community asset mapping tool, ready and confident to jumpstart your own community initiative—block by block!

MoJustice was founded by a formerly incarcerated person to serve as the unifying entity to do what has never been done before: building a statewide prison advocacy movement in Missouri. Our goal is to bring together stakeholders including individuals impacted by the criminal punishment system, concerned community members, litigators, and experts.

Our mission is to educate, empower, and unite these community members, transforming them into a powerful advocacy base. Through collaborative efforts, we strive to drive meaningful reforms within the Missouri prison system, addressing the systemic injustices, inhumane conditions, and absence of accountability.

I firmly believe that collective amplification and collective action are essential in building a statewide base of effective and sustained prison advocacy.

In this breakout session, we will discuss the strategy, obstacles, and collaborations in building this advocacy movement and the dire conditions in Missouri prisons that necessitate such a huge undertaking.

Muslim communities have been at the forefront of many organizing conversations this year, however the progressive movement has yet to understand Islamophobia as a structural phenomenon just like other racial justice issues, that is oftentimes connected to other forms of racism and xenophobia. Recognizing that systemic and institutionalized Islamophobia impacts all marginalized communities through increased state repression, makes it even more imperative to challenge it in our collective social justice fights.

Despite the last two plus decades of the targeting of Muslims in the War on Terror, Islamophobia has often been addressed and challenged as interpersonal violence, which has served to obscure and absolve the state of the institutional violence against Muslims that it has implemented, sustained, and perpetuated. Discounting At the same time, the proliferation and exponential increase of Islamophobia across the globe by other states has largely gone uncontested. In order to expand the conversation on combating Islamophobia, this workshop will engage participants in activities including how we can collectively articulate and define of this system of oppression, discussions on how Islamophobia is impacting Muslims domestically and across the the globe, deconstructing problematic and demonizing narratives of Islam and Muslims, and how to create community accountability campaigns to confront Islamophobia beyond its most obvious iterations, including how it is weaponized against other communities. This includes activities that highlight the industries that are complicit in and that profit from Islamophobia and/or complicit in affirming violence against Muslims and how to confront these forces.

Extremist anti-public education forces that have used attacks on race and gender to erode trust in public schools over the past few years are shifting toward an even more destructive end game: universal voucher legislation that directs billions in public funds to private schools, predominantly for the benefit of affluent families.

Today, in nine states, virtually every school-aged student is eligible to receive public money to spend as they choose—whether on tuition at a private school, tutors or piano lessons, sports programs, religious instruction, or homeschooling. Many more states are in danger of adopting these policies in 2024.

This dramatic expansion of vouchers threatens to undermine state budgets, defund public schools, blur the lines between church and state, and increase segregation. The extremist forces promoting universal vouchers may have unlimited funds, but the pro-public education forces have people power and popular support. Vouchers have appeared on the ballot 15 times over the past two decades, and in each case, the public has voted against them.

In this session, hear from HEAL Together community partners in Florida, Tennessee, and other states about how voucher legislation is impacting their public schools, and the strategies and tools that diverse communities can use to organize majority public support to block, limit, and repeal these policies.

Join us for a powerful and insightful panel discussion featuring Cal and Michael Brown Sr. from Chosen for Change and activists from the 2014 Ferguson Uprising. This panel will delve into the personal journeys of these activists, exploring the pivotal moments that sparked their activism, the impact it has had on their lives, and the progress made over the past 10 years.

The panel will engage the audience through a Q&A session, encouraging discussion on the ongoing challenges in dismantling systemic racism and supporting activists seeking racial justice. Don't miss this compelling panel discussion that offers a unique opportunity to hear from key figures in the Ferguson Uprising and gain valuable insights into the personal journeys, challenges, and victories of a decade of activism. Join us as we reflect on the past and look toward the future in the ongoing fight for racial justice.

In 2001, Boeing received $60 million in tax breaks to move its headquarters to Chicago. In return, Boeing was required to create 500 jobs in downtown Chicago, a promise it failed to keep. Meanwhile, Chicagoans were struggling to access basic services.

In 2012, Chicago fired 172 librarians and shortened library hours to save $3 million. Chicago closed half of its 12 public mental health clinics to save $2.2 million. That same year, Chicago gave $1.3 million to Boeing to reimburse them for real estate taxes.

Dissenters will provide a training on how communities can replicate the success of their 2022 “Boeing Arms Genocide” campaign, which resulted in Boeing moving its headquarters out of Chicago and denied Boeing $2 million in tax subsidies.

The Congressional Progressive Caucus Center will draw practical connections between the military budget and our everyday lives. For example, under the 1033 program, the Pentagon transfers surplus weapons to police departments across the country. This exacerbates violence against Black, Brown, and marginalized communities.

Military funding siphons funds away from social programs. A $100 billion cut to military spending could provide universal childcare ($70 billion), house every unhoused person ($7.4 billion), and provide universal school meals ($5.2 billion).

Together, we'll explore how U.S. foreign policy feeds racism at home and abroad and how U.S.-based campaigns can intersect with anti-militarism work.

Acudetox is a 5-point auricular acupuncture treatment created by activists, physicians, the Young Lords, and Black Panthers in New York in the 70's in response to the heroin and methadone epidemic. This treatment utilizes 5 points on the ear that create a release in the blockage of Chi associated with trauma. It has been used to relieve numerous sources of suffering including, various kinds of addiction.

Beyond these focused outcomes, and accompanied by an immersive sensory experience, Acudetox can open a window into relaxation, clarity, improved sleep, and the release of grief and tension that can last for days. It can serve as simple regular practice for the management of day-to-day impact of trauma in the body.

This session will introduce this easy and relaxing experience as provided by Dr. LJ Punch and the acudetox specialists who are part of Power4STL, represented trained and insured practitioners of auricular acupuncture. This practice includes other sources of healing, such as the burning of cleansing materials such as palo santo, the provision of herbal detox tea, the visual escape of Himalayan salt lamps, and the healing frequencies of a carefully crafted soundscape.

This session will allow participants to sit, exhale, rest, breathe, and reset to be in a better position to access the resources of the conference and to simply let chi flow. An approximate space of 8x4 ft is required for each participant, and a time window of 90 minutes is best.

Together, we will expand our knowledge and accountability to the experiences of Black trans people. Between examples from our history, real-time examples and issues, engaging conversations, and self-reflection activities, we will re-establish our role(s) in movements for racial and gender justice.

This session is about the protection, support, and thriving of people who are immeasurably impacted by historic and systemic violence. "Aliveness" is the category for this space, and we will collectively re-imagine what is needed to create holistic care for Black trans people. This session is not a naïve utopian dream nor a space for hollow performativism; it is a praxis of Radical Imagination and an intentional space for us to live into a better, safer world. All participants are welcome—regardless of their identities, scope of work, or prerequisite knowledge—as long as they are invested in fostering a community where Black trans people are liberated.

Session Objectives:
-Participants will learn about eight dimensions of aliveness and relate those dimensions to Black trans communities.
-Participants will engage in activities to set one goal for Black trans aliveness.
-Participants will develop an accountability system to sustain their role(s) in Black trans aliveness.

This interactive workshop is designed to equip you with the tools and knowledge to effectively advocate for change through meme-making and digital organizing. Here's what you can expect:

🔍 Narrative Shift Case Studies: Explore real-world examples of narrative shifts that have sparked change and learn how to apply these strategies to your own advocacy efforts.

🎯 Creating SMART Goals: Develop clear, actionable goals for your digital organizing campaigns using the SMART goal framework (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound).

🎨 Hands-On Graphic Design Tutorial: Master the art of meme-making with a step-by-step tutorial using Canva, a user-friendly graphic design platform. From selecting powerful imagery to crafting compelling messages, you'll learn how to create memes that resonate and inspire action.

💡 Prepare to Share New Content: Leave the workshop with fresh, impactful content ready to be shared across your social media platforms. Whether you're raising awareness about social issues or mobilizing your community for change, you'll have the tools to amplify your message effectively.

Do you fund or build organizational capacity for racial justice? If you facilitate or fund learning, strategy development, healing, team building, coaching, organizational change, and more to advance racial justice, this session is for you.

In this generative peer exchange, we’ll build community and share ideas about engaging tough issues, including:

*Embodying racial justice in organizational operations and programming
*Countering the attacks on equity and inclusion, and retrenchment on racial justice commitments
*Power dynamics between BIPOC groups
*Accountable whiteness
*Building and redistributing power to develop a racially just and liberatory culture

This session will include community building, peer exchanges, and space for emerging ideas. We will reflect on power and break into peer-exchange groups to explore specific questions, including: what does accountability look like? How can we be advocates for capacity building work that embodies racial justice? What is our responsibility in this post-election time to contribute to the movement for racial justice?

Facilitators are from the Deep Equity Practitioners Network (DEPn), a network focused on creating spaces for learning and strengthening the racial justice capacity building field. Founded at Facing Race 2018, when Race Forward organized a pre-conference session for capacity builders where participants lifted up shared values, a vision of liberated organizations and communities, DEPn is working to build a space to explore different approaches to building organizational capacity, ways to build power that advances racial justice in and through organizations, and ways to influence the ecosystem that supports capacity building work.

Two community coalitions share how they shift local community power by embedding racial equity values into collective decision-making structures. They will discuss the structures for equitable governance and community engagement that allow their work to be led by and accountable to communities of color.

They will share the tools they use to ensure their community development and health equity policy priorities emerge from and are vetted by communities of color and address the root causes of the injustices baked into our housing and land systems. Some tools shared will include power mapping, root cause analysis, and policy prioritization, as well as models for collective governance that leverage the many resources, experiences, and knowledge from partners.

A conversation will be facilitated about the inside/outside strategies these coalitions use to work with allied institutions. This will explore how they maintain their coalition’s commitment to systems change and community decision-making while collaborating with partners who have varying degrees of commitment to racial equity.

The presenters will investigate the common themes and obstacles that emerge across places and points of deviation, while encouraging participants to consider how similar efforts might look in their own communities. The session will be designed for participants to engage in conversations about deepening racial equity analysis and practices in their own place-based and systems change work and decision-making processes.

Participants will leave with a set of tools and practices around community ownership, coalition building, and collective governance structures to bring back to their own communities.

Neighborhood Leadership Fellows (NLF) is an advanced 9-month fellowship aimed at increasing and amplifying the voices of residents from the St. Louis Promise Zone (North St. Louis City and parts of North County) in civic decision-making spaces in order to produce more equitable regional policies for strong neighborhoods.

Developed by the University of Missouri—St. Louis, University of Missouri Extension, and the St. Louis Economic Development Partnership in collaboration with community leaders, NLF supports current and future leadership in the STL Promise Zone region—an area that is 88.8% Black according to the 2020 census—for those who want to make change at the systems level.

By equipping individuals to access the halls of power via seats on boards, commissions, and elected office, NLF addresses policy inequities and pushes towards systemic change, ultimately building a more racially just future. Fellows work together during and after the program to create policy opportunities and planning documents that address regional inequities.

Panelists will be NLF Alumni and will speak to measurable outcomes achieved locally and statewide as a result of their collaboration with other alumni and the role of lived experiences in leadership and community voice that led to their individual and collective success.

For the interactive portion of the session, presenters will lead small group dialogues on increasing resident leadership in audience communities to achieve a more equitable and racially just future. Groups will have the opportunity to share key takeaways.

In this moment, the rise of authoritarianism and increased attacks on democracy call for Black-led movements to have sustainable long-term strategies that include defensive tactics that protect Black communities, and offensive strategies that address the root causes of economic disparities. The urgency in confronting criminalization, gentrification and exploitation of Black communities often leads funders to focus on supporting short-term, “winnable” reformist campaigns, which limits grassroots organizing and community power building.

This session will offer a deep dive into the power of investing in transformative community-led organizations working at the intersection of racial and economic justice in Detroit, Michigan. In this session, you will hear from Black community organizers and their philanthropic partner on effective ways to fund community organizations to win, and how to prioritize the needs of Black movements while centering impacted voices in strategy and solutions.

Housing, employment, criminalization, land rights, and racial justice are just a few areas that make up this crucial intersectional work. This session will highlight recent successes in Detroit, home to the nation’s largest Black-majority city, as a case study for this discussion.

Wellspring Philanthropic Fund, Detroit Justice Center and Detroit Peoples Platform will discuss with attendees innovative ways to support and implement successful campaigns for economic security and stability in Black communities. This session is open to funders and organizations who support or want to engage in organizing, power building, and supporting strategic campaigns in Black communities.

Isolation is an unseen and under-discussed tool of control used to perpetuate mass incarceration. For the 1 in 2 Black women with an incarcerated loved one, that isolation has widespread political impact.

Learn how Essie Justice Group is using the power of isolation-breaking as part of a Black Feminist organizing model to drive social change. This workshop will bring attendees in on the disproportionate harms of incarceration to Black women, uncover the radical power of connection, and uplift key insights, tactics, and strategies attendees can leverage in movement-building work.

You will hear from Essie Justice Group organizers about how women with incarcerated loved ones are caregivers and the strategic backbones of their families, rooted in lived experience, ancestral strategies, and the leadership development that results from graduating from Essie Justice Group’s Healing to Advocacy Program: advocating for self, advocating for family, and advocating for community.

This conversation is meant to be an aspirational moment grounded in forecasting, to discuss the nexus of climate migration, and what we will see in cities, towns and legislation unless we begin to thoughtfully think about the future from a climate migration perspective. It is meant to be equal parts visioning and connection to concrete reality through the specific experiences and insights of audience members and the panelist.

Climate migration is often framed in terms that are fear-based, but there is an opportunity to think about the central value of culture—both those we identify with, and that which we want to create—in how we confront the reality of climate migration and its relationship with race and politics at all levels.

Through the panelists sharing a framework for dreaming forward, and audience member participation in small group work, this breakout session is meant to be a time of generative discussion, planning and visioning.

We see this as a starting point for collaboration, networking, information sharing and collective dreaming, to seed a collective approach to climate migration that is based on dignity, not fear.