(indistinct chatter) - Welcome everyone to the Penny Stamps' Distinguished Speaker Series.

(soft upbeat music) (audience applauding) (no audio) Welcome to the Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series everyone.

My name's Chrisstina Hamilton, the series director.

Today we present a University of Michigan alumni, racial justice lawyer and founder of the Detroit Justice Center, Amanda Alexander.

A big thank you to our partners today, the U of M Prison Creative Arts Project, U of M Democracy and Debate.

And series partners, Detroit Public Television and Michigan Radio 91.7 FM.

The Prison Creative Arts Project which is a very important project that happens out of the University of Michigan brings those impacted by the justice system and our U of M community into artistic collaboration through courses, exhibits, publications, arts programming, and events that reach out to thousands of people each year.

And many of you will know PCAP from the Prison Art Exhibition, the largest exhibition of art by incarcerated artists in the country.

Just so happens, the 27th annual Exhibition of Artists in Michigan Prisons is currently on view hosting the work of men and women from all of our fair state's 25.

Woo, that was a great moment for the mic to go up.

Yes, the state of Michigan has 25 prisons in both the upper and lower Peninsulas.

This year, the exhibition hosts 645 works.

They are on view every day in the Duderstadt Gallery on North Campus until April 4th.

You should definitely go and check it out.

The work is also available for purchase with all proceeds going to the artists.

So it's not to be missed.

I have many pieces of work in my house that I've purchased there.

Some of the favorite work that I own is from these wonderful people.

So please do remember to silence your cell phones.

We will have a Q&A today in here with the microphones at the ends of the aisles.

And I just wanna give you one note before we take off with Amanda today.

I received many messages earlier this week asking if we were going to be moving ahead with today's event in light of the GEO Union Strike currently happening on campus including from Amanda Alexander herself, our guest today.

We even consulted directly with the union to make sure that this event was not in conflict in any way with the strike, in case any of you had questions.

And in line with this thinking about collective opportunities, we're going to start today with a very brief message for Stamps students from Santana Malnaik, who is your Central Student Government Stamps Representative.

And following her message, we will get a proper introduction of our guest today from former director of the Prison Creative Arts Project and now Director of Latina/o Studies, Ashley Lucas.

So now a word from your student government rep, Santana Malnaik.

(audience applauding) - Hi everyone.

My name is Santana Malnaik and I'm a junior here at Stamps.

I'm the current Central Student Government Stamps Representative, a position I've served in for two years now.

It's been my honor to serve you.

I'm here to urge every one of you to vote in the Central Student Government election.

It's a great way to make your voice heard on campus.

Last year, only 30 votes were cast out of 678 eligible Stamp students.

Please step up and be engaged.

You can vote right now at vote.umich.edu.

It takes less than a minute and voting ends in a few hours, so be sure to vote now.

Remember vote.umich.edu.

Thank you so much.

And welcome Ashley Lucas.

(audience applauding) - Good evening everyone.

Thank you to Chrisstina Hamilton and the Stamps series and to the wonderful Prison Creative Arts Project for helping to sponsor this event tonight.

I am really happy to be here and happy that we are not in conflict with the Graduate Employees Union Strike.

I am a tenured professor on this campus and in solidarity, I am canceling all of my classes until the strike has ended.

(audience applauding) So please join me in supporting the Graduate Employees Union as they fight for a living wage and many other necessary demands to make our campus a better and a safer place.

(audience applauding) And now to the main event, I am honored to get to introduce Amanda Alexander this evening because as an advocate for social justice, she is both highly ethical and incredibly good at getting things done.

That is a powerful combination.

She's a lawyer who advocates for racial justice, the end of mass incarceration and a future in which all people can live safely and with the resources that they need.

Amanda remembers and helps the people we are often asked to forget; the poor, the oppressed, those in prison and their children, While holding prestigious fellowships with the University of Michigan Society of Fellows and the Sorrows Foundation, she worked in community with others to develop systems for changing the ways people live and how we think about big ideas like justice and equality.

Amanda is also one of the original steering committee members for the University of Michigan's Carceral State Project which is an interdisciplinary collaborative group housed at our university which addresses the crisis of incarceration, policing, and immigration detention and works toward more just responses to the safety and concerns and social needs of people in Michigan.

Amanda spent many years visiting Macomb Correctional Facility once a week as part of the Inside Out Theory group which brings together scholars, activists, and incarcerated people to read and think about social issues together.

She understands as all good community organizers do, that we must listen closely to the people living through the greatest part of any crisis and partner with them to create social change.

She also helped establish the Inside Out Prison Exchange Program on our campus, and because of her efforts, Michigan undergrads each semester go inside prisons to learn and share with incarcerated students who are interested in the same courses of study.

Amanda is perhaps best known as the founder of the Detroit Justice Center which does such an array of good works that is difficult to adequately describe.

The good folks at the DJC provide legal aid, work for water justice, lobby against the over-policing of Black and Brown people and bail folks outta jail.

They literally send people down to the jail with money to get out folks who might lose their job or their housing or custody of their children just because they can't afford to bail themselves out.

Taking on any one of these issues in a grounded, long-term and thoughtful way would be a lifelong project for many activists and community organizers.

Amanda had the vision and skill to create the DJC as a resource hub that both specifically and broadly addresses the wellbeing of Detroit residents.

We are privileged tonight to have the opportunity to learn from such a brilliant and accomplished woman who is always seeking a better world for all of us.

Please join me in welcoming Amanda Alexander.

(audience applauding) - Good evening everyone.

(audience applauding) I am so glad to be here with all of you this evening.

Thank you Ashley for that beautiful introduction.

I am especially happy to be here during the Prison Creative Arts Project Spring Exhibition.

PCAP has been a lifeline for so many people in Michigan prisons for over 30 years now and it has brought generations of Michigan students into the fight to end mass incarceration.

I am so grateful for PCAP's work and I hope that you all make it out to the exhibition over the next week.

Before I really get going, I want to give a shout out to the brave graduate student instructors who declared a strike as of yesterday.

(audience applauding) That is some well deserved applause.

I wanna express my support for your demands.

This university owes you a truly living wage.

I also love that your platform includes calling on Michigan to pay its contribution to support the new unarmed non-police safety response team getting off the ground in Washtenaw County.

(audience applauding) This is going to be an important resource for U of M faculty and students and community members so it only makes sense that U of M pay in to support it.

So best of luck in your strike.

When Chrisstina asked me to give this talk, she said that Stamps talks are an opportunity for people to talk about their creative process.

And I took that invitation seriously.

So at DJC, much of our work is creative work.

I believe that it's not enough to talk about what we are tearing down in terms of policing, jails and prisons, we will end jails and prisons, but at the same time, we have to talk about what we are building up in the world to create truly safe communities.

So our work at DJC is very much about creative process and building.

You're gonna hear the voices of many different Freedom Dreamers tonight because I wanted you to hear directly from the organizers and visionaries and community builders who are showing us in real time what a world without jails and policing looks like.

And as you hear these voices through the videos and audios that I will play, I want you to keep in mind that these are everyday folks.

So people who saw a need in their community, had a vision for how to meet that need and took action to put that into motion.

So freedom dreaming is often a collective process.

It is about collective imagining about the society that we need to build and that it is about building power to realize those dreams.

So towards the end of the talk, I will also share some opportunities for how to plug in to this work right here in Washtenaw County.

So what brought me to this work?

What brought me to start the Detroit Justice Center?

This work is very personal to me.

My father was incarcerated when I was in elementary school.

He was sent to prison in South Dakota about 800 miles from us home in Michigan.

My mother was a nurse, she started taking on night shifts so that she could keep my brother and I sustained on a single income.

It was important to her to keep a tie between my brother and I and my dad.

So she loaded us in the minivan over summer break and drove us down the highway, that 800 miles so we could have time with him.

She was one of the millions of people in this country who moved heaven and earth to keep people connected through periods of incarceration, so often that is the women in the families.

So as a kid, I carried this around as a point of silence and shame.

I felt like this had to be a secret.

I didn't realize that there were other kids who were going through precisely this thing.

It wasn't until I grew up that I started to understand the statistics.

So in Michigan today, one in 10 kids has had an incarcerated parent, one in 10.

So in all likelihood, in my childhood, in my classroom in elementary school, there are probably two other kids who are going through it but I thought I was the only one.

Many of us here tonight probably thought that we were the only one.

And so it's that type of experience that got me wanting to grow up and tear the system down.

It was understanding that this is what incarceration does to families.

It is a way of addressing trauma with inflicting more trauma.

And so I knew that I wanted to grow up and not just tweak the system but actually tear it down.

And so I got obsessed with the idea of social change but I had no idea how social change actually happens.

I got captivated by the idea that people could change the course of history by putting their bodies where they didn't belong.

I was captivated by these visions of people sitting at lunch counters to tear down systems of segregation.

People occupying a bus seat and refusing to give it up.

People locking arms and blocking highways.

I was dazzled by often male charismatic leaders so Dr. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X.

And I wondered how people got up the courage for these fleeting moments of bravery.

As I continued to study history, I learned that these moments were rarely spontaneous.

So they were the result of people building power over months, if not years together.

I studied the Montgomery Bus boycott and I learned that it was not as I had been taught that Rosa Parks sat down, refused to give up her seat and suddenly segregation was over, not at all.

So the Montgomery Bus Boycott lasted 381 days.

It was over a year of people building an alternative transit system to get people from one side of the city to the other.

It was people who sustained each other and staying laser focused on freedom.

I learned that yes, Rosa Parks was there, Dr. Martin Luther King was there, he was a 26 year old young preacher who was new to town but Georgia Gilmore was also there.

She was a talented cook who founded something called the Club from Nowhere.

She got other cooks together and they sold their food and they plowed the profits right back into the boycott.

And so it was this type of person who was behind sustaining that effort for all that time.

I would go to college and become a community organizer.

And I would continue to learn these lessons about how social change actually happens.

I was fortunate to be trained up by some of the best organizers to ever do it.

Folks in the AIDS Coalition to unleash power or act up.

These are people who in the 1980s were tired of seeing their loved ones die of AIDS because drugs were not coming to the market fast enough.

And so they occupied senators offices, occupied the FDA to make those drugs come to market.

And they taught me that change does not happen because people in power wake up and decide to give you what you need.

It comes about when communities demand and force the hand of people in power.

I continued to learn from powerful organizers in South Africa.

I lived there for three and a half years in my 20s.

And I first went there in 2003, less than a decade after the transition from formal apartheid and organizers were saying, "Yes, we have a beautiful constitution, "one of the most beautiful documents "on the face of the planet.

"And yes, we have the right to vote but we are not free.

"We're not free because 1/4 of South Africans still live "in shack settlements without running water and electricity.

"We're not free because land has not changed hands "from white South Africans to Black South Africans "at the rate that it needs to.

"We're not free because people who are living with HIV "do not have access to the medications that they need."

So freedom was not what they had struggled for because they had not changed the material conditions of people's lives.

So these South African organizers taught me the importance of defining freedom for ourselves and refusing to settle until we have it.

Eventually I would go to law school, I was a reluctant lawyer.

I had seen many lawyers who just dulled the radical energy of movements but I went to law school hoping that there was a way that lawyers could serve social movements.

And it was in law school when I really felt like I could start to take questions of incarceration head on.

To that point, I was still unable to talk about my father's incarceration without my voice shaking.

But I started to meet more and more people who had experienced incarceration either directly by being in prison or with loved ones inside.

And what I found was that every time I shared my family's story, not only did the sky not fall, but it always opened up a point of connection and solidarity and a sense of shared agency.

It opened up more possibilities.

So after law school, I moved home to Michigan and to Detroit 10 years ago.

This was right around the time that Detroit was filing the largest ever municipal bankruptcy.

And I was running a prison and family justice project that was housed here at Michigan Law School.

And I was representing incarcerated parents who are at risk of losing their children permanently as a consequence of their incarceration.

And I was serving families who, because of some kind of legal barrier, were having difficulty getting their kids out of foster care.

And if you remember 10 years ago, there was all of this talk about Detroit's future, about the revitalization, the resurgence, the renaissance, all of these R words.

And what I was finding was that the families that I was working with who were facing incarceration were being completely shut out of this conversation.

I was working with families who are making impossible choices between taking a collect phone call from a loved one in prison upstate or putting groceries on the table.

Between bailing out a loved one or keeping the lights turned on.

And I was angry that these these families' experiences were not part of the conversation about the future of the city.

And to my mind, I knew that we were not having a full conversation about the drivers of poverty in Detroit if we were not talking about incarceration because it's not just that more poor people get swept up in the criminal legal system, it's that the system actually creates poverty, it makes people poorer.

And so I wanted us to have those full conversations about what it would take to build a city where everyone belongs.

10 years later, we are still not in a very good place in Detroit.

Trickle down development has not worked.

So many of you have probably heard about the rapid redevelopment downtown and that is centered in about seven square miles, seven square miles of the city.

But it's 139 square miles city.

And the vast majority of people, Black people in the city, have been shut out of the resurgence.

So just to give you a sense of some of the figures that are current.

So the median household income in Detroit is $34,762.

That is less than half of what it is in Ann Arbor.

43% of Detroit children live in poverty.

We are one of the poorest major cities in the U.S.. One in four homes, 1/4 of all homes were subject to tax foreclosure between 2011 and 2015.

Now many people are familiar with the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis that hit so many parts of the country but this was a completely second wave of people who own their homes outright but sometimes had not paid the back taxes that were due.

And these taxes were unjust for a couple of reasons.

One is that their homes were being over assessed, the assessments had not been adjusted for the change in the market.

And also many of these people, because of their poverty, were eligible for poverty tax exemptions that were not readily available to them.

So we are still living with this devastation 10 years later.

The city shut off water to 140,000 residential accounts because they could not afford to pay.

Between 2014 and the start of the pandemic, there were people living without running water in Detroit.

And you'll notice that the shutoff stopped at the start of the pandemic because our Water Warriors, our activists in the city who had been calling for a moratorium on shutoffs for years finally won it.

Not because the city officials realized that it was unjust and wrong to have people without running water.

Oh, can you, yeah.

But because there was all of the talk at the start of the pandemic of the importance of hand washing.

1/3 of people who are released from state prisons returned to Wayne County.

So what does that mean?

It means that we spend $2 billion a year on Michigan's prison system, $2 billion a year.

And that means that we are heavily invested in the city of Detroit but it is in policing and incarcerating people.

This means that Detroit is missing so many of the adults who would be part of the fabric of community that could wrap around young people to help them be healthy and whole.

It also means that when 95% of people come back from prison as they do, 95% of people come back from prison, when they come to Wayne County, they are met with a lack of resources and a lack of supports for being able to stay out.

Now despite those bleak statistics, in 2014, the legendary philosopher and activist Grace Lee Boggs said, "I feel sorry for people who don't live in Detroit."

Now why would she say that?

It's because of people like this, people who are showing us the way to build more resilient cities because they have experienced the bottoming out of American capitalism in Detroit.

Grace Lee Boggs called them Solutionaries, people who have come up with visionary solutions in the face of devastation.

I would also call them Freedom Dreamers.

So it's people like Malik Yakini of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network up in that corner.

Malik is part of the Urban Farming Movement in Detroit which many of you have probably heard about.

When grocery stores left, people didn't wanna leave.

So they taught themselves how to farm and how to build a resilient local food system.

Malik and his team are on the verge of opening up a new cooperative grocery store in the north end very soon.

Next to Malik, you'll see some kids from the James and Grace Lee Boggs School which is founded by a Freedom Dreamer, Julia Putnam and her co-founders.

And what they're doing at the Boggs School is piloting a new form of education called place-based education.

And the idea here is that they're really shifting the idea of success for young people in Detroit so that it no longer has to be how quickly and how far can I get from the city when I turn 18, instead they're saying, what if success meant how deeply rooted I am in beloved community?

Right below them we have some of our Water Warriors.

So these are people who have joined the fight across the water shutoffs in Detroit and the lead in the water in Flint.

And they're coming up with solutions for the fact that yes, we live on a 1/5 of the fresh water on the planet here in Michigan and yet, people have led in the water and have water shutoffs because of political decisions that are being made.

And so our Water Warriors are fighting for a model of water affordability so that we do not have this barbaric situation of people being shut off from water.

And this is a problem that is going to come to many cities and is already coming to cities across the U.S., this question of water affordability and water scarcity.

So if cities across the U.S. have access to clean, affordable water as a human right generations from now, it will be because of Monica Lewis-Patrick and other Water Warriors.

In the other corner you have folks from the Detroit Community Technology Projects Equitable Internet Initiative.

So until very recently, 40% of Detroiters did not have access to the internet because the large telecom companies did not see it worth investing in the infrastructure.

So the Equitable Initiative was founded by folks who said, "We're gonna create some community mesh networks "and we're going to connect our neighbors to the internet "and then we're gonna train people up to be digital stewards "of that technology."

In the middle here, finally, it's Halima Cassells.

She is many things, she's an artist, she's a cultural organizer and she's also a member of the sharing economy in Detroit.

So she's part of her local time bank.

And for those who don't know, time banks are a way of valuing people and their skills outside of capitalist exchange.

So time banks are often these elaborate spreadsheets where you can track people paying in babysitting hours perhaps and being able to get out a plumbing repair when they need it or a car repair.

Halima says everyone assumes an amount of responsibility with everybody.

It's a different way of knowing that your needs are met.

I founded the Detroit Justice Center after five years of listening and relationship building with some solutionaries like those.

I founded it because it was clear to me that we were never going to build cities that work for everyone without addressing the impacts of mass incarceration.

At DJC ending incarceration is both an essential end in itself and it's also a means for creating the types of thriving communities that we need.

So at DJC we use a three-pronged approach that we call defense, offense and dreaming because we need all three under one roof.

And before I get into what that looks like in practice, I want to go ahead and introduce you to some of the Freedom Dreamers who we talk with.

So part of our work at DJC is amplifying the voices of people who are building a better world right now.

And toward that end, a couple of years ago we launched the "Freedom Dreams Podcast".

Our tagline is, we know another world is possible because we're talking to the people who are building it.

And so I want you to go ahead and hear some of their voices now.

(soft upbeat music) - [Dreamer] I want Black people to be free, happy and whole.

- [Dreamer] My freedom dream is my kids going to school and wanting to go to college, preparing for it in high school like that's what they wanting to.

- [Dreamer] I want black people to not be starving for resources, to be self-determined, to not operate 90% of the time at overregulated and overstimulated.

And having the tools to address harm themselves, to address their inner harm and their inner voice.

- [Dreamer] Beloved community really does sum it up for me.

It really does speak to the present we are fighting hard for but the future that we seek and we see weaving together that future with all the other people and creatures that we share this earth with.

- [Dreamer] My freedom dream is that one day we have truly created a new sense of justice and one that is based in restoration, is based in love, is based in accountability, but is truly about healing and the wellness of all of our people.

And that our systems are rooted in it.

And I am committed to that.

I'm committed to creating space for that dream to become a reality.

- [Dreamer] I would like an interruption in the fact that everywhere I've gone, I've seen Black and Brown people in the worst positions in the world, everywhere.

Just everywhere in this world.

And I haven't been everywhere the world but I've been a few places and I would wanna say like 100 years from now, that is just in the history books.

- [Dreamer] I want Black people to have joy.

That's my freedom dream.

Sounds a lot like heaven.

- So those are some of the beautiful visions, yes.

(audience applauding) Those are some of the beautiful visions that we amplify at DJC.

I don't think we hear nearly enough visions like that in mainstream media, imagine if we did?

Alongside all of the terrible things that are happening in the world, these things are also true.

These visions are also true.

So I want to be clear that we are not just dreaming in the abstract.

Instead this work is about concretely shifting our abundance in this country away from policing, prosecuting and caging people and into all of the things that will help communities thrive.

So this is the number that we are looking at.

The cost of incarceration in the U.S. is $1.2 trillion a year.

That is 6% of our GDP.

The number that is often cited is $80 billion but that is only the cost of operating our jails and prisons each year.

Researchers at the Washington University in St. Louis crunched this number which includes a couple of other things.

It includes the cost on families, the cost that families bear when a loved one is incarcerated.

It also includes the cost on other government systems that are absorbing, you know having to support people when incarceration occurs.

So for example, when a caregiver or a parent is incarcerated and there's no one to care for their kids, those kids are going to end up in foster care.

So there are cost to the family regulation system or the foster care system.

It's the cost to families so you know, putting gas in the car and driving 800 miles and then getting a hotel room for you and your kids when you're there, that costs a lot of money.

It costs families millions of dollars every year for collect phone calls from prisons alone.

So all of this misery cost a lot of money.

Here's what this looks like in families' lives.

So two in three families have difficulty meeting their basic needs as a result of a loved one's incarceration and that includes many children.

So 70% of these families were caring for children under 18.

Nearly one in five families are unable to afford housing due to a loved one's incarceration.

So many people facing eviction and foreclosure which only feeds the problem of a lack of housing in our society.

So a fundamental assumption in our work is that people who commit harm, even very serious harm, should not forever be judged by their worst act.

And we fundamentally believe that we actually need to look at what are the possibilities for these people.

A couple of years ago we were part of a successful campaign to pass clean slate legislation which expanded the opportunity for criminal record expungement for people across the state of Michigan.

We did that in partnership with many coalition partners including Michigan Liberation, Just Leadership USA, Safe and Just Michigan.

And as part of this campaign, we decided to have a workshop where we had people with criminal records come in and shred their records, turn them into paper, where then they could write out their freedom dreams for their lives without their criminal records.

So I'm gonna show you a video from that workshop so that you can hear some of their freedom dreams directly.

(soft upbeat music) - [Speaker] Marinate it real good.

(indistinct chatter) (indistinct chatter) So the past has been erased.

(indistinct chatter) - [Ex-con] Here's the thing, I always wanted to come home and do the right thing but I just didn't have the support and the resources to do it.

'Cause what I experienced is lot of times, women just need support.

Like it's not about tangible things like things you can touch, it's like they need that, they need to be healed and like they need love and they need empathy.

- Right.

- In here?

- Uh-huh.

Then I'm gonna push any button.

(blender whirring) That's right.

It'll make little messy but don't worry about it.

It's only water.

- [Ex-con] This is it.

- Mixmaster.

Now yours hands are gonna get wet, not dirty.

You're going to marinate it.

lift it up.

Great, great.

- Right, thinking about Clean Slate, everything that we just said, we wanna think about the broader picture of freedom, of liberation, right?

And so since we are the ones who should get to decide what our liberation looks like, that's the question that we're gonna be asking.

So we're gonna take like two minutes to be thinking in partners so find a partner and be talking about what does it look like, what does liberation mean for me?

What does it mean for my community?

And then once we're done, we're gonna take them, write them up here and those are gonna be the themes that we're working with when creating posters.

- And can I add one?

And you know what?

See, 'cause this could be my generation.

- Yeah, we have the power.

- Yeah, we have, I'm telling you, we have the power.

- So do you.

- And so do you.

- And if you have me sitting probably like they got a chain or something, you already snatching it off my head.

- Right.

- - Yeah, breaking the chains.

- Exactly.

- Yeah, that's dope.

- Yeah, I like that.

- We came up with something.

- [Speaker] The stigma of a felon places an individual in a form of confinement even outside of walls.

And we oftentimes forget that people that have been incarcerated are in fact human just like the rest of us.

You don't wanna change that back to easily?

You wanna add an S to knocks?

with a system that easily knocks us down, let's help them step back up.

- Boom.

- With a system that easily knocks us down.

With an S at the end of knocks.

- [Ex-con] You know my city, Detroit, you think about the many men and women that's walking around that feel powerless because of the felony stigma.

You know, we're not free.

You can call us returning citizens as much as you want but in the real life is that we're not free until we can eradicate this whole felony word and just get rid of it and allow us to be whole human and be people.

- You don't know how it feels to you know, have your grandchildren saying, "Nana, I want something to eat."

And you can't give them nothing because it was either pay these people at the court or buy some food for us to eat.

And if I don't pay the people at the court, then I'm gonna go back to jail.

- [Interviewer] Exactly.

- So I don't know what- - [Interviewer] So what is that face like?

(soft upbeat music) (woman laughing) - That's you cracking up which I love.

- [Ex-con] We have barriers that that conflict with what it is we wanna do.

And it could be discouraging for some people at times so I guess being free with just be having that ability to go for what you know, what you wanna do and not have to worry about being denied or being stopped or being shot down.

- [Ex-con] Not being told no just because of my record.

- [Ex-con] Freedom looks like having a full opportunity to decide my own faith.

(soft upbeat music) (audience applauding) - So again, this was part of a successful effort to pass Clean Slate Legislation in the state of Michigan.

So thanks to our coalition partners and the DJC team and everyone who led this work.

Criminal records are now eligible for, many more people in the state are eligible for criminal record expungement.

The system is also automatic for certain classes of misdemeanors and felonies now so that people don't have to go through the onerous process of applying for expungement.

And I have to say that we have one of the most expansive Clean Slate pieces of legislation in the country.

Many other states have it but Michigan goes further than most.

And that is because we centered the dreams and visions of people with criminal records loud and clear.

And frankly, we did not settle for the scraps or an offer with earlier versions of that bill.

So this freedom dreaming brought us to having more expansive legislation than we would have otherwise.

As I mentioned, at DJC, we use an approach that we call defense, offense and dreaming because we need all three.

This is some members of our team and some of our partners at a Father's Day bailout celebration.

Our defensive prong is our legal services and advocacy practice.

So this is where people come to us because they are squeezed to the brink because of being caught in this cycle of suspended licenses and fines and fees, tickets, warrants, jail time, all of that.

Our clients come to us sometimes with a dozen warrants for unpaid traffic matters across three different counties and tens of thousands of dollars in court debt.

And our attorneys assist them in going to each of those counties and getting their debts cleared, getting those warrants cleared so they can get a driver's license and they can drive safely to work without fear of being pulled over and locked up.

Our attorneys help people stay out of prison, remove the legal barriers that are often an obstacle to that and help people avoid eviction and foreclosure.

We also have an incredible team of community legal advocates.

And these are not attorneys but they're people who are trained up to help with discreet legal issues.

So it's people who have faced foreclosure of their own homes, who turn around and help their neighbors avoid foreclosure.

It's important to us not just to serve individual clients, as important as that is, we are always looking upstream to see what are the policy changes that need to be made so that thousands of people across the state can benefit.

And so, as I said, we had the Clean Slate victory.

We've also been successful in changing the law.

A couple of years ago we got the state to end the practice of suspending people's driver's licenses for failure to pay court fines and fees.

And this is the problem that impacted 360,000 people in Michigan in 2019.

So this is a huge step towards reducing the criminalization of poverty in our state.

We're also part of a successful coalition that got the ban on food stamps lifted for people with drug convictions in our state.

So until a couple of years ago, if you had ever been convicted of a drug crime in Michigan, you were banned for life from getting food stamps, from getting food which meant that your kids and your families were also banned from getting that benefit.

So we were part of a coalition that got that ban lifted so that people could access food benefits even though they had a drug conviction.

Now we do not have an open door intake policy at the Detroit Justice Center.

We would be overwhelmed, probably 2/3 of the city would be at our door.

And so, instead we have set up partnerships with a couple of dozen referral partners.

So these are organizations that also serve returning citizens.

They might be workforce development agencies that line up jobs for people but they can't get them because of certain legal barriers.

And it is also organizations like Detroit Life is Valuable Everyday.

So this is an incredible Freedom Dreamer I wanna introduce you to.

This is Dr. Tolulope Sonuyi of Detroit Medical Center, Sinai Grace Hospital.

So the need that Dr. Sonuyi saw, he was tired of seeing people, mostly young Black men come into the ER with gunshot wounds.

He would patch them up and it was very likely that they would be re-injured and readmitted within three to four months.

He would see people come in maybe two or three times a year with a gunshot wound.

And so he decided to ask people at bedside after they came out of surgery, what do you need?

What needs to change in your life so this never happens to you again?

And that is the work that DLIVE does.

They wrap around people and provide these holistic supports.

They provide counseling for PTSD, not just the PTSD of having been shot but of growing up in the neighborhood that people grew up in.

They say, do you need an apartment in another neighborhood so that you're away away from where this violent incident occurred?

Do you need support with a GED or with getting a job?

We have set up a health justice partnership with DLIVE.

So if any of these young people have legal barriers like warrants or tickets or custody matters, we help resolve those.

And this has been an incredibly successful violence intervention program.

So as I mentioned before, DLIVE, people were very likely to be re-injured within three or four months.

In the first several years of the program, DLIVE served served over 100 people and they had a less than 1% re-injury rate.

This is an incredibly successful violence prevention mechanism and it is rooted in care and support, not in incarceration and punishment.

These are the types of public health interventions that will actually help us reduce violence.

We go on offense with our economic equity practice.

And this is where our team of attorneys support organizations like this one.

This is one of our clients, the Oakland Avenue Urban Farm.

We have supported the launch of Detroit's first three community land trust.

So these are mechanisms for people to keep their neighborhoods affordable for generations to come and to make decisions about the future of the land and of the properties in their neighborhood.

We've also supported the launch of 12 worker-owned cooperative businesses in the city.

And we also help returning citizens to set up small businesses.

Our economic equity practice is shoring up the freedom dreams that many Detroiters have for their neighborhoods.

So I wanna introduce you to another Freedom Dreamer.

This is Mark Crain of Dream of Detroit.

So Mark and his team were one of our first clients at DJC.

And they came to us because they had bought up over a dozen homes around their community center and they had a whole beautiful vision for their neighborhood.

So they wanted to put all of the homes that they had bought into a community land trust to keep the neighborhood affordable.

They wanted to turn one of the homes into transitional housing from then coming back from prison.

And oh, yeah, they wanted to put community solar over the entire development and they wanted to start a small business corridor of cooperatively owned businesses so that people could have access to the businesses that they needed right there in the neighborhood and that people would have access to jobs right in the neighborhood.

And this is such an elegant solution.

It's a combined solution for the problems of reentry housing, neighborhood affordability, economic justice, climate justice, and is far more beautiful than anything that we as attorneys could have come up with or that a Think Tank could have come up with.

This is the brilliance of community.

So it has been an honor to support Dream of Detroit in getting that community land trust off the ground and in helping to support these next phases of their development.

As I mentioned, we have supported the launch of 12 worker-owned cooperative businesses.

We run a co-op academy in partnership with Detroit Community Wealth Fund.

And so we are helping people who want to start cooperative businesses, helping them understand what that takes, both from a governance standpoint and a legal standpoint.

And these are the some of the businesses that we've helped to get off the ground.

And I'll say that these are mostly led by Black women who saw a need for a type of business in their community that did not exist and decided to create a co-op.

So there's a childcare collective, a beauty supply shop.

One of my personal favorites is a Black Bottom Garden Center.

I'm a gardener, so that's a favorite of mine.

Youth-run graphic design and screen printing company, Motor City Mobile Wellness is a holistic healthcare provider on wheels.

And the important thing about co-ops is you know they are really shifting the idea that there has to be an owner who is taking most of the profits and who gets to make all the decisions.

And instead, every member of the worker-owned cooperative gets a share of the profits and also gets governance decision making power.

And worker-owned cooperative businesses, wages tend to be higher, benefits tend to be stronger than in other businesses.

Finally, we dream in our Just Cities Lab.

So this is where we are really talking in community about what do we need to build up to create safety in our communities.

This is a shot from our Youth Design Summit that we held back in 2018.

So I will show you a video from that summit in just a moment But to give you some background.

So shortly after we opened our doors five years ago, we were approached by activists who said that they wanted us to sue Wayne County because they were moving forward with building a $0.5 billion new jail in the city of Detroit.

This is a partnership between Wayne County and our local billionaire, Dan Gilbert and his company Rock Ventures.

And so they were doing this over the protest of Detroiters who said, "Why on earth do we need a new jail?

"We have three jails already and yet "you're spending $0.5 billion to build a new one "when we have black bold in our schools, "when people's water is being shut off, "when we do not have a public transit system to speak of."

And so we filed that litigation, we filed that lawsuit to stop the bonds from being issued for the jail project.

And while the lawsuit was happening, we also held this Youth Design Summit.

We asked young people in this city, how could we spend that $0.5 billion in ways that would make you feel safe and valued and empowered?

So I'm gonna play you a short clip of what that summit looked like.

- I never just sat down and thought like, let me build a building, yeah.

(bright upbeat music) - Jails are not working and I think we shouldn't build jails.

- I think we should make something to benefit people.

- I think we should build a community to help people that you know, maybe they're having a hard time, maybe they're stealing stuff so maybe we can actually talk to them about what's going on and why are they doing it and try to actually help them.

- We had said, like, a mental health spa which is kinda spa but instead it's for mental health.

- Well, this is the Dream Center.

- We have a tech center here with some offices and build toward, maybe library.

- It would be a cultural museum.

It would have different cultures, different things to learn about.

- Activities like today give people a reason to speak their voice.

- It helps me understand how other people think and sometimes that changes the way I think for the better.

(soft upbeat music) So I'll get to this slide in a moment but it was an incredible day.

You heard one girl mention a mental health spa, that was by far the most popular idea that day.

And so you might be asking, "What is a mental health spa?"

This is their invention.

And the young people had this whole building designed with the support of the architects that we had on hand that day.

And they said, "A mental health spa is a place "where on the first floor you can go in and there's spaces "for group therapy where you can just talk out problems, "talk out whatever you know is just weighing on your heart.

"On the second floor, "you go up and there's rooms for individual therapy.

"And then you go up to the roof "and you can just look out at the Detroit River "and feel a sense of calm come over your spirit."

They had designed it down to what would be the most soothing pink colors on the walls.

This is clearly something that we need to build instead of more jails.

It was incredible to be in a room full of people who have not bought into society's myth that anyone is disposable.

They were not willing to dispose of anybody.

So we took the ideas that they came up with that day and we've also asked thousands of Detroiters at this point, what should we be investing in?

And these are the types of things that people tell us.

And so we crunched the numbers and we found that we could afford all of these freedom dreams and more for the cost of the $0.5 billion going into new jail.

We've done similar calculations for the over $300 million that we spend on police in Detroit every year.

We could build 30 community-based restorative justice centers.

Renovate and modernize every school in Detroit.

Create over 17,000 living wage jobs in Wayne County.

House every unhoused person in a $100,000 home and provided tax credit for families facing foreclosure.

We could create supportive housing for 1,120 people with mental health needs.

So we lost that fight.

Our lawsuit did not prevail and they went ahead and they are building that jail which just means that it is the work of our generation to empty that jail.

We are working on it, ultimately close it and continue to build the things that our community needs.

So you might be thinking this sounds okay but what do people who have survived violence or crime victims have to say about some of these reinvestment ideas?

And to that, I would say a couple of things.

One, the young people at that design summit unfortunately, are not strangers to violence or crime in their neighborhoods.

But secondly, we have some data to look at from the Alliance for Safety and Justice.

They did a national survey of crime victims to ask them their thoughts on what they would like to see investments in.

And 15 to one, they said that they want investments in education instead of investing in prisons and jails.

10 to one said create more jobs instead of building more prisons and jails.

Seven to one said mental health treatment instead of more prisons.

So how do we make sense of these numbers?

The way I think about it is that people who have experienced crime are the ones who have seen our criminal punishment system up close and know how deeply inadequate it is.

Part of moving on from something that is a traumatic event, is being able to put together a coherent narrative of what happened.

People want to know why did they pull the gun on me?

Why did they hit and run?

What happened here?

And our criminal legal system is not a truth seeking system.

95% of cases plea out so you never actually get the full story of what happened.

When things do go to trial, it's all about suppressing testimony, having people not take the stand, all of that.

So many people for the rest of their lives don't get answers that could help them move forward.

And so it makes total sense to me that people who have experienced our system up close understand the need for front end investments that would've prevented this violence and harm in the first place.

And also they know that we need alternatives like restorative justice that could give them some of those answers that they might need.

Toward that end, at DJC, a couple of years ago, we launched the Metro Detroit Restorative Justice Network.

After a year of listening to existing restorative justice practitioners about what they need.

they asked us to create a network that would help build their capacity to divert more and more serious cases out of the criminal legal system.

For those who aren't familiar with it, restorative justice is a very different way of resolving things after a harm than a criminal punishment system.

In our existing system, the questions that are asked is, what crime was committed and who do we punish?

In restorative justice is about asking who was harmed and whose obligation is it to repair that harm?

So the RJ Network has been supporting RJ practitioners and building their capacity and they'll be offering their first community-wide restorative justice training for Detroiters this summer.

We are also honored at DJC to support the work of Care-Based Safety here in Washtenaw County.

This came about when organizers a couple of years ago, saw the need that many people across the country after the summer of 2020, they saw the same need to defund the police and invest in unarmed response teams so that it wasn't gonna be police who were showing up to things like mental health crises or to support people who are unhoused.

And so organizers successfully won an appropriation from the Ann Arbor City Council to get Michigan's first unarmed non-police response team right here in Washtenaw County.

Yes.

(audience applauding) And these organizers did not stop there.

They said, "We actually want to create "and we want to become that safety response."

And so they created Care-Based Safety and it has been our honor at DJC to be able to support them from a legal perspective.

So tons of legal questions come up when you're trying to start an unarmed response team like, what liability are we gonna face?

What type of insurance should we carry?

So it has been an honor to help them get this pilot off the ground here in Washtenaw County.

I'm excited for it to be a model for what can happen in other Michigan cities including Detroit.

One last freedom dream that I will mention that is close to our hearts at DJC is our new headquarters in The Love Building that we'll move into this summer.

So The Love Building is a social justice hub where we will be in headquarters with many of our dearest partners so including the Detroit Community Technology Project that I mentioned earlier, they're going to supply community internet mesh network to the neighborhood.

Powerful organizers like Detroit Disability Power and others.

I'm particularly excited that this is a few blocks from a parole office in Detroit which means that we can be part of welcoming people back into beloved community and helping them remove some of the legal barriers that would keep them from being able to stay out.

I believe that we build a just society by stitching these local experiments and freedom dreams together and learning from each other.

So I want to be clear that as an abolitionist, I don't think we're going to end policing and prisons overnight, that's not the aim.

It is about building up the care infrastructure like the things that you've seen so that over time policing and prisons can become obsolete.

I wanna take 30 seconds now and I wanna invite you all to just close your eyes if you're comfortable with that and just answer this question of what is your freedom dream?

So 50 or 100 years from now, what do you hope is true about the communities that you live in?

I'm gonna give us 30 seconds to just think about that.

(no audio) (no audio) Thank you all so much for taking that moment.

As I hope is clear by now, freedom dreaming, this is long haul intergenerational work.

And so I am often asked, how do we sustain joy and imagination over the long haul?

So I want to move us towards a close and offer some of the practices that I have found useful over the last couple of decades of this work in hopes that they are useful to you as you do your own part of movement work.

So the first is find what brings you joy and put it to use for movements.

So I hope that after this talk, people are not inspired to all go out and become lawyers.

That is not the takeaway here.

Instead, I would hope that you could reflect on what are the things that energize you, what lights you up and how might that be turned toward being useful for movement.

So think of people like Georgia Gilmore, the cook with the Club From Nowhere who helped fuel the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

I think of people like Lauren Williams who is an artist in residence with us at DJC who has helped us to think about what a world without policing really feels like and looks like from an art and design perspective.

Data for Black Lives was founded by mathematicians and data scientists who were tired of seeing what they loved, data, be weaponized against Black communities through things like hotspot policing or redlining.

So the thing that brings you joy is the thing that you can do sustainably.

And that is what we need as people who can be in this work and sustain themselves as a long haul and not burn out after a few months.

Build community through curiosity.

So I hope it's clear that so much of this work is about community building.

It's about relationship building which often comes down to having richer conversations with people.

And that often comes down to asking better questions of people.

So many of our movement elders had questions that they would ask of everyone they met as organizers.

Ella Baker who's here would ask, "Who are your people?"

She wanted to know who you came from.

Grace Lee Boggs would ask, "What time is it on the clock of the world?"

I try to ask people, you know, I wonder what can this person teach me that no one else can?

So I would invite you all on your way out of the theater tonight, maybe turn to someone who you don't know and ask them, "What was their freedom dream?

"What did they see when they close their eyes?"

Define the future worth fighting for.

So I hope that this is something that has come through loud and clear as well, is that we cannot settle for the scraps that are often on offer because what politicians wanna give you is more of the same, more police, more prisons.

Instead, we have to take the time in community to define what our freedom means.

I think of a quote that a mentor and friend of mine, Vince Warren of the Center of Constitutional Rights said, he posed this question to us, five generations from now, what will Black people thank us for?

Five generations from now, what will Black people thank us for?

It's a beautiful question, it keeps me focused on doing the things that will last, not just what feels winnable in this election cycle.

My own freedom dream is that we build a society where Black people and native people and trans people, all of us have all of the elders that we are supposed to have.

I am tired of losing aunts and uncles in their 50s or 60s to heart disease.

I'm tired of hearing about Black women dying in childbirth.

I'm tired of hearing about young people being shot down by police.

I would much rather that we build a world where we can just delight in watching each other grow old.

And that is going to take shifting everything about our society.

So we are spending our abundance not on the things that we spend it on now but on creating excellent schools, excellent healthcare, excellent sources of nutrition.

That is a dream that I am fighting for in the long haul.

But in the meantime, I think we need to practice our freedom.

So I hope that freedom is not just a far off horizon for people but that we actually take the time to practice it in the here and now.

For me, that means spending time in my garden, these are some shots from my flower garden last summer.

That is one way that I practice my freedom.

Another practice I have that I'll offer to you is that, you know some weekends when I can, I'll start the day and write out a list.

I write on the top of a sheet of paper today I want, and then I just listen.

So this isn't a to-do list.

There are no shoulds on this list.

This is my today I want list.

I listen and I hear things like today I want to hear that friend's voice.

Today I wanna go down by the Detroit River and be by the water.

Today I wanna walk through tall trees.

It's this practice that helps me stay attuned to my intuition and to know what it feels like to be free, which helps me sort that out from obligation or for the imposition of someone else's will for my own.

Admire ease, not just struggle.

So I think we've done a lot of admiring of these moments of bravery that are seared onto our collective imagination.

So the mug shots, the arrest shots, the protest.

But I love thinking of our ancestors and our elders in poses like this.

So that's Rosa Parks on her belly doing yoga.

That is Audrey Lord rowing on a lake in Berlin.

We have to create these moments of delight and ease and celebrate them because that is part of what will keep us going in the long haul.

Finally, focus on the movement builders and follow their lead.

I guarantee that for whatever the problem is, there are people who are resisting, who are building, who are leading.

And so it's really about finding out who they are and following in line.

Around the country, people are shutting down jails in their cities and investing in healthcare instead.

People are putting their hands back in the soil and feeding each other and building resilient local food systems.

People are protecting their neighbors from eviction or deportation.

People are building a better world right now and we can follow their lead.

So at the end here, in the interest of following the movement builders, I want to bring up two of my favorite Freedom Dreamers.

That's Nicholas Buckingham of Michigan Liberation and Natalie Holbrook of the American Friends Service Committee and Care-Based Safety.

I'm going to ask them, come on up here.

(audience applauding) So I'm gonna ask them what are their freedom dreams and what are a couple of ways that people can plug into this abolitionist work right here in Wayne County?

Hey Nick.

- Hey.

Hey everybody.

Nicholas Buckingham, get right into it, huh?

- Yeah.

- My freedom Dream and I think you heard a little bit already but my freedom dream, I really wanna wake up one day and this state will eradicate, eliminate, abolish the felony stigma.

I believe that many folks that come in and out of the carceral system are still weighted down because of their felony.

Myself formally incarcerated, I've been home for 10 years and I'm a graduate from right here at U of M and every day I still have to come across the felony that I do have that would not be expunged automatically.

And ways that you can get unplugged with the work with Michigan Liberation, we also have another part of the organization called our Michigan Black Mother's Day Bailouts.

You can look both of this up on any social media platform.

You can Google it.

We are a group of organizers meaning that if you leave us a text, whether it's Facebook, Instagram or any social media or email, we will respond back to you and that is a promise.

- Amanda, thank you so much for having both of us up here.

So my freedom dream is that we shut down Women's Huron Valley Prison in the next seven years.

We don't gotta wait for 50.

(audience applauding) That is my dream.

And that more people come home from prison every single day and I believe we can really do it.

I believe that the vision that Amanda's laying out for Detroit and what's happening there can actually happen everywhere in Michigan.

We have to demand it and build it.

And then to plug in, I have these sheets of paper 'cause I'm geeky like that.

So AFSC is part of a Second Look Coalition.

We are moving to introduce legislation that will give everybody who is serving long time a chance at being resentenced by their sentencing judge.

And we have a very robust coalition; Michigan Liberation and Detroit Justice Center are both part of the coalition and we have awesome trainings going on with the Good Neighbor Project which connects you with lifers serving long time in prisons.

And we have panels on Second Look and we're dropping the legislation on April 12th.

We don't have the time in the morning yet but we are gonna do legislative packet drop offs and we'll get thousands of people out of prison if this legislation passes.

So use that QR code and find out more about it all.

And then for Care-Based Safety which there are two of the founders of Care-Based Safety in the audience, I know for sure.

This is a beautiful program that is not quite the program yet.

So this is a vision.

And by summertime, we will be building a program that will offer an unarmed non-police response for Ypsilanti, it will expand into Washtenaw County.

You can also find out our strategic vision by the QR code or go to Link Tree, that's L-I-N-K-T-R.ee/carebasedsafety.

The coalition for re-envisioning our safety was the catalyst to get CBS and spun off to be its own thing.

And now we're really building this beautiful, beautiful vision to have an urgent response.

And I wanna encourage you all that you can in your, this was just a group of community members.

I encourage you all to come together and think about how your street that you live on can be a safer place without the police.

And always think about what keeps you safe.

I don't think any of us think the police keep us safe.

- Hmm.

(audience applauding) Thank you both so much.

It felt like I was not gonna be a good organizer were I to have a room full of 1,000 people and not give you ways to plug in and introduce you to folks who can plug you in.

So we have about 15 minutes for Q&A.

Nick and Natalie are gonna stay up here and be part of the Q&A conversation.

So feel free to direct questions to any of us.

And Chrisstina has let me know that I know some people need to leave at the Q&A period.

So feel free to go ahead and take off to your next class or whatever you have.

Please do that as quietly as possible.

Wait until you're in the lobby to talk about freedom dreams.

And we will give it just a second for people to come up to the mics here and ask your questions.

Give it just a second.

(indistinct chatter) Okay, we're gonna start the Q&A.

So again, please leave as quietly as you can so we can hear each other.

Yeah, go for it.

- Hello, first off, thank you for coming here.

I really enjoyed your talk.

My question, I guess from an outsider looking in, I'm from Louisville, Kentucky where everything that happened with Breonna Taylor happened.

I wanted to say, what would you say to someone who believes meeting a fist with a fist, someone who essentially believes that if we get punched, we need to punch back.

Because in my opinion, I'm tired of rage, I'm tired of war, I'm tired of bearing arms.

What do you say to someone who believes in something like that?

When peace doesn't work and all they see is violence?

- Hmm, that's such a big question.

Do either of you wanna?

- Yeah, I honestly believe that that is the main ingredient for organizing.

Well, we'd speak with a lot of our organizers in the field.

It's that rage, it's that anger.

It's that wanting to meet the pound for pound, the fist for fist.

But through a lens of organizing, I believe that that anger and that rage that lives in with so many of us is what's needed to go back into our communities and start to have those conversations with other folks.

'Cause I guarantee that there are other people in your community that feel the same way as you and is looking for an opportunity for someone or something to say, "Let's organize, let's build our power "and our numbers and let's go after the system "to make that strategic change."

I don't wanna encourage you to go like fist for fist and let's fight it out.

But look for those folks in your community that have that same feeling.

And even if you're feeling like you can't find them, remember a story is so much.

And when you share that story, you're going to find other folks that are feeling like you even in this room.

And that for me is the main grit.

That's what I'm looking for when I'm invested into leaders and looking for organizers.

It's that rage, it's that anger, it's that I'm sick and I'm tired and what is it that you want to do about it?

And if you can't answer that question, ask the question, what is getting in the way of you wanting to go out there to build the power that you believe that you can build to make the significant changes you want?

- Yeah, I really agree with that.

And if I could be honest, a lot of transgender and non-binary people are starting to take up arms because they are afraid of getting killed.

Do you see all these transgender like anti-trans bills being passed across the United States and even with the Nashville shooting, anti-trans rhetoric has ignited like an infernal across the United States.

People are starting to take up arms and people are afraid, I'm afraid.

- [Amanda] Yeah, yeah.

- [Attendee] I will admit that.

- Yeah, thank you for that.

- [Attendee] So thank you.

- Yeah, thank you.

Thank you for that question.

I think too, I mean, in addition to what Nick has said, I think part of what fuels this cycle of just like rage and resentment at the system is like getting the same like false solutions on offer all the time.

So in my experience, like seeing people being shot just about every day by police and yet the same old reforms are trotted out.

You know people say it's about a lack of training, it's about needing body cameras, it's about getting a more diverse police force and all these things that we know- - [Attendee] They're pussyfooting.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Those things only shore up the existing system.

And so for me it's always about thinking about, okay, how do we interrupt that cycle and start to build towards something else?

Because it's like the solutions that are on offer are part of what is so enraging because it's just part of the system adapting to absorb this critique rather than actually changing things.

But I hear you and I think that taking on this anti-trans legislation head on is a big part of this fight.

So thank you for raising that as well.

- [Attendee] All right, thank you so much.

- Oh yeah, over here.

- So Natalie said community-based safety coalitions can pop up in communities all over Michigan and all over the country if we get together with people from our community.

I'm wondering what you imagined the very first meeting of community members getting together to talk about community-based safety programs looks like.

And what would you put on like a flyer if you were trying to get this started in your own neighborhood?

Like how would you go about that?

- I love it.

- That's a beautiful question.

So you gotta get to know your neighbors first and foremost.

It doesn't have to be some highfalutin analytical talk.

You have a party in your neighborhood and you get to know one another and you care about one another.

You build love with one another.

That is the first step towards any good organizing, it's all rooted in love.

It's all rooted in knowing who your neighbor is.

Having people on porches and not hold up in their houses by themselves.

And then I say, study together.

Get a good book and listen to talks like this and do study together and listen to your elders in the neighborhood.

Listen to the people who have history of the community that you're in.

My neighbors and next door to me have lived on the block that I live on for 80 years.

Their family has lived there for 80 years.

I know a lot from them.

We might politically be polar opposites but I can learn from them.

So getting to know your neighbors is the first part and rooting everything in love.

And then getting to know good organizers too.

And all of us are happy to connect you to good organizers in the community.

- [Attendee] Thank you very much.

- The one thing that I would add too is, you know can start with small conversations in whatever community you're in.

So like if you're in an office, if you're in a classroom, whatever, just like take some time, maybe even take 10 minutes and think about, okay, if something happened, what are the things that we could do instead of calling the police?

And it's like that, that can help us just interrupt, you know, we have a reflex to call 911 but just play out these scenarios.

Like if someone, you know we've talked in my office like if someone had, a threatening person come to the door, what would we do?

If someone is suddenly going into a behavioral health crisis, what would we do?

And just having those plans in place ahead of time is gonna make it easier to avoid defaulting to the police.

Yeah, hi?

- Hi, I really enjoyed your talk today so thank you so much for coming in.

And I work with we the people of Detroit so it's super cool to see Deborah and Monica part of your presentation.

Hi, Nick, it's cool also to see you on stage.

I heard some specific calls to action from these two organizations, Michigan Liberation and CBS but I was curious if there's anything specific to support Detroit Justice Center.

- Oh, I love that.

So that was intentional because I wanted, I was like, this is an Ann Arbor audience and so I wanted people to plug into things right here in Washtenaw County.

But for those who are interested in supporting our work at DJC, one thing is donations are always helpful.

So going on to our website and donating to sustain the team and the work.

Following our social media, we put out calls to action often.

So there is going to be some legislation being introduced soon that would work on ending cash bail in the state, we've been very involved in that fight.

So there's gonna be work to plug in around the bail reform fight.

Yeah, I would say just tracking our website for some different opportunities that come up.

- [Attendee] Thank you.

- Thank you.

Let's go back over here.

- Hi, I just wanted to thank you guys for coming and talking.

The work you're doing is really inspiring.

As someone who's interested in legal advocacy, I would love to work for any of your organizations.

What is the role of volunteers on a day-to-day basis?

Like what is the practical difference that we can make?

- Can I- - Go for it.

- We use volunteers every day to build relationships with people in prison and to get people free.

So if you're interested, my email is on the flyer or the QR code and or talk to the people that are right behind you because we just yesterday did a commutation training to prep people from DJC and some attorneys to write people's commutations and all that takes really deep relationship building and we need students in the office to help us with that.

Being connected to somebody in prison is the first step towards tearing down the walls and we can help you through that.

We have the Good Neighbor Project and can plug you right in.

You can answer prison mail, all kinds of things.

So happy to have you on board.

- Yeah, that sounds really cool.

Commutation writer, I would've loved to be part of that.

Sweet.

All right, yeah, for Michigan Liberation, volunteer, right now we're going into our fourth year of launching our Michigan Black Mother's Day Bailout.

It's a program where we raise our money within the community and go inside the county jails and the courtrooms to bail out Black moms to connect them to the family and resources for Mother's Day.

And what volunteering looks like around that is one, becoming, we kinda like took this from Amanda but becoming a bail disruptor, understanding like how the bell industry works.

So actually like going in and paying somebody's bail, going through that process.

We're also going to be relaunching our Court Watch Program which consists of volunteers and a lot of students and it is like if you watch "Judge Judy", you have done court watching, right?

So it's just not as entertaining as "Judge Judy" 'cause it's real life.

So yeah, you can, Michigan Liberation, I do have some cards but I would have to catch you on the way out, so cool.

- One thing I would add for DJC, so in terms of volunteering, we run road restoration clinics across the state.

So after we got the law changed that people were suddenly eligible for driver's licenses to be restored, we started operating clinics to make sure that people could actually get their licenses.

So we partner, we have the Secretary of State's office there, we have officials from the court there so that we can just clear people's driving records on site so then they can actually walk away with a driver's license.

And so it's really incredible.

And so those are ways that volunteers can plug into those clinics.

And so I will say email info@detroitjustice.org and we can plug you in.

- [Attendee] Thank you so much.

- Thank you.

- Hello, everything was amazing.

Just to give you, this is gonna be a little bit of a high maintenance question.

I was an AIDS activist in 16, boots to the ground.

I organized 100 marches, been to 246 myself and my son is trans, my daughter is queer and I'm queer.

My question to you is come and our, to some of their heroes as Gen Z, one is 16, one's 21, and my heroes were Assata Shakur, Malcolm X, Huey Newton, Fred Hampton.

Malcolm X, his quote was basically, "Unless we build the the Black community in the diaspora, "global liberation won't happen "under a capitalistic system."

So a lot of what you've said is exactly what we need to hear; healthcare, building the communities.

How is it possible to do that as far as policy change when certain policies aren't enforced and have to be enforced also by the police which is, I believe, a huge part of the problem.

How do we do that under this system and how can we change the system 'cause Gen Z and young millennials, and I'm involved with them a lot.

Both my daughter and son are activists.

So they are seeing this from a totally different light as their friends are.

They're seeing racial capitalism, they're seeing capitalism is a huge problem but I'm Gen X, Gen X and over are looking at Gen Z and young millennials as if they've got three heads and they're like, "No, we're done."

Now with AIDS, we were able to shut down Wall Street in '88, '87.

Reagan didn't even say the word AIDS in '87, 40,000 of our gay brothers were dead.

The same thing, it's worse for many of the poor Black communities, there are apocalypses in huge communities including Cabrini Green but that's just one place.

And my question is, is that how these communities find their freedom?

I mean, how do they find their gardens?

How do they find their clean water?

The thing is that I have the privilege of being able to do that but the problem with that for me is a lot of frustration with the fact that my friends who many are poor and they're my friends to the end just feel the stress.

The fact that DTE cut Detroit four days.

The fact that Duggan put in what?

Six billion or six million into cops instead of Detroit public schools.

How can we have a system, this property based that won't even put their tax dollars, our tax dollars into Detroit public schools and then kids come out with a formative education and they get into colleges but how do they stay there when the formative education hasn't been given?

And I think intentionally.

- Yeah, I mean, I think you're hitting the nail on the head in the sense that like racial capitalism is the underlying problem with all of this.

And so, the way that I think of it from getting from here to there, and I think especially as a young organizer, I was thinking about, okay, after the revolution we will have abolished capitalism.

And so, I think a lot of my work now is how do we get from here to there?

And so that is the economic equity practice work that I was talking about is like what steps can we take towards building a solidarity economy in the here and now?

I think that we get beyond capitalism by building up these systems outside of capitalism, building up things like worker-owned cooperative businesses, building up community land trust where people hold land in common.

I think that's anti-capitalist steps in the making and it is trying to prefigure the world that we want to build.

- [Attendee] My next- - Hang on, I gotta stop you right there.

We have a time issue.

I thank you so much for talking.

We've got three more people with questions.

I think if we can literally wrap within four minutes.

I think if we let these other three people quickly ask their questions all in concert and then the three of you can address them as you see fit.

And we need to, they have a program that follows us.

I'm sorry to be the bearer of the news but I'm the one that has to keep things running on time.

So go ahead.

- So I'm a baby boomer, I'm like Gen X, anyway, but the thing of it is, is we've been working at Washtenaw County a number of organizations on banning the box and banning the box means that little thing on a job application that says, "Have you ever been arrested?

"Do you have a felony."

All that stuff.

We've been doing really good in Washtenaw County on getting it off of job applications.

The biggest obstacle we have is U of M. - [Amanda] Yes.

- U of M and Eastern, they don't care what the arrest was or what the felony was or how long ago and how long the person's been better.

And I don't know how we fix that but we are working really hard in this county trying to get the ban the box thing going.

U of M and Eastern are two of the biggest employers in the county.

- Eastern just got rid of it.

- [Attendee] Huh?

- Eastern just got rid of it.

- [Attendee] Oh good.

(audience applauding) So you U of M is next.

- Thank you for that work.

- How can we challenge stereotypes and the negative perceptions that limit imaginations in like the Black community for young children?

So like how can we challenge those negative stereotypes?

- Thank you for that.

I think we're gonna take the one last question then we'll take 'em both, yep.

- Hi, I'm really inspired by everything you had to share with us tonight and I was living in Detroit earlier this year interning with Allied Media Projects and I was really admired by or inspired by everything that they also had to share about data and about justice and about everything going on in Detroit.

And as you were speaking, I was thinking a lot about organizing and thinking a lot about the work that you do related to being like a community member and being responsive to community needs.

And when I hear people talk about these things, I feel like in the world of jobs, in the world of professional, it's often called soft skills.

And I feel like that's so patronizing and that really minimizes like all the work that goes into what you're doing.

And I guess I'm wondering if someone's like not a lawyer but they're like affected directly by the issue or even if they're like an artist or a designer or someone who maybe doesn't have a particular title or certification but they wanna be involved.

Like how do you continue to build that into your life in what you're doing?

- Yeah, I love that question and I think, I really mean it when I say that this work takes everybody.

Like we're talking about whole society transformation which means that there's work for everyone.

I think often like in order to put a protest together, you need people who are cooking food, you need people who are designing the beautiful flyers, you need people who are providing childcare like all of these things is what it takes to fuel movements.

We've been working with a couple of artists and residents at DJC the last couple of years and we put the call out to ask them, just show us what a world without prisons feels like.

And I love it, our first artist in residence, Lauren Williams created a living room that's a few decades into the future in this world without police.

And she just really transported us all there in this really beautiful way that I felt like was far more effective than a kind of a bunch of statistics or things that we could rattle off.

And so I truly believe that there is work for everyone regardless of what your talents or skillsets are.

Do either of you wanna chime in on that or the previous question?

- I just, I'm right on Amanda, there's room for everyone.

- Yeah, definitely room for, like titles are obsolete in our world.

I think we just carry on because of like IRS tax status and stuff but it is like, I think this movement in our ecosystem is for everyone and not just folks that say, directly impacted or are movement attorneys or anything else.

And I've been thinking about this question that you asked.

I think it's like it's a straight up question that really haven't been asked and what I wanna say, like I'm thinking about like myself and the toxicity and the traumas and everything that I've been through, especially coming from like incarceration and then into the world.

Exposure and education, I know that's kind of cliche to say, but I'm feeling like children now having a opportunity to be exposed to the things through a rigorous education.

I'm not talking about like a public school education but a culture education to where like they will have an understanding of where these stereotypes are like really generated from.

Having an understanding of like white supremacy through the history and stereotypes coming from that end and exposing them to just people overall.

And I'm just, I'm saying that 'cause when I came home from prison, the exposure to prison is what helped me put a lot of the stereotypes in the suitcase and push it back up under the bed.

- Nick, yeah.

(audience applauding) It's time, okay, cool.

- [Chrisstina] This is it.

- Thank you all so much.

- [Chrisstina] Thanks everybody.

- Thank you too.

(audience applauding)