Project NIA Newsletter | December 2022 |
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"Let us be reminded that before there is a final solution, there must be a first solution, a second one, even a third. The move toward a final solution is not a jump. It takes one step, then another, then another”
-Toni Morrison
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Announcements, Recaps, and Updates |
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Project NIA will sunset in 2023
Thank you following us for the last 14 years.
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With full hearts and gratitude, we are officially announcing that Project NIA (PN) will be sunsetting at the end of 2023. When I founded PN in 2009, my goal was to create an abolitionist organization that would contribute to ending youth incarceration. We have made so much progress. It was important to me that we center the leadership of young people in working towards that goal. As I look back over these years, I am proudest of the work that we helped to catalyze and incubate including a local school-based & community-based peace room in Rogers Park, Circles and Ciphers (which is still going strong in Chicago), a revamped Girl Talk at the Cook County Temporary Juvenile Detention Center (JTDC), Families in Touch and Liberation Library (also still thriving in Chicago). We helped to pass juvenile expungement legislation, to close youth prisons in Illinois, to successfully demand transparency about suspension and expulsions at Chicago Public Schools, to popularize a demand for Counselors NOT Cops in schools, and to successfully pass historic reparations for police torture survivors in Chicago.
I am grateful to everyone who has been a part of our work, especially the young people. If you have been impacted & influenced by Project NIA’s work, we will provide opportunities for you to share your reflections in the new year. Thank you for sharing our offerings, for engaging with us at our events, and for being a part of our community. Thank you to our donors who have made this work possible over these years. So many beautiful programs and initiatives have grown from the soil that we’ve tilled with others over these years. We are so heartened to see how the work has shifted and expanded. While this container for our work will end, it is also a chance for new ideas and imaginings to emerge and to take up space. Stay tuned for more from us in the coming weeks and months as we celebrate our collective work!
In Solidarity,
Mariame
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This week! Introducing When We Fall Apart: A Movement Primer
Don't miss out on our December Building Your Abolitionist Toolbox session!
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In this session Interrupting Criminalization & Dragonfly Partners will unveil a new resource, "When We Fall Apart: A Movement Primer."
Many of us join or create movement groups because we feel compelled by our circumstances or called by our moral compass. Some of us are in search of a community that will accept us for who we are, understand how we see the world, and support our efforts to make change. Others of us stumble into movement groups and find ourselves changed by the people and ideas they expose us to.
At times, the context of the movement, or your group, or your life changes. Perhaps you need to make a change—to say goodbye, to walk away, to leave, to take time to care for your body or spirit, or to move on to the next phase in your life journey.
In other instances, we may find that our groups are falling into sync with the systems of oppression that we seek to dismantle. Instead of finding joy, connection, and growth in the work, we find ourselves feeling stuck, disconnected, or in pain.
What happens when those who we once had respect, admiration, hope, camaraderie—and even love—for cause us to suffer? What happens when these experiences cause us to act in ways that are counter to our own core beliefs? Must we stick it out? Or are we compelled to lash out? What if we cannot be “in it together” anymore? Maybe what we need is to, quite simply, leave. But the simplest act is often the hardest to do.
This workbook was created to help individuals and groups collectively navigate a breakup from another individual or group. It offers up a collection of thoughts, insights, and lessons gathered from people in the social justice movement who have experienced an intragroup breakup and survived to tell the tale, learn lessons from it, and keep moving forward.
Thursday, December 15, 2022 at 6:30 PM ET
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Queenie's Crew will be back in 2023
Check out this reflection from QC coordinator Leila Raven
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Coming to the end of one year running Queenie’s Crew at Project NIA, we have more than 300 caregivers, educators, and organizers on our email list; nearly 100 actions and activities done; 14 patches earned; and countless ideas for future actions, art projects, and activities to engage 6 to 10 year old kids in the work to build communities of care without prisons or policing.
As a parent and caregiver myself, my favorite thing about coordinating Queenie’s Crew is being able to adapt tools and resources that I’ve used and learned from in my own practice and study of abolition, and making those tools more accessible to the next generation of prison abolitionists. This year, Queenie’s Crew members were pod mapping using an adapted version of the tool designed by the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective, and defining safety on their own terms using an adapted version of art by Rommy Talarico. For Mother’s Day, they sent thoughtful cards to incarcerated mamas, and during Pride month, they learned about Black and Latinx trans revolutionaries, Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, using art by Micah Bazant. The tools we’ve used have been so valuable even in my own home in having conversations with my 8-year-old about how we deal with conflict, where we turn when harm happens, and what safety means.
I am so grateful to all the folks who have been involved in this project: Mariame Kaba and Bianca Diaz for bringing Queenie to life in their book See You Soon, Bianca again for working each month on the art and design of each activity sheet, Mar Erazo for their incredible work designing the website, Arda who gets the monthly emails out to our community and creates beautiful graphics to share about our work on social media, Ki Gross of Woke Kindergarten for facilitating our first event for the Queenie’s Crew kids on imagining abolitionist futures, Maya Schenwar and Kim Wilson for sharing their wisdom on parenting with abolitionist values with our community of caregivers, all of the artists and educators who have contributed art for our monthly activities, and most of all: all of the kids, caregivers, parents, educators, and organizers who have been engaged in this work over the past year. Thank you for being part of this community, and imagining and working toward a future where we can all be free.
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ICYMI: TransformHarm.org Update
Learn about the latest updates to TransformHarm.org
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Check out the new and improved TransformHarm.org, a comprehensive resource hub that offers an array of articles, tools, podcasts, videos, and other media on topics like abolition, carceral feminism, Transformative Justice (TJ), Restorative Justice (RJ), community accountability, and more. This site was created by Mariame Kaba and designed by Lu Design Studio.
Special thank you to the following folks who made this site possible: sujatha baliga, Rachel Caidor, Tanuja Jagernauth, Anna Kark, Keisa Reynolds, Sarah Jane Rhee, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, and Dean Spade
We hope that this site serves as a launchpad for your education around these topics. Please share it far and wide!
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2022 Ann Snitow Prize winner, Mariame Kaba!
Join us in celebrating MK tomorrow, Wednesday December 14, at the award ceremony.
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Following congratulations and brief remarks, MK will deliver a talk entitled "A Wider Lens: Black Women Resisting Violence." She will be introduced by Margo Okazawa-Rey, a member of the 2022 Ann Snitow Prize Jury.
Kaba is the founder and director of Project NIA, a grassroots abolitionist organization with a vision to end youth incarceration. She is a co-founder of Interrupting Criminalization, the Chicago Freedom School, Survived and Punished, and, most recently, Sojourners for Justice Press, a Black feminist abolitionist micro-press. She is also the author of the New York Times Bestseller We Do This Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice and co-author of No More Police: A Case for Abolition with Andrea J. Ritchie.
The Ann Snitow Prize is a $10,000 award recognizing a feminist of outstanding vision, originality, generosity, and effectiveness, whose work combines intellectual and/or artistic pursuits with feminist and social justice activism. See www.annsnitowprize.com for details.
Wednesday, December 14, 2022 at 6:30 PM ET
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2022 Marguerite Casey Foundation Freedom Scholar: Mariame Kaba
Congratulations to our founder, Mariame!
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Launched in 2020, the Freedom Scholar awards exemplify a commitment to scholarship benefitting movements led by Black and Indigenous people, migrants and queer people, poor people, and people of color. The awards also recognize the role that Freedom Scholars play in cultivating and nurturing movements for justice and freedom. Awardees are proven movement leaders who entered academia and academics with a demonstrated commitment to supporting social movements.
Marguerite Casey Foundation supports leaders, scholars and initiatives focused on shifting the balance of power in society — building power for communities that continue to be excluded from shaping how society works and from sharing in its rewards and freedoms.
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Help stock the Bluestockings x Project NIA Free Store this winter
Learn how you can help us get critical goods to folks leaving jails and prisons in NYC this holiday season!
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We have been partnering with Bluestockings Cooperative to expand on its existing informal “free store” offerings, with a focus on getting goods to folks leaving jail and prison in NY.
For background, Bluestockings has been providing various resources/items at no cost to its communities for many years. They have relied on donations to stock their “free store.” It has been difficult, however, to ensure that donations are regularly made and that items are always available.
HOW CAN YOU HELP?
Please purchase items on Bluestockings Amazon wishlist to be shipped directly to their storefront. The list is frequently updated with new items that you can help stock. If you are local to NYC and want to drop off or mail unused goods directly to Bluestockings, you can do so at Bluestockings, 116 Suffolk Street, New York NY, USA, 10002. We are so thankful for the the donations that we have received so far, help us continue to serve our community in NY!
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ICYMI: In Our Own Hands with Rania El Mugammar
Check out this graphic recap of our #BYAT November session!
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This session explores tools and strategies for co-learning about transformative justice & abolition with little ones. Focusing on everyday and organized resistance, the session empowers families, communities, and children with some of the foundational questions and interventions that enable us to get closer to a just world. The workshop is grounded in imagination and possibility as core approaches to liberation.
Rania El Mugammar is a Sudanese artist, abolitionist, anti-oppression consultant, and liberation educator based in Toronto. Rania's artistic and community work is deeply rooted in Black Liberation. Rania is a published writer, award-winning organizer, reproductive justice advocate, speaker, arts educator, and multidisciplinary performer.
You can check out the video from Rania's presentation, the resource and these beautiful graphic notes by Laura Chow Reeve (radicalroadmaps.com) on our abolitionist.tools site that hosts the rest of our toolkits in the Building Your Abolitionist Toolbox series!
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