There was some lovely coverage of our workshop last month at Northwestern’s Women’s Center in the Northwestern Daily. Thanks again to melisa stephen for organizing the conversation, and to everyone who participated in the inspiring and encouraging moment. We also wrote an op-ed for In These Times drawing connections between the #NoCopAcademy campaign that fought the construction of a $95 million police academy in Chicago, and the current struggled against a similar compound in Atlanta being waged under the banner #StopCopCity. Read that essay here, and join the fight.

This month we’ll wrap our series with staff at Logan Square Neighborhood Association, closing with an Intro to Prison Abolition workshop, open to both staff and community members. After a long pandemic-related hiatus, we’ll also meet back up with our friends at Revolutionary Oak Park Youth Action League (ROYAL), offering a Linking Anti-Black & Anti-Immigrant Racism workshop to some of their new members. We’ll return for the second time to be a guest lecturer for the Surveillance Culture course at Colby College, teaching a virtual Pod Mapping & Transformative Justice workshop to undergraduates, and helping them to imagine concrete steps towards a future where we are accountable to one another, and less dependent on the violent mechanisms of the state.

In our first out-of-town event of the year, we’re traveling to the National Museum of African American History & Culture for a convening titled Descendant Communities Social Innovation Lab, gathering the descendants of enslaved people to grapple with the complex task of protecting and preserving historic sites of extreme ancestral violence. On March 18th we’ll sit on a panel titled “Healing from Intergenerational Trauma at Sites of Enslavement” where we’ll discuss our experience building a relationship with the plantation where our family members were enslaved, which we wrote about a few years back in Teen Vogue.

More to come soon!

BH