Music: Here's an experiment, here's an experiment, here's an experiment to begin with.
Damon: Welcome to One Million Experiments,
Kiss: a podcast exploring how we redefine and create safety in a world without policing and prisons.
Damon: Hey, it's Damon.
Kiss: It's Kiss.
Damon: This is One Million Experiments season three, the crisis edition.
Kiss: And we're making it sound scary, but the hope is that that concept actually becomes a little less scary through these conversations with people who have been figuring out how to respond to crises in their community all over this land. As we do that learning y'all know we're not doing it alone.
Damon: Couldn't, couldn't do it alone.
Kiss: Welcoming back into the lab with us, the one and only Eva Nagao from Interrupting Criminalization.
Damon: Yeah, yeah,
Eva: Wow.
Kiss: We're doing the wave,
Eva: Yeah, the sound the sound effects are much better in person.
Damon: There you go.
Eva: Yep, the hand motions.
Kiss: That's the the accountability. Jaguar. Eva, how are you today?
Eva: I'm coming in hot to Chicago, so glad to be in the studio this summer and so excited to introduce our conversation with Care- Based Safety.
Kiss: Tell us a little bit about them. Who are we talking to?
Eva: So we have the pleasure of talking to Liz Kennedy, who's the Executive Director at Care- Based Safety and Sheri Wander, long-time organizer and the Community Building Lead. Care- Based Safety is dedicated to acting with principle and intention, and that comes through in this conversation. They are taking careful steps in building a community response program that brings loving, unarmed support to people directly impacted by structural violence without polic. In their planning response and practice, they center the needs of people who are black, indigenous, undocumented, unhoused, LGBTQIA+, using drugs, and/or are experiencing mental health struggles. This summer, we're really excited to hear more about their Ypsilanti care-based response pilot. During this pilot, CBS is building their collective capacity to establish a full response program that has an open public phone number for access. Throughout the summer, they will be a proactive presence in downtown Ypsilanti and respond to crises as they arise in real time and as they are invited by neighbors, friends, and partners.
Kiss: Yeah, the conversation with the two of them really showed how sharp, thoughtful, rigorous, and heart-based the work that they're doing is. You can find out more at carebasedsafety.org,
Damon: And check that out too during the conversation like we get into the narrative, but their their site has a lot of resources on like the data and the reporting of the work that they're doing. So go deeper and get to some of the stats —
Kiss: — we know you data head out there. Alright, make sure that you subscribe, rate and review One Million Experiments. Make sure that you check out all the work we're doing at Respair at resparemedia.com and @respairmedia on socials. Stream the film One Million Experiments on Apple TV, Google Play, and YouTube movies. Keep an eye out for One Million Experiments "In the Field, " Respair's new travel show coming this fall, and of course, all the great work and all the wonderful resources available at interruptingcriminalization.org.
Damon: All right, is there any further adieu?
Damon: I'm adieu-less.
Damon: You're out of adieu. You got any adieu? Over there, Eva? Alright. Well, with that being said, let's hop into the lab with the Care-Based Safety team.
Kiss: Here we go. We're so excited to be welcoming into the lab with us, Liz and Sheri from Care-Based Safety.
Damon: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Kiss: Just like for anything, anything that people are punctuating the chair, if you just throw a care-based before you know, that seems solid.
Liz Kennedy: Exactly.
Kiss: And so we're so excited to have you here. We're going to start with our ritual or two-part question that we start every conversation with centered around time, and that could be this hour, this day, this season, this lifetime. But in this time, how is the world treating you? And how are you treating the world Liz and Sheri?
Sheri Wander: The world is in some ways, a dumpster fire, right? But in the middle of that dumpster fire, I see people doing such amazing things, and a friend of mine always jokes, you wanted a quiet, calm revolution. We're fresh out of those. I feel like that's the moment we're in, right? Empires aren't sustainable, and that doesn't mean we don't want to help it along. Help it, you know, help it end sooner. But death throws are angry and violent, so therefore our job is to care for each other. So that's that's how I'm treating the world, doing what I can to care for people and accept care when it's offered.
Liz: Mm, hmm, yes, that definitely resonates with me. I love these questions. Sheri and I talk about Grace, Lee Boggs all the time, and we're really rooted in her question, you know, "What time is it on the clock of the world?" And we were in retreat last week, and we were talking about that, and we were talking about this being a moment of empire collapsing and also climate collapsing, but also a time of resistance and community care and revolution. So I'm thinking about our comrades and our immigrant and undocumented family. I'm thinking about all of the liberators and people of conscious moving aid into Gaza right now, and my heart and my solidarity is just with all people fighting oppression all over the globe right now. And the world is treating me.. It's got some hands, I'm not gonna lie. But a quote that's really been sticking with me is, you know, may we be hard on the systems and soft with each other, and so I am being treated softly, and I am extending that softness to others, and that is really helping me get through.
Kiss: Before we move forward. I just have to share something that I'm very excited to premiere on this very episode. Longtime listeners will know we have drops that we sprinkle throughout. We have a new Grace Lee Boggs drop to premiere, and y'all get to hear it right now. You ready? You ready? Here we go.
Liz: Yes.
Grace Lee Boggs: Revolution is evolution towards something much grander in terms of what it means to be a human being.
Kiss: Congratulations, we got a new drop. Thank you for invoking.
Damon: Yeah, as you can see, Grace and Jimmy have been probably, you know, some of the central, like intellectual guides of our working, probably spiritual as well. And I'm not often beat to be the first Grace drop in a conversation. So that was like the first five minutes.
Liz: Had to keep you on your toes.
Damon: Yeah, I'm gonna concede. Y'all got Michigan roots, so you know, y'all have a deeper plane. Now it's gonna be a race the first people to drop Mariame in the conversation.
Mariame Kaba: It's just true.
Damon: We're gonna keep on going. So we're really excited to talk to y'all, not just because the work y'all do is wonderful, and y'all are wonderful people, and like, y'all have been so gracious with your time. But also in, like, preparing for this conversation and looking through y'all work...y'all have done, like, some work, like, there's like, real reports. So what we'll let you in on, you know, one of the jokes of this show is, like fumbling through the scientific method. We both cheated our way through science class. It's like, in a lot of ways, like a metaphorical hook for audience and for people, but y'all are doing like some real-ass social science over there, data and some reports. And so we're excited to fumble into metaphor, out into the real world of some experimentation. And with that, in all of our conversations with the different experiments, we'd like to start with, what was the hypothesis for Care-Based Safety.
Music: I tell you my hypothesis.
Sheri: My hypothesis is that our job on this planet is to love each other. Peter Maurin, who's one of the founders of the Catholic Worker Movement, said that our job is to make a world where it's easier for people to be good. And I think that that's what CBS is doing, right? That when people have their needs met — when people have not just their basic, you know, food, water, shelter, 100% those, but also the need for connection and community — then it's easier for people to be good and for us to just be able to create the space for joy. Like, how do we put our life's work to the test? That's sort of my work, what I think of as the hypothesis.
Kiss: For sure. Liz, what would you add about the hypothesis for CBS?
Liz: You know, I want to call in our Rosser right now — a beloved black woman community member, mother who was stolen from us by Ann Arbor police. In 2014, she was murdered after calling for help in the midst of a mental health crisis. And we know that there are so many other names, both known and unknown, just like our Rosser, who called police asking for help in a crisis and were brutalized and murdered as a result. So that is a central hypothesis that we are working towards. We know that police is not effectively responding to people in crisis, especially when they're Black, when they're brown, people of color, undocumented, when they're living with behavioral health challenges, when they're living with substance use, when they have unstable housing and they may be homeless, all of these things really exacerbate police violence. And that was a really galvanizing moment for this community. And saying, you know, enough is enough. We need another option, and we deserve better. So that is a central hypothesis. Cops just shouldn't be responding to mental health calls, you know, overdoses, etc. But there's a second hypothesis that feels really present for me, which is that we are reclaiming the skills that we know we have ancestrally, intrinsically in every single community, to care for one another and to keep each other safe and to hold one another accountable. You know, we know that prisons and the prison industrial complex is really only a what 200, 250 year-old experiment? But our ability to respond to harm, to move through conflict transformation, to keep each other safe, to hold one another accountable, these are ancestral practices that we literally have thousands of years of practice. And so a big part of our hypothesis is, what are those practices, and how can we restore and reclaim every community's ability and capacity to care for one another? How can we skill up together so police and prisons can be obsolete?
Sheri: Yes, we want people to be able to call Care-Based Safety instead of the police. But you know what's even better: if you don't have to call anybody. Because you have the skills, and you know, your neighbor has a first aid kit, and the person in that tent behind you knows how to reverse an overdose. And then we don't have to call anybody, because we've got each other 100%.
Kiss: So I'm hearing, in some ways, like multi levels of crisis that we're figuring out how to respond to, right? There's the crises that are happening in like, maybe an individual or a couple people's lives, there's the crisis caused by carceral systems trying to respond to those and then there's also this larger crisis of us being divorced from the processes to figure out how to care for each other — that maybe we carried, you know, through ancestral memory, cultural practice. Which of those crises was the clearest you at the beginning of the work at Care-Based Safety and what have you learned about those three crises through the act of trying to figure out how to address them?
Sheri: Wow, that's really good question.
Liz: I'm like, oh, y'all do it.
Damon: Not our first rodeo.
Kiss: But if I asked it in a way, you don't know what to say, then it's cute, but it's not a good question. So if you run it back.
Sheri: No, I think it's really worth reflecting on. When we talk about it, we're talking so often about the one individual, the small group of individuals who are having some sort of crisis: mental health crisis, substance use crisis, you know, lack of shelter. And every time we respond to that, we come up against sort of this larger crisis of capitalism, of empire, of fascism, righ?, Like when people don't have the resources to care for themselves, to shelter themselves, to feed themselves, to get medical care for themselves or their community, then all the crisis response in the world isn't going to solve it. It's just going to give it a band aid. So I think when we talk about it, what comes to mind for most people is that individual crisis. It's the like, who do I call if I'm not going to call 911, type of thing. But really, our work is deeper than that, and as we were designing Care-Based Safety, we did this community co-creation process where we went out into the community and asked people, what do you want? What should this look like? Uniformly what we were told is that community building is as important as response, because they're not actually separate, and that people who are responding need to come from within the communities that they're responding to, and that that's how you build trust. You know, on the surface, our work might look like responding to, you know somebody who is freezing to death because it's cold and they don't have shelter. But if our work doesn't also include advocating for shelter across the board, then it's like an inch deep, right? And that we always have to be willing to go deeper. Which, you know, honestly breaks your heart every day, but that's what this work is about, right? Being willing to sit in that fire and get your heart broken open and say, okay, tomorrow, we're gonna keep at this right?
Damon: Ooh, wee, that's... I'm receiving that. And I'm finding in so many of the conversations or support that I find myself in of basically like an expectation and a commitment to a form of heartbreak. You know, I may not use that language because that may be discouraging. But I think that's actually in some of our, like, our individualistic neoliberal makeup of, like, oh, once there is a discomfort, once there is a pain, once there is something I don't like — that is beyond what I can accept or sign up to, and so I can, like, remove myself from and like, you know, not dismissing pain or not, like suppressing or pushing through, but like this commitment to, you know, I can hold, I can regenerate, I can heal but I can continue to show up. And that's actually part of what I'm expecting. If I'm expected to change the world and address the systems that we are saying are killing people and disregarding people. That's not going to be all rosy. You know, that's not all just the the drum circle and, you know, the community canvas. I want to go deeper, though, into this community co-creation process, because in doing some research, I feel like there's a lot we can learn out of that. What informed going into this process of co-creation, and what were some of the mechanics of how to operationalize it?
Sheri: Well, I think you know, as Liz mentioned, coming out of the murder of our sister Aura, there was so much organizing around that, and so many people were impacted by that. And it wasn't long after that where a young Black high school student was tased by the police and harmed. And again, so many people were impacted by that that it was like, how do you begin to talk about safety based in care and not involve all those voices? And not listen? Because I firmly believe, and I think one of our ways of being with Care-Based Safety is we start by listening. And so if that's part of our work, then it's part of our work right all the way through. And so at the beginning, like a group of people who are engaged and involved in the community in a variety of different ways, came together and started looking at, you know, programs in other parts of the world, not only formal programs, but what is that ancestral knowledge? What is that neighborhood knowledge, you know? And then looked at like, what are the voices that are often unheard? And so we had listening sessions, or some would call them focus groups. I think of them as listening sessions, where we created a list of questions and went out and said, okay, this is a group. We're going to gather a group of youth together. Okay, we're going to gather a group of folks experiencing homelessness together, and the invitations were far and wide, but we kept each group relatively small so that we could really hear those voices. And then, you know, based on what that input was, created a skeleton for this work. But we continue to bounce back to community for check ins. We have seasonal town hall meetings where we say to our community, this is what we're doing so far. This is what we're thinking comes next. What do y'all think? And sometimes it's very specific. Hey, we need to revise our mission statement. Let's do that in a group of 50 people, but sometimes it's a lot more general. You know, here's here's a possibility for funding, but it would come with strings. What does the community think? So it's not just us making those decisions.
Liz: There were 98 folks that were included in these listening sessions, all of whom come from impacted experiences with policing and prisons. They were held in churches, on neighborhood porches, in mutual aid hubs. Childcare was provided, food was provided. You know, all of this, I think, really helped bring these recommendations to life in just such a more authentic way. You know, it is a North Star for us. We actually ended up turning down an opportunity to apply for millions of dollars in ARPA funding through the city of Ann Arbor last year. And a lot of that came out of, like, really sitting back into these co-creation sessions and being like, look, we're not gonna require mandated reporting. We're not gonna surveil community members who are calling us and who are trusting us, asking for help, you know.
Sheri: And I would also add, there's a lot of informal ways that we've created for people to continue to give feedback. So it's not just the formal listening sessions. We have what we call a place based pilot, where we hang out downtown, in an area where lots of our friends, that our folks hang out, right? And we bring harm reduction supplies and first aid supplies and snacks, and we're just there, right? And so we're there all the time, and so people know where to find us, and they know who we are, and that they can give us their input. And people give input.
Kiss: So it sounds like the way that those are structured, and how those invitations go out and where those were held, built a level of trust. And I'm wondering in the first attempts at that, what was surprising in how people responded? Like, was there hesitance? Was there skepticism? What did those first kind of. Reaches tell you or teach you.
Sheri: It was surprising to me, on one level and on another level, not at all how clear people were that community building is as important as response. That it is, you know, two branches of the same tree. Intrinsically, I know that, and I don't know why, like, I wouldn't expect everyone to know that, but like to have it articulated over and over and over again was surprising, not so much that the knowledge was there, but just that it was important enough that people brought it up over and over and over again. I would also say that there's definitely people who are like, yes, this is what I want, and also I'm concerned. What happens when they're shooting in the neighborhood? I want to call the police then. What happens when, right, there's sort of that, how do we engage people's radical imagination, if that's what they have been taught? We know that's not what has always existed, but people have been taught that's what's always existed. So like, how do we get past that to, you know, tap into that radical imagination? And so sometimes that was sort of a little piece of challenge, right. For me, that's where the Care-Based Safety comes in. Well, what is safety and how do we base it in care?
Liz: I would agree with that. I mean, so much unlearning had to happen — for all of us, those of us on staff and in our community, I think a key part of the unlearning that we had to really do some political education about is like, we use the language of being a non-police response program or a non-police alternative, and I almost think that language limited us in some ways, because it just created this equivalence with police. It's like, okay, they're gonna respond and there's gonna be a dispatch number and they're gonna come for, like, a short crisis, and then they're gonna leave. And like, that's not what we do. And we're also not interested in being a non-police response alternative. We're interested in something much more grand, much more imaginative, much more regenerative and healing, quite frankly. And I would say, you know, from my perspective, just being on the operation side of things, I think that I had to relearn that real community safety, it shouldn't be outsourced to bureaucracy, period. So whether or not that's embedded within the health department, whether it's a nonprofit, whether it's a politicized social service or a traditional, you know, crisis response like a paramedic EMT type of formation, we can't keep looking to bureaucracy and especially state embedded systems to save us and to be like the guardians of capital S safety in our communities. Like safety is truly happening on our porches. It's happening in our backyards. It's happening in our driveways. It's happening in hard conversations and sharing harvest from our gardens, like that's safety. So yeah, I would say that with as much learning as we've done together and with community, there's also been so much unlearning and really putting forth a community vision that truly is rooted in abolition and not being against prisons and policing, but is offering a vision that is much, much more abolitionist and healing.
Damon: Yeah, a thing that's like a prickle I feel as an organizer, especially one that's like been doing it over time, is we go out and ask these questions that have kind of like obvious answers, or very like human answers, and after a while, you hear it again and again and that, that doesn't mean we should give up asking, right like that there's actually value to you as the the or receiver of this communal knowledge of like, oh, there is a larger pattern. There's a larger consensus. And maybe it's not like coalesce, but everyone everywhere says they want housing, food, medicine, childcare, and I'm not bullshitting. I'm not making this up, and it's not outdated, right? Like, a refresh of the data, and everybody wants to be a human being that lives, okay, all right. And within that, you kind of scenario-ed out for us, I think probably you know one of the top five slippery or more difficult conversations for abolitionist organizers to feel, especially if they're like just gaining this experience of, if there's an active shooting happening in my community, I feel more comfortable turning back or relying on that police system and that being a conversation you're faced with. And so I'm not expecting Care-Based Safety to have figured out how to address all of shooting in America. But I am curious how you respond to that concern, how you have that conversation with, how you train your folks to respond to that conversation. I think so many people listening value from that.
Sheri: Well, I think one thing is, it can be really easy to get caught up in this, like, I must have the answer. And I think it's really important to be able to say, you know, I have no idea, because we're not that far down the path yet, right? But I hear you say, you know, I'm thinking of one person in particular who said to me, hey, look, when my kids are out playing and I hear gunshots, I want the police there. And so what I can say to that individual is, I hear you saying the safety of your kids is really important. I hear you saying that you want the police to be able to respond, and I know that they can't respond if they're also dealing with the overdose downtown and the person having the mental health crisis three blocks over. So let's start there, because then we can walk down this path together. We get to know each other, we build trust together, so that in the future we do know how to respond to that shooting. Because right now I don't know, and to just be honest about that, and I think that's part of the trust building. Because, frankly, like the cops don't know either, right? Like none of us know, and so when we pretend that we do, that's a violation of trust, because it's a lie.
Damon: There's a way we idealize police response from news, whether it's propaganda and fiction, this idea that they are immediate rapidresponders, they come right when things hit the fan, that like, while the bullets are flying, they're there 90 seconds later.
Liz: They're actually trained..
Damon: ...not putting their body over their children and shielding us. And they're like, sacrificing themselves for us. And like a lot of times when you call them, if they come by the time they come, the shit is over anyway. Now we're dealing with the things that they don't have the skills of, like the aftercare and the relationship building. So some of what I'm hearing is like, not making a false promise, being honest and like fallibility and not having all the answers, but then also having the conversation of, like, we actually have an imaginary about what the police are that's far from the reality, and let's actually deconstruct that so people stop putting some of this, like undue faith into something that's not there in the first place.
Sheri: 100%
Liz: There we there was a toolkit that Movement for Black Lives put out last year that assessed Black perceptions and attitudes towards policing across the country, and they found that it was like upwards of 70% of Black folks that they interviewed said that policing does make them feel safe and that they do want more police presence in their neighborhoods, but a more nuanced look into that, you know, we know that what they want is safer neighborhoods. And when it comes to gun violence, yeah, Sheri. When Sheri shared that story with me, it just felt so clear, like, oh, help us respond to the mental health crises and the neighborly disputes, so that way the cops actually can protect and serve and respond to Black communities in the ways that Black folks are actually asking for it, because we know that Black communities and neighborhoods are over criminalized, but actually under policed. And that's a nuance that I think often gets missed.
Damon: That's a bar.
Liz: That's tea, like that's tea for real. And I want to shout out the work actually a Chicago-based nonprofit, Stick Talk. They have really deepened some of my learnings on the gun violence issue, in particular, because we know gun violence disproportionately affects Black neighborhoods, communities, and their whole framing is, look, no one enters the gun violence cycle as a perpetrator. If we're actually going to be responding to gun violence, we need to understand that the people are engaging are actually survivors of gun violence, and we need to center their needs, and we need to center true community building and a harm reductionist approach, rather than a criminalizing, punitive, you know, judgmental, oh, guns are bad. Like, well, the cops aren't responding on the south side of Chicago. Folks are arming themselves to keep their families, friends and neighborhoods safe, and we're actually looking at Ypsi Police Department call data from the past year. One of the number one reasons for 911 calls in the city of Ypsilanti is for "suspicious people." Like, it's just suspicion. Reading that, it's like, what, what is? What is this? How is this? Not one of the main reasons why folks are calling 911. That, to us, is a clear intervention. So we want to be able to respond to those so that way, for the people who do feel like police is a safe option and a supportive option, that they can actually be doing their job.
Kiss: And what that will reveal, addressing those other things removes an excuse that the cops have, basically, and if this is the thing that people are saying they're equipped to do and they can't do it, then then people might be asking, what else could we do to address those types of crises. But I think that that's an important thing. So, like, I've always said, like, in some ways, we're trying to make, in the short term, their jobs easy. Like, we agree they shouldn't have to do all those things. We should have people who are skilled in that, so that, if they're saying that's what we're skilled at, is addressing these, like, momentary sparks of violence and crisis. Okay, we know what happens when y'all try to respond to that. It often escalates it, but let's remove the excuses that you're making for why that's the case. And so we've named kind of the two spaces that that y'all are interacting with, Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti. And so I want to root us in place a little bit for those who haven't spent a lot of time in that corner of Michigan. What do we need to know about these two communities and the relationship between them in order to understand some of these dynamics?
Sheri: I'm laughing because there is a gentleman who comes to our response pilot a lot. I love him. He makes me laugh all the time, but he always shows up. He's a Black man has lived experience of incarceration, lived experience of homelessness and lived experience of substance use. And he always shows up and he'll say, you know what you need to understand, Sheri is Ypsilanti is Ann Arbor's whole ghetto. A lot of times that's how people in Ann Arbor view Ypsi. Ann Arbor is the home of the University of Michigan. It's a very liberal town, and they're very proud of being a very liberal town. Ypsilanti is also a university town. Eastern Michigan University is here, but it is a much more working class town. It is historically a Black community. It is populated by historically a lot of folks who came from the South to work in the auto factories.
Liz: Yeah. I mean, I just pulled up some some data real quick. You know, we're only about 12% of the population here in Washtenaw County, yet are 52% of the charging requests of the prosecutor's office between 2017 and 2022. While only about 30% of the county are people of color, they comprise, again, over 50% of the warrant requests. There's more of us that are incarcerated in local jails and prisons. There's high correlation between like co-occurring substance use disorder and like mental illness in our local jails and prisons. And more deeply rooted contexts: we are also on Anishinaabeg, Wyandot and Potawatomi land. There has been an Anishinaabeg settlement actually on the river where we're sitting at right now for over a thousand years, and now it is actually a historically Black community, and the U of M Board of Regents is actually proposing to build a server farm out there. So that's a snapshot into what we are dealing with and the evolution of colonial and state-based violence on these lands. And there's also a really strong lineage of Black resistance here and abolition that I want to uplift as well. Washtenaw County, Ann Arbor and Ypsi were one of the last stops on the Underground Railroad, us being so close to Canada and the border. And so all across this county, you have former stations and homes, and one of the oldest abolitionist newspapers in the country actually is rooted right here in Ann Arbor. And so while you have this history of displacement, occupation, state-based violence, disposability. You also have a really strong lineage of abolitionist resistance and Black liberation that really helps guide us. So that is a North Star for us. You know, we know that we are in a strong lineage of bringing folks to freedom, right, like nobody gets left behind, like we go in North y'all coming with?
Damon: I'm really enjoying having this conversation with y'all, because it moves us out of like our urban center focus. I think so so much when we talk about movement or politics at large, we can tend to focus on the cities, but particularly, I think major urban centers, because of segregation operates differently. And so particularly in the Midwest, and in these Rust Belt towns, as we've seen de industrialization, there was this railroad other side of the track dynamic. Particularly in Michigan, I know of two towns, Albion and Marshall, Michigan, where it's basically the same infrastructure, but there is a historically predominantly white, affluent municipality that is sharing infrastructure within a more extracted from or working class, more Black and brown space. And that happens throughout. And as we see the teetering and collapsing, then the like distinction of do schools get folded into each other? Do we go from two hospitals to one hospital? And so then, you know the way we talk about the north and south side in Chicago, de facto, like it is actually more structurally organized. And so with that reality of like, how these smaller town dynamics are working, really want to talk about this pilot that came out of a city council vote, and also the fact that in this two-town dynamic, we have this major institution. So with that, can y'all, like, just talk us through like there's been a few years of now piloting this work and having to navigate this municipal landscape that is maybe different than what folks are used to.
Sheri: I would also say, you know, when you talk about, we call it the 23 divide, because highway 23 runs between Ypsi and Ann Arbor, and when you look at data from one side of 23 to the other, it's just radically different, not by mistake. So initially, when the design team came together, because it grew so deeply out of the murder of Aura Rosser in Ann Arbor. People were initially thinking about a pilot in Ann Arbor, but folks who came together were from around the county, and all of us were deeply involved in liberatory work in one way or the other, whether that's healing justice or working in the homeless community or housing community, and one of the things that came up over and over again is that we needed to be more involved within Ypsilanti, because of that 23 divide, because of the economic and racial disparities. Additionally, because between the University of Michigan and the high tax base in Ann Arbor, there are so many more resources in Ann Arbor than in Ypsilanti. And so as the design team, we really felt like it was important to talk about Washtenaw County as a whole. As Liz mentioned, there was the possibility to get some money from the city of Ann Arbor through ARPA funding. And we applied for that. We did not get it. They ended up pulling the request for proposals and saying, like, we need to revise this. Like we put it out there. It turns out, this isn't exactly what we want. And when they put out the new request for proposals, and you know, this potential to get a lot of money, there was a lot of strings attached, or what felt to us like a lot of strings attached. And so we chose not to apply for that money. And in the meantime, we had really been building up relationships in Ypsilanti, and so a lot of our work now is based there.
Kiss: So it's interesting, you've named now that the request for proposals and the request to stop proposing. And so I'm curious about that decision to not reapply. What was the internal decision making like around that? That can be a very difficult decision to make, to be like we're going to say no to this thing that would like enable us to, quote, unquote, scale up.
Sheri: You know, in some ways it wasn't a difficult decision at all, because what we did is we didn't have to make it. We went back to our community and said, okay, as we created Care-Based Safety. This is what you said we want. This is what this new proposal is asking for. Here are places that we see gaps. Do we change our mission in order to get this money, hoping that we can make enough of an impact that it'll change things down the road? Or do we say, you know, this is now outside of our values? And you know, those of us on staff didn't have to make that decision because the community made it for us. You know, at community meetings, I think, almost to a person, people said, do not even apply for that money.
Liz: The second RFP really regenerated, top down, more clinical frameworks. So the mandatory reporting, collecting, you know, caller data, stuff like that, and completely eliminated a lot of the community co-creation values, the community building aspects of it. Like one of the critiques we got in our application — we were the only bidder, by the way — was that we were we were going to use, like federal funding to host dance parties. Like that was one of their critiques. There was also a really concerning requirement that we provide 24/7 implementation within one year, which is not only completely unfeasible, but it's really unsafe. Like University of Michigan has a huge football team. They pack a stadium every fall with over 100,000 people for these football games. Like you can just imagine what crisis response on that scale would be. And it's funny, because the Ann Arbor city administrator, Milton Dohoney, actually came out recently and said 24/7 implementation is completely unreasonable, like we need to start small. So it took a bit of education, but once we were able to explain to community why the first RFP was so different from the second one, it was, yeah, as Sheri mentioned, really a near unanimous decision. And again, there was a shared commitment to not outsourcing to embedded government models and to really protecting our autonomy, our sovereignty, our agency, and really emphasizing that safety is by us, for us, and it should be accountable to communities. So there was a clear values misalignment. And as Yodit says, Yodit Mesfin Johnson, who's on our mission circle, says, you know, your values should cost you something. It cost us that RFP to the tune of $3.5 million and I will say, you know, from from my perspective of things, you know, put so much into that first RFP, and it was hard for for me to re-strategize. I mean, we kind of opened this conversation by talking about grief, and I think that was a real moment of grieving for our community, right? Like this is coming out of decades of organizing. And of course, we know that the struggle for non-police alternatives long predates just the past 10 years, so there was grief in that decision, but it feels so clear that we made the right decision. And I really want to shout out Sheri here and actually our responders, because when it came time to launch a pilot last summer, I was reluctant, and I had reservations about moving forward with a pilot, knowing that our funding future was uncertain, and we were dealing with, at first, a kind of indifferent Ann Arbor city council, and then it became an oppositional Ann Arbor city council, and then it just went downright hostile. So we were like, whoa. We've put so many eggs in this RFP basket, and now we have to completely pivot. And so it was really our responders who were like, look, y'all, we got all this money, we trained up staff, we hired people, and we said we were going to deliver a non-police response program that was rooted in community, ARPA funding or not. This is what we're here to do. And so I, like, really, gotta shout out Sheri and our response team for being like, we're gonna make a way out of no way, as we always have done. I wanna shout out Freedom House from Pittsburgh, right? Like the Black street medics and healers and crisis responders who invented paramedics and EMT and ambulances as we know it. This is always how we get creative and pivot in the in the face of lies and manipulation from, you know, embedded state institutions. And so we move forward with the summer pilot, and it was a huge success. And we were able to pilot what we've called a place-based pilot, as Sheri mentioned. We've had three. With each pilot, we're iterating, we're learning, talking to community, collecting feedback, evaluating, collecting the data, and seeing where we need to expand.
Sheri: Yeah, I would say one of the things that we've worked really hard is to not over promise and under deliver. There are so many well-intentioned nonprofits or community organizations that come in, they start something, and then they're gone the next year. It does harm to say, here's this number, call it when you have a crisis, and then half the time you get a voice recording, and two months later, that number doesn't exist anymore. And so we've been trying to grow in a way that is organic and real and is built on relationships. So, you know, we started with just the place-based response. You know, we don't have a number, but this is where we're at, and anywhere we can walk to you can come get us, and we'll walk over there, right? And then over the winter, we continued that place-based and we added a phone, and we just gave it to one community partner. You know, on one night a week, we're going to be available to be on call at this number. Don't make this number public, and we realized we could do that. So this summer, we're expanding a little bit more. And in that way, you know, we can keep building our muscle to do more and more, but in a way that not only doesn't over promise and under delivers, but also, I believe, models alternatives for the people that you know that we're walking alongside. We also borrowed from Cambridge Heart their crisis response program, because we're absolutely learning alongside our sibling programs all over the country, especially our ones who share abolitionist values, but we have an asynchronous response support form as well. So every two weeks, you can submit non-emergency requests for any type of community care support, and our responders will get back to you. So that's another way that we are trying to scale sustainably, and, you know, move at the speed of trust, as Adrienne Maree Brown and Grace Lee Boggs teaches us absolutely.
Damon: So I want to celebrate that adaptability and that self trust to be able to pivot. I really want to honor that grief, because I think that is a grief that a lot of organizers are holding. You referenced Cambridge Heart. We also talked to our folks REP in Minneapolis. Like, this is a continued thread of like, there was this moment where the Overton Windows shifted and there were promises, there was this messaging, there was also this, you know, federal funding that was looming, and this posture of alignment, of solidarity, and whether it was, you know, misalignment in values that was sincere or actual, strategic sabotage, we see that those commitments did not matriculate or were receded in different ways. And so then to then pivot into this, really, you know, wisdom-based approach of, like, not over promising and moving at, you know, the, you know, slow is good and fast. You know, that old saying, like..
Kiss: Slow equals smooth, smooth equals fast.
Sheri: And small is all.
Damon: So we just started the third pilot. Yeah, what are some of the top level lessons that are being mined from from the practice?
Kiss: Yeah, things maybe you didn't know before you started the first one or the second one, even. What's emerged?
Sheri: You know, one of the things that is a challenging balance is the best way to plug in volunteers and make use of volunteers in response. You know, I'm just going to name it. So many of the folks who sign on and say, I want to volunteer, I want to be a responder, I want to show up when there's a crisis may have really good skills, but they're not necessarily part of the population that we're responding with. So there's a lot of white, middle class, wealthy women, largely from Ann Arbor, who are like, yes, I want to come to Ypsi and do response. And these are people who are my friends, right? I love them, and in many ways, like, this is me, right? Except, except the wealthy part. But like, what does that say? And how does that change the face of the areas where we're responding? I'm thinking about our place-based response, which is, you know, largely Black folks. It is largely people who are either living on the streets or just half a step away from that, and that is their space, and to change the demographics of it is not right. And so that balancing can be challenging. I have hope that this is one of the places where that asynchronous form comes in because when you know people are delivering groceries or sitting with somebody in court to support them or taking them to the hospital to make sure they're being treated well as a substance user, it's also a way then for those volunteers to be invested in this work. But that... I did not anticipate that level of balancing that that sometimes takes. Partly, I didn't anticipate it because I've been doing work in the homeless community for many years prior to Care-Based Safety. I live at a house of hospitality where folks you know come in to shower and do laundry. So these are our folks I know and love well. And so I've never felt like an outsider in that space. And so this realization that A0 in some ways, I am and B) like, how to navigate that in a way that is safe and kind and honoring people's identities, which can be, you know, complex and multiple.
Kiss: Yeah, and there's like, the moral, ethical side of that, and then also the strategic of like, what? How does it shape our work if we're not thinking about that, and where is it more useful for someone with that position to be the one who shows up?
Sheri: Exactly.
Liz: Yeah, I would, I would agree with that. That's really interesting. I was a responder last summer, which I think it's really important for us operations girlies to get in the field and to make sure, like it's not just about listening to community, it's about listening to your staff members and your colleagues and your comrades who are really leading response. So after responding last summer, I realized, you know, we really work with a population that's kind of getting shuffled in between the jail and the prisons, the emergency room and the shelters, and our programming is community building and crisis response, but then we also have advocacy. It just put it into practice in a whole new way, where it really emphasized, for me, why the advocacy part of our work is so important. You know, you hear from crisis response programs like ours all over the country, like, look, we're responding, but there's no 24/7 shelter in our community. So we're coming for the immediate intervention, but we're not actually creating true community safety. You know, the social determinants of health: We need affordable housing. We need access to healthy, fresh foods. We need affordable medical care. We need trauma-informed healing resources. Like all of these things, create true safety. So it was a real eye opener for me, like whoa, this intervention is so powerful, and we have to keep doing that upstream work and doing the big systems change work to make sure that doing the deep community care work that we need to really build resilient communities. Another piece of it was just, it was so emotional. I mean, we talked about grief, like, I remember, like, helping, oh, again, emotional, just talking about it last summer, like helping a youth, like, set up a tent, like, and the sun was going down, and it's just like, damn, like, this is really the best we can do. There was so much grief involved. And so I found I had to really take good care of myself to respond. And so within our job descriptions, we actually provide all responders — 10% of their time just goes to self care. For those of us who are on the operation side of things, you know, some advice is like, really take creating a care-based internal culture as seriously as you're taking kind of direct service, crisis response work that you're doing. I think that's so so so important. I love that line from a poem that Adrienne Maree Brown wrote where she says that the broken heart can cover more territory. And I feel like last summer was heartbreaking in a way that, like expanded my heart to hold this work in new ways. And I'm really grateful for that. And then from the ops side of things, yeah, I would tell folks, you know, don't be afraid to pivot, for sure. You know, our story is not that we got effed over by Ann Arbor City Council. Our story is that we had to pivot. We made a values aligned decision, and now we have three successful pilots in Ypsilanti that are truly rooted in community needs and accountability, and we feel really proud of that. Five years after the uprising, we know that punishment is deeply popular. Policing has actually expanded. We're actually being we're — we continue to be defunded. The tentacles of the prison industrial complex, they go out so far and wide, which I think was another learning for me, I'm like...
Sheri: Me, too.
Liz: Damn we can't even call this shelter because the cops are gonna pop up and like just navigating so many of wraparound support as a truly decriminalized nonprofit, you know, has been another a tough learning I think for us. I would definitely recommend thinking about governance in radically reimaginative ways as well. We use a system called sociocracy, which I would highly recommend, yes, so we practice
Damon: That word just made my body tingle.
Liz: Yeah. I love that. We love the tingle. So, yeah, we didn't want to just reproduce the same type of nonprofit structure that we know is actually extracting wealth, and it's rooted in consent-based decision making, which is not consensus, it's consent, which means everybody got to give the thumbs up. Everybody needs to consent to decisions in our respective aims and domains before we move forward. So I think that that has been just such a learning experience. At times it has not been pretty right, like we are all embedded and socialized in systems of hierarchy and authority, but just really honoring agency and choice for everyone is such a core part of our values, and it's made me a better person. It's made me stronger interpersonally, just in my personal life, like I just don't make decisions on behalf of other people anymore. And then I guess the last thing I'll say is just to really lean into the resources that you do have. We're really leaning into our local partnerships to do some some of that base building, grassroots organizing work. And since you know this is related to Interrupting Criminalization and this gathering in the fall, I really want to shout out Shira Hassan' s work. The building crisis space has been a really powerful space for us to just like learn and experiment and share challenges, get feedback, she offered us the language of politicized social service that has like, been so clarifying for us, and so I offer that to other crisis response programs, listening. Really look at what a politicized social service is and how to actually embody more mutual aid, harm reductionist, abolitionist values is like, so, so important, and it often contradicts with 501c3, operations. So it's tough, but it's possible. So like, lean into mentorship, lean into working groups, and ask for help when you need it. Because, as Sheri said, like none of us really know how to do this.
Sheri: The last thing that I would add to that is, and this is something I really learned from Liz. I want to also acknowledge joy, and that we have to be joy activists. We have to find joy. We have to create space for joy. Our place-based response, yes, every night you're there, your heart is going to get broken. But also, every night you're there, you're going to laugh. The number of people who come up and just like, appreciate our being there, not in a like, oh, here you are to save the day kind of way, but hey, my friends are here.
Damon: All right, now I wanna pull a pin out of something. I put a pin in something we were talking about earlier, but I didn't tell anybody. This was a secret pin that I put in...
Kiss: A secret pin.
Damon: So secret pin comes out. Early in the conversation, we referenced the data of what people actually call the police for, and so much of it is about suspicion. And I love being honest about that, because, again, I think we need to talk about the dialectic or the contradiction of like, yes, community is trusting, community wants community, community loves each other, but also community is fractured, community has these suspicions, community has internalized these carceral logics and these punishment-based logics and these anti-community logics as well. Both of those things are informing each other. How do you imagine addressing that community suspicion? Like we could get housing for all, we can get, you know, addiction treatment, we can get childcare, but that is something that's deeper and more embedded, and it feels like y'all's work can push us towards addressing the suspicion that people have of each other. So how does suspicion show up, and how do you see the work kind of remedying some of that?
Sheri: As you were asking that question, I thought of something that happened last summer. So one of the things we did is we gave our personal phone numbers to local businesses, and we said, you know, we're here in this area where people have lots of fear and concerns because, you know, folks are gathering and we'll be here, and if there's a crisis, you can call us. And one of the business owners came and said to me, he was very upset because somebody had asked him for money. And I said, oh, did he not go away when you told him no, and he's, well, yes, I mean, he asked me for money, of course I said no, and he he walked away. And I was like, okay, so I'm sounding really snarky here, but hopefully I didn't sound snarky with it. I was like, what, you know, where's the crisis, right? If I asked you for money, would that be a crisis? Would, you know, what's the need? What do you need me to do? Like, that gentle pushback can be really important. And when I talk about, you know, building trust, it's like across the board, right? In harm reduction, we talk about taking people where they're at, and sometimes it's much easier for me to take somebody where they're at, if where they're at is, you know, struggling, but when I see somebody who I don't perceive to be struggling, it's harder for me to take them where they're at. So with this person right to be like, you're really seriously upset because somebody asked you for this like, where help me understand where you feel unsafe. So I think that's part of it. It's just like asking those hard questions and being real genuine in our willingness to listen to them.
Liz: That whole thing about suspicious calls was really eye opening to us, and when we first saw that, we were like, okay, these are clearly the Karens of Ypsilanti who are making these calls. And we were thinking about Grace Lee Boggs, we were thinking about visionary organizing, and how deeply rooted and how deeply popular both disposability and cultures of punishment are. Like they're really popular across classes, races, ecologies, municipalities. Like that movement is winning right now. Data has shown that programs like ours, like REP like Cahoots, are actually incredibly effective public health interventions. This is best practices by the American Health Association. SAMHSA recommends models like ours, but the data hasn't been able to create and actually translate to programs like ours, actually being sustained, funded, etc. So we were like, what if we tried something beyond just your classic political education? We're actually trying to plan a series of somatic workshops where we invite folks who feel safe calling the police, right? Who would call 911, for quote, unquote, suspicious behavior, Black man walking down the street and actually do some somatic work to really help us locate. Okay, where is this fear and this vigilance living in our bodies? Like if we don't feel safe, like if we don't know what true safety feels like, everything that's different or unknown is going to set off the red alerts, like this is unsafe. I'm inspired by the work of Resmaa Menakem, and more of abolitionist somatic works. I do think this is a really important piece to help move our movement forward. And I come as an organizer out of the environmental and climate justice movements in many ways, and I think a major teaching from that movement is that data isn't enough. 99% of the international scientific community is like, guys, we're causing climate change and the climate is collapsing. But like, still, there's, like, so much resistance. And so I think for programs like ours, we're constantly told you need to show the data, you have to collect the data, you have to evaluate the pilots. And we're like, okay, we're doing that. And like, Cahoots is closing after 20 years of extremely compelling, well verified evidence-backed data that's showing just how powerfully effective and impactful that program was. So, you know, we don't think that just collecting data and evidence is going to save us, and we want to really lean into a visionary organizing perspective and look at somatics, look at more healing justice-oriented interventions to truly do the changing of minds and the changing of hearts. Because I am really concerned about how popular policing and just the culture of disposability and punishment is in our communities. It's just so deep rooted,
Kiss: I think that that somatic intervention for the people who might have that activation is really valuable if they're down to show up into it. And I'm also hearing for y'all as people figuring out how to respond to this wide range of what crisis can mean, the value that that brings. And so with that in mind, what have you learned about how to stay grounded, regulated and in focus in moments of crisis? Because that's something that I think so many of us responding to crisis on so many skills are struggling with right now.
Sheri: Yeah. So another organization that I work with is the Meta Peace Team, and we do unarmed response internationally. And one of the things that is just a basic practice is we start everything with a centering, and we end everything with a self care checkout. And I think that's good because it increases our toolbox and it becomes just part of our regular way of being. I often say, when I'm facilitating non violence trainings, I encourage people to create a regular practice of grounding and centering before they're in a moment of crisis. Because most of us don't wake up having, like, never run to the mailbox and be like, what the hell today? I'll run a marathon, right? Like we practice and we train for it, and in that way, creating this space to make it part of our regular daily practice exercises, those muscles, that intuition, all those memories that are in us, and then ending with gratitude or self care as a way to check out, just to remind us of the good and to think about what we're gonna do to care for ourselves.
Liz: I've learned a lot from Sheri in this regard, and also like deepening in the lineage. Like, yes, this work is so hard. But like, they literally were putting people in the back of wagons on these exact lands, less than 150 years ago, on the underground road to get them to Canada. Like, this work has always been happening here. This work will always happen. As shitty as these times are, I believe that we were called to be here, each of us. And I also believe that we chose this time. Like, I believe that in our separate lineages, we were like, you know what? Put me in coach. Throw me into climate collapse. Put me in in the collapse of American Empire. Like, I know shits on fire, but like, I'm ready, like, I'm in there. So it's a commitment to our ancestors who showed us and gave us this resilience. But it's also a commitment to our future descendants. You know, seven generations forward and back and developing a spiritual practice has just been so, so important for grounding me in that lineage of resistance, for sure.
Kiss: Well, as we close out, I want to practice what y'all preach and just share the deep gratitude for taking this time with us, for the deep work that y'all have built over these years, the generosity and sharing your learnings, and sharing the hard parts and sharing the joy just so deeply appreciative of what y'all have built.
Damon: The tingle has sustained.
Kiss: Then you may need to see, you may need to see an urgent care, or call a crisis response.
Damon: It's a warm, it's a warm, generative tingle. I'm feeling it. So thank you all so much, and y'all have helped us contextualize these series of conversations as we've been in conversation with also Cambridge and REP and y'all just brought home so many of the lessons we've been learning in this season. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you deeply for the work.
Sheri: Thank you.
Damon: All right, squad. We are not done. It is time. We are here. We have arrived at the peer review.
Music: Hoping I don't offend on my peers.
Damon: Of course, it is mandatory that we re-invite and welcome back the one and only our partner in decriminalization. Eva, how you feeling?
Eva: Is mandatory good or bad? I'm here.
Kiss: I really hope you never decide that you don't want to show up anymore, because now that it's mandatory, we'd be screwed. But we're very happy to have you here, and we're very happy to have joining us this season in the peer review Deana Lewis. Deana, good to see you.
Deana: Great to see you. Great to be here.
Kiss: What jumped out to you from this conversation?
Deana: What really jumped out to me with Care-Based Safety, CBS, they were saying out loud that abolition is not just opposing police in prisons, but building the world which we want to see. And it's not just that person shouldn't be in jail, and then we get the person out of jail, and we say, bye, see you later. It's that we are actually in community and relationship, and we need to take that care. The other thing that I heard in the episode was how we need to kill the cop inside of us, and I think we've heard that in other episodes, but really that we don't need to surveil other people, that we don't need to surveil our communities, but that we need to work with our communities to keep each other safe.
Kiss: What about for you, Eva, what jumped out?
Eva: Y'all know I'm a one note band, and Sheri was speaking straight to my heart. She said, community building is as important as response. So the building, the blocking, the breaking. These aren't different modes of being. These are the people who are willing to go deeper. As Sheri says, like, we always have to be willing to go deeper. What is the source of these harms? What is going to be the source of our success? And it's this community response. It's this building together.
Damon: I love that point of like community at the root of the work, and through this season, tracing what were the different initial or central communities that these programs are built from. So in Minneapolis, we have the community responding to the uprising after the murder of George Floyd; in Cambridge, it's much more grounded in the work and experience of survivors; and the base community, especially the work that Sheri was bringing to the conversation was based in the community of the unhoused, and for anybody who's done work with that community, it helps you navigate all of the systems. Like she was saying, like, what does it mean when someone who does not have identification has to go to the doctor? That as an example of how these real life circumstances force a system mapping that many folks don't pay attention to.
Kiss: Yeah, and how, at least in her experience, that informed the decisions they made about building this pilot right, the ways that they went out to meet people where they were at to get feedback on what it should look like. You know, they spent a lot of time in our conversation breaking down the process of getting like, decision making in place together — the series of like, focus group, community conversations, which, like, I think we kind of assume we're all doing some version of and sometimes people show up and sometimes they don't, and you go like, alight, well, that's who showed up, but there was this real, like, determination to be like, no, no, this doesn't work unless we have a variety of voices from within the space that we're trying to meet the needs of actually participating in the design. And that took a lot of rigor and a lot of time and a lot of work, but it's made the impact potentially more successful. You know, as they're in this like third version of a pilot this summer, learning through that experience.
Eva: Community buy in, it ain't quick.
Deana: Another thing that really struck me was the humility that they had in this work, and specifically, Liz was talking about, you know, skilling up. You know, we all know that we don't have all of the skills to do all of the things, but it's really coming from a vulnerable place to say on a podcast, hey, I didn't know what I was doing, I'm still learning, and here I am, and we're still doing this work, so.
Kiss: Totally.
Eva: So much of this process is learning, but so much of it is unlearning, too. And I thought Liz and Sheri were really eloquent about, like, accessing our radical imaginations. And I'm really curious, like, what you all think, like, how can we do that?
Kiss: I mean, I think for me, it always lands in having a clearer sense of how your space got the way it was. You know, we talked in the episode about, like, what are the lines of historic segregation between these two towns? What's the relationship between them? And I think sometimes when we say radical imagination, for people who that's not a muscle they've built, it feels kind of like in the air and floaty, but actually it's about, okay, what is the space we have? And then what else could it look like? What would it look like for that line to have different implications than the implications it has? Yeah, that was something that I heard, was them being able to very eloquently and clearly name this is the line that divides access to resources, and this is the line where we're trying to make interventions in the crises that those lack of resources create.
Damon: And to that point of radical imagination, and the way that you name that Kiss like, I think so often we think of radical imagination as a way to source vision, but it actually can be more effective as a way to source strategy of like, how do we evaluate where we are, see our limitations and use imagination to not be confined by our current limitation, and then from there, like, how do we actually make this work more useful, more tangible, as opposed to just like, we can see a day where capitalism doesn't exist, which, like, we need that as well. But what does it mean to see a day where I have a radius of people that are prepared to respond to conflicts that they weren't last year.
Kiss: Yeah, and this is also imagination. Yeah, in this example, it wasn't, let's imagine that downtown Ypsilanti doesn't have anyone in crisis. It's, let's imagine what we could provide to the people who are in downtown Ypsilanti in moments of crisis. That's like a more tangible form of imagination.
Deana: Not only imagine what we can provide, but what we can provide that the state is would never.
Kiss: Right.
Deana: When I think about radical imagination, what comes to mind is time and space. It's not that we want to do the opposite of what the state is doing. We want to do something that works for the people that we're working with. And so we need time to imagine what that is. We need the space to do that type of imagining, to do that type of thinking. And when we think about the folks who are doing this type of work, who are working class, who are we're, steeped in capitalism, who have bills to pay, it's hard to find the time and space. We have to do that, and we have to allow for that for people who it looks like they don't have the time.
Kiss: And that incursion on people's time and space because of capital makes the types of decisions that they made to turn down money like that so much more difficult, right? You go, okay, here is this what could be perceived as gift of time and space to experiment, to try, but being able to, like, accurately look at the strings attached and not fall into the trap of the wishful thinking, which I think they did with so much like, rigor and discipline, and ultimately deciding, like, actually, that's not a gift, that would make it impossible for us to do the thing we know to be true. That's just a very disciplined and grounded choice to make.
Deana: Yeah. I mean, I used to say, like, the money doesn't know where it's you know where it's coming from, as a way to be like, let's just take the money, because we need the money. And then as I grew I'm like, yeah, the money doesn't know where it's coming from, but the people giving the money, they know.
Kiss: Yeah. And in this case, it was less even like, oh, is this money, clean money or dirty money? It's like, what are the implications on what we can actually do if we take this money,
Damon: and what are the strings attached to it?
Kiss: Totally.
Damon: I think, you know, one last thing that's that's coming up for me is this work existed in the context also of Ann Arbor. And so you get the University of Michigan, and like, I think throughout this conversation, we haven't really talked about academia and research in like a super detailed way. And if you go to their site, they have all of these phenomenal reports that I think people should check out. And it actually is really moving to see this data be used, but then at the same time, when the data didn't serve the incentives of the state, was just like disregarded and thrown out the window. And so it's like one this information producing and gathering is and can be very useful for our movements. But there has been this, like, false assumption that, like, if you prove it with numbers, then institutions will then receive it
Kiss: Like they have no choice but to receive it.
Damon: Yeah, our human centered narratives are too soft. We need to have hard data and hard numbers, and then they bring hard data and hard numbers, and it's still thrown out the window.
Kiss: And so I think, as we're thinking about the lessons to take from these crisis responders, maybe this idea of shifting our relationship to data as quote, unquote evidence is really helpful for people listening, who have positions of maybe influence, or who are partnering with grassroots organizations to then take their information and try to use it for policy, because very often it's people in that position who are saying like, hey, in order for me to make a change with this, I need you to provide this data, or we need to do all of this study, and that takes time and space and energy, and so for people who have leaned on that, how do you lessen the burden of that on grassroots organizations while still making sure that the work is rigorous?
Damon: Number and data can't legitimize work that the state is seeing as insurgent, right?
Kiss: They're gonna de legitimize it.
Eva: This is flipping something that Sheri And Liz said on its head. But they say values should cost us something. So dear funders, values should cost you something. Look for organizations that are rooted in the values that we think are going to change the world and really interrogate like, how organizations and people are enacting those values. That's something you can't put a number on.
Kiss: Yeah, that's, that's beautiful.
Deana: That's like a mic drop, right there.
Eva: Guys, this mic was really expensive. I can't drop it.
Kiss: Let's hop on out of here before Eva voids the warranty on her microphone. Deana, where can folks find your work in the ways you'd like to be found?
Deana: Yeah. Well, first, don't find me, but you can find my work. I'm the host of a podcast called Stories for Power. The podcast is a collaboration with Creative Interventions and Just Practice Collaborative and in the podcast, we take folks on a journey across local communities, and we explore the last 25 years of building community, accountability, transformative justice and abolitionist practice, and we talk with the architects and radical organizers of that work.
Damon: So if you rock with One Million Experiments, I could say with a high certainty that you should go ahead over there and absorb that good work.
Deana: And as you're absorbing, do all the things that you're supposed to do for podcasts. Rate, review, share it with a friend. Share it with a nemesis. Should they share with a nemesis? Absolutely, because the nemesis might need to learn.
Kiss: Not an enemy, but a nemesis. There's more room there.
Deana: I feel like maybe even an enemy, because maybe they're just on the outs right now. But then, you know, we can come together more as a community —
Kiss: — build collective power,
Deana: change people's minds.
Damon: Share with that person you're a little indifferent about too.
Kiss: Yeah, that person, you go like, Oh, where did we meet? Send it to them. And then be like, what's your name again? You can, of course, find all of One Million Experiments also wherever get your podcast.
Damon: Check out all the episodes if you haven't already.
Kiss: Send those to someone you feel a little lukewarm about. You can check out One Million Experiments, the film on Apple, TV, Google Play, YouTube, movies and everything else that we do here at Respair Production and Media. You can find at resparemedia.com including our flagship show, Airgo, A, I, R, G, O. Eva. Where can they find Interrupting Criminalization?
Eva: Always at interruptingcriminalization.org. On the socials @interruptcrim, and I'm going to throw in an extra plug. Go on over to millionexperiments.com. Maybe you're already there listening to the episode on our site, but go ahead and submit your experiment. We want to hear from you. Is there something you think people in your community are doing that are bringing us closer to the world that we want to live in? Submit your experiment. Submit something you've seen. Submit a good idea. We want to hear from you. And of course, if you want to find Care-Based Safety, you can see how the Ypsilanti place-based pilot is going this summer over at carebasedsafety.org or on social @carebased afety.
Kiss: All right, y'all, it's been a joy. Make sure you get in tune and we'll see you back in the lab soon.
Damon: Much love to the people.
Deana: Bye.
Kiss: Peace.