Freedom Dreams
Detroit Justice Center
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Freedom Dreams explores the many paths to building a truly just future for everyone. Centered in abolitionist thinking, this podcast, produced by the Detroit Justice Center, expands beyond the realm of criminal justice into conversations around what we could be building and prioritizing instead of punishment and further harm to make our communities genuinely safe.
Available episodes
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May 3, 2023
Building Power Inside the Informal Economy
"The absence of any statistics, like data, history, etcetera around informality is what drove me into getting into it because it was like, these are questions that kept me up at night that I wanted to solve." - Richard Wallace, Founder and Executive Director of EAT - Equity and Transformation
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Richard Wallace is the Founder and Executive Director of EAT and Nicole Laport is the Director of Communications at EAT, an organzation that's been doing something really powerful in Chicago the past several years. They’re organizing people in the informal economy—that includes economic activities that aren’t regulated or protected by the state. As EAT puts it, “These are the bucket boys who we pass on the way to the train every day, the DVD bootlegger at your local barber shop, the person selling loose cigarettes at two for a dollar in front of the local liquor store, and the trans and cisgender commercial sex workers in our communities.” This is a huge part of the economy! And it’s often one that people with criminal records are forced into because they’re shut out of the formal workforce. Very often, work in the informal economy is criminalized, which means it can lead to re-incarceration and extreme poverty. So, EAT saw a need to build power among informal workers and fight to change the structure of the economy itself, and fight the anti-Black racism at its core.
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Each day at the Detroit Justice Center our team fights to reunite families, lift barriers to employment and housing, and strengthen communities by supporting small businesses and land trusts. We’re building a more equitable and just Detroit, and we need your help. To support our work click here.
Freedom Dreams Website
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Apr 19, 2023
The Community is the Family and the Family is the Community
"We consider ourselves an incubator for transformative justice here in the south. We are committed to really creating a new way of being, of dealing with violence." - Rukia Lumumba, Executive Director, People's Advocacy Institute.
Rukia Lumumba comes from a lineage of Black Freedom Fighters. Her dad was Chokwe Lumumba, former member of the Republic of New Africa and eventual mayor of Jackson, Mississippi. She is the Executive Director of the People's Advocacy Institute, co-coordinator of the Electoral Justice Project, and campaign co-coordinator of the successful Committee to Elect Chokwe Antar Lumumba for Mayor of Jackson, Mississippi. She joins Freedom Dreams to describe how she's help build an incubator for transformative justice in the south.
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Each day at the Detroit Justice Center our team fights to reunite families, lift barriers to employment and housing, and strengthen communities by supporting small businesses and land trusts. We’re building a more equitable and just Detroit, and we need your help. To support our work click here.
Freedom Dreams Website
Freedom Dreams IG
Freedom Dreams Twitter
Detroit Justice Center
Detroit Justice Center IG
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Apr 5, 2023
The Cost of Truth and Reconciliation
"We think that there is a basis for human beings to change, and if I didn't think that I wouldn't be involved in this. I often say I, I don't give this speech to alligators...they're not going to change, and I'd be wasting my time. I do think that humans can change and we have to shift the conditions that make it possible for people who may be leaning toward change to want to actually walk toward each other in a way that hold redemptive possibilities for the nation. - Reverend Nelson Johnson, Co-Founder of the Beloved Community Center.
On November, 3rd, 1979, Reverend Nelson Johnson, Joyce Johnson and fellow members of their Communist Workers Party helped organize an anti-Ku Klux Klan rally and march. Five people were killed that day and others injured. Over 20 years after the Greensboro Massacre, the city convened a truth and reconciliation process designed to unpack and better understand the events of 1979. On this episode of Freedom Dreams, we ask...did it work?
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DIG DEEPER:
The Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission
Beloved Community Center
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Each day at the Detroit Justice Center our team fights to reunite families, lift barriers to employment and housing, and strengthen communities by supporting small businesses and land trusts. We’re building a more equitable and just Detroit, and we need your help. To support our work click here.
Freedom Dreams Website
Freedom Dreams IG
Freedom Dreams Twitter
Detroit Justice Center
Detroit Justice Center IG
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Mar 22, 2023
Finding a Common Justice
"There is not one model or one program that is going to make us safe. There is not one alternative that is going to replace prison. That is not the formula. It's like, what is the whole range of the kind of thing we should do that cumulatively is gonna keep us safe?" - Danielle Sered
Danielle Sered is the founder of Common Justice, an organization that develops and advances solutions to violence that transform the lives of those harmed.
CJ operates the first alternative-to-incarceration and victim-service program in the United States that focuses on violent felonies in the adult courts.
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Each day at the Detroit Justice Center our team fights to reunite families, lift barriers to employment and housing, and strengthen communities by supporting small businesses and land trusts. We’re building a more equitable and just Detroit, and we need your help. To support our work click here.
Freedom Dreams Website
Freedom Dreams IG
Freedom Dreams Twitter
Detroit Justice Center
Detroit Justice Center IG
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Mar 8, 2023
Detroit Life is Valuable Everyday
"We can do incredible things from a technological medical care standpoint. Right? Like there's been incredible advances in healthcare and with some of the things that we have in terms of like stopping bleeds and doing all these things right to prolong life. But, you know, I knew that there was a gap in terms of preventing re-injury." - Dr. Tolulope Sonuyi, Founder of DLIVE: Detroit Live is Valuable Everyday
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A doctor in Detroit notices the same patients keep passing through his ER, often with gunshot wounds. He realizes this "golden hour" of opportunity is the precise time to engage patients with a transformative intervention to stop an unnecessary cycle of violence.
GUESTS: Dr. Tolulope Sonuyi, Founder of DLIVE, Detroit Live is Valuable Everyday & Chuck, a DLIVE member
Learn more about DLIVE @ detroitlive.org
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Each day at the Detroit Justice Center our team fights to reunite families, lift barriers to employment and housing, and strengthen communities by supporting small businesses and land trusts. We’re building a more equitable and just Detroit, and we need your help. To support our work click here.
Freedom Dreams Website
Freedom Dreams IG
Freedom Dreams Twitter
Detroit Justice Center
Detroit Justice Center IG
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Feb 22, 2023
We Make Peace
"What if you can still feel a sense of justice without reaching out to the legal system? What if you still can have access to healing without punishment? What if this person who harmed you can do the hard work to never harm anyone ever again? Would that feel like justice for you? And if so, how can we support you in achieving that goal?" - Mike Milton, founder of the Freedom Community Center
On this opening episode of Freedom Dreams: Season 2, Mike Milton, founder of the Freedom Community Center in St. Louis, Missouri is building a movement of survivors in order to design systems that actually keep us safe, rooted in Black freedom, self-determination and healing.
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Each day at the Detroit Justice Center our team fights to reunite families, lift barriers to employment and housing, and strengthen communities by supporting small businesses and land trusts. We’re building a more equitable and just Detroit, and we need your help. To support our work click here.
Freedom Dreams Website
Freedom Dreams IG
Freedom Dreams Twitter
Detroit Justice Center
Detroit Justice Center IG
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Feb 17, 2023
Season 2 of Freedom Dreams!
This season on Freedom Dreams we're amplifying community-led solutions to violence and harm. We called on some of the boldest people we know to learn lessons from what they're building. And of course, we asked them what their freedom dreams are. Our new season begins on February 22nd.
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Learn more about the work of the Detroit Justice Center
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Jun 9, 2022
Fear of Black Consciousness
The Freedom Dreams team is hard at work on a new season of the show. It’ll come to you this fall. But in the meantime, we want to share a conversation Amanda recently had with the incredibly brilliant and tender-hearted philosopher, Lewis Gordon. Their talk was hosted by Source Booksellers in Detroit’s Cass Corridor this past winter.
Gordon's new book is Fear of Black Consciousness and in it he peaks precisely to the moment that we're in. He helps us to understand the COVID 19 pandemic, police violence, and this latest wave of social movements and repression, in the context of the past five years and the past five centuries–and longer. His book weaves in history, linguistics, film interpretation (with an incredible reading of Jordan Peele’s Get Out), music, memory, mythology, and more.
His sources and frameworks are so wide-ranging because his task is so ambitious: to understand the contours of society and how we make meaning, to tell the history of anti-black racism, and, always, to orient us toward liberation. In that orientation, his book belongs to the radical visionary organizing tradition, which James Boggs furthered so powerfully in his lifetime.
Gordon offers us tools to ask better questions of ourselves, like ‘how might we become agents of change?’ ‘How can we expand our options,’ and, as he puts it, ‘build productive and life-affirming institutions of empowerment?” If Lewis Gordon isn’t a Freedom Dreamer, we don’t know who is!
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Feb 9, 2022
How Do We Grow Our Own Food on Our Own Land?
“For anti-colonial movements in the past and still today, regaining access to land that you and your people were displaced from is a core part of what it means to be free.”
In this final episode of the first season of Freedom Dreams, our guests take on black liberation through land ownership and food sovereignty. Tepfirah Rushdan and Erin Bevel talk about co-founding the Detroit Black Farmer Land Fund to help local growers navigate purchasing land. Natalie Baszile, author of We Are Each Other’s Harvest, discusses the history of Black farmland loss and the recent Black Farmers Act. And, Lynelle Herndon shows us how Home Ec Detroit builds community gardens on abandoned Detroit lots.
You can contribute the The Detroit Black Farmer Land Fund _here_ and check out Natalie Baszile’s book _here_.
Find us on IG and Twitter.
TRANSCRIPT
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Dec 29, 2021
How Do We Create Health Care that Meets our Needs?
In our penultimate episode of the season, we’re talking about radical solutions in health care. We look at the historical example of the 1970 Lincoln Hospital Takeover in the Bronx with former _Black Panther_ and _Young Lord_ Cleo Silvers. Casey also goes down the history rabbit hole discussing their MA thesis. We also sit down with Fiyah Angel and Rachel Thompson from the _Radical Well-Being Center_ in Southfield, MI to talk about their work in the field of mental health and decolonized healing practices.
Want to learn more about the Lincoln Hospital takeover? We recommend two excellent recent documentaries: Emma Francis-Snyder’s _Takeover_ and Mia Donovan’s _Dope Is Deat__h._
To learn more about the Detroit Justice Center and support our work, go here.
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Dec 15, 2021
How Can We Heal and Reimagine Safe Communities?
In this episode, we explore the building blocks of community safety—namely knowing your community and working together to keep each other safe. We talk to Sirrita Darby, and Bri and Kris, two youth organizers with _Detroit Heals Detroit_ about the work they do to host healing circles for youth in Detroit, and the importance of collective healing. We also sat down with Curtis Renee, a powerful organizer with _Detroit Safety Team_ (and an excellent chef) to talk about the work they’re doing to encourage Detroiters to find alternatives to safety that don’t involve calling police.
Want to find out more about community safety initiatives where you live?
We recommend checking out:
_One Million Experiments_
_Transform Harm_
_Firework Foundation_
_Don’t Call The Police_
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Dec 1, 2021
How Do We Make School Ourselves?
In this episode, we explore place-based education (PBE)—the pedagogy behind it, and how it works in practice. We talk to Ethan Lowenstein, Director of the SE Michigan Stewardship Coalition about the impact being rooted in place can have on a child's education. We also speak to Julia Putnam, Amanda Rosman, and Marisol Teachworth of The James and Grace Lee Boggs School, a K-8 school on Detroit's east side that "immerses students in local heritage, cultures, landscapes, opportunities, and experiences, using these as a foundation for the study of language arts, mathematics, social studies, science and other subjects across the curriculum." And in the plot twist of the season, we learn that Casey taught art at the Boggs School for a year.
Want to learn more about James & Grace Lee Boggs? This article from Yes! Magazine featuring Julia Putnam & The Boggs Center are excellent starting points.
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Nov 17, 2021
How Do We Ensure our City Budgets Reflect Our Priorities?
In this episode, we dig into participatory budgeting with Shari Davis, Co-Executive Director of the Participatory Budgeting Project to better understand how an expansion of the democratic process can benefit communities. We also speak with Angelica Chazaro, an organizer with Decriminalize Seattle to discuss Seattle's movement to defund police, as well as PG Watkins, Director of Detroit's Black Bottom Archives, and community organizer about the durational fight for a people's budget in Detroit.
Want to learn more about how to organize around defunding police and investing in communities?
Interrupting Criminalization's The Demand Is Still Defund report: an excellent resource on how to run #defund budget fights.
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Nov 3, 2021
How Can Cooperative Economics Help Us Build Collective Power?
In this episode we speak to DJC staff attorney Whitley Granberry and Jerry Hebron who runs Oakland Avenue Urban Farm in Detroit’s North End. Our guests deliver a powerful summary of what cooperative economics are, and how they serve to shore up equity for future generations. We’ll also talk to Jerry about ancestral recipes and how her farm's delicious Afro-Jam came about.
TRANSCRIPT
To learn more about and support our work, visit _detroitjustice.org/donate._
RELEVANT LINKS
Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice by Jessica Gordon Nembhard
Non-profit urban farm in Detroit still helping amid COVID-19 outbreak
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Oct 20, 2021
How Can You Shut Down Your City Jail?
In this episode, we speak to Marilyn Winn and Xochitl Bervera, two lead organizers in the fight to close the Atlanta City Jail. Our guests lead us through the fight to get laws stricken from the books, ensuring that the jails population would dwindle or “starving the beast” as they call it. Learn more about their campaign and about the Center for Wellness and Freedom, the community wellness hub they intend to replace the jail.
TRANSCRIPT
To learn more about and support our work at the Detroit Justice Center, visit _detroitjustice.org/donate._
RELEVANT LINKS
The End of Policing by Alex S. Vitale
'Starving The Beast': The Women Working To Close a Misused Atlanta Jail
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Oct 5, 2021
Why Freedom Dreams?
Welcome to Freedom Dreams! The show that explores the many paths to building a truly just future for everyone. Centered in abolitionist thinking, this podcast, produced by the Detroit Justice Center, expands beyond the realm of criminal justice into conversations around what we could be building and prioritizing instead of punishment and further harm to make our communities genuinely safe. Hosted by Amanda Alexander, Founding Executive Director of DJC & Casey Rocheteau, Communications Manager of DJC, each episode seeks to answer a question that faces our present moment.
TRANSCRIPT
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