My mom talked to me recently about how uncomfortable she was with "defund the police." The wording made her anxious. What would that mean for her safety?
Let me tell you what happened in that conversation, and why I think using uncomfortable language matters here.
I told her that I did in fact mean it literally, and then explained what it means to me: divesting from the concept of policing as we know it, and asking instead, what does the community need? What skills are required to deliver that? What structure is needed to deliver that?
I told her that if we remain tied to the concept of police as the solution to a HUGE range of community needs, it's very very hard to imagine other ways of solving problems. We must be able to first imagine not asking or paying police to solve those problems.
Then we had a discussion about what that might look like, and where modern policing comes from.
Is she now repeating "defund the police" to her friends? Maybe not yet. But it was a deep, nuanced, and productive conversation.
AND...
I firmly believe that the only reason we had that conversation at all was because abolitionists have been spreading the challenging, uncomfortable message of "defund the police."
If the message had been about reform, she'd have stayed comfortable, and we'd never have talked about it at all.
New ideas are uncomfortable at first. Let people be uncomfortable with them. Let *yourself* be uncomfortable with them.
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Hosted our first remote @collectivestrng event last night! It's a monthly event series that we usually host for about 50-100 womxn and nb people on a weekday evening with snacks and drinks.
Here's a thread about how it went over Zoom.
We use Meetup for event listings/RSVPs. So we used Meetup to email guests the Zoom link day-of. This was an issue; not everyone got the email. Meetup wasn't designed to handle this, so there's no way to easily just give people joining info after they RSVP. (@Meetup pls fix this!)
Event format: we usually do either fireside chats with an expert (plus a group activity), or a fully interactive workshop. This month was a workshop I was facilitating with lots of group and 1:1 peer coaching work. We used Zoom breakout rooms for both.