Hey everybody, it's really nice to view with all of you and to be a part of this larger Movement for Youth and Community Justice across the country. We're very humbled and very honored to be invited to do this interview. I guess I came to organizing without knowing I was doing organizing. I was impacted by the system as a young person, arrest, detention, but even more so by police stops where I would be taken aside being white and asked why was I in a particular area, why was I with certain people, twice I was asked if I was kidnapped, and meanwhile youth of color would be that were with me would be on the ground kneeling down, hands behind your heads, backpacks tossed out and searched. So that was also very eye-opening to me, I saw off from a very early age that the system was based on racial justice and not based on public safety. I started to question what were the traditional definitions of safety, policing, and justice in our communities. I had other experiences which is too long to end to but of course as I went saw more aspects of the system it raised even more questions for me, aspects of school policing, and school security, schools that looked and operated more like prisons than like schools, schools that weren't preparing people for college but were preparing too many people for prison, clear tracking in schools where young people that were reading at lower levels were overwhelmingly pushed into classrooms where there were no books, not enough seats, where you'd see a quarter or a third of the classroom already are ROTC uniforms you've been in ninth grade. So all of those aspects of what I saw in my community and coming up had huge impacts on me. When I was in New York I came up in LA and also in New York in the South Bronx. In New York we started organizing to take back playgrounds because we felt that young people were seen if they were in playgrounds as drug traffickers, as drug dealers and the police would come really hard on them. Usually little package playgrounds in New York, really no grass just like basketball court, handball court, maybe some seating area. Meanwhile, there was also a lot of people building in parks, a lot of people living in parks without enough resources and opportunities. So that was the first organizing I got involved and we started to take back those parks with programming, weeding summer jobs to hire ourselves, other young people. It wasn't until much later that people told me that's what you're doing, you're doing organizing. So I came to organizing not through training or drag pathway but just through like many people in the world seeing injustices around us I'm wanting to fight back. We started organizing more formal ways around incarceration compensation. For the Youth Justice Coalition, we started to think about why is it this was in 2002-2003 started to question why was it there LA County locks up more people than any place else in the world. What was it about our history and our geography that we were never taught in our schools and really never heard about in media or from elected officials, certainly not from police officials? So we started to look at that issue and called a meeting together that over three meetings in the spring of 2003 about 62 people came together and told stories about how the system impacted us and our families, put up 13 flip charts on the wall with different areas of the system we wanted to challenge and what our solutions were under each of those areas, and then voted through walking through those flip charts what we thought the top priorities are. Those are the things we've been working on ever since. That's first and foremost to challenge California's and Los Angeles in particular addiction to incarceration and suppression and as its only public safety strategy to dismantle mass incarceration, deportation, and policing criminalization of young people of color and communities of color, and to challenge the fact that the majority of our budgets both locally and at the state level are going to law enforcement, at the federal level of course going to law enforcement and the military at the expense of everything that communities need to be healthy and safe like schools, parks, playgrounds, after school programs. So that's how we got involved in organizing let's say the main vision for organizing has been. Now I would love to pretend that people are trained as organizers and then they start organizing but it's just not what I've seen, is not what I've ever witnessed. People stand up and fight back and speak out and then other people say, ''You know you're a leader,'' or, ''What you're doing is organizing,'' or, ''If you did this with other people and we joined together we can be even more powerful.'' Then long after or sometimes shortly after but usually for a long period after they've been fighting back and speaking out, they're introduced to organizing as a field, even get the name of what organizing is and get access to training or leadership opportunities. Until when we believe organizing is I would say that two ways, one is that we believe in key strategies that we've tried to invest in as much as we could since the beginning. First to build a strong organization and to have a strong infrastructure that focuses a lot on organization led by people most impacted by the issue. We think that for organizing to be good, it needs to be led by people most impacted by an issue. Secondly, that we focus on movement building. That we forfeit our own individual and organizational identities in order to invest in and support a movement identity. We think this is particularly important in the United States where the non-profit industrial complex many would call it, have put a lot of emphasis on charismatic leadership and building individual organizations at the expense of building a strong movement where there are multiple leaders and leaders are constantly changing. If one leader gets attacked or leaves or is pushed out for any reason by the system, there's always a 100 more to step up. We've seen that in international organizing but rarely see it in US organization. So we've tried to model that in our work. Having very horizontal leadership, trying to have horizontal decision-making, transparent budgeting, team leaders as opposed to any executive director or anything like that, that's been really important for us since the very beginning. Having an organizational chart that's organized in case of circles that all of our indigenous communities were organized in circles, that decision-making happened in circles and not in triangles with a small leader at the top. So we've tried very hard to model that whether it's through problem-solving and developing our own transformative justice processes that are in circles, or decision-making or participatory budgeting, participatory action planning, etc. Then as part of movement building too, focusing a lot of our time on coalition building, on working with other groups that are aligned politically, but also lead by formerly incarcerated people in our families. The third thing that we've really focused on is leadership development, and we believe that leadership development has to be constant. When our young people were pushed out of other schools because of either their alleged gang affiliation, we don't use the term gangs in the neighborhood, but any alleged affiliation or because of convictions or because they were part of the school to jail track, we tried to push hard for them to get back into comprehensive high schools, or even to push hard for the continuation schools to accept them. But we just found that often times, you people were disrespected in those settings, and so our members also pushed for us to create our own schools. So part of our leadership development is in our own high school which teaches also justice, organizing called [inaudible] high school, freely starts for a fight for the revolution that will educate and empower Los Angeles. Then we also do leadership development in lockups and in the community, and we have a curriculum called street University which was the basics of organizing as well as we do a lot of training on what to do when you're stopped by the police, how to make it through the Court system, we do a lot of participatory defense what is known nationally now or what we would originally called community defense with our families and with our young people, helping people through the court process so that we can save them. Now, we've saved thousands of years in sentencing or helping people through the streets so that they're less caught up with police or with ICE, or immigration, helping people to fight gang injunctions and gang databases. So that's all of our leadership development work. The next tier up would be Based Building, actually Base building really would come before Leadership Development that, out of order. So after movement building would come base building, and being very aware of the fact that if we win, it'll be with people power and not having a lot of financial power or even access to media. So people powers have been very key for us, the heart of our work is Direct Action Organizing. So Base Building for us has meant three groups of people, one is young people who are system impacted, they've been arrested, detained, incarcerated, pushed out of school. Two is people that are currently incarcerated or coming home, formerly incarcerated people, especially people when at a young age for us, the definition for our members are age seven, because that's when you can get locked up in LA County, up to age 24, which is the oldest set you are in a State's Youth Prison System. Finally, family members whose young people are currently or have been in the system. So that's our membership, and that's where we concentrate our base building. Finally, campaign development. Our organizing campaigns have focused on all of the strategies that other organizers focused on, research and data, and we've put in a lot of public record at risk to expose conditions and realities for people inside and in the streets. Then focusing, based on the data that we collect, also doing a lot of needs assessment in communities, allow surveying of community members, young people, for example, one of our campaigns, we wanted to find out what people's definition of public safety would be or what they would expend public safety money on. We have a 50-Mile march that we done many years, we start at Sylmar Juvenile Hall in the Northwest side of our County, and then walk down to what was then a State's Youth Prison System in Norwalk, which is 50 miles further, stopping at all the lockups along the way, but also surveying families along the way. Survey thousands of community members about how they would address public safety, and particularly violence, and they could have picked more gang injunctions, more police, more prisons lock more people up, but they overwhelmingly picked youth centers, youth jobs, and peace builders or intervention workers in our streets and schools. So that would be one example of how Needs Assessment is very important in terms of asking the community what they want and organizing around those things. Then of course all the other aspects that go into campaign, organizing, developing your strategies, your tactics, organizing your tactics in order of escalation, evaluation after every action, after every meeting, after every public hearing. Focusing a lot on trying to create your own media impact, mainstream media as much as possible. So that's what our organizing strategy or organizing commitments have been to those aspects of the work. We have several campaigns based on the needs and the aspirations of our members to change conditions in the system. We're working to dismantle the school to jail tracks, we have young people right now fighting random searches in schools, we have passed state law around guaranteeing that young people coming out from lockups aren't barred from going home to their comprehensive high schools, we've passed state laws around making sure that when young people are suspended or expelled from school, they aren't permanently expelled, they have a right to return. So that's some of the things that people are working on, and I think it also was eye-opening for our young people and for us that school shootings, for example, going all the way back to 1700s, 98 percent of the shooters have been white, 96 percent of the victims have been white, and yet young people of color are the ones that get the barbed wire around their schools, the metal detectors, the police in schools, and you have drug sniffing dogs in our schools, random searches means that young people are pulled out of classrooms and checked constantly, usually all they have found is things like nail clippers and hand sanitizers. So it hasn't resulted in the safety improvements if they claimed it with, and so that's our school to jail track work. The most important aspect of organizing is that young people, other community members, and communities coming together, that are oppressed in whatever way, you're facing economic injustice, environmental injustice, educational injustice, a very punishing and brutal police and prison system, may be they're in a war area where they're really fighting for their lives. It doesn't matter where it happens in the world, organizing is led by people who impacted by injustice, most impacted by oppression, and people rise up not only because they think things are unfair, but as a way to survive, and a way to make things better for future generations even if they feel like things won't get better for themselves. So I think that's very key for organizing, that's the heart of organizing, and the professionalization of organizing I think is important because it's brought skills to people. But I worry when organizing gets separated from heart, which is that people most impacted by issue most, impacted by injustice and oppression, will rise up to fight back, to resist first, and eventually to win, and build a new reality for themselves, their communities, and future generations.
