Building healing solutions for a world beyond prisons

These days, I’m especially interested in building up my awareness and support of organizations that are building the future solutions we all need to thrive. Here are three organizations I’m excited about right now. Each of them in their own way embodies the core value of healing.

• Designing Justice, Designing Spaces, founded by Deanna Van Buren (one of the very few Black women architects in America with her own firm) is a for-profit architecture firm plus a non-profit institute that supports concept development and assists field leaders on space design projects. Their mission is to end mass incarceration by building the types of spaces where communities can engage in restorative, collaborative processes that promote wellbeing and healing. Their work answers the question, “what do we build instead of prisons?”  The firm is working with multiple city and state governments. Check out their case for support, which includes some really inspiring visuals.

• The Community Based Public Safety Collective, founded by Aqeela Sherrills, is a collective of experts in community-based violence intervention (CVI) – here is a great background video on that – where people with credibility on the street intervene to stop violence before it happens. Among other things, they provide technical assistance and training (TTA) to local organizations around the country – currently 60 orgs in over a dozen cities – to help them secure major government funding and scale their operations. Last week, the CBPS team of grant writers secured over $8 million in federal grants to support partners on the ground in four locations, including the first investment in Native led intervention organizations. In addition, the Collective itself was awarded $3M to provide TTA to new federally-funded CVI programs across the US.

• The Root Cause Collective, based in North Carolina, is run by a group of Black women mental health providers who are building a new model of holistic mental health that’s delivered to cohorts of people who can address and resolve trauma collectively. Their goals are to reduce financial barriers to treatment and care, to provide a space for addressing systemic causes of mental health pressures rather than focusing on individual causes, and to support others to replicate their approach to scale.

• The Life Comes From It fund, run by a board of expert practitioners with over 100 years of experience between them, makes grants to organizations working on restorative justice, transformative justice, indigenous peacemaking, and work that integrates justice and soil (regenerative agriculture and other land work). Their grants are small, and the fund accepts contributions from everywhere, making it possible for people with all kinds of resources to help propel these visions of future.

• Dwayne Betts, the founder of Freedom Reads, shared with me that he and his team successfully installed 5 new libraries in different housing units this week at a women’s prison in Illinois. He reported: “The buildings are falling apart and many of the women [are serving life sentences]. But the freedom libraries reminded them of the world and that there is work being done for them along so many different fronts even if it might never reach them. And of course Freedom Reads is the only org that has sent people to see them.” These libraries can change the lives of prisoners and guards alike. I’m excited to see them grow.