REIMAGINING COMMUNITIES

Throughout a two-year series of meetings, convenings, listening tours, and town halls, including the ideas and voices of incarcerated women, we traveled throughout the United States to determine how to operationalize ending incarceration of women and girls.

Reimagining Communities is a result of our participatory research and is comprised of organizing components within hyper-local sections of neighborhoods most entangled in the criminal legal system. We named our community organizing model, Reimagining Communities, as a clear message that the most directly affected communities are shifting the narrative away from reimagining prisons and toward investing in the resources for creating thriving people in communities.

The components of Reimagining Communities are comprised of community villages consisting of:

• Participatory Defense

• Participatory Budgeting

• Peoples Assemblies

• Political education and organizing

• Transformative Justice and community-led systems of individual and community accountability for addressing crisis and interpersonal harm

• The Community Love Fund - community-led Guaranteed Income Project

• Hydroponic Farms

• Cooperative and small business curriculum