Critical Resistance is excited to share with you our new organizers’ toolkit—Our Communities, Our Solutions: An Organizer’s Toolkit to Developing Campaigns to Abolish Policing—now available for download on our website.
Our struggle for prison industrial complex (PIC) abolition by chipping away at the power and legitimacy of policing has expanded and grown immensely this year during the COVID pandemic. As calls for abolition become more and more popular, shared vision and strategy are needed. Critical Resistance (CR) has been working hard to put together two decades worth of CR’s organizing resources, tools, steps, analysis and advice for building strong campaigns to offer our allies and members in this fight.
You can download and read the 55-page toolkit on our website here. Inside, you will find tips and notes for PIC abolitionists for talking about policing and abolition, campaign development tools including a list of bold demands, clear steps and guiding questions for building abolitionist campaigns, five example campaign case studies already fought and won, and more.
We hope you will share this toolkit with your networks and movements. We hope that you will create spaces in your organizations, coalitions and communities to examine and study this toolkit together, discuss it and use it in your organizing.
Once you have checked it out, please send us some feedback by completing our survey. We aim to make this toolkit a vital, useable resource for our movement in this moment and beyond.
In the coming months, Critical Resistance members will be hosting training sessions to orient organizers to using the toolkit. You will soon be able to request a special training from Critical Resistance members for your organization or coalition, to get direct support in developing abolitionist campaigns to resist policing. Stay tuned for more details on these training opportunities next month in November.
In the past two decades we have come such a long way together, making PIC abolition common sense and a winning, concrete, pragmatic and wide-spread strategy for dismantling policing. We have much work ahead of us still in this fight for the right to live healthy, full, sustainable, vibrant and self-determined lives, and we believe that together we will win.
