In the summer of 2016, the Movement for Black Lives Policy Table released a platform that intervenes in this political moment, advances a more radical Black-centered policy vision, and addresses the systemic devaluing and destruction of Black lives. A major part of the platform asserts a world where those most impacted in our communities control the laws, institutions, and policies that are supposedly meant to serve us – from our schools to our local budgets, economies, our land, and the police.

Join IPS ally Sojourner Truth School for Social Change Leadership for a forum about the platform’s call for “community control over police” as a means of shifting power, enforcing democracy, deconstructing the historic relationship between the police and the Black community, and re-imagining a social force designed to actually protect and serve its population as policy, and not as a meaningless slogan. Through multimedia presentation, group dialogue, and interactive exercise, we will learn what it will take to win community control over the police in a given locale and how to start a campaign to achieve it. PRE-REGISTRATION REQUIRED.

The trainer, Netfa Freeman is Events Coordinator and an Analyst for the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. and an Organizer for Pan-African Community Action. Netfa has decades of experience in activism, grassroots organizing, and coordinating events around issues and causes ranging in scope from local to national to international.