Transforming Justice East Coast

cross posting from jason’s great website blackandpink.org

This is Gael from Sylvia Rivera Law Project & Reg from Critical Resistance and Queers for Economic Justice. We’re calling out to folks interested in being part of the planning committee for a Transforming Justice East Coast regional gathering.

First, a little about Transforming Justice. Back in October 2007, Transforming Justice brought together over 200 formerly imprisoned transgender people and allies to work together to:

• Build a shared conversation and analysis among the LGBT, anti-prison, and prisoner rights movements about the root causes of imprisonment, poverty, and criminalization in transgender communities;
• Prioritize and build leadership of transgender and gender non-conforming people most impacted by prisons, poverty, and policing;
• Create space to share and develop strategies to end the cycles of imprisonment, criminalization, and poverty in our communities.

A number of participants from the Northeast region who attended the gathering Transforming Justice on October 13th & 14th in Oakland California have been talking about organizing a regional gathering similar to the national one maybe some where in New York, New Jersey or Philadelphia. We want to build on the momentum from Transforming Justice and continue to build a movement that challenges the Prison Industrial Complex and talk about ways of supporting and strengthening the work at the regional level.

We wanted to propose doing an initial conference call to check-in and talk about our capacity to hold a gathering, would folks be down for that?

Also, Critical Resistance is holding its 10 year anniversary conference (CR10) this September out in Oakland, CA & we were
wondering if folks were interested going to the conference. Because a lot of people nation wide are expected to attend, this could be a good place to continue the conversations started at Transforming Justice thru us doing workshops, panels & gathering together with other people working on similar issues. If people are interested in going maybe we
could work on the workshop proposals all together (like at a regional gathering!) & figure out other ways to implement Transforming Justice into the whole conference. In addition, we thought of bringing back the Queer Visibility collaboration between various folks attending CR10, similar to the organizing we did for the US Social Forum which not only implemented queer visibility throughout the forum in terms of trainings and internal accountability to queer and trans issues but also brought the participation of queer and trans speakers at various panels and other presentations throughout the conference. If folks who were involved then want to bring this group back for CR10 please join the call and let us know.

Please forward far and wide and especially to transgender and gender non-conforming former prisoners who would like to be part of the planning committee. To sign on to the listserve you can go to yahoo groups and search for transformingjustice_northeast.