The 2020 uprisings for racial justice galvanized a debate about policing in the United States. As state violence against Black Americans is increasingly made visible on social media, a growing chorus of activists and community organizers are rethinking the role of law enforcement and the allocation of public resources.
I spoke this week with Paul Patu, Executive Director of Urban Family, about how community organizers in Seattle are building on this conversation and promoting public safety. Together with Community Passageway’s Critical Incident Response Team, The Boys and Girls Club of King County and the YMCA, organizers launched a community safety initiative that focuses on unity, restorative justice, and accountability.
Patu said the collaboration emerged when the organizations found each other during the 2020 protests following the murder of George Floyd. The coalition is building on the legacy of the Black Panther Party and the Guardian Angels by conducting street patrols in the community and creating neighborhood “hubs” that facilitate trust among residents, community groups, and law enforcement.
We are not necessarily looking to some outside institutions to protect our communities, but for us to really take the expertise that exists within our communities, from community leaders as well as organizations and Black and Brown people, to mobilize and organize around safety.
Patu is part of a broader conversation. The Appeal reported this week that the city of Seattle — responding to demands from organizers and activists — will allocate $30 million dollars for a “participatory budgeting” process, giving residents a say in how public money that typically would be spent on policing will be spent.
I asked Patu if he saw himself as a utopian thinker. “I’m a hybrid between disruptor and peace keeper, honestly,” he said. Before healing can occur, Patu said, there must be a reckoning about the foundations upon which injustices in the U.S. have been built.
The only way to reset and breakup the ground is to first acknowledge that harm has been done—particularly to Indigenous African Americans and Native Americans— before you can build a utopia or a connected community. There has to be that acknowledgment, and then the healing process can begin. All things flow out of that.
Watch my full conversation with Patu here:
Peace and Justice
Black Lives Matter was nominated last week for a Nobel Peace Prize by Norwegian MP Petter Eide. In his letter, Edie praised the movement for inspiring a global movement for racial justice:
Awarding the peace prize to Black Lives Matter, as the strongest global force against racial injustice, will send a powerful message that peace is founded on equality, solidarity and human rights, and that all countries must respect those basic principles.
The Movement for Black Lives reflected on the nomination, and said that the work for liberation and justice continues:
Recognition must be met with meaningful action and rebirth — because, without accountability and transformation, peace is hollow, like the bullets that ricochet off Black bodies at the hands of the police; empty, like the savings accounts and trust funds of Black kids whose generational wealth was robbed from them; and barren, like the promises of reconciliation and reparations made to Black people around the world, only to be abandoned.
Patu and the coalition for community safety in Seattle represent how movements galvanize community leaders to create change. Grassroots organizers like Patu are answering the Movement 4 Black Lives’ call to direct action, and putting ideas into practice.
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Doughnut Economics
Ciara Nugent’s article in Time magazine about “doughnut economics” provides thoughtful insights on how city planners and economists are rethinking growth. British economist Kate Raworth created the doughnut model in a 2017 book. In order to consider the threat posed by climate change, Raworth argued that economies must find the “sweet spot” between the “social foundation” (what we need to live a good and healthy life) and an “environmental ceiling.”
The article details how citizen-led groups are central to finding and promoting the “sweet spot.” Through democratic deliberations, doughnut economics emerge from the bottom-up. The model is not without its critics (from the Left and Right), but the Covid-19 pandemic created a profound economic crisis, creating opportunities for organizers and experts to insert radical new ideas into the public consciousness, which have the potential to reshape societies:
COVID-19 has the potential to massively accelerate that transformation, if governments use economic-stimulus packages to favor industries that lead us toward a more sustainable economy, and phase out those that don’t. Raworth cites Milton Friedman—the diehard free-market 20th century economist—who famously said that “when [a] crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.” In July, Raworth’s DEAL group published the methodology it used to produce the “city portrait” that is guiding Amsterdam’s embrace of the doughnut, making it available for any local government to use. “This is the crisis,” she says. “We’ve made sure our ideas are lying around.”
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