Reckoning With Sustainability: Black Leaders reflect on 2020, the Funding Cliff, and Organizing Infrastructure
In this special episode, co-host Adaku Utah and M Adams reflect on the Building Movement Project's latest report in the Movement Infrastructure series - Reckoning with Sustainability. The report explores how more than 50 Black movement leaders and their organizations understood the brief moment of “racial reckoning” in 2020, how their organizations have fared in the years since, and what they see on the horizon.
By centering the foresight of Black leaders, we hope this report will bolster advocacy efforts to sustain funding and investment in the capacity of Black-led organizing groups that are building power in communities across the country and critical to the broader struggle for Black liberation.
“Power, as mostly plain stated, is the ability to get something done. We’re fighting for us to have the direct ability to get something done — which is not fighting for somebody to listen to me; to do right by me. That’s a different orientation. If you are fighting to build power, then you have to be thinking seriously about governance, which is how do groups of people get things done? To me, infrastructure is key to that.”
ABOUT THE EPISODE GUEST
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Born and raised in Milwaukee, in a community frequently targeted by police, gendered based violence and other forms of violence, Adams knows the impacts of such violence all too well. Being a survivor compels Adams’ work as a prison abolitionist and a radical Black queer GNC feminist organizer. These commitments also fuel her to build her own family, as she is a proud dad and hubby, and she sees her family as the primary motivator for her work.
As a queer Black person and a movement scientist, Adams thinks critically about power, oppression, and movement building and regularly applies and tests her intersectional approach in diverse arenas. Adams has been a leading figure in WI politics as the Co-Executive Emeritus of Freedom, Inc., and the Take Back the Land Movement. Additionally, she has presented before the United Nations for the Convention on Eliminating Racial Discrimination, she is a co-author of the book Forward from Ferguson and a paper on Black community control over the police in the Wisconsin Law Review, and she authored an important piece of intersectional theory called, “Why Killing Unarmed Black Folks is a Queer Issue.” Adams can regularly be seen in person, on local and national TV, and in the newspapers giving presentations, testifying at city council meetings, and energizing crowds at protests. She can also be seen at local dog parks with her pack.
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