Host Max Rameau talks with Manju Rajendran of Durham Beyond Policing. Together, they discuss the landscape of organizing in North Carolina, abolition, healing justice, and the work of building and maintaining community.

Manju Rajendran is a facilitator, trainer, conflict transformation practitioner, and organizer with 27 years of local, state, regional, and national-level experience. Her work is grounded in popular education pedagogy and healing justice. Manju is a trainer with Ready the Ground Training Team, member of Sanctuary Beyond Walls, and part of Durham Beyond Policing. Manju is a queer, working class, South Asian immigrant woman who grew up in North Carolina. Her father organized with the local NAACP chapter and her mother was active in public schools, so she was brought up in meetings and community gatherings. She brings an expansive network of intentionally-sustained relationships with peers and mentors with her, especially from across the Southeastern US, and remains accountable to the communities who raised her.

Links to topics mentioned on this episode:
Durham Beyond Policing
Budget Proposal on Policing
News article on 2023 protest
Community Safety and Wellness Task Force
Southerners On New Ground (SONG)
Interrupting Criminalization
INCITE
Critical Resistance
BYP 100 Durham
UE 150 City Workers Union
Manju's bio with AORTA

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Host Max Rameau talks with Kamau Franklin of Community Movement Builders, Inc and Black Power Media. Together, they discuss the movement to Stop Cop City, its national relevance, and the strategy behind the movement. They also discuss creating accessible political media, and what Kamau's learned from his time in Palestine.

Kamau Franklin is the founder of Community Movement Builders, Inc. Kamau has been a dedicated community organizer for over thirty years, beginning in New York City and now based in Atlanta. For 18 of those years, Kamau was a leading member of a national grassroots organization dedicated to the ideas of self-determination and the teachings of Malcolm X.

He has spearheaded organizing work in various areas including youth organizing and development, police misconduct, and the development of sustainable urban communities. Kamau has coordinated and led community cop-watch programs, liberation/freedom schools for youth, electoral and policy campaigns, large-scale community gardens, organizing collectives and alternatives to incarceration programs. Kamau was an attorney for ten years in New York with his own practice in criminal, civil rights and transactional law. He now lives in Atlanta, Georgia with his wife and two children.

For more on the topics we discussed, see these links:
@kamaufranklin
@CommunityMvt
https://communitymovementbuilders.org/
https://www.blackpowermedia.org
https://forgeorganizing.org/article/struggle-stop-cop-city-any-means-necessary

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DSC Communications Coordinator Tafari Melisizwe and Coordinating Committee Member Andrew Hairston of Texas Appleseed join organizer, writer, and radical political theorist Geo Maher for a robust conversation on policing and social justice movements. The episode begins with Geo laying out the ideas of his book A World Without Police, and then continues with a conversation with Tafari and Andrew about translating these ideas to the work of getting police out of schools and transforming society.

Geo Maher is an abolitionist educator, organizer, and writer based in Philadelphia. He has taught previously at the University of Pennsylvania, Vassar College, Drexel University, San Quentin State Prison, and the Venezuelan School of Planning in Caracas, and has held visiting positions at the CUNY Graduate Center, the Decolonizing Humanities Project at the College of William & Mary, NYU’s Hemispheric Institute, and the Institute of Social Research at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). He is the author of five books: We Created Chávez (2013); Building the Commune (2016); Decolonizing Dialectics (2017); A World Without Police (2021); and Anticolonial Eruptions (2022); and co-editor of the Duke University Press book series Radical Américas.

Andrew Reginald Hairston is a civil rights attorney and writer who serves as the Education Justice Project Director of Texas Appleseed. In this role, he engages in public policy advocacy and works with community groups to diminish the presence and influence of school police officers across the state of Texas. In recognition of these efforts, Andrew served as a 2019 Law for Black Lives Fellow, along with Tyler Whittenberg of Advancement Project’s National Office. Along with Khem Irby, he is a 2022-23 co-chair of the Dignity in Schools Campaign’s Coordinating Committee. He earned his law degree from Louisiana State University in May 2016, where he was a Faculty Scholar. Andrew received his bachelor's degree, cum laude, from Howard University. From 2017 to 2019, Andrew served as a staff attorney at Advancement Project in Washington, D.C.

Tafari Melisizwe is a passionate educator, brand strategist, graphic designer & photographer based in Chicago. He joined the Dignity in Schools Campaign as Communications Coordinator in April 2018. Tafari is the owner and operator of The Indigenous Lens, a photography company that works to connect heritage and beauty through the art of visual conversation. Tafari also is a Facilitator-in-Training at AYA Educational Institute, an African-Centered educational and leadership development organization that facilitates a myriad of trainings, workshops and one-on-one sessions designed to heal alienation, heal toxic communication patterns and other wounds born of oppression. Previously, he Co-Directed HABESHA-Baltimore, a Pan-African organization that cultivates leadership in youth and families through practical experiences in cultural education, sustainable agriculture, entrepreneurship, holistic health, and technology.

Links for more information:
Dignity in Schools
Texas Appleseed
Geo Maher

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