Dear Community,

Today and every day, our commitment is to justice and liberation of Black people. In the past several weeks, faced with the unrelenting violence at the hands of the police, we have grounded in this commitment to our community and to the values of solidarity, intersectional organizing, community led safety, and the hard, vital work of creating systems of accountability that are anchored in healing justice and transformation.

Black Visions is a Black-led movement organization in the Twin Cities. Reclaim the Block is a campaign focused on moving resources out of MPD, which is anchored by leadership from Black Visions alongside a multiracial group of other community members. Because of how closely linked our work is, we work and write this letter together, so that we are clear and consistent with our community. 

As a young collaboration, growing in public, we are committed to creating modes of accountability that center our people, our families, and our abolitionist politic. We have been listening open-heartedly to calls from our community for clarity, understanding, communication and accountability as our work has been placed in a national spotlight over the past two weeks, and people want to know how our resources are being used.

Towards the end of the first week of the uprising, as people reached out to contribute to our work, we began redirecting people to send their donations to underfunded organizations and funds in our network, and continue to do so. We aimed to spread support and resources across the radical organizing ecosystem that is responding to uprising efforts, because we know that we are part of a movement ecosystem in the Twin Cities that is strong and vast. In order to do this with intention and alignment with our values:

• We clearly assert that any organization or individual who wishes to fundraise on our behalf, especially locally, first contact us directly so we are able to consent.
• We strongly encourage allies ready to support our work to understand the full scope of need right now, and invest in the many other amazing organizations within our ecosystem.
• We clearly articulate a commitment that any fundraiser we host will also benefit and support other Black-led organizations and/or formations in Minneapolis.

We see this work, to reimagine systems of accountability, as a core part of our abolitionist mission. It is in service of a shared vision for just alternatives to carceral and punitive responses to harm, that we write to our community today. We offer the following:

• Transparency about how much money we have raised, and where it has come from. To date, we, Reclaim the Block and Black Visions combined, have raised $26.1 million via our online donation database. We are continuing to account for additional money from other sources via mail in check, foundations, employee matching programs and donor-advised funds. This exact number will be available in the coming week.
• A virtual community meeting to continue this, and other conversations, about our goals and shared vision. The meeting will be held via Zoom, Tuesday, June 23rd at 5pm CST. Register here.
• From our beginning, we have been working to embody a commitment to sustainability, strategy, and long term vision, toward building a thriving and intersectional, Black organizing ecosystem. We will continue to be stewards of this work and maintain this as a long-term commitment. For more on our plans to redistribute more of this money outside of the emergency fund, see our earlier statements. We also plan to be in an ongoing communication about these plans as we build them.
• To that end, Black Visions and Reclaim the Block have created an emergency fund to get $700,000 ($500K available from RTB funds and $200K from Black Visions) into the hands of individuals and organizations that have been on the frontlines, leading strategies to advance community-led safety, and who have emergency needs. The application is open, and available here. Please share and apply.

We invite you to join us in this movement to protect and defend Black life, and we close with two important reminders. First, as a Black, Queer and Trans-led organization, we know too well the patterns of anti-Blackness that result in the rapid distrust of Black leadership, especially when composed of Black women, femmes, youth, nonbinary folks, and Trans people. Historically, we know that this distrust is often part of a concerted effort to discredit our work. Ultimately, history has shown us that capitalist systems are not designed to serve our communities. We are simultaneously working within and against these systems in order to meet our communities’ needs.

Finally, and most importantly, we are here to transform the world, away from punishment and disposability, and into Black Liberation and community accountability. We ask our community to be in principled struggle with us, and to give us an opportunity to model what Black Liberation and centered accountability looks like to us. We ask you to trust, wholeheartedly, the leadership of  Black women, femmes, youth, nonbinary folks, and Trans people. We are leading. We are all collectively transforming the world. And we are worthy of your trust.

Signed,

Black Visions in partnership with Reclaim the Block