- Are you interested in community organizing?
- Have you or someone you know been affected by harm, violence, policing, or the criminal justice system?
- Want to join a group to come up with real solutions to your community’s experiences with harm and violence?
Criteria
- Must be a resident of East Durham
- Compensation: $100 per session
- Commitment: March-December 2023
- Ages 18-21 and people 50+
- Able to meet monthly between 5-8pm on weekends
- Childcare provided for meetings
- Must be a resident of East Durham
- We ESPECIALLY welcome Black, Brown, and People of Color (Latino/a/x)
About Us
Durham Beyond Policing’s commitment to abolition requires a deep belief in and reverence for people’s abilities to name our own problems and create our own solutions when provided the necessary resources. Through our Community Design work, we will create alternatives by asking the residents of Durham to call for what we really want and need. Along the way we will practice democratic participation and being in right relationship with each other. Ultimately we’ll join forces to shift power to the people.
Our Process
Our Community Design project is based in the Critical Participatory Action Research (CPAR) framework. CPAR is an ethical choice that exposes and seeks to change existing power structures and inequalities within the community under study. It does so within a framework of smoothing out inequalities within the research structure.
We will roll out the Community Design Project within 4 Phases as followed:
- Planning
- We will move through intensive planning to identify stakeholders, set intentions, brainstorm on which communities we desire to co-create with, and form our team, which will include a core committee of 25 Durham leaders, and Durham Beyond Policing membership and staff members who will help us shape our framework. We also identify desired outcomes in the process.
- Design
- During this Phase, we begin to shape the container, making considerations around accessibility, volunteer capacity, and logistics support.
- Engagement
- We begin reaching out to our potential core committee of 25 Durham leaders, and having conversations. We will also begin doing outreach to Community Researchers, based on which communities are most impacted by gun violence and policing in our city.
- We hold focus groups to begin understanding what critical needs residents of those communities are experiencing, and what they need/want to feel safer.
- We will listen and learn about what our city’s collective needs are, and co-design a significant alternative to policing, and transform our culture of safety and accountability in Durham.
- Action
- The best and most successful model will come from community deliberation and visioning of what will keep us all safe. We will work with members to build public consensus for the project we will create, particularly within our own communities— specifically, Black, Brown, immigrant, poor and working class, youth, elders, people with disabilities, LGBTQ*, women, trans, and gender nonconforming people. We will listen and learn about what our city’s collective needs are, and co-design a significant alternative to policing, and transform our culture of safety and accountability in Durham.
Contact Us
Want to get involved? Still have questions? Contact Us!
Email us at: cpar@durhambeyondpolicing.org