The Path Forward

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The Path Forward is the 2021 campaign seeded by Black Visions and Reclaim the Block, in partnership with dozens of organizations across our city. Our work is about getting our communities the resources they need to build real safety - by defunding harmful institutions like MPD, funding the things we need to live with dignity, and building new systems that actually keep people safe. 

This year, we’re focused on planting the seeds for a long term, people-centered agenda, developed collaboratively and through struggle. It’s time for transformative change: time to move our city away from violent, ineffective policing and towards real safety. 

Key Strategies for 2021

 

At the center of our plans for 2021 are People’s Movement Assemblies to build a People’s Agenda. People’s Movement Assemblies (PMA’s) are a tradition that comes to us from our comrades in the U.S. and Global South. We are inviting partners and community members to join us in this process from April-September 2021. 

What’s a PMA? 

  • A gathering of people who are impacted by an issue, coming together to define and study the problems they’re facing, name solutions they want to see, and identify the next steps they want to take together

  • Some bring together people who share a neighborhood or ward, an identity, a workplace, or have other shared experiences. Some will be broader cross-community gatherings. 

  • Can be held online or - once it’s warm enough to be outside safely together - in-person.


Why? Black Visions and Reclaim the Block don’t have all the answers, but we know that together the community is full of experts about safety - especially people with firsthand experience dealing with violence and policing: Black people, immigrants, people of color, indigenous people, queer and trans people, sex workers, survivors of violence, and disabled people. Through PMA’s, we want people who often get left out of city policy conversations to talk with each other to shape a vision for safety in Minneapolis. 


Through PMA’s, we plan to come together across differences. By engaging deeply with community, we hope to generate stories and information that can support all our work. We will  discuss the safety issues people are most concerned about, the transformative solutions people propose, and a new vision of our city that community members want to live in. Through collaborative decision making and principled struggle, we will turn this into the People’s Agenda - which we can use as a roadmap for a city budget that invests in people, uproots violence, and builds the solutions we will practice as a community. 


New Infrastructure for Safety

The Yes 4 Minneapolis campaign will be mobilizing voters to change our city’s charter, eliminating the requirement for a police department and establishing a new Department of Public Safety. This is a key step in developing the infrastructure at a city level to begin investing in new strategies for community safety.