Artwork stating 'Education Destroys Barriers', 'We Demand Treatment', and 'I Need A Chance'

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  • What did and did not change in Tampa Bay after the 2020 protests

    In the Tampa Bay area, the 2020 protests for racial justice and against police brutality did not result in reduced funding for area police agencies. But the protests did help prompt numerous other policing reforms in multiple agencies. Four Pinellas County agencies adopted body cameras. Some departments, including the St. Petersburg police, introduced alternatives to police to respond to mental health crises. One agency will train its officers in active bystandership, to make the duty to intervene in police misconduct more of a reality. Tampa restricted its use of no-knock warrants.

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  • Five Days Without Cops: Could Brooklyn Policing Experiment be a ‘Model for the Future'?

    For 50 hours over five days, police and community members collaborated on the Brownsville Safety Alliance pilot project, which kept police officers away from a longtime crime hotspot so that community members could provide for police-free public safety. During the experiment, no one in the neighborhood called 911 to report a serious crime. Criminologists caution that the test does not prove that police can step away permanently. But residents say that after longstanding friction over policing, they and the police struck a new tone of cooperation in community-led crime prevention that they hope can continue.

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  • A Year of Intersex Victories

    To promote the need to end intersex surgery, an organization launched a multi-pronged campaign that raised awareness about the potentially damaging impacts of the practice. The group used social media, created a petition, and held protests outside of a local hospital – all of which resulted in the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago issuing an apology and declaring that "they will no longer be performing intersex surgeries unless absolutely medically necessary moving forward." Throughout the world, similar awareness efforts have also garnered positive outcomes.

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  • Fragile cities are being inundated with people fleeing the impacts of climate change. How can they cope?

    Durable Solutions Initiative (DSI) aims to create long-term solutions to help internally displaced people in under-resourced urban areas, many of whom fled climate-related disasters. DSI relies on ideas from the displaced communities about how to move towards self-reliance. In Somalia, the participatory and locally-created approach led to Midnimo I, a donor-funded initiative that created short-term jobs, built or upgraded community-prioritized infrastructure projects like schools and hospitals, and improved relations between authorities and displaced communities, benefiting nearly 350,000 people directly.

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  • How Youth Turned the Tide in the 2020 Election

    A team of young people helped Kirsten Harris-Talley win a seat in the Washington state legislature. The 63 young people, ages 12 to 22, did more than the traditional behind the scenes work, like phone banking and door knocking. Rather, the young campaign workers participated in strategy meetings, ran the campaign’s Instagram account, and shaped the campaign’s climate justice and youth rights platforms. Ten of the young people were given paid fellowships and carried out responsibilities in all aspects of the campaign, such as voter engagement and fundraising.

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  • Under Biden, the Justice Department is expected to again police the police

    After East Haven, Connecticut, police officers were caught harassing residents based on race, the Obama Justice Department took the police department to court and won a consent decree requiring a long list of reforms, in hiring, training, discipline, and use of force. The oversight, rare for a small city, changed the department's culture and won praise from many residents, who now trust the police more. Such federal action waned in the Trump years, but is expected to revive in the Biden administration, though perhaps under a more collaborative, less coercive model.

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  • Lessons From Portland's Protest Movement

    Organized groups of volunteers helped sustain over four months of Black Lives Matters protests, with centralized information sources keeping the public informed and essential support services provided. A network of over 160 medics tended to protesters' health needs and organizers provided air filters to deal with tear gas. Protestors getting out of jail were given food, water, and other resources, and affected neighborhoods were cleaned up by teams of volunteers. Such support created other ways to participate while also providing critical infrastructure to sustain months of protests for racial justice.

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  • These gardens ask visitors to reconsider solitary confinement

    Solitary Gardens is an art project that protests prisons' solitary confinement conditions. Incarcerated people connect with volunteers on the outside who plant flowers, vegetables, or herbs in beds matching the tiny dimensions of the prison cell that confined Herman Wallace for a record 41 years in Louisiana. The people inside prison imagine their garden, often with memory triggers of what they have lost, and their gardener carries out their plan. The idea is to make a place for grief, healing, public service, and public education, as the gardens in four cities teach about solitary confinement.

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  • How US cities fixed violations to Asian Americans' voting rights in 2020

    Violations of the Voting Rights Act during primary and local elections led the city of Malden, where 23% of its 60,000 residents are of Asian descent, to provide voting materials and information - including mail-in ballots, voting instructions, official election websites, and precinct signs - in English and Chinese. The city also hired a trilingual city employee fluent in English, Cantonese, and Mandarin and collaborated with community advocacy groups on voter outreach and recruiting more bilingual poll workers. Advocates see Malden as a role model for other jurisdictions to remedy voter access issues.

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  • Ranked Choice Voting Debuts in 2020 Basalt Mayoral Election

    Ranked choice voting (RCV) lets voters select multiple candidates in order of preference. If no one gets a majority, there is a second round where the candidate with the fewest first choice votes is eliminated and the second choice on those ballots is counted. The process repeats until one candidate gets a majority. More elections use RCV, including Basalt ’s 2020 mayoral race where another RCV-experienced city shared public information materials and election judge training. RCV requires close attention to all ballots and campaigns are more civil because of the incentive to be a voter’s second choice.

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