UCLA Luskin: BLACK, BROWN, AND POWERFUL: FREEDOM DREAMS IN UNEQUAL CITIES

Black Workers Rising, Los Angeles Rising
Lola Smallwood Cuevas, Los Angeles Black Worker Center

Tenant Power: Victories for Housing Justice
Tony Roshan Samara, Urban Habitat & Right to the City Alliance

Resisting Police in Schools & Organizing for Educational Reparations Now
Manuel Criollo, Activist-in-Residence at UCLA

Building Power in Watts: Community Leaders & Systems Change
Jorja Leap, Watts Leadership Institute
Kathy Wooten, Loving Hands Community Care

Special Performance: Lockdown Unplugged
Bryonn Bain & the Lyrics Crew, UCLA

In Los Angeles and elsewhere, working class communities of color are being pushed out of their homes and neighborhoods and face re-segregation at the margins of cities. In this workshop, we examine the housing crisis in Los Angeles County, from the criminalization of the houseless to widespread evictions. We also link this crisis to other sites of struggle, from Santa Ana to the Antelope Valley, and to other urban regions such as the Bay Area. In doing so, we discuss key efforts to address the housing crisis, including community land trusts, rent control, and the campaigns for just cause evictions. Our goal is to share organizing frameworks and strategies and to consider regional alliances for housing justice.

Lead participants include: Josefina Aguilar, T.R.U.S.T. South LA; Elizabeth Blaney, Union de Vecinos; Kim Carter, Time for Change; Terra Graziani, Anti-Eviction Mapping Project; Noah Grynberg, Los Angeles Center for Community Law and Action; Gilda Haas, L.A. Coop Lab; Rahim Kurwa, UCLA; Jorge Rivera, Long Beach Residents Empowered; Michael Lens, UCLA; Luis Sarmiento, THRIVE Santa Ana; Tony Roshan Samara, Urban Habitat & Right to the City Alliance; Benny Torres, CD Tech; Pete White, LA Community Action Network.

All organizations and movements involved in housing justice are welcome to attend and participate.

Workshop B.
Pay for Freedom, Work for Free: Economic Extraction in Criminal Justice

Moderator: Noah Zatz, UCLA

Bail, court fines and fees, driver’s license suspensions, racially profiled traffic stops, court-ordered community service. As millions are spent on policing, arresting, and incarcerating people in working class communities of color, these same systems are also extracting resources from the same communities, in the form of both cash and labor. And the failure to pay these debts often means further criminalization. Mass incarceration is thus also mass economic extraction, draining families of the resources needed to live and thrive, substituting policing for investment and forced labor for good jobs. This workshop examines these links among racialized policing, debt, and labor as forms of institutionalized theft. Our goal is to share research, organizing frameworks and resistance strategies, and to lift up the work of organizations working hard to break the cycle of mass joblessness, mass incarceration, and mass extraction.

All organizations and movements connecting work against mass incarceration and for economic justice are welcome to attend and participate.

Lead participants include: CT Turney-Lewis, A New Way of Life Reentry Project; Theresa Zhen, Back on the Road Coalition, East Bay Community Law Center; Laura Hanna, Debt Collective, Alvin Teng, Million Dollar Hoods; Tia Koonse, UCLA Labor Center; Jeylee Quiroz, UCLA Labor Center.

Workshop C.
Disentangling the Web of the Juvenile Justice System

Moderators: Laura Abrams, UCLA, Manuel Criollo, Activist-in-Residence, UCLA, and Matthew Mizel, UCLA & InsideOut Writers

Youth of color in the United States are disproportionately supervised and incarcerated in the justice system. A number of structures feed and maintain this process, including the education, social welfare, policing, and probation systems. In this workshop, we will explore the way these social structures function and produce the mass supervision and control of youth. The narratives of those with lived experiences as both youth and adult advocates will center our discussion. We will collaboratively seek strategies to move the treatment and care of our youth to be more life sustaining. Towards that end, we invite all whose work touches and is touched by juvenile justice and the systems that entangle with it.

Lead participants include: Jesse Aguiar, Journey House; Yahniie Bridges, Social Justice Advocate; Michael Mendoza, #cut50; Javier Rodriguez, Underground Scholars Initiative, UCLA; Jimmy Wu, InsideOut Writers.