December 27, 2020
⭐ New or updated content | ☎️ Phone calls | 📋 Petition | 🍎 Education | ✊ In-person or remote action | 💵 Donations | 🚗 Driving
Please feel welcome to forward this email to others! Click on any green text to follow links for more info.
In this political moment, we are investing in the long haul work for racial justice with Community Change, Inc. CCI has supported anti racist movements in New England since 1968, and helps make SURJ Boston possible through mentorship, programming, and legal and administrative support. Donate here.
With another round of stimulus checks on the horizon, SURJB’s mutual aid team will work to redistribute checks from our network to our neighbors and community members. We are building our plans in consultation with partners and will keep pledgers updated.
Sign up to pledge your stimulus check!
Our mutual aid partners (Cape Verdean Association of Boston, 12th Baptist Church of Roxbury, and VietAID) continue to remind us that critical supplies like food, masks, and sanitary products are in higher demand than ever.
This past week you donated ~$2,000 to our mutual aid partners. Thank you SO much. It makes a huge difference.
We’re asking folks to focus on the following items for 12th Baptist and CVAB:
For VietAID they are accepting the following donations:
SURJ Boston has drop off sites in Allston, Arlington, Belmont, Cambridge (new location till January), Jamacia Plain, Roslindale, Roxbury, Somerville, and West Roxbury.
Make a monetary donations to our partners instead so that they can continue their life saving work. The links to donate are hyperlinked below. Please shoot us an email at surjbmutualaid@gmail.com if you donate!
The incarcerated community in Massachusetts is facing scary rates of COVID with little access to basic hygiene resources. Black & Pink and Deeper than Water are organizing a fundraiser to continue health and safety purchases for incarcerated people, to provide funds that cover the costs of communicating with loved ones in the holiday season, and to prevent the evictions of released members struggling with employment and income. Please send what you can!
Along with other important items, Governor Baker has blocked language in the MA State Budget that would support decarceration during a pandemic - even though it is the gold standard for public health. Please read more here, then contact your state legislators to ask them to keep this language intact!
📋 Sign These Petitions to Protect Our People From Police and Prisons!
Boston Education Justice Alliance member the Boston Teachers Union is holding a forum on Tuesday, December 29th from 6-7:30 PM to discuss safety and educational needs in the Boston Public Schools as schools re-open during this pandemic. Please click this link to register and forward this along to friends and families connected to the BPS system.
If you know families in the Boston Public Schools that could benefit from free meals, please spread the word about the Boston Public Schools (BPS) School Meals and Super Sites available across the city. Additionally, anyone can pick up these meals and drop them off for a BPS family, they just need to know how many children are in the family!
Please consider donating to the Unafraid Educators COVID-19 Relief Fund for students and families in Boston Public Schools who need financial support during this time. Also, please share the form with those who might need it.
Call the statehouse before the legislative session ends on January 5! Urge them to bring bill H.4115 to a vote before the legislative session ends. This bill would strengthen affordable housing in Boston and MA by allowing individual communities to set rules that meet their own needs on linkage fees (fees associated with new development that go into funds for affordable housing and job training). We need at least 60 more people to call to meet our goal of 100 calls! Use this automatic calling tool here.
Please sign and share widely! The Coalition for a Truly Affordable Boston is calling on the city to change the Inclusionary Development Policy (IDP) to more accurately reflect the need for affordable housing in Boston. Sign the petition here—help us reach our goal of 2000 signatures!
Thank you so much to all who have donated! Please continue to support our community members who lost their home to a house fire. Please share these powerful words from one of the residents and fellow organizers, Lori, and keep sharing and donating to the fundraiser if you can.
We have an opportunity to pass the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA) as a part of the Economic Development Bill (H.4879). This act would give tenants of a building the right to be notified and make a first offer (or designate a third party, like a nonprofit, to do so) when the landlord plans on selling their building. This is a no-cost solution for the government that would keep more people from being displaced from their homes. The Boston Neighborhood Community Land Trust (BNCLT) has launched a holiday card writing campaign to pass TOPA. Send one to your legislators this December here.
Every Wednesday 12 to 1 PM
Want to host your own? Trainings the last Wed of the month 1-1:30 PM (just stay logged in)!
Register here for action hours and invite friends to action hours on Facebook. We will be holding these throughout December!
Overwhelmed by the number of actions you see each week? SURJB Active Members guide participants through calls, emails, petitions, fundraisers and more as we build the movement for racial justice! We provide more context on the calls to action and insight on how our actions help to advance the struggles we are working on.
This American Life’s 60 min. podcast about when 38 Dakota Indians were hanged…158 years ago on 12/26/1862. “Growing up in Mankato, Minnesota, John Biewen says, nobody ever talked about the most important historical event ever to happen there: in 1862, it was the site of the largest mass execution in U.S. history. Thirty-eight Dakota Indians were hanged after a war with white settlers. John went back to Minnesota to figure out what really happened 150 years ago, and why Minnesotans didn’t talk about it much after.” Nov. 2012
We appreciate and acknowledge that we live and are guests on Indigenous land. We want to be mindful and respectful of this, treating and celebrating the land (and our environment in general) like any place we would be as a guest. To get informed: native-land.ca and usdac.us/nativeland. Learn more from a panel discussion here.
On 10/18, while demonstrating against Super Happy Fun America, a white supremacist organization, a Black activist was violently arrested by Boston Police Department. He was defending his fellow protesters from police harassment, and has since lost his job due to the ensuing court case. Please help him stay afloat while he fights his case and for liberation.
Join our Confronting White Supremacists Announcement List to hear from us about opportunities to learn more and take action against non-state white supremacists and fascists in New England.
️✊ SHARE: CONFRONTING WHITE SUPREMACY IN NEW ENGLAND WEBSITE
Local activists have released NewEnglandWhiteSupremacists.com to contribute to the goal of exposing, opposing, and defeating local white supremacist movements. This is a great resource to share from your personal or organization’s social media
pages. Feel free to reshare this one from Solidarity Against Hate Boston!
With all eyes on the GA Senate runoff race, the SURJ Boston Election Defense Team is joining with national efforts to get out the vote in GA. See details of actions and fundraisers below!
Join phone banking and post card efforts to get voters to the polls for the GA Senate runoff through the following:
Donate here today to help SURJ mobilize white voters across Georgia to turn out to vote for Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, while building lasting infrastructure and laying the groundwork for racial and economic justice victories for years to come.
Law firms (one in Boston!) in key battleground states like Arizona and Pennsylvania are doing post-election litigation to challenge legitimate votes and counting processes. Over the past couple of days, their offices have been flooded with calls and emails from people like you, demanding that they discontinue their efforts to threaten a free and fair election. Click here to call local and national law firms today!
Donate and become a Dream Sustainer to support immigrant youth to protect their community!
Follow Jobs with Justice on Facebook to learn more about their ongoing work and campaigns. You can donate or become a monthly sustainer!
Hieu Huynh, a 49 year old refugee from Vietnam, has been detained at Essex County Correctional Facility since May. Hieu has been separated from his family and ill, elderly father for a conviction from over thirty years ago that he’s already served time for. The on-going detention of Hieu and the 400 immigrants and refugees detained at Essex County poses a massive threat to their health and safety, as Covid-19 infection rates peak and continue to rise.
Sign and share the #BringHieuHome petition to demand that Hieu and the 400 immigrants and refugees at Essex County be freed so they can be #HomeForTheHolidays with their families and loved ones. Find a further toolkit here.
This holiday season, BIJAN invites you to join or support their outreach efforts to people they’ve accompanied while they or their loved ones have been detained by ICE and/or fighting their deportations. As we end the year, BIJAN want to mail gift cards and holiday greetings to all we reach who are interested and out of detention, and to send commissary funds and letters of support to those who remain incarcerated. Sign up here to help them make this happen!
Join BIJAN and Movimiento Cosecha in fundraising to provide emergency response & mutual aid to those impacted by Hurricane Eta.
Read BIJAN’s response to the Attorney General's Office's report regarding attacks made on community members detained in Bristol County this spring. Find sample email scripts and a Call To Action here.
Policing, incarceration, and deportation are rooted in white supremacy and anti-blackness. Black immigrants make up about 7% of the total non-citizen population in the U.S., but they represent over 20% of immigrants facing deportation because of the criminal punishment system. Donate to the Black Immigrants Bail Fund (a fund co-run by the Haitian Bridge Alliance and African Bureau for Immigration and Social Affairs).
📋 Please sign and share this email petition to support the library staff at Boston Public Library branches who want to be able to provide the materials desired by their patrons. This is a matter of racial equity and justice, since the communities most impacted by the limits of the BPL plan are communities of color.
Sunday, January 10, 2021
12:30-2:30 PM ET
In January we’ll be reckoning with the results of the Georgia Senate runoffs and the likely continuing chaos of 45’s last days. What are we to do? We hope to have some of our favorite elected officials and local activists speak briefly on their priorities. Invitations to them are out but we’ve received no confirmations. Then we’ll reflect together on our work for the next 100 days. Come prepared with pen and paper.
Register for the brunch here. You’ll receive an email with the Zoom link.
Contact Amelie Ratliff with questions or for information.
We engage in a variety of group discussions to build community and awareness, and take action to disrupt the systems of racism in the U.S. and beyond. All are welcome.
Join us in Knapsack meetings (all on Zoom for now):
See all upcoming meetings on our Meetup page, and please RSVP here if you can attend. More options are regularly added.
Join the Facebook discussions. This is an alternative to the Meetup group; it is not required to join this FB group to join/attend the Meetup group. All are welcome in both.
Moving From Talk to Action: Find classes and sign up on the WPCR website.
SURJ Boston is a project of Community Change Inc (CCI), a Boston-based organization promoting racial justice and equity by challenging systemic racism and acting as a catalyst for
anti-racist learning and action.
In 1968, as a result of the Civil Rights Movement and in response to the Kerner Commission which named racism as "a white problem”, CCI was birthed. CCI promotes racial justice and equity by challenging systemic racism and acting as a catalyst for anti-racist learning and action. CCI accomplishes its mission through education, advocacy and working in solidarity with others to organize for change.
Feeling overwhelmed?
Commit to doing just one thing this week.
We can do this.
Read more about SURJ Boston and ways to get involved on our website.