Case Study: Emancipate NC
Skills at a glance: Project creation and management, copywriting/editing, graphic design, WordPress, communications, and public speaking.
I am very passionate about transforming the legal system, building and expanding on the community power of marginalized groups through movement-building, and executing community-based solutions to the violence enacted on BIPOC communities by the carceral system and its many societal iterations.
The Actions & The Results
This passion led me to be elected Policy Chair of the CJAA where I used my connections to community organizations such as Emancipate NC, a decarceration and policy organization to build a partnership utilizing what college campuses have a lot of: brilliant young people who have the time and drive to build movements.
This led me to create the Criminal Justice Education team where I adapted training materials given by Emancipate NC’s Dawn Blagrove, to teach college students how to give the training to peers, student groups, and community organizations themselves. These trainings taught people the importance of elected officials and how to leverage voting power as a means of harm reduction while fighting for transformation.
By increasing the number of people who were able to give the training, my program was able to expand the impact and mobilize larger numbers of people. We were also able to reach more groups of people who not only have voting power but can be mobilized to act.
So I began to take lead on more projects.
The Actions
My leadership and management project was such a success that Dawn Blagrove hired me to continue the work of transforming the system by managing Emancipate’s Justice League.
This program mobilized those directly impacted by the system to advocate not only for themselves but for others. Here I saw an incredible opportunity: narrative strategy campaigns. I wrote articles about the horrors of COVID motels and SROs in schools. I also partnered with the National Juvenile Justice Network (NJJN) for an IG Live using a narrative strategy to encourage youth advocacy during the 2020 election.
The Results
The narrative strategy campaign not only informed the public about important issues but it increased traffic to the website and other articles highlighting Emancipate’s advocacy, mobilized groups of directly impacted folks and their allies, and strengthened the partnership between Emancipate NC and NJJN effectively increasing movement power.