S1E4: Mary Hooks & Kate Shapiro on ending bail in ATL & the Black Mama’s Bail Outs

12/06/22 • 70 min

What does it mean to look at an issue like “bail” and “the criminalizaton of LGBTQ people” through the lens of a campaigner? That was the question for Southerners on New Ground in the lead-up to launching their Free From Fear campaign framework, which they used to pilot successful campaigns to end wealth-based incarceration in the City of Atlanta - which reduced the jail population by over 90% - and inspired the Black Mama’s Bail Outs tactic that has since been replicated all over the United States.

In this episode, we’ll hear about how they realized they were “doing the most” in their first campaign in Durham, NC ( 13:44), organizing around ‘quality of life’ vs life or death issues (15:30), how agitation from organizers in Ferguson encouraged them to start their own campaign in Atlanta (19:22), ‘glitter bombing’ a judge during a campaign against fines and fees (25:55), landing on two regional demands via a debate between SONG members (35:06), developing a new tactic to help SONG chapters test campaign work and learn more about bail (35:49), how campaign work makes a different kind of community-building possible (1:04:10), the importance of making campaigns “a street fight” (58:21) on grassroots organizers’ terms and avoiding getting “out-paced” by advocates and attorneys (52:06).
Mary Hooks is a Black, lesbian, feminist, mother and Field Secretary on the field team for the Movement for Black Lives. Mary is the former co-director of Southerners on New Ground (SONG). Mary joined SONG as a member in 2009 and began organizing with the organization in 2010. Growing up in a family that migrated from Mississippi to the Midwest, Mary’s commitment to liberation is rooted in her experiences and the impacts of the War on Drugs on her community.

Kate Shapiro was born in Durham, North Carolina, and raised in Atlanta, Georgia where she still lives with her daughter. She has had the great honor to work in the service of US Southern freedom movements for gender, sexual, racial and economic justice for the last 16+ years. She is a grassroots organizer, trainer, popular educator and strategist. She has worked at Women’s March since 2020 and was on staff at SONG in a variety of roles for 8 years before that.
SONG’s Atlanta campaign team wrote a reflection about the campaign. Kate Shapiro and other SONG leaders also developed the organizing curriculum "We Don't Want to be Stars," which they discuss in the interview.
Check out a writeup for this episode on our website or at The Forge.

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Visit www.trainingforchange.org for workshops and training tools, or to make a donation. Follow us on social media @tfctrains. The Craft of Campaigns podcast is made possible by grassroots donors. We welcome your feedback; if you like these episodes, please consider donating, to keep the show running. This podcast is hosted by Andrew Willis Garcés and produced by Ali Roseberry-Polier.

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S1E3: Sasha Wijeyeratne on holding a "hard no" & winning the narrative “on the doors” in the fight against Amazon’s “HQ2”

A week after the 2018 midterm election, Amazon announced it would spend over $5 billion – matched by billions in tax breaks from Gov. Andrew Cuomo – to build an East Coast headquarters in a working class neighborhood in Queens, NY. Some of the city’s most influential labor unions enthusiastically supported the deal, along with what looked like most of New York’s political establishment, as did many of the neighborhood’s working class tenants, initially. And yet over four months, a small coalition of basebuilding organizations stuck to their “hard no”, and derailed the country’s most powerful corporation.

In this episode, we’ll hear about deciding not to negotiate (12:02), quickly mapping out their opponents and key leverage points (15:09), countering Amazon’s & Cuomo’s PR machine “on the doors” in Queens (27:17) and being willing to struggle with their own members on the issue (29:15), how AOC’s recent primary victory influenced their targets “flipping” on Amazon (32:02), the influence of this fight on their current campaign against Innovation Queens (47:40) and learning more deeply the resonance of Bernice Johnson Reagon’s quote, “coalition isn’t home” (49:05).

Sasha Wijeyeratne is the Executive Director of CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities. Most recently, CAAAV kicked Amazon’s headquarters out of Queens, helped pass New York’s historic 2019 rent laws, and is currently fighting for a community-led rezoning that would intervene in speculation and displacement on NYC’s waterfront. Sasha has also been part of various kinds of queer and trans organizing, racial justice organizing and political education projects, including the National Queer Asian Pacific Islander Alliance (NQAPIA), DC Desi Summer (DCDS), No New Jail Coalition in Dane County, Asians for Black Lives and hotpot!.
Check out a writeup on this campaign at our website and at The Forge. This campaign was run by a coalition of many neighborhood-based, city-wide, and state-wide organizations, including CAAAV - Organizing Asian Communities, Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM), Central Corona, Queens Neighborhoods United, Make the Road New York, New York Communities for Change, ALIGN, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, and others.

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undefined - S1E5: Debt Collective organizers on crafting campaigns against an idea and generating “inside game” leverage by keeping up “outside” pressure

S1E5: Debt Collective organizers on crafting campaigns against an idea and generating “inside game” leverage by keeping up “outside” pressure

No single executive order by President Biden may be as consequential as the one he signed in August, that may soon lead to forty million people having all of their student debt wiped away. But most of the stories chronicling the path to mainstream acceptance of student debt cancellation leave out the first five years the organizers were largely ridiculed and ignored... until they launched the nation’s first student debt strike, and ended up at a bargaining table with the Secretary of Education.

In this episode, we’ll hear about the campaign’s beginning at Occupy Wall Street (16:01) and its “scouting” phases (13:20); how they used crowdfunded medical, bail and student debt cancellation as an outreach tactic ( 13:42); “dropping a bomb” in a red box on Obama Administration officials (29:00); how they kept up outside pressure even when they were at the bargaining table (32:12); how their basebuilding and casework influenced the 2019 Democratic presidential primaries (36:13); focusing on Black women borrowers (43:25) and building a broader coalition to keep the pressure on (43:37).
You can watch some of the Debt Collective's actions, referenced in the episode, on their website.

Ann Bowers is a former Corinthian Colleges Inc student and organizer with the Debt Collective.

Eleni Schirmer is a writer, educator and organizer. Her writings have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Nation and Boston Review, and elsewhere. She currently works as a research associate with the Future of Finance Initiative at UCLA's Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, and organizes with The Debt Collective.
Check out a writeup on this campaign at our website and at The Forge.

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Craft of Campaigns - S1E4: Mary Hooks & Kate Shapiro on ending bail in ATL & the Black Mama’s Bail Outs

Transcript

AWG: Today, we’re going to hear about an organization that has profoundly influenced me as an organizer. About six years ago I founded a grassroots Latine basebuilding organization here in North Carolina, Siembra NC, which did a lot of things that other Latine groups weren’t doing, that helped us build a base and change the conditions for our communities. Our undocumented members raised and distributed tens of thousands of dollars in solidarity funds to families w