Support the Human Justice Fund.
From 2000-2020, over $100 million was spent surveilling, criminalizing, and incarcerating people in Bed-Stuy, Brownsville and East New York.
With your investment, you can reverse this harm and repair our communities.
Let’s stop focusing on jails and start focusing on neighborhoods.
NuLegacy Neighborhoods is our desire for our communities - well-resourced, safe, and thriving places to live. NuLegacy Neighborhoods are neighborhoods with several Million Dollar Blocks that deserve to be repaired and healed. The safest neighborhoods don’t have the most police; they have the most resources. NuLegacy neighborhoods are built by divesting from mass incarceration and systems reform and instead investing directly in people, families, housing, land, cooperative businesses, and truthful and empowering education.
Your donation provides direct reparations to system-impacted people.
You can stop the targeted incarceration of Black and Brown New Yorkers.
Million Dollar Blocks was coined by Eric Cadora and the Justice Mapping Center and informed by NuLeadership’s Seven Neighborhood Study. The research showed that criminalization, police brutality and surveillance, and mass incarceration targeted 7-specific neighborhoods in NYC and 3 in Brooklyn - East New York, Brownsville, and Bed-Stuy. These neighborhoods are overwhelmingly Black, Latinx, and low-income. The research also showed that NYC and NYS were spending millions of dollars incarcerating several residents from the same blocks in these neighborhoods. Mass incarceration destroyed entire communities by separating families, closing schools, and spending hundreds of millions of dollars on the prison industrial complex.
You can get people settled safely at home after release from Rikers.
We partner with the People’s Bail Out. They help free people from jail and refer them to us for post-bail support. Your gift will help people get settled into a secure place to live and have funds for immediate basic necessities including food, clothes, medical care (copays, prescriptions), transportation, rent.
Your gift will stabilize families and communities.
Research on guaranteed income shows that recipients have a much greater chance of securing full-time employment and improved health and well-being than those without guaranteed income. Guaranteed income provides people, families, and communities opportunities for unconstrained choices - something everyone, not just the rich - deserve. When given funds with the freedom to spend as needed, guaranteed income recipients overwhelmingly spend on food, clothing, home goods, utilities, and car expenses. People with histories of incarceration suffer great losses in income - subsequent annual earnings reduced by over 50%. These losses entrench families and entire communities in lifelong poverty.
Your donation provides guaranteed income to formerly incarcerated people - this is reparations.
Research shows that incarceration results in significantly higher rates of chronic illness, infectious disease, substance abuse and mental illness and lower life expectancy. This is true of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated individuals and their families. People who experience incarceration after 55 years old are 550 times more likely to suffer from chronic and mental illnesses. The Medicaid exclusion policy means that once incarcerated, a person loses Medicaid coverage. Reinstatement is a complicated and long process. This disruption in care results in persistent low rates of health insurance coverage for formerly incarcerated people and continued worse health outcomes.
Your donation pays for healthcare coverage and/or costs for formerly incarcerated people - this is life-saving.
Formerly incarcerated people and their families are ten times more likely to experience homelessness. The revolving door between prisons and shelters is well documented and results in much higher rates of drug use, mental illness, and death. Housing policy prevents people with incarceration histories to easily sign leases, access public housing (for themselves and their families), and obtain mortgages. Discrimination by landlords, developers, and loan officers is rampant. Guaranteed housing programs have shown to help participants secure long-term stable housing, improve health, secure long-term stable employment, and to end homelessness in municipalities.
Your donation supports rent payments and pathways to sustainable housing because guaranteed housing ensures dignity, choice, and improved self-worth.
Your gift creates an inclusive, barrier-free, no-cost, empowering education space.
From the school-to-prison pipeline to divestment from public education in poor, criminalized neighborhoods to the race and class based tracking of students of color, to the invalidation of truthful history, the relationship between the education system and communities decimated by mass incarceration has been adversarial.
Communiversity uplifts the tremendous knowledge that exists in communities and invites community members to build and share their own courses on things they care about, things they’re interested, and things that make their lives and the lives of communities better. We also provide courses taught by leading activists, organizers, academics, researchers, and public intellectuals that community members otherwise wouldn’t be able to access.
The goal of Communiversity is to open access to vital information about history, politics, organizing, and power. We are shifting mindsets from rugged individualism to community cooperation. With basic needs/Human Rights met through guaranteed income, housing, and healthcare, participation in Communiversity has been rich, full, engaging, and extremely successful.
Your donation supports pathways to land and homeownership.
There are dozens of opportunities for land and home ownership - for people with capital. In the case of Million Dollar Blocks, gentrification has resulted in increased costs of living and owning and further displacement of long term residents.
In order to own homes and land, our community ownership program is pooling resources, learning about ownership vehicles like Community Land Trusts, looking at converting HDFCs into co-ops, and buying farmable lands in upstate NY.
There is great strength in numbers when it comes to ownership and even greater strength in cooperative ownership.
Please give to the Human Justice Fund and join the growing movement to shift from criminal justice to Human Justice.
Addressing mass incarceration by investing in communities is long overdue. Transforming Million Dollar Blocks into NuLegacy Neighborhoods will show how directing resources to improving communities will have better, more lasting impact than systems reforms.
