• A Special Thanks to Our Collaborators

    Thank you for engaging with the resources and questions in this guide. We hope that you have been able to take small actions and imagine taking larger ones, while working through the sections.

    We’d like to thank our collaborators on this project, who provided everything from deep background, personal stories, case studies, thoughtful review, editing and design, and more: Alicia Sanchez Gill, Amber Akemi Piatt, Breanna Diaz, Caty Simon, Charles Hawthorne, Christine Mitchell, Gabriela Zapata-Alma, Haven Wheelock, Kat Humphries, Kel Montalvo-Quiñones, Julian Rodriguez-Drix, Kelli McIntyre, Leila Raven, Michelle Velasquez-Potts, Shaan Lashun, Sonali Sadequee, Susan Sherman, Tanagra Melgarejo, Thaddeus Pham.

     

    Please consider donating to some of their favorite abolitionist organizations and projects:

    • The Youth Justice Coalition (YJC) is working to build a youth, family, and formerly and currently incarcerated people’s movement to challenge America’s addiction to incarceration and race, gender and class discrimination in Los Angeles County, California, and the nation’s juvenile and criminal injustice systems. 
    • Critical Resistance seeks to build an international movement to end the Prison Industrial Complex by challenging the belief that caging and controlling people makes us safe. We believe that basic necessities such as food, shelter, and freedom are what really make our communities secure. As such, our work is part of global struggles against inequality and powerlessness. The success of the movement requires that it reflect communities most affected by the PIC. Because we seek to abolish the PIC, we cannot support any work that extends its life or scope. 
    • Whose Corner Is It Anyway is a Western MA mutual aid, harm reduction, political education, and organizing group led by stimulant and opioid using low-income, survival, or street-based sex workers. All members are current or former low income sex workers. All members either use/have used stimulants and/or opioids, are/have been homeless, or work/have worked outside. We low-income sex workers have created a regular community and organizing meeting for ourselves — a haven. 
    • Molly House Project is a community of bois, men, and masculine-of-center* trans folk committed to changing the way we talk about sex work. 
    • Collective Action for Safe Spaces is a Black trans, queer, and non-binary-led organization that uses public education, cultural organizing, coalition-building, and advocacy to build community safety. CASS cultivates the greater DC community’s capacity to respond directly to patriarchal and state violence through transformative justice and abolitionist frameworks.
    This guide was coordinated by Sasanka Jinadasa and Kate Vander Tuig throughout 2020 with funding in part from the Bloomberg American Health Initiative.
     

    A Concluding Note of Gratitude (and a Request!) from the Coordinators:

    If you have feedback, comments, reflections on the guide, and/or would be willing to share how you are using it, please email towardsabolitioninpublichealth@gmail.com

     

    We would love to see this type of work develop and expand within the public health field. As advocates for abolition with roots in anti-violence and harm reduction spaces in the US, we know that our own analysis, and this guide, have their own limits. It would be great to see other public health abolitionists take steps to develop additional sections like the one in this guide for areas where we have less experience:

    • Abolitionist approaches to land and environmental justice
    • Developing food justice and security
    • Abolition of/in work, labor, the workplace
    • Housing, property, and community development
    • Global public health and abolition
    • And more!

    Thank you again. We believe that abolitionist futures will bring us the health and care that public health practitioners work towards everyday.