Search results for: un delegation

We are thrilled and grateful for the outpouring of support from Chicago and around the nation. We are now able to send two additional youth organizers as part of a delegation of young people that will present our report on police violence to the United Nations Committee Against Torture in Geneva. We could not have done this without your support.  Today, we are featuring the profiles of the two new delegation members. The second is Malcolm London, who is 21 years old.  Malcolm is from the Austin neighborhood on the westside of Chicago

MALCOLM LONDON, called the Gil-Scott Heron of this generation by Cornel West, is an internationally recognized Chicago poet, activist & educator. 

 

In 2011, Malcolm won the Louder Than A Bomb youth poetry slam in his native Chicago, scooping the top award as both individual performer & with a team. Since then, Malcolm’s work has been featured on national outlets including CBS, NPR, Huffington Post, The Root, and the Chicago Tribune. He appeared on the first ever televised TED Talk with John Legend & Bill Gates & has shared stages with actor Matt Damon & rapper Lupe Fiasco as a part of the The People Speak, Live! cast. He also appears on Season 2 of TVOne’s Verses & Flow. Malcolm recently wrote & directed a spoken word infused play responding to the Zimmerman verdict called Two Years Later at the Goodman Theatre with an ensemble of five youth poets. He is a member of the Young Adult Council of the prestigious Steppenwolf Theater.

 

Malcolm currently attends University of Illinois at Chicago.  He is s a member  and co-chair of BYP100 Chicago Chapter, a national organization of black activists & organizers. Deeply interested in working on ways to improve the national education system, Malcolm regularly visits high schools, youth jails, colleges and communities to work with students on writing workshops and performances. Malcolm is devoted to being a youth advocate.  He is the coordinator of The Know Your Rights Project out of Northwestern Law School, a project dedicated to educating young people on their rights within the juvenile justice system.  He also a teaching artist on staff at Young Chicago Authors, a program working to transform the lives of young people by cultivating their voices through writing, publication and performance education.

We are thrilled and grateful for the outpouring of support from Chicago and around the nation. We are now able to send two additional youth organizers as part of a delegation of young people that will present our report on police violence to the United Nations Committee Against Torture in Geneva. We could not have done this without your support.  Today, we are featuring the profiles of the two new delegation members. The first is Asha Rose, who is 20 years old.  Asha is from Oak Park, just west of Chicago.

My name is Asha Rosa. I’m an organizer, student, and poet. I’m 20 years old and grew up in Oak Park, a suburb just west of Chicago. I was politicized via the poetry slams of Chicago, a legacy of fighting for change inherited from my immediate family & generations of Black folks, and in a little family of prison abolitionists in the Malcolm X Lounge at Columbia University.

Much of my work deals with how power gets tangled up and hard to understand. Having started organizing as a Black college student, I grapple with the contradiction between identity & privilege. Institutions like universities often work to silence challenges to racist, classist systems of criminalization and incarceration by spreading the lie that college students aren’t a part of those systems. It’s important to recognize that the same way dominant notions of who is criminal are defined by Blackness, notions of who is victim or who is successful are determined by anti-Backness. To move through and be a Black exception in such a system without challenging it, is to deny one’s identity and submit to white supremacy. To be Black and still alive after the New Jersey 4, after Trayvon Martin, after Renisha McBride, after Mike Brown, presents a similar responsibility.

I joined Students Against Mass Incarceration during my first year of college and have since been engaged in anti-prison and anti-policing work. I am also an original member of the Black Youth Project 100, a group formed out of the collective moment of trauma experienced when George Zimmerman was found not guilty and we were reminded that the U.S. criminal justice system fundamentally does not work for our people.

My organizing is informed by a radical Black queer feminist lens, a prison abolition framework, and Assata Shakur’s instructions: “It is our duty to fight. It is our duty to win. We must love each other and protect each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.” I want to bring this perspective on how criminalization works to Geneva and I’m proud to be a part of this delegation because I’m young, but my commitment is lifelong. I’m pretty sure fighting for liberation is the only thing I know.

As we enter our second week of fundraising, we are thrilled and grateful for the outpouring of support to send a delegation of young people to present our report on police violence to the United Nations Committee Against Torture in Geneva. To date, we have raised over $11,500 online. We could not have done this without your support, and we are so grateful to everyone who are using the #chicopwatch hashtag, spreading the word about our Police Encounter Line, participating in Copwatch trainings, donating time and money as well as sharing the link to our fundraiser via social media, email, and word of mouth. Please continue to do so, and we are confident that we will not only be able to send our delegation to the UN but also build the foundation for long-term work around resistance to police violence in Chicago. In addition to our online fundraiser, people are organizing to raise funds through a Dozen Dinners for We Charge Genocide and a Dozen Faith/Spiritual/Religious Communities for We Charge Genocide. Please visit those links for more information on how you can get involved. We are hoping that these events will raise awareness on the work of We Charge Genocide and encourage people to reflect on what they can do to actively participate and to support the young people who are leading this work.

Today, we are featuring the profile of our last member of the delegation to Geneva. Breanna Champion is a 21 year-old organizer who is active in a number of Chicago area grassroots organizations.

I am a lifelong student, organizer, personal is political advocate, and black woman living on the south side of Chicago fighting to change the inequities I see every day. I would describe my activism as self-interested and continually growing as I battle between fighting against the perils I face as a black woman who has worked countless minimum wage jobs to pay for an already expensive college education and the struggles my brothers specifically have to face as black men in this country; us as black people in this world. I want to go to Geneva to present our report to the UN because the actualization of this report is really important to me. It gives a voice to people like myself and my brother who has been physically assaulted by the police, in order to change the terror we have to deal with in this country daily and especially by law enforcement.

I am currently a field organizer for Chicago Votes, core leader of the IIRON student network & Roots of Justice at UIC, and organizer with the Black Youth Project 100.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Please help Breanna and the rest of We Charge Genocide’s delegation get to Geneva to present their report before the United Nations Committee Against Torture. Donate online here, organize a dinner/party fundraiser, or ask your congregation to take a special collection to send these young people to Geneva, and keep spreading the word!