This year, Critical Resistance (CR) is advancing our organizing plans and deepening our connections to the inspiring, re-invigorated movement to abolish the prison industrial complex (PIC). Amidst the Covid-19 pandemic, economic austerity, and a polarized political climate, people are ORGANIZING and ready to fight for liberation.
Together we have:
- Increased opposition to ICE policing, detention and deportation in New Jersey and New York.
- Advanced the campaign to Defund Police in Oakland, California.
- Helped build and sharpen the call to close prisons in California.
- Corresponded with over 17,000 imprisoned people and shared thousands of political education resources, including 2 issues of The Abolitionist newspaper.
- Made over 70 public presentations on the prison industrial complex (PIC) and abolition to shift common sense about what helps us stay safe and thrive.
With your support, CR will advance strategic campaigns and projects this year. In 2021, we are in touch with people inside, developing our membership (strengthening our membership’s political education, analysis, campaign skills and organizing plans), pushing forward in our campaigns, and continuing to shape CR into a stable organization built to last! Resourcing abolition is an essential move we invite you to make with us.
Abolition is essential to our liberation, and CR invites you to share our commitment to advancing this essential strategy and vision in 2021. We are ready to organize through the challenges and urgencies presented by our current conditions and the Covid-19 pandemic; we ask that you join us!
Over the past ten years, you helped us financially stabilize and weather the storms of financial crises and shifting winds of foundation funds. Now we are strengthening, stabilizing, and extending our readiness to meet the moment and the plan. At the end of 2020, with the help of our skilled allies at Center for Political Education, CR developed a National Strategic Plan for 2021 to unify and guide our organizing, and to deepen our impact in the movement to abolish the PIC. Please make a gift today to bolster this essential organizing in Summer 2021.
We aim to raise $20,000 for our national organization and chapters in one-time gifts and monthly sustainers. In 2020, over 6,500 people donated to CR for the first time. We are truly grateful, and we want to keep this going! If only 300 of these new donors committed to ongoing support of CR as monthly donors, it would bolster our organizing for PIC abolition well into the future. You can:
- Donate $20, $200, $2,000, or $20,000. Please support us by giving online or sending a generous check.
- Become a monthly sustainer online or by check (some workplaces have giving programs!) to keep CR strong.
- Subscribe or donate to The Abolitionist, our bilingual newspaper that we send to imprisoned people for free.
- Spread the word to family and friends by sharing our website, posting on social media, and encouraging people to support CR.
- Host a house party, workshop or presentation to benefit CR and share our materials and vision.
In solidarity,
CR National Fundraisers and Jess Heaney and Shirley Leslie, Critical Resistance’s Development team