Dear <<First Name>>,
We did it! With your help we were able to meet and surpass our urgent fundraising goal and pay our December bills. You can keep track of our fundraising progress here. Thankfully, we won't have to worry about money problems interrupting the important work we're doing to build and defend the movement to abolish mass incarceration. We'll be continuing our fundraiser for the rest of the year, and although we always appreciate people helping to spread the word about our work, please don't feel any obligation to donate again. Your support has already been a great relief and we are deeply grateful.
 Our next fundraising goal is to raise enough money to hire Robert Saleem Holbrook as ALC's 6th staff member in 2018. Saleem was sentenced to life-without-parole (LWOP) when he was 16 for his role as a lookout in a robbery where his older co-defendants committed a murder. In 2012, the US Supreme Court declared that sentencing juveniles to LWOP violates the Eighth Amendment, which opened the door to resentencing for hundreds of Pennsylvania juvenile-lifers. Saleem was re-sentenced last month and was made immediately parole eligible, and we are planning ahead for his expected release.
Saleem has been a long-time comrade and mentor to me. In September 2007, when I was part of a small group in Pittsburgh organizing to travel to Jena, Louisiana to support six teenagers being targeted by a racist district attorney, I was told by a friend that a man named Saleem in a state prison an hour south asked why we were going to Louisiana to fight juvenile injustice – there was plenty of that in Pennsylvania. The world leader in sentencing children to LWOP is in fact Pennsylvania. That same friend invited me to the first public meeting of the prison abolitionist/prisoner rights group, the Human Rights Coalition, which Saleem co-founded while in prison. I attended and began writing letters and learning from people inside the prisons.
Since then, Saleem and I have worked together closely, including in the filing of a censorship lawsuit that recently settled for $95,000. As those who have been condemned to die in prison return home and assume leadership positions in our movements we will grow stronger and continue to set broader horizons for what is possible as we work daily against the prison state.
In solidarity,
/s/ Bret Grote
Legal Director | Abolitionist Law Center
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