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Dear CRC Community,
This week, with support from our friends, family, and Slought, we launched a Mutual Aid Fundraiser in solidarity with the Movement for Black Lives. We are matching up to $7,000 in donations to seven organizations listed and described in the latter part of this message. The fundraiser goes until June 24th, 2020.
In choosing the organizations below, we focused on Black-led groups who offer mental health care services or other direct aid to local Black communities in unceded territories of Chochenyo Ohlone and Lenni Lenape–now known respectively as Oakland, where CRC began in 2016, and Philadelphia, where we are currently based.
Mobilizing now to abolish policing and prisons demands a revolution in how the United States supports Black mental health care. People with mental illness diagnoses are 16 times more likely to be killed by police than the rest of the population, and Black people in the U.S. are three times more likely to be killed by police than white people. The drug war has installed warriorized police in Black communities living under constant surveillance. Psychiatry for its part still has yet to register “racial trauma” as a category in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual used to treat Black suffering. Across all medical services in the United States, medical professionals are not trained to listen to or valorize Black voices, from natal to hospice.
Community-based listening is how we practice health justice work. In listening to our networks over the past weeks, in particular Black youth in our Creative Resilient Youth program and community organizers calling for reparations, we organized this fundraiser to redistribute wealth from our extended communities to center and support Black-led organizations.
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