In November, 2017, Philadelphia elected Larry Krasner to the District Attorney’s office in Philadelphia. Krasner is part of a nationwide movement to shift the focus of prosecutorial offices to justice instead of incarceration. In Queens, Krasner endorsed reformer Tiffany Cabán, whose nearly 1,200 vote win in the DA’s race was just recently overruled by the Board of Elections. The Queens election is still in question.
When Krasner was elected he said:
This is not another story about kings and queens. This is a story about a movement. This is what a movement looks like.
A couple weeks ago, I had the chance to see some of the leaders of The Alliance for a Just Philadelphia and The Coalition for a Just DA speak. They not only spoke about the DA race but also about the work the coalition was doing to fight the privatization of schools, to end 10-year tax abatements, and to build a peoples’ platform for Philadelphia. It was one of the best sessions I attended.
We’re trying to do something similar in Cincinnati so I asked them if they’d share some of their experiences and lessons learned.
1. How did you become involved in community activism?
Kendra Brooks: I have always been an active community member and active mom, but I didn’t know that “organizing” had a name. I got involved in the movement for education justice in Philadelphia in 2014, after the School District attempted to turn my childrens’ elementary school over to Mastery Charter, a larger charter school corporation.
Rick Krajewski: My first taste of community activism was in STEM education—in 2015 I began volunteer teaching introductory programming classes at Huey Elementary School to 5th graders. Then in 2016 in the aftermath of the presidential election, I felt the need to become more deeply involved in community organizing, which led to me attending a Reclaim Philadelphia meeting that fall and eventually becoming a leader in the organization.
Hannah Sassaman: During the Republican National Convention in 2000, I saw a brutal act of police brutality against a protester of color. Later, that protester found me because of a jumpy hand-cam video, and we were able to support him in his defense against a charge of felony assault against the police, under the then-”Deadliest DA,” Lynne Abraham. I brought a sense of the importance of community media and storytelling, tech justice, and justice around policing, race, and mass incarceration through the rest of my work, in Philly and beyond.
Bryan Mercer: Two experiences in college shaped my political development. First was the second Bush election and broader anti-war movement. I was inspired by activists I knew at the time to take a semester off from school and work on the election in Florida, which gave me a lot of lessons in electoral organizing, what to do and what not to do. Second was being a part of student and community solidarity campaigns to fight Columbia University’s plans to expand into West Harlem and the displacement that came with it. I took from these experiences the importance of being rooted in place and building coalitions.
Arielle Klagsbrun: When I was in seventh grade, I had a teacher that taught me about global warming and I was utterly befuddled as to how our government wasn’t doing anything to stop fossil fuel companies, and when Hurricane Katrina happened, I gained clarity around the intersections of race, class, and climate in this country. Years later in college, I found organizing while trying to get the CEO of the world’s largest coal company off the university’s board of trustees.
2. How did your coalition(s) come together?
Kendra, Arielle, and Bryan: The Alliance for a Just Philadelphia came together in the lead-up to the 2019 City Council elections in Philadelphia. In 2018, community organizers from education justice, housing justice, and criminal justice reform watched our issues get pitted against each other during the budget cycle. The dominant narrative coming from our City Council was that there was only a little bit of money—and we should choose between our schools, affordable accessible housing, and services for returning citizens. We knew that this was not only false (there’s plenty of wealth in Philadelphia) but also dangerous—our communities deserve all basic human rights and city services. The goal with the Alliance was to bring together various organizations and movements in the city to create a platform across all sorts of issues to use in the May primary and beyond. With one cohesive platform, we aimed to resist any attempts to pit schools against housing against criminal justice against immigrants. Over 6 months, we built a coalition of over 30 organizations that represented work on education justice, housing justice, criminal justice reform, immigrant justice, harm reduction, economic justice and fair work, disability rights, climate justice and environmental health. Then, we put together a large and ambitious platform. Then in March of 2019, we and the MLK DARE coalition held a 1,300-person forum featuring 20+ candidates for city council to hold candidates to our issues. The Alliance continues to be a space for shared power building in Philadelphia.
Rick and Hannah: The Coalition for a Just DA was first convened in the winter of 2016. Given Philadelphia’s position as the most incarcerated and impoverished large city in the country, community organizers and activists were strategizing about how to push the office of the district attorney, traditionally ground-zero for “tough on crime” criminal justice policy, to a space where our organizations could introduce a platform that called for less incarceration and more diversion. As such, the 20+ groups involved, whose issues included the rights of immigrants, undocumented people, youth, sex workers, the formerly incarcerated, victims, and survivors, crafted a multi-issue platform in advance of the 2017 DA election, that we could use for accountability, and more importantly, co-governance.
3. Larry Krasner’s election to district attorney in Philadelphia in 2017 was big. This was a national success story. How were you able to accomplish this win?
Rick and Hannah: Countless organizations played a role in Krasner’s revolutionary win, which is part of the secret to him winning. It is often difficult to convince groups that work on different issues, or in different sectors, to come together for a shared goal. Given Seth Williams, our previous DA, resigning from the office in disgrace after being indicted on corruption charges, Philadelphia was primed for something new. Something that would follow-through on the empty promises Seth made as an incoming DA, that he would be a reformer, that he would undo the legacy of Lynne Abraham and other harsh prosecutors who had no lens of racial or economic justice in their use of the law. The Coalition for a Just DA harnessed this energy in a critical forum held in April 2017. We publicly presented our platform, and asked candidates bold questions about their commitment to ending the use of cash bail, the death penalty, and blanket mandatory minimums. Our willingness to push the envelope on the issues resulted in a leftward shift on what narratives candidates needed to stand on to convince voters. This was coupled with door knocking programs across the city. Organizations like Reclaim Philadelphia, 215 People’s Alliance, the Working Families Party, and POWER mobilized our bases throughout the primary cycle, having conversations with our neighbors about the nature of safety, their experiences with the justice system, and how electing a DA like Krasner would be an unprecedented step toward ending mass incarceration. The inspiration felt during this election led to over 180,000 doors knocked, just for Krasner.
4. During your panel session, I loved that you talked about the importance of learning to struggle together. This phrase really hit home for me. Can you explain what this meant to the coalition and talk about how you learned to “struggle together”?
Rick and Hannah: A necessary component of our work is taking risks. Given that coalition-organizing requires collaboration between communities who may have never worked together, there will be times where we’ll have miscommunication or misalignment. And we’re trying a tactic that’s never been done before! So there is a component of flying in the dark. Recognizing that we’re facing these challenges, you must prioritize building relationships, and through those relationships, trust. Struggling together meant learning that the hard way, because if you don’t have a foundation of trust, when mistakes are made, or when failure occurs, it becomes that much harder to recover. We learned a lot from mistakes and failures in this process for subsequent processes focused on the issues at stake in city council and judicial elections.
5. Can you give us an example of a risk the group took and/or something you learned from taking that risk?
Bryan: When we created the Alliance for a Just Philadelphia we weren’t looking at the usual template of single issue coalitions. We really wanted to create a space that brought together leaders rooted in vastly different issues—from the environment and racial justice work to harm reduction interventions in the opioid epidemic. Common wisdom would say we can’t bring these issues under the same strategy, especially because they could divide communities. To make this approach work we spent quite a bit of time at the early stage of the Alliance for a Just Philadelphia focused on values, structure, and relationships. What this let us do is reach a moment where leaders across issues saw that though they are working on different issues they have a deep shared interest. It strengthened our ability in moments like hosting on our city council candidate forum to make sure all of our issues were represented.
6. To me, a big theme of your session was that the people closest to the problem should be the people coming up with the solutions. Can you talk about why this is so crucial and give some examples?
Rick and Hannah: As community organizers, our orientation is always toward empowering those who’ve been impacted. We do this because building a movement of working class people that’s lifting up black and brown folks is critical, even if we are just looking at it numerically—1 in 4 Philadelphians have a criminal record. If we were able to organize these people, that would be a base of over 300,000. That would be enough force to win whatever we wanted. Lifting up those closest to the problem is also the most effective means of developing our analysis of the solutions. Who knows better what’s needed for bail reform than a person who’s had to sit in jail for weeks, or even months or years, because they can’t afford their bail? The Coalition for a Just DA was made up mostly of people with direct experience in the system, from immigration and harm reduction around drug use to resentencing folks who have spent decades in prison.
Kendra: Part of what was exciting about building the Alliance was bringing in groups who had direct experience on issues. Because we know that if you’ve experienced something and then fought to change it, you’ll understand it the best and have a different lens than someone just engaging in advocacy. This is both useful in understanding how policy solutions and proposals will actually play out in real life, and also in terms of our vision toward organizing a real movement here in Philadelphia. We know that building local leadership, leadership from people who have shared experiences and stories of our communities—that is the leadership that will build a citywide movement for justice here.
7. What’s next? Where do you go from here?
Rick: While the Coalition for a Just DA has primarily changed into a working group structure, we’re continuing our work of holding the DA’s office accountable, along with other actors. As some readers probably know, a number of our member groups recently targeted Attorney General Josh Shapiro in a direct action where he committed to support a repeal of a law that takes power away from Krasner’s office. We’re also taking on targeting judges, since they wield significant discretion in sentencing of cases. Reclaim, along with 12 other organizations, held a candidate forum that closely resembled the April 2017 DA forum. Reclaim endorsed a slate of six candidates for Court of Common Pleas, of which two won.
Bryan: For the Alliance for a Just Philadelphia we’re looking ahead to our city’s general elections and the new members of city council coming into office. We think it is a prime moment to be sitting down with incoming elected officials, explaining the People’s Platform, and pushing our progressive vision for the city. We’re also on a new footing with how many groups across the city relate to one another, meaning we can be more coordinated and supportive of each other’s organizing, and make sure that when it comes to the priorities of our city’s leaders we are not pitted against one another.
Kendra: In the primary election, it was amazing to see how many candidates moved toward our platform. And for me personally, I am running for City Council At-Large this November on the platform as a Working Families Party candidate. For years, we have seen our movements push from the outside and fight around issues. But I also want our movements to be the ones writing that policy and winning victories for our people. We’ve had some huge wins lately—regaining control of our schools, Fair Work Week legislation, increasing the minimum wage for city workers—but there’s still so much to do to make our city thrive for all Philadelphians. I’m running not just so that a low-income single black mom can have a voice in city hall but so that all our movements can be at the table.
Kendra Brooks was an organizing member and parent advocate/activist with Parents United for Public Education and steering committee member for 215 Peoples Alliance and the Our City Our Schools coalition who is currently running for Philadelphia city council.
Rick Krajewski is the lead Mass Liberation organizer for Reclaim Philadelphia and was a field organizer for the campaign to elect Larry Krasner as district attorney.
Hannah Sassaman is the Policy Director for the Media Mobilizing Project. As the campaign director at the Prometheus Radio Project, Hannah helped lead the grassroots organizing and legislative strategy that resulted in the passage of the Local Community Radio Act.
Bryan Mercer is the Executive Director for the Media Mobilizing Project. Bryan has led a number of major programs, including a collaboration with nearly two-dozen partner organizations to create Keyspots, a city-wide digital literacy program to broaden internet access.
Arielle Klagsbrun is a community organizer with the 215 People's Alliance who worked to abolish state control of Philadelphia's schools and helped build the Alliance for a Just Philadelphia that elected Larry Krasner. She is leading the campaign to end the 10-year tax abatement.