Hello Everyone,

This is Gael from Sylvia Rivera Law Project & Reg from Critical
Resistance and Queers for Economic Justice. We’re calling out to
folks interested in being part of the planning committee for a
Transforming Justice East Coast regional gathering.

First, a little about Transforming Justice. Back in October 2007,
Transforming Justice brought together over 200 formerly imprisoned
transgender people and allies to work together to:

*Build a shared conversation and analysis among the LGBT, anti-prison,
and prisoner rights movements about the root causes of imprisonment,
poverty, and criminalization in transgender communities;

*Prioritize and build leadership of transgender and gender
non-conforming people most impacted by prisons, poverty, and policing;

*Create space to share and develop strategies to end the cycles of
imprisonment, criminalization, and poverty in our communities.

A number of participants from the Northeast region who attended the
gathering Transforming Justice on October 13th & 14th in Oakland
California have been talking about organizing a regional gathering
similar to the national one maybe some where in New York, New Jersey
or Philadelphia. We want to build on the momentum from Transforming
Justice and continue to build a movement that challenges the Prison
Industrial Complex and talk about ways of supporting and strengthening
the work at the regional level.
We wanted to propose doing an initial conference call to check-in and
talk about our capacity to hold a gathering, would folks be down for
that?

Also, Critical Resistance is holding its 10 year anniversary
conference (CR10) this September out in Oakland, CA & we were
wondering if folks were interested going to the conference. Because a
lot of people nation wide are expected to attend, this could be a good
place to continue the conversations started at Transforming Justice
thru us doing workshops, panels & gathering together with other people
working on similar issues. If people are interested in going maybe we
could work on the workshop proposals all together (like at a regional
gathering!) & figure out other ways to implement Transforming Justice
into the whole conference. In addition, we thought of bringing back
the Queer Visibility collaboration between various folks attending
CR10, similar to the organizing we did for the US Social Forum which
not only implemented queer visibility throughout the forum in terms of
trainings and internal accountability to queer and trans issues but
also brought the participation of queer and trans speakers at various
panels and other presentations throughout the conference. If folks
who were involved then want to bring this group back for CR10 please
join the call and let us know.

Please forward far and wide and especially to transgender and gender
non-conforming former prisoners who would like to be part of the
planning committee. To sign on to the listserve you can go to yahoo
groups and search for transformingjustice_northeast.

Thanks!

Posted under revolt, prison aboliton