Movement for Family Power

As 2024 comes to a close, we are reflecting on the community, power, and capacity that we’ve built together this year. In a world where families face relentless state violence, our movement has been a profound source of hope and resistance.  Swipe to reflect with us! Please join us in deepening our work in 2025 through healing and capacity offerings; expanded mutual aid funds; and co-creation of new strategies to disrupt family policing. • Make a one-time or recurring donation: https://lnkd.in/g3xNAwNt • Shop MFP’s Bonfire Fundraiser Store: bit.ly/movement-merch Tap in with MFP in 2025! • Sign up for Movement Syncs: bit.ly/Movement-Syncs • Contribute resources to our Resource Library: https://lnkd.in/gFdcMn_6 •Submit your organization, campaign, or collective to our Movement Map: https://lnkd.in/gjtP8eCS • Add movement events you are hosting, attending or wanting to uplift to our Community Calendar: https://lnkd.in/g38ewqhs Let’s step into 2025 ready to fight and care for one another like never before!

***CONTENT WARNING: The featured article includes descriptions of child sexual abuse.*** A recent article by Roxanna Asgarian for The New Republic highlights the stories of survivors of child sexual abuse (CSA) who seek safety and justice outside of punitive systems. The piece challenges deeply ingrained assumptions that punishment and family separation are the best ways to protect children–when in many cases, they create more harm. Stigma, punitive approaches, and the fear of having their lives disrupted often force young people into silence. We must center the needs of survivors, focusing our attention on healing and self-determination rather than failed systems of punishment and isolation. Read the article at bit.ly/csa-survivors and check out these organizations to see this work in action: The Firecracker Foundation Freedom Community Center Just Beginnings Collaborative Mirror Memoirs Soil: A Transformative Justice Project (soiltjp.org)

The momentum for Informed Consent is GROWING! Across the country, healthcare providers secretly drug test pregnant and postpartum people and their newborns, and report the results to family policing agencies (a practice known as “test-and-report”). This practice violates bodily autonomy, breaks patient-provider trust, and exposes families to the risk of family separation. In 2018, MFP incubated the Informed Consent New York Campaign, which seeks to require healthcare providers to obtain written and verbal informed consent before drug testing or verbally screening pregnant and postpartum people or their newborns. Now, the campaign operates with its own steering committee of leaders from Black Families Love and Unuite, The Bronx Defenders , Drug Policy Alliance, New York Civil Liberties Union, and Pregnancy Justice. Grassroots organizers across the nation have been building power through similar campaigns. Thanks to this organizing, the practice of secretly drug testing pregnant and postpartum people is facing scrutiny nationwide through lawsuits, investigations, changes in hospital policy, and legislative advocacy. All the while, major medical professional organizations have taken a firm stance against non-consensual drug testing and punitive responses to prenatal substance use. Tap in with the Informed Consent New York Coalition to keep up the momentum! informedconsentNY.org

We are breaking silos in reproductive justice and building solidarity to end family policing! Last month, Center for Reproductive Rights and Justice at UCBerkeley, If/When/How, and Movement for Family Power brought together partners, allies, and new comrades from across the country to interrogate family policing as a reproductive injustice. We were thrilled to co-create this space with advocates and organizers from many interconnected movements within the broader fight for reproductive justice—including birth justice advocates, prison abolitionists, sex workers rights organizers, practitioners of abolition medicine, and family defenders. Together, we explored critical questions like: 💐 How are system-impacted parents, organizers, attorneys, and community doulas building towards liberation to protect families from family policing?  ✨What harm reduction strategies can legal services providers, advocates, medical professionals, and others use to prevent family separation? 🌱How can we build across and within movements to actualize a comprehensive vision for reproductive justice? Were you able to attend #BreakingSilosRJ in-person or virtually? Please fill out this brief form to share your feedback at https://lnkd.in/eaT3CPwR Missed it? Explore our resource list–including recordings of our keynote addresses by Dorothy Roberts and Amanda Wallace and other resources to learn more, strategize with other abolitionists, and get support–at linktr.ee/breakingsilosRJ

You power our movement! This #GivingTuesday and beyond, your support gets us closer and closer to realizing a world where all families can thrive. Now more than ever, we must deepen our collective fight for reproductive justice and family integrity. Here’s 4 ways you can support MFP in resourcing grassroots and systems-impacted organizers on the frontlines of dismantling the family policing system through MUTUAL AID, CAPACITY-BUILDING, and HEALING JUSTICE: 💐 DONATE – No amount is too small! Individual donations give us flexibility in meeting the emergent needs of our movement. Make a one-time or recurring tax-deductible donation: https://lnkd.in/g3xNAwNt 🎁 SHOP – Head over to our Bonfire Fundraiser Shop to purchase merch for yourself, comrades, and movement fam: bit.ly/movement-merch 💫 SHARE – Download our Supporter Toolkit, which includes graphics and sample language for social posts, emails, and text messages: https://lnkd.in/e7ttBxR6 🌞 CONNECT – Join our monthly movement syncs, add your org to our movement map, and sign up for our listserv! Links are in our bio. Thank you to our partners at Operation Stop CPS, Black Families Love & Unite, Equity Justice Consulting, and InTuned Consulting for their words of support. And keep an eye on our stories–we will be uplifting donation requests from partners and aligned organizations all day. Show them some Giving Tuesday love too! Let’s keep building a healthy and loving movement to end family policing, together!

November is declared National Adoption Awareness Month. As systems flood us with fairytale stories about adoption, let’s remember that forced family separation isn’t a benevolent use of state power. Every day, parents are fighting to bring their babies home from the foster system. Yet, the dominant narrative is that their children are "unwanted" or "better off." Instead of providing meaningful support to parents, the system uses its resources to destroy families in the name of creating new ones. And adoptees are frequently told that they should be grateful, leaving little to no room to grieve what has been taken from them. This National Adoption Awareness Month and beyond, listen to the nuanced stories of adoptees. Many are reclaiming their names, their culture, and their history–and facilitating spaces of deep care to address ongoing harms. If you survived the family policing system as a child, check out this peer-led abolitionist support space hosted in partnership with Peer Support Space: bit.ly/survivorspss And if you want to learn more about adoption abolition, tune into an upcoming IG Live at @the_empress_han on December 10 at 8:30PM ET. 

Together, we can grow the movement to end family policing. Giving Tuesday, a global day of generosity, is just one week away–and we are calling on our community to support our work to build connection, capacity, and care. As an abolitionist movement hub and incubator, we are creating critical movement infrastructure to harness our collective power. Your donations will directly fund: • MUTUAL AID–to meet the ongoing and emergent material needs of systems-impacted families and frontline organizers • CAPACITY-BUILDING–to provide grassroots organizers with skills-based training, fundraising support, and leadership development • HEALING JUSTICE–to support activists in reclaiming methods of deep care to sustain ourselves in this movement No donation amount is too small! Visit https://lnkd.in/g3xNAwNt to make a one-time or recurring donation. P.S. Are you looking for a 🔥 holiday gift for you, your loved ones, and your movement fam? Visit our Bonfire fundraiser shop to find our staple and newly dropped designs: bit.ly/movement-merch

As the Fall semester wraps up, we’re dreaming of a future where every student can thrive—learning, growing, and creating in safe environments. True school safety begins with an end to policing in all forms, including mandated reporting. One year ago, we published the “Survival Until Revolution” zine in collaboration with Erica Meiners, Charity Hope Tolliver, Shawn Koyano, Shannon Perez Darby, Jasmine Wali, Van Jordan, Ayla Gelsinger, and Alia Russel. This zine was borne out of conversations between these activists, all of whom are fighting to end family policing. In recent years, the Counselors not Cops movement has made waves at school boards across the US. But we know that policing of young BIPOC bodies is still happening in schools, and not just by cops. Mandated reporting deputizes teachers, counselors, and social workers to police young people and their families, too. Year after year, education personnel are one of the highest sources of reports to the family police. As abolitionists, we must tighten our analysis around the interconnected ways systems police children and families, and ensure that any demand to divest from cops, includes a demand to divest from the family policing system. It is BOTH mandated reporters and school cops that funnel marginalized children into the school-to-foster system-to-prison pipelines. Read the full zine and watch the webinar: https://lnkd.in/ducyvP6A 

27 years ago today, the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA) was signed into law. At the time, ASFA was framed as a solution to reduce the time children spend in the foster system. But instead of reducing forced family separations or supporting reunification, ASFA requires and incentivizes states to move faster to terminate parents’ rights (TPR). We call the termination of parental rights the “family death penalty” because it permanently severs the legal relationship between a parent and their child. For many, this also marks the last time a child is allowed to see their parents. Black families are disproportionately harmed by TPR. 1 in 41 Black children will have their parent’s rights terminated, compared to 1 in 100 children overall. It’s time to repeal ASFA. This law destroys families. It does not make families safe. In 2019, MFP incubated the Repeal ASFA Campaign. Now, the campaign is self-sustaining with its own Steering Committee of impacted leaders. Learn more at RepealASFA.org

“You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.” - Angela Davis Today, we ground ourselves in what we know: no election will break our commitment to each other. Regardless of who holds office, we show up for each other in ways that no system ever will. Movement for Family Power will continue working towards a world rooted in racial and reproductive justice–where all families are protected from state violence and forced separation; where the dignity and bodily autonomy of every pregnant, birthing, and parenting person is upheld; and where all families and communities receive essential resources to nurture our relationships and keep us safe. We will continue to grow a loving and healthy movement to end family policing and to build networks of community care to bring into being the world we deserve. For now, hold tight to your values. Connect with your loved ones and comrades. Take deep breaths, slow exhales, and let affirmations anchor you. Remember, we take care of us. And then, let’s keep organizing together - • Sign up for our movement syncs to collaborate and strategize with other family policing abolitionists: bit.ly/movement-syncs • Add your organization, campaign, or collective to the movement map: https://lnkd.in/egXjv6jk