Building Coordinated Crisis Response Learning Space

Over the past two years, Interrupting Criminalization has hosted a monthly, virtual, abolitionist, multi-lingual, collaborative learning space for groups and organizations dreaming, visioning, planning, building and implementing community-based crisis responses that do not involve surveillance, policing, coercion, or punishment — including coercive medical interventions.

In this new Building Coordinated Crisis Response Learning Space resource, we offer a summary of lessons learned over the past two years of the Building Coordinated Crisis Response learning community, including issues explored, resources shared, questions to consider, and pitfalls to avoid on the road to building sustainable, accessible, and resourceful community-based crisis response.

The report includes Painting the Ocean and Sky as an appendix, also available as a gorgeous stand-alone ‘zine from Transformative Justice Fellow Shira Hassan. In it, she invites careful and nuanced consideration of the kinds of formations we are building, and what the shape of our crisis responses take means for us and the people who access them.

We hope you that as people continue to think through, build, expand, assess, and evaluate community-based crisis responses, that all these resources together — gathering the collective wisdom of decades of crisis response from dozens of organizers — will offer helpful guidance.

As Interrupting Criminalization enters a Chrysalis period for 2024, the Building Coordinated Crisis Response learning space will now be hosted by our friends at Just Practice Collaborative — learn more and sign up for sessions on their website!