Freedom Project

Mission

Freedom Project works alongside the community to end mass incarceration and heal its traumatic effects on people who are targeted and impacted by incarceration, on their loved ones, and on our community. As a community-centered and culturally-responsive organization, we come from, are in, and are directed by the community we seek to serve - Black, Indigenous, and Communities of Color impacted by multiple systems of oppression. We create space for collective healing and liberation by seeing each other for our humanity, meeting needs as defined by individuals and the community, and amplifying the power that already exists among us.

Description

Thank you for your support! It makes it possible for us to quickly and responsively provide housing and basic needs to those who are the most marginalized and aren’t eligible for support from restricted funding buckets. Funds for rental assistance, emergency housing, and move-in costs helps community members finally find permanent housing, instead of staying in a perpetual survival mode. We seek to support the inherent power and ability in our community, which has been denied to us through multiple systems of oppression, racism, and anti-Blackness. In doing so, we prioritize relationships over resources, healing over change, and seeing people’s humanity no matter the circumstance. We carry these values into all the work we do. Currently, we focus on three critical community responses: 

1. Provide direct support and fill gaps in housing resources in the community through culturally-relevant individual care coordination and systems navigation.
2. Work to dismantle systems and policies that perpetuate racism and harm towards our community by challenging racially-biased narratives, sentencing policies, and legislation.
3. Create spaces for healing from the impacts of mass incarceration, racism, trauma, and systems of oppression inside prison and in the community by providing a safe physical space to gather and ongoing healing workshops.

Freedom Project was founded in 2001, when a small group of people currently incarcerated at Monroe prison and people outside collaborated to bring “Nonviolent Communication” workshops to the prison, and created spaces for dignity, connection, healing and community. They called this work “Freedom Project.” To adequately embody centering the voices of impacted individuals and prioritizing those with lived experience, the scope of our work began to broaden and expand. Our work evolved to ensure racial equity and cultural responsiveness is at the center of our relationship with compassion. Today, we are a community organization rooted in a consciousness of Compassionate Communication, committed to healing from and dismantling mass incarceration. We have been providing anti-oppression and Compassionate Communication workshops in Washington state communities since 2015, reentry support since 2016, and legislative and community advocacy since 2019. Our programs inside Washington prisons have been on pause since 2020 due to the pandemic. We do the majority of our work within King County, and we also have relationships in Pierce County and in Eastern Washington. In 2022, we provided intensive personal support (including emotional support, resource connections, financial assistance, and navigation support) to nearly 600 community members and families.

Our work is designed to be responsive, accountable, and beholden to our community. We disburse mutual aid with reduced administrative hoops, flexibility, and a priority toward people who have historically fallen through the gaps of other support systems. However, we approach this work knowing it is not enough to simply send a resource someone’s way. Instead, we connect community members with wraparound support and social services once we have established relationships and trust, in an effort to address the full range of emotional, physical, and interpersonal needs of individuals and families. We seek to co-create non-judgemental spaces where you don’t have to assimilate, where you don’t have to come in and walk and talk like the dominant culture, where you don’t have to apologize for being Black and being impacted. These healing services are consciously integrated into the support people receive from CARE Coordinators, as we know that we first need our survival needs met before we can deepen in our healing process.

Freedom Project team members have the lived experience that is needed to envision community-based solutions to the issues we face. Our staff consists of 26 people - 20 identitfy as Black, 2 as API, 2 white, 1 Indigenous, 1 Latinx -- and 93% are impacted by incarceration (including folks who were sentenced as children and some who had been imprisoned for over 20 years). We understand the nuances of the legal, prison, and reentry systems and bring our lived experience to support our community.