Juneteenth 2023: Update on Walnut Avenue's BLM Commitment
/Back in 2021, Walnut Avenue published its support of Black Lives Matter, both as a principle and as a movement, along with seven commitments to action.
In honor of Juneteenth, we wanted to publish an update of where we are in those commitments since our last update.
Reflecting on the Commitments
1. Being consistent and regular in reviewing policies and procedures for their effectiveness in lowering barriers for Black staff and program participants.
Our Equity Committee, established around the same time that Walnut Avenue assembled its commitment to BLM and composed of a variety of direct service and administrative staff, has been systematically reviewing our agency’s internal policies, including its grievance policy. Although a slow process, since daily services must continue and approval by the board of directors is required for any policy changes, this review of internal policies remains steady and ongoing.
2. Being clear in what the confidential feedback process is so that Black staff, volunteers, and participants can be honest in their experience with Walnut Avenue without fear of punishment, for the purpose of Walnut Avenue remaining adaptable to people’s needs over time.
This has been tied to the aforementioned review of internal policies. However, a low-barrier option for providing feedback without requiring a full grievance process remains in process and has not yet been approved for public release. Such an option is overdue.
ETA (6/27/23): an anonymous feedback option can now be found on the feedback page, which can be navigated to from the homepage or by scrolling down to the website footer. Information about the grievance policy can be found on the same feedback page or on our ‘who we are’ page.
3. Ensuring that all agency trainings, including its certified domestic violence advocacy training, involve anti-racist education relevant to the training’s purpose.
Our state certification for domestic violence advocacy spends its first day discussing the sociopolitical context of gender-based violence and how it intersects with other areas of marginalization, especially race and ethnicity. The legal day of the same training also takes extra time to explain why law enforcement interventions shouldn’t be the default for domestic violence interventions and what alternatives look like, based on the lived experience and publishings of Black survivors and activists.
After expanding on this area and subsequently receiving feedback from some of our Black volunteers, we also added increased education on successes from Black survivors and activists which have been integral to the development of domestic violence awareness, intervention, and prevention. This helps provide a more balanced perspective on Black experiences and reduces the tendency of education efforts to focus too much on Black trauma at the cost of honoring Black success and healing.
Intersections of personal identity, including but not limited to race and ethnicity, and how those can impact a survivor’s experiences are consistently revisited throughout the whole training.
4. Better incorporating anti-racist resources into its social media campaigns.
Our social media presence overall has taken a backseat to other matters that we believe take priority, such as the development of our new Space for Change program (described below), reviewing our internal policies from an equity perspective, and evaluating how to best strengthen our domestic violence, youth, and family services on the other side of COVID’s lockdown now that our community is opening up again.
This means that incorporating better anti-racist action into our social media campaigns will need work in the near future.
5. Collaborating with individuals, groups, and other organizations on projects which are within our scope of service and resources which center the specific needs of Black community members.
This, as well as collaborations with most other individuals and organizations, has been hindered by the limitations of COVID. As the community has begun to open these past few months, however, Walnut Avenue is considering practical methods to expand the capacity of its staff and volunteers so that it can actively pursue new options.
This past April, Walnut Avenue hosted the first of what it hopes will be an annual event: “Let the Caged Bird Sing” is a performance by the local Musical Soulmates project wherein survivors use song and poetry to express their lived experiences. The artists, many of whom are Black, also range in age from teen to senior, which allows for an even greater richness in the experiences being presented on the survivors’ own terms and skills.
If you’re interested in exploring what collaboration with Walnut Avenue might look like, check out our page here. We’re actively looking for ways to take advantage of having a lovely historical home that can host events for our community!
6. Exploring ways in which we can expand on education, resources, and services for Black residents in Santa Cruz County.
In August 2022, Walnut Avenue launched a new program called Space for Change. Based on principles of restorative and transformative justice, Space for Change offers an alternative for people who are (or have been) in relationships involving domestic violence to address the harm that’s happened without having to involve law enforcement or the legal system. Space for Change is non-clinical, non-legal, and fully voluntary from start to finish, and was based heavily on resources published by Black and Indigenous communities from a prison abolitionist perspective. One of our volunteer advocates and academic interns, Devika Best, herself a biracial Black woman, was instrumental in the program’s development (and creating its name, too!).
The program itself would likely never have happened if the events following the murder of George Floyd in 2020 hadn’t caused such a widespread paradigm shift in domestic violence as a field, even though Black advocates and other advocates of color have spent years explaining the risks of social services relying so heavily on law enforcement for domestic violence intervention. Walnut Avenue would not be able to offer this service without the influence of BLM as a movement on social services or the decades of work from Black and Indigenous activists, who have been implementing and refining community-based interventions for violence for a long time.
You can learn more about Space for Change on our website here.
7. Demonstrating no tolerance for racism and discrimination in all of our practices, collaborations, and communication, and having clear recourse for those occasions in which it does inevitably happen.
Walnut Avenue has not been made aware of any incidents of anti-Black discrimination by its staff or volunteers. This may be due to the point in #2 (above) in which a clearly described, more informal feedback process has not yet been made public. Alternatively, it may be true that no such incidents have occurred. More information is needed, beginning with the publication of an informal feedback process.
When examining the proportionate demographics of anonymized, aggregated data from our programs, Walnut Avenue serves a slightly higher percentage of Black participants than the percentage of Santa Cruz County’s population that identified as Black on the most recent census. This is a good sign, but Walnut Avenue also understands that trust is continuously earned, never an absolute, and that it must continue to improve as an organization.
In Summary
The Biggest Step Forward: A New, Non-Legal Program
Space for Change spent 1.5 years in development in collaboration with the Conflict Resolution Center of Santa Cruz County. It offers three main categories of services:
Survivor healing circles: wherein a survivor of domestic violence may engage with their children, family, or other loved ones to address the direct or indirect harm that’s occurred and resulted in broken trust, violated boundaries, or other relationship challenges;
Ally education: wherein loved ones and community members can receive support and education from our trained advocates on how to better support the survivors in their own lives, not just for the survivors’ well-being but for their own well-being, too;
Community accountability: wherein a person who’s caused harm to family or a partner can find nonjudgmental support in learning how to make safer, healthier choices, and they have an advocate who helps put together a network of compassionate accountability from their own community (or in building a personal community if none exists).
This program was made possible by the impact of BLM on domestic violence social services; was born out of the work done by decades of Black and Indigenous activists beforehand; and operates on principles that emphasize wholly voluntary participation, eschews legal system involvement, and relies on community participation for accountability, safety, and healing.
Further resources on restorative justice, transformative justice, and community accountability are available on Space for Change’s page, as well as a list of the amazing works that formed the basis of the program.
If you have your own thoughts or feedback that you would like to offer us, you can contact the community engagement coordinator, Marjorie Coffey (they/them), at mcoffey@wafwc.org.