Mission
The Freedom Community Center’s mission is to build a movement of survivors that will meaningfully address violence in St. Louis City and collectively design alternatives to state systems of punishment. Our community will fight to end mass incarceration and advocate for transformative justice approaches to reducing harm.
Vision
Our vision is to end mass incarceration and state systems of punishment. We imagine a Beloved Community, in the tradition of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., where people have the power to address all forms of violence.
Our work
Make Peace
The current punitive approaches to violence such as police and incarceration don’t prevent future violence, they compound it. In the face of this violence, we make peace. By practicing strategies such as restorative justice, pod-mapping, and providing access to timely and affordable mental health support for survivors of harm, we seek to transform our responses to harm.
The cornerstone of our transformative responses is a series of early intervention strategies including restorative justice processes that intervene and work with people who are experiencing or perpetuating harm before they interact with the police or at the beginning of their interaction with the criminal punishment system. We also post bail for people and support people in release from pretrial detention so that we can intervene in the harm the criminal legal system does to people while they are legally presumed innocent.
Build Power
At its foundation, FCC is a community center designed for fostering healing, repairing harm, sharing resources, and building power. We create space so that those directly impacted by violence — from the living room to the street to a jail cage — can share their experiences, their wisdom, and dream collectively of a safer St. Louis.
In order to make durable change, we build power in a community of survivors of violence who have the answers to the question: What keeps us safe? The leaders we develop at FCC have the tools to intervene in violence in their own communities, the political education to analyze systems of power and control, and the strategic and tactical knowledge to advocate for investment into transformative healing resources.
Follow our journey.
Our values
Collective Liberation
We draw our power from our ancestors, from those who fought injustice before us, from those who shaped us as young people, from those who pour into us now. Because we are linked so intimately together, our freedom is also bound together. At FCC, we believe that we must build our collective to fight against systems of punishment and control, until we are all free.
Communal Healing
Healing happens through meaningful relationships with others. At FCC, we believe that deep, transformative relationships pave the road towards addressing violence at its root. Black and poor communities have been practicing communal healing for centuries at the tables of our mothers, aunties, uncles and cousins. Through communal healing we are able to confront the main drivers of violence— shame, isolation, trauma, and inability to meet one’s needs.
Nonviolence
We are committed to the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s nonviolence teachings. We believe that in order to create The Beloved Community, we must courageously practice nonviolent action. As Dr. King says, “Peace is not the absence of violence, but the presence of justice.” We fight mass incarceration and intervene in state and communal violence because our action is required to break cycles of violence and create new cycles of peace and health.
True Accountability
Punishment is not accountability. Punishment is violent, and too often it allows people to escape the hard work that accountability requires. Accountability is an honest and ongoing assessment of the impact of our actions on others. It is taking steps to change those actions if the impact is harmful, and doing the hard work to repair for that harm. When harm or violence happens, we are committed to holding ourselves and our community members accountable so that we might take a different path in the future.
At the systemic level, we are committed to true accountability, making the systems that govern us accountable for the disproportionate damage they inflict on Black, poor, indigenous and other communities of color. We fight mass incarceration because we seek accountability.
Embracing Repair
Our Black and poor communities have been damaged by policies, practices and systems of control that have enacted violence on us for many years. Slavery, Jim Crow, redlining and mass incarceration have ripped our communities apart. We seek to be whole again. As we seek that freedom, we embrace strategies to create repair for the violence done to our community. By the same token, in our interpersonal relationships, when harm has happened, we embrace strategies for repair that validate the experience of those harmed, that center the voices of those harmed, and wherever possible that meaningfully repair what was broken.