June Member of the Month, Amistad Law Project

 

 

In the middle of the 2020 uprising for Black lives, we found ourselves in a pitched battle to reduce the Philadelphia Police Department budget. While some elected officials located the demand to #DefundThePolice solely in street protests, we knew that it ran much deeper. Members of communities throughout Philadelphia had been calling to defund the police for years.

Feeling a fierce urgency to make sure that people in Philly’s Black and brown neighborhoods were heard, we worked on a documentary called Everyday Philadelphians Want to #DefundThePolice in collaboration with Bonfire Media Collective and an animated series titled Practical Abolition in collaboration with artist Erik Ruin. We put these videos out on social media and sent them out to thousands of people through our email list. However, we needed a broader forum where people who didn't already follow us could hear these urgent stories about the need to fund communities and reduce the police budget. 

That's where PhillyCAM came in. We joined as members of PhillyCAM in April of this year hoping to amplify the community voices in our Everyday Philadelphians Want to #DefundThePolice and Practical Abolition videos. PhillyCAM staff really supported us throughout the process. As a small organization that is often juggling a lot, they helped facilitate the process of getting our videos on the air so thousands of people throughout Philadelphia could watch them. We're proud to be a new member of this community of independent media producers and media makers and we look forward to working with PhillyCAM in the years to come.