Free Our People Initiative
Our Purpose
The Free Our People Initiative is an abolitionist education pillar of FLM that raises awareness around the harms of the prison industrial complex (PIC), advocates for communities and people impacted by the criminal punishment system, builds alternatives to this system, and works through narrative change, political education and the project of dreaming radically to create a just world of safety and accountability for all people.
What We Do
Narrative Organizing
Storytelling is a vital tool in changing the dynamics of power, culture, and individual mindsets. Oklahoma did not become one of the top incarcerators in the world and home to some of the deadliest police forces by happenstance. These realities came through a deep-seated carceral culture in our state. Our work to bring awareness to harmful carceral narratives and to amplify helpful liberatory narratives surfaces in our 1 in 2 Campaign. This campaign shares the stories of system-impacted people and trains Oklahomans to become part of the narrative change deeply needed in Oklahoma and beyond.
SAFE Commune
SAFE Commune is a transformative justice (TJ) project building a network of TJ practitioners to intervene and respond to harm and violence in our community. TJ is a survivor-centered and community-based process to address harm or violence through a rigorous process focused on safety and accountability rather than punishment. Learn more about this project here.
Against Carceral Feminism OK
FOPI began our work by coalescing a group of passionate community members together to address the urgent issue of carceral feminism which serves to uphold the prison industrial complex while harming survivors of gender-based violence. Learn about the collective below.
Vision & Purpose
Against Carceral Feminism Oklahoma is a collective of survivors, organizers, advocates, educators, and community members invested in providing safety and liberation for all marginalized groups.
Survivors of gender-based violence are too often used to uphold the carceral system in Oklahoma – this collective serves as an intervention to end gender-based violence and all other forms of violence without a reliance on policing, prisons, surveillance, and other carceral tools.
View our slate of Community Conversations below! First, a conversation around the harms of carceral feminism and the work of providing safety for survivors and preventing gender-based violence; and most recently three conversations in local contexts with community leaders across the state of Oklahoma discussing organizing around defund and divestment campaigns.
Study and Struggle OKC
FLM facilitated Study & Struggle OKC with community partners Black Lives Matter OKC and Dream Action OK to bring political education to communities impacted by Oklahoma’s crisis of incarceration.
Study & Struggle is a study group organizing against incarceration, detention, policing, and criminalization through political education. the group met throughout the fall of 2020 and engaged the work of Angela Y. Davis, Robin D.G. Kelly, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and many, many others in an effort to enhance the consciousness of our community as we take the lessons learned from these scholars and apply it to our context in Oklahoma.