Welfare Warriors: Organize, Educate, Research, Make Movies
The Welfare Warriors have been busy organizing, doing political education, research and making a movie!
Organizing
We continued our work in the Human Resources Administration (HRA) campaign advocating welfare justice for trans and gender nonconforming people. We joined Trans Justice, Housing Works, the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, and others in meeting with an HRA deputy commissioner. Our goal was to push a policy against transphobia at HRA sites defending trans and gender nonconforming people’s access to vital services like public assistance. We are currently organizing a set of actions to confront the rampant discrimination at HRA and implement a procedure that would confront transphobia and discrimination.
In July, the Welfare Warriors held their three-week-long, intensive “Train the Trainers” organizing school, facilitated by Welfare Project consultant Kai Lumumba Barrow and hosted by the Brecht Forum. We met daily to develop strategies to prevent burn out, further our political analysis concerning systems of power, concretize plans to support wealth redistribution, and build our organization skills against racism, classism, ableism and gender oppression. Our methods included compelling workshops, role playing and popular education.
As part of Train the Trainers, Kai facilitated a week-long campaign training workshop aimed at stopping transphobic violence in the NYC shelter system. The workshop helped us focus our goals, obstacles and strategies of an 18 month campaign. The school culminated in a group writing of the Welfare Warriors Manifesto and a surprise soapbox speak-out at Sheridan Square Park marking the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion and drawing connections between the conditions low-income queer, trans and gender nonconforming people face today and the conditions that helped spark the Stonewall Rebellion. Watch the October 2009 Edition of PBS’s In The Life to see footage from the Train the Trainers Organizing School.
Political Education
In August the Welfare Project launched Connecting Communities. Part political education session and part town hall, Connecting Communities is an ongoing series of discussions making connections between the issues and experiences of people navigating the welfare system and other institutions. Our first meeting, planned by welfare project interns Ash Hammond, Mel King, as well as Welfare Warriors Dwayne Bibb and Sandie Green, addressed trans and queer reproductive justice issues in the welfare and prison systems.
Miss Major, a Stonewall veteran and organizing director of Transgender, Gender Variant, Intersex Justice Project (TGIJP) in California, Terry Boggis, Center Kids Director at the NYC LGBT Center, Mya Vasquez Trans Justice coordinator at Audre Lorde Project and Stephanie Rivera of the Sylvia Rivera Law Project all spoke to an audience of sixty about topics ranging from trans experiences in prisons, violence at the HRA office, and queer parenting to reproduction in the face of eugenics. For the event we also published article on Reproductive Justice for Queer and Trans Communities in the Prison System and the Welfare System written by Ash Hammond, which has drawn trans people into the discourse concerning reproductive justice, state-sanctioned reproductive violence, and how communities can fight back.
Research & Documentary
As part of polishing up our Welfare Warriors documentary, we’ve screened a rough cut and fine cut of the film, which captures our process and stories of our community members surviving violence, challenging injustice and building a sense of community over the last few years. We will also release the results of our 18 month research project through the documentary before disseminating our findings through a zine, report and a class at La Guardia Community College this coming November.
