Justice Transformation

CPD’s Justice Transformation Program works in collaboration and solidarity with our partners and allies for an end to discriminatory and oppressive policies that marginalize Black people and other communities of color, particularly in our education and criminal legal systems. CPD looks to strengthen the power of communities to ensure public safety is defined and resourced through investments in education, health, jobs, and housing, rather than in the trillions currently spent on policing and jails.

Our society faces myriad challenges deeply rooted in white supremacy and historical policies that require advocates to meet this moment with bold visioning and complex strategies. We use campaigns, research, and advocacy to assist our partners in fighting for a society where structural oppression is eradicated and all people can control their social, economic, and political destinies. 

Our theory of change focuses on building relationships across geographies; infrastructure and narrative groundwork for radical and transformational shifts; and fighting for policy and budgetary change at the local, state, and federal levels. We believe that meaningful and sustainable change comes from the ground up and must be created by those most impacted. We seek to build the capacity of local organizations to pursue a transformational vision of racial justice that includes divestment from violent state structures and unbridled privatization; the abolition of hyper-criminalization and mass incarceration; and reinvestment in the health, safety and wellbeing of Black and brown communities.

As a primary focus, we are supporting multi-jurisdictional organizing and campaigns that advance Black freedom and power building, to be led and designed by our partners of color on the ground. We remain active in national spaces, including collaborations with national consortiums working on repealing and replacing the 1994 Crime Bill, divest/invest budgetary campaigns, ending mass criminalization and mass incarceration, strengthening public education, demanding charter school accountability, and dismantling the school-to-prison pipeline.