$25,000 / Spring 2017
Eric Mann, Associate Director
Los Angeles, CA
www.thestrategycenter.org
Founded in 1989, the Labor/Community Strategy Center (LCSC) is a multiracial, intergenerational, community-based organization based in Los Angeles County working to impact local, national, and international public policy and form a regional base. Over the last 25 years, the Center has built successful campaigns and developed publications and popular education workshops on environmental justice, civil rights, public health, mass transit, workers and immigrants’ rights, climate change, and the growing criminalization of communities of color. Last year, through its youth organizing work, LCSC was able to get the LAUSD to remove assault rifles, acquired through the federal 1033 program, out of LA schools and also saw an 80 percent reduction in school police citations. This coming year, with renewal support from Hazen, LCSC will continue to organize to stop the School-to-Prison-Pipeline in the Los Angeles Unified School District; increase divestment in LA School police while alternatively investing in restorative justice; and build momentum to end LA Metro’s “stop and frisk” practice by decriminalizing fare evasion. Through its long-term vision and transformative organizing frame—Fight for the Soul of the Cities—Strategy Center is organizing to end the racist mass incarceration and criminalization complex of the past 40 years and replace it with newly won human rights, community resources, restorative and reparatory justice.