#8: "So you started an experiment..." + S3 Zine
Welcome Back to the One Million Experiments Newsletter.
Season 3: The Crisis Edition
Our 2025 1ME podcast season focuses on the concept of crisis and crisis response. In a time of acute crisis across the country, we share wisdom from projects whose progress we’ve been following since 2020.
All three featured organizations center local members with deep roots in long-time community organizing projects. The three models show different trajectories of projects that grew out of the 2020 uprisings, highlighting what’s worked, when things have gotten messy, and what hopes organizers carry into the future. Our guests have worked alongside and around the state and tested different configurations, responder styles, and funding models. You can listen to all Season 3 episodes now.
New Zine: Peruse the Crisis Edition zine with interview tidbits illuminating lessons learned from Relationships Evolving Possibilities, Cambridge HEART and Care-Based Safety in the One Million Experiments Zine Library.
So You Started An Experiment…
Interrupting Criminalization and One Million Experiments introduce So You Started an Experiment, agenda playlists for starting strong and looking out for each other for the long-term.
The formations we build to counter the violence of the prison industrial complex — including borders and border enforcement, policing, incarceration, and surveillance — and the things we make to sustain ourselves and our communities, require us to stay clear, listen well, and get (organizationally) healthy. This means learning how to work together, build strategy, and practice showing up well when conflicts happen.
The first of three agenda playlists, So You Started An Experiment is a compilation of short videos, slides, and workbook pages drawn from Interrupting Criminalization’s Building Your Abolitionist Toolbox series to support groups getting ahead of the inevitable conflicts that come up in organizing.
Each playlist focuses on a different key topic and set of skills core to building our capacity to plan for conflicts and know what to do, in our specific groups and local places, when they happen.
This month’s playlist focuses on Organization Building and Sustainment, in November we’ll focus on Self-Accountability and Movement Building, and in December we’ll practice Active Listening and Restorative Conversations.
The playlists are meant to be about the length of one or two meetings for organizations or a short retreat or workshop. Each one includes step-by-step materials and compact facilitation guides, available in Padlet (an online platform that you can use to step through the playlist) and as a PDF with links to the materials.
This October kit will support your group in naming assumptions, principles, and goals for your work while also getting ready to address conflicts before they happen. It includes materials from In It Together, by Interrupting Criminalization and Dragonfly Partners, and from Turning Towards Each Other, by Jovida Ross and Weyam Ghadbian. It features video clips from Project NIA and Interrupting Criminalization’s Building Your Abolitionist Toolbox series, workbook excerpts, and slide presentation excerpts, along with the facilitation guide.
Share Experiments Near You
Do you know of an experiment around community-based safety or wellness that we can include in our collection? We’re looking for a broad spectrum of strategies that communities use to build safety. Share the experiments you see making moves near you!
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Brilliant. How are difrent configurations effectively evaluated?