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Want to Join COSpace? Excited to have you on board!
Fill out the form and one of our volunteers will get in touch with you on how to get involved.
Please consider a tax-deductible donation to support our mission to educate, motivate, unionize, and mobilize communities with the task of dismantling an intricately woven system that was built to keep Black and brown bodies under the foot of white supremacy. Take action with Claim Our Space now!
Claim Our Space Now boldly commits to dismantling white supremacy and saving all Black lives. Our work will radically transform and restore all Black communities' sovereignty to claim their dignity, safety, and birthright to claim space and live unapologetically.
Our mission is to ritualize consistent and urgent action to dismantle systems of white supremacy and save all Black lives. We build and mobilize power by making multimedia education, grassroots organizing, and consistent community care accessible to all.
We do this through:
Base-Building: We make revolutionary resources, safe spaces, and direct actions accessible (across language, disability, cultures, generations, interests and more!) to build and preserve community power to claim the social change necessary to save all Black lives.
Leadership development: Our community organizers co-create with our board of directors to meaningfully connect our community through our initiatives and resources to make room for growth, trust, and experimentation as we collectively seek to transform the world around us and achieve systemic change
Consistent and Urgent Action: We ritualize direct actions to Educate, Motivate, Unionize, and Mobilize all in our community to dismantle white supremacy and co-create new equitable systems in its place
We recognize that the nonprofit industrial complex traditionally lends to competition for funding and exploitation of labor. We are committed to constantly seeking new and transformative practices in order to change how a nonprofit operates and make a direct impact in our communities, not make a profit for staff.
We are committed to correcting the false narrative that abolition (prisons, borders, etc) is destructive and show our communities, alongside other movements for change, that it is a creative practice that will ensure our collective survival on this planet and restore all Black and all oppressed peoples’ dignity. When we prioritize our community’s needs, we make systems of punishment and surveillance obsolete.
This is why Claim Our Space Now creates and elevates resources to educate our community, safe spaces to share our testimony through this struggle connect and build trust, and ultimately build community power that will shape our current and future generations’ path to liberation.
White supremacy has historically won the world over because of the tendency to marginalize, divide, and conquer whole communities. Rather than seeing the differences as things to keep us apart, we lean into these differences to find solidarity through our experiences and help us find a pathway forward.
We reject the idea of there being a one-size-fits all solution to dismantle the intricately woven systems of white supremacy. We embrace imperfection and learn through honest mistakes as we find solutions that work within our communities. If we do make a misstep, on the personal or communal level, we take accountability through honest conversations that help us move forward together.
This isn’t easy work. But we strive to bring a spirit of positivity and collaboration to everything we do so the burden does not fall on any one person or group. Changing the world is a fulfilling and joyful process, and we pull up together to do just that.
We encourage taking breaks in this work. In order for us to sustain this fight healthily and not allow the systems of white supremacy to consume us, we create safe spaces that bring the we are fighting We respect that for each of us this looks different.
We honor and continue the work of movements that came before us. Our demands (below) are a composition of the Black Panthers 10 Point Program. We are fighting to become the generation that moves beyond reform and radically transforms our world to make space for all Black lives to claim their sovereignty and dignity.
We have noticed that many people have defaulted into keeping their activism on social media, based on what’s trending in the news, or other forms that lend to performative actions. Change can only come with active participation so jump in and find out how you can actively Claim Space with/for Black and historically disenfranchised groups NOW.
No organization can do this challenging work for you. Claim Our Space Now can present the resources, safe spaces, and programs but it is up to YOU to do the personal healing work to know how YOU uniquely show up for all Black lives consistently. There is no one way to show up and fight for Black lives. We all have different skills, passions, expressions, and intersectional experiences that will influence how we activate in our communities to create change.
We do this work because we have the audacity to hope for and create a better world with our communities. In spite of devastating news of police brutality, climate crisis, and other pressing issues humanity faces, we know there is power and endless inspiration in numbers. To reach our collective goal of liberation from white supremacy and save all Black lives, we affirm our liberation by organizing to dismantle the intricately woven systems of oppression and gracefully share our practice with others so that hope catches on
We are building an intersectional future. We understand that when space is created for the most marginalized among us, space is created for all of us. This affects the decisions made by our leadership team every day. Our pledge to save all Black lives means creating safe spaces for all and that can only happen if we meet our communities where they are.
We invite all to join us on our daily journey to understand, unlearn, and act together to dismantle the systems that seek to separate us based on our varying experiences of oppression and work to create equitable cultural and political conditions that will protect, honor, and celebrate all Black lives.
We are not machines programmed to do this work. We want to incentivize this liberation work from an authentic place and that will look different for every individual. We aim to arm ourselves and all community members with the autonomy to claim space and sovereignty through our initiatives and active work. No one leader is going to save the collective, we all have to have stake and ownership in this fight for our collective liberation from white supremacy and the intricately woven systems that empower it (capitalism, patriarchy, colonialism etc)
We claim our Black communities’ collective rights, dignity, and birthright to claim space and live unapologetically. No government or enemy who profits from systems of white supremacy is going to give us freedom. We must claim it. And we must claim it now.
