The Invest in Community (IIC) Campaign builds on our vision of public safety through healthy communities, restorative justice, and services that meet people’s needs, with an immediate focus on Oakland’s budget.

This stems from Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) Bay Area’s long-standing commitment to abolition – meaning that we work to abolish systems of incarceration and policing that cause harm and move towards societies that invest in local models, organizations, and services that insure true public safety and foster communal accountability and responsibility for preventing and responding to harm.

We believe that one challenge to achieving true public safety is white people’s perception of crime, its causes, and what actually creates safety. This common narrative weaponizes white fear and puts too many white people on the side of increased policing and incarceration.

Policing and surveillance disproportionately punish communities of color, and we in SURJ Bay Area believe that if our neighbors of color are not safe, then our communities are not safe, and we have a shared stake in fighting for safer communities for all. The work of SURJ Bay Area is to organize white people in a multi-racial coalition for justice; the work of IIC is to organize white people to support a transformative vision of community safety.

Our goal is to move a base of white people to pressure elected leaders to shift money away from policing and towards addressing peoples’ needs and the root causes of crime. Last fall, following the leadership of the Anti Police-Terror Project (APTP), we were part of successfully organizing against the renewal of the $2.5 million three-year contract for Shotspotter, a gun detection technology that surveils Black and Brown communities.

We are now organizing white people to speak out for an Oakland budget that funds key services and cuts police overtime, a costly and out-of-control practice in Oakland that takes money from the community.

SURJ Bay Area’s primary partner in this work is the Anti Police-Terror Project (APTP), a Black-led, multi-racial, intergenerational coalition that seeks to build a replicable and sustainable model to eradicate police terror in communities of color.

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We are also a member of the Oakland People’s Budget Coalition, comprised of over a dozen community organizations rooted in neighborhoods across the city.

Learn how you can get involved with SURJ Bay Area.