Community Conversation
SHARING OUR TIME, SHARING OUR KNOWLEDGE.
Held the 4th Monday of each month
from 7:30 to 9:00 p.m. EDT
Pausing the Conversation to Listen…
We want to hear from you.
As the holiday season approaches, we are pausing our monthly Community Conversation so that we may reflect on conversational topics for the coming year.
Over the last nine months our conversations have focused on creating awareness and solution focused discussions on Housing Insufficiency, Homelessness, Mass Incarceration and Judicial Reform. We have been fortunate to welcome inspiring speakers who have shared their stories and engaged with our community in meaningful discussions.
Thanks to our community members and our speakers during our series this year. See you next year!
We want to hear from you during this time!
Suggestions for topics including books, articles, or advocacy issues are most welcome.
Please send your suggestions to coalition4justiceandequity@gmail.com
Enter Suggested Topic for 2025 Community Conversation in the Subject Line.
Books allow us to have conversations involving people we may not have the chance to meet, but value knowing.
Thank you to all who joined for our previous discussion of Laura Coates' book Just Pursuit.
This instant New York Times bestseller offers “a firsthand, eye-opening story of a prosecutor that exposes the devastating criminal punishment system” (Ibram X. Kendi, National Book Award–winning author of How to Be an Antiracist) in this “compelling collection of engaging, well-written, keenly observed vignettes from [Laura Coates’s] years as a lawyer with the US Department of Justice”
(The New York Times Book Review).
"On the front lines of our legal system, Coates saw how Black communities are policed differently; Black cases are prosecuted differently; Black defendants are judged differently. How the court system seems to be the one place where minorities are overrepresented, an unrelenting parade of Black and Brown defendants in numbers that belie their percentage in the population and overfill American prisons.”
Our discussion of Bryan Stevenson’s Book, Just Mercy, In May began a journey of increased understanding of the impact of racism on our criminal justice system. In selecting, Just Pursuit, we continued the discussion and the development of a call to action to be a source of hope and change.
Just Mercy, was written in 2014 and includes a detailed discussion of the Equal Justice Initiative founded by Bryan Stevenson. Visiting the website will further inspire, but also distress you.
After visiting the web Equal Justice Initiative website, consider viewing Bryan Stevenson’s Keynote Address on March 31st, 2023 at United Nations Outreach Programm on the Transatlantic Slave Trade and Slavery. It is 30 minutes well spent.
See information below on the Compassion Project by way of an example of such a project, as well as additional sources of information/inspiration in service of thinking about how to frame a “call to action.”
Compassion Prison Project (Letter Writing Campaign
