Statement on our Disaffiliation from B & P National
Dear FoW community,
It is time to let you know that we have disaffiliated from Black & Pink National as both a chapter and as a fiscal sponsee. We are charting a course again as an independent organization. Our leadership team struggled for a very long time with this decision, but in the end decided it would be in the best interests of both our organization and our inside members to take this step.
Flying Over Walls Prisoner Solidarity Project began in 2011 and affiliated in 2014 as a chapter of Black and Pink. FoW affiliated as a chapter under a, then, shared understanding that Black & Pink was a grassroots, anti-capitalist, feminist, anti-racist, anti-Zionist organization with anarchist roots, deeply dedicated to abolishing the prison industrial complex and to liberating LGBTQIA2S+ people who are affected by the PIC, particularly through letterwriting, organizing, and advocacy with our currently incarcerated queer and trans family.
Since the establishment of Black & Pink National as a 501c3, FoW has recognized a shift and deviation from both our shared abolitionist goals and our shared focus on letterwriting, organizing, and advocacy with currently incarcerated LGBTQIA2S+ people. This included the attempt Black & Pink National made in 2019 to remove the word “abolitionist” from its mission statement, the decreased investment in staffing and resources in support of our currently incarcerated members (relative to the investment in reentry and youth programming, etc), and most recently, the transition from being an explicitly prison abolitionist organization to identifying as a sex worker liberation project.
While we wholeheartedly support sex worker liberation and the decriminalization of sex work, we recognize this shift as contributing to our growing misalignment of values. It is important to us that we continue to focus our resources on mutual aid and direct support and collaboration with currently incarcerated LGBTQ+ people. We also recognize that many of the shifts in goals and programming of Black & Pink National appear to be influenced by funding sources, and we wish to separate ourselves as much as possible from the non-profit industrial complex that seeks to control and pacify our movements through capitalist organizational structures.
It was also becoming increasingly challenging for us to feel we had agency in contributing to a large National Organization with the turnover that has been occurring over the past many years, at all levels of the organization. We have found mutual communication and transparency to be challenging. We have also been disturbed by the multiple reports from Black & Pink National staff of their experiences within the organization. We hope that the staffing issues, leadership transitions, and labor disputes move towards resolution and stability.
As well, we have come to see the value in having independence as a local organization to structure our finances, decision-making, and programming. We have, in many ways, already been functioning largely autonomously. And we have been connected/ing to a network of other chapters, many of whom have also disaffiliated or are in the process of disaffiliating.
Over the years that we have been a chapter, we have gained strength and knowledge from being connected to a national network of queer and trans abolitionists, and we look forward to working as a coalition partner with Black and Pink National, as well as with other current and former chapters. It is our hope and intention to develop a renewed and positive relationship with Black & Pink National leadership as an independent organization.
We plan to stay connected to the broader and historical network of Black and Pink by continuing to reference our organization secondarily as San Francisco Bay Area Black & Pink, given our long presence and recognition in our local community by this name.
If you would like to financially support us as we embark on this next stage of our journey, you can send donations to us via venmo or paypal (@FlyingOverWalls).
And if you’ve been thinking you want to get more involved, now is a great time. We’d love to have you join our local leadership team and be a part of the behind-the-scenes of making Flying Over Walls happen! Here are some of our current areas of work—email us to plug into any of these projects, propose something new, and/or to join our monthly leadership meetings:
- Advocacy, reentry & inside member support
- Event organizing
- Communications (inside member newsletter, social media, outside member communication)
- Tech (database & website support, data entry)
- Political education & study groups (we would love some help getting our inside/outside study groups rolling again!)
- Penpal matching, follow-up & support
- Art/design, finances, care & culture, and more!
In solidarity,
The leadership circle of Flying Over Walls Prisoner Solidarity Project, also still known as San Francisco Bay Area Black & Pink