The PMI 3-2-1 newsletter shares three ideas, two quotes, and one question to ponder. This issue focuses on the disproportionate harm caused to families of color by the child protection system and challenges all of
us to recognize and reduce trauma and build new versions of community conditions and institutions. We thank Corey Best, Founder and Community Curator of Mining for Gold, for editing this summer 2023 issue. FRIENDS and our PMI partners rotate editing each edition. The format, 3-2-1, is based on James Clear’s newsletter that shares ideas related to developing effective habits, drawing from his book, Atomic Habits. Freedom and independence are celebrated on the 4th of July. While many recognize this tradition
collectively, we have not held the truths of the Declaration to be self evident. ALL bodies may have been created equally, however, the treatment of the most minoritized and marginalized remains eerily familiar
to the days of yore. For countless Black families, the severity of exposure to child protective services (CPS) means a life filled with prolonged and exacerbated racialized trauma. This destruction has been researched, challenged, debated far too long. No one is “sleep.” The greatest fear is that we, in “prevention,” may be timid about building anew. We have hope for those…

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It’s been said that freedom arrives “when we are no longer afraid.” What if we struggled without fear? What if we heeded lessons from historical truths? What if we believed that the way we damage people impairs and destroys the collective us? What if the invention of race didn’t dictate who we deem deserving and capable? Dammit, this brings more questions, right? For depth and texture, let us try this frame: We believe that you know the immense harm caused by our interconnected human services institutions (because you are, or have been complicit in causing them). And that you are ready with all the earnestness at our command to be fearless and thorough. Ready to mount new ideas, solutions, resources and thinking that equal the magnitude of the harm. This belief connotes that we have grown a mutual understanding of our duty and have collectively embodied compassion and empathy for the “other.” Ready to be bravely
on our way to becoming a society that measures its worth based on a sense of justice, liberation, and belonging. Rather than reducing people to widgets and thrusting them into programmatic categories associated with a prejudiced degree of risk. Frederick Douglass taught us; “Power conceded nothing without a demand.”

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WELCOME BACK TO THE LIBERATED VOICE EXCHANGE IN 2023.  Martha Wilson, LVE’s premiere author, is back in the cypher to usher in the new year.  In her 2023 debut piece, Resolution Reframe: Ditch the Resolution and Stand Resolved, Martha expresses the value in the principles of Kwanzaa, and how the principles have positively impacted her in the quest of liberation, justice, and belongingness. Once the principles and virtues are outlined and accepted, it then becomes about how to practice them daily, moment by moment. She makes a call to action of readers to care deeply and genuinely for oneself, reminding us that we are beautiful, AND we are worthy of rest and rejuvenation. And in turn, readers will have the renewed energy to heal in the collective. The insight, humanity, and unwavering sense of justice is greatly appreciated and necessary.  It is time to stand resolved!

Corey Best and Ivory Bennett co-authored and curated the introduction, Justice as the Through Line, for the National Association of Counsel for Children’s (NACC) forthcoming 4th Edition Child Welfare Law and Practice “Red Book”.
Best and Bennett demonstrate for the reader what they mean by effective legal representation. The guiding chapter offers lawyers and judges a view into the world of those impacted by family policing, and challenges them to question what “justice-centered” means to them. This is a call to action for judges and lawyers to become more than their position; “it is time to become a liberated agent of law, justice, and humanity!”
Best and Bennett’s core purpose of their expression is to ensure that justice-centered legal representation becomes an immovable marker of the quintessential, decolonized American child welfare system. The authors leave the audience with fifteen actions with which practitioners can LEAD: Learn, Explore, Act, and Discover. From this, their hope is the journey with this message will increase the presence of humanity, and values-driven legal representation for families.

BOOK INTRODUCTION

Ivory Bennett, M.Ed. is an educational leader, a national equity advocate for foster care and education, and an award-winning published author.
Corey Best is a dedicated father, and the founder of Mining For Gold, the curator of community experiences. The Mining For Gold movement of longing for justice, liberation, and belonging is rooted in thinking culturally, not strategically.

Mining For Gold is grateful to have Martha Wilson as a cornerstone and foundation of the Liberated Voice Exchange. In her newest expression, “We Have A Dream,” Martha continues her dedication to a justice-centered, liberated voice for families, and the Liberated Voice Exchange is grateful to be the platform for this mission.
This article is dynamic, and threads the theme of Martha’s day of birth, which commemorates the day Dr. King delivered the iconic “I Have A Dream” speech, and the Children’s Rights ICERD Submission that declares Black children and families face racism and this failure to dismantle systems and laws that discriminate against Black children and families represents an urgent human rights violation and is an urgent human rights issue. “We Have A Dream” calls for organizing our communities, to embody the work of undoing racism by identifying it, describing it, and then dismantling it.

Children’s Rights ICERD Submission for the U.S Periodic Report can be viewed at:

https://www.childrensrights.org/childrens-rights-icerd-submission/

Martha Wilson is back in the cypher with this timely, must read article, “What, to the Black Woman, is the Fourth of July?” Using her liberated voice, Martha brings the audience through the pain and rawness of the recent loss for women of entitlement to full body health, the continuous police slaughtering of Black bodies, and how Frederick Douglass’ call to the American people in 1852 rings true in 2022 on what the Fourth of July means to enslaved people.

The call for liberation and justice is NOW. The cypher is where we are expressive, independent, and a bit impatient as we struggle for even a taste of justice. The Liberated Voice Exchange is where you will find a symbiotic force, both the heaviness of minimal air to breathe, and the light of freedom and liberation.