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.

Martha Wilson has once again gifted the Cypher with her liberated voice. In her timely “Interconnected Systems–An Oppressive Game”, Martha demonstrates that only radically driven, bold moves will support changes necessary to advance racial justice.

In this truth-telling story of how the family policing system is like a game of chess, you will bear witness to how each system plays a game that is designed to tear apart families most harmed and marginalized by structural inequities and racism; not support or protect them.

Martha awakens the reader to this heavy, and most necessary time for justice. MFG is proud to be a place of intentional healing for voices such as Martha’s. Liberation is calling!

The cypher is a space to show your gifts, your talents, and most importantly; to gold mine. At MFG, we do nothing without the leadership of those most impacted. Martha– Thank YOU for helping us see–the unseen.

Mining For Gold proudly introduces Martha Wilson as a premiere voice of LVE. Martha’s work entitled “Legacy of Purpose-Safe Passage”, claims the story of the lingering impact of Trayvon Martin and anti-blackness in child protection.