Project NIA Newsletter | December 2023

"...O little light in me, say:

Enter my heart in peace.

All of you, come in!"



"Not Just Passing" by Hiba Abu Nada (1991-2023)

Capping off 15 years of Project NIA

Learn more about our sunset and celebrate all that we have accomplished together

In August, Project NIA entered our 15th year. At the end of December, our work will officially sunset. In the 14 years of our existence, the world changed and changed and continues to change. When we launched in August 2009, Trayvon Martin was alive and well, so were Rekia Boyd, Sandra Bland, Mike Brown, Tamir Rice and George Floyd. We hadn’t experienced a global pandemic like COVID-19 and few of us imagined that we would. Al Gore and others had warned us about climate change as a danger but most of the world ignored them. So much has happened since 2009, some of it horrific and some of it beautiful. 

When I launched Project NIA, I had a few goals in mind and a five-year timetable. By year 3, I felt that we had achieved most of those initial goals and was already starting to think about what would be next for me. The best laid plans of people…lol. 

It turns out that our work expanded way beyond my limited goals and my shrunken vision. This happened because so many brilliant and wonderful young people joined our work. They brought their passion, creativity, ideas and most importantly their labor to the mix. I feel so blessed to have gotten to meet, to know, to work with, and to love so many people through Project NIA. I’ve worked with many of you beyond the work we started at the organization and that will continue into the future. I also want to thank the many people who worked with Project NIA as staff, contractors, and volunteers. I hope you know what a difference you made. 

I have searched a while for the “right words” to share as Project NIA ends and I don’t have them. I will only say “Thank You.” Thank you to each and every person who contributed to what we created together over these years. These two words seem small but they encompass a universe of gratitude and love. 

We planted many seeds and I hope that they will continue to flourish well past the lifespan of this organization. I believe that some will as those of you who were involved in our work have taken root in other soil. 

This is the last newsletter that you will receive from Project NIA. We are archiving our work on our website. For those who would like to keep up with my work and interests, you can follow Interrupting Criminalization on social media, you can follow my adventures in publishing at Sojourners for Justice Press and finally, you can subscribe to my personal newsletter. 

My friends and comrades Tom Callahan and Arda Arthman worked on a beautiful audio time capsule of Project NIA which I am so proud to share with you. See you soon and take care.

In peace and solidarity,

Mariame

Founder and Director 



P.S. If you’ve found Project NIA’s work valuable over the years and have participated in our workshops/convenings/events, joined our organizing campaigns, & used our educational resources and research, we invite you to donate in our honor to REBUILD. It would mean a lot.

Painting the Ocean & Sky with Shira Hasson

Don't miss out on the last Building Your Abolitionist Toolbox session of the year on non-carceral community crisis response

Are you interested in forming a crisis response team that doesn't use the police? This session will get clear about some critical terms, and ideas abolitionist organizers are using when building coordinated structures of care that are alternatives to police/carceral emergency services.

We will discuss:

• What is peer-led work? 
• Is it the same as mutual aid? 
• What is the difference between crisis and emergency? 
• Is there such a thing as a non-profit social service that can remain true to abolition? 
• 
  

Naming who we are, why we are doing this work, and what we are creating helps us get clear, creates a collective understanding of our projects, allows for boundaries, and gives us room to see ourselves, our power, and our formations so we can continue to nourish our resistance movements and build complex, viable community-led responses that do not involve the state

December 14 at 6:30 pm ET

Online via Zoom

Missed our November session with MK and JJ Skolnik on Abolitionist Bystander Intervention for Youth, you can check out these beautiful graphic notes by Laura Chow Reeve (radicalroadmaps.com) and the Abolitionist Bystander Intervention Pocket Zine all on our abolitionist.tools site with our other toolkits in the series!

One Million Experiments Podcast: Palestine Heirloom Seed Library

The 1ME Crew chats with Vivian Sansour, founder of an interactive art and agriculture project that aims to provide a conversation for people to exchange seeds and knowledge

The 1ME squad has the honor of talking with Vivien Sansour, the founder of the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library (PHSL), which seeks to preserve and promote heritage and threatened seed varieties, traditional Palestinian farming practices, and the cultural stories and identities associated with them. Recorded five weeks into the 2023 flashpoint of genocidal violence enacted upon Gazans and Palestinians across Israel/Palestine, Vivien reflects on how she is surviving from across the ocean, how she loves seeds more than ever before, and what is at stake for all of us in this test of our humanity.

You can support Vivien and the Seed Library via her site, viviensansour.com

Keep up with the podcast and all things #1MExperiments via our millionexperiments.com site, subscribing to the One Million Experiments newsletter, and following 1ME on Instagram.

After two incredible years, our Queenie’s Crew program is coming to an end with our organizational sunset.

Thank you to Queenie's Crew incredible coordinator zara raven, and resident artist and designer Bianca Diaz for their work in compiling all of the activities they developed for the children and caregivers in the program.

During the summer of 2023, sixteen young people explored anti-criminalization through a historical lens rooted in archival and other research methods.

The Youth Public History Institute (YPHI) was a program conceived by Mariame Kaba, founder of Project NIA and co-founder of Interrupting Criminalization, that took place in July 2023 in New York City. The institute invited 16-24-year-olds interested in prisons, policing, surveillance, research, and social justice to collaborate on creating a walking tour. 

We hope that this site serves as a tool for exploration, education, and replication.

Blackbird Letterpress, a woman-owned small business that makes handmade notebooks and prints, is partnering with Project NIA founder & and director Mariame to raise funds for two projects: For the People Leftist Library Project and REBUILD.

This year, Blackbird is offering a limited edition "Libraries are for the People" notebook and a "Hope is a Discipline" print. Both are ready to ship so if you're still looking for holiday presents, these could be great options! Links for the notebooks and prints

For the past two years, we supported Bluestockings with sustaining donations to their long-standing free store offering in NYC. Small donations make an incredible difference for community members.

As the weather gets colder and the holidays approach, please consider regularly sharing and donating to their free store and seasonal kit program via their Amazon wishlist (they also accept in-person donations for our NYC community): qrco.de/bstox-wishlist.