Our History

Envisioning Safety on our Campuses is an effort founded to cultivate a roundtable network to bring together regional university stakeholders working to remove police from college campuses. This initiative was born following the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and the call to Defund The Police on the campus of the University of Minneapolis in the summer of 2020 in the height of uprising. After former SGA President Jael Kerandi led the campaign to terminate police contracts on her campus, the USA saw a high number of collegiate direct action with similar demands to Defund The Police and to provide resources and services for historically marginalized students on their campus. This work inspired Trinice McNally to create an initiative that is dedicated to providing political education that will mobilize students to building power.

In the fall of 2020, a small group of higher education professionals in the Washington, D.C. and Maryland areas came together to address the alarming rate of conflict that occurs on college campuses and ways to circumvent it through a transformative justice lens. Thus, the initiative Envisioning Safety on our Campuses was created to convene a network of leaders, including student organizers, student affairs professionals, faculty and administrative staff, and community organizers to create a cohort aimed at creating spaces on their own campuses to address safety and protection amongst college students and alternative practices to the school-to-prison pipeline seen in higher education. ESOC was originally funded by the Open Society Foundation (OSF) in 2020. We are currently a 2022 recipient of the Black Girl Freedom Fund, and have been a grantee of the Meyer Foundation's Fund for Black-led Change since 2021.



Core Values

  • Self-determination

  • Transformative justice

  • Abolition

  • Black feminism & womanism 

  • Cultural Production 

  • Historical Preservation 

  • Decoloniality

  • Holistic Wellness

  • Transnational Solidarity

Our Mission

Develop a network of students, faculty/staff, alumni, and community members to advance transformative justice practices on college campuses across the DMV. ESOC is a commitment to building infrastructure for intercampus student organizing and providing political education rooted in the Black Radical Tradition. We are also in the process of expanding our curriculum, programs, and outreach to include more of a global organizing depth that focuses on cultural, political, and social justice movements of the diaspora through experiential learning opportunities and archival practices.

 

ESOC X Meyer 2021

In the fall of 2021, our Leadership Retreat convened 10 student leaders advocating + envisioning for safety alternatives on their campus.

Listen to what they had to say 👇🏾

 
 

Our Goals

The ESOC Cohort is a transformative learning intensive aimed to deepen relationships amongst DMV college students. The cohort experience provides political education and experiential learning opportunities that mobilize students into building power on their campus and community.

Develop

Develop a cohort of student leaders & community members knowledgeable about abolitionist organizing, can make holistic interventions on their campuses and communities, and, most importantly, are well.

Examine

Examine the ways historically marginalized people are systemically impacted by colonialism through a Black feminist praxis by exploring care ethics, policing, environmental crisis, imperialism, classism, educational access, xenophobia, homophobia, patriarchal violence, transnational solidarity, etc.  

Political Education

Provide political education as a tool for leadership development to mobilize cohort members to build power on their campus and community to reimagine alternatives beyond institutional (punitive) structures.

Utilize & Explore

Utilize and explore transformative justice, the social determinants of health, and harm reduction practices as abolitionist praxis.