Black & Pink National: Give Out Day 2024

From Vida

Since 2005, Black & Pink National has been a powerful force for change. We are a prison abolitionist organization dedicated to abolishing the criminal punishment system and liberating LGBTQIA2S+ people and people living with HIV/AIDS who are affected by that system through advocacy, support, and organizing. We understand system-impacted to include individuals who have been impacted by such violent carceral systems as incarceration, detention, foster care, and family surveillance.

Here is what your support makes possible:

• Groundbreaking Research
  Earlier this year we released Advancing Transgender Justice: Illuminating Trans Lives Behind and Beyond Bars, a special report made in partnership with the Vera Institute that trans and nonbinary folks incarcerated in state prisons around the country. This is a powerful advocacy tool that highlights the experiences, voices, and recommendations of those that are directly impacted by the criminal legal system.
• National Support Network
  Our chapters provide vital local support, centering the experiences and wisdom of currently and formerly incarcerated people. Black & Pink Chapters are volunteer-led and support a wide array of projects focusing on local needs.
• Lydon House
  This nationally-recognized program in Omaha, Nebraska provides housing and wrap around support services to LGBTQIA2S+ people who are impacted by incarceration. This ranges from supporting someone in accessing food, healthcare (including reproductive and mental healthcare), education, employment, identification documents, gender affirming care (including Hormone Replacement Therapy), and housing. These support services are grounded in caring for each members’ wellbeing and tailoring wrap around support services to fit each individuals’ needs. 
• Opportunity Campus
  Opportunity Campus is a new project that will be a housing and community space for LGBTQIA2S+ youth and young adults who are system-impacted. This initiative will provide housing, wrap around support services, mental health support, daily drop-in services (such as hot meals, showers, food pantry, and laundry), and community programming to youth, young adults, and their families. All services at the Opportunity Campus will be provided at no-cost to our residents and members.

Thank you so much for your supporting our vital work at Black & Pink!

In solidarity,

Vida
2024 Board Co-Chair

FROM BLACK & PINK

Your support means the world to us at Black and Pink National, where we stand alongside systems-impacted people, those living with HIV, and our queer and trans siblings, with a special focus on uplifting Black and Brown communities. Through your generosity, we can continue our vital work, advocating for justice and fostering a sense of belonging for all.

We build our programming from a space of community need but also out of recognition that queer and trans people need and deserve alternative structures. We've watched over the last few months as states try to eradicate trans people. We will not stand for this and we fight by continuing to create our own spaces, both literally and figuratively.

Building systems outside the system brings us closer and closer to full abolition of the Prison Industrial Complex and all of its harms. Many corporate and foundation funders struggle to see the vision of our work. It can be hard to imagine hopeful work like ours when there is so little programming like it.

Our Sex Worker Liberation Program recognizes the labor and talent required to do sex work and the lack of structural support for it. We build collaboratively with workers for safety and for success. Our support services programs meet people where they are to give them what they need most, establishing structural safety through housing, gender-affirming care and other essentials. Lydon House serves as a space of respite and healing for those who have recently left prisons.  We've continued to co-create groundbreaking research, including our recent collaboration, Advancing Transgender Justice: Illuminating Trans Lives Behind and Beyond Bars.

Black and Pink provides food to those who need it and safe spaces to sleep. We help our members complete their job search or find a gender affirming doctor. We bail people out of prisons and give them money when no one else will. We show up again and again because we believe that it is community care like this that builds a world without carceral harm. And we can only show up because of people like you, who care so very much.

Please consider a donation. In the name of hope, of pride, of protest, of liberation. We can only build the world of our dreams with visionaries and supporters like you by our side.