Our Strategic Framework
Our Strategic Framework
From 2021-2024, The Ella Baker Center will lead a strategic framework that brings power firmly back to where it belongs – local communities. Our strategic framework builds on our 25-year history of challenging the power of the prison industrial complex to drive tangible shifts towards a culture of care. Our movement work is the work of power, and today, we decisively name and claim this power for the people we care for.
Through the Ella Baker Center’s power model, we analyze the harm caused by current systems – police and prisons, state and local governments, media narratives, and more. We develop visionary solutions to intervene, transform the harm caused by the status quo, and reclaim power for our communities.
The Ella Baker Center’s understanding of power is inspired by the legendary activist and movement leader Ai-jen Poo’s community power framework. We build and exercise power in six distinct arenas, shown below, to advance a new vision of safety and secure transformational social change.
The Ella Baker Center intervenes by exercising disruptive, narrative, political, economic, modeling, and healing power to transform harm and build lasting power for our communities. “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” – Frederick Douglass
