COMMUNITY GUIDE FOR GRASSROOTS GROUPS
This guide offers critical Know Your Rights (KYR) information and a guiding framework for grassroots groups, fiscally sponsored projects, and fiscal sponsors working on mutual aid, bail funds, and Palestine solidarity initiatives. This guide offers key recommendations on managing targeting, risk, and government scrutiny. It offers a framework groups can use to address infrastructure development, map potential oppositional threat targets, develop plans, crisis response, and financial record-keeping.
The guide is divided into three sections:
An overview of organizational infrastructure, with guiding questions and checklists.
Threat mapping and resilience planning for movement infrastructure.
KYR resources specific to mutual aid and donation management.
This guide draws on the expertise of organizers and lawyers with direct experience in executing large-scale mutual aid and bail fund projects within Muslim communities. Please note this document is not legal advice or exhaustive and does not replace consulting with an attorney.
Defending our Future | A Guide for Communities to Resist Project 2025
Given the formidable threat posed by Project 2025, Muslims for Just Futures developed this brief with contributions from the Detention Watch Network and the Armenian-American Action Network. It provides an overview of Project 2025, emphasizing the proposed policies within the expansion of militarism, immigration enforcement, prisons, and jails. It analyzes the potential impact on BAMEMSA and SWANA communities and offers recommendations for community groups on effectively countering Project 2025 and building long-term power. The recommendations and analysis covered in this brief apply to BAMEMSA and SWANA community groups and broader movements building toward a radical democracy.
Resources | Know Your Rights
Building Community Power Requires Strong Defense
Our rights are only as powerful as our knowledge of them. That's why Muslims for Just Futures is launching a series of "Know Your Rights" (KYR) resources tailored for community members and organizers. Our first resource focuses on general rights awareness in Chicago, especially in light of the upcoming DNC. We strongly encourage groups to download and share the full KYR guide. This resource covers: 1) Agencies that can bring criminal charges against you in Chicago; 2) What to do if you're arrested. 3) Pretrial detention procedures. 4) How to protect your privacy during searches.
Federal Advocacy Demands
This community memorandum offers input from organizations working with impacted BAMEMSA and SWANA communities on key initial recommendations, as a starting point, for federal government agencies in implementing a comprehensive White House Islamophobia strategy. This memorandum also offers concerns with the existing process for developing the White House Islamophobia strategy, provides a community-rooted framework of structural and gendered Islamophobia and contains key agency recommendations. While these recommendations are wide-ranging, we note that they are not exhaustive. This community memorandum was developed by Muslims for Just Futures with consultation from our working-class community members and Palestine Legal, Afghans for a Better Tomorrow, HEART, DREAM of Detroit, Muslim Women For, American Muslim Bar Association (AMBA), Center for Constitutional Rights, and Savage Daughters. Overall, 95 community-based organizations, national networks, and coalitions working across communities have endorsed the recommendations and joined this memorandum