Safety & Security w/Che Johnson-Long

The Rad Ops Podcast is one component of a dialogue-based tool that supports organizations assessing and discussing the possibilities and limitations of putting liberatory values into practice. Each guest will share their Rad Ops lineages, their expertise on today’s pressing operations questions and leave listeners with resources and discussion questions to take back to your teams.

In this episode we talk about Safety and Security with our guest, Che Johnson-Long, Community Safety Director at Vision Change Win. 

Resources from this episode:

• Vision Change Win offers many resources on community safety, including:
  • Get in Formation Training Series is an intro level training for basic community safety skills around verbal deescalation, event safety and organizational safety.
  • Organizational Safety Planning Risk Assessment Tool will guide your group through building a risk assessment, the first step in organizational safety planning.
• Fascism Barometer podcast by Ejeris Dixon, helps us understand the current political moment which can inform our assessments.
• Power and Protect Safety Resource Library - prevention and preparedness resources, and recommendations to help build organizational practices and resilience

Discussion questions to take to your team:

• To get a sense of how to make a fear assessment rather than a risk assessment, you can start by asking yourself and your group these two questions:
  • What is the likelihood of this happening?
  • What is the impact it might have?
• To help discern the likelihood of something happening to your particular organization or community, talk with partners and ask questions like these:
  • I’m worried about this scary thing happening. Has it happened to you?
  • I’ve heard about this thing in the news. Have you heard about it at our local level or in our communities/sector?
• As you are making assessments around safety and security, regularly pulse check within your group: Are our assessments making us move away from or toward organizations we are in partnership with?

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Produced by Josh Elstro with Convergence magazine. Design support from Kimmie Davids. Music by Tigercat, Sha’s amazing 10-year-old, with polish by Josh.

Guest Speaker

Che Johnson-Long is an abolitionist security practitioner and community organizer who can’t leave well enough alone. She is currently the Community Safety Director at Vision Change Win and serves as a board member of Third Wave's Accountable Futures Fund Advisory Council. Before this, Che organized with the Solutions Not Punishment Collaborative of the Racial Justice Action Center, the Policing Alternatives & Diversion Initiative, and the Safe OUTside the System Collective of the Audre Lorde Project. She holds a Juris Doctorate, comes from a long line of Blues singers, and calls Atlanta, GA home.