BreakOUT!

BreakOUT! was launched to focus on the one area in the South that incarcerates more people than anywhere else in the world - New Orleans, Louisiana.  But our impact stretches far beyond New Orleans city limits.  In just 3 years, we have amplified the voices of LGBTQ youth and young transgender women of color to levels heard all across the country.

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All across the country, LGBTQ youth, particularly young Black transgender women, are disproportionately experiencing the harmful effects of the criminal justice system due to disparities in housing, employment, education, and social service providers.  In Louisiana, many transgender youth runaway from neighboring rural Parishes to New Orleans in search of greater resources and affirming communities.  And yet, once here, we often find ourselves arrested by New Orleans’ notoriously brutal police officers, detained in a jail with one of the highest rates of death and violence in the country, or on the streets in a city without one single transgender-affirming youth shelter.

Enter BreakOUT!, circa 2011.

Our youth members, all LGBTQ youth ages 13-25 and directly impacted by the criminal justice system, are identifying the root causes of policing, the historical ties to methods of criminalizing LGBTQ lives, bodies, and identities in the New Orleans, and strategies for staying safe and building the world we want, based on our own expert knowledge of what it means to grow up LGBTQ and on the streets in the incarceration capital of the world.

BreakOUT! is working to build a safer and more just New Orleans, rooting ourselves in the rich cultural tradition of resistance in the South and building the power of LGBTQ youth through youth organizing, healing justice, and leadership development programs.

OUR VICTORIES INCLUDE:

 

• Secured adoption of “Policy 402” in the New Orleans Police Department to prohibit officers from using gender identity, gender expression, or sexual orientation as reasonable suspicion or probable cause for a stop or arrest on the 44th Anniversary of the Stonewall Riots;

• Mobilized over 75 diverse community members from 15 different local community organizations to “Stop and Frisk Affects Us All” demonstration in front of NOPD headquarters to draw connections between racial profiling and gender profiling by the police;

• Co-Launched Get Yr Rights with partner organization Streetwise and Safe (New York, NY) to creat a national network of LGBTQ youth resisting policing and developing strategies for staying safe with law enforcement;

• Co-Launched From Vice to ICE, a partnership with the Congress of Day Laborers in New Orleans to develop solidarity strategies between directly impacted communities that draws connections between the criminalization of undocumented Latino communities in New Orleans and the criminalization of transgender women of color in New Orleans;

• Brought LGBTQQ youth on trips to conferences and convenings in Detroit, MI, Atlanta, GA, New Market, TN, Oakland, CA, and more to develop their leadership skills and expose them to national networking opportunities.

**AND MORE!**  For more information on our work, go to www.youthbreakout.org

Please show us some love by donating to BreakOUT! THANK YOU!