Freedom Community Center

The Freedom Community Center (FCC) is a Black-led organization in North St. Louis that was founded to dismantle systems of oppression that inflict harm and trauma on Black communities in St. Louis City, particularly the police and the criminal punishment system. We ground ourselves in the knowledge that the Black survivors of St. Louis have the solutions to the question: What will keep us safe? Given the resources to alleviate immediate economic needs, the space to facilitate communal healing, and the time to dream collectively of alternative approaches, our community of survivors meaningfully address harm happening in St. Louis.

Together we will work toward a future of compassion and investment not punishment and isolation. We center our work on five main principles: Collective Power, Communal Healing, True Accountability, Embracing Repair, and Nonviolence.

The Freedom Community Center’s mission is to build a movement of survivors that will meaningfully address violence in St. Louis City and collectively design alternatives to state systems of punishment. Our community will fight to end mass incarceration and advocate for transformative justice approaches to reducing harm.

Make Peace

The current punitive approaches to violence such as police and incarceration don’t prevent future violence, they compound it. In the face of this violence, we make peace. By practicing strategies such as restorative justice, pod-mapping, and providing access to timely and affordable mental health support for survivors of harm, we seek to transform our responses to harm. 

The cornerstone of our transformative responses is a series of early intervention strategies including restorative justice processes that intervene and work with people who are experiencing or perpetuating harm before they interact with the police or at the beginning of their interaction with the criminal punishment system. We also post bail for people and support people in release from pretrial detention so that we can intervene in the harm the criminal legal system does to people while they are legally presumed innocent.

Build Power

At its foundation, FCC is a community center designed for fostering healing, repairing harm, sharing resources, and building power. We create space so that those directly impacted by violence — from the living room to the street to a jail cage — can share their experiences, their wisdom, and dream collectively of a safer St. Louis. 

In order to make durable change, we build power in a community of survivors of violence who have the answers to the question: What keeps us safe? The leaders we develop at FCC have the tools to intervene in violence in their own communities, the political education to analyze systems of power and control, and the strategic and tactical knowledge to advocate for investment into transformative healing resources.