Chattanooga Peoples’ Movement Assembly
Through 2016, the Chattanooga Peoples Movement Assembly was a process of grassroots community governance building. Communities and organizations came together to create a collective understanding, based on folks’ lived experience, of what was happening in our city at that moment. With a shared understanding of where we were and a vision of where we wanted to go, we planned and committed to concrete steps to take together to move toward that vision.
Criminalization, over-policing, poverty, and other front-lines of struggle all impact community safety. The CPMA is re-imagining safety and uprooting the systems of oppression that perpetuate violence in our communities, ensuring that directly impacted folks are at the center of creating and implementing strategy.
Saturday March 5th 2016 marked the beginning of the CPMA process, but many of the community members and organizations moving the assembly forward are rooted in a long history of resistance and struggle for community control here in Chattanooga.
The CPMA resolved to uplift and support the Feed the Community Program, a collective effort to distribute free produce to food deserts across Chattanooga. In an effort to intervene with the city’s 2016 budget process, organizations and community members involved in the CPMA process participated and helped organize the People’s State of the City; a collective counter to the City and Mayor Berke’s narrative of progress and innovation.