This post originally came from our Compassion Team Circle Mobilizing Because Black Lives Matter blog here.
This Saturday, we’re Turning Up, and you’re invited. November 18th is a night of celebration, and we would hate for you to miss it. TurnUp to Bailout will take place at 1125 S. Broad Street from 7pm-midnight. It’s a festival with 4 live musical acts and a DJ-driven dance party, supplemented with food and art from within Philly’s talented black community. Ticket proceeds will support the Philadelphia Community Bailout Fund.
Maybe the idea of a festival feels out of tune with the times we’re in. Does a festival mean we don’t take the divisions in our world and in our city seriously? No way!
We haven’t forgotten ourselves, or the racially divided world we inhabit. We’re not taking a day off. We’re not ignoring the systems that create suspicion, then capitalize on it, targeting our brothers and sisters of color and brutally marginalizing them. We won’t spend the night looking away from the communities in disrepair from the over-incarceration of its members.
From the moment Jon Williams steps up to the mic around 7pm, until DJ Huxtable plays her final jam around midnight, we will be present in spirit with those broken by our inequitable system of cash bail, and present to the pitiful system itself. This that we’re inviting you to be a part of will not be sidelined by a sense of powerlessness. We will be light-hearted, light-footed. We will be raised up and held fast by a force stronger than the inertia of despair. We will move and relate to each other in the spirit of joy. We will make connections that will deepen our resolve to imagine remedies to the present fear and distrust fueling our judicial system.
We don’t have to hold people who have yet to be lawfully convicted, but condemned by their poverty to unreasonable confinement. We don’t have to squeeze the last nickels and dimes out of family support systems to ensure their loved one won’t run before their day in court. We can do a little bit on November 18th to help people be in their own homes, not jail cells, while they wait for trial.
Join us. Get your $15 ticket now, or bring $20 with you on Saturday night.
Want to know where your money’s going? Check out Philadelphia Community Bailout Fund’s website,and/or watch their video. There will be people at the event that can tell you more about who your money will help, and answer any other questions you might have.
Let’s be a part of a new way of justice that leads with love and acceptance, desires forgiveness, and acts for redemption and full integration, partnership, and kinship. To that end, let’s be led by a vision of justice, filled with J-O-Y.