The Borough Based Liberation Project is a series of neighborhood cultural events and interventions to collectively vision abolition, climate justice, migrant justice, and housing futures in New York City. For the month of September, our project will activate this storefront to serve as a centralized hub for our organizing. As our communities converge, learn, and share together, we will co-create an intersectional space that connects our local and global struggles to build solidarity and power. The project’s “Abolitionist Futures” theme will spotlight local resistance and link struggles for liberation from NYC to Palestine to indigenous territories in Abya Yala through art workshops, exhibitions, teach-ins, gatherings, performances, and celebrations.

Chinatown has always been a site of resilience and resistance. For the past several years, there has been a growing grassroots abolitionist movement against the city’s Borough-Based Jails plan set to expand NYC’s carceral facilities with four new jails at the cost of $15 billion. Adjacent to this building is the site of the new Chinatown jail, set to become the tallest jail in the world.  When we fight for Chinatown, we must know and celebrate the generations of dissenters and stewards that came before us. We seek to share stories from some of these movements and to imagine and grow structures of accountability and community justice within our intersecting struggles.

We hope this project will provide our communities with a nexus to oppose the political and economic forces that threaten to displace us from our homes, even as funding for cages, policing, deportation, resource extraction, and war increases rampantly. We hope to encourage community members to join abolitionist struggles that oppose increased policing, new and old jails, prisons, and detention centers, prevent extraction in indigenous territories, and support Palestinian liberation.

The Borough-based Liberation Project (BBLP) is a riff off of the Borough Based Jail Community Construction Office which is the “community engagement” office for the new Chinatown jailscraper located at 110 Walker Street. Our BBLP will be activated at 127 Walker Street. Our project will be located around the corner from the new jail site in which there is growing grassroots community resistance and opposition to, and in fact the back wall of the space shares a wall with the new jail.

This project is facilitated by the Chinatown Art Brigade and the W.O.W. Project in collaboration with Black Indigenous Liberation Movement, Borough Based Liberation Project, Lavender Phoenix, Dandelions NYC, Asians 4 Palestine, Protect Sunset Park, and many others.