By Logan Langlois
NASHVILLE, TN — Black Nashville Assembly (BNA), an extension of the Southern Movement Committee (SMC), is hosting its first family fun field day on June 15 to promote community togetherness. Arts and Culture Director Mike Floss said the mission of the event is to celebrate Nashville’s Black youth who have either successfully progressed through another year of schooling or completed their education altogether. Organizer and lawyer Erica Perry said BNA’s overall mission is to encourage community organizing and political engagement within Nashville’s Black community to influence long-lasting change.
“A big part of making a community stronger comes with systemic change in infrastructure,” Floss said. “It takes those types of investments with our tax dollars to really shift reality.”
Perry said though the upcoming field day was organized to celebrate the youth and local community, BNA has been organizing events with the knowledge that community togetherness is one of the strongest preventing forces against gun violence. She said many people in the community have been impacted by gun violence, and that spaces such as the upcoming field day allow for local community members to come together and support those who could be grieving or traumatized. Perry said BNA hopes to build connections within the community, as well as help the community make connections within itself that can lend to its ability to enact long-standing systemic change.
“We’re a base-building organization,” said BNA and SMC Co-Founder and organizer Jamel Campbell-Gooch. “We pool people together and ask them to talk about what are their budgeting priorities, and what things could actually improve their lives.”
Floss and Campbell-Gooch detailed that the events of the field day will begin on June 15 11 a.m. with a group meditation conducted by Shabazz Larkin of the Museum of Presence. He said the day will include food, basketball, tennis, three-legged races, sack races, sidewalk chalk, bubbles, and live DJ sets. Floss said the field day is expected to wrap up around 5 p.m. that evening.
Floss said along with celebrating the accomplishments of Nashville’s Black youth, SMC is also spreading the word of their proposed Varsity Spending Plan that is designed to reinvest Nashville tax dollars into north and east Nashville community centers and public schools, and to build an Office of Youth Safety to be run by the city. He said the SMC is asking the city to allocate $10 million to the Varsity Plan, which he said is less than 1% of the total $3.2 billion budget Nashville currently has at its disposal. Floss said BNA hopes to spread the message of the Varsity Plan as much as possible while the city is still in its current budget campaign season.
Perry said $2 million of the Varsity Plan would go to establishing robust restorative justice programs with trained staff to teach conflict resolution and outreach in five public high schools in north and east Nashville. She said $4 million would be dedicated to placing restorative justice practitioners inside community centers in generally underinvested north and east Nashville areas impacted by gun violence. Perry said funding would also be dedicated to the Office of Youth Safety which would focus on creating alternatives for troubled youth that do not include police involvement, as well as programs to fight against gun violence.
“Our mission is to fight for human rights and racial justice in Tennessee,” Perry said. “A part of that work has to include investing in community-based, youth-centered restorative justice.”
Floss encourages Nashvillians to email their local city council person to put the Varsity Spending Plan on their budget wish list, as well as to follow SMC at oursmc.org.
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