The Freedom Community Center opened in April and was one of 10 organizations nationwide to receive the 2021 J.M.K. Innovation Prize earlier this month. The prize is awarded every two years and provides $175,000 over three years to awardees, along with a learning collaborative designed to support organizations’ journeys to create change in their communities.
The Freedom Community Center’s award was one of a record-making 2,826 applications submitted to the J.M. Kaplan Fund.
“I was ecstatic, surprised and extremely grateful,” Milton, executive director of the Freedom Community Center, said.
The Freedom Community Center opened in April and takes a survivor-centered approach to end interpersonal violence by first providing a survivor whatever their immediate safety needs may be and then assigning them a “healing support specialist.” The survivors also are given the opportunity to engage in a restorative justice process with the person who hurt them.
Milton conceived the Freedom Community Center while working for the Bail Project in St. Louis. He noticed oftentimes those who called the police on someone were the same people who would then call the Bail Project to get that person out of jail.
Thus, the center seeks to reduce community violence through healing and restorative methods that do not include imprisonment. In doing so, he believes the center can work towards Black freedom through decreased incarceration rates and legal involvement.
“Black Freedom [is where] we have the same access and quality of life as everybody else,” he said. “We have the same access to health care. We have the same access to resources, we have autonomy and agency within ourselves and our communities. … Black freedom looks like power over trauma.”
The J.M.K. Innovation Prize was established in 2015 and supports nonprofit and mission-driven for-profit organizations tackling America’s most pressing challenges through social innovation. The organization defines social innovations as pilot projects, new organizations and nascent initiatives that involve a certain amount of measured risk but which may ultimately lead to large-scale, transformative results.
“Freedom Community Center offers a potentially game-changing answer in a category of critical need,” Amy L. Freitag, executive director of The J.M. Kaplan Fund, said. “Like their fellow J.M.K. Innovation Prize awardees, they’re building collective power that promises to reshape communities in more just and equitable ways. We can’t wait to see how their path-breaking ideas develop.”
Milton’s Freedom Community Center seeks to break from the path of the carceral justice system by restoring justice and providing healing by engaging both parties of a crime, the victim and the perpetrator.
“Healing from trauma means that I get power over my pain, over what happened, over my autonomy of my body, and it means that I have agency over my life and what happens in my life,” he said. “So, to me, that's Black freedom, the ability to have joy, the struggle without the interruptions of the state and the criminal legal system and violence.”
The other awardees include Black Women Build, Cambium Carbon, Co-op Dayton, Every Campus A Refuge, Forestry and Fire Recruitment Program, HEARD, Nuns & Nones, Respond Crisis Translation and Wikitongues.
“I think the Innovation prize really allows us to really dig our heels down and expand our work of supporting survivors the best we can, so I’m extremely grateful that the Innovation prize, and Kaplin in general, chose to invest in us,” Milton said. “We will make sure we will do the best with that investment and try to scale and expand it as much as possible.”
To learn more about the Freedom Community Center, visit www.freedomstl.org.