Giving Compass' Take:
- This toolkit provides insights for donors who want to support the urgent work of fighting surveillance to protect communities, particularly marginalized communities.
- What role can you play in fighting surveillance? How can you best support existing efforts in this area?
- Read more about how surveillance disproportionately impacts minority students.
What is Giving Compass?
We connect donors to learning resources and ways to support community-led solutions. Learn more about us.
As funders aiming to secure safety, self-determination, and freedom for all, the rising threat of surveillance cannot be ignored. The practice is more widespread than ever, and continues to harm communities at the margins, as well as those fighting for justice and liberation. On November 30, 2022, Borealis Philanthropy’s Spark Justice Fund held a teach-in for philanthropy to hear from frontline organizers and activists representing Eye on Surveillance, Mijente, and Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (S.T.O.P.) on various grassroots efforts to combat both mass surveillance and incarceration.
This toolkit provides an overview of learnings from this event and additional resources to help guide funders in their learning journey about the many intersections of surveillance with justice-oriented work.
What Can Funders Do?
Spark Justice Fund is proud and humbled to bolster anti-surveillance organizing in our role as a philanthropic intermediary dedicated to ending mass incarceration and developing alternatives to jail while promoting true community safety. Without swift intervention from philanthropy, we can only expect more invasive surveillance in our lifetimes— and with it, the criminalization of a spectrum of communities, particularly Black, Indigenous, and People of Color; queer and trans folks; and migrants, as well as the exacerbation of our country’s incarceration epidemic. Here are three things that you can do as a funder today:
- EDUCATE YOURSELF about the depth and breadth of surveillance, and specifically about how it targets marginalized communities fighting for justice and liberation.
- DIRECTLY FUND the grassroots organizations leading anti-surveillance and antiincarceration work.
- PARTNER WITH THE SJF to sustain and propel the efforts of these activists, agitators, and builders.
Read the full article about the fight against surveillance at Borealis Philanthropy | Eye on Surveillance | Mijente | Spark Justice Fund | S.T.O.P..
Emerging surveillance technologies have become increasingly popular among police departments in the United States over the last few years. Law enforcement has rapidly expanded the use of technologies, including facial recognition software, social media monitors, and other surveillance tools, without much transparency or oversight. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the racial justice uprisings in 2020—catalyzed by the police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and, unfortunately, many other Black and brown community members—surveillance technologies are increasingly and disproportionately targeting and harming Black and brown communities, and organizers fighting for justice and liberation.