We Grow the World Together

Maya Schenwar is director of the Truthout Center for Grassroots Journalism and board president at Truthout. She is the co-author (with Victoria Law) of Prison by Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms and the author of Locked Down, Locked Out: Why Prison Doesn’t Work and How We Can Do Better. Schenwar has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Nation, among others. Schenwar is a cofounder of the Chicago Community Bond Fund and organizes with the Love & Protect collective. She lives in Chicago with her partner, child, and abolitionist cat.Kim Wilson is an educator, self-taught artist, and cohost and producer of the Beyond Prisons podcast. Dr. Wilson holds a Ph.D. in Urban Affairs and Public Policy, a Master’s in Education in Adult and Organizational Development, and a Bachelor’s in Business Administration with a concentration in Human Resources. Wilson’s work has appeared in Shadowproof, Truthout, and Abolition Journal, and her art has been shown in galleries across the country. She lives in Chicago.

“This is the book that I wish I had when my children were young! Taken together, these powerful essays offer an irresistible invitation to embrace the ‘soul work’ of parenting which is vital collective labor for a liberatory future. By reimagining what parenting can and should be, and by challenging us to see all children as our own, these authors demonstrate that we can build the world we want with love and inspire young people to embrace the freedom we all deserve.”—Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow“Everyone who raises a child imagines a bright future for that precious being. This beautiful book teaches us how to imagine a bright future for all of us: children, families and communities. Abolition is liberation and love. I recommend this work for every reader.”—Imani Perry, author of South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation “With too many powerful and thought-provoking pieces to name, this collection will inspire caregivers of all kinds to imagine and work for a more interconnected, interdependent, and caring world.”—ALA Booklist“The beautiful chorus of voices gathered in We Grow the World Together invite us to take up the work of parenting ourselves and each other toward becoming and bringing into being people who can live the liberation we long for. As we continue to enact and survive intergenerational trauma on a global and genocidal scale, the practice of parenting toward healing and uprooting all forms of violence, policing, and punishment in all our relationships is key to shifting the shape of societies toward the world we want. Whether you are raising children, building families, or creating communities of care and resistance, abolition requires each of us to answer their call.”—Andrea J. Ritchie, author of Practicing New Worlds: Abolition and Emergent Strategies and coauthor of No More Police: A Case for Abolition“We Grow the World Together is an antidote to the death-dealing systems of police, prisons, and war. This poignant and playful collection celebrates abolitionist worldmaking through the everyday interactions between parents, children, and caregivers of all types. Each chapter is a reminder: life is precious, no one is disposable, and with care and intent we will change the world.”—Dan Berger, author of Stayed on Freedom: The Long History of Black Power Through One Family's Journey“This is a book that a lot of people have been waiting for, whether they know it or not. Our movements are always stronger when we take the complex needs of parents and caregivers into account, and We Grow the World Together is a fine example of that principle. This book will enrich our movements and our relationships. Bringing our change-making values into our familial relationships is essential if we truly hope to cultivate new ways of living and being together. Loving relationships are one of the contexts in which prefiguring the world we want makes the most sense, and yet, many of us are still unprepared to do so. We need books like this one that help us contemplate such personal work. To love with an eye toward transformation in a hostile world is a brave pursuit. This book offers some accompaniment in that journey.”—Kelly Hayes, coauthor of Let This Radicalize You“In the home, school, streets, organization and behind the walls, caregiving is an essential part of any abolitionist praxis. Finally, we have a text that highlights the forms and function of the work that makes the work possible.”—Stevie Wilson, currently imprisoned abolitionist organizer and facilitator“Crossing genres, generations, and prison walls, We Grow the World Together is a beautifully moving meditation on caregiving and prison industrial complex abolition. A vulnerable, practical, and deeply inspiring must-read collection for anyone reaching toward an abolitionist future.”–Emily Thuma, author of All Our Trials: Prisons, Policing, and the Feminist Fight to End Violence“Our children and grannies are so very precious. This beautiful book, page after page, author after author, generously shares ways that we can support and teach our children and grannies to live together, to build transformative communities together that do not rely on carceral logics. This book brings me such joy, to know the world our children and grannies reimagine will be how they will live free from all harm.”—Debbie Kilroy, founder, Sisters Inside“This book is a revelation! Both parenting and organizing for a radically transformed world can be very lonely tasks. But reading this collection of brilliant and insightful offerings is like being welcomed to a long, deep, heart-opening conversation at a kitchen table—with elders you can’t wait to learn from, peers who help you see your own life with fresh compassion, and kids who pry open your imagination. As an anti-Zionist and abolitionist organizer, and likewise as a parent, these essays gave me so many fresh ideas to try on.”—Stefanie Fox, executive director, Jewish Voice for Peace“As a co-parent of Black sons, We Grow The World Together moved (indeed, troubled) my soul and ignited my political and moral imagination to rethink and re-practice the deeper everyday meaning, existential vitality, and vulnerability of what abolition looks like in a world held captive by toxic, violent, and death-dealing rhizomatic structures of carceral domination whose raison d'etre is to tear us apart and break the bonds that unite us as caregivers and as human beings. Through their intimate, courageous, and truth-telling narrative force, the voices within this healing text unveil lament (as they must) and encourage and signify deep joy through a shared revolutionary understanding that we form ontologically embodied interconnections, strive for non-violent mutual touch and mutual care, and possess an audacious collective capacity and willingness to think, to imagine, and to be otherwise. This text is a gift that reveals how doing the work of abolition needn’t be spectacular, but something as beautifully simple and yet profound and revolutionary as saying (and meaning it) to one’s child, indeed, to our collective children, or just to each other, ‘We’ve got you! We’re here for you! We won’t let you go!’ That’s abolition!” —George Yancy, Emory University, the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Philosophy, Emory University“Putting abolition and parenting in conversation with one another, We Grow the World Together compels us to rethink and reimagine in ways surprising and expansive. Refusing the individualism and privatization that shapes so many books on parenting, this rich collection compels us to think about the deep interconnectedness between parenting practices and abolition movement building. Centering the lives of parents and kids who’ve been impacted by systems of policing and punishment and involved in movements to abolish them, the book helps us understand how interconnected systemic power structures shape our familial relations, and reveals the complexities, contradictions as well as possibilities that arise as we seek to reshape these systems in ourselves, our relationships, and our movements. The radical love and care that guide the authors as they navigate joy, grief, loss, hope, and possibility in the context of community is beautiful, powerful, and life affirming—a much needed balm in these difficult times.”—Ann Russo, director of the Women’s Center and professor in the department of Women's and Gender Studies, DePaul University“The contributors to this insightful collection breathe life into the saying by Ruth Wilson Gilmore: ‘where life is precious, life is precious.’ They demonstrate how caregiving and caregivers not only make future abolitionist forms of worldbuilding possible, but through deep responsibility to each other, we make the world we do have joyful and thrivable even as we seek to undo it.”—Danielle Squillante, parent and abolitionist organizer"[A] visionary collection...With too many powerful and thought-provoking pieces to name, this collection will inspire caregivers of all kinds to imagine and work for a more interconnected, interdependent, and caring world."—Booklist

• Foreword By Beth RichieIntroduction: From Prisons to the Playground, Caregiving and Abolition IntertwineBy Maya SchenwarPart 1: Lessons From Our Kids, Lessons From Our ParentsI Want to Start School So I Can Learn to Write Letters to My Dad in PrisonBy EJ, 6 years oldThe Work of Making Life: Four Vignettes on Abolitionist Caregiving in PracticeBy Harsha WaliaParenting Toward Abolition From Inside Prison: A Letter to My DaughterBy Erika Ray“An Imagination Party”: How My Toddler Fuels My Abolitionist VisionBy Maya SchenwarWalking Side by Side With My Mother: A Reflection on Abolition and Accountability By Jnana “It Opened My Heart”: Lessons From Being Parented by an AbolitionistBy Paul LaCombe, interviewed by Kim WilsonSaying Goodbye to My Grandmother From PrisonBy Antoniese GantA Mother's Neverending Pain From Incarceration: The Ongoing Fight to Restore DignityBy D’Marria MondayInterdependence at the End of the World: Abolitionist Parenting Beyond Happiness By Sarah TysonPart 2: Parents and Caregivers in MovementThe Legacy of Black Mothers’ Radical Resistance of CareBy Dorothy RobertsMama Solidarity and the Founding of Moms United Against Violence and IncarcerationBy Holly KrigFree Gilbert Jones: The Early Political Geography of Mothers ROCBy Ruth Wilson GilmoreLearning From Claudia Jones: Mobilizing Parents Toward Liberatory Political Consciousness in the Face of a Right-Wing “Parents’ Movement”By Kaitlin NossParental Tools for Abolition: Some Dad ShitBy Dylan RodríguezOut of Many, One: Our Adventures in Parenting Toward FreedomBy Bill Ayers and Bernardine DohrnPart 3: Caregiving Dreams Beyond Normative Family StructuresQueer Family as an Intervention on Police Violence: Abolition and the Beauty of Choosing our Loved Onesby Shira Hassan, interviewed by Maya SchenwarEmpire and Colonization Operate Through Family. How Do We Disrupt Them in Our Homes?By Stacey Austin and Nadine NaberBuilding an Abolitionist World Includes Supporting Caregivers. Here are 6 Concrete Ways to Do That.By Victoria LawHe Calls Me Zaza: A Nonbinary Roadmap to LiberationBy Keisa ReynoldsShelter and Shower Toward Abolition: A Reflection on Collective Care, Reproductive Justice and Educational JusticeBy Anya TanyavuttiPart 4: Practicing Abolitionist CaregivingUsing Children’s Books as a Tool for AbolitionBy Mariame Kaba, interviewed by Maya SchenwarIn Order to Talk to My Child About War and Prisons, I Must Talk to Him About ResistanceBy Ryann CrokenKids Are Wondering… What Is Abolition?by the PDX Childcare CollectivePassing On: Practicing Restorative Justice at HomeBy Jennifer VietsHow Do We Survive—and Parent—With Our Love Intact?By adrienne maree brown and Autumn BrownConfronting Copaganda: How to Challenge Cartoon Cops and Officer FriendlyRania El MugammarWe Love Ourselves, Too: Stewarding Possibilities Together By Alejandro Villalpando and Susana Victoria ParrasConclusion: Continuing to Learn and GrowBy Kim Wilson