We are proud to honor Mariame Kaba at the Mazals, the 2019 Awards Gala of JFREJ and the Jewish Vote.
The Mazals
December 19th, 2019
5:30pm reception, 7:00pm program
El Museo del Barrio, 1230 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY
Also honoring: Make the Road NY, Tiffany Cabán and the 2009 JFREJ Board of Directors
Mariame Kaba is a long-time organizer, educator, and curator and source of wisdom for JFREJ and our entire movement. Her work is focused on prison abolition, violence prevention, and racial, gender and transformative justice. She is the founder and director of Project NIA, a grassroots organization that works to end youth incarceration, and co-founder and organizer with Survived and Punished, an organization working to support and free criminalized survivors and abolish gender violence, policing, prisons, and deportations.
Mariame is the founder and editor of the website Prison Culture, covering issues related to the Prison Industrial Complex, and is a widely respected and followed voice on on twitter @prisonculture.
After many years in Chicago, leading social change organizations doing anti-violence work, Mariame is back in her hometown of New York City. She is currently a researcher in residence at the Social Justice Institute of the Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW) where she has launched a new initiative “Interrupting Criminalization: Research in Action” with Andrea J. Ritchie. We are so excited for her to be in New York City to receive this award.
Mariame’s consistent work with these organizations demonstrate her transformational vision. We honor her for her bold and outspoken voice on prison abolition, her creative wisdom in movement building, and her commitment to youth leadership and empowerment. Not only does she work to dismantle prison, police violence, and surveillance, but also to undo the very circumstances that make these injustices possible. For her, prison abolition also means providing living wages, housing, good education, and environmental justice — it means recognizing mutual humanity and our true interdependency.
We are moved by Mariame’s vision that a deeper understanding of injustice, deeper connections and relationships, and disciplined hope are the paths to a more just world.
For her countless projects, contributions, and insights, we honor Mariame Kaba with The Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz Visionary award.
