No Justice No Pride — Back To Business
This update has been a long time coming. Please welcome NJNP’s new leadership.
Community —
It has been a year… It has been a pandemic… and we are still here. We are aware there are many who are wondering about us and what we have been up to. This update has been a long time coming.
Last summer, NJNP received a short reprieve from the month to month dash to raise rent funds with a grant for our housing work and NJNP members took advantage of this by restructuring NJNP, forming a new leadership team allowing others to step back and support in other ways.
Due to Covid-19 our fiscal sponsor was dealing with issues that were escalated by the pandemic leading to NJNP not having a fiscal sponsor from late last year into the first months of 2021. This made it harder to take full advantage of the reprieve by being able to continue raising funds for our monthly housing costs. Making it even more stressful, in February we were alerted that one of our property owners had listed one of the homes we rent for sale on zillow.
We then entered the race to buy the house, launching a gofundme, a campaign to give special consideration to offers on the home made by NJNP and more. In response the property owners were combative, threaten litigation against us, called the police on our members twice all of which added stress to our living situation. After a successful gofundme campaign to raise the cost to get a down payment, working with a lender, a realtor and a lawyer, we put in an offer on the house on February 24th. Shortly after putting in an offer we received a counter offer that asked that we would remove social media posts involving what had gone down thus far and increase a closing-related fee from $8,000 to more than $30,000. The lender that was working with us on the property then backed out due to complications around lending to an organization. The lender specialized in home ownership opportunities for veterans, and was working with us under the impression it was one member/leader of the property who happened to be a veteran who was buying the home, instead of it being purchased and co-owned between the leader and the organization. We already were aware of outstanding issues with the property and upon re-strategizing, NJNP’s leadership decided it was not in the best interest of our members to continue seeking to purchase this specific property but instead to use the funds we raised to buy a larger property in association with our long term plans to purchase a building for long term and permanent housing along with commercial spaces for Black Trans Women to open businesses in.
From March on, NJNP went through blow after blow, as we lost community member after community member. Most notably, in April; a former NJNP resident named Josie passed away and when we all thought things couldn’t get worse, our beloved core organizer, Nona Moselle passed away. From the ballroom community to the trans community, we all have been so crushed by these deaths that it’s forced us to put the breaks on nearly everything we were planning. We are all still healing. #Everything4Josie #Everything4Nona
This past year may not have been the most active for us but we have focused on what mattered the most, each other; while developing our leadership and building up new leaders of tomorrow. We are still changing everything. NJNP has always been led horizontally, and in collaboration with multiple people since before 2018. We’re in a time of transition, and doing the transition work has been really hard on the youth in leadership. We, the younger generation, are asking to be taken seriously right now.
Please think about how much we’ve accomplished, just since the start of the pandemic. We have held name change events, We successfully organized to have Capital Pride remove police from Pride, led a protest to Mayor Bowser’s house over funding police and not community — we took the streets, including cultural ballroom performance — We then took our activism to the beat with a Black Trans March through K ST NE. We (the new leadership) are still learning. We’re learning different boundaries than the ones we grew up with. We want to be given support, not judgement.
We want the older generation to be able to trust the younger generation, trust our experiences, and trust we understand what we are talking about.
We are all young and we are pushing this organization and our members everyday to go a long way. We have been working and building capacity throughout this past year among our residents and members. We believe younger people are fully capable of teaching older folks new and achievable things.
We would love to teach others in the movement world, and we would also love to have greater help from others in supporting the houses.
You can read more about what we have accomplished with our houses, here.
We are enthusiastic about the learning, the planning and the doing that will take place over the next several months, although at the same time; this is a process to support Black Trans Women in leadership that we need the community to be patient and supportive with. The best leadership is a resourceful one and we still have so much to learn.
From managing multiple houses for houseless individuals and not just the monthly costs associated with that, but also the conflicts between residents, the conflicts between neighbors, ANC members accusing House managers of engaging in sex work in neighbors driveways without evidence, and so much that we do not discuss publicly; all these situations that we are responding to each day are not things most people have to deal with nevermind the experience. But these are the situations that Black Trans folks within NJNP and NJNP’s leadership are responding to with or without broader support from the community and this is why we do ask for patience and your support. We’re afraid that if we aren’t seen as perfect, we won’t be given a chance to figure things out for ourselves. We are capable of that.
First things first —
As new leadership our plans for the future include opening up a center that won’t just focus on providing services but in addition will be a place that includes spaces for the arts, as well as entertainment and gaming. We are developing a workforce development program, planning on opening up a new house for individuals living with HIV, and searching for properties to buy.
We are asking the community to support our new leadership and our existing housing program costs. You can find more information about our housing work, here.
You can become a monthly supporter of Trans housing by joining our patreon.
Other ways to give:
Venmo: @nojusticenopride
nojusticenopride.org/paypal
patreon.com/nojusticenopride
For Tax Deductible donations: https://opencollective.com/nojusticenopride
Additional fiscal sponsor information: https://docs.opencollective.foundation/about/official-information-and-documents
