Our Work
Language Justice Programs
What is Language Justice?
Language Justice is a tool that helps create spaces where working-class communities are seen and heard. Language justice practices go far beyond a checklist or to-do list. Language Justice practices build stronger movements and allow our members to have agency to express themselves. These practices allow members of our organizations and communities to understand and build relationships with each other as we immerse in collective struggles. It actively seeks to develop our identities as workers, women, queer, trans, non binary people, as various oppressed communities that have only either been seen as numbers in our organizations or tokenized within our spaces, whose labor is perpetually invisibilized.
Language justice workers are often not seen beyond their labor. Language Justice allows us to see Language Justice workers beyond their labor as a part of the community we are trying to build through our work. It also creates space to see members as more than numbers at our organizations and recognize their role in contributing to the larger movement. Language Justice creates the opportunity to understand what is being shared in our own language, articulate our thoughts, experiences and critiques to build the world we want to live in. Most importantly, it allows for people to grow organically as their authentic selves in their preferred language.
How We Fight For Language Justice
Program Areas
Building Language Justice Leaders Program
We develop a base of language justice leaders within multilingual organizations base building with working-class immigrant communities. The base consists of member leaders and organizers. The base identifies ways to improve language justice practices within the organization including infrastructure that must be developed and we work collectively to improve these practices.
BIPOC Solidarity Program
We develop a base of organizers and member-leaders in coalition spaces conducting cross-racial organizing to achieve systemic change. The coalitions interested in this Program are Housing Justice For All (80+ member organizations) , Secure Jobs (30+ organizations and coalitions), the Unemployment Bridge Program/ Excluded Workers Fund (100+ organizations).
Infrastructure Development with Language Justice Workers
This program further expands our base while creating much needed language justice infrastructure. We will recruit and train language justice workers from frontline immigrant communities and allies. We will invest in their political activation around language justice as well as teach them the concrete skills necessary to work as an interpreter or translator in movement spaces. South Asian organizations often work with the same 1-2 interpreters or translators which is unsustainable and impedes the ability to create multilingual spaces. We envision a world where there is an abundance of trained and politicized Language Justice workers supporting working-class immigrants fighting for a better world.
Expanding Language Access Program
This program seeks to build the leadership of Bangla interpreters and translators that work in movement spaces by supporting the establishment of a co-op of interpreters and translators that work with grassroots community organizing groups. We want to support them to expand their ability to work with New York City local government. Currently, city translations into Bangla are of extremely poor quality and often difficult to understand. Grassroots translators and interpreters face many barriers to working with the city, including certification and we will support them in this process. As organizations like DRUM expand the pool of trained interpreters and translators they work with, we plan on working with interpreters and translators of other South Asian languages to support them becoming organized as a co-op or collective depending on their preferences.
