Can we talk about next week's ballot questions? The Committee of Seventy has a good breakdown of the questions in plain english. Several people have asked me which way I'm going on the questions, and I realized that I'm grossly under-informed on most of them.

Anyone have thoughts on any of these they'd like to put out there?

Here they are again:

State Bond Question

The Inquirer ran an interesting piece about developers' attempts to rush through project approvals today before Nutter is inaugurated on Monday. It specifically focuses on the proposed development at the old Schmidt's Brewery site in Northern Liberties at 2nd and Girard.

The residents of Northern Liberties have been really well organized and came up with a plan for their neighborhood development years ago. And while they've had some wins, such as preserving their park, much of their concerns have gone unheeded by the city leaving plots of land at the whims of developers.

Reading the news these days gets me excited about what seems like some significant wins for criminal justice reform.

As most of you probably already read, NJ abolished the death penalty today and earlier this month there have been several changes to federal drug sentencing laws .

It will be interesting to see if NJ's decision will give more momentum to the PA anti-death penalty work and can be leveraged to force a more timely response to the demand for a moratorium. It will also be interesting to see how other criminal justice related work specific to PA laws, like changing the terms of life sentences, can benefit from the public attention to these other changes.

(Bumped back up. -Dan)

For both professional and personal reasons I've been trying to strengthen my ability to frame the work I do during my day job at Bread & Roses (note: posts under my personal ID are not at all representative of the organization)in a way that clearly and articulately conveys the relationship between violence in the city and the need to fund work for racial and economic justice in a way that will resonate with the greater public. The connections may seem obvious to most on this list, but it's difficult to really express the sense of urgency that is at hand for B&R to raise more money to help build community organizations' capacity in larger circles. As we reach out and expand our base, I want to feel solid in my ability to frame these connections.

In order to do this well I feel like I need to do a bit more reading and self-education.

I've been culling things that came up in past posts, but thought I'd just post a straight up request as well. Do you have any reports, studies, essays, etc. that are your "favorites" or that you have found impactful or resourceful that go beyond just looking at gun control policies? I know this request is a little vague and there are about ten million things we could all list here-- I guess I'm looking for a small handful of top favorites.