After eight years pushing for change and reform in U.S. policing, the activists in Florida group Dream Defenders can sense victory is close.
The group was founded in 2012 by students across Florida who came together in the wake of the killing of Trayvon Martin to advocate for reform in the state’s stand-your-ground and gun laws.
Learning what makes real change
A year later, after the acquittal of George Zimmerman, the group occupied the Florida Statehouse in an attempt to force passage of a suite of bills known as “Trayvon’s Law.”
Co-director Rachel Gilmer told Blue Tent the occupation was a “very transformative moment” for the group. Coming after Occupy but before the Black Lives Matter Movement, Dream Defenders’ occupation of the capitol was a first step in asserting youth organizational power—though it ultimately fell short of the goal and the suite of bills was not passed.
“We hadn’t seen young people confronting power like that,” she said. “Dream Defenders was thrust into the public spotlight.”
The lesson the group learned was that in order to build power, they needed to go to their communities throughout Florida and work to build power and a wide political base. “There’s a difference between movements being popular and movements having power,” Gilmer said.
That tactic was exemplified in their work to promote Amendment 4, the 2018 voter initiative restoring the right to vote for felons.
“When we think about the long game and building political power, one in four black people couldn’t vote,” said Gilmer. “Rick Scott only won by 50,000 votes, Ron DeSantis by 20,000. Well, now that’s 1.4 million more people infused into the political system.”
Big donors fund the work
Dream Defenders is backed by the mega-funders at Tides Advocacy and has received large sums from charitable grantmakers around the country.
In 2017, Dream Defenders received a total of $450,000 from the William R. Kenan, Jr. Charitable Trust; in 2018, the group took in $145,00 from the Tides Foundation and $200,000 from both the Foundation for a Just Society and the Limestone Foundation.
Publicly available reporting from 2019 and 2020 shows that the group also took a smaller amount of money —in the tens, rather than hundreds, of thousands—from individual small donors.
Reinvesting in community
The group has called for divesting from policing and punitive policies and for reinvesting in community solutions. Those calls have grown louder in the post-George Floyd era, which has led to the popularity and prominence of the slogan “defund the police.”
Gilmer said that Florida’s spending on incarceration versus spending on education—$50,000 per prisoner against $8,000 per child—indicates the need for major reform.
“All youth jails in the state are privatized,” she said. “Someone is always making money.”
The consequences of pouring billions into punitive programs while letting social programs wither are clearer than ever in the time of COVID, Gilmer added, telling Blue Tent that the pandemic has exposed deep-seated issues around what the state finds important—and why that needs to change.
“Putting more money into what really keeps people safe has always been part of our program,” she said.
