After hearing former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton propose widespread criminal justice reform while on the campaign trail last fall, law student Aditi Juneja had an idea.
“I thought, ‘we should make a list of what that would look like,’” Juneja, a third-year law student at the New York University School of Law told NBC News. She began working as a volunteer legal adviser for Campaign Zero, an anti-racism organization that fights against police violence.
“After the election, we knew we needed to shift focus,” Juneja said. “I started making a Google Doc and tables to keep track of different policies and what is going to happen to them.”
After working closely with Campaign Zero’s Samuel Sinyangwe and others, that document and list would become the framework for the recently launched Resistance Manual, an open-source website for activists and community members interested in "organizing against President-elect Trump’s policies." Categories listed on the page include sections on the Affordable Care Act, immigration, and mass incarceration.
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“We decide that since there are multiple avenues for people to get involved, that we’d put them all there on the site,” Juneja said. “People have different skill sets, time availability, and comfort levels. We wanted the site to have multiple issues and multiple options listed.”
Readers will also be able to find information about how to run for office and how to get involved in city and state government.
Juneja said the site was designed specifically to be accessible to users who may be new to activism.
“The idea is that there are good briefings on the issues in each section so people can use it to inform themselves,” she said. “And then if you scroll down there are pages for different states so you can see what your state is doing and then see likes to crisis resources and tools of resistance.”
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One thing that makes the Resistance Manual unique, Juneja said, is that all of its content is created by active users around the country.
“It’s using crowdsourcing to create policy solutions and because it’s crowdsourced people can add to it and edit it,” Juneja said, adding that the back and forth between the different editors is crucial for healthy discussion. “We should be having a debate on the best ways to advocate for raising wages and on climate change and other issues.”
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