Who are we?

This site was put together initially by Grassroots Leadership (GRL) staff. GRL is a community building, non-profit organization in Austin led by and almost entirely comprised of BIPOC impacted by the Criminal Legal and/or Immigration systems. We wanted to start this page outside of Grassroots Leadership’s webpage to make information about defunding work in Austin more centralized and easy to access. Most of the information found here has been crowd-sourced. This work and ideas are not new, and we want to honor local organizations, groups, and individuals who have been driving abolitionist and divestment work in Austin for many years. One of these groups is Communities of Color United, a local group pushing for an Austin people’s budget (REAL budget) that divests from the police and invests in the community since 2014.