Freedom to Grow is an abolitionist-driven initiative at the intersection of art, land-based healing justice, community empowerment and archival practices. The three-year vision for Freedom to Grow is to establish a permanent Legacy Center and Archive in New Orleans dedicated to documenting the lives and contributions of leaders who began their organizing journeys while incarcerated.
By engaging artists, archivists, organizers, plant lovers, community herbalists and dreamers, the Legacy Center will serve as a space for visioning a new world, responsive to our ever-changing landscape - and as an incubator for growing our imagined future. In illustrating the relationship between past and present, planet and human, abolition and possibility, Freedom to Grow will activate the present.
Just as prisons were once imagined, we can now envision new systems rooted in care and healing. At Freedom to Grow, we do that by tuning into the lessons that plants can teach us, and by collaborating with elders, artists, organizers, herbalists, and dreamers to co-create new visions of a future without prisons.