Allison Goldberg - Community-Based Safety

Community-Based Strategies to Advance Safety and Well-Being.

In addition to social movements and policy campaigns specifically focused on the criminal legal system, I examine collective actions that seek to build a safer, more equitable society outside of formal state structures, including by examining mutual aid grocery operations, housing support during COVID-19, and funding for organizations affiliated with the Movement for Black Lives (BLM):

Mutual Aid

Mutual aid is an ancient practice generally defined by collective care for collective power. As the practice regained popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic, I examined neighborhood-based mutual aid grocery operations in Brooklyn, New York. Drawing on in-depth interviews and participant observation, I analyzed how residents attempted to navigate the harms of gentrification and displacement following the racial reckoning taking place in 2020. I theorized mutual aid as a moralized market in which residents framed this collective mobilization as “ad hoc income redistribution.”

This article was published in Mobilization here. Two subsequent articles from this project are forthcoming.
This research formed the basis of a course I designed and taught at the City College of New York (CUNY), which was rated 4.9/5 by students
I was one of twenty-five early career scholars selected internationally to receive funding from the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics to present this work at SASE’s 2023 Annual Meeting.

Housing Support

With a research team led by Professor Katherine Beckett, I examined the potential and limitations of community-led efforts to provide shelter to unhoused people during COVID-19. Through interviews with case managers and participants, we examined how this housing program for society’s most marginalized members navigated the significant constraints of limited long-term affordable housing, barriers to identification and public benefits, and unyielding state surveillance. This study, like my research on mutual aid, reveals how people grapple with their roles and responsibilities in building a more equitable society in the face of deeply entrenched injustices.

Our policy reports are available here and here, and have been presented to the Seattle City Council and the Public Defender Association.

Funding for BLM

With Professors Jelani Ince and Hajar Yazdiha, I am examining funding streams to organizations associated with the Movement for Black Lives (BLM). During Summer 2024, I have collected, cleaned, and coded data from Guidestar, a database with detailed funding information on all 501c3 nonprofits in the United States. With this data, we will examine funding for nonprofits associated with BLM in five cities with particularly large racial justice protests: Baltimore, Baton Rouge, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and St. Louis. We plan to complete data collection and cleaning by Fall 2024, and to subsequently analyze the sources and recipients of funding, the amounts granted, and key words associated with various funding streams, to glean if and how movement goals may evolve with funding.