The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Maximillian Alvarez:

The Trump administration continues to weaponize the federal government to carry out President Trump’s wars on his critics, on the media, on the world of higher education, on federal workers, and on the administrative and regulatory functions of the federal government itself. And these attacks have understandably gotten more public attention over the past year, but what has gotten significantly less attention is how Trump’s allies and his administration are waging war against the world of progressive philanthropy and on progressive philanthropists themselves and the many civil and human rights supporting movements, media organizations, and nonprofit institutions that depend on them. The short-term and long-term impacts of this will be seismic, but we’re not talking about it enough. And so to talk about what this all looks like and how people are navigating it within the world of progressive philanthropy, I’m really grateful to be joined today by Leena Barakat, president and CEO of the Women Donors Network.

Leena, thank you so much for joining me today. To start, please just tell our audiences a little more about yourself, the Women Donors Network and the work that y’all do, and then tell us about how the Trump administration’s war on philanthropy is affecting you, the WDN, and the work that you do.

Leena Barakat:

Thanks, Max. It’s great to be here. As you said, my name is Leena Barakat. I am the president and CEO of Women Donors Network and our C4 affiliate organization, Women Donors Action. I have spent nearly two decades working of my career working across the grassroots, philanthropic and private sector to really move and shift resources and power towards communities that are fighting for justice. And 10 of those years has actually been, it started out as a young member of WDN to this moment. We’ve been around for 30 years. We are a national network of donors that are committed to using our wealth, our influence, our privilege, and our collective power to advance justice. And as a collective giving model, that has translated to over $160 million that has been moved across the field to frontline organizations. But our work goes far beyond just writing checks. As a donor network, we help our members really examine their relationship with their resources, their wealth and their power and help them leverage that more strategically.

So that has meant more funding of grassroots movements, building political power, organizing our peers across the sector, and preparing really for us, the next generation of women donors to lead and continue this work. And to answer your question, I think this moment, excuse me, has been incredibly clarifying for us. As you said, the administration is using their power to really intimidate all of us and create chaos and fear amongst nonprofits and make funders afraid of funding them. And so the result that we’re seeing is many institutions retreating and pulling back resources precisely at the moment communities need it the most. And so for us, you asked how is this sort of impacting us? We’re not taking the bait. It’s only sharpened our focus in this moment. We know that in this moment it is not just important to sustain movements and continue resourcing and funding these movements, but actually you go bigger, you go harder.

We need to scale these movements and organize not just ourselves, but the philanthropic sector to really stand together and again, to help donors in this moment and anyone in this moment to leverage every resource and form of influence and power they have, not just their money, but their voices and relationships to fight back. And that’s exactly what we’re doing.You mentioned the war on philanthropy. Now in terms of that, I feel like this is so much bigger than that, honestly. This is so much bigger than the war on philanthropy. This is really a broad, this is a war on dissent, and I think we have to talk about it. We have to talk about it. I think this is really about how, if you think about it from the perspective of the administration, it is absolutely in their best interest to create this climate of fear, to create fracture among us and atrophy within the sector and specifically within the social justice sector where you are seeing critical resources and services moving to communities that need it most, but also who are organizing around dissent and organizing towards justice, which is against this administration’s direct agenda.

And so essentially, what is their strategy to do that? If they want to really accelerate their agenda, they have to do what they can to cut this off at their knees, to turn off the faucet on the very resources that are fueling these movements to begin with. So therefore it has included attacks on progressive philanthropy, who’s resourcing these movements. And so as a result, this is exactly what we’re seeing. We’re naturally seeing an escalation of these attacks and funders and the response to that has been sort of an array of response across the spectrum. I think traditional philanthropy has unfortunately responded with a lot of hesitation, fallen in line with the fear, clenched their pearls and decided to reevaluate strategies, their risk and retreat from funding. And many of them have gone into, frankly, self-preservation mode. And I think the story in their minds is we need to protect ourselves if we’re going to protect everyone else, it’s no good if they go after us.

And so that has looked like protecting their endowments and themselves and somewhat abandoning many organizations who have far less resources, who are far more vulnerable in this particular climate. And philanthropy or philanthropic survival, I would say is important. Of course it is. I’m not going to argue that it’s not, but it will never be more important than supporting the people and communities we exist to serve to begin with.

When you ask what has this done for us or how has it impacted us, it’s just given us a lot of clarity. Our work right now is really about how we are thinking about continuing to stand and defend these movements, organizing the sector and really building the power and capacity of our women donors to stand up and fight back. And the last thing I’ll say too on this piece is I think this is a movable moment. I think there’s a lot of reason for very good reason to be afraid. Inevitably, there’s a lot more risk in this moment. I won’t deny that for sure. But this is also a time of transformative thinking. As much as systems and old patterns are crumbling right now, one could argue it’s not totally a bad thing. These structures and institutions weren’t serving many of us to begin with.

And so while we’re seeing this sort of dismantling of so many old systems and structures and patterns in addition to our civil liberties, I think this is also a time to think about what do we want this future to look like and how do we get on the design team of what comes next? I feel like if structural racism and inequality can be designed, so can justice and I want to be on that team.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Hell yeah. Well, I mean it’s so refreshing to hear you say that because obviously The Real News is very open about the fact that we are a nonprofit news network. We’re a 501 right? We, like so many other independent media outlets that you watching this also subscribe to. We depend on the philanthrosphere as much as we depend on small donations from viewers like you. But when they’re coming after us, they’re coming after you because they don’t want us being able to report on the movements, the stories, lifting up the voices that we do so that you can see the truth.

Leena Barakat:

There’s a playbook to this. As students of history, you see the cycles and the patterns, the writings on the wall, it’s very clear. And in many ways it’s not as sophisticated as one might think. I think for the average viewer and public, I don’t expect everyone to be paying attention to this in the same particular way, but it does give us insight into how to respond and how to move in this moment. It’s not as unprecedented as one might think if you look at a larger context in history. Just as we were talking about thunder retrenchment, this is a tactic. This in and of itself is a tactic, but a tactic of part of what? What are they trying to do right now? I really want to think about what is the end game here? What is this? And ultimately in many ways and in the context of what we’re talking about with the philanthropic sector and the nonprofit movement and the broader movements for social justice, this is really about how we weaken the capacity and the infrastructure of our movement so that we no longer to disrupt our progress, to disrupt momentum.

You’ve heard many people say, I’m sure in the past that this is actually, this is what we’re seeing as a backlash to the tremendous strides and progress that we’ve made, the tremendous wins we’ve had in movements. And so when you think about how might they, what can they do to weaken the capacity and infrastructure of our movements, you think about it and for me, there’s three things that really come to mind. One, and again, student of history has been documented as part of this playbook. So what is in that playbook? One is to sow fear, employing tactics of fear and intimidation. This is creating false accusations, putting out a lot of information and disinformation, putting organizations and groups on lists and threatening to revoke their C3 statuses. You might recall last year, was it last year? Yeah, it was just last year, the bill HR 9495, this was otherwise known as the nonprofit killer bill.

This was a bill that was heinous bill that was put forward accusing a list of organizations, slandering them with accusations of terrorism and hate and antisemitism and all of the buzzwords you can imagine. To what end is to actually really create a funder freeze so that people stop moving resources to them, accusing them and then requests for investigation of these organizations to potentially strip them of their C3 statuses for any organization that is accused of wrongdoing without ever defining what the wrong is, without ever having to prove what that wrongdoing is. So these are some of the tactics that created a lot of chaos and fear and frantic behavior within the sector, which I think was very intentional on their part. They want to isolate these organizations. They want to isolate these movements, call them bad things so that no one goes near them. This immediately creates, this is a very destabilizing effect.

Number two is fracture. This is about the ways in which they have sewn a lot of fracture within our movements and tried to pin movements against each other. We’ve seen this across history and we don’t have to look that far back in history. This has been part of the playbook all along.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Divide and conquer, baby.

Leena Barakat:

That’s right. That’s all it is. That’s all it is. And so to pin movements and organizations and groups and communities against each other, and I think our biggest mistake historically has been falling for that, is actually giving into that. And three is capacity drain. So this is where you see lawfare tactics get into play. So HR 9495 also plays into that a little bit, but we’ve seen a slew of organizations all of a sudden get these lawsuits accusing them of fraud in their funding or in their behavior, suddenly needing to double down on their audits and trying to find anything. And most of these lawsuits have resulted in losses for them, but a win, a net win for them because it has drained the organization’s capacity, their resources, their time, it has distracted them away from what the work is. This is a tactic. So even though there’s a higher rate of losses, the organizations winning these cases and the opposition losing, ultimately they have won just knowing that a lot of time resources and capacity has been, and this is weakening the infrastructure of the movement.

And so when you think about that, when you employ these types of tactics, it is a very destabilizing effects. It slows down momentum and it creates the funder retrenchment moment that we are seeing in this moment. In the last few months alone, I would say since the spring, and just three organizations, three funding organizations, very well known and what has been historically seen as sort of stabilizing funding organizations have decided to reevaluate their strategies, reduce their sort of risk appetite and completely pulled out of funding a lot of the movement organizations we have seen. And those three funding organizations alone, and I’m only naming three, there have been many, have amounted to over $150 million pulled from our movements. And some of it is going into effect immediately. A lot of it won’t start until next year, which means Max, we’re sitting with sticker shock.

We haven’t even seen the material impact this is going to have on our broader movement. So this is, I think, part of that playbook. And for us, we need to see the writing on the wall and resist it immediately.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and I hate to make light of any of that, but my impulse is to tell our viewers, but wait, it gets worse. They’re doing that to the media. Everything that you’re saying sounds like what we’re experiencing on the media side. You have the high profile attacks against corporations like ABC and Disney. You have the coordinated attacks on the corporation for public broadcasting and all the public media, but you also have attacks on independent outlets like Breakthrough News. They are going for everybody that they can in philanthropy and media and higher ed. And it even makes me think of the DOGE or Department of Government Efficiency so-called cuts to USAID. We saw organizations around the world that were dependent on USAID go under. A lot of people died and are dying because of it. Again, this isn’t a theoretical argument anymore. People have died because of it.

And a lot of us didn’t realize how many organizations around the world were dependent on that funding until it was frankly too late. And so there’s a comparison in my mind to what we’re talking about here to that. And I wanted to sort of ask if we could talk about those trickle down effects that this is having on the ecosystem of movements and organizations and institutions not just like ours, but so many others out there that depend on philanthropic support.

Leena Barakat:

Yeah, you hit the nail on the head there. I think if you want to talk about this, we have to actually understand the impact that this is having. I actually want to take us back to why and how the impetus of philanthropy’s existence to begin with. Why does philanthropy exist? It is truly, it is a sector, an institution, a method of actually filling the gaps of government. This is why philanthropy was created. It was intentionally created to fill the gaps of providing aid and services and care to help civil society in ways that the government could not step in and support. And so when you think about that, if philanthropy exists to fill the gaps of government and then the government’s going after philanthropy, this is having a material impact on the daily lives, the very basic livelihood of many, many individual people who have nothing to do with anything.

This is even outside, I would even expand it beyond a movement against dissent. These are just everyday communities, whether that’s here in the United States or internationally, who rely on these resources to live. And so whether that’s disaster recovery, providing critical healthcare, stipends, legal services, all of this is the kind of thing that is a baseline of dignity in our lives. And they have directly, cutting these programs have directly impacted that for everyone. And I think this is increasing the stakes and the tension in which we are operating right now. And so this is why it’s really important to note this retention doesn’t happen in a vacuum. This is happening part of this broader trend towards authoritarianism where institutions that once saw themselves as allies and supporters and service and care providers in this moment are suddenly… This is why that decision to recalculate or to pull back funding and recalculate their risk is actually inherently a political decision.

This is the quietly stepping back and normalizing retreat and trying to see that as a reasonable choice. This has a tremendous cost on everybody. And we’re seeing a lot of organizations right now say, “Well, we’re not political or we don’t want to get involved.” Everything is political when you are impacting the daily lives and the dignity of people and communities. And so the normalization of that is something that is exactly what we’re trying to disrupt right now. It’s exactly like we do not accept it. And this is what we’re trying to organize around. And that’s really sort of led to what has become co-founding the Block and Build Funder Coalition, is really to really disrupt the normalization of the retreat as much as possible. We founded the Block and Build Funder Coalition two years ago. So it was actually under the Biden administration. And I just say, I think people tend to subscribe what is happening in this moment to Trump.

It has accelerated in Trump, but this is a bipartisan problem, to be completely frank with you. So under the Biden administration, we saw a list of organizations that, it was Palestinian rights organizations and movement organizations and several funders of them put on the same list, requests for investigation, all the slander and accusations of terrorism and hate that we talked about earlier. And I knew that this was a test. This was going to be a test for how we responded to this was inevitably going to have an impact on everybody else. And so we launched the Block and Build Funder Coalition to really build a muscle around solidarity, to understand this concept that this is all of us or none of us in this particular moment, and to also hold the line on non-capitulation. And so the coalition now has grown to over 270 funding institutions.

We meet every single month and that are committed to really resisting authoritarianism, defending our movements on the ground and safeguarding our civil liberties as much as possible. And what that looks like more practically right now is, as I said, the normalizing of solidarity and holding the line on non-capitulation, this idea that it’s all of us or none of us and that we are stronger together than we ever will on our own. We can be more courageous together. And it also has meant that we are showing proactively, showing up proactively to frontline groups and really centering them in the agenda and the prioritization of our work right now, really understanding what they’re experiencing, what they are seeing, where the attacks are coming from, and making sure we are organizing ourselves as funders to fill in those gaps or to have strategic interventions to stop this as much as possible.

And that has also included providing safety and security for a lot of these organizations who don’t have the resources to safeguard their, whether it’s digital footprints or physical security. And finally, giving our movements and these organizations permission to build anew. We need to get off of this sort of crisis, this crisis loop that we are in and give our movements permission to actually dream about what comes next, to actually pilot their ideas and fund those resources. Because as I said to you earlier, this is actually very much a builder’s moment. And so it’s been work that has been incredibly purposeful in this moment. And I think some of the quiet impact of that has been the loud organizing around the philanthropic sector, shifting the culture in this moment to not be afraid, to go bigger, to go bolder, to be very clear, not to bend the knee.

And we’ve heard a lot of funders really say to us that they were really on the cusp of pulling back themselves just out of fear and knowing that they were part of something like Block and Build Funder Coalition, they felt less alone and it’s prevented them from doing that. And our message to them is keep funding, keep going. We’re stronger together than we are on our

Maximillian Alvarez:

Own. It’s wild listening to you talk about the Block and Build Funder Coalition because as someone who interviews workers around the country and around the world for a living, I’m like, sounds like what you guys got there is a union. And hey man, the old truths are the strongest for a reason. Yeah, injury to one, it is an injury to all. Solidarity will be our salvation. We are stronger together than we are alone. And I think those enduring messages are evident in the ways that people are fighting back across the spectrum of struggle, like working people on the front lines of their exploitative bosses or neighbors on the front lines of ice raids, people banding together at that grassroots level. But also it sounds like what y’all in the world of philanthropy are doing, what we’re hearing about folks like Mark Ruffolo and other artists and cultural figures banding together to stand up for Palestine or to stand against the sort of oligarchic takeover of the whole media ecosystem.

There is power in what unions and movements can teach us. And I really love that you take so much inspiration from the stories of our past because that’s what we do here as well. And it’s also, you named the elephant in the room, and I think we should talk about it here because we got to talk about Palestine. And you are Palestinian American and you have been an outspoken leader and advocate for social justice. We at The Real News have just been relentlessly covering the truth of Israel’s occupation of Palestine and its ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, not just since 2023, but since the existence of The Real News. And you and I both know they are trying to criminalize, punish, and smother any form of solidarity with Palestinians and label it as support for terrorism, any criticism of Israel and its genocide is antisemitism. So that’s where we are.

So what do we do about that?

Leena Barakat:

Well, first and foremost, I actually just want to, from the bottom of my heart, thank the Real News Network for doing that work, for being the truth tellers that you are, being an independent media news outlet. I know what a struggle that is right now and to cover a topic like this that has had a material impact on perhaps in the past your capacity to grow and get even bigger supporters. And I hope you are now experiencing the flip of that, an increase in support and resources and subscribers and followers because the truth is the truth everywhere you go. And I appreciate that that has held true for the Real News Network. Max, you said let’s talk about the elephant in the room, Palestine. Listen, Palestine isn’t the elephant in the room. It is the room. It is the room. Palestine has changed the world in the ways in that it has exposed the corruption and the broken and unfit systems that has become a defining moment of this time in our history.

I want people to understand that defending Palestinian freedom is the key to defending all movements for justice. It always has been. It always, always, always, always has been. That hasn’t new, that’s not a post 2023 thing. That is day one. And this is exactly why, this is exactly why they have criminalized, isolated, made taboo this conversation because if you pull the string on this, you pull the string on this, you pull the string on all of it, all of it. And who’s benefiting from that right now? They don’t want us to know. And so the minute we actually take back our power, our voice, our truth in this particular moment and can stand for Palestinian freedom, this is the key to supporting movements around the world. It will break down systems, it will break down and old patterns. And guess what? Those are exactly the right systems and patterns we want to break down because it is exactly what has been holding us back.

This is not just in Palestine, this is here. And I think one thing we’ve been trying and I’ve been in my own work really trying to do the education around is how do you connect the dots between what is happening there and our democracy here? And years ago it was so hard and so hard for people to really see that. It wasn’t just me being a Palestinian. Yes, I am a Palestinian. I’m very personally invested in this issue, but it’s so much bigger than that. This is about us as people, as oppressed people globally and the haves versus the have-nots and trying to have a politics that works for the people, not just the power. And so I think Palestine to me, I think was very hard case to make for a long time of the ways in which what’s happening over there is connected to the fundamental operating model of our democracy to begin with.

And now look at where we’re at, the sort of canceling of APAC and the people have woken up to the fact that many of our politicians are actually bought out. What? This is actually a democracy. What does that mean? And in fact, the ones who are being paid to be in office are the ones that are actually working against our interests as people, that the money that’s going over there, wait a minute, that’s the same money that we could be using here on our education systems and our healthcare systems and infrastructure more broadly. What are we doing? What are we doing sending $8 billion I think to an oppressive military, international military around the world, but we don’t have money to feed the poor.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Our schools are crumbling. Yeah.

Leena Barakat:

A hundred percent. What is that? He’s out there writing checks of money. Do you have money we don’t have? So I think that’s what this has exposed. And this is where I have a tremendous amount of confidence. This is where I have tremendous amount of hope. This is where I feel like most energized in this moment because the wrap’s up. We see it as a people, we see it and we won’t unsee it now. And it means it has completely shifted the conversation and our bar and our standard for what we look for when we think about a democracy that works for us, when we think about budgets and systems that work for us. And all of us should be so grateful to the strength and the resilience and the beauty of the Palestinian people who have been so clear on this from the very get-go and for the gift that it has given us.

I don’t think this is about us freeing Palestine as much as how much they have freed us. And I hope that’s something that gets really seen and recognized one day.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, that was beautifully and powerfully put, Leena, and I appreciate you for saying it. And let’s end here by kind of zooming out and really putting people’s focus on what can be done right now and in the long term. What is Women Donors Network doing? What can people watching this do to change the outcome here?

Leena Barakat:

Right now in this moment, the most important thing you can do, the most important thing any person, any listener, anyone in the world, this is all of us, can do is to not give up your power. And what do I mean by that? Your hope, your sense of hope in this moment. Your disillusionment for the future. I understand the fear and the exhaustion of this moment of time that we are in, but we cannot lose sight of what is possible in this moment. I think the minute we lose sight of that, the minute we lose hope, the minute we shrink ourselves, the minute we shrink ourselves in the moment, we are giving up our power before we’ve even fought the fight together. And so that’s the second part of this, is don’t go it alone. Do not soak alone. Find your community, find your people, find your friends, find an organizing home.

Find an organizing home. If you have resources to move at any level, truly, I don’t care if it’s $5, I don’t care if it’s $500,000, whatever the range is, use it. Find a philanthropic home and find your political home right now. This is a time of the people. This is the time of the people. This is our time to rise up. There is more of us than there are of them. And they don’t want us to know that. They want us to forget that. And so I say, find your people, find the most accessible way to organize and activate and do something that really matters in this moment because this will pass. This system will crumble. I am certain of it. I am so certain of it. History tells us that it will. Where do we want to be when that happens? What do we want to say that we have done when that happens?

And how do we have a stake in what comes next? Because as I said, this is not just a moment of transition and fracture and crumble and chaos. It is, but it is also a builder’s moment. It is also a transformative time. So how do we think about what comes next? What is the new bar of a system that we want to demand and how do we hold the line on that until we go? And so that for me is really important that we are together. We are not alone. We don’t lose sight of the future.

And we take a reconstructionist approach to this moment. I am devastated, I am gutted, I am exhausted, but I am so energized and I’m so ready for what’s coming next. And that’s the energy I want us to all carry together as we do this. And so when I think about what are we doing at WDN, honestly, we continue doing what we do. We don’t stop. We go bigger and we go harder. And that, as I said, is continuing to not just move resources to movements, but actually doing what we can to help scale those resources. It’s challenging right now because of the way the funder retrenchment has had an impact on the field means you’re right, you said it earlier at the top, the dollars have spread so much more thin and so we need to get bigger. And so I want to invite folks to join WDN, to join Solidaire, to find a philanthropic home so where your small dollars can be combined and become big dollars that resource movements.

That’s what we do at WDAN. Tha’s what Solidaire is doing. So find a space for that. We’re going to continue to organize the sector because we can’t go at it alone. There’s no one organization that’s going to take this moment on. It’s going to be all of us. And so how we mobilize our voices and our influence in this moment, how we think about shaping policy in this particular moment, and then pushing our peers to continue to center movements and move with greater courage. So don’t be afraid, be a part of something that comes next. Go bigger, not smaller. That’s what I would say.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Mansa Musa:

Welcome to this edition of Rattling the Bars. I’m your host, Mansa Musa. Today we are joined by Courtney Teasley, who consider herself and identify herself as a legal disruptor and justice strategist. We’ll be discussing her perspective on how she is intervening in the criminal injustice system and her work challenging the prison industrial complex as it exists today. Thank you, Courtney. Welcome to Rattling the Bars.

Courtney Teasley :

Thank you so much for having me. I’m really excited. I’ve heard a lot about this podcast, and so thank you so much for this opportunity to talk to your audience.

Mansa Musa:

Okay. Let’s start by introduce yourself to our audience and tell our audience how you came into this space, but more importantly, what is a legal disruptor and a justice strategist? What’s your identity as how you identify those things? So tell us a little bit about yourself.

Courtney Teasley :

Yes. So my name is Courtney Teasley. I am a licensed attorney in Nashville, Tennessee. I have practiced mainly criminal defense for the last 13 years and am now a retiring lawyer, a criminal defense lawyer, because I have done all the things within the criminal justice system from teaching and training in mock trial, training and coaching other lawyers to open their own law practices, and also then to teaching as a criminal justice educator over at a historically black college and university here in Nashville called Tennessee State University. So I taught there for a number of years as well. And then that is where I was able to see the big three that were creating this cycle. I call them the big three education topics that people from what I like to call the DAMM community, D-A-M-M, and that’s the disproportionately affected marginalized minority community. And people from that community are often not educated in the big three that I call financial literacy, criminal justice literacy, or legal literacy, and civics.

And these three lead directly to mass incarceration. And so after running a campaign, it was a historical campaign here, we unseated a criminal court judge for the first time ever in Nashville. I decided to create a legal education company to help fill that gap of legal literacy that so many of us never received and that basically you had the cops saying, “Hey, ignorance of the law is no excuse for breaking the law, but you never taught me the law.

That’s legal literacy and then financial literacy. You keep me in cycles of poverty. You keep me broke. You don’t teach me ever how to really make money.” And so that leads right back into the criminal justice system. And then finally civics, the last one we’re undereducated in, you teach us nothing more than go vote. You don’t teach us anything else around how to actively participate as a citizen. So we don’t really take advantage of the things that we should. We don’t really hold people accountable the way we should. We don’t show up the way we should when it comes to voting because of that. So that’s why I created my company is called MFN and I created it with the intent to help reduce mass incarceration.

Mansa Musa:

Okay. And it’s interesting that you identify three areas that you say are essential in disrupting this cycle. So let’s talk about those. Let’s talk about those things. Walk us through your program. How do you engage the community or who is your target audience?

Courtney Teasley :

Yeah, so like I was kind of telling you why I created it, I forgot to mention a very important part of that all the things we do are proactive in the criminal justice system, meaning I feel like if mass incarceration is going to go anywhere, the efforts to fight it must happen before someone has been found guilty or someone has pled guilty. We know 97% of people take pleas. And so the majority of efforts in the criminal justice system usually are happening after someone has already pled guilty and been found guilty. They have received that ultimate if, made a felon. Their rights may be restricted. They have a lot of different things. They have a lot of different hurdles at that area versus fighting proactively where I think we can be a lot more strategic and a lot more effective. So that’s my company focusing in on the proactive portion of fighting back.

And so how we do this and how I engage in the community, and I think you asked me also who is my targeted audience. And so the ways that we’ve been. My target audience is who I was telling you, the damn community, disproportionately affected marginalized minority community, the 97% of people who take pleas, the people from areas of town that others may look down on. I’m talking about the hood.

The people who most likely come into contact with the criminal justice system, that’s my target audience. And so we engage the community through multiple efforts, whether it’s through our partnerships and collaborations with schools, churches, community centers, organizations that care, from us going out and creating the activations where we’re bringing the legal literacy, but we’re bringing it in a fun way where people actually want to take part in and they’re getting to understand it, they’re getting to participate. So we do that and then we do some advocacy training where now we train organizations how to fight back proactively. So I’m a criminal defense attorney and when I say a justice strategist, I’m a fighter and I’m a strategic person first. And

So I’m going to pull back the veil and I’m going to show you what the criminal justice system really is and then I’m going to teach you how to do what I teach my lawyers how to do, play chess and not checkers, how to fight back unapologetically, vigorously. And so that’s what we do in our advocacy training. And so that’s how we engage the community. A lot of times we’re doing events where we’re going out to people who are having events in the community and a lot of people just don’t feel competent in teaching legal stuff. And so we bring that to you because we speak the language of the damn community, D-A-M-M community, African American English.That’s how I’m so successful as a lawyer because I’m bilingual. I speak two languages and that’s how the community resonates. If my life is on the line, I don’t need you speaking above my head.

So that’s how we engage in the community in an authentic way.

Mansa Musa:

When you saying legal literacy, are you educating me on understanding my rights somewhere like the Black Panther Party had, when they came out, they was going around, they was telling people they had the right one to be on, but they wasn’t saying your right to bear saying you have a right to be arm, but you have certain rights when the police pull you up and stop you. You have a right to not say nothing. You can ask to speak to somebody. When you say legal literacy, you talking about pre, post incarceration or do you deal with people at all sectors, like a person in society or people in prison or people that got out on what we call paper, out on parole?

Courtney Teasley :

Yeah. So with legal literacy, when I’m speaking about that, we’re talking about all facets of it. So I have books already for the Fourth Amendment, the Fifth Amendment, books on that. And I teach out on the Sixth Amendment because that book is not out yet. We have plenty of books that are coming out, but the Fourth and the Fifth Amendment, the Fifth Amendment is the one that just came out. And actually I’ll send y’all over a copy of it so you can check it out.

But the way that we really just break, it’s packed full of pre-protection. Now, and when I say pre-protection, that means protection that jumps in from the moment you’re accused of anything. A lot of times we like to rely on the Fifth Amendment and wait until the police tell us, oh, you got the right to remain silent or you’re being forced to testify and you’re like, oh, I plead the Fifth. However, no, the Fifth Amendment, it actually came into play the very moment you were suspected. So when that cop gave you a call and said, Hey, I want to talk to you, you know what I mean? We’ve heard from such and such. You mind coming down here talking to me? At that moment, even though they haven’t told you that you’re a suspect or whatever it may be, you have the power to say, oh, hold on.

I think I’m going to choose to stay silent. I’ll have my lawyer contact you. So you get to make a determination whether it’s in your best interest to talk about anything. So you have that pre-protection. And so that’s how we kind of engage with the amendments that really pop up in the criminal justice. The fourth, fifth, and sixth are the ones that we focus in on when we’re teaching our advocacy training. But those come into play when you’re incarcerated.

If you’re just on bail and you’re waiting, well, those are in play. Or even if you’ve been found guilty and you’re appealing, those are in play. You need to be able to understand those. And so then for other ones that we don’t have books on, then you rely on a person like myself to be able to train you on what that means for your organization or your specific

Mansa Musa:

Situation.

Courtney Teasley :

Okay.

Mansa Musa:

Yeah. And then in financial literacy, because I was telling off camera that when I got out, I hadn’t established no credit, but I had established a savings. So when I went to get an automobile, my mind was I ain’t want no car note. So I wind up paying $15,000 for 2015.

Courtney Teasley :

Oh

Mansa Musa:

God. And had I had established credit, I would’ve had made out better. But since then I had established credit. I went to a dealership in 2023 and I had the same amount of money and because I had good credit, I was able to get a 2023 and I paid the same amount of money I paid to get for that 2015. So my concern with the financial literacy, what is this? Because when you talking about the damn community, a lot of us don’t have a pot to piss in the window to throw it out. So we don’t have no funds. So are you teaching how to create your own business? Are you teaching how to go about getting grant, how to get money and then how to manage it? What is this, your financial literacy model? I

Courtney Teasley :

Love that you asked that. So after I declared retirement from the practice of law, I went and got certified as a business coach and I’m also a certified strengths coach. And so I basically am talking, when I’m teaching about financial literacy, I did that to go be able to teach my lawyers who were never taught anything about business. But when we transition it over here to people in the damn community, we started the very basics, like you said, learning about building credit. It’s just something so simple that it’s like a lot of times we don’t think about it or we’ve been so used to having not so good credit that we try to disregard it, that we never try to maybe get it back together. Well, and I understand that, but I think that there are multiple ways that you can start building your credit in smaller ways that a lot of people don’t talk about.

So we like to bring in financial strategists and people who are investors who actually have done these types of things to help you understand what to do. A lot of times, think about it like this. When you were just talking about you had a savings and the thing is you’re thinking about how can you make more money? How can you do whatever? You got your job. Then it’s like, well, who is here teaching us about investing? These are things we never learned about. Nobody’s sitting here giving us the playbook on what to do or how to do it. Like you said, you might be working a dead end job, a job that doesn’t promote you. Well, then you need to learn about what kind of jobs are out there, what kind of jobs, what kind of skill set do you have? What have you already done?

And then how can we use those same skills to get you a job that now has advancement opportunities? So it’s just all of those things that come together and that comes with us partnering with other organizations and actually bringing the experts to you to be able to help understand how do I segue now? I have not partnered yet and I’m open to it. I have not yet partnered with an organization for reentry where we’re teaching the coaching to them, but I have connections with one of the world’s top traders just in the last couple of years. I did an interview with him and he’s actually a Nashville native and he came down and he did a gig where he just talked to us all about investing, the bare minimum, how to start, what to do. Then you want to get somebody else. What’s a 401k?

How do I start it? What’s the IRA? You bring the experts to be able to bring it down, take all the high paid jargon out of it and speak the language of the damn community and explain to me, how do I get my ducks in a row? How do I protect myself and my children? And so that’s what I think we do well with partnering with other orgs to help

Mansa Musa:

That. And then we talk about civic and that in of itself speaks volumes in terms of our lack of understanding of electoral process, our lack of understanding of different institutions that regulate, responsible regulatory type things that affect us. So what is your civic model? Because when we learn civic in school, we know that at a certain age you get a right to vote. We know now that that’s not a guarantee with the latest Supreme Court decision, but be that as may, what’s your civic model?

Courtney Teasley :

Yeah. So with civics, my big thing has always been people get so mad, especially the new generation, it’s like, oh my God, they don’t vote. They won’t do this. They won’t do that. And it’s like, well, you got to teach them more than just go vote. It’s more to civics than just going to vote. And I like to bring up a case that I was fighting vigorously back in 2023. It was called disruptmanchester, if you look on Instagram or Twitter. And a family with five children, five Black children were driving through Manchester, Tennessee and had their children taken and forced into foster care all over marijuana. And so in that case, I had to publicly put it out to people and let them know what’s going on in this city that we consider a sundown town. A lot of Black people have known it to be that over the years.

And so we know what it is when these people are taking Black children and forcing them into foster care. And so when you’re making it public and you’re letting other people know what’s going on, and basically I call it criminal defense organizing, “Hey, this is what they’re doing to us in real time. We need you to be concerned about what’s going on.” I want to ignite their civic abilities and a lot of times they have to know what that means. And your civic abilities just meant, “Hey, you got the power to come court watch. You know that you can come. You have a right to come into a courtroom. You have a right to sit in here and see what they’re doing.” That’s accountability, making sure that the people that your taxes pay, that they’re accountable to you. And then also when we had issues where we were saying, “Okay, well, you guys took the children.

The state trooper did this, the county did this.” Well, people started to request records. So as citizens, like, “Hey, I’m requesting to see the stop. I’m requesting to see your personnel records. I’m requesting…” So that’s the type of thing when you’re igniting people to understand that as a citizen, because government officials, public officials, you pay them, your taxes pay them, you have the right to inquire into anything that’s going on, and you have the right to demand answers, you got the right to transparency, you got the right to ask for, you can file complaints, you can come court watch. So igniting them to see that your civic duty far exceeds just voting, right? You have power and you just need to know how to utilize it.

Mansa Musa:

In the District of Columbia, before you answer, we got the right returning citizens. Anyone formerly incarcerated, you’re a DC resident, you got the right to vote. And so we got that right. But with this latest decision that came out the Supreme Court, we looking at how they might try to take that back because the federal government got complete control over the District of Columbia, everything relative to District of Columbia, the federal government. We’re not a state. We got home rule. So talk about how you look at people that’s disenfranchised because that’s your costume population specifically. And not only that’s them and their family, because their family is highly affected by their incarceration.

Courtney Teasley :

Absolutely. So basically with what you’re talking about is probably going to go more into efforts that are reactive, but very necessary. And so what I did recently is incorporate a nonprofit so that way we are able to partner with organizations that do a lot of the rights restoration. And so most recently we hosted a judicial forum and in the judicial forum, we talked about, we educated them first on what all these seats, because right now we have a special election for judges going on right now. So we educated them around that. And then we had a forum so they could hear from the people. But one of the big pieces was we wanted people who did not have their rights, who may have been made felons at young ages. We wanted them to be able to come in and inquire about how to get your rights back so we can start that process with them.

And so what we do is we’ll have them come in, let us know, “Hey, I’m interested in getting my rights back or however, just let us know you’re interested.” And then we can do the connections with making sure you get that done. And we do that through collaborating with other orgs who are already doing it. So that’s how we try and fight back reactively by partnering and empowering, kind of like you were just saying, how you give amplify people’s voices. So we try to do that with other organizations. We’ll connect with them and allow them to do what they’re doing best in that field around rights

Mansa Musa:

Restoring. Yeah. And I mentioned earlier that I was incarcerated. Prior to being released, I did 48 years in the Maryland system. And a lot of what you’re saying, we would educate ourselves on all those levels. You had guys that did financial listing, they studied the stock market. They understood it and they invested their money. We had people that was jailhouse lawyers and did legal and was proficient at that. And then we had people that came together around organizing the community around social issues in general. If a person, and I’m looking at the prison population in particular, if a person in the prison population, when they let me out, they gave me $50.

They didn’t give me no bus ticket. They let me out in the city. They let me out in Baltimore City. I reached out to my family. I ain’t know if they had got the message or not, but that’s what I left out with $50 after serving all that time. The average person leave out a prison in the Maryland system with about that much money before they leave. If they leave with any kind of money, it’s not enough money for them to sustain themselves. So what’s your economic, that component and why you call it the missing curriculum and how do that factor into the system eradicating it or stabilizing the people that’s coming out?

Courtney Teasley :

Yeah. So I love that you asked this and I think you’re talking about when I call it why financial power is a prerequisite for social justice. Because one thing for me is as a criminal defense lawyer, I didn’t take the public defender route. I didn’t want to work for the government. I didn’t want my hands tied. I didn’t want to go to handcuffs. I wanted to be able to fight because the moment you fight a little too hard, guess what they going to do? Take your money from me, right?

Mansa Musa:

Yeah.

Courtney Teasley :

So that’s the way they keep us in order. And so I wanted to be able to fight without having that issue. And so I started to see that the fact that I was private practice, I was able to create, I charged my worth the majority of the times, but because of that, I was able to create scaling fees, sliding fees, low income, and represent people who really needed it because I charged my worth over here in my law practice the majority of the time. The people who can’t afford it were able to pay that and the people who were not able to afford it, I’m still able to represent you because I get to create that. I didn’t need the government to tell me to do a pro bono or to take a court appointment. I knew how to serve my community. And so one thing I kind of started to see is I would do all the things.

I told you I did the mock trial. I was the NAACP legal redress chair. I was the equality and justice committee chair for the Tennessee Association Criminal. I was all these things. And I started to see that real change. Y’all trying to burn me out. You know what I mean? And you’re not going to pay anybody for it. So I started to see that if the narrative being pushed is if you want to help your community, you need to do it for free and long hours, do it under a nonprofit, don’t get paid much. And I was like, well, that’s the reason none of these initiatives are long lasting.

Mansa Musa:

They

Courtney Teasley :

Only last for a little bit of time. And then as soon you run out of money and then now you can’t help anybody else. And so what we have to do is be able to be self-sustaining. So when people in our community are creating businesses, when I had my legal education company and 10% of all my product profits go back into the very people who are fighting proactively. So one of the Middle Tennessee National Action Network, I trained them and my trainings was $5,000. Well, they didn’t have to pay for that because people that actually were supporting and buying our product books and buying into our other things. And so that is, to me, a model that other businesses can take and see that, look, there are problems in our community. I’m making money over here. Well, let me figure out how to best assist.

And then that means in your situation, when you’re talking about a person coming from prison, well, if you have a business that actually cares, that you’re partnering with a business and they’re like, you know what? This is hard. People are trying to get back on their feet. We want to be able to make sure that they can do just that so that person can come and maybe they can do an externship. They can get a job over here and then they can get a stipend up front. Whatever it is, we are the ones who have to create the solutions. Nobody’s coming to save us. And the solutions that are coming through nonprofits are the monies. Come on, we’re under this administration. A lot of people aren’t getting money for anything that’s assisting Black people in general. So it’s going to be up to our community to be able to build financial power, to be able to become financially literate and to be able to be creative in actually helping assist.

For me, I care about any mass incarceration. For somebody else, it could be something different, but it’s going to be up to us to create those solutions and then partner with the ones that are doing it.

Mansa Musa:

And I think your approach to this mindfulness and skill building, it goes back to an era where we was educating for liberation. So I think we get caught up on how we see the problem and therefore we let that be determined the solution. But more importantly, who telling us what the problem is? Not so much as it how we see it. Let me rephrase that. Somebody telling us this is what the problem is, and then we say, okay, then the solution is, and trying to get a solution, it become, to your point, we try and get something from the government and the government ain’t going to fund you to get your freedom. That’s not happening. Government ain’t going to come and say, okay, because we still waiting on our 40 acres of the mule. And

Courtney Teasley :

It ain’t

Mansa Musa:

Coming. It ain’t coming. So the best thing we can do is do what we’ve been doing. But Courtney, I really appreciate you coming and having this conversation. And I hope our audience can really understand the importance of this approach, mainly when you’re dealing with the cost population. I know from experience that when people come into that system much like yourself and provide education, information and knowledge that we’re receptive. And there was a lot of people that was locked up with me, all of us that got out in the last 10 years. And a lot of what we learned while we was incarcerated, we’re doing it now in the Baltimore community and other communities. But you got the last one. What you want to tell our audience about how they can get in touch with you and how they can support your work?

Courtney Teasley :

Thank you so much, Mansa. First of all, what you just said is exactly why I’m doing the work I do and why I focus proactively prior to someone becoming incarcerated, prior to someone taking a plea or pleading guilty because I think it sucks that you did 48 years. Could you have helped me prior to that? And a lot of times you’ll see the Innocence Project, which is good and they’re doing good work, but it’s like people are only getting out and that effort’s only coming in after people have done 30 and 40 years. And it’s like, I think we can do something way before then while they’re fighting their cases more proactively. And so you can find me over on TikTok. I do a lot of legal literacy education over there. I have a whole course up there called Easy Way to On Your Right.

It’s Criminal Justice Literacy 101. It went most viral. We have over 30,000 followers and we have so many resources like a fight your case manual. So anyway, come over and follow us at MFN, that’s E-M-E-F-F-E-N. And we’re also over on, if you want to follow me personally, you can hit me up on LinkedIn, Courtney Teasley, or you can find me on Instagram @thecourtneyteasley. And so YouTube, again, we have the same thing. It’s not MFN, it’s @blacklawgirl. So if you want to find us on YouTube, it’s @blacklawgirl.

Wherever I am, look, come find me, come get me, and let me know. I love to come collaborate with y’all wherever you are. Let me bring the legal literacy and let me bring it in a fun way that’s easy to understand.