What is a Block Captain?
We are hosting Block Meetings in 52 neighborhoods in Tennessee to prepare for this year’s local elections and build power beyond this voting season. Black and working-class communities have used voting, organizing, and block meetings as tools for liberation for decades. Although the state is attacking many of our rights, the wins that have gotten us to this moment result from our people’s battle at the ballot box, organizing fights, and collective political engagement. To win in Tennessee and make the change our communities need, from education to public safety to housing, we must build community with other Black Tenenseeans committed to racial justice and liberation. We are hosting block meetings in 52 neighborhoods to prepare for local elections and build local power. At our block meetings, we’re deciding what wins we need to get us closer to liberation in Tennessee and what we can do together to make this election matter for our communities. Become a block captain or join a block meeting at tennesseeblock.org.
The Block Captain Program is recruiting community members in Tennessee to hold community meetings in their neighborhoods. We are working with Block Captains in Tennessee to hold community meetings in their neighborhoods where they will discuss issues in their neighborhood and come up with policies and programs to address those issues. We invite community members to attend Block Meetings where they will learn about how to use political engagement and participatory democracy to transform their local neighborhoods and the state of Tennessee.
In Nashville, Tennessee, the Block Captain Program is hosted and coordinated by the Black Nashville Assembly, a project at the Southern Movement Committee. In cities outside of Nashville, the Block Captain Program is hosted and coordinated by the Southern Movement Committee.
The Black Nashville Assembly (BNA) is a political engagement and community organizing project at the Southern Movement Committee. We are committed to Black-led participatory democracy as a solution to address government infrastructure and policies that fail to honor our people's needs.
The participatory democracy we are talking about is unlike anything we've seen in Nashville because it fundamentally changes the power dynamics between our communities and elected officials, giving us the power to create solutions that transform our lives.
The Southern Movement Committee (SMC) engages in community organizing and community-led lawyering for racial justice and human rights in Tennessee and the South.
We are Black organizers, artists, workers, creatives, and movement lawyers working with community members to implement progressive and transformative policies developed by people directly impacted by incarceration, police violence, racism, and economic inequality.