How do we want to live together and resource our neighborhoods to keep everyone living there safe and secure in a more just, caring way?

We imagine a future Minneapolis where 5 years from now, a neighbor-led Office of Community Safety resolves security, emergency, and health crises instead of a Police Department. The Police Department budget is redistributed in full to the Office of Community Safety, and using participatory budgeting assemblies, neighborhoods determine how to fund the security services they need. We imagine that our neighbors got tired of having an under-funded Department of Community Safety accountable to the Mayor’s office but not to their neighborhoods–so we took it over. We imagine our neighbors got tired of the over-use of force, violence, and displacement as a solution to security issues in their communities. We imagine people got tired of the city providing one-size fit all solutions to the complex health and social challenges we live with.

In response, we imagine all of us cooperating to create a much more imaginative system for community safety. We imagine neighborhood associations hosting People’s Assemblies to design, test, roll out, and fund unique community security programs responsive to their specific challenges and creating space to continue that work as dynamics change shape. These projects are also staffed by residents who already are experienced first-responders or becoming that. Finally, we imagine our neighbors are holding people’s budget assemblies. There the people decide on how to fund our neighborhood and citywide visions of a secure future.

Come and experience what it would be like to live in that future. Hang out with Confluence and your neighbors at MirrorLab where we will experiment with redistributing the nearly $200 Million (and growing) Minneapolis Police Department Budget through hands-on play and collective imagining. Together we will explore ways to expand our definitions of security and our systems for community safety.

Opening Night is Friday, January 12th from 6 to 8pm.

Open Gallery on Saturday, Sunday and Monday is from 10am to 2pm.

Participatory Budget is from 2 to 5pm on Saturday and Sunday and from 3 to 6pm on Monday.