Describe yourself in three words.

I would describe myself as creative, optimistic, silly.

***Jenica Garcia***, 2024 CSS Liberation Generation Fellow

Tell us about the work you brought into your Fellowship and why this work is important to you.

I’m the Cultural Organizer with Lavender Phoenix, we are a community organization that builds Trans and Queer API power in the Bay Area. This year, we developed a campaign to challenge the San Francisco City Budget called "Care Not Cops," which is the work I brought to the Fellowship. In this collective vision toward liberation, I really imagine a world where Trans and Queer people are thriving and living dignified lives without fear for their safety. But right now, the lives of many Queer and Trans people, especially the working class, face the brunt of violence, particularly by a very preposterous city budget that prioritizes profits over people. This is really a form of economic violence, and I see that it’s my and my fellow organizers’ duty to expose that.

Queer and Trans folks are often used as pawns in building up this narrative around inclusion and safety. Government representatives will say, “This is what API people need, more police. Queer and Trans people are asking for more cops.” and that's not true. So it's really important for me as a cultural organizer to empower our people’s agency to see themselves as writers and makers of their own future and history.

Summarize your fellowship project and how you are using narrative strategy to expand the impact of your work.

Slide From Garcia’s Fellowship Presentation

As we were developing this campaign, we realized the core issue: Cops are robbing people—not only their money but also their lives. Understanding how that issue persists, Story-based Strategy really pushed me to study it more in-depth: the Copaganda narrative that’s very prevalent in our city.

If we want to see a future of true care, there needs to be a cultural shift, a narrative shift where the people are exposed to how the cops are robbing us. The ways we did that in our campaign was through social media strategies.

We made a video of all the actions we conducted over the three months leading up to the final budget vote. We used Instagram to expose what was happening in the city. In April, we went to the lobby and talked to our [County Board of] supervisors who represent us, Chinatown, and API People. All of us spoke at public comment and we edited together a video.

In June we disrupted the final budget process. During public comment, we asked everyone, “Did you know that the budget is going to be $821 million?” We got their reactions on camera, really trying to expose the city and what the tax dollars are going to. Many people in line were there because their funds were being cut from the budget to go to an entity that “provides safety” to people.

We also put on a Zine-making workshop to get folks together in the Bay to create this cultural project to tell our own story when it comes to the cops.

Explain to us why you are doing this work and at what stage you are in your process.

Last year we were organizing around emergency and safety planning with the Justice for Jackson campaign. Jackson Salas was a young Asian man who was found dead in a high-rise apartment after going on a date. We were working with his parents to find justice for their son. We led a teach-in around pod mapping, and we held a trans march in his honor in 2023.

This year, our vision for organizing was shaped around taking action that is rooted in shifting power. June is our month to organize, and it’s also the time when they’re finalizing the budget, which hurts us. This included millions of dollars more for policing and major cuts to services, so we really pushed ourselves to prepare to confront the budget by June. There are so many orgs that are social orgs or that create community for Queer people, but we know that our people will only continue to survive and thrive if there isn’t this threat to our lives.

Our committee has revisited our strategy and the structure of our campaign work. This is the first year Lavender Phoenix took on such a big project. Really assessing what was effective, what was sustainable for our members and how we can improve that fighting chance for next year.

How would you describe Story-based Strategy (SBS) to someone who has never heard about it?

I’d say Story-based Strategy is a strategy that incorporates narrative work into the fabric of organizing. Building power for the people is a really intentional way to connect the personal and creative side that is in everyone to the political.

How did SBS affect your work on the project? What specific SBS tools did you use or center in to move forward your fellowship work?

One of the first tools I used to get us ready for the campaign was Elements of the Story. Starting off with understanding what our conflict was, who our characters were, and what images and foreshadowing were involved with our narrative. It also helped with our social media work in the ways we wanted to frame our campaign for the external people, not just us internally. We made this campaign accessible and really easy to understand and really impactful.

It helped us to understand that the conflict is that the cops are robbing us. Story-based Strategy helped me understand that framework and how we really need to focus on the audience part specifically because of the high Copaganda narrative in our community.

If you could have another iteration of your work, how would it have changed?

Something that occurred to me when we were doing that last action in June was when we were interviewing everyone; I realized that many of these orgs are on the same page as us. Some people were really affected by the budget cuts in the city but may not necessarily know that the money is going toward an increasing budget for the police. So, if I do another iteration of this work, I would like to connect with these orgs facing the same issue earlier on and be a lot more collaborative in our narrative strategy with them.

I think a lot of the social media we did this year was separate. We built relationships with a few orgs and collaborated on some social media posts. But I wonder if we were all together and we all know our audiences in different ways, different sectors of our community, how are we working collectively on this work to reach a specific audience. I’m excited to try something like that next year.

Do you think SBS will change how you relate to future work in collaboration with others? How? And why?

I feel like these strategies taught me a lot of different ways to work on narrative collectively. I think when you’re an artist or a creative person coming into organizing, there are some individualist approaches. However, when it comes to organizing, this is work that needs to be done interdependently, which is a strong value in Lavender Phoenix.

But it’s something that I am learning every day. The approaches y’all taught me and the activities and tools that can be done as a group. They are really accessible to people who may not think of themselves as artists or creatives, but they can empower them to use the tools for organizing. The most important part for me is figuring out how we move people’s minds to be on our side vs this Copaganda narrative. Doing it collectively is the way to do it. So, I really appreciate learning from Story-based Strategies. It changed the ways and methods I want to use to approach cultural work in the future.

What other kinds of CSS workshops and opportunities would you like to see?

I’ve been in different workshops with folk from all over the country, and I've learned more about their work. It would be really cool if there was an intentional cross-sharing space where I could learn more about the projects that other people are utilizing or a specific tool that people are using; I’d also like to expand my imagination on how to organize people. I was very excited to meet new people in past workshops.

Share how folks can get involved with your work or see your work’s final product.

@lavphoenix lavenderphoenix.org