Queen-Cheyenne Wade is a Greater Boston-based organizer and practitioner grounded in her dedication to decolonial solidarity and community/collective care and autonomy. Queen-Cheyenne organizes with The Black Response, Greater Boston Marxists, Community For Us, By Us, Lowell Mass Action Collective and FTP Boston with initiatives around the abolition of policing systems within Black communities in Cambridge, Boston and Lowell, mutual aid/direct reparations programs such as the Boston, Cambridge and Lowell Mutual Aid Funds, and communal learning through popular education such as Greater Boston Marxists Black Radical Reading Group/Documentary series. Queen-Cheyenne has worked as a community-based educator in Boston and Cambridge, a therapeutic mentor for youth in Greater Boston, and a domestic violence survivor counselor in Cambridge and Somerville. Her work centers around pillars and values of transformative justice, liberation theology,  abolitionist and Black Marxist theory. Queen's work and practice is in envisioning our world, communities and selves without systems of harm through processes of decolonization, political/popular education, and self/communal care.

My remarks will be based upon the work of The Black Response and the community-based processes they have facilitated to create and implement a collaborative community based response program in Cambridge. These processes use practices of Transformative Justice, community autonomy and collaborative/collective creation. The Black Response program is now called the Cambridge HEART Program (Holistic Emergency Alternative Response Team) of Cambridge.