MORE Justice

During our first year as an organization, more than 500 people came together and voted to prioritize mental health and education for research and action. After several months of research and building the power of organized people, MORE Justice members turned out more than 1,300 people to our inaugural Nehemiah Action. There, we pressed local law enforcement to certify all officers in Crisis Intervention Training, or CIT, by April of 2021. In the face of such broad community support, both Columbia PD and Richland County Sheriff’s Department committed to do just that. Now, a year and a half later, Columbia PD has gone from only eight CIT certified officers, to more than 150 CIT certified officers (nearly 40% of the entire department)! Due to our continued and persistent follow-up, Richland County Sheriff’s Department has also certified another 90 deputies in CIT. Now, due to our power of people, our officers will be better prepared to safely and successfully interact with those in our community with mental illness and deescalate situations.

In our 2022 House Meetings, we asked about how our community has been impacted by the changing environment. Our members talked about the rising cost of food, worsening quality of produce, and the limited availability of foods they used to have access to. At our Community Problems Assembly later that year we had over 250 people vote to prioritize food insecurity as our newest campaign.

Through our research in over 25 meetings so far, we have learned that 65,000 Richland County residents do not know where their next meal is coming from. As with most problems, this is a systemic level issue that has many root sources, including discriminatory grocery store placement far from low-income, black and brown neighborhoods, inaccessible public transportation alongside costly personal vehicle ownership, and people making low incomes combined with the rising costs of not just food but also housing and other basic living expenses. We met with the City of Columbia’s Food Policy Committee, who generated two solutions that can address parts of this massive problem. First, the use of publicly-owned properties in neighborhoods with low food access to provide more food options such as pop-up markets, produce stands, community gardens, and more. Second, the creation of a mobile market, which is a grocery store on wheels, bringing food into communities that otherwise do not have the access.

At our 2023 Nehemiah Action, Mayor Rickenmann and City Councilmembers Herbert and Duvall all supported these initiatives by agreeing to have an informational meeting with MORE Justice representatives to make a plan for the sustainability and success of these programs. Since then, MORE Justice has been working with the City’s Community Development Subcommittee and Food Policy Committee to begin these conversations with the goal of having more concrete action steps moving forward.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic the 2020 Nehemiah Action was canceled, but our gun violence committee kept pushing forward. In the fall of 2020, MORE Justice held a “GVI Town Hall” meeting virtually where over 100 community members and representatives from over 10 community organizations gathered to learn about Group Violence Intervention (GVI), one of the evidence-based programs from NNSC that is proven to reduce gun violence by over half. The next year, over 1,100 people joined together for the 2021 Nehemiah Action on Zoom. The gun violence committee was prepared to ask Columbia Police Chief Holbrook to advocate for a contract with the NNSC for a problem analysis and ask him to meet with the director of the GVI strategy. Unfortunately, Chief Holbrook refused to attend the meeting. At the 2022 Nehemiah Action with nearly 700 people present in-person, newly elected Mayor Daniel Rickenmann committed to fund a problem analysis for gun violence to be completed by a nationally recognized entity as the first step to a gun violence intervention strategy. At the end of 2022, the Mayor announced the creation of the Office of Violent Crime Prevention to help oversee the reduction of our gun violence crisis. MORE Justice’s Gun Violence Committee plans to continue working with Mayor Rickenmann and this new office to ensure that the best practices are implemented.