Barefoot Lawyering

In naming Barefoot Lawyering as a co-designed approach with Central Valley Movement Building (CVMB), we honor the legacies of Black, Indigenous, and other liberatory traditions in this country. CVMB is a coalition of student and parent organizers working to dismantle the school to prison pipeline across 9 counties in the Central Valley. In close partnership with CVMB and California Native communities, we are engaged in deep listening and documenting the unique needs of urban and mountain tribes and monitoring the specific ways school push-out and criminalization impact these communities.

By co-creating and democratizing legal education tools, we will work together to train and build the capacity of parent leader guides to engage in school discipline defense regardless of formal education. We are in the experimentation phase of this innovative practice of Barefoot Lawyering (BFL). Through deep community reflection and analysis, we will move towards building out this BFL practice as a model for other communities in the Central Valley.