Safety & Security w/Che Johnson-Long

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[00:00:00] Yashna Maya Padamsee: In a time where social justice organizations are under attack, we bring you RAD ops that stands for Radical Operations. It’s a dialogue based tool that supports organizations assessing and discussing the possibilities and limitations of putting liberatory values into practice.

[00:00:27] Sha Grogan-Brown: Many organizations are in turmoil. As they pivot to meet this moment, RAD ops offers principles, guiding questions and tools that organizations can use to identify ways that they can and cannot. Practice liberatory values in this unjust world. 

[00:00:44] Yashna Maya Padamsee: I’m one of your co-hosts, Yna Maya Psi, 

[00:00:48] Sha Grogan-Brown: and I’m your other co-host, Sean Grogan Brown.

Together we bring over 40 years of movement operations experience to inform these conversations.

Our topic for this episode is safety and security, and our guest is Jay Johnson. Long. Who is an abolitionist security practitioner and community organizer who can’t leave well enough alone. She is currently the community safety director at Vision Change Win and serves on the as a board member of Third Wave’s Accountable Futures Fund Advisory Council before this CHE organized with the Solutions Not Punishment Collaborative of the Racial Justice Action Center.

The Policing alternatives and diversion and initiative and the safe outside the system collective of the Audre Lorde project. She holds a Juris Doctorate, comes from a long line of blues singers and calls Atlanta, Georgia Home. Welcome, so happy to have you. 

[00:01:48] Che Johnson-Long: Thanks for having me. 

[00:01:49] Yashna Maya Padamsee: Yes, welcome, Che. We’re so looking forward to talking with you about safety and security because of your experience and perspective from years of work.

As Sha mentioned, all the way from the Auditory Lord Project to your current work at Vision Change Win. I wanted to note that one of the first deescalation trainings. I did was with you you were one of the leads during your time at the Audrey Lorde project in the Brooklyn office down the street from my collective house, and that was such an essential training and it’s.

Some of those skills have stayed with me and I still use to this day. Since then, we’ve been in multiple generative somatics trainings together, did parallel moves from the north to our beloved southern cities. Walked our dogs together, and most recently spoken on the opening and closing panels of the movement Operations Gathering, hosted by Center for Empowered Politics Education Fund.

And we had you on our Dear Rad Ops episode in the fall of 2025 about risk versus fear assessments. I’m so happy to get to talk to you today and welcome to the RAD Ops podcast. 

[00:03:08] Che Johnson-Long: Thank you for having me. I’m so excited to be here. I feel like I’m already a fan girl of the podcast, so it just feels like such a treat to be able to be in the thing that I’m a fan of.

[00:03:20] Sha Grogan-Brown: When I was reading your bio just. Colloquially for me living in Brooklyn in like the mid two thousands, the safe outside the system work was really powerful for me as like a queer and trans person in the city at that time. And I remember even gonna parties and having the folks from that collective at the parties that just made it.

And intervened in some situations that we needed some supportive and relational security and safety around. So just the legacy that you are part of is also part of what shaped me as a queer out here in the world. 

[00:03:54] Che Johnson-Long: Oh my gosh, that’s so cool. I just. If you haven’t organized in like the club or in a church basement or some other dingy place, have you really organized, 

[00:04:04] Sha Grogan-Brown: yeah. That’s where the real stuff comes out. Okay, before we get into some more detailed questions for you, in the spirit of the rat ops, like no one size fits all we wanna hear from you. What’s your. Current political landscape read and any big lessons learned or assessments that you’re making for this time around safety and security that you would say are like kind of fundamental big picture before we tackle those closer end questions and like things you might wanna ground folks in for this episode?

[00:04:37] Che Johnson-Long: I think it’s. So important for us in this moment to recognize that we’re up against a system that is also organizing against us, and that has goals, that strategic plans that base build. I think that the fascist and authoritarian regime that is causing political harm and violence to so many of our communities is really looking to continue to disorganize us.

So one of our tasks right now is to recognize when we are falling for that disorganizing. A thing that I see happen so much in so many organizing spaces is this false binary. And, fascism loves a false binary. 

[00:05:30] Sha Grogan-Brown: Yes, indeed. 

[00:05:31] Che Johnson-Long: Yes. They just, they live for it. One of the things I see so much is.

I’m in a meeting and someone will say, we’ve seen this all before, there’s nothing new happening. Everything that we’re experiencing, we have we’ve dealt with and we are prepared. And I am tired of pretending like we are reinventing the wheel. And I’ve also heard sometimes in the same meeting someone, get up and sound frustrated and say.

Nothing that’s happening now has ever happened before, and we must innovate Everything that we do, we must be creative and we must remain emergent, and we can’t stick to any strategy that worked in the past. And I just wanna say for my sanity and to stay in alignment with my ancestors and my mentors, that I don’t think either of those are true.

I think what’s true is that we are in a political moment that is reminiscent of moments that we’ve navigated in the past, that we have a lot of lessons that we can use and learn from the AIDS epidemic, from the post nine 11 targeting of our communities. We have a lot of lessons that we can learn from the past and.

There are some unique conditions happening right now that have never happened before. There is a particular convergence of threats and it will require us to get creative and innovative, and I think the more that we can blend into that third space and remember that the fascism regime that we’re pushing against, that we’re trying to survive wants us.

To believe in a binary. They want us to pick one lane. ’cause that’s a losing lane. And so we have to keep re recognizing when there’s another option, when there’s a window and we’re just looking for doors. 

[00:07:32] Sha Grogan-Brown: Yeah. And I think, we’ve done a lot of, in our conversations with folks around this concept of radical operations, these false binaries come up all the time and it’s, we’ve seen them like pit us against each other.

In this deeply unhelpful way when like usually there’s some truth to both sides and there are other things at play, and all of it means we have some contradictions that we have to navigate and can we do that together? So thank you so much for lifting that up. 

[00:08:00] Yashna Maya Padamsee: You mentioned being INTA in integrity with your ancestors and your mentors, and I see this in you and your work.

So much of honoring those who have come before. And I wanted to say inspired by you. You and I did a preliminary interview for RAD Ops a few years back when I was first starting this project. And you, one thing you said inspired a whole. Cornerstone of our work, which is the RAD ops lineages timeline.

So you said, I wanna know what is the history of radical operations in our movements. And so thank you for inspiring that timeline. And I wanna ask you as well as all of our other guests. Is there some person organization movement lineage that you want to name and honor who has shaped your rad ops work?

And in that, if you could also share more about yourself and tell us what rad ops roles you’ve played and your personal operations roots. 

[00:09:08] Che Johnson-Long: I am so blessed to be a part of a really thick and long lineage of safety and security practitioners that mostly comes outta New York City. Our lineage is anchored by a few organizations, but there’s one in particular that.

I wanna talk about today mostly because I think they don’t get enough shine as leaders and innovators in the safety and security landscape in the US today. And that’s star street transaction revolutionaries. I think star. Did so much work in such a short period of time, and one of the things that I really appreciate about Star as an organization is that they were holding down the material needs of their members, right?

So they were housing the girls. They were creating safe places for folks to get off the streets. They were creating safety pods in the streets. They were navigating harassment in the West Village against trans women of color. Both by cops and by regular folks. And so in that they were doing informal know your rights trainings, so that folks understood what some of the laws were, some of the transphobic laws that said, you can’t be in the clothes that you’re in, you can’t be in the makeup that you’re in.

At the same time Sylvia Rivera and Marsha p Johnson were doing really cutting edge coalition work that I think we are still trying to figure out how to replicate today. Sylvia was, meeting with leaders of the Young Lords Puerto Rican Liberation Organization in the Bronx. Which at that time had not publicly come out as an organization in support of the trans community, but had individual leaders that were allied enough with Star that Sylvia became a member and was really working hard to also meet with QE of the Black Panthers.

And had a vision to create a coalition between STAR and these really incredible organizations that were also holding down safety. I just think that’s no small thing. I can’t even begin to imagine as a cis woman of color who is queer. I can’t imagine what that was like for Sierra Leon Rivera at the time to be trying to build this coalition.

In an organization that Assumably was mostly cis and maybe mostly straight, while also getting kicked out of the gay liberation movement, pushing back against their trans folk and their racism. There’s just so much there’s so much to learn from the audacity of star, and I think from an operations perspective, it’s like.

Imagine if your job were to house people to help them get out of jail when they get arrested, to prevent them from going to jail, by training them to create pods, to hold down street-based safety, which necessarily means it’s unpredictable. Then to also protect your organization while coalition building.

I can’t even think of many groups who do that today in 2026. I think that level of goal setting requires a lot of internal work to make sure that an organization is well, to make sure that folks trust each other and. They’re a shining light for me, especially when I feel like I have too much work going on.

I just think about Star and I’m like, okay, I’m not doing all that. So I think I can answer these emails. 

[00:12:52] Yashna Maya Padamsee: And they’re probably under-resourced in that time too, 

[00:12:56] Che Johnson-Long: right? Yes. Thank you. Gush. And I think, and unpaid, right? Like completely unpaid. Unpaid. I just think it’s important for us to remember that lineage and that.

In those conditions, they innovated street-based responses to hate violence that we’re still using. And I think that. That is a testament to how powerful and strong our safety and security lineage is. But it’s also just a testament to what we can do without a whole lot. And as people, talk about what organizing can look like in a world where c threes are criminalized, 5 0 1 c threes are criminalized for their support of Palestine I think it’s important for us to remember that.

We have done that before, right? Yes. We have organized, we have held campaigns outside of nonprofit 5 0 1 c threes before. Yes. And we can do that again. We will defend our ability to hold our resources as C3 nonprofits and we can do this. We have done this and our ancestors have built a really incredible blueprint for us to be able to organize in a way that’s adaptive.

[00:14:07] Yashna Maya Padamsee: I think that’s such a great example of what you were, what you started us out with, of breaking the false binaries of yes, we can defend and continue our work within the C3 system. And what else? What else can we create and learn from the past and innovate for the future and work in multiple lanes at once.

Thank you for that and I’m excited to put star on our. Rad Ops lineages timeline. Thank you. 

[00:14:37] Sha Grogan-Brown: I feel like what you just shared is also so reflective of the false binary that you named, that’s like. We’ve never done this before. We’ve also done this before, and there’s a new thing that we need to do now, and it’s all true.

The other thing I will say about that is I’m working with Raquel Lavinia on a piece about safety and security, and in particular about this concept of. Cultivating a more relational security in this moment. And we’ll come back to this in a minute, but I, I think one of the things we’re looking at is like in these retrospectives where we look back to our history, to our legacy legacies that came before us.

Just the way you just gave a perfect example of star, where it’s like there are lessons that we can learn, there are advances that we made that are still with us. There are also limitations for. Applying the exact same thing from that era to now also won’t work. And so then given all of that, what’s the right sized approach to security now, in this moment?

So I just, you just literally did the thing that we’re working on doing. So thank you for that. But my next question is we’ve worked on developing these principles, rad ops principles, and so we wanna ask you, we’re asking our guests to share with us which of these principles resonate for you or have maybe even been a guiding force for you in your approach to your operations work.

And, if you can share any examples of how you’ve seen folks put any of these principles into practice in particular around safety and security. 

[00:16:07] Che Johnson-Long: I am a risk assessment girl. I love calculated risks. So I think that this principle around assessing and taking calculated risks is the one that speaks to me first.

I believe in taking calculated risks and I think one of the first things I learned coming into community organizing and anti-violence work was that, organizing has inherent risks. We are contending for power against the state, and because we are contending for power the state will push back against us.

And so there’s always going to be a risk in doing this work. I think that having that understanding as a baseline and then getting really clear about, so then what additional risks are we gonna take knowing this is our baseline. It’s gonna be different than the baseline of someone who chooses to engage in social justice work in a different way.

I think from there it’s important to get a clear sense of what will interrupt our work or make it so that we cannot do our work anymore. I think oftentimes. We can again, fall into this false binary of either trying to protect our political projects or trying to protect our leaders.

To me, our leaders and our political projects are equally important, and we wanna look for strategies. That really address both. I think a great example of this is early on in my anti-violence organizing work we were supporting the family of somebody who had been killed in an incident of transphobic hate violence.

And whenever you’re supporting a family of someone who’s been killed through hate violence, there’s an important balance to strike as an anti-violence organizer. Between making sure that their material needs are met and that their sort of like mental health needs are met while also.

Trying to work with them to prevent this from happening again, which often means organizing and sometimes that can be really hard to do. I at the time was working with an organization who had a really staunch ab abolitionist politic, and we didn’t believe in calling the cops. At the same time we respected the wishes of family members who decided to press charges against people who had murdered their loved one.

And I think that’s a difficult line to hold as an abolitionist to say that we don’t wanna increase police power and we don’t believe in the power of police to create justice. And that’s not my sister. That’s not my daughter. And building close relationships with folks who have experienced loss personally sometimes means figuring out how we balance sort of our values or our future vision with the people who are in front of us right now.

So in the midst of this conversation with the family, there were a few folks in the family who, felt like they wanted to individually host a press conference. They didn’t want our organization to be a part of it. They wanted to have something that felt apolitical. And so we’re discussing this press conference that they wanna host and, they say.

We don’t want there to be security. We think that having movement security there will attract police and will tell police that we’re up to no good. And they were very staunch about this. And we’re faced with a conundrum, which is how do we respect the wishes of this family while also holding down the safety, not only of them, but of anyone else who they invite.

To this event. I think in that moment we could have made a move to contradict, we could have said that’s against our principle, that’s against what we believe in which is that we wanna promise people that we have a safety plan whenever we invite them to something. We chose to not make that move.

Instead, we chose to lean into an informal risk assessment with them. And that looked like a series of questions and real questions. Really curious about where they’re coming from and understanding how their understanding what the likely threats are for this press conference. And so we just started asking.

What did it look like when you had the press conference a few weeks ago and there were security? Did it feel safe? What’s telling you that having security there will encourage the cops to think we’re up to no good. And so slowly starting to understand okay, we have different risk assessments. And then sharing ours, we’ve noticed that in the past few rallies that we’ve hosted there’ve been some hecklers across the street who have gotten really loud, and we wanna make sure that people who are there to grieve don’t have to deal with hecklers.

So what’s a good way for us to address that? I think that a lot of times a risk assessment is about really understanding the lay of the land together and then developing a plan that addresses the likely needs, the likely threats that are gonna happen without calculating risk and deciding, yes, we wanna take on this risk, or no, we’re not ready to take on that risk.

What will often happen is conflict. And I think in that moment we were able to come up with a plan that really laid out what we collectively assessed were the likely threats. That dug into some places where we disagreed and said, okay, we disagree. Let’s get deeper in that. Let’s figure out why we’re disagreeing.

Then at the end of the day came up with a plan that actually worked for everyone that made everyone feel heard and that met the goals of this press conference, which is to let New York City know that we will not stand for transphobic hate violence. That’s why I love that principle. 

[00:22:42] Sha Grogan-Brown: I have so many thoughts here, but I just, I think the things that really stood out to me about that story that you just shared are the how well you listened, and like really took seriously the disagreements and the difference in assessment and didn’t shy away from it.

You leaned into it and then found the place of what contradictions are we holding here together for the purpose and the sake of. The goal of this press conference. So yeah, that just, that’s the thing that I think stood out to me the most around, how we can get to a place of. Collectively assessing the calculated risks that we’re gonna take together.

[00:23:22] Yashna Maya Padamsee: And one of our other principles is approach conflict with curiosity. And I think this is a common word that we use in our movement work, which is. Be curious and lead with curiosity, but I feel like that story really illustrated what curiosity looks like and feels like. Like a genuine curiosity.

Not just asking leading questions, but asking truly questions that to dig and learn more about the other person and where they’re coming from. So then some common ground can be found. So thank you for modeling that and. We’ve really appreciated. Your guidance around how to make grounded risk assessments both in this story and from our previous short form Dear Rad ops episode that we did with you on risk assessments versus fear assessments.

And in these times, it is crucial for us to develop this muscle and our skill in assessing what risks we’re taking. Based on grounded assessments and not in fear. I’d like to read two quotes that you shared with us on the Dear Red Ops episode. I could read them or would you like to read them? And we can hear it in your voice again.

[00:24:46] Che Johnson-Long: Yeah, I could read this. Risk assessments as opposed to fear assessments tend to move us closer to coalition partners. We are all tired right now. Frankly, we don’t have time to isolate or to try to reinvent the wheel and invent new strategies when our partners might have already thought through the thing.

We’re going to be each other’s biggest resource. 

[00:25:14] Yashna Maya Padamsee: Thank you for that. And both of these quotes of yours highlight that the first place to go is relationship. And so we wanted to hear more about the why. As you said, we are each other’s biggest resource. So in the context of safety and security, can you share more about why relationship?

[00:25:38] Che Johnson-Long: I used to be a person who’s. Anxiety would take the steering wheel. Sometimes I can still be that person, I think especially in my mid twenties, there were periods where I could feel the weight of what we were up against, and that weight would create anxiety in me. Which would then allow me to make the mistake of moving fast and alone.

And the irony of trying to move fast and alone in safety and security work is that you don’t actually go anywhere. It’s running really fast on a treadmill. You might have gotten some cardio in, but you’re not actually moving the work. 

[00:26:33] Sha Grogan-Brown: Yep. 

[00:26:35] Che Johnson-Long: One example. Of this is when I was a part of the Audrey Lorde project, we were working on launching the first ever Bed-Stuy Pride and Bed-Stuy is a neighborhood in Central Brooklyn that, up until that point, had never seen in LGBT Queer and Trans Pride.

So we’re organizing this event. And we wanted to have it in this central park in the middle of the neighborhood. And we chose that park in particular because it’s a community hub. A lot of events happen there. And as soon as we decided to have the event in this park residents started telling us, you don’t wanna have it there.

You don’t wanna have it there. 

Now to their credit, there are some things that make the park more difficult than other spaces. Namely, it’s really close to the local police precinct. But then there were concerns that I think were just rooted in values that we didn’t share. Some folks thought we should move it because there were a lot of houseless folks who hung out in the park and they felt like an LGBT pride did not really mesh well with houseless folks being present.

Assuming of course, that none of the, none of those houseless folks are also queer or trans, or that there could be a way for an event like this to both support homeless and houseless communities, and also to navigate anything that might come up from just sharing space with people. 

And so we started to plan the event and. I as a security lead started training up a team and our team was mostly made up of folks who had done security with us for lots of other events. And some of the people on that team were from the neighborhood and knew it really well, but not everybody. A mistake that I made that man, I wish I could go back and do things differently was, 

I did not think to include those residents who had safety concerns in the team. 

I didn’t even really think to include them in the plan. I created a distance between us and them because I assessed that we had different values and that they didn’t really understand what we were trying to do, and we made our plan separate from them.

Our plan included other folks who lived in the neighborhood who had values that were more aligned with ours, and then on the day of our event, we get there and we realize, oh, maybe these folks had some valid points. For example, there was an older black gentleman who always hung out on his bench.

And that was his bench, and that’s where he sat every time he came to the park. And when we showed up, we had planned on having our information booth right there. And so somebody had to talk to this gentleman and say, sir, could you move? I didn’t wanna be that person, right? And I didn’t wanna ask anyone like, who wants to be that person?

No one. And so some of the folks, I’ll call them, some of the naysayers showed up to our event and they pulled me aside and they said, Hey do you want me to talk to Mr. Johnson for you?

And I realized that yeah, we maybe had some different values, but at the end of the day, they were really just trying to figure out how to weave this event into the fabric of the neighborhood.

And so they talked to this gentleman in a way that did not piss him off, and they gave him another place to sit and he had a fabulous time and he stayed and he came back the next year. I think there are a lot of moments like that early on in my organizing, and even now sometimes if I get too stressed out or if I let anxiety guide me where I get really narrow.

And I wanna just create the plan by myself. Because I assess that the potential collaborators in my life either don’t agree with me enough and I don’t wanna deal with that disagreement, or that I could just do it faster alone. And in safety and security, we don’t really get the option of working that way.

Because it’s a group project, and so getting really clear about the fact that we have to be wide, we have to work with other people. It necessarily means really addressing that tendency. Addressing that desire to narrow up sometimes for some valid reasons. I just wanna get this done or we started this thing late.

But then also recognizing, when narrowing up can really actually cut off a valuable resource for us. Over the years of hosting Bed-Stuy Pride, I learned so much about the resources in the community. I learned so much about what deescalation looks like in small ways and in big ways, and eventually security at Bed-Stuy Pride became a breeze because the whole neighborhood was showing up.

Everyone was in on our protocols and business owners were there, and it was just such a collaborative effort that often when security would notice something popping off, they wouldn’t even get there before someone else had already squashed it. You know what I mean? That is the ideal, right?

That’s how we want all of our events to go. We want community members to just handle things before they become anything, and security just becomes these fabulous people and walkie talkies and vests who just tell you where the bathroom is.

That’s the 

[00:32:37] Sha Grogan-Brown: goal. That’s the dream. That’s 

[00:32:39] Yashna Maya Padamsee: the dream. 

[00:32:40] Che Johnson-Long: That 

[00:32:41] Yashna Maya Padamsee: is the dream. Of ease. Yes. Because the work is done in preliminary and in the relationship building and in the progress and towards it. I love that. I love that. And I think that story also highlights that it’s so easy to say, yeah, I’m being relational, but it’s with your team and the people you always work with versus.

Who else can we bring in here that will bring a different voice? And that might create challenge now, but that is going to reduce the challenges later because we’re doing the relational work now. So thank you for highlighting that. 

[00:33:21] Sha Grogan-Brown: Okay. We’re getting close to time, but we wanna talk a little bit more about something I said earlier, which is I’m working with Raquel Lavinia to write a piece about building resilient movements.

And cultivating relational security. She’s also gonna be a guest on this podcast in a future episode. And. In writing this, Raquel has this hypothesis that while left movements have come a long way in developing safety and security protocols, they’re both lessons we can draw from. And also an element that can be missing from some current approaches to security is this relational approach that we’ve been talking about.

And we wanted to ask you one of the questions that Raquel has asked other folks in this strategic inquiry, that informed readiness piece. And the question is, what are the internal practices that can help leaders discern the tensions that need to be addressed, amend them quickly, and then move on collectively.

[00:34:18] Che Johnson-Long: I would like to answer this question with a quick story. There was a time when I was online dating and it was mostly awful, but I would go on these first dates and. I would look at everyone with like long-term partnership criteria, and I would assess on this first date based off of whatever somebody, people say random stuff on first dates.

It’s not always the best representation of you. I would assess, is this person, the person I can be with for the rest of my life? And you can guess that the answer was often 

[00:35:01] Sha Grogan-Brown: no. 

[00:35:02] Che Johnson-Long: It’s not the person and. That’s one way to date. I think as I continue to date in my life, I realized that there are a lot of different ways to relate to people and they aren’t all life partnership.

Some people are just great to go to the movies with. Some people are just, are fun to hang out with. And it helped me to understand the nuance that’s available to me around connection. I think that our movements sometimes approach coalition work and partnership across organizations. The way that I was approaching dating, I think we have one meeting if that, if, sometimes we just go to each other’s events and we see a group across the room and we just say.

Do they perfectly align with everything we believe in? And if not, I do not wanna work with them. And I think this standard that we look for around political purity is unrealistic for 99% of the groups that we’re gonna see in the world. I think especially in this political moment where we have to build a strong and broad united left, we cannot afford to be assessing every potential political partnership as if it were life partnership or marriage, because the truth is that it’s not.

We can make temporary agreements with other organizations. That sunset when we defeat fascism,

we can roll with each other until and the, until I think it’s really important. I have a political mentor such a Rivera who would always talk about, the differences between coalitions and networks and alliances, and she really felt it.

Important that people understand that there are ways to work together that are actually just about a political project, and then the relationship ends, right? There are ways to work together that actually aren’t about agreeing at all, that are just about, we’re gonna get together and share information, right?

And networks are so important for that reason, but I don’t have to believe in anything that you believe in. I just have need to have enough agreement with you to say. Here’s what’s confidential, here’s what’s not. Here’s what we’ll share here. Here’s what we want. So I think one internal practice that can really help leaders to notice tensions or even prevent them from happening is to get very clear on how they wanna get wide and collaborative, and then to identify what are the actual limits to the collaboration.

Does my. Internal safety team that’s working on a new data retention policy, need to write that policy from scratch. Or could we talk to coalition partners who we trust and ask, do you have a data retention policy? Could we even share a data retention policy? 

That’s a question right? Does my organization need to make a brand new travel safety protocol?

Or do we wanna ask around? And then when we’re actually divvying up rules for this travel safety protocol, do we wanna say all the rules for this protocol have to exist within our staff? Or could it be that there’s another group in our ecosystem? Who we trust who could hold down some of these roles with us.

And what if they’re not abolitionists And we are. 

[00:39:06] Yashna Maya Padamsee: Yeah. 

[00:39:07] Che Johnson-Long: Does that mean we don’t? 

Work with them on this travel safety protocol? Does that mean that they can’t be one of the people who calls emergency contacts? If someone gets arrested while they’re traveling? Maybe right, but maybe not.

Like maybe I don’t care if the person who like calls my partner because I’ve been arrested. I don’t care if they’re an abolitionist or not. I don’t need them to be that. I need them to be a kind, loving person who can tell my partner, I’ve been a, been arrested, and who can, answer their phone, and so I really think that we limit ourselves deeply when we only work with folks who we perceive and sometimes falsely perceive to have the exact same values as us. When we have that, it’s precious and rare and beautiful, and we should absolutely develop deep, meaningful, long-term relationships.

But. But everybody else, I’m like, girl, we just go to the movies together. You know what I mean? Like it’s not, 

[00:40:08] Sha Grogan-Brown: that’s right. 

[00:40:09] Che Johnson-Long: It’s not that serious. And we agree to it and it’s casual and that is healthy. That’s a healthy way for us to organize, and I think we will have to get used to some serious casual dating if we’re gonna build that wide left that we need to defeat fascism.

[00:40:29] Sha Grogan-Brown: Oof. Yes. Yes. Okay. The thing that really just stood out to me, what I really hear you saying is we tend to limit the pool of people we can relate to instead of limiting and narrowing and being clear about what is the, like purpose of this relationship. Yeah. What is the request I’m gonna make of you and are you able to do it?

[00:40:56] Che Johnson-Long: Yeah. Yeah. 

[00:40:57] Sha Grogan-Brown: And that’s different. The limitations of who we can be in relationship with and the limitations and the like clarity about what is it that we’re trying to do together or different things. 

[00:41:08] Che Johnson-Long: Absolutely. Yeah. That width is gonna be different for different organizations. For example, I think the work that about Face is doing right now.

To politicize folks who are in the National Guard and to peel off some of that base to join the Left is critical about Face is specifically positioned to do that work. There are a lot of organizations who are not positioned to do that work, right? But when you can find that lane, right where you can do some strategic base building or you can do some strategic partnership.

You should figure out where that is for you. There are a lot of anti-violence groups who are not abolitionists, but who can be a part of our safety plans. And when I say our, abolitionist safety plans and be useful. And I think it’s important for us to recognize like who’s directly to the left of us, like who’s close enough to us that we can make those we can make those partnerships stick.

And where do we need to draw lines and actually say. I would be terrible at recruiting folks from the National Guard to join the left. Do not ask me to talk to anybody, but that work needs to happen and I support it happening and it’s important for it to happen. And so where can I stretch in my political landscape?

To find my version of that. 

[00:42:28] Yashna Maya Padamsee: I’m really glad you mentioned really the spectrum within the last few minutes of that safety and security. Under this context of RAD ops, radical operation, safety and security could mean data retention, and it could also mean what about face does, which is like safety and security in this w.

Through organizing and changing hearts and minds towards building a bro broader left that so just appreciating that spectrum and also for our listeners to think about that full spectrum when we talk about rad ops and radical operations, we mean this broad spectrum of what we’re doing internally in our organizations, but also how opera all of these different fields of operations can play out.

To help build a stronger left. So thank you for that. I wish we had more time because we actually do have more questions, but maybe that’ll be a future episode. But I wanna close us out with our rad ops speed round. Cha sha and I are gonna ask you some quick questions. First thought, best thought in your responses.

I’ll get us started. So first question, spreadsheets versus post-Its. 

[00:43:48] Che Johnson-Long: Post-its 

[00:43:50] Sha Grogan-Brown: notes, digital versus

[00:43:52] Che Johnson-Long: analog. See a theme here? 

[00:43:56] Yashna Maya Padamsee: Text versus phone call versus voice Note. 

[00:43:59] Che Johnson-Long: We meet in person of under the cover of night in disguises with no devices.

[00:44:08] Yashna Maya Padamsee: Yes. 

[00:44:08] Sha Grogan-Brown: The fourth way. 

[00:44:10] Che Johnson-Long: The fourth way. I love it. 

[00:44:12] Sha Grogan-Brown: Okay. This is a contentious one. Receipts. Do you keep ’em or toss ’em? 

[00:44:17] Che Johnson-Long: Take a picture and toss ’em. 

[00:44:19] Yashna Maya Padamsee: Please shout out an org or ops person that you are loving right now. 

[00:44:24] Che Johnson-Long: I have to say, y’all rad ops, you’re holding, like this podcast is incredible. Your work is incredible.

I tell everyone to check y’all out, so y’all Oh, aw. Thanks. 

[00:44:35] Sha Grogan-Brown: Thank you. 

What song do you put on to set the tone for a meeting or a session? 

[00:44:43] Che Johnson-Long: Right now it’s we don’t need Another Hero by Tina Turner. 

[00:44:48] Sha Grogan-Brown: Yes. 

[00:44:48] Yashna Maya Padamsee: Yes. That’s good. What is the soundtrack for your operations work? 

[00:44:55] Che Johnson-Long: It is so eclectic. The soundtrack is rock.

It’s country music. It’s punk, it’s hip hop, it’s r and b. It’s resistance music across the black diaspora which extends to pretty much all genres of music. 

[00:45:10] Sha Grogan-Brown: Three words to describe the future of movement operations. 

[00:45:16] Che Johnson-Long: We’re gonna win. 

[00:45:18] Yashna Maya Padamsee: Ooh, 

[00:45:20] Che Johnson-Long: okay. 

[00:45:22] Yashna Maya Padamsee: Yes. To that. And to close us out, one wish you have for movement operations people in this moment.

[00:45:31] Che Johnson-Long: May you see your work as a part of a bigger fabric as a strategy towards liberation. May you be respected in even the smallest task, and may you have lots of time to rest and rejuvenate so that we can collectively hustle. 

[00:45:54] Yashna Maya Padamsee: Yes, may be so I receive.

Oh, thank you so much, Jay, for being with us again on our Rad Ops podcast. We’re so happy and delighted to have you. 

[00:46:09] Che Johnson-Long: Thank you, y’all. This has been such a pleasure.

[00:46:15] Yashna Maya Padamsee: We hope you enjoyed the show. You can subscribe and listen to more episodes wherever you find podcasts. Check out the additional resources from each episode in the show note. And take it all back to dialogue with your teams about building adaptable and values aligned infrastructure. You’ll also find links there to subscribe to the Rat Up Substack, where you’ll get the latest updates and resources.

[00:46:41] Sha Grogan-Brown: This show is produced by Josh Stro and published by Convergence Magazine. Design support from Kimmy David Music by Tigercat, my amazing 10-year-old with polished by Josh, and remember.