By Mary Ellis | Staff Writer
ChangeWaco is an organization that connects local social justice-focused nonprofits to one another and is working to enact initiatives in Waco and McLennan County at a governmental level.
“We recognize that there must be an intersectional alliance between Black and brown-led organizations and white allies. ChangeWaco is a coalition for other nonprofits and organizations to be able to follow their missions,” program administrator Tneyah Thomas said.
ChangeWaco is currently working on three initiatives: a Cite and Release ordinance, a Criminal Justice Committee on Equity and a Waco Bail fund.
A Cite and Release ordinance is a policy that directs police officers to citations for low-level, nonviolent offenses instead of making an arrest. Thomas said the goal of enacting a cite and release policy is to reduce the jail population.
“That is pretty much the goal for a lot of the initiatives we have, to reduce the jail population,” Thomas said.
A Criminal Justice Committee on Equity is “a group of representatives set up to evaluate local data and identify systemic issues to improve McLennan County’s criminal justice system,” according to the changewaco.org website.
ChangeWaco is in the process of contacting local officials have made progress but ultimately “the city commissioners still have a lot of questions,” Thomas said.
Cuevas Peacock, a co-organizer of Change Waco, said that after the Black Lives Matter rally that took place in summer 2020, a question arose.
“What happens next and how do you generate action from the awareness that has been raised?” Peacock said.
The initiatives ChangeWaco wants to enact takes place on different levels. The “Criminal Justice Committee on Equity looks at criminal justice at a countywide level,” and the Waco bail fund will look at “citizen input and citizen representation on a Waco PD level,” Peacock said.
“Change happens at the speed of trust,” Peacock said. “We are trying to build trust with [city officials], but the goal is not to achieve these outcomes and continue more work. With ChangeWaco, the goal is to achieve these initiatives and set a foundation for broader community input where eventually ChangeWaco will be able to potentially dissolve itself,” Peacock said.
ChangeWaco is a link between other social justice-based and ethnically diverse nonprofits in Waco with the intention of making their missions more accessible and easier to achieve.
The Waco community can aid ChangeWaco by “remaining aware of our social media and the various calls to action that will hopefully help get people involved and raising awareness about the efforts that we are trying to enact locally,” Peacock said.
