Our Work

Relationships Evolving Possibilities: A 5-Year Reflection

Our Origins

Relationships Evolving Possibilities (REP) began as a conversation in May of 2020 in the days following the murder of George Floyd. That conversation turned into an abolitionist project aimed at supporting community members in the Twin Cities to build skills and to practice what it is to turn towards each other in moments of crisis and urgency. REP has always understood ourselves to be a project, a way of trying to gain a bit more wisdom about how we live into abolition every single day of our lives, no matter how calm or in crisis.

We have three core values that organize our work: ancestral knowledge, Black love and liberation, and radical consent. At this, our five-year mark, we are reflecting on these values and on what we have learned. We are in a moment that we somewhat predicted, knowing that the larger interest in funding Black-led collective safety projects which exploded in the wake of George Floyd’s murder would at one point disappear. We knew that, however closer some local communities came to the broader vision of abolition, the push-back would be even larger. And so here we are. Looking left and right and noticing how many friends in this work, some who also came into being in 2020, have had to sunset for these reasons and more. But REP is still here, even as we are changing.

Organizational Shifts

The origins of Relationships Evolving Possibilities (REP) are old. Even if the concrete project as we know it began in the wake of the 2020 Uprisings, its actions and shape are just one revolution in a long spiral of resistance, remembering, and repair.

It has been a recurring practice for REP’s people to engage in periods of slowing down and reflecting on community needs, check on the internal REP body that moves this work and check on the impact we are having. We entered our most recent Slowdown period near the end of 2024, with a month of reduced programming in October, followed by several mini-retreats that began first REP-wide, then in smaller programming configurations in subsequent months. During this Slowdown period we addressed issues of role-clarity within REP and identified priorities that included tending to our internal relationships as well as assessing what we were seeing and hearing from people engaging with our services, so we could be more effective in strategizing around community needs.

In early 2025, REP’s Core team and a Leadership Circle made up of Black Contractors held their own mini-retreat, and recognized the importance of reassessing our offerings—looking at both what we’re providing and how it’s landing in the community—within the reality of our shifting resources. Some of this is a reality we knew was coming – that eventually the kind of large-scale grants that REP was awarded in its first two years would be turning in other directions. We are still bringing in funds, but not seeing the increased funding amounts that we once did. So, as we proceeded into crafting a leaner budget for the year ahead, we asked ourselves many questions about the ways we were currently serving the community, and how we could be doing so more effectively and efficiently across our program offerings.

REP Hotline: A Transition

The Revolutionary Emergency Partners (REP) hotline project began in summer 2021.  The hotline began as a community dream of care and abolition. And it has been a privilege and honor to be able to offer community care through the hotline response. But REP is now at a point where shifting community needs and funding pressures have opened the conversation of what role the hotline is serving in the community. 

The hotline, as it is now, has been receiving few calls and has not been utilized to its full capacity. and REP is beginning to dream what might could be the next step. There is no clear plan at this time, but ideas are being explored on how to use our network of volunteers and the technology developed for the hotline, these include offering training in de-escalation, or offering as-needed marshal/de-escalation, and/or using the hotline as a resource-sharing line. CARERs will begin the process of exploring options and including community input to reshape the REP hotline.

The operation of the current REP hotline (7pm–12am live responding on Friday and Saturdays) will pause after June 7, 2025. 

If you have interest or concern about future ideation for the REP hotline, please reach out and we will get you connected.

Studios and Radical Ecosystem Pods

Radical Ecosystem Pods will continue offering Studios we have already planned for 2025, as identified together in a retreat this past January based on community needs and feedback. You can expect to see more of our current line-up of Studios including Radical Study Groups, Trans Survival Meetings, and Black Collective Care. Our collaborations with groups like Campaign Against Racism (CAR) and Sex Workers in Minneapolis (SWIM) will continue.

However, there will be changes in the scale of our Studios and how much emergence we can support. After July 1st, our team won’t be working as many hours and won’t have as much admin capacity. We won’t have as many resources at our in-person gatherings (we love providing a full meal but we’ll have to opt for a snack table instead). Though we love hearing from you and supporting your pods or other endeavors, we have very little capacity for additional events, partnerships, or projects in 2025.

We are also exploring the possibility of a pay-what-you-can fee for some Studios, and offering more personalized private facilitation or training as a service we charge for. More earned income would be very helpful to REP and we believe there’s a way to do this, through sliding scales or other practices, while keeping our programs accessible.

Please keep sending us your inquiries about Studio offerings, pod support, or other resources in our networks! We want to continue to support you, dream together, and deepen relationships toward creating more safety for our people.

Community Trainings + Engagement

In addition to the hotline and studios, REP plans to begin offering general community trainings that shares the tools and insight developed over these last five years. Before realizing that we would need to shrink in size, our plan was to begin trainings this summer. However, with the shifts and changes REP is making, we know that our summer 2025 training is on pause. Our goal is to announce new training dates by the end of the summer.

Last year, REP started tabling at community events to share information about the hotline and studios and to be in conversation with the community about abolition. We still plan on being part of community events but these will be targeted to both honor our capacity and the many places in community we want to support. Our goal is to connect with folks in the community, talk through scenarios and inform our programming with what we hear from community members.

Admin + Sustainability

There is an ongoing tension between the money that anyone spends on administration and the money spent on the concrete actions we take in the community. REP is no different. As we decrease our budget, we are in a deep state of emergence around our administration and the capacity of our people. Across our first five years, REP has had times with very minimal administration and other times where we have put more money into administrative support including fundraising and communications. We have also started some preliminary archival work, compiling and clarifying the records from REP’s first five years and the story of how we got to where we are now.

As we enter into this new stage of REP’s life cycle, we will be again shrinking our administrative overhead and looking at new ways to sustain the heart of REP’s work that demand less resources. While we are ready for this, we are also grieving the impact of diminished resources to support our people’s capacity. Less money means less hours and less support for our people which means less dollars in uncertain economic times. This is not a small thing and we know that. We are continuing to track and archive our work in smaller ways, as best we can, to honor all the labor that has been contributed to REP over the years, and the myriad of ways each person has contributed to our ongoing impact on the community.

Looking Ahead

REP has never been interested in becoming an organization or an institution focused on its own survival. We are here because we believe that abolition is possible and that we have the means to care for each other. From the beginning, we reflected that the challenges to abolition’s success sit on multiple levels: the state and the habit of turning to the state – or to faith-based organizations or private organizations – to deal with the things that are hard and/or messy, the fact of anti-Black racism – as well as other forms of systemic oppression and harm – and their entrenchment at all levels of community, the skills that we have and don’t have to show up for each other when things are hard and messy, and the ways in which internalized carcerality, internalized oppression and internalized supremacy can rise up and make it difficult for us to stay in a place of respect and care. REP’s work has never been to make abolition happen but instead, to support each and every one of us to be in the practice and learning of abolition, to become the people who our ancestors prayed for and our descendants will remember.

June 5, 2025

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