BK Whistles: Empowering Communities Against ICE

BK Whistles funds will buy 2,000 whistle kits, bilingual guides, and displays

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BK Whistles: Empowering Communities Against ICE

Grace Gill is organizing this fundraiser.

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Across the United States, whistles have become a critical grassroots strategy for communities to protect themselves from ICE. Together with friends, family, and my community, I am organizing "BK Whistles," a day to come together and assemble whistle kits to distribute throughout BK and NYC. With your help, we can purchase supplies to assemble 2,500 whistle kits!

Why whistles?

This tactic appears to have emerged in Los Angeles during the immigration raids in August and went viral in Chicago in October. Since then, activists and everyday people have been using whistles as effective community alert systems across states like California, Illinois, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oregon, and Washington. Some of the key benefits of this strategy are:

Whistles help turn silence into action by alerting the community to ICE activity.
Whistles can summon help faster than social media, and the sound travels further than shouting, with the benefit of working across language barriers.
Whistles are a simple, inexpensive tool accessible to people without technological expertise and can be carried every day by anyone.
Whistles give witnesses a way to call for support while freeing them to also run, drive, use their phones to document ICE, send messages, and generally stay alert and attentive to the situation while still getting the word out.

For more info, check out this post on “Why whistles?” https://nycwhistles.substack.com/p/why-whistles

How will people know what to do when they hear a whistle?

This strategy is most effective for protecting our communities if our loved ones and neighbors know about whistles and know how to use them. In other words, it’s about education and awareness as well as access to a physical tool.

We will distribute kits which include a whistle, key chain attachment + lanyard so people can carry their whistle with their keys or wear it around their neck, bilingual information about whistles as a community alert system, a Know Your Rights card, and a card with information about how to report federal government action (including ICE activity) in New York state. For every 50 kits, we plan to purchase a small box for displaying kits on counters and reception desks.

This is the breakdown of my math for transparency about cost of materials.