The St. Charles Center for Faith + Action is hosting an interfaith gathering to mark Human Rights Day and bless the newly-installed Solitary Garden at 7100 St. Charles Avenue (our office and the location of the St. Charles Avenue Baptist Church) on Tuesday December 10, 2024 at 6 pm.  This gathering is in partnership with the Louisiana Stop Solitary Confinement Coalition (LSSC) and Impacted Solitary Survivors Council.

Human Rights Day is observed every year on December 10 to commemorate the United Nations General Assembly’s adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on December 10, 1948. We will use this opportunity to build our connections as a community and amplify the call for an end to solitary confinement, a practice and policy of institutionalized dehumanization. We will lift up themes of dignity, justice, freedom, the capacity for love and the image of God in each human.

This fall, numerous volunteers and impacted community members came together to build the Solitary Garden at St. Charles Avenue Baptist Church. Solitary Gardens is a social practice project rooted in abolition, which transforms solitary confinement cells into garden beds. The contents (plants, flowers, and herbs) of the prison-cell-turned-garden-bed are designed by currently incarcerated people serving their sentences in isolation and are tended by community members on the outside. As prisons are the descendants of slavery, the garden beds are constructed from the ancestral byproducts of sugarcane, cotton, and tobacco, exposing the illusion that slavery was abolished in the U.S. The Solitary Gardens both directly and metaphorically ask us to imagine a landscape without prisons. This event will serve to bless the Solitary Garden and call for freedom and justice for all.