Community Movement Builders ​is a member-based collective of black people building sustainable, self-determining communities through community organizing and cooperative economic development.  We build cooperatives, support existing community members in staying in their homes and campaign against gentrification, maintain a community house and garden, and create opportunities for youth and leadership development.  

Our goal with the CMB Community Safety and Cop Watch Patrols is to create an environment that fosters self-determination, unity, and safety.  Patrols will provide an opportunity for community members to get to know and work with each other, and to develop leadership and conflict prevention/de-escalation/resolution skills.  Patrols will also prevent police harassment by shining a spotlight on policing activities, by raising community member’s awareness and assertion of their rights, and by creating a buffer that reduces entanglement with the criminal justice system.  

CMB’s Patrols are a necessary component of our advocacy for community control over policing- to transform current policing culture and practice in poor and working-class Black communities in southwest Atlanta and beyond.  Our goal is for CMB Patrols to be a replicable model for all of our chapters and other organizations seeking to facilitate community control over public safety. We are raising resources to train and hire young adults from the community in our Patrols, as well as our organizing and cooperative development projects.  Our vision, once the Patrols have become institutionalized, is to create an elected board of residents to govern the program, giving the community direct power over the "policing" institution in their neighborhood.