Ben & Jerry’s Partners With Gun-Control Group for Ad Campaign

One of many nation’s largest ice cream manufacturers has joined with a gun-control group to push for eradicating police from colleges.

On Friday, Ben & Jerry’s introduced it partnered with March for Our Lives on a brand new digital advert marketing campaign. The pair launched an advert marketing campaign they mentioned would primarily goal swing states, together with Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. They didn’t say how a lot cash they deliberate to spend on the adverts however mentioned the adverts would run on Fb and Instagram by way of October 2nd.

“For too lengthy, our method to pupil security has been to harden our colleges with armed law enforcement officials, locked doorways, fences, and metallic detectors, all of which have proved ineffective in defending college students,” Christopher Miller, International Social Mission Director at Ben & Jerry’s, mentioned in a press release. “As a substitute of investing assets that make our colleges really feel like prisons that disproportionately affect Black and Brown college students, we needs to be investing in creating colleges that foster development, improvement, and studying by investing at school counselors, psychological well being professionals, and trauma-informed workers.”

The advert marketing campaign is the ice cream firm’s newest foray into political activism. The model’s founders are well-known for his or her progressive politics. Whereas Ben & Jerry’s is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of multinational conglomerate Unilever, it has tried to maintain up its picture as a progressive model. Its basis gave $5.1 million to “help progressive, justice-focused grassroots organizing” final 12 months.

That activism has typically generated severe backlash for Unilever. In 2021, the corporate was accused of antisemitism after Ben & Jerry’s briefly reduce off ice cream gross sales to some components of Israel. Nevertheless, since then, the ice cream model has continued to donate to different progressive causes.

March for Our Lives is now one of many teams benefiting from the corporate’s activism.

“Our youngsters deserve greater than reactive, fear-driven insurance policies that flip their colleges into prisons and do little or nothing to stop college shootings,” Natalie Fall, Government Director of March For Our Lives, mentioned in a press release. “We’re proud to associate with our associates at Ben & Jerry’s to shine a light-weight on the misguided insurance policies which might be fueling the school-to-prison pipeline.”

The hassle to focus on the potential unfavorable penalties of stationing police in colleges comes as a pair of faculty useful resource officers ended a capturing at a Georgia Excessive College. Whereas they have been unable to stop the capturing that took 4 lives, a number of regulation enforcement officers have credited their comparatively fast response with saving many extra youngsters from being killed.

Nonetheless, the pair referred to as using college useful resource officers and different strategies to “harden” colleges are “outdated, damaged options that flip colleges into fortresses, not locations of studying.”

They mentioned they supposed to make use of the advert marketing campaign to spice up help for the Counseling Not Criminalization in Colleges Act, which was launched by Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley (D., Mass) and Senator Chris Murphy (D., Conn.) final November. That invoice has simply 27 sponsors within the Home of Representatives and 7 within the Senate. All of them are Democrats.

The marketing campaign will likely be supplemented by a mid-September foyer day in Washington, DC, that includes “college students, dad and mom, and survivors” who will communicate with their representatives in regards to the invoice.