One of the nation’s biggest ice cream brands has joined with a gun-control group to push for removing police from schools.
On Friday, Ben & Jerry’s announced it partnered with March for Our Lives on a new digital ad campaign. The pair launched an ad campaign they said would primarily target swing states, including Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. They didn’t say how much money they planned to spend on the ads but said the ads would run on Facebook and Instagram through October 2nd.
“For too long, our approach to student safety has been to harden our schools with armed police officers, locked doors, fences, and metal detectors, all of which have proved ineffective in protecting students,” Christopher Miller, Global Social Mission Director at Ben & Jerry’s, said in a statement. “Instead of investing resources that make our schools feel like prisons that disproportionately impact Black and Brown students, we should be investing in creating schools that foster growth, development, and learning by investing in school counselors, mental health professionals, and trauma-informed staff.”
The ad campaign is the ice cream company’s latest foray into political activism. The brand’s founders are well known for their progressive politics. While Ben & Jerry’s is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of multinational conglomerate Unilever, it has tried to keep up its image as a progressive brand. Its foundation gave $5.1 million to “support progressive, justice-focused grassroots organizing” last year.
That activism has sometimes generated serious backlash for Unilever. In 2021, the company was accused of antisemitism after Ben & Jerry’s briefly cut off ice cream sales to some parts of Israel. However, since then, the ice cream brand has continued to donate to other progressive causes.
March for Our Lives is now one of the groups benefiting from the company’s activism.
“Our children deserve more than reactive, fear-driven policies that turn their schools into prisons and do little or nothing to prevent school shootings,” Natalie Fall, Executive Director of March For Our Lives, said in a statement. “We’re proud to partner with our friends at Ben & Jerry’s to shine a light on the misguided policies that are fueling the school-to-prison pipeline.”
The effort to highlight the potential negative consequences of stationing police in schools comes as a pair of school resource officers ended a shooting at a Georgia High School. While they were unable to prevent the shooting that took four lives, multiple law enforcement officials have credited their relatively quick response with saving many more children from being killed.
Still, the pair called the use of school resource officers and other techniques to “harden” schools are “outdated, broken solutions that turn schools into fortresses, not places of learning.”
They said they intended to use the ad campaign to boost support for the Counseling Not Criminalization in Schools Act, which was introduced by Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley (D., Mass) and Senator Chris Murphy (D., Conn.) last November. That bill has just 27 sponsors in the House of Representatives and seven in the Senate. All of them are Democrats.
The campaign will be supplemented by a mid-September lobby day in Washington, DC, featuring “students, parents, and survivors” who will speak with their representatives about the bill.
