In Indiana, “We Keep Us Safe” is more than a slogan. It is a commitment to build the relationships, leadership, and institutions communities need to protect one another and shape their future.
Josh Riddick is a central leader in that work. A pastor, racial-equity trainer, civic dialogue facilitator, and community organizer, Riddick serves as an Indiana state organizer with LIVE FREE USA. His organizing connects faith, identity, public safety, and the development of emerging Black leaders.
Building Community-Led Safety
LIVE FREE Indiana brings together clergy, directly impacted people, community leaders, and partner organizations to address gun violence, mass incarceration, over-criminalization, and the systems that make safety unequal. Its goal is to build community-led alternatives rooted in dignity, healing, accountability, and opportunity.
Riddick helped launch the Black Church Coalition in 2021, creating a vehicle for Black clergy to act together on public policy and community priorities. He has advocated for trained clinical professionals—not handcuffs—as a response to mental-health crises, as well as oversight, transparency, and public-safety systems residents can trust.
His work also addresses the barriers facing people returning from incarceration. As a founder of the Validus Movement, Riddick has helped challenge obstacles to stable employment, civic participation, and a genuine second chance. Incarceration does not end at the prison gate when housing, work, and opportunity remain out of reach.
Faith Becomes Organized Public Action
LIVE FREE Indiana and its partners also support immigrant families and Indianapolis communities. Through the Indy Action Coalition and local faith networks, congregations become places of information, support, and collective action. Families should be able to worship, learn, work, travel, and seek help without fear.
Cultural storytelling strengthens this organizing. The Cost of the Cage, a short film featured by the chapter, confronts the human toll of mass incarceration—the families separated, communities destabilized, and opportunities lost. It creates space for directly impacted people to be seen as leaders, not statistics.
The strength of the work is its infrastructure. A press conference can draw attention to a crisis, but organized relationships keep people moving after cameras leave. Congregations, neighborhood leaders, returning residents, and advocacy partners form a base that can identify problems, develop demands, and hold decision-makers accountable.
Josh Riddick and LIVE FREE Indiana are building that base. Their work shows that faith can become disciplined public action, directly impacted people can lead policy change, and community safety is strongest when people have the power to create it together.
