that we all live under and that we see reproduced in hundreds of films, television shows and in our communities. So we're here to actually talk about both the real-life experience of practicing other forms of justice as well as people's visions and aspirations for it. I'm gonna briefly just name our three dear dialogueers. And then we'll actually start with a brief video that Miriam Kaba from Chicago who has come here from Chicago to join us from the organization from Project Nia and Miriam will tell you a lot more about that. Danielle Serred from Common Justice and a Jared Stixon who was the founding coordinator of the Safe Outside the System Collective of the Audre Lorde Project. And wanted to start off with a video. I'm gonna turn these the house lights off just for a second so you can watch it and hopefully there will be no technical difficulties. This is off. Just wait till it's paired. Is it paired? Is it paired? Who actually uses Bluetooth? I still have to plug stuff in. It's great! It takes a while. Okay, three, two, one. It takes ability. Turn it up on there as well. And like a lot of 16-year-olds, I was going through a lot of things. It was a real part of all of it. I was in a new high school. I was feeling self-conscious just getting into relationships. But the main thing that pleaded better than inside of me was an anger. And I think this anger that was inside of me that was so apparent to everyone I met, stemmed from negative detention or negative discipline actions that had been put upon me from a young age. Starting back when I was seven years old, getting kicked out of class all the time, told I was a bad student, to be stopped by the police when I was 12 years old and my neighborhood called a savage, told I wasn't right to be in that space that I was making the neighborhood bad, or I'm in a high school and being pushed out of my high school. So all of these things were on my back. These at all times were really negative feelings towards all institutions. And I really appreciate all the painless that were up earlier, but honestly if you came to me when I was in high school and said, come to do a peace circle, this is who I was, laugh. And I would skip that just like I skipped the class. What circles offered to me was a space alternative to the institutions, to the normal place in society where normally people are met with love and are met with care, but based on social and race lines, people aren't offered that. And we have to go find other places and a lot of the time we see us on the streets where we find them. But even there we're met with constant police surveillance, but I was 16 when my friend's house was broken into under suspicion of drug selling and they found three 16-year-olds playing video games. Put an AK-47 to my headset if I moved out or died. And it's kind of funny that we're sitting here talking about a start of justice, almost arguing it when the current system just seems so obliquely unfair and unjust. A lot of things today have made my blood kind of boil and I want to say this, I want to bring it back to the sort of justice is not a new idea or a new thing. It has been practiced by indigenous people all over the world for centuries and centuries. We are the ones who have adopted an arcade justice system that is gripping the throat of young men of color, young men of color. I'm blessed to have circumstances in my life. I believe every community should have a space for them that actually accepts them like precious blood ministries that was mentioned earlier with the other restorative justice hubs that are now being developed. And another thing is if you really want to look for the work you can find it. There's spaces all over the city where it's restorative justice is popular and it's all about getting involved. It's not like this is a brand new idea that's coming. Real quick, what circles offered me was somewhere I was where I could sit and share vulnerability with the other young men in the city, a kind of taboo, not just for young men of color but in general for people that address patriarchy and masculinity in our lives. It was a space that respected me for where I was when I came to it. Didn't ask questions, didn't make me wear a uniform, didn't force me to be there. It was a space where I was appreciated, where my voice was appreciated, my presence was appreciated. It was a space where I could sit with my brothers in solidarity in a city that, if four of us are hanging out of a corner, it's mob action. It's our research that speaks to me a lot to me and I hope that these words today stir something in me. To not to hear us talk about restorative and transformative justice which is really important to me and my life because I'll talk a little bit about how I came to kind of become a practitioner of RJ and TJ. But what you just saw is a video of one of our leaders from a project that we incubated a few years ago called Circles and Cyphers. And Circles and Cyphers is a hip hop leadership development project for young men and now some young women who are gang affiliated or prison involved in some way. And it's the basis of Circles, as you heard the young man Ethan speak about, is transformative and restorative justice more restorative justice than transformative justice though the restorative justice practices are done within a framework that's meant to be transformative, right? And you heard him use language like patriarchal masculinity. I assured you that when he came to the program that would not be the same. But over time as they learn and grow and discuss we think about oppression in context. We think about its impact on our lives. We think about the ways in which it is the glue basically that violences the glue that holds oppression together, right? And so we really think about that on a regular basis. In order to be able to uproot violence we have to be able to uproot oppression. These things are co-constitutive and reinforcing and reproducing. And so we want young people that we work with to also understand that. To understand what's going on in their lives in a broader way not just in an individual, everyday struggle kind of way. Those things are important too but connecting that gives you a political consciousness that allows you to see yourself and understand yourself differently and provides a power that's hard for you to be able to as the system tries to take your power, your gaining power by learning more about what the system really is and how you're rolling it is not just that an individual being oppressed but that we're all in this together and that it's going to take building collective power for us to be able to make these kinds of changes. So our young people understand the notion of collective power building, right? Because that's super important to be able to get free. And ultimately that's what we're trying to do, right? Is to get free. So I wanted you to hear him talk about the project in terms of circles. It's only one part of the work that we do. I'll talk a little bit about some of the other things we do. But I wanted you to hear from his own voice because it's always important for the people who you supposedly are working with who are supposedly most impacted by the thing that you're doing to have their voices heard talking about that thing. Because I can tell you a lot of things but as long as they're not the ones who are experiencing it and I have in my own head as removed as I am that we share a racial affiliation we don't share much else, you know in terms of my experiences and his we didn't come from the same kind of place we didn't have the same kinds of experiences it's important for them to shape and talk about their own lives in an important kind of specific way and I'm glad that you got to see that. So I'm from, I'm originally from New York I was born and raised here so this is coming home for me which is always good and I grew up here on the Lower East Side I have had an experience that is I don't know, maybe not I came to the work of kind of thinking of abolition of prisons from the perspective of somebody who did a lot of work on anti-violence against women and girls stuff so I came out of kind of my politicization started with a concept around race and racism and then moved quickly to addressing violence against girls and young women based on my own survival experience and when I was doing work in the late 80s around anti-violence against women and girls stuff this was a beginning of the process I think the full on process of the professionalization of that movement into a field a lot of the people who had come like a generation before me had basically birthed the movement as something that was radically different than what it's become which is they wanted to end violence and what we have now is a field that wants to manage violence those are not the same things when you want to end violence you build movements to try to do that when you want to manage violence you can build a field that's focused on people having jobs that are professional to treat violence in certain kinds of ways the analysis is totally different and so too is the strategy and the solutions that are proposed I pretty quickly came to doing that anti-violence work from my own personal experience of a survivor of rape trying to figure out what justice looked like for me in my particular situation and I knew very quickly for myself that my justice did not involve the perpetrator of my rape going to prison for lots of reasons but I couldn't find any places that would speak to that because the fields that I had come against only had a couple of options for me and mainly it was report report to the very cops who I had zero trust in having grown up having bunch of my friends consistently harassed, targeted and incarcerated by that same system I had no interest in going to the cops to report but I had no place for me within that space so I tried to struggle and try to figure out what else and I couldn't really find a niche for myself I went and taught for a couple of years at a high school in Harlem and I taught social studies and in my second year one of my students was killed by another one of my students he was 16 and she was 15 and when the murder happened we were all stunned because what we knew of this young man was that he was most certainly not a monster and we all loved him and what we knew about the young woman was that we loved her too and we were left struggling with figuring out where we were going to hold all of these things together and what we were going to do what was going to be the request and in particular if you think about a space where a bunch of young people who had both their friends have tragic one person who did a horrible, horrible thing but was not a horrible person and one person who you loved was no longer here who you want accountability for that person no longer being here too so what ended up happening very quickly was that our school people took sides very fast who was supporting this who was supporting that we had to try to find a way to break through that that's how I came to restorative justice was because I didn't know what to do we had two things pretty quickly become apparent was the district attorney wanted to try him as an adult and that meant 25 to life but if he stayed in juvenile then he'd be out at 21 we knew we wanted to try to intervene so that he'd be tried in the juvenile court it provided our school community something to organize around and we knew we then had to go and speak to her family to ask them how they felt about him not being tried as an adult and whether they would do what seems impossible when you lose your daughter which is to advocate for this person not going to jail for the rest of his life so myself and another teacher went and met with the family of this young woman and what I learned there was a lesson that I'll never forget that allowed me to feel brave enough to always advocate for something different and that was her mother turned to me and said we love him they were dating it was a dating violence situation I never knew about dating violence at that time I didn't know that teenagers had I was not clued in I don't know how many people knew that but I ended up going and doing a lot of work and starting curriculum that were teen dating violence curriculum that I left right after that to do that work but she said we don't want him to die in prison that's not what we want that means I won't have lost two people so she and to her credit everlasting went and advocated for this kid to be put in juvenile he graduated he went into the prison he spent five years he came out of prison this young man is now a social worker a father of three and does some of the most important work in this city with young people again people do bad things without being horrifyingly bad people and we do sometimes have to find ways to account for the harm without disappearing the person and so that became the beginnings for me of trying to think through what else what else that should exist besides this way of doing things how else can we intervene in a way that allows for people to also be able to heal this current system that we have an adversarial incredibly oppressive all the isms that you want to have all together playing themselves out within that system deeply profoundly unfair is not justice for me it's also not justice for many other people so therefore we find ourselves having to look for new places and new things that we can create together that will provide more of a sense of justice more of a sense of an ability for us to repair harm and heal and to do that in some sort of real authentic way so years passed and I started Project Nia in Chicago after having started many other projects and organizations over my lifetime an organization called the Chicago Freedom School an organization called the Women and Girls Collective Action Network I mean just I build organizations I'm somebody who believes that we need to have containers for people's energies to exist in and organizations often offer that as a space for people to be able to use our collective ideas, thoughts, and power to be able to transform and change the world so that's my ability and what my talents like where my talent life I have in me I'm not an actress, I don't draw you know what I mean, I don't do vacations like I have a lot of vacations so I know how to build spaces and create organizations I know how to do that so these are all the things that I came to over a long period of time to remember why it was and I cared about what I was trying to do what I wanted to bring together in one place and that ended up being Project Nia and I was not supposed to talk beyond 15 minutes here's what I wanted to do is allow the rest of my esteemed dialogueers to go off and do stuff and I could talk later more about this nuts and bolts about Project Nia and I can also do that in questions that you may have does that make sense? yeah, let's get back to the nuts and bolts yeah, I can do that 15 minutes 30 seconds we're wrapping her for a reason take a second to let that thank you I'm Danielle Serret and I direct Common Justice which is an alternative to incarceration and victim service program for serious and violent felonies based in restorative justice practices what that means in human terms is that in cases like gunpoint robberies stabbings, serious assaults if and only if the people who are harmed want to people are diverted with the consent of the district attorney into an extensive preparatory period after about three months we bring both parties together with their support people so family, friends, neighbors mentors, people with a stake in the outcome and reach a set of agreements about what the responsible person can do to make things as right as possible those include things you might expect like do community service pay, restitution, apologize go to school, get a job they include things you might not expect like a harmed and responsible party that's what we call victims and defendants or offenders and we do that because it defines their relationship to an event and their whole identity so the harmed and responsible party meeting each other's children so this man who was robbed at gunpoint saying I want you to meet the children whose father you almost took away that night with your gun and I believe today in the father you can be to your baby girl someone say that to her face harmed and responsible parties one who shot at the other in a public park doing a speaking tour in their neighborhood about the impact of cycles of violence on their lives harmed and responsible parties making a movie about their experience in the program together and like learning how to make a movie harmed and responsible party one where the person who really seriously mugged someone else so stole his money and beat him badly taught himself defense techniques so in the course of this dialogue you can imagine how my general counsel felt about that you know in the course of this dialogue the young man who's responsible for this harm says every man older than me in my family has served at least 10 years in prison my older brother served 11 and every one of those 11 years he won the prison boxing league championship and he's the man who taught me to fight and that night on the street I showed you the wrong ends of it but he's also the man who taught me to defend myself and if you want I'll teach you that too and the little talking stick goes we'll talk about talking sticks those are the nuts and bolts they're not even nuts and bolts it's a stick it's like lower tech than nuts and bolts passes it to him and the man who was mugged said I would love that and after I clear the vision of my general counsel from my head you know we start to move forward and in that example we go to the center for anti violence education which some of you may know we're the wonderful director who holds that space for us so that we can do it safely and the responsible person teaches the harmed person self-defense technique so first he stands like he's the one who's harmed and he demonstrates like you push here and twist here and that sort of thing he's better don't use that at home and he does it over and over while the person who was originally mugged is holding him and modeling it and then they switch places and the person who was harmed is there in the position that he was in that night so by the same man who held him that night and practicing these things and first he's not very good at it and then he is increasingly better at it and the person who was holding him is using more and more of his strength until he's using all of it and repeatedly this man is releasing himself from his grip the harmed party in that case had suffered from really serious post-traumatic stress which means all the things that our bodies do when we're hurt so he would say whenever someone came up behind him even if it was a little old lady he would freeze up so his body would freeze his adrenaline would rush, his stomach would turn he would feel hot, his head wouldn't he couldn't think clearly everything would contract and the day after we did that self-defense class he calls me and he's like, y'all I'm calling to tell you nothing happened which doesn't seem like a cell phone emergency call to me and so it's like there's no more and he said, I walked by a six foot four man and nothing like his body didn't freeze, his mind didn't raise his stomach didn't turn and he had about half an hour before he had to be at work he worked in the back of a restaurant for cash and he had been taking cabs home every night which took half of his wages and he had half an hour before he had to be at work and he went to Times Square so he could walk by as many people as possible and he's on the phone thinking, hold on I see a towel and he's like, nothing there are a few so those are some of the agreements the responsible parties have a year to fulfill them they go through a 15 month violence intervention curriculum that supports them and understanding where their values about violence originate in their own experience and their own culture and their own lives interrogating those values setting goals for themselves becoming accountable for what they do thinking about what they owe to whom and why and how to do that and in the meantime we work with the people who are harmed to support them in what happened to them and in their lives generally so you're unique in the country in a couple of ways we're the first alternative to incarceration in the criminal justice system as we know it that diverts cases of serious violence into a process like this so we haven't done that before in this country it is not the first time as the young man in the video said that cases of serious violence have been handled by processes like these these processes are much older than this very strange and effective thing we've invested in profoundly and are embarrassed to pull out of we're also unique in our realism about who victims of crime really are and this connects to the art that you describe so powerfully about the victim's field which is that a young man of color is 10 and a half times more likely than me to be robbed or assaulted and it's still people like me in most victim service programs I deserve them so does everybody else and so we also think about what would victim services look like if we started with a young man of color in mind and we know that doesn't just mean taking out the Madonna quote and putting in a Tupac quote we know that for each of us the way we heal, the way we move through pain what accountability looks like is deeply rooted in our cultures and our experience and so understanding and answering that question means constant deep engagement and dialogue with the young people whose lives are at stake we think about I should also tell you the stories that I'm telling you I have permission to tell and have told in the way I'm telling them to you too the people whose lives are about so if you've heard me talk before and you hear me tell them because I'm boring I may be boring but that's not why because we take people's stories very seriously in the way we tell them very seriously and so I have very specific permission for which stories I share including people being like their stories I'm only allowed to tell in a room that's more than half people of color as best as I can judge it looking into the crowd so like those I can't tell here and so we take those permissions really seriously and honor them so I'm not sharing something that I've that I've been given the honor of sharing with you we know there are a few core lies that we don't believe one of those is at the interest of the people who commit harm in the interest of people who are hurt are inherently opposed we have an adversarial system that makes that increasingly true the deeper you are into the process but then nature of human beings is that our lives are interconnected and our needs are interconnected and even after we've heard each other we remain each other's family and each other's neighbors and each other's community whether we like it or not which means we have an investment in the person who hurt us becoming better because they live on our block and they we may love them or we may just not want ourselves and people we love to be hurt by them but either way that connection remains true we're told the lie that people like me are most likely to be victims of crime that is not a lie invented by the victims movement in the 70s the story that white women are in danger and black men are dangerous is the founding myth of our criminal justice system in America we have been telling that story for a very very very long time and it was not true when we started telling it it hasn't become more true in time so that lie motivates so many of our practices and it's dehumanizing for all of us it is dangerous to the survival of people of color and it is dangerous to our humanity as white people we're told the story the lie that what victims of crime want is for the person who hurt them to be incarcerated for as long as possible fewer than 2% of victims of robbery get help when they've been hurt we have no idea what people want right if I was like well I talked to 2% of people and everybody likes chocolate best it's not bad in your mind it's bad methodology it's like the best analogy I've been able to give is you did a survey in line at the hamburger spot about people's favorite food and we're like everybody loves a juicy burger and you need to talk to the people at the Chinese food spot and at the salad place and the people who brought their own lunch before you have any sense of what it is people want we also have all had the experience of eating something that didn't nourish us that made us sick that was the only thing available and that's what incarceration has become in this country for people who are hurt so when we say to people to victims of crime in the system do you want prison we are asking them do you want something or nothing and of course when we're hurt we want something we don't live the same way we don't always live in the same place we don't work the same way our lives are upended the way we love might be upended do I want something or nothing I am hurting what we find is that after you ask do you want something or nothing which you kind of shouldn't even ask seriously but if you gotta ask it instead of assuming the answer is yes then you ask do you want this or that 90% of the victims we've talked to have chosen common justice over incarceration for the people who hurt them those include people who have scars from here to here lacerations to their liver collapsed lungs, guns to their head some of the things that are not like oh this kid stole a candy bar from my store which are the examples we usually get in restorative justice and they choose it for a lot of reasons some of them choose it because like in the example you've shared they're like this person is my people I know this person or I'm connected to this person or I recognize myself, my child, my loved one and sometimes like one woman her son was really brutally robbed he at first I wanted him to drown and then I wanted him to burn to death and then I realized I didn't want either of those things I wanted him to drown in a river of fire she's like but I have to ask myself three years from now when that, I'll use the word young man that is not the word she used when that young man is walking down the street my nine year old son will be 12 and he'll be coming and going from the corner store and he'll be coming and going from school alone and I have to ask myself where do I want him to have been for the last three years and while if I had a machete in my hand and he were in front of him I would gut him and chop him to bits and bury him six feet under the jail myself if I could I believe this woman the truth is I would rather have him be with y'all so she does what our criminal justice system is incapable of doing which is to make a rational decision about the public safety as opposed to an emotional decision about vengeance to feel the desire to for vengeance to feel the fury to feel the anger to be connected to those emotions and not to choose it as the course forward because she cares about the well-being of her children and her neighbors children and she is willing to put that over her own temporary emotional satisfaction if the mother of a child who's been beaten can do that a system who hasn't lost anything should be able to do it too um the other lie we're told is that we don't know what to do um like we don't know what else to do especially about violence we might know what else to do about misdemeanors we might know if we know to do treatment for drugs if you're here Monday you've heard some thoughts about that um we said we don't know what to do about violence um we are taught that more often than we were taught almost anything else about ourselves and about one another and so at common justice the main thing that we do is get everybody out of the way so we were talking before about what we're experts in I'm like I'm becoming expert and getting people out of the way so that people can do what happens when people sit in a room together and address the harm and say this is what you did this is how it impacted me this is what I want to know this is what I need and the people responsible saying this is what I did and this is the impact I understand because your healing is taken and so is my dignity right in common justice their freedom is too so people who don't complete the program successfully go to prison on average our participants are facing five years all are facing at least one some that faced as many as eight um and so they're they're earning an opportunity to recuperate their freedom but they're also earning an opportunity to recuperate their dignity and if there is anything I have learned in my ongoing process as a white person in this country is that there is no avenue to human dignity other than through accountability um and that it is hard as hell to do um and it is the only way we come back fully to ourselves so it is as much for the people who commit harm as it is for the people who are hurt um that we owe it to make the kind of space for processes where people can engage in the kind of repair that we all fundamentally know how to do when we're not brutally interrupted I'll end with the word interrupted I think I also have to take a second or a moment because wow um I feel really thankful to be here I feel really thankful to the to the foundry and to just be honest stories um so my name is my name is Jera Stixon and I've been working in social justice movements for about the past 15 years and I've been working on violence specifically homophobic and transphobic violence for the past decade you know it hits you in your life okay still me and I still myself and um I didn't start working in violence I actually started in economic justice work and um and part of it I think is because because I'm a childhood survivor of violence I grew up in a um in an abusive home um with a physically and emotionally abusive parent and um so when I started to anti-violence work it resonated with me but it was that place where it was just a little too personal right um and uh work resonates for me because um there's only one time I remember calling 911 and that was when it was like we were not sure if everyone was going to be alive at the end of that night um and other than that um I didn't want my dad locked up I wanted him just supported to change right um so economic justice work was awesome and great and taught me a lot um about building winning campaigns and the nuts and bolts of it and I I'm probably going to talk a lot more about the specific strategies that I've worked on than than analysis because it's also my orientation to the movement I am a deep lover of strategy and I feel like doing transformative justice or community accountability work for me is about practicing experimentation right but like a rigorous experimentation where you try something you write it down and then you're real honest about whether or not it worked and then you try to tweak it you know because the truth is is that we need we need effective strategies I'm not going to sit up here and say this is the world I believe in go forth I'm going to be like I tried these things this work this did it good luck let's chat um so I started um I got hired at the Audrey Lloyd project to work at that point on what was called the working group on police and state violence and they've done a lot of work around police violence police brutality and a lot of anti-war work but they've been trying to launch this project around homophobic and transphobic violence that was happening in Central Brooklyn at the time and I had they were like yeah we have this history in police violence work so we don't want to just advocate for a police to deal with this situation better and I was like bet it makes sense to me I was like I'm going to call the other people who do this work I'm going to like you know just like shift what they do and we're going to be fine it's going to be easy right because that's how I had done it at other places you know like I worked with child care providers what we called other people we just like adapted so we called we called and there are lots of people who do work around community based approaches to violence and they span generations and you're going to hear me say community based approaches to violence transformative justice and community accountability interchangeably because I mean the same thing like how do we address violence work on violence intervene in violence and prevent violence without using police criminal justice system court systems just so that y'all know that it's not like four different concepts that I'm throwing at you so the thing is is that there's a lot of groups that had worked on this around around child sexual abuse there are lots of groups who have done it around domestic violence or personal violence sexual violence the thing that we that dawned on us was that oh crap we're doing this work with strangers because there is a there are lots of ways to hold people accountable outside of the police if you know something about them if you know where they go to school who their family is maybe where they worship what other institutions something else that they care about that you can use to leverage so that they can be held more accountable but when all you know is that this person was at the same place as this person at 3am and you don't even know who else is there because nobody's talking about it what do you do and so we had that realization about a year and we were like this is deep but we did know we wanted to be safe and the thing about either people when they're harming people or being harmed it's an it's an isolating experience right and so we were like if we just were to like make it so that people aren't strangers anymore that can maybe lay the foundation for what we need to actually hold people accountable later and really it was that so we just started to contact institutions whether they were businesses or organizations and say like hey we're like queer folks in the neighborhood how you doing like would you agree to not allow homophobic or transphobic violence in your space and if you don't know what we mean by that that's fine we will talk to you about that we'll even talk to you about how things escalate because many times people understand how violence escalates but when sometimes it's a sound right like if I had you like close your eyes and say imagine the sound of violence escalating you can hear it but we all put our own distinct cultural lenses on it so then when I was talking about homophobic and transphobic violence I don't know what y'all sound like so and I was like okay bet like we're building the thing we need right so and that's what we did we ended up recruiting 15 different businesses and we ended up building strategies and trainings just based on sometimes we did the opposite of the thing that didn't work sometimes we just like had community meetings and said what worked for you what would you want someone to do we created safety tips like that and we we applied what I had learned of as kind of a traditional campaign development model we did a lot of outreach to folks who had experienced violence we hosted a lot of meetings and forums we talked about all the things we needed and then we put them in order and when we thought about what is the thing that we need the most and people are like sometimes I need a place to run to or I need to know where I can go and they say they'll try to keep me safe and then we kind of like slid into like without the criminal justice system which which people were a lot more comfortable with but they were just very quest they're like what do I do and then we start to talk to them and then they'd have all these other strategies so sometimes you just like I think we've all said this you have to allow people to like speak past the thing that we're supposed to not know and allow them to then be like oh but I could do this and so it was very funny the first workshop we ever did we were we borrowed from the June Jordan poem and we were like this is the workshop because we're the ones we've been waiting for and it was really just all of us we created safety tips and strategies off of like okay this thing happened to me I was harassed last night I tried to do this somebody made a really loud sound in the corner and that disrupted the thing we were like loud sound in corner you know and we think about that we we talked to our parents because as LGBT as lesbian gay bisexual transgender people of color it's not like our families had these long histories of utilizing police or the criminal justice system to get you know like it was something that had targeted us so there's actually a body of knowledge and so I talked to my parents who both grew up in Louisiana under Jim Crow laws and I was like okay mom I know in New Orleans y'all didn't call the cops I know you did it they were like you know like in 1950 they did not call the cops in New Orleans to disrupt family violence I was like who did you call but she was like there were these two big dudes one was a teacher a preacher that was not intentional but it was the idea that they were leveraging their community power they were leveraging their community power and they had close ties to say we do not want this to happen in our community and so we were like how do we replicate that world how do we rebuild that how do we just so like sometimes when I was talking to people about an incident or preventing incidents I was like do you know all the stories and people on your regular routes do you know them have you built with them like I was like including like yes the dudes on the corner you need they're going to be there they're going to be there faster than anybody else be there and they're going to know what's going on there was a year I was like so are you building with them because that's your first step it's rebuilding those fractured ties that happen in our communities and leveraging them to challenge violence so okay so I guess I can just go to lessons I think a lot of my my lessons were the first around getting rid of judgment whether I think there's a lot of judgment on both sides from people who practice kind of like criminal justice work and from people who practice alternatives like again you know like and it's true because we're told we're wrong all the time so we have reasons but I'm not going to judge anybody's safety strategy particularly when we're building them and so my first lesson is we did a workshop on there's no what did we call it there's no community ambulance so what do we do instead recognizing the fact that when you call 911 in New York City you also get police and then also how do you negotiate that relationship how do you navigate how do you what can you look out for for safety so we actually the collective was not a place where we said you have to have these politics to come in like do you want to feel safer do you want to work together do you do the things you say you're going to do like that's where because like I I don't know about you all but so many of us have been saved by unlikely allies so we're not going to put like a barrier at the door and we're not going to say you were wrong because you were bleeding and you called 911 we're going to say let's figure out how we reduce the harm in that situation right I think the other lesson I've learned is the more I do the less I know and I was saying this earlier that when someone is like this is the way that you end violence I'm like oh you starting out huh because I at this point at this point I have worked on I think about 25 murders of LGBT people and I can't like there are trends there are trends I don't even need to there are trends I don't need to mention there are trends in like how like how bodies are attacked and things like that but in terms of this is this is the way you address it no it's about keeping that channel open and being able to figure out it's identifying chosen family it's seeing if there's limits for chosen family blood family all those folks in the room to have like an honest conversation with each other and it's navigating the trauma in all the myriad of ways that it manifests in my decisions which I think is also to my lesson question the place where it's been hardest I'm just going to be very honest place where it's been hardest to practice or to figure out the appropriate way to practice community based solutions to violence has been around murder it doesn't mean I'm not going to keep asking but it means that like I think at that point when somebody is gone and there are certain strategies as to what the alternative is it's really hard to say so do you want to do this other thing what is that other thing it could look like this it could look like that people want kind of a definitive notion in that sense of trauma and I thought about that and I name it not because I want people to use it against us and say well that's why community based solutions don't work but that's where we have to step up our game to practice and that's why I went into after ALP to do more traditional anti-violence work not because I was changing my politics but because I wanted more practice and I wanted more exposure and I actually have had illuminating conversations about violence with like the hate crimes task force why because they saw more murders than I did so we could say alright well this is what I see so I would also say like allow ourselves to learn from all kinds of different people because we never know where strategies are coming from I don't know if I have I think the other piece that I've really been thinking about is that I'm encouraging everyone to also to document your practice and share it and share your failures and share your successes because also they're often in context because we need them we have done I think a good job as a movement not that like everybody knows why we do community based solutions to violence but there's been a lot of exposure to the analysis as to why prisons and policing are bad there's a lot of movements right now who are doing some really good work at rolling back prisons are rolling back discriminatory policing and that's where they need all of us doing community based approaches to violence to have a thing to say because when they're saying know this they need a yes fact and we're saying yes because you should it's not going to fly and sometimes we're theorizing while people are dying and and I don't mean to make it that dramatic but I really there have just been times where there was a woman that I was working with whose daughter was murdered who she didn't know was queer by a former by her like a previous boyfriend it was very very early on because like what happened as we started to be practiced or get good without reach was that then people were coming to us for individual support and we didn't know what to do we built it a long time but we didn't know what to do and at first all I did was just listen just listen to her on the phone as she cried what was what came out of it was really useful was she was having so much trouble accessing CVB I don't know if you get prime victims bureau funds their funds for people who have been like victims in the criminal justice system that they can use to access to pay medical bills or other things there's like a bunch of hurdles to go through and if you didn't report then you have no access to them so her struggles helped us realize that we created a community based fund like what we call the living against violence fund which was just like here you go no applications no receipts no verification like you've been through it whatever you need whatever you need but at first I was just listening and listening like now I have a practice on how I do that but before I didn't and so for me building a toolbox of strategies and I really I think Mimi Kim because she actually created this like 700 page toolkit that you can actually I think if you google creative interventions you can you can access the toolkit in that way but the more of us that are actually documenting the practices that we've seen work in our own lives and tweaking and critiquing the others that we come across the more that we build a body of work that when people are in the throes of trauma we can find a way to speak to them through and about I think I'm going to end with like I don't have any sense I want to take a moment to actually thank all three of you I have some questions do you have questions and comments do you have some things collect those we're going to move into that when we start to do this I'm going to pitch out a couple initial ones I think there's a story to tell about project Mia and also maybe for us who are living in New York a little bit also the context of what's happening in Chicago would be great so in the last I would say probably 10 years in Chicago we built an interconnected web of folks who are doing restorative justice community-based accountability and other kinds of community-based responses to harm and I think there's several folks who Mimi comes out of Chicago and she's a good friend so a lot of the thinking around how we think about these things has been going on for quite some time I started project Mia years ago and my initial thought was that we were missing a space particularly for young people who were in conflict with the law to be able to access some of these ideas and thoughts and experiences so when I initially started we were getting referrals from the police we wanted to get at the front level the entry level and be like divert young people from the very beginning of the system because we know that the more they get into the system the worse it is for them and the worse they become so the system just doesn't do a good job of any sort of reclamation any sort of reformation if that's what your hope is it's a criminal punishment system I don't even like to use criminal justice or criminal legal system we have a criminal punishment system that's what we do at the very beginning and we thought well when the cops get a young person then we'll be in a community based setting in our community which is where I'll just park in uptown that we would then be a place where they could send these young people what do you think happened after a couple of years what's your imagination of what ended up happening by setting up a space where the police could send young people no the police what we were expanding the reach of the prison industrial complex because young people who would have regularly been maybe let go not harassed in the first place now there was a place where you could send quote-unquote young people who you targeted or saw as bad so we were actually doing the thing that we didn't want which is getting more young people into the system in the first place yeah because now the cops have a space to send them where that's before they didn't so they had to actually be more judicious and figure out some other things so we stopped doing that then right away we recognized that our role was not necessarily going to be a system hand made where we were going to become another arm for the state we think there's value in that particularly at different points within the system somebody's already adjudicated indicted maybe has a conviction there are other ways in which you might want to partner with the system but for us when our idea was to keep young people out it wasn't a good idea to partner in that kind of way with the system so we had to kind of learn and change and be willing to change and I think you know what Adjara talked about in terms of the notion of always being change like being willing to change and being willing to try things try new things is critically important and I always think when you're creating and making things that's actually the beauty of that is to be flexible enough to be able to try various things because we're all different kinds of people we all respond to different kinds of things we're not the same you can't make cookie cutter interventions that work for everybody you shouldn't want to in the first place part of what capitalism has done is it's actually rationalized everything the same for everybody and we talk about scaling up replication people are not widgets this is really important and I think we all get stuck in it and then God forbid I used to be a funder for a while Lord have mercy as a program officer it's like how are we going to replicate no not everything has to be replicated so we're really clear on that in terms of how we figure stuff out so one angle is circles and that work that we do we also have a wellness program and a wellness space and initially we had a community's wellness room for many many years we just stopped doing that because we wanted to move around in the community and initially we were in one place and because our community is like every other community in the US in terms of an urban center we had a lot of gang issues in terms of turf we also figure that out around where young people can go that safe space within the neighborhood in the community people always say well you work with gang affiliated young people how do they all come together one of the most beautiful things about being in a restorative space is that we've not had one problem with young people who are coming from multiple different gangs they come to circles three nights a week and then do stuff in terms of leadership with young people who are from these various gangs now if they get outside of the space of that then all sorts of beef can pop up so the question is how do we expand these spaces so that beef gets subsumed over a period of time so the wellness space is basically an attempt to use alternate modalities to connect with our community around healing and healing justice and so that's incredibly important to the work as well of transformation is we want people to be well our system is super oppressive we have a lot of unwell people because of oppression and we need to address that in a communal way so that we can actually be able to engage each other in the ways in which we want to be because when I come to you and I'm sick and I'm transmitting my illness to you as well and you have your illness which you're transmitting back to me in that kind of way in that language we're not being able to be authentically connected with each other we're coming with a whole bunch of other stuff we have to find a way to heal from our stuff so that we're coming to each other in a different kind of way and living in this kind of a culture this is very difficult to do across all different social locations that we come from our communities, our values, our backgrounds so we do a lot of work around that as well we also do a lot of work around just kind of getting data and information out into the world from our own voices and perspectives we create a lot of work like we put out zines we do work around we just put out a zine series last year called historical moments of policing and violence and resistance and that's a way for us to be able to talk with each other about the fact that nothing is old everything I mean nothing is new everything is old and replicates and comes back and like folks were up in Harlem not just yesterday addressing police violence right? but that's how Malcolm came into being Malcolm's birthday was on Monday, Malcolm X right? How did Malcolm get known in Harlem? It was from the Hinton Johnson incident in 1957 where Hinton Johnson is beaten in Harlem and they call Malcolm and you go if any of you see that movie where Malcolm is everybody standing in front of the police station and he goes like this and they go that one man should not have that much power that's a police brutality story yeah so that's 57 and before that 1941 riots 1943 riots in Harlem what did that start from? Police? what happened when Harlem went down in 1964? Police? what happened in LA when that went up? Police? like these are not new things right? because certain communities have had antagonistic, hostile, horrific relationships with the cops from time immemorial we know that we want our young people to understand that their history is rooted from that place and we want people in our community to stop calling the GD police on each other we think that's super important particularly in a neighborhood like ours where a lot of non young young gentrifiers are moving in and our calling cops when a kid is just bouncing a ball in an alley standing in front of the they're not thinking about the chain reaction they stand in motion by that one police call so we have a program called chain reaction where our young people interview each other about their encounters with the police it's online alternative to policing.org.com those young people take those stories and then do workshops in the community in caps meetings in other places to say this is what happens to us when you call the cops stop! like you know that's community accountability of a different kind now you've seen this don't pretend you don't know you know if you're afraid in your neighbor in your house you got your windows locked you got the kids out you think and you think you're going to be safe that way you're not you're making yourself scared to death and those young people do not want to do you harm but the fact that you look at them and you think they're going to do you harm pisses the hell out of them and whatever happens they'll be keying your car next week you know what I mean? somebody asked me the other day is it that you walk down the street Mary and Carla's cars parked down here all these other cars are good people flashing people's cars in my car Christine and he's not running me off the street no the hell no and then eventually you know over time it's like they start to know who the hell you are I get calls they want to knock on my door doing Halloween trick or treat I'm like aren't you 16? what's going down? why are you coming for me for some chocolate? that's part of the work so that's what we want to do in Project Nia is make things known to each other make ourselves known to each other stop living in the fear teaching people about our history and understanding that that's where a lot of this kind of oppression needs to be dismantled isn't that way transformative justice is not just about the practice of the talking piece of the circle that's important but one of the things that I think we have lost is this notion that just because you have a talking piece in a circle you leave that circle that's it it's not it, that's just the beginning that's the continuation you need to keep at it, keep at it, keep at it and you need to keep calling stuff out that you see that's not okay right? because people start to trust you and believe in you once they see that you are on their side that's the other thing about young people and people in general people who look at you, I don't like the term ally I think we should all kill that term because I always say, and I say this all the time I rant about allyship I rant about it on Twitter, Vicky knows I'm like, you know what I mean, I do not like that term because it involves no work okay allyship is very easy to talk about I'm an ally to you, oh really show me I want to know what the work is you've done you don't get to call yourself some shit and then sit around and be like I'm that person, no I want to see the work I want to see you where I am I want to know what your investment is and I want you to struggle with me there's a difference, you know so what we need is to build more co-strugglers within our communities to be able to hold what we talk about when we talk about transforming transformation is work transformation is not identity okay, you don't just get to sit there and be like, oh I'm down with the LGBTQ folks but then shit's going down, you know where to be found yeah, I'm down with the black people but you're spouting anti-blackness 24-70 or you're co-signing it by your silence right, so like you got to do some work with me before we can actually transform interesting, so that's part of this as well it's like that, we got to keep on that work so that's a little bit about you know kind of where we're at in terms of Project Nia, there's a lot of work of ours that's online, we are we are committed to information activism, so we put out almost everything we have is free for everybody to download our curriculum, our zines our research all the stuff is up on our website you can also go to thepicis.org and download a whole bunch of stuff that we've done including some short films that we do around restorative justice within schools so you can find a lot of our resources there comments, questions and then turn it back so this hand hand right there, is there a third? want to get in the queue right here okay great I'm just going to ask, as people that practice restorative justice have you encountered or do you believe that there are people who are non-discrimination and even if you try to counsel with love and with forgiveness we'll continue to harm others for whatever reason and what's the answer, what's the restorative justice answer to your personality? great question one you said if folks want to change something they're going to do some sort of change they want to keep it in their jobs like we do for the department home service we've been doing some kind of SRO now so you said that immediately that's what I thought of because the juniors can't keep their jobs Nicole you said something can you tell me something you did the right and it wasn't noticeable but you had to be because you're hungry that's the key to the show and you you guys in the corner I had this conversation with her we should just follow her mother so her mother everyone knows if I send you after the store if you send them they'll be respectful if I send you to the store something happens they'll be the first one to be respectful I'm Danielle I'm Danielle but I'll answer to that I have enormous respect for kids at the home so so have you had conversations yet yes I wasn't supposed to answer that of course you could elaborate a second my question to all three of you is in the restorative justice justice programs are you looking at the mothers of these kids and restoring justice for them because I recently came out of a four-year visit in the federal prison system and had 225 beautiful women walking through a revolving door most of which were mothers of kids who will only end up being in the system and requiring restorative justice and have not been able to by example because their mothers are afraid for one reason or another and it transcended race gender, demographic socio-economic it just transcended everything it had to do with a way that we as women are not dealt with in the system and there are so many over-incarcerated women that until I'm curious about the programs that might start at the root the people who bring these children into a paradigm that doesn't work so those are the three questions and we can answer any questions simple questions one, two words we depend completely on a partnership with the district attorney because once a case is indicted the only way with mandatory minimums that that person can not go to prison is if the district attorney consents and so there is not after indictment a possibility the only way that door can open is with that partnership so we depend completely on our relationship with that maybe elected I can speak briefly to the mothers and children we don't do work with the parents in that way we work with the young people directly but doesn't mean we haven't done what we used to be at a school where we ran a peace room for two years which was an alternative to suspensions and expulsions when we would train community members in restorative practices to go into the school and be there initially we started two and a half days a week and ended up being five days a week we took all of our resources we had to get out of the school because CPS wouldn't fund the project and the program we had to do it all ourselves but anyway through that we had an SRO that was and some of the grandmothers who were taking care of the children came in to the peace room and asked for support various things they needed that they were feeling like completely lost so Clay who was my staff person at the time who was running that initiative started for two years a grandmother circle peace circle so the grandmothers had their own circle that they would need on Wednesdays at the peace room and they would exchange it became kind of a mutual support group more than anything where they had and they built new relationships with each other so they could depend on each other when things were going down part of the problem about being in an SRO was that there was so much lack of trust that was breeded in that space because people were so desperate that they would do things to other people that broke trust yeah and actually what ended up happening is that they then when we left took the circle within the SRO and continued to meet so I think there's possibilities where people being able to connect with each other and grow from that kind of space and use the practices of restoration and restorative justice anywhere and so that was an experience that I saw where caregivers and caretakers of the young people we were working with were getting some sort of a mutual support from each other so that's an example there I can do mothers and I can try to start for me a notation the one about the easel question and I saw just like I'm happy yeah go ahead so with mothers I think there's a long history of mothers particularly with murder mothers who start organizations after after their children have been killed so that's more of my experience working with mothers and a lot of my work is sometimes uniting mothers with friends and family of their deceased children that they did not know were connected to them and finding ways to kind of collectively make decisions in the aftermath of violence and I've done some work of like uniting mothers who have lost children from police violence with mothers who've lost children from homophobic and transphobic violence because there's a lot more commonalities and sometimes folks would think and that I think that some of that work has been like there was a time when we were about to do a workshop in a middle school and around homophobic and transphobic violence and the parents were incredible they were like who let the gays into the school that's when you call the mothers that's when you call the mothers that's when you call the mothers and I was and I called Desire Brazil who was the mom of Sean Brazel who was murdered in 2005 and his body was found in pieces in different parts of Central Brooklyn and I was like Desire I need you because they're not going to listen to me they need you to come with me like not instead of me but I need you to come with me and talk about why it's critical for us to be able to start to have these conversations with young people and the life that you wish your senate had um um I don't think you can address you can do anti-violence if you're not working with mothers if you're not working with families you're doing anti-violence work you're in that kind of broken fractured system perspective as opposed to a community based like I think like repairing harm is about reuniting relationships and allowing a voice and also the empowerment of mothers so that's and um okay so people um part of what I think is that our system treats anyone who's done harm like they are a person who is incapable of remorse like they are a person that is incapable of transformation um and we've already talked about I love people without widgets so I think that's that's um I love folks who've done harm that I've worked with I have not met that person I am open to the fact though that there are times where it can be unsafe for two people to share community with each other and we need to build strategies around that um and I also believe that our system makes people who have done harm uh I think it increases violence right increases and sanctions violence and and I get very and I think when you are a person who's experienced most people I know who have harmed a lot have been harmed a lot that's like the number one that's the number one thread um and the fact that our movements divide people into divide actions into identities of the good people and the bad people um allow us to not support and treat people who have been deeply hurt or people who are deeply troubled and how that can manifest into violence um um and and it was even like I've had so much trouble just finding help for people who maybe I worked on worked first who were quote unquote survivors in their first relationship who then went on to another relationship who were then causing harm and I'm not talking about self-defense I'm causing like this person is in power in control and playing out the stuff that was happening to them and I know that because I think like I've I've I've fucking done that too um so I I yeah so I I do think that it could mean another strategy but I think that that's the first place we go there are these people who are who cannot be supported and we don't look at it from the how did we get here um being somewhere where the thing I say after someone else answers that question that I agree um so that's not usually what happens I think it's really important that um we not think about personalities right I guess there's what we do with those kinds of personalities I think it's important we think about people um I do believe there are people who if they were released today or people who are currently free and often holding high offices um who cannot stop hurting other people yeah I believe that's true yeah um for people in this room who survived series violence we have beliefs about the people who have harmed us yeah we are entitled to those beliefs and I'm not going to argue with anybody in this room about your beliefs about the people who have hurt you um and will hold my own about the people who hurt me wherever they are you know um I believe and this is really connected to what you were saying that there are people whom our system has harmed so profoundly that that harm may not be something we can repair with any tools currently available to us and that to me means two things it means one we are on the hook for building those tools right the same way if there is a disease that people are dying of we got a lot of people trying to figure out how to stop that from happening like we are on the hook for building those tools together that's our job um we shirk that responsibility all the time and it is our job to build those tools so instead of thinking about what people can't be free the question to me is who what type what people and types of harm can we and can't we hold in our communities and how can we build communities that can hold more and more people and more and more types of harm so that the burden of the work is on us the question is what can that community do not how bad is that person what are we capable of holding so for me I was like armed robberies and shootings we can do that the systems like these people are above the line I'm like we can do that give them back right and we do we have a fewer than 10% failure rate find me one prison that comes close what is it fewer than 10% fewer than 10% 8.5% and nobody since January of 2012 has been terminated from the program for new crime 2.5 years nobody find me a prison um so one is like we are on the hook for building things that are more capable of saying no to that question not because there aren't people who want to hurt a lot of people but because our communities are so robust and so strong and so well resourced and I don't mean money that we can hold anything right and then the second thing it means to me is that the harm that has been caused to those people who are most often people of color are most often poor people and I don't mean like Dick Cheney which is a sort of separate conversation that we could have in a different space and we know like the kind of people who like sociopaths actually are most likely to be CEOs not on the throat like it's actually just like even the psychologists say so but if someone has been incarcerated many times like they committed horrible harm they got out they committed more harm they're back in they got out they did it again while they're in they're doing it more on us and to the extent that we have created and benefited from and stood by a system that causes damage that cannot be repaired in our lifetime we are accountable for it and that's a I'm especially talking about white folks in this room like we are on the hook if there is a hell we may go for that right for the things that we have participated in been complicit in allowed to happen watched occur benefited from in our neighborhoods in our rent and all the police to come through to make sure we're happy there and all of it like in all the ways we have benefit from it as it has carried out irreparable destruction on people's humanity that the destruction of another person's humanity is a serious thing to be responsible for and I believe that in my lifetime damage has been done in my name that may not be able to be repaired and that I am on the hook for it and so when I say yes to that question I say yes with a very heavy heart I say yes to somebody who doesn't know that there is a pathway for me to redemption for my part in that for why I just work all the time you know like and I don't mean that I don't sleep I mean that stay in the work so I think that answer is yes but I think it means things about us far more than it means things about the people that we're asking about yeah I mean I would say that for me I've not had that experience in terms of the people I've worked with but I will say that even if I grant you yes that there are some people that the numbers are going to be so tiny that we shouldn't worry about that that our worry is the 99% of people who can be transformed the fact we're not doing enough to make that happen so my feeling is like people telling me you're a prison abolitionist you mean you want to free them all I'm like yeah I actually want to free them all but if you're not down with freeing everybody you pick your group that you think needs to be out and let's free all of those folks tomorrow and let's come back and have a conversation with the rest of the folks that are there and take that group and you know what I mean because one gets stuck in people's head there are lots of bad people who are not in prison and you're living with them right now we solve our problems in community whereby we learn to live with each other outside of you know constantly struggling with oppression right so we gotta hold on to something so tightly that it turns to ash in our own hands we don't have any way to be able to recoup what's real so I think you know again give me the folks you want to give me once we start taking all those folks freeing them then you'll be like the world's not over it's not Babylon moving on next thing right we'll just keep on to the point where all of a sudden it's like we're without prisons you didn't even know it happened you didn't even know it happened you woke up you're like I got no television to watch I'd love to get another round in I'm really curious about this idea of community response as opposed to and I wonder about the trans the transience of communities the gentrification of communities the real estate market as you will and how I mean everything's intersectional right but everything is endlessly intersectional so how do we think about restorative justice when the very meaning of community is constantly in revolution and that's the thing that I wanted to ask only the simple questions I have a question about how to speak with young people about wellness I was a young person while I was entangled in the criminal justice system at one of the court ordered lockdown programs that I was a part of a nice white lady came to teach these really poor brown kids how to touch their toes we call it yoga it was about breathing and it was about moving and that was a personally very transformative thing and that's the practice I've had for 10 years and now as someone who walks into a store and when I buy something people call me sir so apparently I'm an adult apparently in these classrooms apparently you know I'm a 40-figure etc I'm teaching yoga in a very similar situation my location within that situation is just a little bit different and I found myself I co-teach with the white women and I found myself very uncomfortable about not only the way that conversations of wellness are structured in the classroom but also how the organization that I'm working with how those conversations come across whether that's not how they're intended I don't want to say that, I'm saying that how conversations around wellness and on self-control come across as complete serves to legitimize the incarceration of other people saying hey you're out of control so I'm having a conversation tomorrow after a full semester of trying to gain the trust of these young people I'm having a conversation tomorrow about self-control and I am struggling with how is it that I can approach this in a way that is responsible to the young people that I'm working with and also responsible to how much violence they've survived and it's not just diminish that and say hey control yourself and also recognize that they need more effective strategies to survive on the streets because of the police because of X, Y and Z so any thoughts on how specific we need to speak to young people about this very interesting third question I'm not exactly sure how to put this it's triggered by your conversations about community and also I've been involved with a lot of issues around restorative justice and worked in the province but also worked in a fairly entitled university where the students are fairly entitled and this idea of how do you take some of the things that you're talking about into a community where things happen that are illegal or very harmful and there's no process because we only have a process for this that has to be involved in these situations and I do have permission to tell this story I had a student who was white who was raped by a white kid in her freshman year of college and was tormented by it for three years and she wanted to do a project in my class about girls who were raped on campus and confront him as part of the project and she ended up not doing that as part of the project but she suffered terribly and saw him around and he was like the social justice hotshot student and then eventually he asked her out on a date believe it or not through Facebook and she said yes and she met him at a restaurant with a friend of hers in the corner and she looked him in the eye and she said you know you raped me and she went through the whole thing with the hair and the you know him holding her hair and pulling her jam and he went through it but for her we had been talking in the class about prisons and restorative justice she took everything we were studying in the class about torture victims and other kinds of things to her own life to restore her humanity to herself and she told me that after she graduated that she did that but there was no system in the college really I mean honestly the counseling failed her the professors failed her I didn't quite know what to do breaking confidences and she felt like she had to take it into her own hands to make him suffer but there was no I'm sort of curious that your program because it seems like there's much more engagement beyond that moment because then she left and so is that really restoring her humanity to herself we don't know what she just needed to do it and I'm just wondering how in communities that are not considered violent how do we take some of this and practice it in places where you know well how do we deal with that I don't really know can I respond a little bit to that I think one thing that's interesting at Columbia University there's right there's a whole department to deal with sexual assault right on campus I mean this is an example where you know this the Columbia University students aren't the people for the most part sometimes they are for the most part not being profiled by the police not the people being demonized you know this is precisely why Columbia University has the sexual violence response built in because they don't want to expose those very privileged people to this criminal justice system we've been talking about and I feel like that's one of the pieces is for people with more privilege you can usually address it through private means through hiring counselors therapists and having to deal with the state systems it speaks also to your question about communities what do you mean by community we're not just talking about geographic connection sorry to the woman in the back Melanie our communities are all different kinds of spaces that we inhabit so just because your community that you're living in in terms of the geography doesn't mean that you don't have what you make with other people on a regular basis who can address those issues in a similar kind of way so my community is not necessarily just defined by my neighbors where I live but my community is a larger group of folks a lot of the conversations have been who's on the street we've talked about it that way but the concepts of transformative justice can be applied to various kinds of communities however you choose to define where you are the issue about when you said it's not just that the this young person was failed by these institutional systems but the criminal legal system fails survivors of violence all the time rape victims in particular who since we have very small numbers of people who actually get convicted for rape and put behind bars in the first place 96% of people don't get that justice from that source anyway which is why if you build up more of these alternative kind of spaces and many of her friends were trained and could feel that they would have provided her with that kind of angle that she wouldn't have been left alone with so when we talk about transforming justice we're talking about that in a mass way that is not just in your own little pocket but it's your little pocket and my little pocket that intersects together kind of like the rings of the Olympics and we end up with this massive thing I don't want to be using the Olympics I'm thinking about Brazil lots of things are going down so that's what's going on and we're laying this scaffolding that allows the main reason I care about transformative justice is because I was a survivor and transformative justice allows for my voice to be heard in a way that the system can't hold and will never be able to hold so it's survivor centered it's literally survivor defined all the time because the survivor doesn't have to engage if they want to they can engage the person who is the perpetrator can engage anybody can engage that's the beauty of the notion of it it's that we have within our power an ability to be able to work together to solve the problem and repair the harm the reason I don't use restorative justice even though I've been using it tonight is because for the most part if the harm has happened we've been depleted of resources people were marginalized in the first place and I don't want to restore them to the horrible mess that they were living in before I want to transform that mess and I want something new in its place that's better, that's without oppression that has a different vision to it that's what transformative justice for me suggests and it asks you to move beyond the interpersonal and it asks you to connect to structural and systemic issues in a way that that's right so there are lots of things that you can think about this way but what I guess we're all asking you to do is to get out of your today imagine something different that allows you to actually be able to live to the fullest that you can possibly live fighting oppression on a daily basis finding communities where you find them healing from the harm that's caused to us in multiple different kinds of ways and that you can do transformative justice that are wonderful too getting together with people in celebration is also possible it's also part of transforming justice we're not only needing to come together when there's conflict we can celebrate each other we can welcome each other back into the community after we've been ripped out we can find ways to make this a positive project I am an abolitionist because it's a positive project I'm building something I'm not just trying to dismantle there's a difference so you have to think about the world differently in order to be able to inhabit and create that world that you want to live in but the anchors of oppression are so deep that we get so stuck and we are so afraid we are so goddamn scared and of what I'm not sure because what we're living in right now sure ain't good you know what I mean? the other side is scary but I promise you it's not as bad as what we're dealing with right now move from what you don't know what's going to be there but go go! figure it out! she goes battling guess what you can fix it community change question but I have had a lot of experience with it so I'll share that which probably my last year at the Audre Lorde project some of our major safe spaces were like being evicted or in the process of losing where they were and so we took up that as another fight for our own safety like fighting for our safe spaces to stay here's the part that got hard there weren't enough of us there weren't enough of us to do both and it was really hard good things that happened were wherever people ended up the work that we all did together changed us and they took it if they ended up in the Bronx if they ended up in Atlanta but they took it and so there was there's something there in the sharing and the building that was worth it and it's not that we lost so many folks that we couldn't continue it we also were very clear about like it was really important for us to talk about gentrification because we had a membership of folks some folks who would consider themselves gentrifiers some who grew up in the neighborhood trying to work on violence and many times LGBT queer and trans folks of color who grew up in their neighborhoods can sometimes be read as gentrifiers when a gentrifying process is happening so it's just like it's like at the end targeted in that like newcomer stuff those things like first the artist then the gays so it was really important for us to keep building keep base building I think for me traditional organizing was super important for me we keep doing outreach even when there's new folks we keep asking about businesses even when there's new businesses and we take up that struggle for us to figure out and the prioritizing because what would happen is first we're working on safe spaces then we're working on safe spaces in individual cases of like violence because we couldn't say we work on violence and then if this person comes it's not work on it then our safe space is starting to go and we were like do an outreach like a mother but that capacity question that I think it's really critical for me to share is something that SOS still struggles with a lot and that I think we all will continue to struggle with and it's really like how are we building effective movements in the face of ever changing opposition that's what it is I want to say something small on the wellness piece too I've had a lot of white people try to teach me wellness and and it really hasn't worked and it does feel like a form of control right a form of like controlling something that is bad or wrong about me or like you know I work too much I am too much and you're going to have me do all these things to rest so I'm more palatable to you fuck that meditate now I need better but we need to do that within a structural analysis so we need to talk about wellness within a structural analysis to talk about like a lot of my overwork was trauma based running from stuff if I keep busy I'm not dealing with it if I work with people or four people who had it even worse than me then I don't ever have to see myself so that's my own stuff that eventually kind of like hit me like I had a whole bunch of health issues that happened last year from me not taking care of myself but I needed to have that space with other people of color with other survivors with people to say like we need you to be here we need you to be here because we have mad shit to fight and all these forms of oppression are playing out you are punishing yourself as part of your own internalized response to oppression so we are going to help you slow down we are going to learn I'm learning to address my own anxiety which I'm very certain is connected to my experiences of oppression and my experiences as a survivor so I do meditation to address my anxiety I do like all these different things but we have to have wellness within a structural analysis when people are sent to organizations just an isolation of the structural conditions it is another form of oppression we need to find a way to break that dichotomy and say like we are doing this so that our communities can thrive and we are doing this with people because for me someone had to say to me like yo I've been through blah blah blah blah and I was like oh really okay because otherwise like this white lady who didn't seem to me like she had problems telling me to breathe deeply I was like people are dungeoning I didn't care so I think part of what we need to do is think critically about I don't think the tools of wellness are inherently oppressive but the delivery can be and we have to think about how to shift those relationships and how to have more of us prior to be like these are the things that happened to me when I was not taking care of myself to then start the conversation like that and to find us different ways to deal with our anger, our trauma our oppression that allow us to live a little longer to support people did you ever do something with the young people already that was a what we call it the stop start continue have you ever done that project with youth before so you might ask them what do they do to take care of themselves and come up with a brainstorm list of all the different things and you allow them to say everything whatever what do you do to take care of yourself and then you ask each them in their small group to identify what they want to start doing each of them to make a choice what on this list of all the different ways that all these people in this room together came up with this crew of like what we do to take care of ourselves what you as an individual want to start doing what you want to continue doing and what you want to stop doing and you'll be shocked to see at the middle of that stop list a whole bunch of stuff that they've already identified as destructive to them you use that list of the things they want to stop doing to build your wellness program your wellness conversation offer you see what I'm saying because it's come from them you're not the one telling them you eat too many Cheetos and flaming hocks and you're drinking that red toxic you know I want them to stop too right but if it's coming from Miss Kava saying it no matter what my intentions are it's just heard differently it's heard like their mother telling them to stop eating whatever but if they looked on that list and they came up with it themselves the things they want to start doing now to take care of themselves the things they want to continue doing that they think is positive and the things they want to stop doing you have the basis now for them to have a conversation with you about their own self-care do you see what I'm saying that that spring I mean of course my pedagogical model is not to go sure of course that's not the model my analysis brings me to recognize that there are not simply like analytical and psychological contours of violence the way that we've experienced violence has not simply shaped our minds but the physics a lot the ways that our bodies are in relation to the world or they're not just an example of this man who when someone another man walks up behind me he doesn't decide to be to feel that any more than a young person on the street who's assaulted by a police officer decides to fight back and so the question for me is how can we bring like embodied somatic practices into the discussion around social structural analysis which we seem to be too like these are two totally different worlds and there are people who are having meaningful conversations about the embodied nature of socialization and there are people who are having amazing conversations about structural violence and there are very few people that are bringing those things together in my experience up to this point unfortunate for me no but I'm just saying like those are some ideas though of things you can use to build the conversation and then add in your own curricular pieces you know like one of the things you might want to do to get them back in their bodies might be to ask them to act out the thing that they want to stop doing with their bodies silently non-verbally you know what I mean so like I've been working with young people a very long time and what I have always found to be helpful is that when we start with the base of their knowledge and they're talking about themselves from a certain kind of place I can do almost anything with them they'll probably go down the road of trying anything with me if it's their words being used to support that thing right so just again throwing out those ideas and then saying like use your pedagogical knowledge of the things you know how to do to leverage that and lift that up and connect it to your practice you know you can do a lot of stuff curriculum wise you know I write curriculum and do a lot of curriculum building and those are the things we try to do is use the indigenous knowledge of the people in the group to make your practice of what you know how to do really connect with them yeah so that I think that those are some ideas and ways to really build that thing get it all out there I didn't tell you to stop doing this you told me now now you act that out show your peers how to make that done just by movement you know and trust with each other now two of you pair up and work it out together right and then like building the thing next thing you know you got them breathing you know what I mean and they even know they were breathing they work but they didn't know that they were breathing right you didn't even know you didn't even know in terms of just the question about like the survivor of the university and that sort of thing the thing I would say about that is that while the criminal punishment system is applied primarily to four people of color it's not messaged as that right we're not told we have this justice system for black people and you can see because everyone in line is a black person except for the lawyer and the four Latinos you know like we don't talk about it as what it is we talk about it as the system for all of us the longest standing alternative to incarceration in the United States is whiteness all of us white folks have committed crime and not gone to prison people have seen to engage us in other ways to support us in other ways in concrete ways we get probation at worst right we are seen as people who made mistakes we are trusted to our parents are trusted to parent us they're allowed to systems trust our parents to parent us right we take that for granted that is no damn joke right so all the time we are given opportunities we write essays instead of getting handcuffed and we go to detention and someone takes an interest in us and we do art projects and they encourage us and they you know it's like all the time and so when we say one of the lies is we don't know how to do it every white person has been through an alternative to incarceration in this country all of us and for most of us the life outcomes in terms of better income like check better health outcomes check right the long term outcomes of the most massive alternative to incarceration in history are really fucking impressive we beat them all the time and so we know things about what it looks like the downside of that and the down or the down there are a lot of downsides like our humanity is damaged in the process but because it's inequitable but the downside when we deal with cases of serious harm is that the stories are told about our collective incapacity to handle harm that are told to us so that we will tolerate the imposition of the system on people of color are told to us about ourselves too so our ability to do anything else for something serious also atrophies because if we start to build it then we might be like this is the white people's alternative to incarceration for violence for white folks because we believe that we're innately morally superior we build that in name so when we approach cases of serious violence the larger process of our imagination of our dignity of our belief in our own capacity atrophying because we are told we don't know what to do and we internalize that comes back to hurt us too because then all of those creative things we might have built that we know how to do that we could grapple toward together making a lot of mistakes along the way are ripped from us as much as they're ripped from anyone else because of that larger story that has to be told to everyone in order to be believable like one of the things that has been really important in my development in this work as a white person is understanding that part of why violence against black people exists is to keep me from struggling with them right so part of why poor white folks tend to align with rich white folks instead of poor black folks even though their conditions their food their living conditions their needs are far more aligned is because we is because of the fear of being treated the way black people are treated and if that stops being too scary then we start to think maybe we can organize maybe we can organize a union across racial lines like you listed on all the impedances that were police brutality also the other moments that you see will be moments across racial organizing especially among poor folks right and so the thing in order for that to remain terrifying enough to keep me if I am a poor white person from operating in line with my own self interest in line with my own liberation in line with having food on the table and healthcare for my children and education for myself and the people to come and ask me to roof over my head if I have to be given a lot to not fight for that and so the alternative has to be terrifying and so while violence against people of color I believe is carried out because of deep seated racism because of hate in order to oppress people of color I know that it is also carried out as a lesson to me to stay in my place and that and that means that the more we as white folks organize the likelihood that the violence against people of color will escalate is really real because that's how we are intimidated right and so we have to be prepared as we build movements to build capacity to be responsible for that to respond to that and to not be like oh these terrible things are happening to other people think goodness it's not us or it's so sad and God forbid we ever say oh I wish it was me in that place because that's a lie that respects the pain but for us to be ready to recognize the way these stories are are not just targeted at folks of color but are lessons for us about how we can and can't and children shouldn't live that's a long answer to what to do about an incident at university thank you I want us to have a chance if you do have some time to stick around just hang out so we can talk to each other in a more informal kind of way in I think these were your words Jaris I hope that this dialogue has been a space that allows people to speak past the things that we're not supposed to know I hope we can make more spaces to speak past the things that we're not supposed to know and just want to say thank you again to the three of you thank you