I just wanted to speak for like a second about a pivot and a sort of collection and a continued inquiry going forward. And I think that a couple of things occurred to me that I wish I could share with you because I would love to have a conversation with every single person afterwards. And one is something occurred to me yesterday about the word movement and about thinking about all of the various things that are going on all over the place. And I wonder if we might even think of replacing the word movement even in our imagination with the word ecology. Thinking about all of these little things that are growing all over the place. We don't know yet exactly what we are or even how they will all connect with each other. So it's kind of like our understanding of ecology, what is connected and how is it connected. So I just wanted to share that kind of frame of inquiry with you to see if anybody responds and we can talk about it a little. And the other thing that I would like to say is that yesterday when we were talking about the invitations that we made to the Shacklowist movement and to the Landless Workers movement, these movements are so enormous. There are so many facets to the orientation of them and it's impossible to talk about in 20 minutes. It's an ecology unto itself. And I think that I want to encourage everyone to spend some time on the internet and really go deeper into the work that these people are doing. The protest politics are really only an entryway in some ways, an entryway into a living structure that is so forward thinking and complete. And I can't tell you enough, I can't say enough how many people are influenced and inspired in their own work by the complexity of these movements. And so I really really, I thank our speakers so much for having to fit in 20 minutes. And I really want to encourage and please to find out about the living day to day of these movement structures. And then the last thing I wanted to say, and then I'll be done, the last thing I wanted to say is that I'm a maker. I make things. I'm a theater maker in particular. And I chase with all my heart beauty in everything that we try to make. Sometimes that beauty has nothing to do with message in a way that is understood as message or what have you. And I think that there's a lot of, in the ecology of who we are, there's a lot more room for us to consider our relationships to people whose lives are completely consumed with trying to manifest beauty, which is maybe the most elusive, it's like trying to bring God down. And I just want to say that part of the work of the Foundry itself, and the reason I started it in the first place really was to investigate and reorient the relationship between artists and activists, which I think has a lot of history of different kinds of words and relationships. So I thank you. I wanted to share that it was important to me. And I really want to talk to every single person who is here when it's all over. So thank you so much for letting me share that with you. So on Friday night we got to hear from Andrea Smith and Nelson Johnson and Grace B. Boggs. And for those of us that were able to be there, I just think it was such a powerful conversation. And we got to follow it up yesterday with our two presentations. Another politics with the South African Chacoas Movement and the Brazilian Lamas Workers Movement, followed by another media with Flalia Acunha from La Vaca and Diana Nucera from Allied Media Projects. So we're continuing this investigation into other ways to do things. And our first one today is called Another Safety. And we can think of that as how do we respond to the violence and harm that we experienced that's produced in our society? How do we respond to that thinking outside of the criminal legal system that we're inside of today? Our two presenters today are going to not just talk about why that's important to do, they're actually going to tell us and show us a little bit about how they do it. Our first presenter is Mimi Kim from Creative Interventions in Oakland, California. Hi everyone. Can you hear me? Is this mic on? So I would have to partially read my presentation today. I don't usually do that. But I was a little nervous. A little more nervous than I usually am about doing. Talks today in part because RJ might not know but sent us an email that gave us some indication that we should make this like a TED talk. And if anybody has seen a TED talk, you know, it's very well choreographed. People probably spent six months practicing it from the mirror. And I didn't do that. He also had a link that connected to Bobby McFerrin rousing the audience and that was a little bit daunting. So you're not going to get that kind of performance. I'm sorry, maybe next time. And what you will get is a condensation of a lot of different things that I'd love to be able to talk about and hopefully point towards so that when we can have a little bit more engagement as we go on and make this a kind of participatory experience that I think that RJ and Melanie have imagined and have really been able to make happen in this really amazing event. So I want to thank the Foundry Theater, of course, and RJ who I've been long connected with and Melanie who I've just met today for making this event and a really incredible event happen. And thank all of you for coming and being part of what I hope to be a very participatory afternoon. I wanted to start with a little bit about myself and that I'm a Korean-American. I'm the daughter of immigrants. My father is a refugee from North Korea and my mother is from South Korea. Both have been fleeing the devastation of the Korean War and my mother from the internal war of a family torn apart by violence inflicted by her father, my grandfather. So I come from a country in which a civil and global war left one out of four dead, setting brother against brother, sister against sister. So it's probably no wonder that I've been seeking solutions to both intimate and state violence and I've also been very interested in how we can keep communities together and not apart. I also came into the anti-violence movement in the late 1980s. This was during a time when the movement was mostly white women, serving mostly women of color. But it was also during a time when many of us were from communities of color and were interrupting the dynamics of the movement. I'm still going to use the word movement, sorry Melanie, by starting anti-violence programs in our own communities. And for this, for me this meant that I was involved in the late 1980s in starting a Korean domestic violence program in the Korean community and another Korean program in Oakland some 12 years later. For me this also meant that I was taking a largely white model for violence intervention and colorizing it for communities of color. At that time we were fighting for inclusion because there were so few points of access for women of color seeking help around violence. But we largely accepted the basic assumptions of the white anti-violence movement. Now there's, you know, one could give a two, three hour talk on what those assumptions are and I'll try to make this brief. So what are some of these assumptions? First that intimate forms of violence, domestic violence and sexual violence were overwhelmingly about gender and not necessarily about race, class, sexuality, immigration status, ableism and so forth. This movement had moved from discussion of self-determination and liberation towards a concern about effective services and the assumption that safety was the overwhelmingly primary goal. There was also the belief, and this isn't talked about as much, but there's a belief that people who do harm mostly are men and they are men who cannot change. And that putting energy into trying to change men or the conditions of violence was at best a waste of time and more likely would be coddling men, colluding with the enemy and inviting greater danger. There was also an unquestioning, unquestioned willingness even if one wasn't crazy about the criminal justice system but there was a willingness to call violence against women a crime. So how do these assumptions shape options in a movement? If someone is in a relationship with a person doing harm who can never change then what are your options for safety? The only safe option is to ultimately leave, escape or remove yourself physically from the individual person doing harm. If the person doing harm cannot change and is wasteful, coddling, colluding or dangerous to deal with that person then what are your options for safety? Engaging that person is not an option and has not been very much an option for the movement. The only safe way to engage that person then may be to turn that person over to the state and make that their business. What is the role of the community in this model? Increasingly the movement got left to professionals and the criminal justice system. The community rather was seen as a place of danger and or ignorance. And our job as and I'm saying this as somebody who's worked in the movement was to educate the community to recognize violence but to not trust the community to do anything about it. Rather when somebody asked what can I do we gave them our crisis line numbers and we told them to call the police. So even now there's really an increasing critique of this basic set of assumptions but what is often called the over alliance on the criminal justice system. But I would say that today perhaps 99% of crisis lines across this country and I believe this is probably becoming more of a global phenomenon you will still hear the voicemail message if you call if you are in an emergency call 911. So it doesn't say if you're targeted by the police maybe it's not a good idea to call 911. If you're undocumented you may be subject to detention deportation and the possibility of never seeing your U.S. born children again. If you're in the same gender relationship you may both be arrested. If you're transgender you may face humiliation if not brutalization. If you want to stay with your partner you may be encouraged to get a restraining order which will make staying with your partner a violation. If you cannot don't speak English don't want to are politically against or afraid of calling the police well that is not in the voicemail message. So to be brief our options have been and still are in many cases for the survivor to leave for engaging the person doing harm to call the police and for the community too often we see that separation and dislocation are the only solutions to violence. Many of us who started immigrant programs in the immigrant community such as what I described before and in other communities of color and in queer communities found that many people wanted violence to end but they didn't want to leave their relationship. Many didn't want to call the police many did not trust the police or fear the police and many did not have the luxury of escaping to safety shelters or other programs may not have been and may not be safe places for them to go to and leaving once community may play someone at greater risk of racism hemophobia, ableism and so on and may remove them from material and emotional and spiritual resources that someone needs to survive. For me personally I experienced these limitations in a very real way. I have a friend, a very close friend and I'm also friends with her partner or I was friends with her partner I knew they had a troubled relationship and I came to find out that there was violence as well. All of the resources I knew about shelters, crisis lines, the police, the courts she knew about all of them and she didn't see any of them as an option. I at the same time had some idea that I could talk to the partner it was somebody I knew it was somebody that I had a caring relationship with a respectful relationship with. I was outraged and I continued to be outraged and I still cared. I had the idea that confronting him alone may have been dangerous not only for myself but for her there were any form of retaliation but I also had this idea that if I could involve other people in a strategic way that we may have been able to do this in not only a safe way but in a way that may have actually made a difference in this relationship. With all of my years of training I had no skills and no information to tell me how to move forward and I had everything to tell me that this would be a foolish if not dangerous act. At that time I imagined what it would be that I would need and that's when the idea of creative interventions came to mind. What did I need at that time? I needed a place where I could talk about what was going on where I could find resources models, tools to support myself to gather friends together to talk with the survivor and to come up with a solution that we could at least have tried even if not successful. A place where we could support ordinary people in places where they live, work, organize and gather to intervene in and prevent violence without necessarily relying on the state and without necessarily even relying on our conventional domestic violence sexual assault resources. So I wanted to give this to you as a bit of my personal journey coming to the place of starting creative interventions but I'm also here today talking to you because there's been a social movement and for me the social movement has been largely launched not only with the anti-violence movement which I will give credit to starting in the 70s but with the founding of INSIGHT in 2000 and for those of you who know the work of INSIGHT when the color gets violence or saw Andy Smith on Friday night you perhaps are familiar with INSIGHT. It was also launched by the founding of critical resistance in 1998 which was a prison abolitionist organization and I think that together that we were finally able to look make this the intersection of intimate or gendered violence and state violence at the center of our concern and not something that was just a side issue. At this, by the, by year 2000 many of us had been working in our own communities for quite a while and had come to see the many limitations of the way that we have been doing the work. We had many critiques against criminalization and our reliance upon the state but there was, there were so few places where we could talk about this, this was happening you know the meeting after the conference in the bathroom during the break at someone's home after you had come back from a gathering of anti-violence advocates and they were always on the side they were always brief and they were always only a pocket of us and we weren't sure what other people were thinking well we kind of found out in 2000 that there weren't only just a couple of us that were thinking about that and it wasn't only even the twelve or so of us that were gathered to start this organization called Insight but in fact thousands of people that were resonating to this concern thousands that tried to go to the first Color of Violence Conference in 2000 of which I think a little over one thousand were able to make it so we knew that this wasn't just a few of us talking about this was in fact a movement and I know that many of you in this room are part of this movement as well since this time then this critique and the call for alternatives has been a very powerful force there's many different terms floating around and we have discussion about what they mean and what is one compared to another but perhaps you're familiar with community accountability transformative justice and the more modest community-based responses to violence perhaps when we have the conversation later on we can talk more about these differences if there are any with overlapping and why it's really good perhaps to have a lot of different names to call things so that we don't all get centralized and that we keep generating new ideas I want to give credit to some people I know here from Philly Stanza challenging male supremacy project Generation 5 an unnamed South Asian group in New York City anybody here from that remaining unnamed support New York harm-free zone harm-free zone New York in later Durham a lot of folks and I'm sorry if I other people in the room there's actually many many across the country at this point it's really beautiful to see what also became clear at that time and we're talking about the early 2000s was there was just a lot of work to be done I actually imagine at that time we would find all kinds of alternatives and what I found was there were very very few that exist or at least that were documented and that most of what we saw as restorative justice for those of you have heard that term involve the state and we were looking for non-state examples I think one shocking thing for me and this is probably true today is people could not even imagine what an alternative would be so there were all sorts of people that thought okay I like I agree with this critique I like the idea of alternative but what does this look like so one of the things that I think I came to realize this is actually nothing new people have been doing community accountability community-based response to the violence probably since violence began they aren't always done well they may not always be done with values that we would consider liberatory and certainly they're not really written down for us to look at but people have taken individual and collective action to try to intervene in violence we know this and I began to hear these stories in going around it started to have these conversations about the critique and about alternatives people invariably started saying we don't know what this is I can't imagine what this is I'd say 15-20 minutes into the discussion somebody would say oh do you mean is it kind of like when I heard about a high school a group of high school friends who found out that their friend was being beaten by their father and they confronted him oh, is it like and this is another kind of example when we took our sister's husband and beat him with every garden tool that we had in the shed well is this what we mean this leads to many many interesting questions that the anti-violence movement wouldn't look at because they didn't consider these to be interventions and certainly wouldn't consider anything violent to be an intervention that we really need to grapple about and talk about and I'm not condoning about so I'm just saying that these are some of the conversations that I think that we need to have this became the basis of a storytelling and organizing project hearing these stories that well I have the privilege of hearing these but other people would love to hear these too and I want to find out about those high school kids who started it wasn't useful to stop did the girl feel grateful did it lead to more violence these kinds of questions about how things work how we can make how we can improve things and how we can be inspired to do these things ourselves so this was a basis for the storytelling and organizing project and it's a way for me to tell you a little bit more about what we're talking about for creative interventions when we say community based intervention to violence we purposely chose what we consider to be a fairly unsexy name, community based interventions to violence in part because we wanted this to point to very ordinary things and let the stories speak for themselves and the actions speak for themselves prefer not us to not get caught up in something that might be marketable might lead to good publicity but rather something that will really generate kind of actions that will be what becomes prominent so we were looking for stories about anybody who did something to address, reduce, and prevent violence that was collective and by collective we mean it could be 2 people, 3 people 5 people, 20 people that does not rely upon the state does not rely upon shelters, hot lines of service organizations and had some say to this project had some element of being successful that may mean that the actual intervention was a total failure in many ways but the survivor felt like at least somebody tried to do something for example there were stories like that it made us really rethink what we thought was success in terms of intervention and I'm going to at this point read you part of a story that someone gave us from a Maori community in New Zealand and we had a chance to interact and talk to them about some of the things that we were doing here in the US and certainly they had been doing probably for much longer in New Zealand and somebody said well I think I have a story something I have in my family and most of our stories actually are interviews and transcripts and this one in particular was one that she wrote and put together I'm sorry that I'm going to give you a little shorter version but just for the sake of time this is called a small story and she begins the story we're talking about the valley where she and her family live there are a number of things to know about the valley one is that the last 33 children in the world of their small sub tribe to grow up and be educated on their own lands go to school here despite government efforts to close the school another is that the valley is known to outsiders and insiders as pachawahini literally meaning to beat women and this is not said as a joke this valley is also the valley where my husband and his siblings were beaten at school for speaking their first language it is the valley their mothers sent them to so they would be safe from their father back to her people it is where they milked cows pulled a plow, fed pigs but often went hungry and were stock whipped my brother in law still lives in the valley in a group of houses next to the school so it's no surprise that one of our cars would be parked by their houses right by where the children play perhaps also not a surprise that while playing that time old international game of rock throwing our eight year old nephew shattered the back window of the car if I'd been listening I probably would have heard the old and ah that accompanied the sound of glass breaking from town and if I'd been really tuned in I would have heard the rapid frightened heartbeat of that boy as well his mother is my husband's cousin and she was on the phone to us right away she was anxious to assure us that that boy would get it when his father came home his father is a big man with a pig hunter's hands who hoists his pigs onto a meat hook he is a man of movement and action not a man for talking those hands would carry all the force of proving that he was a man who knew how to keep his children in their place beating that boy would be his way of telling us that he had learned his own childhood lessons well so before he got home we burned up the full mind sister to sister cousin to cousin brother in law to sister in law wife to husband brother to brother this was because the cousin and his brother know that there are some lessons you are taught as a child that should not be passed on the sound of cows hands on tender flesh the whippers of watching sisters the smell of your own fear the taste of your own blood and sweat as you lie in the dust useless useless better not born this is a curriculum like no other a set of lessons destined to repeat unless you are granted grace and insight and choose to embrace new learning so when the father of that boy came home and heard the story of the window that boy was protected by our combined love and good humor by the presence of a senior uncle by invitations to decide how to get the window fixed in the shortest time for the lease money once again phone calls were exchanged with an agreement being made on appropriate restitution how a barrel of diesel turns into a car window is a story for another time when these small stories are told and repeated so our lives join and connect when we choose to embrace new learning and use our fitness to heal not hurt then we are growing grace and wisdom on the earth so thank you I actually had more than I was going to say about another kind of a pilot project we had about how we can do this ourselves and it's an orange should I continue that's such a lovely ending it's okay to continue okay well I can't really say no right okay so I'll continue so that's part of our first project and I think everybody can see how important a story can be the other kind of creative interventions then was coming up with a pilot testing of a model that we can use how can certainly stories like this tell us what families have done to prevent violence but we wanted some to know more about how if we were to get a situation of violence how would we handle it we could find stories that might tell something but we really needed more guidance we already had a model as I told you an individualized model call the police go to shelter but what are some other things we can do to engage each other as friends and family and neighbors to do something about violence so we had a pilot test and it was pretty under the radar until very recently why was it under the radar first of all we wanted to see what would happen we certainly couldn't base any kind of model on the 3, 4, 5 kinds of situations we saw at the beginning so we really wanted to wait until we had gathered quite a few we also suspected that we might be breaking some laws and we wanted our project to survive long enough to be able to finish and see if we were able to create something so this was a collaborative project it was immediately collaborative and it so happened that those organizations there were anti-milals organizations in the bay area that were really interested in joining we didn't have to do very much recruitment they came forward so they wanted to be part of this the Korean community, the South Asian community there was a Pan-Asian shelter there was a Latino organization that were really interested in seeing how this would work but didn't feel like they had the resources to do this within their organizations so it became this kind of perfect place to form a collaboration and we met as a group of about 8 of us every 2 weeks for a 4 hour chunk of time for a period of 3 years what we did is we took calls word of mouth we didn't really feel like we were in any position to start advertising calls came in we basically did probably no screening anybody who called and was in the area could come by or we would go by to see them we had over time one of the first things we would ask people is who do you want to bring in with you and we would be meeting with sometimes one person who wanted help deciding who else to bring in sometimes we met with 7 people sometimes we had 15 people in that room and we made sure we had a group that had chairs in a circle and was big enough to really be able to sit and discuss we didn't have time limits it wasn't an hour and it's up people sometimes sat there for quite a long time and basically over the set of 3 years we were able to gather about 25 situations of violence we met with about 100 people what we came up with is an organizing model not surprisingly an organizing model where we thought how do you get people together to solve the collective problem of violence how do you work together strategically and not just have one person saying giving you one set of advice and another person telling you something completely contradictory how do we work strategically together how do we create goals that we all agree on not assuming that we all want the same thing because we might overall want to enter violence but what we're willing to do together can be very very different and we need to come to some agreement how do we do it in a way that we might be able to last for a long time and sometimes takes to try to resolve situations of violence so I want to go back to thinking about my friend and go through what some of these components are at this point so in thinking about my friend and her husband and what I had hoped to do what I first needed was just to sit down and have a place to talk about what's happening what's going on, who's being run to whom what do we know about this and what we call this is getting clear we don't use words like somebody might call it assessment really trying to move away from this kind of clinical language to everyday language so getting clear who are we going to bring in to gather with us who makes sense to bring in so this is what we call mapping allies and barriers who should we not bring and who really shouldn't know at this point because they might go back and tell the person doing harm they may be a gossip and so on what do we do to say stay safe so I was really realizing that if I actually went and talked to this person that there might be some issues around safety and I couldn't be guaranteed even though I had never experienced any danger before so we would want to get together and talk about what some of those dangers could be and what could we do to create some safety around them also realizing that we might be willing to face some dangers I think that Nelson Johnson had a story that that talked about that earlier on that we might actually be willing to take a risk what so what risk might that be and how can we reduce the risk setting goals what do we hope to achieve what do we really want from this and in some ways separating from things we use the word fantasies and I know that kind of sets some people off but for some what we realize is for some people this intervention to make the original violence go away and that's something that's not going to happen so for example that people may have fantasies and we understand this is violent retribution well we need to talk about this is this something that we want is this something that somebody just needs to express so they then can go on and think about what they really think is realistic what they really think is in the line with their values how do we support the survivors so many for those of you who have been involved in interventions there can be a tendency that gets so involved in thinking about the person doing harm that you forget about the survivor you forget about offering support giving connection taking their lead and so on so supporting the survivors another thing to pay attention to taking accountability what do we mean by accountability this is a huge question we hear about accountability all the time and how many times does accountability mean somebody serves time how many times does it mean they suffer consequences perhaps get punished so how do we support accountability how do we make accountability safe not only for us but also safe for the person doing harm how do we make accountability beneficial for the survivor the community and for the person doing harm how do we take into account the high probability of resistance now if we think about this we need to expect that there will be resistance if anybody in this room has been held to account we might know ourselves that it's very easy to at first say well at first maybe say nothing be in denial maybe say oh yeah you're right but if anybody insists you do anything more you're kind of saying well you know wasn't it enough that I said alright you know there are many there are 101 ways to resist taking accountability and all of us are familiar with at least two or three of them so we need to make systems flexible and strong enough to anticipate resistance but to also reduce resistance over time how do we do that so this is a sort of a conceptually different way of looking at interventions to violence the other two components of the model are how do we work together in a way that we are transparent about communication our decision making how do we keep on track that is how responsive to change things change all the time people are not staying still while you're doing an intervention of violence things happen people change their mind new people come in that might be beautiful to get involved people move away people get burnt out people have disagreements how is it that we can keep moving forward given that there's going to be changes all along the way and how are we going to make this sustainable how are we going to nurture a process that's very very difficult how are we going to cut each other a little bit of slack how are we going to hold each other accountable for sticking with the process how are we going to make sure we have enough to eat somebody has a snack for me in here today actually and how are we going to celebrate our achievements however small because we're going to need to as they sometimes are very rare so from this experience of the three years and talking to many of you who are in this room and getting feedback we are not the only people that are doing this and they're not the only people that have been trying to write down and share in other ways the kinds of progress that we've made but we now have what is now fondly called not a toolkit but a tool shed because it's 500 pages long I'm really sorry but I'm sure one of you will take and whittle it down to about 40 pages thank you in advance or maybe make a short video so when we the 500 pages is with I don't mind who isn't responding to me so hopefully this will come out soon and this ends with this we will end the organization the 501C3 that we call creative interventions and that we opened creative interventions with the goal of ending it after these projects got documented and spun off so the storytelling and organizing project right now is a spin off of creative interventions and it's held by a group of volunteers and perhaps we'll include all of you who hopefully will be able to collect stories so that we can share them all just a little bit more about that we didn't want to stick around so long that we shifted our mission due to concerns over funding reputation, risk aversion I think many of you are familiar with these problems we also took no government funding because it was clear that that would have constrained the way that we did our work what we will do is keep our websites going which is the creative interventions website which is linked also to the storytelling and organizing project website we want to keep the toolkit as a living document and a shorter document hopefully in the future and what that can be just used, adapted take what you want that we're not going to have we don't have ownership over this it's something that belongs to all of us as a community and I don't want to say that this means that we think that all institutions to end but that having institutions and can be another alternative model for institution building so I want to end with one more story that is one of the few stories that we have so far from the perspective of a person doing harm this is a story that we gathered relatively recently and he shared with me when I talked to him that he spent the last several years three or four years looking for stories from person doing harm to help to support him and over that time that he only found three stories and only one story with enough information to really be helpful so we're hoping to add the story to the collection so that hopefully this can help all of us but in particular be there for people who have done harm he he is somebody who has a history of being both sexually abused and being sexually abusive to others as an adult and as a youth this is an unusual story in that one he shares it to that he also initiated his own accountability process but also with the help and support of many individuals and organizations doing the work of community accountability he also asked that this is a very short clip of the story but he also asked that if any of you do recognize who this person is that you engage him and let him know that you have heard the story he wants to be able to talk about it more and not have a lot of people around that know about the story or know only part of the story that he wants to be able to talk about it so I'll end with a brief part of his story and it's like this I have a friend that's been involved in a lot of accountability work and he's insisted to me that what I'm doing is an accountability because there's not survivors somewhere issuing a list of demands or that kind of thing but for me that's only one aspect of accountability there's another aspect that's being accountable to myself making sure that I'm leaving the values that are important to me in the world accountability for me is a commitment to do what I need to do to make sure that I don't repeat those patterns that they stop with me part of that has been the work around creating boundaries for myself part of that has been the healing and transformation and part of it is also engaging with the world to not see it as an individual thing but to see myself as part of a social struggle I need to be engaged with the world to be part of ending all of this sexual violence that's everywhere the accountability has this gift of humility one of the things that is really valuable for me about that humility is the amount of compassion that it's allowed me to have for other people at this point in my life I'm able to understand myself as being the same kind of human as so many other people I don't put myself on a different level from them as I did before and so I feel like I have a much greater ability to understand people's struggle and pain and to learn from it and to love people coming out of that compassion and shared struggle that ability for real authentic love is something I never had I thought that love was this obsessive thing and when I realized that I needed to stop that I had this moment of grieving and loss and doubt because I thought well if I stop this will I ever feel love again it required this huge shift once it quieted down once I stopped it then the whole landscape was just silent it took me a while to retune my hearing so that it wasn't just the roar of the subcession but that I could hear the birds and the insects and the breezes from there learn a sort of love that's based in resilience and shared commitment and sacrifice so that's been a real gift that accountability has given me thank you it's so exciting to have Mimi in the same room with the people that I'm going to introduce now I'm just going to bring them up and build another story Joyce Johnson and Reverend Nelson Johnson let's give them a hand I feel like I sang that song not because I'm happy I sang it because I'm free it's a ministers to my inner self my soul in particular today because Grace has been saying you're going to sing for me aren't you Joyce and the last song I think was at her 96th birthday party where we had a bash last year also for Melanie and RJ and others who are here at the theater who I know struggle to integrate their particular gifts their calls into this great call we all have to build a better world and who are often marginalized because they don't have the fists in the air and whatever known that it's all a part of the same thing and also our hearts are particularly a little heavy this morning because we were awakened early this morning to know that our musician for the youth in our church who by now should have been rocking that room in our small church in Greensboro, North Carolina died and I'm not sure the child was even 50 years old and so the youth and us are struggling but I feel like pressing my way because we need to as an African-American man who did a lot of things he was the band director and a teacher of the school and worked with the local university and did all types of things and played a lot of churches we are often stressed and stretched because we have not yet built that world that we know we must build a world that is safe a world that is nurturing a world where we don't have these early deaths particularly for men and women of color who are so consumed by the dredges and the negative aspects of our world known that it is a better world we are going to build so we are going to take a few minutes to talk with you about what do you do pretty much like my friend Mimi who I just met that we communicated by email that have been around you seem to fail hmm what do you do when you've seen five of your friends ten of your other friends but five of your friends killed in the broad daylight by clan and Nazis whom you thought as growing up as a little girl in the late 40's and 50's that that was over because you know we marched and what have you said we thought you know that we shall overcome and at least that aspect was done but yet in 1979 you faced that so what do you do you see five people killed not just fellow marchers but friends you see ten others wounded including your husband stabbed and he's been dragged off to jail while many of the people who were the perpetrators would let go and not spell you because there are two trials all white jurors not guilty the perpetrators start taking hold so much that those of us who spent at that time 20 years or so of our lives dedicated to freedom, justice equality and people start doubting your intentions they believe what they hear because they're afraid not to because if they killed these fine people who worked so hard for justice what might they do to me so I need to shift back what do you do in the very churches the houses where the love and the equality and the justice and the righteousness whatever the nomination or the faith the Jewish houses, the Christian houses initially pull back what do you do that was the question we faced about 30 years ago and we grappled and you can imagine all the things we went through but what we came to is that first we got to keep going on secondly we had to create something new and that's what we're still faced with is creating something new another possibility because we knew deep down no matter what was being said in the media or wherever else whatever the legal institution said we knew that those killed were really freedom fighters those who were given all in their lives were taken we knew that those who took the lives were also part of the same thing that trapped all of us we didn't hate injustice but that we had to find a way out for all of us if there was any hope for our children our two and many others who were there that day and saw people shot them so we knew we had to create something new and we're here to share that with you and hopefully we'll all continue to create some new things because there is a way of no way so we're going to share with you now a video clip that will give you some sense of what happened some of you will have heard some of this before either from your previous experience or from Nelson sharing on Friday evening but we want to share this clip and then we'll come back and talk with you some more On a bright November morning in 1979 the sound of gunshots and shouting pierced the fall air of Greensboro, North Carolina organizing textile workers and in 1979 that was still an uphill struggle and we were having a major rally to promote that work what we wasn't aware of is that the Greensboro police had put together a racist united front for the specific purpose of coming to disrupt the launch Clan and Nazis took weapons out of the trunk of their cars and fired into that group of people gathering for a march Gemwala was shot in the back and killed Cesar Cossay was shot in the chest and killed William Sampson was shot in the face Sandy Smith was shot in the head and killed and Michael Nathan was shot in the face as he was trying to render service to William Sampson and all of this was videotaped the shots were pretty clear on the television in spite of this blatant act of violence two subsequent criminal trials acquitted the shooters of any wrongdoing what does it take to confuse and frighten the community to the extent that it actually denies what it saw with its eyes in an effort to help the Greensboro community heal Nelson and Joyce Johnson began work to form a local truth and reconciliation commission in 1999 it was modeled on a similar one that shaped post-apartheid South Africa it's said in a fact that we are dedicated to carrying out a truth process with the intent of actually promoting forgiveness and healing Greensboro became an open classroom as citizens took part in hearings town hall meetings and petition drives the Johnsons brought labor women's civic and religious groups to the table to improve the lives of those affected they brought former Nazis and Klansmen face to face with relatives of their victims helping both of them to release long-held pain I believe that the hope of our city is not to run from its yesterdays but to face its yesterdays so that the yesterdays will not be its tomorrow so before we move forward I invite you just to take a moment to absorb what you've seen what you might have felt and to think of those five persons in particular and just honor them because they are still here with us though not in the body of the earth we form just take a second thank you Nelson and I do a bit of a volleyball playing process when we do this so I'm going to ask him now to come forward and do a little bit more elaboration of the backdrop to move on something I want to begin by thanking the organizers of this tremendous coming together of those who are seeking a better tomorrow and Melanie and RJ whoever else worked with you on this it's a meaningful and a powerful contribution and I want to thank Kim for sharing a piece of the new way and for taking a powerful stand that violence cannot be our future or if it is we have no future and that we have an enormous capacity to love each other that's one end of the spectrum on the other end we have the capacity to be evil and mean and violent and dangerous and the choice that we have is which one do we aspire to which one do we nurture which one do we want and if we can believe in it deftly we begin to take up space in our thinking as we begin to imagine and read imagine a different future I have to acknowledge my friend Grace Boggs who is at one and the same time a powerful inspiration and a powerful challenge I have never been in her presence where she has not challenged me to stretch a little more to do a little more and I'm thankful for it I think that's part of what we have to do you know I don't know how much I need to say about this you've seen that let me just share a bit about myself I grew up on a farm in eastern North Carolina and all around us was a discussion of race and my mother and father used to say what the white man would do what he is doing and now he wouldn't give us money to get seeds to put in a crop and there was this constant talk about the white man and as a little boy I remember saying why don't people get together and stop this white man you know thinking like a child as I grew up I was able to see grown men who come into the little town of Lilt on a little tipsy and the police just grab them in the collar and twist it up like that and open handed and push them back like that and it burned into my soul the need for something to correct this now this is the 50s I'm talking about so it's been a minute when I was 16 years old I was elected the student council president of this high school we called the bus from the eastern part of the state to the western part of the state and that's a long way in North Carolina it's a long state and James Leaton and I wanted to sit on the front seat but we were scared and so we went from one town to another town seemed like forever when we got the show up a seat opened up and we had built up our nerves so we got up and went to the front seat and people started to throw ball up paper on us and said these in people don't know what to you know they beside themselves and then a man got up and just boom against my head and knocked me over in the lap of the young man with me and and everybody including the bus driver looked out the window like nothing had happened I was terrified and so he asked what are you going to do that's what my friend asked so I said I'm going to the back of the bus and I have never made such humiliating steps as to stand and walk to the back of the bus and sit there for another 21 miles to where we got started when I came back and told my dad I actually put it in my report to the school and when I went to the principal and asked him he said Nelson you can't do that if you do that you will mess up the school for everybody and I'm sharing that to say that it's not some marches, some romantic things that that came way later but there was a terroristic way of ruling in this nation in the south and it was fear and so when we started to organize I was convinced that white people were our problem and that was that and I was going to fight white folks and as we grew I started to see that was not the case so we went through the black power of pan-Africanness then in studying Marxism and that got me to see that we were dealing with deep systemic problems structural problems that fared our propensity to dominate and make people other that it wasn't just something everybody was born to do and so that led us into the textile mills and we were bringing together black and white workers with the black community and I had done a lot of work in the community and groups started to pass out flyers and that this whole matter of unions is just a way that black people, because we were leading it we're trying to get in charge of the lives of white people so we were having a conference on how to bring together black and white people workers community people to engage this question and to struggle about it I had a little speech in my pocket that I was planning to give but we added a march to it because we were going to march through the community we had drums on the back of a flatback truck we had singers and it was going to be a living march as you walk and sing and more people join the march so if you start with 200 you end with 800 because you just go right through the community and you go into the place and that was our vision it didn't happen the police gave the parade permit to the Klan and Nazis they knew where we were gathering we had no idea they were coming and they rolled in and opened fire as you saw and George kind of set up for us what is it that you do will we frame the question a different way how much confusion and disinformation is necessary to cause people to see things that were not there how much distortion and demonizing is necessary to turn the potentiality of love into a reservoir of bitterness and hate so that our community is split as unto how much fear is necessary to convince people that what they saw with their own eyes they did not see we had three trials each trial averaged five months and so by way of imagination Grace said we got to reimagine everything economy food systems and I'm with that and I want to strain into that as part of my limited future but if you can imagine lawyers in an adversarial context where a group of lawyers are paid to make another group look bad and another group is paid to make this group look bad nobody is invested in the truth nobody is invested in some way out some restorative way and that then is our legal system trial headlines for five months every day something in the newspaper another distortion and then five more months 15 months of litigation and after a while the amount of distortion and confusion and fear even after years go by sink into the ground and it pollutes the ground water and people drink of it and do not know why we are here why we can't get along because there is this whole matter of distorted ways of thinking built into our culture and it seemed to me I went to seminary she had the story the other night and the Klan was planning to march for the first time in seven years and every time I came home I was staying with Joyce's mother in Richmond really enjoyed it three hours from Richmond to Greensboro they would ask me what are you all going to do are you going to have another shootout and so it was almost like getting me to make public comments about this group coming to spit on the graves of people and I had to deal with that and I came to the conclusion that to get involved in this media exchange was really not the way that I had to try to touch bases with people who were the labor of Klan and Nazis but I had become convinced that beneath their fears and beneath their hatred there was a human being there and that there were certain potentialities there and that if I could get through all the walls of culture and come face to face with somebody without any television cameras there may be the possibility of having some kind of meaningful conversation and so I had called I set it up I found the place and Mount Bala up in the western part of the state and I went up and I got scared half way up there they had arranged for a meeting a pickup truck full of white men with Yankee baseball caps on the meaning of that escapes me but we had this meeting and actually after about 15 minutes there really was some level of connection and I say that because they were convinced that I was setting them up and that I would have carloads of armed people rush upon them and get them back and they told me that later on and they had me sitting in front of a door in front of a window and there was a quarrel across the street and they asked me did I know why I was sitting there and I said that's the seat you offered me but they said because we have people in this other building with a gun train on you because if you made a funny move this would be it at this point I knew we had reached an understanding you know because you wouldn't tell me that and we went off into various discussions and sometimes I wish I could share some of this but let me just hasten to say that 87 was the beginning of the truth process for us it took shape in 2003 and we were joined by people from Peru and from South Africa as we structured something that seemed to fit our community we put together a selection panel and it was pretty broad it invited the police the chain of commerce the Jewish faith community the Muslim faith community the branches of the Christian faith community Protestant and Catholicism and they all appointed people to it the mayor appointed someone to it the two groups that did not were the sons and daughters of the Confederacy and the Greensboro police but they all had an invitation and the chain of commerce helped me somebody and I say that because there were 17 people invited and they actually selected seven people out of a pool of about 80 people who had indicated a willingness to do this and five of those had to be from Greensboro the other two could be from anywhere and that was the commission that sat for almost two years and against a tremendous pushback from the city that did not endorse it but actually voted to oppose it and said that nobody is coming to this you have no power but my testimony today is that Klan and Nazi memos came back the judge who presided over the case came back the lawyers who spawned the awful stories on behalf of the Klan and Nazis came back people in the community they were having a wedding in the community center that I didn't know about and didn't learn about for years later but people were terrorized children who had no place to tell their story came back and started to tell their story and let me end by saying this and then perhaps some discussion would be in order when George stands up it's time for me to sit down is I just want to share one story about a Nazi named Roland Wayne Woods he takes credit for killing at least two people he was in a convalescent home and he talked to the commission but he called Signe whose husband we believe he killed she's Jewish and he asked if he could have a convalescent and so she asked me to go with her and we drove 30 miles and with her son they talked with him and I joined them and this huge man with a cigarette dangling from his lip was sitting on the side of a bed and he said that I what I did was wrong and he said some things that were questionable that the BATL the Bureau of Tobacco pushed him to do it but they would take his command as the leader of the Nazis in that area if he didn't do it but he said how sorry he was and that he had asked God to forgive him but he could not forgive himself and so we talked a while and I asked him to accept his forgiveness you cannot change yesterday but you have breath in your body and there is a tomorrow and we want to try to figure out how to do some things differently and I'm not saying that this is a recommendation for everybody but it seemed right at that moment in that setting when he was in when you're dying because that's the place he was beloved let me in by saying that I think that there is an enormous opportunity as the systems of economy fail as the justice system is flawed as people are rising up and occupying spaces and other people are organizing tea parties there is a massive unleashing of energy in our nation and the issue before us is what is our imagination and our work that hold the possibility of directing us away from a cultural domination of violence and abuse that has the potential being anchored in that creative force called love that is the key to ultimate reality in which we become brothers and sisters beloved one to another and shape institutions and economic systems that's consistent with that and I think that the degree to which we can envision that and believe that that the Earth itself will give us energy to run on to see what we can do and so we want to stop here and share perhaps enough details and so that we would have some time that we might discuss this together I was looking at the at the time and I think we got a little bit of a late start to actually have a chance to be inside of this conversation with our respondents and as a whole group so I'm just going to suggest right now that we'll push this to around 215 to give ourselves some more time but then also still give us a break to move and do all the things we need to do we also use the mics for the live stream so it's important to use them and for all of us that speak and ask questions or respond we just try to speak more slowly because we're doing interpretation so it just makes it easier for the interpretation to happen I'm going to bring up our local respondents the first one I want to invite up is Yalini Dream Yalini worked with the Audre Lorde Projects safe outside the system collective for five years the safe outside the system collective is based in central Brooklyn and it's an anti-violence program for lesbian, gay bisexual trans and gender non-conforming people of color safe outside the system is devoted to challenging hate and police violence by using community based strategies rather than relying on the police next I'd like to invite up Marcus Gardley who's a playwright and who's been amongst many other things wrestling with some of these questions around restorative justice, transformative justice community based responses and wrestling with the reality of the ongoing state murder of African American men in our country amongst many other people Marcus please come on up third respondent is Jill Williams Jill worked as the executive director of the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission and she supported truth processes examining historical injustices related to busing and desegregation in the 1970s in Boston native child welfare issues in Maine and federal housing policies in other forms of structural racism in Detroit she's currently working with religious leaders around the country to create a national truth seeking movement around the foreclosure crisis I just want to thank three of you for joining us so Jill you were involved in this process and I'm just curious both from Mimi's presentation which might have been new and being back with Joyce and Nelson what is like one question that came up here before I get to my question I want to say I'm really honored to be here with all of you Mimi your stories were really really powerful for me to hear I want to say one thing Nelson talked about the selection panel in Greensboro and how the sons and the daughters of the Confederacy declined to be involved in that and I don't even know if I've told you this that a few months after the commission released its report I met the person who had been in charge of the sons of the Confederate soldiers at that time he told me that the reason that they declined to participate was not because they were opposed to the process it was because the sons of the Confederate soldiers and the daughters of the Confederacy are two different groups and they couldn't come to any agreement together about who they would appoint I always found that to be interesting the question that I have for the group actually is around the resistance one question that I have is around the resistance that both of you faced to creating sort of grassroots structures for dealing with this type of violence it makes me think actually of something I read in Howard Zenz of People's History of the United States where he talked about in 1965 or 19 in 1635 the governor of Maryland at the time asked the Native American tribes in Maryland in that region if they would please deliver any one of their members who killed an Englishman if they would deliver that person up for punishment by the English justice system and the response from the Indians were it is in the manner amongst us Indians that any such accident happens we do redeem the life of a man that is slain with the 100 arms length of beads and since you are here strangers and come into our country you should rather conform yourselves to the customs of our country that impose yours upon us the things that strikes me about that are one thing is that that's the appropriate response really regardless of what you think about the beads as being appropriate reparations how do we get the question I guess is how do we get from that point to where we are now to where so many people particularly people of color are to some degree at least willing to give up that power of deciding how to reckon with violence in their own communities to the state and what is the and that's a hard question but I guess in your particular situations what was the resistance that you faced or from those folks who are much more comfortable letting the state take care of those problems well I think we are probably still and I'm saying we because I think many of us are engaged in this struggle on the one hand there's a certain amount of openness to doing something different there are a lot of people I think even in the criminal justice system who feel like that's a failure and have been interested in alternatives also dealing with the I guess for lack of better name the mainstream movement there's a certain amount of openness I think of having done this for a number of years now what is that for example the Oakland police ask me to come and work with them I mean I've not worked with them I think to accomplish anything so I just didn't go but I also thought that this particular individual probably was a good person we weren't going to engage in the system so there's both resistance then there's also the possibility of openness and there's also co-optation there are certain kinds of lines that we drew that was one was to not be involved in anything with the government at all until they've actually been very specific about that one because we want to stay under the radar two because we understood that the dynamics would lead towards co-optation or worse and over time also seeing that there are certain people with them making a more mainstream anti-rounds movement that have been interested but that nothing's come of it so far and it's really I think we need to still do some analysis of this oftentimes it was one or two people within an organization that were very interested probably are still engaged in some ways in some of the alternatives that we've been creating and trying to convince their leadership to also take this up and I was really excited about these opportunities and it still will because I still feel connected to the mainstream movement and people will make certain efforts that don't take a lot of energy to try to enter but I think there definitely is a way in which I don't exactly know what the dynamics are but that it's not taking on that's why we need to really form this alternative space where we are here to nourish other and defeat each other's ideas and I just have to let go of a certain amount of I think hopefulness out of the beginning that there would be more people and more organizations that would really take this up this might not be the time I agree with Mimi both aspects are there but to speak to the resistance the holding back if you think about it this is part of why number 3 1979 happened the individuals killed those of us who were caught up in this thing really were among frontline leaders in North Carolina in particular we were dealing with questions of education certainly the work and the plants it was a period when this economy was beginning to go toward where it is now and so there had to be some kind of way to grapple with this worldwide this country was being realigned look that differently number 4 the takeover in Tehran just to give you those of you who are students of history a lot of you are young or you won't remember these things but and all even during the period of slavery and Jim Crow those who resisted what happened you know the whole lynch thing and the Jim Crow laws there has been a whole pattern of fear so yes Jill that you remember even as once you came on the scene the independent truth commission even the credibility of that group was questioned whether people would come but that only spoke more and more to the need to do something different for people not to just be frightened because of those who were standing for justice and righteousness were taken down that would make other people feel wow we can't do anything and so we knew we had to keep standing keep going on and as we can have continued the numbers are increasing and there are places more and more around the country there's more and more credibility even in our city so I think it was the fear in fact I know it was the fear for those who were in some levels of perceived privilege fear of giving something up for those who in other areas of fear of having the same thing happen to you I was teaching a university and then people were afraid to come around for fear that somebody would come in to shoot me and they'd get shot so all these things were happening but with the persistence and the resolve because ultimately it is about the heart and the fact that people do want to live the more abundant life that some progress has made just very quickly I want to affirm both of what you said and want to make this very brief comment is you know how we measure something is important because I think that change can be happening and we don't have the instruments with which to measure so I think you've got to come to some conviction of what's right and then you've got to stand there and I say that because if you put a match under a bucket of water and stick your finger in it you could conclude that nothing is happening here and you come back in an hour and you would draw the same conclusion but if the flame stays there it gradually heats up that water but you're not measuring it so I think it starts with the belief that there is something inside of the human personality that is able to grow to a goodness greatness and love and generosity and we have to keep nurturing that even when we don't see the manifestations of it within the short run and I just fall for that as a way of talking I would first like to say it's an honor to be here and to be responded to I have a burning question that's been burning about three years about racial profile and it then happened to me I was writing a community play and I was coming home from a play in San Francisco at night and I was walking in an outflow in a white neighborhood and a young man was following me on a bike and he followed me about half a mile and I knew something was going to happen because events like this happened to me a lot but not at this extreme so a big tree a cop, a police car a cruiser shot at me almost hit me and two cops came barreling out with guns and lights and screamed to me to get on the ground, get on the ground and various things happened after that and I asked them why I was being harassed and they said you get the description of a rapist and so I asked them what does the rapist look like and they could respond to that and then the female officer just kept saying to me this is not what it looks like this is not what it looks like and when they discovered that I lived in New York but was there I had to convince them that I was working on a community project about community healing which I thought was very ironic and I decided in that moment that I needed to convince this cop that this is what it looks like that was my goal and I couldn't get through to her and after it happened I called the mayor and he wrote to this artist with Chronicle and I got all my artist friends together and we kept hitting against the wall the police commissioner told me he couldn't deal with it because he was going on vacation and I got the badge numbers I memorized the badge numbers of the officers and their punishment was because it was a start I looked nothing like the rapist not that that would matter but their punishment was they took a racial profiling course workshop, that's what happened and no one believed me because of a technology because I said both officers had guns blazing and only one did so that had a really huge impact on my life and my burning question out of that story is what can one person do because I feel like the police is not in that system doesn't work I remember going home my parents lived in a really bad near-footed Oakland and I remember talking to my cousins and them laughing because this happens to them on a constant basis and so what can one person do to combat racial profiling and that's a big question I think you have to link up with other people I think to just pursue it by yourself would not be the way to go but a one person's experience can become vicariously the experience of many others and then working with a community and in the spirit of community I think you can begin to challenge many of the features of the profiling culture let me just say this one of the groups that we work with is called the Latin King and Queen Nation they are known widely as a gang but in Greensboro it's really a tremendous group of young people and they were hounded and harassed and we work with them we be in the beloved community center some churches that we work with and what we were doing was they would get fired from jobs they would get charged with felonies they wouldn't go through court the court didn't threw them out or found them innocent and that's really heavy when a gang members were stronger than a police office because there's no credible evidence and they were just harassing them so the community started to build a worker's center because they couldn't get work and the idea was that we had several people who were willing to hire people who were charged with felonies you have to do enough, you don't have to be convicted just charge with the felonies it'll show up on your record and it blocks your job and that happened as a result of a community believing that these young people actually were treated wrong they deserved a chance to work and any culture where you don't have any work that's the most verbal experience of non-love so I would just say think in terms of how to leverage your experience into something broader than yourself and then creatively think through what might we do together that I by myself could never do and I think that that starts with the individual with not accepting the prejudices the assumptions that led to European racial and international profiles we've talked with some persons we've had meetings where we invite people to come in and talk about what happened even a woman who was 80 plus years old in the one choir one of the prominent churches who was thrust to the ground one time the grocery store together the reasons were people told to get on the floor there was a robbery happening and she said wait I can't get on the floor she wouldn't just jump down they pushed her down as a whole long story to it she was so ashamed for a while to come forth and speak because I mean this is not what folks do at so and so A&E church and so the prejudice if you take that into your spirit and you'll be less likely to speak I'm sure there's very similar some things meaning has dealt with first thing this is not right what happened to me I think that Trayvon's family has demonstrated that for us that it's about their child but it's about all doctors I just feel like I'm just going to repeat not as eloquently what's already been said but I think a lot of what we've been talking about is the importance of collective process but what our culture tells us is the importance of the individual hero and I think we really need to challenge that even there are individual heroes but behind them there's always an organization and a movement of people and not to give many, you took many actions yourself and I say they're very commendable and I see the frustration of having them not they've led to the outcomes that you wanted this is why we need to challenge Dyalini as a colleague of Mimi's in being here for Nelson and Joyce's presentation and having been involved in trying to seek responses to the violence against the community that's a part of Ascension Brooklyn what's the question that came up for you? I don't think it could be said enough times how I feel to be participating in this event and to be among so many powerful spirits and energies who are looking for an alternative and another form of safety and envisioning I also want to say that there are some current incredible driving forces of SOS who aren't here today and because the Safe Neighborhood Summit is happening in Brooklyn right now and so which is an annual summit where SOS take outside the system collective brings together individuals from community members of the SOS businesses and organizations that institutions that are part of the Safe Neighborhood Campaign to strategize about intervening, preventing violence healing from violence and then also increasing accountability so as we are connected with the spirits of those who have passed as well as you know everybody here in this room as well is like the work that's happening in Brooklyn and throughout this country right now and creating these spaces and I also wanted because I only have one question two questions came up but I do want to kind of reiterate just something that I heard emerging from y'all which is that in some ways where a shift that's happening to me listening is that in envisioning and imagining we're trying to look for something alternative to this system of dominating capitalist domination and othering looking for maybe an interdependent ecology of love just those I feel like is what I've been hearing from y'all and their speaking so keeping that in mind and then also thinking about I feel like the affirmation of spirit that y'all have been demonstrating and communicating and then also thinking about also the stories Mimi that you have brought forth what are concrete ways keeping in mind forgiveness and affirming spirit that if encountering somebody who has committed violence who is not in a place where they are remorseful or open to transformation how do we from that place of spirit also work in a way to protect the community from further harm and in that way hold people accountable so acknowledging transformation knowing that understanding that we have to do healing work within ourselves harness work from a place of harnessing healing energy versus anger or bitterness and yet at the same time also or I guess I don't want to put them in opposition to that I want to say like extending that to protecting community and keeping somebody from harming somebody else again within a community. Okay that is a very very challenging question and I think in so many situations of interventions it's exactly in some way part of the thing that we face it's hard to give a general answer because every situation is going to have different kinds of opportunities that might be there but I do want to say that there's been a concern for me about I know a lot of us are taking up these alternatives in this place of banning banning banning in intervention that that banning or asking somebody to leave an organization let's say or a community or have people uphold safe boundaries but I think that we have to move towards thinking of these as potentially temporary measures in order to increase safety but what they become is equated with accountability and like the end in and of itself. It may be that you never get to go beyond that stage but I do feel that there's a way in which people haven't had enough opportunities that's why we have to keep having these dialogues these little these places these opportunities where somebody may actually be able to have a connection with this person that is resistant in every way and be able to find another leveraged point for reaching in and making a difference. I think that one of the things that this the person that I read a quote from at the end had said that he was very resistant but simply hearing that there was very stands up actually a place that he wasn't familiar with and had heard about that would not immediately condemn someone she made the shift for him to be able to see that there was such a thing that was possible. I do think that many of us are struggling so much to find that expansive place that we still often come to the point of shutting down fairly early that does that make sense and but that we really need each other's knowledge skills but also spirit to try to see how we can join together and expand that space and really with actual sincerity and goodwill and the ability to engage in a long term process will we be able to expand that space? Thanks so much for that question but does that really puts on the ground some of the realities that we face as we are both envisioning and working toward a new world a thought that came to my mind was something that the Archbishop Tutu said with us by the way we were just honored to have him visit us in Greensboro two different times and we ended up visiting him right in Soweto during this process so we had a lot of help to bring about this process but he said you know though our vision was a free and united one South Africa we had to have measures agreements actions to stop open killing us you know that's just real you have to grapple with that and while we're doing our work we have our vision of the beloved community but that means while we are pursuing that we stand for strive for fight for the protection of people the equality what have you so we are actively struggling with our police department about its accountability while at the same time put forth a paradigm shift of how these gangs these groups of what they see as negatives can be a resource for community safety if we are all really working together so we deal with that tension a lot and as Mimi said it's not like we have a cookie cutter kind of an answer but it's more being wise as we're doing this work and so often in the movement we start arguing about this things in rooms about the theory and the vision as opposed to some of the reality and you have to do both but the reality of what you do has to be said by that love paradigm that view and whatever we'll come to some understanding how we do amazing how when you have that things that unities and resolutions that you don't anticipate just seem to pop out but they are really fed by this possibility and this belief in love let's get some questions from you and before we take a break see some hands we do progressive stacks so it would be nice to see a few hands and then I could kind of call on people to start hearing and if you could speak up now we know in the South Africa Truth and Reconciliation Commission we speak about major successes and limitations of the Truth and Reconciliation process so that's the question one we'll take three and then you can kind of work with them so all of you spoke very eloquently about and I heard a lot of what you were saying about the need to both transform on an international level but also the community around who really has to be part of this whole effort and there was some discussion of resistance but I'm interested in how if you have any strategies for how you were able to work with the broader community to kind of continue that process of accountability with the person you were working with I'm actually going to try and repeat the questions for the live stream just so they can hear so the first one was around feeling like there were a lot of things that people evaluate went well and things that went badly in the process in South Africa the original Truth and Reconciliation process so if they could speak to how they felt there the second question was how do you continue to engage a broader community response you just mentioned something about gangs possibly being a resource for community safety and I would really love to hear some more about that more about gangs as a resource for community safety so those are the three kind of questions we're sitting with so let me first of all acknowledge that any process that we set up right now will not totally solve the problem and there will be deficiencies in it when we went to South Africa late at night we would hang out with some people A and C and others just at the socializing places to get a feel of people and they were fairly disappointed they were saying that you know people got up and told very gruesome stories and said they were sorry and they were they were set free and then with the tremendous unemployment in South Africa youth who might steal some bread or chicken or something would get five years and they were just looking at this and trying to figure out what shall we make of this and so I want to say first of all that as long as the system of domination or capitalism or whatever name we want to call it is in place that it tends to continue to produce the problem that you are trying to solve and I want to say and this is very important but that does not negate the process itself I think it was good my own way of thinking is that they probably prevented a civil war in South Africa and but when you look at it that way it's hard to measure the war that wasn't but if you use your imagination you could see where that was going unless there was something but the issue is whether or not there is a continuing process that builds on that in such a way that it leads to a fundamental transformation of the society itself I think we're all faced with that problem we had some success in Greensboro but there's been a tenacious struggle and the culture of corruption inside a police department is really really stubborn it may be the most stubborn stronghold in the culture I'm not sure of that but we made progress on that and we've gotten part of the city council looking at this differently and a huge part of the community and the first thing is not to overestimate a process but to appreciate it and make it do so that it can do knowing that it will not be sufficient but it's better than what you started with I think another part of the questions was interact with some of the very strands in our community and one really was what should you do in here dialogue talking to folks even when they didn't want to be talked to but anything that well from my experience anything that's significant one that the idea is playing in the hearts of minds of more than you you may be the first one to ask this country to me is part of too much or who is the first person to just do that but anyway and so we started where we could start so this person and that person and that person doubted and understood the need to revisit this horrible situation in our history in Greensboro and that the truth about that reveals something about how we're going to move forward period and the failure to deal with the men that we're still as Nelson says a lot living in yesterday then you start with those people then they talk well that was one time we had something called the night of a thousand conversations which means that those people that we could gather up that gone through some trainings and information of what had happened and you know how to deal with questions and what it's like this sort of question and so we had house meetings somewhere in houses somewhere in churches somewhere in community centers whatever we could have on campuses and everybody was talking about it and we summed up and gone from there things like that we did we just met people where we could meet and we went to go to the Rotary Club we go to the same school class we go wherever we could in some place we received well some we were not but often there was at least one person out there who didn't talk better the other part of the question Nelson may want to elaborate on this more is like how do we deal with this paradigm and that, okay you want to take it now alright let me take it I said that because I said that because I worked pretty closely with this group of young men who were widely understood as a game they defined themselves as a street group which there's a different they had a history but let me connect this to the truth process that because of the truth process and the publicity guy that we have a Wednesday table anyone in town can come and have a discussion about anything and it's just an open public space and people come and raise things well this young man came and said that he was the anchor I'd never heard that word before the anchor or the leader of the of the almighty Latin king and queen nation in North Carolina and that he wanted to talk to us about how to move his organization toward peace and unity well this was stunning you know but actually it's because we took a stand on the truth thing and there was somebody he thought he could trust so this is the discussion we had we actually worked at it's a long process he has actually been pretty badly treated by the police but we actually had a discussion and brought together six leaders of six gangs and the discussion was what is it that you're doing why did you get started and what do you want to do and we had this on a Wednesday night it was raining in the basement of a church you're having Sunday school on that Wednesday night Bible study and they didn't want to go to a private place because they were afraid that when they were together they were being watched so it looked like they were going to Bible study but half of the people went left the other half went right and we had a good discussion that night and what came of it was a treaty that got written on paper and we sat down with the police and with the mayor and with the city manager and said listen we think we have a way to help reduce crime in the communities where you're targeting and they said what is it we said we've got young people who have built a treaty among themselves and they to do this work if y'all don't as soon as you see them we're working with them and so that's what we were talking about we'll be glad to send you the paper it's called a paradigm shift and what it means is envisioning young people and people who have been in gangs as a resource for building safe communities and healthy communities and let me say to you now that it's not like a glowing success but it's a way of doing things they know everyone with people and we were in conversation with them and the clergy was in conversation and so you get a little we've had counseling with things as they started to tell their life and what they've been through and we think that this is the work that community has to do these are beautiful young people some of whom who have lost their way but ends the desire to be actualized as a beautiful intelligent person you don't have to see it you just have to believe it and then act like that and I think new things start to happen I just want to say with our collaborative team for creating interventions there were eight of us and two of the members were men with a history of violence one with a long history of violence and a brutal history of violence which we talked about really it was rare actually in the anti-violence community for survivor groups that are working with women to work with men and certainly not to work with men who have a history of doing harm I think we thought it was very important to include that who else understands violence and the motivations that people have in harming others and it really became a very, very rich kind of discussion we had with each other at one point we were working with a young woman who had been sexually assaulted and he came forward and was working as one of the facilitators of this intervention and talked about not at length but did reveal his history of harm it was such an unusual thing for me I really was wondering if we had made a terrible mistake and kind of exposed her she had come for help or exposed her to somebody who had talked about we talked about it later it might have been different with a different person but she said that she felt very relieved to be talking to somebody who could talk openly about their history and was there to come back and talk to her about how she might have a different understanding what could be done so I just want to say that I think that it's important that it needs to be done with care of course but it's important to involve people who do have histories of violence and most of us have some history about it regarding the community question can we have some other people in the audience maybe share some of their experiences or is that not part of it unfortunately it's really just only a question of time there are some ways that we've been thinking about how do we take what's just such a great beginning and kernel and create more and more possibilities for that to continue to extend our folks that have set up some social media for this weekend have not gotten a lot of love just because we haven't been really pushing those methods so I just want folks to know if they can use the hashtag this is how if you want to use that to enter into a conversation with people that are here people that are watching a live stream and so forth if you have something you want to write you want to share that you videotaped or documented or that you think is relevant to this there's also a tumbler that's the first letter in that phrase this is how we do it so it's like tihwdi.tumblr.com that's like another online space that I wanted to make sure people know about and if you go on there and you don't see anything it's just because we didn't do our job of telling you about it and put something on it to share and if you understand that they're open to it both respondents and presenters for this and the previous panels and the one that's coming up we'll find out what sort of contact information or just information about their organization that they're interested in sharing we'll gather that and then if you purchase the ticket online or you signed into our our signup sheet if we have your email address in one way or another we will get all that to you as well RJ, all the links of all the organizations in this whole yeah there's links to the orgs but it's like in addition to that if there's other stuff they want to share or other kinds of contact information like we're going to pull that together and just share it to folks a couple other things we are going to take a break now and that's also an opportunity to approach people and just have these conversations it's also an opportunity to please get some food feed yourself, shake out your body and take care of yourself and then just our request so we can kind of try to hold this thing together be back in the room at 3.10 and we'll try and really start this thing at 3.15 if we're all together here so let's thank our executive so what pink work do you do who brings you here