Request for Collective Justice Trainings

This workshop provides participants with an introduction to conflict and harm and an opportunity to gain skills and tools that are trauma-informed and grounded in restorative justice. Topics covered include: theoretical underpinnings and movement history of restorative and transformative justice (tensions and possibilities), restorative and transformative justice as an organizing strategy in the context of structural violence and interpersonal violence, circle process practices. Participants will gain an understanding of the principles, practices, and philosophy of restorative justice and of community circles as the foundation of community-led healing practices. They will alsogain skills to keep community circles in their own communities. Ideally, this training is an interactive circle training that leaves participants inspired by restorative justice as a paradigm shift.

As human beings, we are extremely resilient. We rebound from war, disaster, violence, and betrayal. But traumatic experiences, whether it is something done to you, or something you yourself have done, interrupt safety, agency, dignity, and belonging and leave traces on communities, families and individuals. Unresolved trauma can have significant impacts on our well-being, health, and relationships. In this training, we deepen understanding of trauma, including generational, oppression-based, complex, and single incident trauma, and their causes. We explore the impacts of trauma, including the physiological impact, the hidden effects, and the connection between violence and trauma and how trauma and resilience play out and lead to cycles of harm or the possibility of healing, wellness, and resilience and stop cycles of harm to ourselves and others, develop connection to ourselves and others, and create possibilities for our futures.

This workshop will explore the concept of socialization as a process where individuals inherit norms, values, beliefs, ideologies, customs, and behaviors across our life span. We are socialized often into rigid ways of being and acting based on our real and perceived identities - along the lines of race, class, gender, ability, sexuality. This is a hands on workshop exploring individuals’ own gender socialization and the impact of patriarchy on all of us. We will explore connections between gender socialization and how we experience and perpetuate violence and harm and how we heal together.

In our society, accountability is equated with punishment or feels elusive altogether. In our search to explore what accountability can look like, we often vacillate between minimizing responsibility for our actions, and shame-spiraling to such a degree that measuring up to the task of responsibility becomes impossible. In this skills-based training, we will use tools to explore self-accountability as a building-block to accountability in interpersonal relationships and for harm caused to others. Through the use of the accountability tool, and an accountability letter writing assignment, as well as exercises and discussion, we will offer facilitation techniques to create a space where grounded, “right sized” accountability is possible. This workshop is foundational for growing accountability within collective bodies and for restorative and transformative justice in response to harm. The workshop builds off the work of ShannonPerez-Darby and the Northwest Network’s accountability tools, and Insight Prison Project and Ahimsa Collective’s accountability processes.

As a society, we are practiced in moving from one task to the next without taking the time to pause and reflect. Perhaps there is too much on our plate, we don’t have the energy, or we have built little tolerance for reckoning with and taking stock of our actions and impacts. Slowing down and taking time for self, peer and team-reflection helps us create self-awareness and work deliberately with awareness of our impact. It’s about taking a step back and reflecting on your time, practices and impacts, and using those reflections to take action or make adjustments to live in closer alignment with your values. Being able to sit with our own intentional and grounded assessments of the world around us, and being able to provide and receive useful, grounded feedback, can strengthen our work, deepen our relationship to others, and lead to more bolder, more impactful work in the world.

This training builds a foundational understanding of how trauma lives in our bodies, as survivors and as people supporting survivors. We live in a society that discourages us from sharing our experiences of harm and trauma. As a result, we are often not well practiced in holding space for one another to share or experience deep emotion.When it comes to supporting one another as we share more about ourselves, the quality of how we listen and respond matters. In fact, just helping a person feel heard and understood can sometimes go a long way toward healing. Depending on time and intention, this workshop may offer practices for holding space with care to support circle participants to collectively hold space for one another.

In this workshop, participants learn frameworks and practices for self and collective care that can be utilized in restorative and transformative justice processes and for facilitators to stay in this work for the long haul. Healing Justice is a framework that positions individual healing within an analysis of broader social systems of power and oppression. Healing Justice as a movement and a term was created by Cara Page and the Kindred Healing Justice Collective, a group of Black, Indigenous and People of Color, women, and Queer and Trans Southern/rural healers. In this workshop, we will cover Healing Justice as a movement, engage in frameworks and theory and practice self and collective care tools such as pod mapping and wellness plans.

Over the past 40 years, the criminal legal system has been propped up as the front line approach to address violence. The increasingly punitive orientation has been detrimental to women and queer people marginalized not only by gender, but also by factors such as race, class, sexuality, nationality, and immigration status. As the carceral system grows, it continues to sweep more and more survivors into it. Survivors’ involvement with the criminal legal system is overwhelmingly the result of their trauma, acts of self-defense, lacking funds for legal representation, and not fitting the racist stereotype of the “perfect victim.” This teach-in will discuss community organizing for criminalized survivors including defense campaigns and legislation.