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Alison Reba is a Black Trans butterfly, sibling, community organizer and healing practitioner who centers relationship building as a means to transform ourselves and our communities. They believe in the radical imagination and power of young people to transform our world, and carry with them over 10 years of experiences co-learning from their brilliance. Alison is deeply committed to a practice that interweaves storytelling, dreams, and soul + ancestral medicine as tools for collective liberation.

We're excited to share a new video collaboration with Project Nia & Blue Seat Studios. This four-minute animated video is made with young people in mind but can be a useful introduction to basic #DefundPolice concepts for all ages.

We recently released three new videos in the Building Accountable Communities series: Everyday Practices of Transformative Justice, The Modern Roots of Transformative Justice, and What is Accountability?

The Building Accountable Communities Project promotes non-punitive responses to harm by developing resources for transformative justice practitioners and organizing convenings and workshops that educate the public.

Created by Project NIA and the Barnard Center for Research on Women. Video produced by Mariame Kaba, Dean Spade, and Hope Dector.

Project NIA’s mission is to dramatically reduce the reliance on arrest, detention, and incarceration for addressing youth violence and to promote the use of restorative and transformative practices, a concept that relies on community-based safety responses. Beyond all of the words, what we are after is to end youth incarceration, a practice that we consider to be harmful, immoral, and counter-productive. When our ultimate goal is bluntly stated in this way, it becomes more difficult to win a majority of the public over to our side of the argument. People begin asking all sorts of questions like “surely you believe that some children and young adults belong in prison?” or “Is it realistic to close all youth prisons?” These are valid questions and we engage them.

Project NIA founder and director Mariame Kaba has written a new zine designed by artist Naimah Thomas. This publication was written with high school students in mind. It’s a great way to discuss the criminalization of Black girls and also the school to prison pipeline. Please feel free to share with educators, young people and others in your communities.

Restorative Justice practitioner Jennifer Viets has developed a new resource, “Talking Circles At Home and Parenting Restoratively.” The resource asks and answers the following questions: How can we use family Talking Circles to deepen our closest relationships with honest and open communication? What would it mean to intentionally create our own family values? What is a restorative conversation and how can we use it to practice naming as well as repairing harm with everyone in our household? What is the value of a Peace Corner for children and adults, and how can we build one?

This fall, join Project NIA and friends as we assemble our abolitionist toolkits. In this series, we will explore six different resources that help us build daily practices to move us closer to a world free of imprisonment, policing, and surveillance. Together, we will learn how we can use abolitionist organizing tools and values in our relationships, our homes, our schools, our organizations, and our communities. We will consider how we can deepen discussions about justice, harm, and healing, and we will dive into active ways that we can work towards an abolitionist future that includes everyone.

In July 2020, Project NIA partnered with EFA Project Space to create and co-present the Janine Soleil Youth Abolitionist Institute—a series of programs around the interwoven questions of abolition, justice, equity, transformation, and reparation.