Building Your Abolitionist Toolkit: Everyday Resources for a Punishment-Free World
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.
Unless otherwise noted, events will be held on Thursdays from 6:30 to 8:30 PM ET. All events will include live closed-captioning and ASL interpretation. For more information, questions, or accessibility requests, please contact interruptcrim@gmail.com.
Para obtener más información, preguntas o solicitudes de accesibilidad, por favor contacte interruptcrim@gmail.com.
For each session, we strongly recommend reading the resources beforehand. If you don’t have familiarity with the material, your experience of the sessions will be diminished.
Building Your Abolitionist Toolkit: Everyday Resources for a Punishment-Free World
Restorative Justice at Home
Thursday, September 24, 2020
Restorative Justice at Home
Join Restorative Justice practitioner Jennifer Viets to explore her new resource, “Talking Circles At Home and Parenting Restoratively.” 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 them 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?
Presenter: Jennifer Viets
Jennifer Viets (she/her/hers) is a Restorative Justice practitioner both in community and in Chicago Public Schools. In her role as a Restorative Practices Coach, she works with all members of a school community to build relationships and employ restorative responses to harm. With an emphasis on using the arts to “reach, teach, and heal,” she has worked as a multi-disciplinary teaching artist and arts administrator for children and families for the past 30 years. Jennifer is also the mother and mother-in-law of four grown people, and a practicing Abolitionist. She is currently leading virtual circles for teachers, parents, and community members.
Fumbling Towards Repair Practice Session
Saturday, October 10, 2020
2:00 to 4:30 PM ET
Have you purchased the “Fumbling Towards Repair” workbook co-authored by Mariame and Shira? Are you interested in digging into the resource with them? During this session, Mariame and Shira will answer questions that Community Accountability (CA) process facilitators have and will guide you through a couple of the activities in the workbook. This session is ONLY for CA facilitators who have a copy of the workbook and want a space of practice.
Presenters: Shira Hassan & Mariame Kaba, Just Practice Collaborative
The Just Practice Collaborative is a training and mentoring group focused on sustaining a community of practitioners that provide community-based accountability and support structures for all parties involved with incidents and patterns of sexual, domestic, relationship, and intimate community violence. This group and practice is a resource and a model for those who want to address violence without reliance on criminal legal and traditional social services.
Shira Hassan has trained and spoken nationally on the sex trade, harm reduction, self-injury, group work and healing, and transformative justice. Currently working as a consultant and coach, Shira offers program development and design, grassroots fundraising, participatory evaluation/action research, and assistance creating sustainable, healing centered and trauma-informed environments within organizations.
Mariame Kaba is the founder and director of Project NIA, a grassroots organization with a long-term vision to end youth incarceration. She has been active in the anti-criminalization and anti-violence movements for the past 30 years. For more information, visit http://mariamekaba.com/.
Creating Community in Classrooms
Thursday, October 22, 2020
As education evolves to meet the demands of a new era, we are all learning, socializing, and working in digital spaces more often. Sharing physical space has new limits, too. Online or in person, how we teach, learn, parent, facilitate, and lead are all changing in indelible ways. How do we create nurturing, productive, and transformative spaces for learning, work, and growth? What are the building blocks for sharing space and how can we use them to address our needs as learners and educators? In this session, we will use the resource “How To Share Space” as a springboard to explore the opportunities presented by these changing norms and the challenges they bring. This is an interactive meeting, with time to question, analyze, and create — so come prepared to participate!
Presenters: Atom Fire Arts Cooperative
Atom Fire Arts Cooperative is a group of dedicated educators, artists, learners, and their supporters imagining the future of education together. How to Share Space: Creating Community in Classrooms and Beyond is a resource that comes out of our research and experience in building worlds with others. We study and seek new ways to implement best practices like trauma-informed care and transformative justice models in order to create learning spaces that allow people to be their fullest and most engaged whole selves.
Whose Security is it Anyway? Practical Strategies to Address Institutional Violence in Nonprofit Organizations
Thursday, November 5, 2020
Join veteran youth workers, advocates, and co-strugglers Lara Brooks and Mariame Kaba for a presentation on their toolkit "Whose Security is it Anyway?" This resource explores a neglected area of focus in the marginalization and criminalization of young people: the non-profit industrial complex. Heightened racialized surveillance and increasing state violence, particularly against BIPOC individuals, has also led to increased collusion and reliance on law enforcement within these spaces. Young people in institutions like schools, clinics and hospitals, homeless shelters, faith-based settings, homeless drop-in and outreach programs and recreational facilities are finding highly controlled spaces that are quick to punish and expel them.
In collaboration with youth workers from across Chicago, Brooks and Kaba created a toolkit to share strategies of resistance to the increased securitization of non-profit spaces and illuminate the need for organizations and individuals working within them to interrogate policies and procedures with an intersectional lens, develop and learn community accountability practices, and question program values and structures. We hope the strategies outlined in this session inspire, energize, and awaken possibilities towards creating more supportive, healthy, and transformative spaces for young people.
"As organization leaders and workers, we must understand the impact and roots of institutional violence before we can fully acknowledge the ways our programs knowingly and unknowingly, passively and actively, deny help and—on some occasions—forcefully push young people closer to engagement with law enforcement."
Presenters: Lara Brooks & Mariame Kaba
Lara Brooks (she/they) has worked with young people experiencing homelessness, survivors of violence, and queer and trans communities since 2001. Lara is the current Chief Program Officer at the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, and the former director of the Broadway Youth Center (BYC) in Chicago where they worked for nearly a decade. At BYC, Lara supported drop-in services, facilitated support groups for youth experiencing homelessness, and expanded programming to help link thousands of young people each year with services and opportunities like resource advocacy, counseling, medical care, GED tutoring, basic needs, and youth-led leadership programs. Lara specializes in the fields of harm reduction, trauma-informed systems of care, organizational program design and development, community accountability, and intimate partner violence.
Mariame Kaba is an organizer, educator and curator who is active in movements for racial, gender, and transformative justice. She is the founder and director of Project NIA, a grassroots abolitionist organization with a vision to end youth incarceration, and has co-founded multiple organizations and projects over the years, including Survived and Punished, the Just Practice Collaborative, and Interrupting Criminalization. Mariame co-authored the guidebook “Lifting As They Climbed” in 2017, and in 2019 she published her first children’s book, “Missing Daddy.”
Two Sides of Justice
Thursday, November 19, 2020
In this session, we will explore the “Two Sides of Justice Curriculum” by engaging in the activities and discussing how and where this curriculum could be implemented. We will discuss questions like: What is justice? How can we address violence in non-punitive ways? How do carceral systems impact people who cause harm and who have been harmed? The session will be as interactive as you like: Engage in the conversations or listen in — all are welcome.
Presenters: Santera Matthews & Mariame Kaba
Santera Matthews is a queer, mixed indigenous (Keewenaw Bay Ojibwe) organizer born and raised in Milwaukee, WI. Santera’s work focuses on supporting people who are criminalized for acts of self-defense, facilitating and supporting restorative and transformative justice processes, and supporting LGBTQ people who are incarcerated in Wisconsin as an organizer with Black and Pink.
Mariame Kaba is an organizer, educator and curator who is active in movements for racial, gender, and transformative justice. She is the founder and director of Project NIA, a grassroots abolitionist organization with a vision to end youth incarceration, and has co-founded multiple organizations and projects over the years, including Survived and Punished, the Just Practice Collaborative, and Interrupting Criminalization. Mariame co-authored the guidebook “Lifting As They Climbed” in 2017, and in 2019 she published her first children’s book, “Missing Daddy.”