New Videos in the Building Accountable Communities Series

Featuring: Shira Hassan, Martina Kartman, Rachel Herzing, Mia Mingus, Priya Rai, Lea Roth, and Sonya Shah.

Transformative justice is a vision and framework for preventing, intervening in, and transforming harm. There are a number of different practices that fall under that broader framework. In this video, longtime practitioners of restorative and transformative justice discuss the everyday skills that we need to develop to reduce violence and to address harm.

Proactively mediating conflicts among friends and family, learning to give good apologies, negotiating healthy boundaries, and developing active listening skills all contribute to increasing our self-efficacy for preventing and intervening in harm. These skills are building blocks for lessening conflict and harm and provide a foundation for building towards an abolitionist horizon.

Featuring Mimi Kim and Shira Hassan.

In this video, Mimi Kim and Shira Hassan talk about the work they were doing starting around 2000 with INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence and the Young Women’s Empowerment Project (YWEP) that came to be defined as community accountability and transformative justice. They discuss how organizers were creating spaces, resources, and practices to respond to the needs of their communities facing violence, navigating work in criminalized economies, being barred from access to food banks, housing, and other basic needs without turning to the state and the non-profit system, which was often a key source of violence and exclusion. These organizers and communities developed practices through building relationships and crafted culturally-appropriate responses to day-to-day needs. Transformative, life affirming, and necessary, this work was dismissed and marginalized by the mainstream anti-violence movement.

In recent years, there has been a significant shift in public interest in transformative justice by the funded anti gender-based violence movement. In part, seeing the devastating consequences of decades of laws criminalizing interpersonal violence, organizations that were once calling for more laws and increased state intervention are now joining calls for decriminalization and non-punitive accountability. Shira and Mimi address what practices of transformative justice look like, as well as both the powerful possibilities of these practices and the threats of cooptation.

Featuring: Mia Mingus, Priya Rai, RJ Maccani, Esteban Kelly, Sonya Shah, Shira Hassan, Elliott Fukui, adrienne marie brown, Stas Schmiedt, Lea Roth, kai lumumba barrow, Martina Kartman, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, nuri nusrat, and Mimi Kim.

Accountability is self-reflecting, apologizing, making amends, and changing your behavior so the harm you caused doesn’t happen again. It is a process and not a destination. Over the years, accountability has been at the heart of transformative justice work. In this video, transformative and restorative justice practitioners discuss how accountability is enacted and some challenges in the journey.