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Fumbling Towards Repair: A Workbook for Community Accountability Facilitators

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Fumbling Towards Repair: A Workbook for Community Accountability Facilitators

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by Mariame Kaba & Shira Hassan

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Publisher: Project NIA/Just Practice
Format: Book
Binding: pb
Released: June 18, 2019
ISBN-13: 9781939202321

Fumbling Toward Repair is a workbook by Mariame Kaba and Shira Hassan that includes reflection questions, skill assessments, facilitation tips, helpful definitions, activities, and hard-learned lessons intended to support people who have taken on the coordination and facilitation of formal community accountability processes to address interpersonal harm & violence.

Mariame Kaba is the founder and director of Project NIA, a grassroots organization with a vision to end youth incarceration. Mariame is also a co-organizer of the Just Practice Collaborative, 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. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications including The Nation Magazine, The Guardian, The Washington Post, In These Times, Teen Vogue, The New Inquiry and more. Mariame uses her extensive experience with issues of racial, gender and transformative justice to catalyze various projects.

Shira Hassan is the former executive director of the Young Women's Empowerment Project, an organizing and grassroots movement building project led by and for young people of color that have current or former experience in the sex trade and street economies. A lifelong harm reductionist and prison abolitionist, Shira has been working on community accountability for nearly 25 years and has helped young people of color start their own organizing projects across the country. Shira's work has been discussed on National Public Radio, The New York Times, The Nation, In These Times, Bill Moyers, Scarleteen, Everyday Feminism, Bitch Media, TruthOut and Colorlines.

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A workbook that includes reflection questions, skill assessments, facilitation tips, helpful definitions, activities, and hard-learned lessons intended to support people who have taken on the coordination and facilitation of formal community accountability processes to address interpersonal harm and violence.

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Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement

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Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement

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Afraid to call 911, but not sure what to do instead? Here are strategies for accountability beyond the criminal justice system.

Transformative justice seeks to solve the problem of violence at the grassroots level, without relying on punishment, incarceration, or policing. Community-based approaches to preventing crime and repairing its damage have existed for centuries. However, in the putative atmosphere of contemporary criminal justice systems, they are often marginalized and operate under the radar. Beyond Survival puts these strategies front and center as real alternatives to today's failed models of confinement and "correction."

In this collection, a diverse group of authors focuses on concrete and practical forms of redress and accountability, assessing existing practices and marking paths forward. They use a variety of forms-from toolkits to personal essays-to delve deeply into the "how to" of transformative justice, providing alternatives to calling the police, ways to support people having mental health crises, stories of community-based murder investigations, and much more. At the same time, they document the history of this radical movement, creating space for long-time organizers to reflect on victories, struggles, mistakes, and transformations.

Featuring writing, tools and interviews by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Kai Cheng Thom, Amita Swadhin, Audrey Huntley, Amanda Aguilar Shank, Janae E Bonsu of BYP100, Philly Stands Up (Esteban Kelly, Jenna Peters-Golden, Qui Dorian, Bench Ansfield and Beth Blum), Creative Interventions, Trans Lifeline, Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective, Oakland Power Projects, SOS Collective/Audre Lorde Project, Icarus Project/ Fireweed Collective, Raquel Lavina, Chris Lymbertos, RJ Maccani, Nathan Shara, Staci Haines, Georgia Latino Alliance For Human Rights, MIJENTE, Monica Sehovic Bowen Forrester, Elene Lam, Chanelle Gallant, Elisabeth Marie Long, adrienne maree brown, Adrian Cole, Yalini Dream, Shira Hassan, Mariame Kaba and Mimi Kim.

Ejeris Dixon is an organizer, consultant, and political strategist with twenty years of experience organizing within racial justice, LGBTQ, transformative justice, anti-violence, and economic justice movements. She is the Founding Director of Vision Change Win Consulting where she partners with organizations to build their capacity and deepen the impact of their organizing strategies. Her essay, "Building Community Safety: Practical Steps Toward Liberatory Transformation," is featured in the anthology Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? Police Violence and Resistance in the United States.

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is the Lambda Award winning author of Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home, Bodymap, Love Cake, Consensual Genocide and co-editor of The Revolution Starts At Home: Confronting Intimate Violence in Activist Communities. A lead artist with the disability justice collective Sins Invalid, she is a longtime cultural worker, educator and organizer within disability and transformative justice communities.

Praise For Beyond Survival:

"Beyond Survival is a book for anyone yearning for transformation within themselves and across communities. If I had this book when I first began organizing, I would not have felt so alone and lost when seeking ways to confront conflict, harm and violence without policing and punishment. As our movements evolve, so must what we consider as essential reading - Beyond Survival is clearly essential reading." -Charlene A. Carruthers, author of Unapologetic: A Black, Queer and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements

"Somewhere between a call to action, a love letter, and a prayer, Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the TJ Moment is a gift to those of us working for justice. The voices in this collection are strong and compassionate, and their reflections are honest and open-hearted. Readers will feel challenged, inspired and held by this critically important book. It will surely inspire change." -Beth Richie, author of Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America's Prison Nation

"I've been waiting for this book for so many years. Gritty, unsentimental, blunt, compassionate, and visionary, the wildly varied voices, insights, and experiences collected in this exceptional - and essential - anthology help chart new pathways through the harms of violence in its interrelated interpersonal, vigilante, and structural forms. Appearing at precisely the moment we need them most, these visions, questions, and practices will stir your imagination, fuel your own radical dreams, and open your heart to the possibility of transformed futures for us all." -Kay Whitlock, author of Considering Hate: Violence, Goodness, and Justice in American Culture and Politics

"Beyond Survival arrives just on time. Through the combined brilliance of Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha we are offered a beautiful invitation: away from any quick and easy solutions that don't ever do what they purport and towards a fundamental rethinking of what safety is, and a lifetime practice learning, relearning and creating it through community with all the messiness it entails. This book is truly making the road by dreaming and I'm so grateful for it." Tourmaline, filmmaker, Happy Birthday, Marsha and Atlantic Is a Sea of Bones

"Beyond Survival is full of grounded, practical wisdom based in brave, thoughtful, collaborative efforts. It will be immensely useful to people trying to respond to the real crises our communities are facing with creative solutions that actually build healing and safety. This is the collection that so many of us have been waiting for, capturing the knowledge generated by grassroots experiments undertaken by bold, imaginative activists working to respond to and prevent violence. We will be using this as a reference book for building community responses to harm and violence for decades to come." -Dean Spade, author of Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law

"If you're serious about toppling the pillars of white supremacy in the United States, start by reading Beyond Survival ... Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha have provided a blueprint, featuring some of the brightest minds making transformative justice a reality. While many articles and essays have highlighted the "why" of transformative justice, the question of "how" persists. Now, Beyond Survival boldly answers. Ejeris and Leah, along with the featured writers, have propelled transformative justice into today's stagnant policy discourse ... With interviews, stories of success, and unadulterated realness, Beyond Survival shows us how to keep going, how to keep pressing forward, how to survive until we are beyond the injustices of today." -Eric Ward, Executive Director of the Western States Center and Civil Rights Strategist

"A unique contribution to an ongoing discussion about emerging Transformative Justice processes for building safe and equitable communities, especially in the context of the 'defund the police' movement. While municipalities across America struggle to respond to incidents of police brutality, Beyond Survival offers writings from three dozen TJ practitioners as well as a plethora of principles and examples of community practices for responding to violence without relying on police." - Toward Freedom

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Beyond Survival Afraid to call 911, but not sure what to do instead? Here are strategies for accountability beyond the criminal justice system. Transformative justice seeks to solve the problem of violence at the grassroots level, without relying on puni

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We Will Not Cancel Us And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice

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We Will Not Cancel Us And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice

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by adrienne maree brown

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Cancel or call-out culture is a fraught topic these days. Originating as a way for marginalized and disempowered people to address harm and take down powerful abusers, often with the help of social media, it is seen by some as having gone too far. But what is "too far" when you're talking about imbalances of power and patterns of harm? And what happens when people in social movements direct our righteous anger inward at one another?

In We Will Not Cancel Us, movement mediator adrienne maree brown reframes the discussion for us, in a way that points to possible paths beyond our impasse. Most critiques of cancel culture come from outside the milieus that produce it, sometimes even from its targets. Brown explores the question from a Black, queer, and feminist viewpoint that gently asks, how well does this practice serve us? Does it prefigure the sort of world we want to live in? And, if it doesn't, how do we seek accountability and redress for harm in ways that reflect our values?

With an Afterword by Malkia Devich-Cyril.
Praise for We Will Not Cancel Us
"This book offers much needed ground for those of us who 'are in the mud together' as Black feminists, abolitionists, co-strugglers, and everyday people. Through her own vulnerability, adrienne maree brown invites us to ask ourselves uncomfortable questions, to name our fears and terrors. She makes it clear that the solutions to our most pressing challenges squarely lie in how we relate to one another and to the tender spots that exist within our own-selves. We Will Not Cancel Us acknowledges humanity while inviting us to become more discerning, loving, and rigorous for the sake of collective liberation."
- Charlene A. Carruthers, author of Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements

"As someone who wrote 'kill your rapist' on every surface I could find in the 90's and then went on to find other nonviolent solutions for transformation, We Will Not Cancel Us brings me face to face with my innermost conflicts about transformative justice. How do we align anger, believing and supporting survivors, with a values-based daily practice of accountability for those who harm us? How do we, as a loving community, stay with the necessary questions of abolition when we are aching for the pain and trauma to stop? In this book, adrienne maree brown gives us the space to sit with our discomfort and honors our process as a growing abolitionists. She gives us points to struggle with so that we can continue on our journey to the next best version of our community, our practice, our politics, and ourselves."
- Shira Hassan, co-author of Fumbling Toward Repair: A Workbook for Community Accountability Facilitators

"adrienne maree brown urges us to go deep, sink down, struggle, and swim as we find language, spirit, ourselves, and each other in this time of chaos. I cannot say how grateful I am for this work of poetry and love that makes sense of my/our everyday state of confusion and shows us how we might live abolition-not as an absolute state but as a dynamic motion forward and together."
- Mimi Kim, California State University, Long Beach

"This piece is part vulnerable inquiry, part loving challenge. adrienne risks in revealing both her unthinkable thoughts and the process of public grappling. Through this, she invites all of us into authentic reflection of our practices towards accountability and our commitments in them to both life and healing."
- Prentis Hemphill, movement facilitator and former Healing Justice Director at Black Lives Matter Global Network

"Do we want to practice a politic of construction or destruction? This is the fundamental question adrienne maree brown is asking in this provocative and necessary book. We are in a moment of colliding crises of ecology, economy and empire, personal & political disorientation, because of a pandemic, growing global racist and patriarchal authoritarianism, and a re-alignment of left forces that are experimenting with new set of tactics and strategies. Amidst all of this, conflict, political difference, and confusion is going to happen in our movements, organizations and communities. She calls for radical and compassionate rigor in acknowledging, facing and challenging how we deal with harm and hurt. I believe principled struggle is a skill and politic to be trained in-adrienne inspires us to continue creating new forms of accountability that are not punitive like the state we seek to abolish. Transformative Justice is a living practice towards the new world we want to create."
- Cindy Wiesner, Grassroots Global Justice Alliance and Rising Majority

"adrienne maree brown's written voice speaks to readers that dare to stretch their usual narrative and challenge the norm. This book is a fitting read for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of how a transformative justice approach can be applied as a personal and collective practice that generates liberation."
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adrienne maree brown is a writer rooted in Detroit who now lives in Durham, NC. She is a student of the works of Octavia E. Butler and Ursula K. Le Guin. Some of her books include , , and Emergent Strategy. Her visionary fiction has appeared in The Funambulist, Harvard Design Review, Dark Mountain, and YES! Magazine.

Malkia Devich-Cyril is an award winning writer and public speaker on issues of digital rights, narrative power, Black liberation and collective grief; as well as a founder, former Executive Director, and current Senior Fellow at Media Justice, a national hub boldly advancing racial justice, rights and dignity in a digital age.

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In We Will Not Cancel Us , movement mediator adrienne maree brown reframes the discussion around "call-out culture" for us, in a way that points to possible paths beyond our impasse. She explores the question from a Black, queer, and feminist viewpoint that gently asks, how well does this practice serve us?

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Turning Towards Each Other: A Conflict Workbook

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Turning Towards Each Other: A Conflict Workbook

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by Jovida Ross & Weyam Ghadbian

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Turning Towards Each Other: A Conflict Workbook - Community Resource Hub

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So what do we do when we inevitably run into conflict? This was the question on our minds when we wrote a new conflict workbook for groups working towards a shared purpose.

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Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective (BATJC)

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Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective (BATJC)

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by Ari Perezdiez

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When People Who Harm Don’t Consent to Transformative Justice

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When People Who Harm Don’t Consent to Transformative Justice

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The reality we must face is that even when liberation comes - people who cause harm may not choose to transform. Consenting to the process and commitment of transformation is difficult even when love, community, and resources are present and available. Everyone will not make the choice to be accountable and transform themselves. And we will have to learn how to adapt when people in our communities choose otherwise.

Mia Mingus of the Bay Area Tranformative Justice Collective defines transformative justice as "a way to respond to violence within our communities in ways that 1.) don't create more harm and violence and 2.) actively work to cultivate the very things that we know will prevent violence, such as accountability, healing, trust, connection, safety." Transformative justice frameworks are a part of the revolutionary work cultivated by Black, Indigenous, and people of color to dismantle the root of abuse and violence - systemic oppression. This framework offers us a future where we are whole and valuable rather than disposable. So of course, those of us who are committed to liberation want to utilize transformative justice frameworks whenever possible because we know harm WILL happen, and we want our communities to thrive. But an issue we have yet to address succinctly is when someone who has harmed will not consent to transformation, and there is still an expectation and push from our communities to make transformative justice happen anyway.

Transformative justice is not a cage for us to die in. Some of our traumas, conflict, and situations of harm will not align with transformative justice processes. We must be prepared to not know all the answers when we can't make people consent and commit to transforming their harms. We must be prepared to navigate uncomfortable repercussions because there aren't enough options to support survivors and those who are harmed. When situations arise where transformative justice is not available, appropriate, or consented to (by the person who harmed) - we have to make room for the complicated, messy, public, agitating, war-waging, and deadly responses to harm.

The onus of transformation should not be on those who were harmed. And if those who cause harm do not consent to transformative justice processes- let's hold survivors more gently for the blood that will inevitably be shed. Sometimes people who cause harm will be killed. Sometimes people who cause harm will get their ass beat. Sometimes people who cause harm will be publicly shamed. Sometimes people who cause harm will be stripped of resources or be exiled. And often, these decisions are not made initially or consensually by survivors. Rather, these decisions are often made out of desperation, lack of options, burnout, compassion fatigue from overextending to those who have harmed them, and in response to those who have harmed failing to be accountable.

Sometimes the amplification of harm doesn't directly impact the person who caused harm - but rather intimately affects those who were harmed. Sometimes survivors remove themselves from space, exiling their own livelihood. Sometimes survivors self-harm, become destructive, and emerge as entirely different people. Sometimes survivors don't survive. We should hold all of these possibilities in tension as we continue to recognize that these realities will exist regardless of transformative justice.

In Fumbling Towards Repair, Mariame Kaba and Shira Hassan write: "Punishment is passive - it happens to someone. It does not require taking responsibility or transformation. Accountability is actually harder because it requires real transformation - accountability is active." This is deeply true. But to be clear, the context of this passage is through the practice of engaging a community accountability process. When someone does not consent to transformation, how do we hold the nuances of punishment and consequence for perpetuating or enacting harm? Have we arrived there yet?

Kaba and Hassan define punishment as 'suffering, pain, or loss that serves as retribution' and consequence as 'the results or effects of an action or condition.' (These definitions were given within the context of transformative justice processes.) How do these definitions change when the opportunities for consequence and boundaries are not applicable? How does the possibility of punishment get held with care if the people who harmed us never commit to accountability and transformation? If we are all in different communities, with different embodiments of liberation, how will we draw the line between what is punishment and what is a natural consequence for causing harm outside of transformative justice? The truth is - we won't.

We must disrupt the idea and hope for an accountability utopia. Not only is it unrealistic for our vastness as human beings who deserve a world of possibility where violence is no longer cultural and systemic, but it also inadvertently puts the onus back on survivors (and those who cause harm) to adapt to one kind of accountability. Anything that is expected to be a utopia for all of our communities would inherently mimic the rigidity and one-size-fits-all model of the prison industrial complex. We cannot project transformative justice frameworks onto survivors who are often surviving people who are not committed to transformative justice. We cannot make anyone transform themselves or their harm. We also cannot limit transformation to one idea or embodiment when we are of different communities, identities, cultures, and experiences. This may mean that survivors and communities may utilize consequences AND punishments that everyone does not find value or validity in.

When the people who harm us do not consent to transformation - it leaves us open for more questions that may not have answers. Do we just let it go? Is it inherently carceral to want them to suffer if they're not committed to addressing the suffering they created? Does it make us less aligned with liberation to want our harm-doers to feel the impacts of the harm they cause? What are the "right" consequences for someone who doesn't consent to transformation? Is there room for us to make decisions that may lean towards punishment? Is there grace given to those who want to punish those who have harmed because their opportunity for accountability was denied?

When I chose to fist-fight my abuser, I was so deeply fearful that I strayed from my commitment to Black liberation. If I was really about liberation, I wouldn't want to physically fight my abuser - I would want them to transform, right? But the reality was: a.) my abuser had a history of abuse and has already gone through a community accountability process before for the same harm, b.) my abuser is an emotionally abusive manipulator who could've been given the platform to continue their abuse through a community accountability process, c.) I tried to hold them accountable privately and they declined, and d.) I don't give a fuck about their transformation. After researching, conferring with my community, and processing my feelings, I felt like there was no other option for a consequence that made sense for what they did to me. But I also realize in hindsight that this particular type of consequence - something that many Black communities have utilized to navigate harm and conflict - could also be seen as punitive to someone else. The nuances of how we define consequences has the ability to divide those who see transformative justice as the "right" way to address harm, and those of us who know that we need more variety of options for survivors and the different circumstances we're navigating.

We have to make room for the reality that everyone will not come to the table. And survivors will survive how they have to. How survivors survive these circumstances should be less about being "right" or "perfect" in our trauma, and more about the lack of options that exist for surviving harm. Every response will not translate the same to everyone, and it shouldn't. We are all in different communities, with different cultures and identities that shape how we see accountability, transformation, consequence, punishment, and beyond.

The truth is that we cannot control or predict how our trauma will show up. We also cannot predict how those who harm us will show up through our trauma. What we find valid as survivors is complicated, and sometimes does not align with our values beyond that trauma. What we determine as a response as survivors is deeply contingent upon the impact of trauma, our circumstances, our communities, and those who harm us. But retribution and punishment will not be eradicated from our decision making if there aren't more options to support survivors who's harm-doer's do not consent to transformation or when transformative justice just doesn't apply.

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When People Who Harm Don't Consent to Transformative Justice

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The reality we must face is that even when liberation comes - people who cause harm may not choose to transform. Consenting to the process and commitment of transformation is difficult even when love, community, and resources are present and available. Everyone will not make the choice to be accountable and transform themselves.