Transcript: "Transformative Justice in the Era of #Defund" with Shira Hassan and Mimi Kim (2 of 2)

8:03PM Oct 21, 2020

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I will I can put the link into the video description. Okay, so should I just take out what's out there? What's up there now? Yeah. Okay. And I'm gonna just say my introduction that we're trying to get the live

captions resolved and we're sorry. Yeah. Put them in the YouTube Live. I'll do. I'll put it everywhere.

Awesome. Thank you. Okay, I'm going to take it out right now.

the live feed based on the live caption helps us as interpreters to so I know you said you're gonna put it everywhere and we love that thing. Okay,

all right. I'm gonna start I think everyone feel good about bots. So even taking you out.

Okay.

Mimi and share? Are you ready? Okay,

it's gonna be great.

It's gonna be great.

Okay, got it. Got it. Okay.

All right. We are going live.

Eve, will you Oh, is Eve not there. Asha. Can you are you watching the live stream? Can you give me a thumbs up if you're watching the live stream? Okay, well, you give me a thumbs up when you see us on the screen. Thank you. Okay, we're going live.

All right, getting the thumbs up that we are good to go. Great.

Hi, everyone. I'm hooked director and creative director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women. I'm excited to welcome you all to this online conversation transformative justice in the era of defend police lessons from the past strategizing for the future featuring Sherif Hassan and unique him.

I wanted to start with a couple of notes on accessibility for today's event. We are currently working on the live captioning for the event, our live caption or have a family emergency.

And so

we have a new live caption or Sarah who is getting set up as we get started and we will post the link to the live captions below the video description in YouTube and also on the event page as soon as it's available, and we apologize for the delay with the live captioning. huge thank you to our ASL interpreters for today's event, Brandon and Carly will be keeping the video in gallery mode so that you'll be able to see Brandon or Carly as the conversation goes on. The event is scheduled to take place for two hours and we're planning to take five to 10 minute break about an hour and 15 minutes into the event. So that when we come back from the q&a we'll be when we come back from the break we'll be ready to start the q&a. This conversation is part of the building accountable communities project which promotes non punitive responses to harm by developing resources for transformative justice practitioners and organizing convenings and workshops to educate the public. Building clinical communities is conceived by Merriam Kaba and is a collaboration between vSphere W and project nia. You can find links to previous online events and videos from this series on the event page. I have a few quick notes of links and information that might be helpful for viewer before we start the conversation. First, thank you to Merriam Kaba for creating this project and for sharing your abolitionist brilliance with the world in so many ways every day. Thanks also to Dean spade for sharing your thoughts and insights love collaborating on these videos with Maryam and me. And thank you to all my co workers at UC or w for making these events possible including Elizabeth Castelli, Pam Phillips, ami Navarro, ami Cummings and especially Eve cash who is coordinating so much of the work that goes into this event behind the scenes including managing the social media and communications during the event. And also to be CW student research assistant, Asha featherman, who is working with us behind the scenes today. If you have a question

you can ask in the chat on YouTube Live page or by tweeting vSphere w tweets or emailing BCR w@barnard.edu. As we mentioned in the event description

today's event takes as a starting point three new videos in the building accountable communities series which teacher transformative justice practitioners sharing their wisdom and insights from years of experience. One thing that came up in many of the interviews we did for this series was the need for people to keep trying things and sharing what worked and what didn't as part of the organic process of growth of transformative justice practices. With that in mind, I feel very lucky to get to hear from Sherif Asana meanie came today, Sharon Mimi are both longtime anti violence organizers with decades of experience with harm reduction and responding to violence without policing. You can find their full BIOS on the event page. So I don't want to take time away from their conversation to read them here. But I did want to mention as sort of essential reading in transformative justice to amazing resources that they've contributed. Sherif Hassan co wrote with and I am Cava from link cards repair work workbook for community accountability facilitators. And you can find the link to that on the event page. And

many

work on the creative interventions toolkit, which is fundamental reading for transformative justice practices. So with that, I want to turn it over to Sharon meany, and thank you both so much for being here. Beautiful.

Thank you. That was great. Thanks, hope. We just want to like echo all those things. We want to thank also the interpreters and the people working on live captioning, to make this event as accessible as possible. And we want to of course, thank Maryam project, Nia, and BCR w for all of their incredible support and hope for all for your introductions and like this unbelievably smooth tech that we're experiencing right now. So thank you so much. I think we also want to make sure that we thank our broader TJ community and the women and careers that we've been growing and thinking with over the last 25 years, a lot of what we're going to share today

has been done

in collective and what we've at least one of my most important learning has been over the last 20 years that you can't practice TJ in a vacuum. And your interventions are so much better when you're practicing with people who are also practicing to learn and grow. So I'm

I'm Mimi. Yes.

Thank you. Thanks for joining this conversation. Um, I agree. It's very rare. Fortunately, though, we have this much time live to talk, when I saw that this wasn't going to be reduced to three minute clip, which I actually thought at first, but was actually going to be two hours for us to have a conversation that's both terrifying and have to admit, but also an opportunity for us to really spend time and go a little bit more slowly. I think a lot of times, now that we've been asked to do more and more webinars and other public speaking, we're often constrained to do something within a five minute or seven minute span of time trying to think about what we want to get in. And this allows for some spaciousness, we hope that we were able to offer something that maybe you haven't heard before, or a way to say that synthesize things, I think for us and just preparing for this. It allowed me to go and really remember all of the people in the community that have been with us from before, still today, and all those that are so that I'm co learning with, who I know are going to be the near future. So we'll have time to mention some of those people. Not all of them will be mentioned will miss people. But I know that I'm looking forward to being able to really give honor to some of the people so many of you who have been part of this journey together. Thanks Me,

me. So what we're hoping to talk about today are we want to talk about interventions we want to where we're going to talk about our mistakes, like the one like are some of our first ones, some of our failed ones and some ones that we're seeing right now that are really successful. We're also going to talk a little bit about the history of TJ our personal history. And how it evolved, and and how we got to the work now. And we're going to talk a bit about, like current dilemmas and tensions that are coming from

the

incredible groundswell around D fund that has brought all these kinds of new questions around scale and capacity and how to work parallel to the state. outside the state all together, we're like, what non reformist reform looks like and things like that. So we want to, before we like dive too much further, we want to talk a little bit just to make sure we're all working with the same definitions. And we want to talk a little bit about the differences between transformative justice and restorative justice. And then we want to talk for a minute about carceral feminism versus abolition feminism. And so we want to just set the stage for those things. And then we're going to give like examples and get deeper once we have that. So I'll start and I'm gonna use a really simplistic definition for all of these things. And I'm going to start with the definition for a transformative justice. And this is like the young women's empowerment project definition that, for me, has made the most sense over time. transformative justice is a way of interrupting and transforming violence, while addressing the root causes, so that everyone has a right to heal. And everyone has a right to confront systems as they get in their way. And so, TJ, for us is any solution or intervention that happens outside the state. And the critical part is that it has to happen outside the state, it should address interpersonal, the interpersonal thing that happened between the two or more people. And it should also address the root causes of what created that problem to begin with.

Um,

Mimi, do you want to go every other?

Um, are you gonna keep going with your definition of restorative justice? Do you want me to do it? I could do that. I mean, I could maybe was, maybe it could add just out a little bit to why. And that is, in, in doing this, there's no transformer Josias restorative justice dictionary, that for the encyclopedia, that doesn't exist. So a lot of this is like living language. And I think that what we've found, I'm sure I'm gonna talk to you that much about strictly but I know that these communists come up there, some of us do have different definitions are different, and it probably reflects a different entry point into actually starting to use the language. So I know for me, it's somewhat recent that I more fully embraced language to transformative justice, because I had really come into this using the language of community accountability. So some of this is thinking about some of the resistance I had to the Justice language, because justice had been so embedded in the criminal legal system. That is seemed like when we were starting to do this contemporary work 2000 and beyond, it just seems so fraught, to even be able to see justice. And it seemed like, I saw so much how people immediately got on the justice system. And that might be some of my storytelling that I do at the beginning, was that so many of us who even even those of us who are opposed to using the criminal justice system often replicated some of the same kinds of language, concepts, tactic, tactics, strategies, values, and the kinds of interventions that we were trying to do that were alternative to or challenging carceral types of logics personal kinds of strategies. So I in part, I know that I avoided using the language of transformative justice, I wasn't opposed to it. It just I was just one comfortable using community accountability, to emphasize community as a space in which we were doing this work community as the folks that we got were accountable to and I know, community can mean a lot of different things. And you know, we could go and get into that as well. But if it and it was seemed a little bit more modest in its language and what we were trying to do, because we were just doing this on the ground, and we had, I think our politics in place. But a lot of times we're grappling things and we're pretty close to the ground, pretty nitty gritty, pretty much, you know, in the community that we, as we understood community at the time. So it's more recently, I think, in that, um, transformative justice has become so more widely embraced by people it's been and you know, it's definitely has its detractors on all sides. So So I understand that as well coming into this conversation, but it is something that has become a more acceptable and a really appealing and powerful language across a lot of our social justice communities. I think that we've had enough the conversations of that we do not mean the punitive system, and have acknowledged the mistakes we've made in the past. So that I think is clear that we are really looking at a different kind of notion of justice. So I've come become more comfortable to use transformer adjusters as kind of an overarching politic for some people just really a way of life that we're trying to live and grapple with, what does it look like to practice and to believe in, to think and do transformative justice in our everyday lives, I know that some of what we'll talk about today. Um, so I'm gonna, you know, emphasize the kind of the overarching politic and the practice part of it, that is all of those things, that we're trying to create responses to harm, that do not replicate harm, and are not continuing or furthering harm. And that is something that's not that easy to do, as we find in the real world, as we're trying to figure out what this looks like. It's something that does actually believe in transformation, and change even of those people who have done really heinous and horrible things to us that have who have an armful, and that those people sometimes are us. So those are some of the things that I just wanted to add to the definitions that are really unhappy that you're about from why one

think you for talking

about like the difference in the language between community accountability and transformative justice, I think we've like come to use them interchangeably. And they did. And I mean, we don't have to get into this because it's a whole can of worms, but they did evolve, like, not separately, but kind of simultaneously through different groups who, who were practicing things, and there was a synchronicity to it. That was really interesting. And so they do actually have their own, um, stories behind them that I don't know how important they're to get into. But I want to say that

the way I've come to

kind of think about community accountability is that it is transformative justice is a broader philosophy that has tons of interventions.

Acute, there's tons

of interventions for transformer justice. And I've come to think about community accountability as one of those possible interventions. And that can look like a process, it can look like all kinds of things, but it's become, for me, something that is a set of interventions inside the TJ philosophy. And that's, that's kind of how it have evolved in my head. But that's not that like Mimi, you're saying like there's no dictionary or like, Encyclopedia for us to like check which came first like because so much of this was like in our heads and we were just evolving over time. So yeah, synchronous for me.

I don't I don't

continue to barking. Mimi. Mimi, do you have

the live stream playing that might be causing an echo?

I'm not sure. I didn't know. What was happening. He didn't change anything. No, no, not going away. I think it's a little bit better now.

I'm sorry. Um,

all right. Let me keep going. And maybe I'll have them sit a little bit further from the mic.

All right. That's better. That was

okay. There is a little bit of an echo. No, sorry about that, folks. I hope it goes away. Um, I think we were talking about yet. I wanted to echo echoing because I don't think that they developed in opposition to each other. I think it was kind of rubbish. Political trajectory that we're really into over the same time, I know, I was working very closely with generation in the Bay Area we have written together tended to New Testament justice, we tend to communicate, and whatnot and struggle and fight in any way anyone have a preference. And I think that I've been having a calm, a synchronous language. And both figuring out when a unifying principles and concepts and language are important. And often really allow for free school, and or very little, depending on the community you you feel attached to. And depending on where you're going. So I really want that interplay between both.

Yeah, and I think like

one of the things that's important to me in terms of lifting up restorative justice, and I, I, we have like such great examples that we want to get to. And so we're kind of like, giving you the, we're trying to give you the quick and dirty. So we are at least all on the same page with what we're talking about.

And when we're thinking

about restorative justice, the contrast between TJ and ca. That's my shorthand for transformative justice and community accountability versus RJ restorative justice is that RJ, first of all, is like a beautiful, has a long lineage of so many hardcore indigenous and bipoc organizers, who, like in Illinois, were responsible for overturning the death penalty here. So I think it's like incredibly important to honor and respect the lineage of RJ organizers. And RJ also has given so many interventions that ntj we utilize all the time. And so like they there's there's a real, again, synchronicity and symbiosis. The thing that happened was, and I, you know, there's people more educated than me about when this went, but I feel like it was the 70s and 80s, we started losing our j language to the state. And

now that's how

you have like restorative justice courts. And that's how you start having RJ in prisons. And so one of the things that like, I like to think of this, like, there was rj 1.0, which is like the Oji RJ, and like the people who are like, hardcore, and when we talk about risk restoration of a harm that happened, which is part of the definition of RJ that we're restoring

the people

who were involved in a harm back to their original form, so that we're ameliorating or healing whatever went wrong between them. Um, that we

remember that the the O g, originators of RJ were talking about pre colonization, like that, that was one of the main harms. And so, rj 1.0 was absolutely about challenging root causes. And one of those root causes being colonization, as RJ got co opted. This is part of how TJ formed was not so much as a response. But as to get more clarity to make sure that we're clear that TJ has to happen outside the state. And at this point, RJ, we don't know what it means anymore, because rj 2.0 got really co opted. What I love is the RJ what I call rj 3.0, which is like so many incredible restorative justice projects that really mirror 1.0 that are like the incredible project that

Sonia Shah is a part of,

and so many of the other amazing practitioners that we're really closely aligned with in TJ work. Because this is where TJ and RJ really do merges in that 1.0 3.0 version. And personally, I I see a little away from the language of restorative justice just because it's become some money. And what I think is we have to really be aware of how and when we're using transformative justice now, so that TJ doesn't go the way that ours you when we don't want to have to have a 2.0 because we want everyone to understand that RJ happened like that TJ has to happen outside the state. There is no version Have it that kind of align with the state to remain TJ? I think you're on

mute Me, me. Oh,

I think okay, I think somebody's muted me. So the echo problem. I love the way explained that Sharon, I've never heard an explanation in that way, it makes too much sense. I think I came into understanding RJ and some kind of version of 1.0. And also understanding the indigenous roots of RJ. And also now understanding that many indigenous First Nations people don't resonate at all with them with the language or the term restorative justice. It's simply the way that that they've done the work on that I want to speak for for indigenous folks, but I have been in spaces where the use of the labeled restorative justice was seen as rude or offensive. So just wanted to take away from those learnings, I think that I then just went on my own community accountability, TJ way with, you know, with a lot of other folks, including us, you're gonna get to know you a little bit later. Um, you know, we know that people in Philadelphia we're doing really stands up. You know, folks in Durham, we're doing grow. And so there were different people that were doing this in different locations. And we were kind of getting to know each other and care about each other. outside the system in New York, and found that we were growing our own kind of way of doing teaching. I think, for me, I really didn't know RJ practitioners at the time. And there was something that I saw in terms of understanding that there was a full history of practice that had been done and really wanting to learn about that. And it really wasn't until, honestly, more recently, that I've made some more contact, and was, and went into artists spaces that were actually so shocking, we like they weren't so systems oriented, they would have entire panels that were, you know, middle aged, white men, and didn't see that as problematic. This isn't so long ago. So I have I very much understand that, to point out went a whole different way. I read some of the really early work by Howard Sarah, who said this should never go into systems was very, very clearly saying that is the earliest pieces among some of the way men and I people that were doing restorative justice in the United States. So I, I came in then really wanting to know about some of the methods that had been developed, many of which I think, have informed teaching people and practices, some that I'm actually learning from now. And you know, they're not uniform, there are all kinds of different ways of doing, RJ as there are different ways of doing, tj. I think, um, you know, I really appreciate the honor that you're giving to the lineage of restorative justice. I think sometimes I've been because I've seen 2.0 becoming something that people will grab onto and start funding. And that looks like the alternative everybody's talking about right now. And I know that so much of it is just doesn't question is reliance on criminal legal system or ties of law enforcement? That I have been I know, publicly? pretty strongly cautioning against restorative justice to the point where, you know, I think I don't haven't had a chance to acknowledge important work with people you mentioned. So Yasha, Sujatha, baliga, and others, who have really also been trying to move restorative justice new, who are more embedded within restorative justice movements, and who are really strongly trying to move them away from law enforcement and into the community.

Yeah, I think like, maybe it makes sense to also get into some storytelling before we go to the other definitions. And so, like, do you want to talk about how I mean, I think like, what people need to know is that Mimi is one of the co founders of insight, women of color and trans people of color against violence. And what insight created over 20 years ago at this point, is what so many of us have been working with for these last two decades. And so I guess, you know, I've always been curious about,

like, how, what happened like

how how, what, what world collided that allowed, like, how did you even get to insight? Like, you're one of the co founders, like what was happening? Um, the other? And that, can I just say one last thing before you answer to is like one of the things that I've always like so greatly appreciated admired about the co founders of insight is that everyone was an anti violence activist and working within dp NSA. And that, to me is such a big difference between kind of like what we're seeing now, which is awesome, where so many people are drawn to TJ from multiple fields. And, you know, from, like, you know, whether you're, you're just an activist on your block, not just whether you're an activist on your block, or whether, you know, you're running a rape crisis hotline. And so I think it's like such an important thing to remember that this, this current wave movement was founded by activists, survivors working within anti violence, who were all queer and trans people of color.

Um, oh, so you're asking me the origin story? Ah, well, I don't, you know, according to what we would all the people that were there at the beginning of a different memory and understanding, I mean, I do want to give credit to Annie Smith, she, she I, you know, I know that that there's a lot there. But she did know, a lot of people that came together at the beginning, I had been working in the same organization in Chicago, being part of the anti rape movement, from the late 80s, and had different encounters. And remember, Beth Ritchie coming as we as women of color in that movement in Chicago, and you know, because you're, you're from Chicago. So that was a really formative time. For me, it was when I first entered the anti violence movement, but also, very, very quickly, came to deeply understand white racism within the movement, and organize together with across other people of color with a movement who, whatever critical mass had had, at that time, reached point when, when we decided that we really had to organize and have you know, a bit of a revolt at the time, that was really formative for me, it was formative to see the different kinds of concerns that we as people of color had, that were very different than the white feminist movement. And, you know, and I also want to say that wheels, we also thought that the anti mouse movement in the sustaining of that movement was very important. But we were very tired of always being on the sidelines, always working as line staff, and having been the leader is just on a kind of very organizational level. But what that meant was that we weren't able to center the kinds of concerns and politics that we had, that we had to struggle to define for ourselves, you know, we didn't all come with the exact same people of color politic, that is something that we did we develop and struggle. And I think that a few of us have already been meeting in different spaces, whether they work, you know, meeting them bathroom, space, hotel room, right at a conference, and start talking about what you wish you had, or what needed to happen or doing or doing your critique. I think that I talked to you recently, I feel about a National Coalition Against Sexual Assault Conference, I went where the very struggle about naming sex work either as a form of work or as a form of victimization was a huge, a huge, I would say battle, it was huge. And it was along the lines of a brace. I know it doesn't always fall that way and every place in every space it did then, and those were some of the struggles I was walking into in the late 80s. So I was I had many many years to be in conversation and build relationship with various people that Beth Richie, you know, other people that now we now see as many you know, many of whom have left the actual movement, some of whom stuck stuck around and, and many of whom are responsible for saying, Listen, we need to center something else. As you probably heard the insight conference, the founding conference in 2000. We really think a couple hundred people would come in it just became like a place for us to gather and see if, if we could find something that was centered around me color But when we saw that almost 2000 people signed up, it was very clear that there was something else happening beyond the handful of us that were organizing that event. And you could absolutely feel the energy of that, at that conference. It came two years after the critical resistance conference where I had a very similar experience, there was something different. This is the kind of the birth of a contemporary version of abolition, and the coming together with a feminist abolition feminism that we didn't have a name for at the time. And it had energy, it had potency, it was the right. I mean, was, had been the right time, long ago in it. And it certainly didn't start in 2000. But there was a way in which we decided to create an organizational form that wasn't in the form information of a nonprofit. But that really sparked people's imagination, and became so much more than those of us who are performers.

Yeah, thank you so much for that. And for all of the work I one of the things I also loved about insight founding and, you know, like, rather than go to, on and on about it, because it there's lots of places to learn about it. through multiple anthologies revolution will not be funded and the color of violence and also through this incredible event that BCR w did for the 20th anniversary.

Back in March,

I think it was or April, or may I lost the pan that my pandemic clock is not working. And, you know, so but like, just also how anti imperialist It was like it was all it was. So anti state and the reach of the state was so critical and linking, like, war to the anti violence movement was so

epic for

me. And so, you know,

yeah, I just want to say the yogi, as you were saying, at that time, so much of what was happening, it was in somebody's space, and it still can be, you know, you had your panel with an Asian person, a Latin x person, African American person. Maybe she had made her makeovers, and that was the recipe book, that so many people were following, in terms of what it meant to have people of color, anything, you know, inclusion, politics, and this really lasted those kinds of categories as categories, just, they just fell away. And you could see the complexity of the real world. And the kinds of connections were making. And as we said, against imperialism across Palestine, South Africa, noses, Canada, you know, there it was coming together so much of their energy. But um, no, I want to ask you also share from I don't know, I know that you've been very much part of your

family and,

and partner growing into politics and practices. But I actually have a lot of questions about you. And the importance of why when young women's empowerment project as a really, just a week, mission weren't as unique as it seems to still be, but critical information in, in not only your imagination, but just in the company what you've done. But what is I think there's different myths going around about ciera and relationship to wireless. So I'm going to give, I would love to ask you to talk more about that. Oh, I mean, I don't

I'm sure they're, I mean, don't get your mitts in the comments, because I don't even want to know some of the rumors I've heard about myself.

I'm, like, very impressed with my life and rumors.

And

in real life, I like leave my house for an hour every day to walk the dog and that's it. And I you know, I guess like to go back to interventions, though, like also, like, I guess one point I want to make is like part of why we're talking about the history of all this. Well, there's two reasons in my mind one is because, um,

you know,

we're so a historical like, we think everything is about now like that defund is a movement that just started it's a movement that galvanized beautifully and ethically, but that we have actually been base building and doing this work through not only like building a really careful political analysis, but also through the interventions which is the second reason why important is that the history of TJ is defined by our willingness to try and balance interventions. And, by the way, we needed each other so much to survive and still do now. And that was actually part of like, so I, I didn't know I was doing TJ, and people probably heard the story before, say,

share it somewhat

often. And oh, no, like, I was just a part of communities that can call the police because we were using drugs or because we were involved in the sex trade, where even like, when I was younger, and sleeping outside a lot, or squatting a lot, that isn't legal, it's not legal for young people, to not leave their house to not live attached to like, a parental body, whether it's a court appointed, or you're the people who you were born to. And so like you had to kind of figure out how to solve problems.

Mostly

the problems we were experiencing. Were around like, sexual violence, intimate partner violence, like, you know, relationship violence, that's the word I use now intimate partner violence, but that wasn't the word I use.

And, you know,

also seft was like an enormous part of problems we're constantly trying to solve. And like,

in many ways,

craft is so hard, because it's like, if we didn't have money to replace the item collectively, then like that loss around theft is so painful and so real, especially when you're stealing from each other, and you have so little resources to go around. And so we were always figuring out how to solve problems without the state because social workers didn't know what to do with us. And we actually could not go to the cops at all, it wasn't, you know, I think a lot of times people would threaten to call 911 and each other as a form of retaliation. But honestly, it, it, it, it really happened very little in the immediate world I was in because it was, it was just ridiculous, like everyone

was at such

equal risk for harm and doing that. So that's kind of like, like that, interventions that I was doing that I didn't call interventions, I called it protecting her back or having her back, or we're like, we have to do something because so and so keeps taking people's shit, you know, like it was like this thing. And then, when I joined Young was power and project, I joined it once it was founded by a group of people, I wasn't a part of founding it. And it was in 2000 2001, that I started getting involved in youngers apartment project. And we were a project that was a while at that time, we became a project that was all buying for.

That was all bipoc.

But at the time, in the beginnings, in our early days, we did have plenty of O'Leary who was waiting, like one of the most instrumental co founders of why, but we were all people who train it's extra money for survival. And we were all people who had some overlap with the street economy, either through trading sex for money, or through buying or selling drugs. And so when I like, got more involved in why web somewhere around, so I was involved from like, you know, 2000 2001, we became a nonprofit in oh two. And I, like my involvement got more and more. And then when I became like the CO director, you know, five,

six, I think

one of the things that we experienced that brought us to insight, which we knew of insight from the conference, but like, we didn't know, insight, like, we were like, you know, we went to the one in Chicago, because we're in Chicago, we went to

the one

in New Orleans, because we got so lucky to go to that. But it's just like two of us. And it was a conference. It was like not a, we didn't, we didn't really, we weren't a part of it. But what brought

us to it that was also

an intervention is that we experienced death threats. As an organization. I experienced them specifically, but the organization experienced them as a whole for a couple of different reasons. We had like copson says that we're seeking us out trying to get at someone's partner. And then we had two different one john targeting one of our outreach workers, and another john targeting me and it was all converging and we had no idea know what to do, we actually did call the cops because they were outside of our building. And so we were like, either tell us why you're outside of the building or do something about these death threats? And they were like, are they threatening your identity? Because otherwise, it's not a crime. It's just her telephone harassment. And we can't tell you why we're out there. We have no record of you being out there really for pretty sure we're strung out, we have a wreck. And so we called InSite. Actually, I don't remember how I got connected. But it was it was Andrea Richie was the one who set up a phone call. And like, all of a sudden, there were like, these six badass people, other women of color from like all over the country, helping us figure out how to get out of our building, helping us figure out like how to communicate with each other without cell phones, helping us figure out how to document what was happening, and where to keep that documentation because they could take it from you. That's not legal. I learned that from Andrea. And like we were, you know, doing these interventions. And that was weird. And then we were like, Oh, this is a thing like this is called something because we do stuff like this all the time. We're just not all usually targeted at once. And so we needed someone else to help us puzzle through how we were being targeted.

But I think that

that like one of the things that about and I get really amped when we're talking about this stuff, is remembering that TJ is built on interventions, community accountability was built on people just trying shit like right now we have so many workbooks. And we have not, we have so many, we have two or four that I can think of right now that are out right now that are so great. The ci tool kit from encourager pairs, another beautiful one that just got dropped,

whose name I'm forgetting, and there's

another one coming out. And then we also have so many trainings, and so many like opportunities to sit and think about this. But what I'm trying to see is how that's going to spark interventions, because that's, that's what this

is, it's a practice, politic,

got smoothed out and developed

over time. And there's so many people who were so incredible at the analysis and making sure we all understood, but you have to be willing to try shit and fuck up. Because that's how we figured this

out. And it wasn't professionalized. It wasn't

like a place that you call for an intervention. It was something that we kept figuring out. And I think that so many of us keep doing it that way. And other people are, I think, are afraid to jump in there, and practice. And I think as much as possible, I love these stories of, maybe we could each tell a story of a failed intervention,

to help people get

comfortable. My favorite thing is to talk about mistakes. I keep threatening to do this workshop called every mistake I've ever made. But the reason I can't do it is because it's like three days long. And so how do I pare it down? I haven't figured it out, because my mistakes are pretty massive. And I think like if we can talk about like some failed interventions, maybe to help people realize what doesn't what hasn't worked for us. And I think,

then we can talk about some ones

we're seeing that are really working.

Thank you. Yeah, well, you know, I'm going to actually start with a little bit of a story about how I started thinking about this too. And it's not necessarily mine, but I will share one of the many. And that is, I think, coming out of 2000. And starting inside one. We, this became central right, talking about whatever we call them. I think community accountability at the time, became a central part, something you can name is a central part that some of us were doing, whether we're doing it as a sideline, you know, like, Are we on a paid job, and then we did this or unpaid job, which pretty much most of us don't at this point. But I remember going in talking about, um, you know, I think we use the language of alternatives to criminalization since early 2000s. and was like, What are you talking about it and then just, people just, you know, 20 minutes and we're like, Oh, is it like