Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement

by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Indigenous and ancestral practices, including chanting, African drumming, burning sage, building altars, offering libations, grounding, and taking time to check in with one another before getting down to business.

I find that social justice or leftist communities also tend to misapply social analysis to individual situations of abuse, suggesting that individuals who belong to oppressed or marginalized groups can never abuse individuals who belong to privileged groups (that is, that women can never abuse men, racialized people can never abuse white people, and so on). But neither of the above ideas is true. Survivors of abuse in one relationship can, in fact, be abusive in other relationships.

Education about child sexual abuse.

Asking people to organize their pod was much more concrete than asking people to organize their “community.”

This is how it feels s we think about forming mini-pods from our small group. It feels more manageable and personal.

It places relationship-building at the very center of transformative justice and community accountability work.

Facilitate intentional orientations for new youth participants. Create a fifteen-minute, relational orientation that shares messaging around values, mission, services, and expectations.

Accountability can look many different ways—stopping harmful behavior, naming harmful behavior, giving sincere apologies, stepping down from leadership roles, developing daily healing and reflection practices to address root causes of harmful behavior, building a support pod,28 providing material repair, contributing to community efforts to end intimate and sexual harm. Dodging accountability can look many different ways—denying, avoiding, minimizing, shifting blame, manipulating, disconnecting, waiting it out without taking genuine action.

people who have done harm often need to share their experiences of being harmed themselves before they’re able to feel or acknowledge the impact of their own actions. And yet, what many survivors need first from the person who caused them harm is acknowledgment of the abuse.

Transformative accountability means that when we apologize, there is congruence between our words, emotions, and actions.

“rather than bend disabled bodies and minds to meet the clock, crip time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds.”

“moving at the speed of trust,”

I just want people to try shit. Just try something. Write down what worked. Write down what didn’t work. And let’s just keep moving on.

don’t think this is a work that is about experts. I want this work to be work that anyone and everyone who wants to try to do it does.

This is what we want to build at New Hope. Space for foks to step in and do the work on their own initiative.