Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement

by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

When we make judgment into one of our primary organizing strategies, we reduce the trust needed to create safety. Some of the people with the most practice working on violence are deeply embedded within the criminal legal system or other punitive structures. I’ve had enlightening conversations about trends in homophobic and transphobic violence with prosecutors. I’ve also learned about de-escalating violence from bouncers and from school counselors. I deeply wanted to learn from people who had held down more incidents than I had. This new experience expanded my knowledge and deepened my practice. I coordinated organizers in their efforts to implement advocacy and community-organizing strategies in response to more than forty murders of queer and trans people. I had the opportunity to refine my process developing and presenting community-organizing options to recent survivors of violence and to surviving family members. Through this intense practice I created a process of rapid-response organizing in the aftermath of violence. I was able to use all the skills I had developed while doing community safety campaigns, and I gained a deeper, more nuanced understanding of organizing around trauma. The ability to work with survivors of intimate-partner violence, sexual violence, homophobic and transphobic violence, and police violence was invaluable, as was my experience working with survivors and organizers around the country. I also want to acknowledge that in these times, takin...