The weekend of October 11-13, I will travel to NYC to participate in a Community Accountability Workshop. Here is a description of the event:
Just Practice is excited to announce three full days of workshops and strategy sessions on community accountability for grassroots organizations, collectives and activist groups. These sessions will take place at Barnard College & the YWCA in Brooklyn, New York.
These sessions all presume that participants share the value of prison abolition, even if their work is not explicitly abolitionist.
We recommend attending with 2-3 people from your organization or group so that you can strategize during the workshops and bring action steps back to your team.
These sessions were developed by the Just Practice Collaborative, which existed from 2016-2018 in Chicago to build our communities’ capacity to effectively and empathically respond to intimate partner violence and sexual assault without relying primarily on police or other state-based systems.
How do we collectively work together to reduce our dependence on state systems and social services? How do we support each other to become accountable when we have caused harm? This workshop will explore the basic principles of Transformative Justice and engage in honest conversation about the challenges we face when using this model. Using popular education and through video and audio stories we will deepen our understanding of this complex and intimate model.
This full day workshop will also address the power and pitfalls of using community accountability in the age of social media. Together we will develop some best practices for addressing the issues that might and do arise on and offline. Workshop participants will contribute to developing guidelines that can be shared with our broader communities.
This full day workshop will guide participants through the key elements to creating, setting in motion and concluding a community accountability process.
While this workshop is not only intended for those working in grassroots groups, we highly encourage you to attend with comrades to improve your experience.
We will cover:
3 Common Process DesignsHow to know when it's done, goals and objectivesCreating a Community Accountability teamSetting a positive toneDealing with fatigue & creating structures to support follow-through of all facilitators
Fumbling Towards 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 (CA) processes to address interpersonal harm & violence.
This workshop is the final day of our weekend and will allow the participants self reflection and time in their teams to practice the application of the previous days. We will present key ideas and concrete exercises from the workbook and support participants in working through real time examples. Participants will be required to have copies of the workbook. Some will be available for sharing and purchasing on the day of the workshop.
Note: Any profits that derive from the sale of this workbook (after recouping production costs) will be reinvested in the training and curriculum development work of Project NIA and Just Practice Collaborative.
I look forward to sharing my reflections on this workshop in the days ahead.
