Interrupting Carceral Feminism: An Introduction
This interactive workshop will examine carceral feminist frameworks that rely on the state to respond to violence in cities, states, and nations. Carceral feminist frameworks advocated for punitive responses that focus on individuals regardless of the impact on the larger community. In this workshop, we will explore the alternatives to state-sponsored punishment and sanctions as we continue conversations and movement towards transformative justice feminism that fights against the disinvestment in communities, values community accountability, and provides spaces to transform the lives of those who cause harm and those who are harmed.
Trainer Deana Lewis
Vogue Studies: Using Community History to Inspire Action
In this workshop, participants will examine a concrete example of how the history, experiences, and traditions of community can be harnessed from within for collective empowerment. Engaging in a movement workshop based on the Black and Latino queer dance form known as voguing, participants will feel what it is like to use aesthetic movement to inform struggles for justice. Participants will be walked through the workshop, examine its components, and then have a chance to map out some of their own ideas for specific workshops that might empower their unique communities of learning and organizing.
Note: This workshop is open to People of Color only.
Facilitators: Benji Hart & NIC Kay
Creative Practices for Envisioning A World Without Police
Facilitators: ill Weaver/Invincible (of Complex Movements and EmergenceMedia.org) and adrienne maree brown (co-editor of Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements and creator of the Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute)
Using science fiction and exploring emergent strategies such as adaptation and resilience, we will work together to generate community based practices for resolving conflict and addressing interpersonal violence without unjust police systems. We'll start the day by creating a science fictional Chicago in which to explore alternatives to policing, and then explore lessons from the natural world through the science of emergence to see what practices the community can generate to create more possibilities for a just future.
Facilitators: adrienne maree brown & Invincible
Abolishing the PIC and Transforming Justice
Prisons are not ‘broken’ nor are they rehabilitative. Prisons exist to punish and control. They were never built to end systemic racism, sexism, transphobia, homophobia, classism, ableism, or xenophobia. In fact, they exist to reinforce and reproduce these systems of oppression that perpetuate the violence we experience. Project NIA has been creating and lifting up solutions to harm that transform it as well as the people affected by the harm. We are part of a movement that is interested in building a world focused on accountability, healing and transformation for all of us. We believe that abolishing the prison industrial complex (PIC) by relying on the practice of transformative justice offers the best opportunity for us to create the world in which we want to live: one without imprisonment, oppressive policing, and state surveillance.
Join us for a workshop facilitated by Mariame Kaba (director of Project NIA & member of the PIC Teaching Collective) about abolishing the PIC and transforming justice. This workshop IS NOT appropriate for participants who are unfamiliar with the prison industrial complex. It is not an introductory workshop about the PIC. This workshop is intended for those who already understand how the PIC is structured and functions. The goals of the workshop are as follows:
a. Explore working definitions of abolition and transformative justice
b. Create space for participants to consider ways of dealing with harm outside of the PIC
c. Develop abolitionist strategies for individuals, and organizations they are a part of, to utilize in their work
Trainer: Mariame Kaba
Transformative Justice Responses to Institutional Violence & the “Youth Control Complex”
Institutional violence within community centers, healthcare organizations, and social services, in concert with the “helping” industry’s increasing collusion with and reliance on law enforcement and security guards, isfueling the prison pipeline. In response to pervasive institutional violence and increasing policing, surveillance, and targeting of queer and trans* youth of color, street-based youth, and youth experiencing homelessness , Project NIA created a toolkit to share short- and long-term strategies and practices of resistance. How might a social service agency practice community accountability without relying on the cops—and, instead, cultivate youth resilience and leadership?
Participants will leave the session with:
1. A shared definition of institutional violence and its connection to the prison industrial complex
2. A toolkit with practical strategies to resist reliance on and collusion with law enforcement
3.Strategies for preventing, interrupting, and transforming violence that uses harm reduction and transformative justice principles to engage all levels of an organization or project.
Trainer: Lara Brooks
Healing Justice 101
This interactive workshop will lead participants in a discussion exploring concepts of self-care, community-care, and healing justice as practiced by those who value social justice. The workshop will use a popular education framework to explore questions such as: How do we take care of ourselves and take care of each other while doing social justice work? How do we prevent and transform burnout, thus cultivating sustainability in our healing and justice-seeking practices? How do we critique our own communities and organizations and tackle internal challenges without creating additional harm? How do we find and create spaces where we feel safe enough to fall apart, and still trust we will have collective space available when we bounce back again? The workshop is designed for newcomers to Healing Justice work as well as for people who want to continue and deepen their analysis and toolbox.
Trainers: Stacy Erenberg & Tanuja Jagernauth
Creating Community Solutions to State Harm: Strategy Session on the Anti-Trafficking Movement
This three and half hour workshop will include an update on the Anti-Trafficking laws and movement in the United States and Illinois. We will spend significant time brainstorming and working together to create resistance strategies that work for both individual sex workers & youth in the sex trade –as well as transformative justice and radical groups that may be interested in forming a community response.
This workshop is NOT for beginners. Harm Reductionists & Transformative Justice language, values and beliefs will be assumed for all participants in this session.
Facilitator: Shira Hassan
Creative Strategies for Healing from Trauma
This training will create an experiential space to explore creative approaches to healing. Through deep dialogue about individual and collective trauma, we will pay special attention to the intersections of culture, age, gender, sexual identities, & the critical role these pieces play. Healing from trauma is an ongoing and holistic process that can sometimes take years and/or generations to move through. This will not be a group therapy session. Attendees will leave workshop with new strategies and tools for use in their personal, political and professional lives.
Trainer: Bonsai Bermudez
Decolonizing Healing
In this popular education based workshop, participants will explore the ways in which colonization impacts our minds, bodies, and spirits. This workshop will help participants explore specific ways they can approach their healing and organizing work from a decolonization lens. The workshop will take place in a circle format. Each participant should bring something that represents the sacred to them.
Please note: this workshop is open to folks who consider themselves grassroots healers. We define grassroots healer as a healer or practitioner (including western medicine) who is committed to an anti-oppression framework and community based practices that seek to integrate individual/collective healing and resiliency to transform and heal our communities and our conditions through an economic and racial justice lens. (Taken directly from the USSF Healing and Healing Justice PMA report back)
Trainers: Tanuja Jagernauth & Stacy Ernberg
Intimate Partner Violence: Using Harm Reduction & Transformative Justice Approach
How do we collectively work together to keep survivors of violence safe individuals & state systems and social services? How do we support each other to become accountable when we have caused harm? This workshop will engage in honest conversation about the challenges we face when using harm reduction & transformative justice in community settings to manage intimate partner violence. Using popular education and through video and audio stories we will harvest our collective knowledge and practice new strategies for interrupting violence.
Note: This workshop is NOT for beginners. Harm Reductionists & Transformative Justice language, values and beliefs will be assumed for all participants in this session.
Trainer: Shira Hassan
WERKING 9 TO 5: A STRATEGY SESSION FOR TRANS & QUEER PEOPLE OF COLOR WHO WORK INSIDE THE NPIC
This three and half hour workshop will include an update on the Anti-Trafficking laws and movement in the United States and Illinois. We will spend significant time brainstorming and working together to create resistance strategies that work for both individual sex workers & youth in the sex trade –as well as transformative justice and radical groups that may be interested in forming a community response.
Trainer: Tony Alvarado Rivera
The Sex Trade: An Overview
This popular education based workshop will discuss the wide range of the sex trade and street economy and explore the practice of reducing harm for those involved in the sex trade. We will look closely at how & why the sex trade is different for boys, girls and transgender youth. The training will introduce ideas for physical safety, sexual, emotional, and physical health, and ideas for building community with young people currently trading sex for money. Participants will come away from the workshop with a greater understanding of the complexity of the sex trade and practical, realistic ideas to offer to those in the sex trade.
Trainer: Shira Hassan
Diving Deep: Creating Community Solutions to State Harm: Strategy Session on the Anti-Trafficking Movement
This three and half hour workshop will include an update on the Anti-Trafficking laws and movement in the United States and Illinois. We will spend significant time brainstorming and working together to create resistance strategies that work for both individual sex workers & youth in the sex trade –as well as transformative justice and radical groups that may be interested in forming a community response.
Note: This workshop is NOT for beginners. Harm Reductionists & Transformative Justice language, values and beliefs will be assumed for all participants in this session.
Trainer: Shira Hassan