Daniel Kisslinger (Kiss): Welcome to One Million Experiments, a podcast showcasing and exploring how we define and create safety in a world without policing and prisons.
Damon Williams: I'm Damon.
Kiss: I'm Kiss.
Damon: We're back with another exciting project that we're hopping in the lab. We have, of course, with us, our partner in decriminalization, Eva Nagao, Eva, what's up?
Eva Nagao: [cheering] Hey, pal. [chuckles] Good to see you.
Kiss: Good to see you too, pal.
Damon: Good to see you too. Who are we hopping in the lab with today? I'm excited.
Eva: We've got friends in the lab today, which is cool because we have made friends in the lab but these are old friends. We've got homies coming to join us. The homies today are Deana Lewis and Shira Hassan, who is the principal consultant for the Just Practice Collaborative hometown heroes in Chicago. The Just Practice Collaborative was founded between 2014 and 2015, and it's morphed into many different things. It's a training and mentoring group focused on sustaining a community of practitioners that provide community-based accountability and support structures for all parties involved with incidents and patterns of sexual, domestic, relationship, and intimate community violence.
This group and practice is a resource and a model for those who want to address violence without reliance on criminal, legal, and traditional social services. Just Practice Collaborative works to create a world where survivors in their communities can feel believed, feel held, and like healing is possible. Thousands of people have been trained in Just Collaborative convenings and workshops. Today, Just Practice Collaborative has a couple of offerings. One that we've promoted on the show a lot, the Help Desk, which is a collaborative project with interrupting criminalization that we'll get into.
Just Practice Collaborative also offers thought partnership and has two really great resources on their website. A mix tape, steps to end a prison, and policing that has a whole series of training videos for people who are doing TJ 101 and Beyond and Fumbling Towards Repair. The book that Damon keeps on his desk, as do we all for [chuckles] community accountability facilitators and folks stepping up your conflict transformation game.
Damon: We get real deep into some of the machinations of their work but also, the how and why, the limitations and the intentionality with which they do what they do. Which I think even if you're not doing specifically the same things that they are, the way that they approach building structure is something that I think will be really useful for everyone. We'll talk more about it in the peer review, but just wanted to flag that as something to pay attention to. All right, anything else before we hop in the lap? I guess you can find out more about them @just-practice.org and get in tune with those resources that Eva mentioned.
All right, y'all, let's do it. Let's hop in the lab with Shira and Deana.
[music]
Damon: I'm brimming over with excitement. Big close of B brimming over with excitement. I am honored. We have in the lab with us some of the greatest people. We have from Just Practice, Shira Hassan, and Deana Lewis. [cheering] It is part of the shtick but it is sincere. It is. Where I'm at, I am high energy for this, I'm juiced.
Kiss: That was worth the plosives on the B. That was fantastic.
Damon: Get it plosives if you have to.
Kiss: Let's go.
Damon: I'm plosiving [laughter] We're going to hop into this thing the way we do. We like to start with the tradition and that tradition is centered around a two-part question. That question is rooted in the conception of time. This time can mean this day, this hour, this season, this lifetime. In this time, how is the world treating you and how are you treating the world?
Deana Lewis: At this moment, I wish I could start on a high note. So let me start with a quote from the great philosopher Christopher Wallace, "Fuck the world. Don't ask me for shit. Everything you get, you got to work hard for it." [laughter] October's often hard for me because of just change. I'm in the middle of a grieving process. My body is in pain. My emotional state is also, I'm just in pain and I'm in pain also for what's happening in the world. We can talk more about seeing hope and seeing light, and I'm grasping at it.
Imagine being underwater and you're struggling but you see the light above you. I was treading water but now I've sunk but I still see the light and I'm really swimming for it. I have community and fam really holding me and pulling me up. I really thank all the deities for those people and I'm lucky to have those people really surrounding me and holding me.
Shira Hassan: I'm struggling a lot generally but specifically also just holding Gaza and all of Palestine in my heart, soul, body, mind, every second. I have a really long-term relationship with a palm reader who I've been seeing since I was 20, who's this incredible genius who was like, "Shira, you are so out of time right now." She didn't mean time had run out, she meant I'm out of my timeline. I'm crossing multiple timelines at once. I think a lot of us are, and I think grief does this and I think joy does this. I'm in so many time zones in this linear plane, and then I'm 1000 years ago, 2000 years ago, and 1000 years in the future. I'm also trying to remember to get my laundry done kind of thing.
[laughter]
Damon: That time zone idea is beautiful to think about the experiencing of multiple realities at the same time and how that lives. I have never thought about that. We have much more to discuss but that was something beautiful.
Kiss: Already making the connections. I love it. Even that dynamic way of looking at time speaks to my understanding of the time that Just Practice has exist. I'm segueing us into origin story but I love and respect and know so many folks on the team and I feel like Just Practice both is always just coming into existence but has been here forever. I was trying to remember in my movement history timeline, I usually am very good at, "Oh, this is the month where for the People's Artists Collective came about. This is the time that BYPY, this is the story of--" I just know, Just Practice and y'all as an ecosystem of facilitators have been here but I cannot pinpoint the time that it started.
I would love to hear the origin story of how this emerged into the world to become what it is now.
Damon: Maybe connected to that, it can start with the same starting place for all of these experiments, which is, what was the hypothesis of Just Practice as it emerged into the world?
Shira: Do you want me to start Deana, or do you--?
Deana: Yes.
Shira: We actually had a really clear hypothesis. I was a part of Young Women's Empowerment Project here in Chicago and had been a part of it since 2003, something like that. We were a project that was led by and for young people of color who had current or former experience trading sex for money, for survival being the sex trade and very importantly being a part of the street economy, meaning drug use, drug sales. That goes back further for me because I had some of that in my history as a young person. We were always trying to figure out how to solve problems without cops because it was impossible to call them. Similarly without social workers, often without healthcare.
Because It's so difficult to get help from a system that's actually set up to eliminate you. We were doing a lot of processes and some of them were not actually processes. Some of them were ways of intervening and transforming and responding to violence as violence was playing out in the moment without the use of police or state systems. Simultaneous to that, I was in conversations with Mariame who was doing similar things-
[music]
Shira: -in her world. Which was also with young people. She was doing it through a variety of different projects. The Rogers Park Peace Room, she was doing it through Young Women's Action Team. Mariame and I had been already working together for years anyway. At one point, she was on the board of Young Women's Empowerment Project, had done a lot of cross-work. At some point, I don't remember when the conversation started, one of us just confessed that we were doing this. It was not a thing, it wasn't a thing that you could say, "I'm holding processes without police. I'm responding." What did you call that then?
That was probably '08, '09 and we started comparing notes and started figuring things out and started screaming on the phone and calling each other at 2:00 in the morning and venting and trying to figure that out. Then somewhere around 2012, 2013, two things happened. Mariame decided to move home, move home to New York. Simultaneous to that, we were both seeing a huge increase in people reaching out to us for help, responding to particularly sexual violence. We were like, "Oh my gosh, we can't be the only people that people are calling. There's got to be more than just us. We just don't know who they are."
We started spreading feelers out to try to find people who were getting those calls. Our presumption going into it was, "There's probably 30 of us who are getting these calls. We're just not talking about it," but the more we talk to people, the more we realize no, it's actually a small handful of people who are repeatedly getting them that we can track to. I'm sure there were more, but that's who we could track. This is where the hypothesis came in really clearly was we have got to expand Chicago's capacity to respond to violence without the use of police. That was a part of our abolitionist vision and our political work. It was never paid.
It was a political project from the start and remains so. It was also a part of capacity building, not only for our movement but also for me and Mariame, we had always I think struggled. It's always hard to do this work, but I think we were starting to struggle even more. Then with Mariame leaving, it was like, "Oh, shit. That's actually a significant shift in resources." We held a meeting with Deana who's here, Rachel Caidor, Anna Mercado, and Kesa Reynolds and we were like, "What do we want to build?"
We did something that I really recommend to everyone who's starting a group do, which is we had lots of conversations. We did lots of skill shares and we very, very carefully decided on what our definition of violence was, but also what was the kinds of violence that we were going to be responding to. We landed on sexual violence, intimate partner violence, intimate violence more broadly, domestic violence so that it was very clear.
We did that for two reasons. One was that was where all of us came from. We all had worked in DV. We had all worked in intimate partner violence, we had all worked in rape crisis, my life, and work around sex work organizing. That was where we actually had the most skill together. It was also because this is some of the hardest violence to interrupt and transform. We thought what we come up with to address sexual assault and intimate partner violence will work for things like theft, which are often embedded in a lot of those things anyway, but people calculate them out. Theft is a huge part of intimate partner violence, for example.
Then we ask ourselves, "Okay, what can we do to try to expand capacity in Chicago so that more people can respond to, intervene on, transform this kind of violence in our community without the use of police and state systems?" I can pause because I just talked a minute.
Damon: In a time where timelines are crossing, that was a very clear timeline. Thank you. [laughter] Before we pick up there, I want to go back to before the hypothesis. You named that there wasn't even really commonly shared language for this role that you and Mariame were finding yourself being asked to do. How did you define it, or what was the language you used and what were people coming to you asking for? If there wasn't the language of, "I want you to facilitate a process and we know the term," what were the words, what were the frameworks that people had?
Shira: Help. It was, we can't access the cops, fuck the cops. There was language around police brutality and there was a language around police misconduct and there was even language around ending militarization and those worlds overlapped. It wasn't until critical resistance and Dr. Angela Davis started really languaging those things that I started to understand. I don't think it had been an articulated framework around abolition until I would say '98, '99, I started learning more around critical resistance, harm-free zones, and insight. Then to move forward, how were people reaching out? People were reaching out and saying, "Help, I'm hurt right now."
They were reaching out to people who were in their networks who they already reached out to for help or they were reaching out saying, "You are not going to believe what just went down. She just called me and told me what happened over here. Can you either come over here or find someone who can come over here? Because we got to get out of here and we can't get out of here" Some of this was even before-- a lot of it actually. Cell phones have only been a recent part of the work for me. Sometimes this was pager codes, sometimes this was landline calls and sometimes it was calls that were happening for one reason that would then morph into something else.
"I'm calling because this is a hotline and I need to talk about this immediate thing, but then also, do you know where I can go about this thing?" A lot of times for me, people would just show up because there was a physical location where I existed at Young Women's Empowerment Project. Someone would just come by with someone and say, "This is happening. Right now, we didn't know where else to go. We heard about this place."
Kiss: I want to jump in. On the way you also named it was from a place of necessity and survival and because there was such a harmful and dehumanizing relationship to the state already established. You just named police wasn't an option, but was it already explicitly a politicized anti-casual abolitionist or were you just practicing it and did you find that politic from the necessity? Before this language was commonplace, how did the folks like y'all understand what you were doing?
Deana: I've been thinking about this a lot as a person who identifies as an abolitionist as a core part of my identity. Just like I can't leave and will not leave my race, gender, or sexuality behind or privilege any one or the other, I also feel that way about being an abolitionist. The projects that we're doing might not be designed as abolitionists, but because that's how we're entering, especially this work, then it is. I also feel like Just Practice Collaborative came out of a time right before what I think of as the big abolitionist boom when people were saying, "Yes, police are terrible." I'm trying to identify as this thing called abolitionist or abolish or something, but I don't really know how to go about it.
The work that we do was a way to show people that we're re-imagining the communities and we're building the communities. We're doing abolitionist work. This is abolitionist work. It might be person by person, but we're doing this work to reduce harm and violence in our communities and it's just regular people doing it. Just us. That's important that it's us. It's not some abstract out there, them. We're trying to liberate us too. When we're doing a process or when people are calling to say, or texting or signaling or WhatsApping to say, "Hey, I really need some help." We're really trying to support people and to just work through this harm that's happened.
We're trying to engage the practices, we talk about, we read about that keep people safe, keep people out of the carceral system, and at the same time, hold those people accountable for the harms that they caused and support them so that they don't cause that harm again.
Kiss: It sounds like embodied practice is part of what you're naming. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's like we are the ones doing this work. We are doing this to address what we need as a communal we and we're not looking to anybody else to have the solutions, but also, we are doing this with the politics we embody and bring into it. Does that ring true?
Deana: Yes. I talk with Shira and Rachel all the time, like, "God damn it. Why do I have to live my ideology? I just don't want to do it." [chuckles] I just want to be a dick. I want to smack somebody sometimes. I just am so mad, but then I'm like, "No, I can't do that. I'm trying to reduce harm. I got to talk. I got to use my words. I got to blah, blah blah," but sometimes I'm just like, "Gosh, darn this ideology I have." [laughter]
Damon: I like that the guys you darn is because he's attached to it.
Kiss: I want to actually dig deeper in that, and correct me if I'm wrong. The mission and the structure is to focus primarily in movement and movement of adjacent spaces for Just Practice.
Shira: Movement only. It might be fair to say movement adjacent just because it's hard to draw that line, but it isn't designed for movement adjacent. It's not designed to bring people outside of the movement in. It's more like because it's not easy to draw that line, there's going to be people who aren't necessarily. What I will say, something that doesn't work with transformative justice and something that does not work with the model that we have been working with, and this isn't a challenge, it's just I think a truth is that if you are not politically and values aligned around abolition, transformative justice is not going to be your thing.
That necessitates that you're in movement to some degree. Whether or not that means you're an organizer or an activist or whether that means you're someone who believes in abolition and works at a bank. You know what I mean? That part is where the line is fuzzier. In order to do community accountability and live into the philosophy, the value, as Deana was saying, of abolition, is absolutely central to that.
Part of I think why there are so many people who are frustrated with transformative justice and frustrated with other things or, "It didn't work for this because X," and it's like, "It was never designed to work for that, A, and B, if not everyone is values aligned, then this actually isn't a tool that makes them values aligned. This is a tool that was created and structured and designed by and for people who could not safely or at all reach out to police or state systems to intervene on and transform violence and/or were currently being harmed by it."
Deana: I wanted to jump in to say that community accountability, transformative justice is not a one-size-fit-all situation. Working with and trying to support these folks over here using transformative justice practices and community accountability. A lot of those can be found in Shira Hassan, and Mariame Kaba's book, Fumbling Towards Repair,
Eva: [cheering]
Deana: Of course.
Damon: Available now. [laughs]
Deana: Available where you have the interwebs. Those tools or any one tool that you might use with these people over here might not work with somebody else and so that can be frustrating for some folks because they want just, "Here's my prepackaged thing that I'm going to put onto a situation and then everything's going to come out beautifully in the end. It's going to take six months and then we'll be good," and so on and so forth. It just doesn't work that way, and that's okay because there's beauty in that too, because you're also taking things that are known. You're taking tools that are known, you're working with folks and you're trying things out together.
There's a lot of vulnerability in that. I also want to say that it's not a six-month thing doing this work, it can go for a long period of time and so you're going to be in it for the long haul. It's important to understand that and be informed by your capacity at any one time.
Shira: I was wondering if it would be helpful to go through the model that we used to try to build some of this out.
Kiss: We love a model.
Shira: Okay, because it was intentional.
Kiss: Let's do it.
Damon: That is unsurprising.
[laughter]
Shira: Dack to time. I've tried to calculate it out. Another part of my life is I run this amazing resource called the Transformative Justice Help Desk that's at interrupting criminalization. I started to write down what we did in part because I wanted to be able to offer things out in a concrete way and one of the first things that we did was map our skillsets and map what we knew, map what trainings we had taken, map what we wanted to know.
We had done so much before we even came into the room together, from HIV AIDS test counseling work to 40-hour trainings through both rape crises and DV through volunteering on hotlines, through shelter work. We came in with a fair amount, mostly volunteer, mostly political, but sometimes paid training, and then we spent a good year skill-sharing and swapping the information that we had. I remember Ana Mercado doing this really amazing workshop skill during our early days around restorative justice.
Some of those things were like, "Oh my gosh, I didn't realize what I was doing had a model." Some of it was like, if I had had that, I would have saved myself so much. That part was really helpful and when I wrote it all down, I realized we'd spent a good year doing that. I think that is something that's important to know as you're building out. If you want to build out something like this, get to know each other, fall in love with each other's skill sets, and figure out how to make up for what you don't have either, through outside trainings or skill sharing internally. That was the first year. Then we did outward-facing stuff.
Damon: Which is so interesting. I think a lot of times groups aspire to meet a need and the lesson I'm hearing is there's an infinite amount of things that need to and could be done, but really emphasize and instead of us doing a needs assessment, doing a what we have assessment, a skill assessment, and then building from there, which I think is a very valuable lesson.
Shira: Yes, and we didn't even, I think, think of it as assessment, but it really was, it was an assessment and skill up phase and really what it was was deep relationship building and learning each other's learning styles, learning each other's teaching styles, learning each other's thinking styles. I can anticipate what some of people in Just Practice will say. I sent a text this morning on our thread and I knew I still needed to hear it, but I knew [laughter] because it's been so long.
The next phase was outward-facing and this phase we did for a good five years because remember, our purpose was to increase Chicago's capacity to respond to violence without the use of police and state systems and particularly intimate partner violence and sexual violence. We did an outward-facing training calendar that we pulled in so many people because we knew people from so many different parts of Chicago who were responding to and transforming violence in so many creative and ingenious ways. We had Stacy Ehrenberg and Tanisha Jagouna do something on decolonizing healing, on the history of healing justice, and the practice of healing justice.
I remember Benji Heart did an amazing training on voguing as violence prevention and Deana did something incredible on carceral feminism, which people rarely talked about those words at that point and it was so important that people begin to understand how feminism was carceral and how that affected us. I was always doing stuff on sex work. Mariame used to do this one, speaking to your earlier point around, what did we call it if we didn't call it abolition? The workshop she ran repeatedly was, I Don't Want to Call the Police. That was the title.
We did a series of that. We hosted them in an accessible space that was free. We offered a sliding scale range and all of that money either went to the facilitator and then we dug into our own pockets because this was our political project for snacks and at the end, it all usually added up to cover what we needed for the space cost, so it was self-sustaining. Then we realized that people were coming from Canada, people were coming from Wisconsin, people were coming from California, from Arizona, from Washington State, which was never our intention. This was a Chicago-based project.
I haven't counted in a while, but the last time I counted, it was well over 3,000 people who had come through in those first five years. Then that brought us to the next phase because at that point, we were also still documenting, practicing, documenting, practicing because a big part of what we wanted to figure out was how do we teach this shit? How do we explain and describe what we've all been doing? The other I guess, parallel purpose was for us to start swapping with each other and partnering with each other to respond to processes as they came up.
Mariame and I were often a pair. Deana and Rachel were often a pair and Anna and Kisa were often a pair. Then we would also swap. It had this internal external piece where we were teaching skills out, but then internally, we were also trying to do peer support and again, swap skill sets with each other around how we could continue to build our own practices internally. After we had done all that writing and we realized, "Okay, now we need a two-day intensive," then we went to a three-day intensive--
Damon: Get more intense.
Kiss: Get more and more intense.
Shira: Yes. Then we did something we called a Nonfrence. The Nonfrence was for 80 people who had come through most of Just Practice offerings at that point, who were already doing community accountability work and process facilitation, and then wanted a deeper place to dig in. We released Fumbling, which so much of that was based on the work that Mariame and I were doing prior to Just Practice, but it got refined and we got to practice it again, and then we got to practice how to communicate what we were doing.
Then we got to practice how to teach it and evaluate it, and then it got written down into Fumbling. Then we started using Fumbling to try to do more trainings and evaluate Fumbling and figure out what was missing from Fumbling and add to that.
Damon: All right. We need to take a moment right here. In the...world, we are big proponents of gas, gassing people up. Affirmation as others may say. I say gassing up. [background noise] Oh my God, this is not on purpose. It is literally right here. [laughs].
Shira: Nice.
Damon: I swear for everything.
Kiss: Dame, what have you got there for the listeners at home?
Damon: For those who are just listening to this, I have a copy of Fumbling Towards Repair right here on our little critter scanner thing, and I did not plan that, but--
Kiss: We love we love props and stunts on the [crosstalk]
Damon: Props for a non-visual medium [laughs]
Kiss: Yes, we're hustling backwards too. Talk about fumbling.
[laughter]
Damon: What Fumbling Towards Repair has been for our world and our community is such a gift in such a offering. I can't count the amount of times where folks are wanting to learn or wanting to respond. Where all that history you named of it being abstract or informal or not codified that more than anything else, this is the resource I see people turn to actually, and even more than people who actually crack the pages and engage it just as a totem of this exists in the world. Even in the show, Daniel brought up the hypothesis, our joke is that we fumble through this extended science metaphor because we both didn't pay attention to science class as liberal arts students.
Just this notion of fumbling as a meme almost for the way in which struggle builds practice and builds capacity and that it'll never be perfect. The impact that that has had on our spaces is beyond the words that I can bring right now, so I just want to thank you so much for this amazing gift that you've given to so many people.
Shira: That's amazing. I can't hear that without also naming what Fumbling was about, which was the Creative Interventions toolkit. We couldn't have written Fumbling without Creative Interventions Toolkit.
Damon: Which I've downloaded and is much longer if I'm not mistaken, right?
Shira: The reality is, it's longer because it has so much more important detail and practice information. This was always designed to be a companion to that. Those of you who are excited to pick up Fumbling, you really need to pick up Fumbling along with Creative Interventions. This is something we imagined in your backpack as you were holding a process because it's true, the Creative Interventions Toolkit doesn't quite fit into your backpack, but there is a condensed version.
Kiss: Carry on.
Shira: The green one does.
Deana: Yes, the workbook?
Shira: The green one, the workbook. Yes
Damon: I have the PDF on my desktop, but that's not as exciting of like, "Oh look, it's a physical right here." Shout out also to the Creative Interventions Toolkit.
Shira: Yes, because without the Creative Interventions Toolkit, I don't know where any of us would be.
Damon: Here's what I want to go to. As we said, this is not one size fit all for the whole society. This is really for aligned value-centered movement spaces that are grounded or at least aspiring towards principles of abolition, and that's an important lesson for us to take. Also, the language has now become much more popular and can sometimes be used in a one size fit all that I think one, provides some opportunities. I think also there are some serious limitations to the language, the frameworks, the mechanisms of how we respond to DV and essay and intimate violence being used for all types of social harm, whether it's interpersonal, whether it's-
Kiss: A conflict, yes.
Damon: -power struggles, whether someone said something that hurt my feelings and now I don't feel as comfortable in a space or did not care for me in the way that I need it, that is being named as harm often appropriately. Then responded to with I think a lot of the mechanisms of DV and intimate violence. Also, I think the language of harm and abuse and gaslight gets used to talk about structural dynamics and structural relationships, which I think also is appropriate, but is also different. [laughs]
For y'all, there is a way in which I think restorative language, transformative language, harm-centered concepts get used beyond these specific transformative processes. What opportunities does that give us and what are the limitations or concerns you've seen of how that comes up in spaces?
Deana: I'm not starting, Shira.
[laughter]
Kiss: Damn, that was a little stare-off there. That was great.
Shira: I know. What I think is the opportunity in the language being out there is that there is so much cultural transformation that has happened even just in the last 20 years, and some of that has undoubtedly been through the use and creation, and stewardship of such precious language. I love that that means too, that the cultural shift that we're experiencing, and I'm actually quoting Rachel Caidor, who's a Just Practice member from the intro to the archival podcast that we'll release.
One of the observations that she had was that what's so amazing is that this shift in culture that we've had, especially over the last 10 years, but absolutely seismically over the last 20, you can really see in evidence by the language that people use has been a cultural shift that's happened because of femmes and trans people and women of color who created a strategy to transform our movement culture. What I love is that the language is evidence of that transformation in a way that's very trackable because you can hear people ask for a process now in a way that 5, 10, 15, and especially not 20, no one would've known what you were talking about.
I love it for that. Especially in the last three years, what we've seen as the larger mainstream world outside of movement has gotten a hold of our language has been the flattening of it and the erasure of the nuance in what it means and the misapplication of what it means. I think the exciting thing is that people are newly politicized, but then they're newly politicized into language that's actually quite purposeful and nuanced. It feels a little bit like people don't learn math. They learn quantum physics, and they're like, "Quantum physics is so cool."
I'm like this because I suck at math, but I'm obsessed with all sorts of quantum science, but I also know that the minute I actually try to understand what some things mean, I am lost and I have no business trying to go to space.
Kiss: Fine, just call us out for our extended science metaphor for this thing.
Shira: I know.
Kiss: Yes, we're not going to-- we get it, Shira. Okay.
Shira: To continue it, we are personal scientists. What I love about transformative justice work and what I love about our movement is how devoted we are to being personal scientists and any drug user [chuckles] is an amazing personal scientist. Your body tells you exactly when it needs critical lifesaving, new juice to keep moving. Your body tells you when it's coming down. We are incredible personal scientists, and I'm speaking like this in this way because drug users and sex workers are such a big part of how transformative justice, prison abolition, and all of this work came to be.
We do actually know how to be personal scientists in our movement, and that's part of what I love about the One Million Experiments frame is the experiment as truth. We are doing experiments right now. What I want to invite us into is when we don't know what words mean to really do the work to figure it out before we try what we think is the principle behind that work or else the egg won't stand up on the equinox or whatever. It's not supposed to stand up on the equinox. It's supposed to stand up on something else-
Deana: The equator.
Shira: -I can't remember. Equator. I'm always dropping eggs at the wrong time.
Kiss: What a mess. Maybe this is an opportunity for one of those interventions or an opportunity to help people do that work. Are there particular uses without that nuance that as people who have been hands-on building this language, this is an opportunity to help people see a little bit more nuance behind words that you see get thrown around in Instagram captions?
Deana: I really encourage people to learn the lineages of the movements that they're stepping into. I don't mean just read marks. A lot of the people that Shira is speaking about, so queer folks of color, trans folks of color, sex workers, folks in the street economy didn't necessarily write down or document the work that they were doing to keep the community safe. They were doing the work and not necessarily documenting it. Right now, we're living in a time where we have so much, not only documents but books to videos, to short videos of people really documenting these different lineages.
I'm going to do a shameless promotion of the homey Shira. Shira wrote a book called Saving Our Own Lives: A Liberatory Practice of Harm Reduction. Now, people talk about harm reduction often now, but people are not necessarily using harm reduction in the way that Shira writes about it as a liberatory practice. That is what harm reduction started as in those same communities that Shira's been talking about. Shira mentioned this, intersectionality. People talk about intersectionality all of the time, and that concept has been around for a long time.
I would be remiss if I didn't mention The Combahee River Collective. Now, in their statement, they didn't say intersectionality, but they discussed the concept of intersectionality. I'll also say that's a must-read. Damon, you mentioned harm and we also have to understand that there is a difference between harm and discomfort. We have to learn how to be in conflict with each other without harming each other and that's going to be uncomfortable because we want to not be in conflict.
We want everything to go smoothly in our groups. We want everything to be puppies and rainbows all of the time, and we're all fighting together and we're protesting and we're locked arms and we're super happy and we go home at the end of the day, we've done such a great job. In our organizations, and this is something that another part of what Just Practice wants to do is we want people to build up that muscle of dealing with discomfort within their groups so that a schism doesn't happen, which then could turn into harm.
It's okay to disagree with each other and still love each other. It's okay to be mad at each other as long as you're working through it and you're not trying to harm each other in that anger. That goes back to our science metaphor. We have one million experiments, not all one million experiments have succeeded or always succeed and that's the point of science. [chuckles] I'm not a scientist, but it's okay to fail. It's okay to make mistakes because if we don't make mistakes, if we don't fail, then we're not going to learn and then we're not going to change for the better.
Shira: What you just said, Deana reminds me of, the learning principles that we share. We've been using these values that are written down in Fumbling, but that I think are really important. What you just said reminds me of that, which is that this learning space is generous and generative. This learning space honors mistakes. We believe curiosity and judgment cannot coexist. We answer judgment with curiosity, with a question, take care of yourself, and take care of the group. It just really reminded me when you were talking of how important it is to also be values guided, not just values aligned, but guided by your values as you go.
Damon: I'm hearing so much about the types of learning and relationship building and the way we position ourselves to our values that Just Practice has embodied. I want to talk a little bit about the trajectory I've personally experienced and actual response. At the intersection of skills, building, capacity, and boundary, I'll say, and I'm sure y'all as one, an organization collectively, but also as singular practitioners have experienced of, we are approaching for me, a decade of this work, for y'all, 20 years of this work.
[laughter]
I'm sorry, I meant to say--
Kiss: The exhale. [crosstalk]
Deana: Could you edit that out, please? Thank you.
Damon: Yes, I will. Time is so weird because I'm saying it as a point of humility.
Deana: No fucking timeline. We already moving across timeline stories.
Damon: We've been doing this across timelines [laughs] with varied levels of experience. Even very recently, I have been called to respond and I was moved, Shira, earlier, you said there's this sense that you had at first that there's a lot of people who are getting these calls, but that's actually not true. That it is actually a concentration of folks who are getting those calls. Personally, I've been through workshops, I've looked at some of the books, I watched the videos and the webinars.
I feel in these moments like I have instinct that I can respond with and that I do have more skills and experience than 90 to 95% of other people who I'm interacting with, but still feel very much unqualified for each and every instance that has come my way. Still feel like there is a margin of error or vulnerability of this can go left and become more harmful or I could be putting myself at risk and I don't have a formal support team to come back to, to debrief these things.
The learnings that I have, I can't write them down and say, "Here are the 10 things I've learned." They only come back up when something triggers it in real-time and that doesn't feel like a very codified way to transfer knowledge or to expand our collective capacity. I know y'all as an organization as Just Practice, when things come up, Just Practice I've heard come up with like, "Oh, we don't know what the fuck to do. Let's reach out to Just Practice and see what we can get."
One, as an organization, how do you navigate that? Is there boundaries that need to be set? Is there capacity that needs to be consistently assessed? Then y'all as people who I'm sure have gotten exponentially more calls than I have, how do you manage going through you never know what you don't know and there's always this risk involved that you do have to balance against this notion of we are responsible for each other or that we are each other's business? Those things don't always co-exist in a very clean and neat way. Personally and collectively that relationship to boundary versus responsibility that comes in real-time when shit's hitting the fan a lot of time.
Shira: Do you want to start or do you want me to start?
Deana: I love that you keep asking me that, but I want you to start.
[laughter]
Shira: I knew that but-
Deana: I know.
Shira: -I wanted to ask. I want to start with part of what we would say at the beginning of every workshop and at the beginning of every training is that this is called Just Practice because we need spaces to Just Practice. Not only that, the more we practice, the more justice we believe we'll have access to. In Fumbling, it's just written as try shit.
We have to have the assumption. I have never been a part of a process, I've never been a part of a training, I've never been a part of an organization. I've never been a part of a relationship where there wasn't fuckups and there wasn't mistakes made.
The best version of those, have mechanisms for repair built-in, you know how to apologize to your person, you know how to make it right with people. In your organization, there's an accountability mechanism hopefully, if not, how do you build that? If there's one thing I know is how to fuck up. It's funny that people would think that I know how to do it right. What I really know is how to fuck up. The great thing about that is I'm less afraid of fucking up because I really do know what it means to fuck up.
I'm more afraid of not trying. It doesn't mean I'm not exhausted though. When I talked to Rachel Caidor to ask her if there was anything that she wanted to make sure was included, today, what you named was actually exactly what she said, was how do we bridge this gap between the number of trainings, number of things we've written down and the reality that crossing the gap into practice still feels really wide for some folks.
I do think we have a bizmillion more practitioners than we did when we started 10, 12 years ago, a bizmillion. That's not all to our credit, there's so many people doing this work. It's not all us at all. I know that we did have an impact on that and I know that we had an impact on the language changing and all those things, but to Rachel's point and to your point, I have that same question. How do we close that gap for people around practice, training, information, support? I feel like it's this knee-jerk feeling of I'm not the expert, therefore I must outsource this. There's some coupling there that I do think is something that Paolo would say about the cop and the heart. You could link that amazing article. I do think there's an embodiment around outsourcing our problems that is very hard to recondition ourselves to do. I think also you don't always have to be the person who holds a process. I am definitely at a stage of life now, and I think this is partially towards your capacity question, where, yes, I'm not in the best place to hold process right now for a number of reasons. That has to be okay, right?
There's other ways that I can support, and some of the ways that I can support is through supporting others who are holding process or holding other roles around violence, which I do. I hold a lot of roles around lots of different violence and harm that's playing out, but I have to know that I'm not going to be the lead right now.
Damon: Do you feel-- Sorry to interrupt. Without going into detail? Do you feel comfortable naming some of those roles? There may be people listening who are holding those roles and didn't acknowledge that as part of what they're doing.
Shira: Yes. I think you can absolutely be a supporter to someone who's holding a process. You can hold that person down. That person can count you on their team as someone who they call when they need thought partnership. You can also support people who are involved in a process. Let's say a survivor comes to you or a person who causes harm, or anyone in between, you can be a friend or an ally or accompany that person through the stages of a process.
It's also important to think about how are you a resource towards ending violence. I'm imagining the pod mapping worksheet that the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective put out years ago, which I'm sure you can link, but the outer circles are for resources. If you name a bookstore as a resource because you know that's a safe place you can go, it's your home spot, and also, there's tons of amazing articles in that spot. Maybe even a martial arts place is something you want to pull into your life as a resource.
I think it's interesting to think about how we can be those resources. We can intervene on violence more broadly too. For example, the incredible people, and I believe you had them on who did The Love Fridge, that's such an incredible intervention on transforming violence. Not to underestimate the millions of factors that go into transforming violence in our culture that aren't always about a process.
Deana: I also want to jump in to say some of those roles are, especially intervening on violence, is supporting the person who caused harm, and again, it's a long haul situation. Thinking about the Bay Area Transformative Justice pod-mapping and the way those pods go out, maybe you're not the person who is directly holding space for the person who caused harm, but you might be holding space for the person who is.
Another thing about the pod mapping, which I think everybody in an organization, grassroots, collective, whatever you want to call it, I think everyone should do this. There might be different maps depending on your location. If I'm a person who's been harmed, then I might have a different map than if I'm a person who has caused harm in this particular situation, which is also to say that we all have the ability and have caused harm. We need to understand that, too, as we go into a process or when we start thinking about violence and ending violence or transforming violence.
Shira: There's two things I want to add to what Deana just named, too, that got me thinking. One is I remember hearing two different things from two different people who were supporting processes who were not a part of them. One of them was just cooking food, and they were cooking food for all the people who were facilitating, but they were also, whenever there was a meetup bringing food, and another did a fundraiser for grocery cards.
It wasn't the whole length of the process because the process was longer, but they probably raised quite a bit of money for people to get groceries covered during the process. I've also heard of people helping raise money for therapy. There's a lot of different ways to plug into the repair part. Dang it, there was something else. Oh, mistakes. I always assume that mistakes are going to happen in a process. What I will always say to people whenever I do a process is I'm going to make mistakes. There is no such thing as a process that doesn't have a mistake in it, it will happen.
What I want to know is when I make a mistake, if I catch it, here's how I have responded in the past. How does that feel to you? If you catch it, what do you want to do? I try to really make sure that's written down in advance so that we both know that mistakes are going to happen, and we also know that repairing the mistakes and keep going is a part of what's my commitment and priority to an action plan.
Deana: Can I jump in on the gap between training and practice because something just struck me? I feel like in this timeline that we're in, we're living in a certification industrial complex. If you get a certificate that's signed by someone who was the facilitator/expert, then you are like, "Okay, I now know and can go out and do." That's not true necessarily, or it could be true, but really if you are a person who is in movement, you have so many skills.
Even if you're-- [chuckles] For the people who are not in movement and doing work, you too also have skills, but I'm just being specific here. That if you went to Just Practice training, you didn't get a certificate, but you have the skills. You decided to come. That's given you a skill right there. To go out and try and to lean on your community to help you win that trying so that you don't need this certification to make you the expert or who can do this work.
Damon: That's so real. It's funny that you say that, as you name it. I just realized how much humans are just these symbol-driven primates. [chuckles] Once you put it on a little piece of paper, we feel so much more confident, so much more excited. Even if it was just you click a couple of bubbles on the screen and then press print, but once you got the certificate, it's nine [crosstalk]
Kiss: Can I give you a perfect example?
Damon: Yes.
Kiss: I got married last week. Our good friend, a brilliant movement worker, artist, married us. They were going to do the same thing regardless, but they had to fill out the little 30-second officiant certification. For whom was the universal life church involved in our wedding?
Deana: You're talking to a reverend right now, so--
Shira: Me too.
Kiss: The question-- [laughs]
Shira: I have my universal life.
Damon: You're certified.
Shira: Yes, I'm certified.
Deana: I think I'm American marriage industries or something like that.
Kiss: [laughs] That sounds so...
Deana: I know, but what? I think also, Damon, what you're talking about is it's not inherent in us. It's how capitalism has changed us to believe that in order to do something, we need some proof from some governing body-
Damon: Institutional permission. Yes.
Deana: -and permission that says, "Oh, you have this, so now you are able to do this."
Kiss: For sure. I have one more big question that I feel like you all are the people to ask this question to. I think it pertains to a lot of what we've talked about. You've been very explicit about who this formation of Just Practice is for, and who these processes are-- the shared values alignment there. That means that for many of the people who are going through that they're both dealing with what has happened interpersonally in an intimate relationship and the harm there. Also, the way that their affiliations and participations in movement spaces are impacted or overlap with that.
Maybe that means their partner is also part of the campaign or the formation that they're part of. Maybe that means that information about the harm is impacting organizing that has nothing to do with that harm directly. A food distribution, all of a sudden, there's tension in the room planning because people know that this harm occurred for good reason. I'm wondering how you all think about process serving those two components. There's the addressing the needs, the healing, the processing of the people who were involved in the harm, and then there's the way that that's impacting the movement work that's happening around it.
Sometimes, I feel like those needs would line up, and sometimes they wouldn't. I'm wondering how you think about that very specific relationship because I think we've seen the disruption on a movement end that intimate partner violence and sexual violence causes. I think sometimes, as students of movement, we focus on that as opposed to, "Well, maybe that disruption is not the priority over addressing the needs of the person who was harmed."
Deana: I forgot, what do you do? This?
Damon: [laughs] There's nose going happening for those.
Deana: Yes. Shira is going to go first.
Kiss: For those keeping score at home.
Shira: I really thought you were going to go first.
Deana: I thought I was too, but then no.
Shira: That's layered. It's a couple reasons why it's layered. One is we aren't necessarily organizational development facilitators. Our arena has mostly been between people who are directly experiencing the harm. You're right in that movement. That's a false silo in that the ripple effects of that play out in organizations all the time. In Just Practice, our area would be more direct with the people who are experiencing the harm directly.
That said, I do think there's this really difficult part with transparency around transformation where the reality of this healing and transformation is that it is so deeply vulnerable and takes years. I think people want a process to be fast. Even if something can be done on a shorter term, the healing and the transformation is very long-term work. Often a process follows that transformation timeline more than any other.
Organizations, I really feel, shouldn't really be the one to be holding those processes because capacity-wise, that's so impossible on a number of levels, both financial, but also how it affects the work inside the organization, the inside-outside transparency, if it's a nonprofit, then it has all kinds of employment issues. I've really spent a lot of time really discouraging people from holding process, especially inside organizations.
I still feel that way, but I do feel something often needs to be done for people who are experiencing the vicarious impact, and vicarious trauma is very real. It is a trauma in and of itself, and I think it gets diminished a lot. I do want to make room for the witnessing of trauma as a trauma in and of itself. I do think we need more and more solutions, ideas, circles, strategies for how to hold people as they move through transforming that part of the experience of violence, especially because of how triggering and layered it is.
Deana: I would also say that even though the organization should not hold the actual process be the facilitators of that, the organization collective, et cetera, should have ideas about what they'll do when harm occurs. Where are they going to go to help folks work through this harm, work through this violence, this trauma that they've experienced? It's not as though they're off the hook like, "Oh, we can't do anything." It's that the building of your organization, the value setting that you're doing needs to include, "Harm is more than likely going to occur. How are we going to find ways for others to help us address it?"
Kiss: I think that's really helpful for listeners who are building their own formations that you shouldn't necessarily be the ones leading the process, but you should be the ones guiding people toward helping to make sure that that structure exists.
Shira: Aorta, shout out to Aorta in Philly, has a great tool on like as you are building your formation, but you could even do it midway. It's a tool that you use to track how you want to be spoken to and addressed if harm happens. We can leave a link so people can start incorporating those kinds of resources from the beginning of their formation. I really like what Deana was saying about how important it is to just assume that there's going to be a problem, harm, disagreement.
Deana: I just want to point out that it's not a negative thing to believe that harm is going to happen because what we're trying to do, again about building muscles, is we want people to be able to respond to and address harm when it occurs in their communities and then reduce the harm moving forward so that we don't have even more harm happening.
Shira: I know we've been talking so long. One thing I just want to say, I was saying this every day for the last six months or something, is that the work is hard work, but because it's hard doesn't mean that it was bad. Even if the outcome is that people decide to move on, or like Deana was referring to, schisms happen, and that's also okay. We often think that because a meeting was hard or because the circle was hard, or the outcome was different than we expect or people moved on or self-selected to do something else that it means we failed. I want to just like explode this success-failure binary or even the idea.
[laughter]
Shira: Even the idea that something should be easy and if something is easy, it's right, and if something it's hard, it's bad.
Kiss: You got me.
Shira: Yes.
Kiss: Wait till you hear what I do a poster. That explosion too. That's going to be incredible.
Deana: Not in post. That's one of my favorite sayings. "Oh, we'll get that in post."
Kiss: It doesn't work for processes, but it works for production.
[laughter]
Kiss: Before we get outta here, how can folks connect with the work of Just Practice? What do they need to know, and if they're interested in building a similar structure where they are, what do you want them to know as they step into this work? I know those are two different questions.
Shira: Can we start with what we want people to know?
Kiss: Yes.
Damon: Yes.
Shira: Are you wanting me to start, Deana?
Deana: No. No, I'm joking. Go ahead.
[laughter]
Shira: What I want people to know about building these formations or trying your own projects and experiments is that this work is deeply relational. If we are building deeply relational work, it will be hard, and it will be hard for the right reasons because if our work wasn't deeply relational, we would not be able to transform the violence that we are working to transform. We're talking about transforming epic structural violence. We're talking about transforming experiences of interpersonal violence in the framework of racial capitalism and extreme militarized state. This work has to be deeply relational and long-term for us to be able to transform it.
One of my favorite things about Just Practice that I know 1000% is replicable is the intentional way that we have maintained our relationship, whether that's through our daily text thread or whether that's by making sure that we prioritize each other and us as whole people as a part of our work. The relational aspect of transforming violence is perhaps, I think, one of the most important layers of this work.
I am so thrilled that that wound up to be true through our exploration over the last two years that we've been doing and archiving so much of the early work because it is 1000% replicable. Relationship building is something we do know how to do, and we heal in relationship in part because we experience harm in relationship. Those two things have to co-exist, and we can keep it complicated together. I know we can.
Damon: I love that. There's that old K.I.S.S., Keep it simple, stupid. We can go from K.I.S.S to K.I.C.K., Keep it complicated, kids.
[laughter]
Shira: That's cool.
Deana: I love it. I feel mad that I didn't come up with it. Damn it.
Kiss: We got to kick it.
Damon: We came up with it.
Shira: We got to kick it.
Kiss: We kicking it together.
Damon: Oh, that's so funny.
Deana: I love that.
[laughter]
Deana: I love that.
Damon: Deana, did you want to add to how folks could come back to the work or to that thread of what is replicable?
Deana: Yes. I mentioned earlier about being in study and not in a punitive way, but to love to learn and learn in the ways that work for you. There's no one right way to learn. I shouted out Shira's book, Saving Our Own Lives. I also want to shout out some other books, such as Healing Justice Lineages by Kara Page and Erica Woodland, who write about the lineages of healing justice and how it goes beyond the past 10 years and goes way back. Books like Let This Radicalize You and Practicing New Worlds are also wonderful histories, lineages, just a way to understand and learn more about movement work and the things that people are doing to resist.
Damon: Thank you for those resources. Want to thank you again, and Shira. Thank you again for all that you've contributed. Deana, you are one of the best spirits that I interact in the spaces that we convene. Even when it's heavy, even when it's when it's dense, there is a light and a vibrance that you bring, and you named being underwater coming into this conversation, and you're swimming to the light, but you brought still so much light here.
I want to shout out and thank the rest of the team who is filled of people that have supported work that I've seen directly in real time. Rachel Caidor, Ana Mercardo, who you all named a lot, Keisa Reynolds, and obviously Mariame Kaba. What you all as a collective have contributed and offered to our world, to our people is really immeasurable. There are the big ways that come in PDFs and in glossy text and in conferences, but I've witnessed just a glimpse of the ways that are never going to be documented and actually can't be talked about. I know the way that you all show up. I'm really grateful and honored to be walking through these paths with you all. Thank you so much eternally.
Deana: Yes, thank you for having that. This was great. First, I want to say thanks to Shira for always going first and me putting her on the spot. She knows that I love her and that I was probably going to do that anyway. Thanks, Damon and Daniel, for having us. This was amazing. I'm glad that you were open to hearing us and engaging with us and making all this shit happen.
[music]
Kiss: Woosh. Shout out to Shira and Deana for getting in the weeds with us, going deep. What a great conversation. As always, it is time to welcome our pal Eva back in for the peer review.
[music]
Kiss: Eva, hello.
Eva: Hi, you all. Woo. The homies brought the heat.
Kiss: They did. What's jumping out to you from this conversation?
Eva: If I'm being totally honest with you, the thing that jumps out when Deana and Shira were talking about try shit-- In my neighborhood, there's a skate park, and there's this famous, probably pretty famous skater called Fuck Shit. I kept thinking of this character, this identity, as the try shit. If you were a skater or you're an organizer, you're try shit. What a sweet, dope nickname that would be.
Kiss: I could see the T-shirts.
Eva: Right? Try shit. I think that Just Practice Collaborative is just such a good example of need to do shit, need to try shit, and shit happening. Then here we are, almost a decade later, and what that shit has transformed into. We often think about what crossing the gap into practice really feels like. In this session, Shira and Deana talked about how wide that gap can feel.
I thought that what it kept bringing back to me and what this podcast relentlessly brings me back to is the building relationships aspect of it. I mean, just the hilarity of being in the studio with Deana and Shira together to see that bond, to experience it, to know that that is the building block of this work. There was this quote, "We heal in relationship because we experience harm in relationship."
I think we were talking about why this isn't a one-size-fits-all thing, why this TJ thing is a community thing. That really spoke to me, that these relationships that we see in Just Practice Collaborative, that they're helping people fine-tune all over the country and the world, are what it always comes back to. There are so many people out there who I think have the seeds of not Just Practice and collaborative in particular but of these relationships that are the building blocks of these kinds of organizations.
Kiss: You're 100% right that these seeds have spread so far and have really pollinated. Am I using pollinated, right? No, pollinated is that, yes.
Eva: Yes, that's fine.
Kiss: The seeds have spread so far, and there's been this grand pollination process. We in the conversation talk about how the lexicon or how the discourse has changed over this last decade or so. Yes, I know them, I know the work, and I know how important it is, but being in the conversation, I just felt overwhelming sense of gratitude. One, have dedicated so much of our work and our life to this notion of abolition, and I realize now that if I didn't have an articulation of what restorative and transformative processes need to look like, I don't know if I would be able to stand in abolition as strongly as I do.
It would just be I don't like the cops, and I don't like prisons, but to have this notion of what the new presence looks like-- If I trace it back, it is as much from this community as we could credit any space. That it is from this community, as much as any space, that these ideas have been able to transmit into my day-to-day life. Beyond even ideologically and feeling more grounded and what we're talking about, the world to look on a macro level, personally, if it wasn't for this example, if it wasn't for this mandate of how do we take more responsibility for our people?
We can say things like, "We are each other's business," or "You have to take care of folks," or "We need to show up for each other," but the notion of a process or the notion of intervention being real tangible things to participate in, and that you have a responsibility to, have transformed for me what it means practically to be in community. I think sometimes we can just say that word, and it means we go to the same venues when an event happens. What Just Practice has really given folks the skills for, or at least the compass towards, is the way in which you have to show up when shit gets real.
Damon: Yes, I completely agree. Even if we don't fully understand how to do it all the time, the concept that there is a structure that you can step into that anyone can have a hand in and that we need more people to participate in, actually, and get trained to help facilitate. I think is a really important contribution while still knowing, like they said, "This is not perfect for every situation." Everyone involved needs to have a shared politicized framework, which I thought was also new to me to hear.
In this process of responding to the question of what are the alternatives, quote-unquote, to policing, often TJ process gets thrown out there as an answer to that. I think no one is fully satisfied with that answer, including TJ practitioners, because people who have done this work know that this is not applicable for everybody. The type of consent needed to move through a multi-year Transformative Justice process is not going to work in every situation, especially when people are not coming in with the same informed consent, really, about what that looks like.
That was new to me to hear people who do this work and who have been leading this work say, "Hey, where we know this can be helpful is for people who are in movement with a shared politic," which is honestly a little disappointing at first to hear because you want to be able to lift this up politically more actively. I think the more honest we are about what this experiment can serve, the better of an option it is when people need it.
Eva: That's so true. I think I really appreciate how honest and real Deana and Shira always are about that when they talk about Transformative Justice, what it is and what it isn't, and what the possibilities on the ground now are versus the possibilities in the future. I think what we found on this podcast is try shit isn't that different from fuck shit. Just really hitting home the experimental nature of what we're trying to do to survive in community and how hard isn't bad, easy isn't right.
I think not only politically, but it's a lot of fucking work. It's not just a one-size-fits-all. It's not just a one-to-one replacement to calling police. Oh, and you have to infuse TJ into every facet of your life and be a decent human being and learn great communication skills and also have access to it. What we're building is pretty large, and I hope that that can be exciting.
Kiss: Which makes sense because the need is large. Compared to the violence that folks are experiencing and suffering through, it should not be an easy one, two, three thing and now we're perfectly equipped. That would be underselling the need that our community has, the need of survivors, the need of women, femme, non-binary, and trans people, and those who are marginalized in the sex work economy, right?
If it was just click some multiple-choice bubbles on a website and get your little certificate, we would have fixed that problem a long time ago if that's all it took. These tensions, these violences that people perpetuate and experience are so deep-rooted, are so generational, are so socially embedded in just how our whole life is organized, that it's going to take generations of this work that it's going to take a long time for us to figure out how to--
We can't have one shoe. We got to make a million shoes. Just the production of that, the scale of-- We don't have factories yet to build all the shoes, but we have to know the model and how to get there. I thought that metaphor was going to go much cleaner as a former sneakerhead, but you all get where I'm going.
Kiss: Damon's really just advocating for manufacturing on a scale of one to two.
Damon: Yes, that's not what I was trying to say, but I used to study limited-size runs on shoes and stuff.
Kiss: I understand.
Eva: Of course you did.
Damon: Your skater reference, my sneakerhead reference.
Eva: There you go.
Kiss: I'll throw my [crosstalk] reference in there, and we'll really make it strong. As Derek Jeter once said-- Yes. See, there you go.
[laughter]
Kiss: Any last thoughts before we hop on out of here?
Eva: I'm going to hold up the tagline one more time. I told Dam I was going to do this. We can keep it complicated together. I think we owe Shira and Deana a t-shirt for that.
Damon: Yes. Keep it complicated, kids. [laughs]
Kiss: Keep it complicated, kids. [laughs]
Eva: You all, it's good. It's good stuff. It isn't the messaging that the kids need.
Kiss: Yes. go kick it.
Eva: Here's one more is we do it every day. It's hard. It's a big thing to build, but we are building it every day by building community and relationships.
Damon: It's a cooperative factory, just for the record.
Kiss: Okay. Thank you.
Eva: Yes.
Kiss: Worker-owned.
Eva: That's right.
Damon: Yes.
Kiss: The shoes they make are sustainable leather.
Damon: Participant driven. Everyone decides together what the production skill going to be, how many hours we're doing. [laughs]
Kiss: Yes. Wages are capped and non-hierarchical. No, absolutely. The shoes are fly too. They're really nice shoes.
Damon: Great shoes.
Eva: The shoes are fly. That's the thing is the shoes are fly.
Damon: They're customized. They're made to fit you.
Kiss: Let's go kick it.
Damon: It takes a lot, all right? Yes, let's go kick it.
Kiss: See? Eva, working folks find out more-- Let's start with the Just Practice Collaborative. Where can folks find out more about them?
Eva: You can go to just-practice.org to find all about Just Practice Collaborative and the cool homies who work there.
Kiss: Speaking of cool friends, where can folks find out more about IC and the work that you all are doing?
Eva: Go check out interruptingcriminalization.org, and you can always find us on social at Interrupt Crim.
Kiss: We're at AirGo Radio as well as at Respair Media, which is our movement media ecosystem hub that we've launched this year. You can find our flagship show AirGo A-I-R-G-O, wherever you get your pods, and I think it's time to wrap up this experiment. We will see you all back in the lab next month.
Damon: Much love to the people.
Kiss: Peace.