Collective Justice

Collective Justice fosters transformative and healing justice through community accountability, survivor-centered practices, and prison abolition in Seattle.

"Collective Justice grew out of many conversations with survivors, community members, and incarcerated people who have been directly impacted by multiple forms of violence. We all came together to express the need for spaces and practices that focus on healing and not further harming and isolating each other." 

Collective Justice focuses on four main areas of work, described in their words, below.

1. Healing Circles
2. Dialogue and Accountability Processes
3. Survivor Organizing Academy
4. Trainings & Presentations

Healing Circles: Our team holds healing and accountability circles both in prison and in community for people on all sides of harm. Community members who join our circles share and witness each other’s stories as we move together through individually-held pain to a journey of collective healing. Drawing on restorative justice practices and transformative justice principles, we build skills and wellness around coping with triggers, self and community-care, and building resilience. 

Dialogue and Accountability Processes: We facilitate healing and accountability processes where people who have survived or lost loved ones to violence can have face-to-face dialogues with those who have caused them harm. Talking in a safe setting can allow those harmed to give full voice to their experience and all that they endured. Survivors may want to ask questions about what happened, express the impact, and make requests for repair. People responsible for harm, no matter how severe, are given the opportunity to face the often wide-ranging and complex impact of their actions and work towards their own accountability.

Survivor Organizing Academy: Through embodied leadership development and political education, we support community members who are left feeling powerless without a channel to influence legislation and public policy that aligns with the needs and values of their communities. In 2021, we launched our Heal2Action program, an intergenerational organizing academy for survivors. We invite those who have been deeply impacted by violence to come together in a network of healing, politicized BIPOC survivors to build the kind of power we need to build safe and thriving communities. These survivor-leaders want to build real power and heart-centered relationships, they are willing to engage in principled struggle and have unwavering commitment to our communities.

Trainings & Presentations: As experts in restorative and transformative justice practice, we offer trainings and public education to individuals and agencies. The latter centers building a broad understanding of restorative justice and why it matters, elevating what it truly means to shift our societal responses to harm toward community healing practice. To ensure this shift takes place as expansively as possible, we also train practitioners to facilitate restorative justice within their own agencies and communities.

Source: Collective Justice