Launches the Peer2Peer Exchange
Submissions will only be accepted by those who receive an invitation code. If you do not have an invitation code, please contact P2PFund@saveourplanet.orgSara Ebrahimi at Social and Environmental Entrepreneurs (SEE) ph. (818)-225-9150.
BACKGROUND
Across the United States communities are creating powerful spaces and systems of deep healing and safety. Communities directly impacted by incarceration and violence are implementing transformative solutions to end the unequivocal reliance on the criminal punishment system. While this reality is undeniably true, emerging leaders and community organizations are faced with stark disinvestment within the current climate as the vast majority of philanthropic resources have gone directly to the criminal punishment system to reform itself and public health departments to implement programming.
In response to these dynamics a group of community organizers, transformational justice practioners, funders, and community leaders came together …click to read more
to seek ways to drive investment into communities most impacted by the criminal punishment system who are actualizing transformational spaces of healing and care. These stakeholders went through a process to create a funding model designed to equalize power disparities in the field of philanthropy and strengthen relationships between funders and advocates through a consensus-based grant making process. The Transformative Communities initiative (TCI) was the result of this work.
TCI GRANTMAKING MODEL
TCI takes inspiration from the goals of Transformative Justice: a) Safety, healing, and agency for survivors; b) Accountability and transformation for people who harm; c) Community action, healing, and accountability; d) Transformation of the social conditions that perpetuate violence – systems of oppression and exploitation, domination, and state violence.
The work of TCI is governed by a racially diverse group of community mobilizers and transformative justice experts, including those with identities on the continuum of gender, sexual orientation and experiences surviving correctional, sexual and other forms of state and interpersonal violence. Founding partners include W. Haywood Burns Institute, Project NIA, Open Society Foundations and a range of network partners. …click to read more
The TCI is eager to align our resources in support of broader movement building. For that purpose, we aim to increase our participation in public and private dialogue and cross-sector learning to shift the national and global narrative on violence.
Partners within the Transformative Communities Initiative (TCI) share the following goals:
Identify emerging trailblazers from communities heavily impacted by violence,
Increase leadership of grant makers with direct experiences of criminal punishment involvement,
Increase the presence and operational capacity of organizations led by system survivors,
Diversify internal resource contributions from funders and advocates alike,
Gain collective philanthropic decision-making expertise in reducing power disparities and strengthening relationships between funding and field activists.
TCI welcomes additional partners interested in providing multi-year funding to stabilize and grow the field. We met our 2nd quarter objectives to fund the first 10-15 grantees and are looking to raise $500,000 additional dollars in 2018 to expand the network and training opportunities going forward.
2018 INAUGURAL NETWORK OF EMERGING LEADERS
Thanks to the energetic contributions from new advocates and funders, TCI launched its first funding opportunity on March 1st, the 2018 Inaugural Network of Emerging Leaders. The P2P Exchange Fund is an invitation-only resource for transformative justice movement building centered around survivors of incarceration, violence and community organizations building alternatives to police, jails and state surveillance. Twenty sites will receive general support grants that come coupled with travel and training resources for young leaders to connect with peers across the country in order to exchange frontline expertise and tactical support as they design bold local responses to violence using transformative justice approaches.
The 2018 Peer2Peer Exchange Selection Committee members include: …click to read more
- Angel Pantoja, Free Write Jail Arts & Literacy
- Gretchen Rohr, Open Society Foundations US Justice Fund
- Jennifer Hoffman, Social and Environmental Entrepreneurs (SEE)
- Lashonia Thompson-El, The W.I.R.E.
- Malachi Garza, W. Haywood Burns Institute
- Manuel La Fontaine, W. Haywood Burns Institute
- Mariame Kaba, Project NIA & Survived + Punished
- Prentis Hemphill, Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity (BOLD)
- Robert D. White, Consultancy/Youth Advisory Council, Annie E. Casey Foundation
Invitations from the P2P Selection Committee will only extend to uniquely qualified community groups matching criteria described further on the P2P web link here. Invited organizations will receive a CODE to begin online applications due April 2, 2018.
The scope of the P2P Fund’s national support includes:
- flexible organizational grants,
- live training, web access and toolkits
- cross-site exchange coordination
- travel funding and support
- leadership development and coaching
- exposure to sector funders/partners
HOW WE APPROACH TRANSFORMATIVE JUSTICE
Across the country, there is a growing community-accountability/restorative & transformative justice movement that needs more people. Organizations and individuals have and are creating local projects and initiatives that offer alternative ideas and structures for mediating conflicts and addressing harms without relying on police or prisons. Part of the work is also focused on creating the conditions necessary to ensure the possibility of more safety in our communities.
From Ferguson to Baltimore, from Rikers Island to Guantánamo Bay, our prison nation ensures expensive and profound precarity and violence. …click to read more
Yet the current interventions posited as “alternatives to incarceration”—including drug-treatment programs, boot camps, community-based supervision or probation, electronic monitoring, and community service—still depend on carceral logics of surveillance, containment, and sometimes punishment. We must create new forms of justice defined by principles of respect, interrelatedness, and mutuality.
As there is no blueprint for transformative justice however, we must spend time imagining, strategizing, and practicing other futures. This encompasses many facets: We must organize and mobilize to address the root causes of oppression and violence. We need to test the limits of our imagination of what’s possible in terms of addressing violence and harm. We must creatively rethink our current structures of policing and warehousing individuals. We need to expose the brutality and abject failure of the current system. We must foreground a revolutionary transformation of ideas while demanding that our resources be radically reallocated. Collectively envisioned and determined, community safety and transformative justice will look different from one community to the next. There are many vexing questions and unknowns to puzzle through. We envision the P2P Leadership Development Program as one space to do this.
Definitions and Concepts
The goals of Transformative Justice are: a) Safety, healing, and agency for survivors; b) Accountability and transformation for people who harm; c) Community action, healing, and accountability; d) Transformation of the social conditions that perpetuate violence – systems of oppression and exploitation, domination, and state violence.
The Peer2Peer Exchange supports non-punitive justice paradigms erected to either address harms, needs and obligations after a specific violent offense (i.e. community conferencing circles , victim-offender dialogues etc) OR to address systemic harms, individual/societal needs and obligations after a broader structural injustice (i.e. Greensboro Truth & Reconciliation, Burge Torture Reparations Ordinance ).
The distinction between new and old paradigms of justice is illustrated in the graph below:
| Retributive Paradigm | Restorative Paradigm |
|---|---|
| Crime defined by violation of law/rules | Crime defined by harm to people |
| State as victim in the abstract | People as survivors with concrete relational needs |
| Survivor’s healing, safety & agency secondary | Survivor’s healing, safety & agency central |
| Wounds of harm doer & community peripheral | Accountability by and for those who do harm |
| Offense defined in technical legal terms- interpersonal, social economic, policy dimensions are irrelevant | Offense understood in context of social conditions that perpetuate violence in order to transform root causes |
| Competitive, adversarial process with goal of punishing thereby reducing likelihood of future offenses by defendant | Inclusive, collaborative process with goal of repairing thereby reducing likelihood of future offenses by everyone involved |
| Transformative Justice: Uses the restorative paradigm of accountability and healing to resist oppressive root causes of harm, including the criminal legal system itself. If restorative justice is the compass; transformative justice is the map. |
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| Restorative Justice: “is a process to involve, to the extent possible, those who have a stake in a specific offence and to collectively identify and address harms, needs and obligations, in order to heal and put things as right as possible.” [Howard Zehr] | |
| Community Accountability: strategies aim at preventing, intervening in, responding to, and healing from violence through strengthening relationships and communities, emphasizing mutual responsibility for addressing the conditions that allow violence to take place, and holding people accountable for violence and harm. This includes a wide range of creative strategies for addressing violence as part of organizing efforts in communities when you can’t or don’t want to access state systems for safety (The Audre Lorde Project, National Gathering on Transformative and Community Accountability, 9/2010).” | |
Contact Information
Questions may be directed to the Peer2Peer Fund Management at Social & Environmental Entrepreneurs at P2PFund@saveourplanet.org or you may contact Sara Ebrahimi, SEE’s Office Coordinator at 818-225-9150.
