STEP 5 —

Pursuing values-driven community work within creative industry, as well as arts and culture spaces, COMES WITH conflict.

How we respond to disagreements, as well as harm and violence, matters when we are trying to do community work in a trauma-informed way, prevent burnout for ourselves and others, s well as practice the very values we advocate for.

Let’s identify some of the difficult things that can happen within community-driven work:

• Conflict occurs when there is disagreement over ideas, issues, or values. This is a normal part of humans’ social interactions, often requiring facilitation to resolve.

• Harm happens when a significant negative impact or injury happens to someone. It can be emotional, physical, sexual, financial, or spiritual and oftentimes results when one party has systemic power over another or privilege and that power is abused.

• Violence occurs when the harm is intentional and causes significant disruptions in a person’s life. While there is a distinct difference we have seen how easily conflict can escalate to harm and violence when our traumas get activated, especially in social justice spaces.

When engaging in community work, it’s important to distinguish between conflict, harm and violence.

By distinguishing between these different types of exchanges, we can work to prevent further conflict, harm and violence within our communities and community work.

Restorative Justice

Restorative Justice is an approach to violence and harm that draws from indigenous principles of interconnection, mutuality, inclusion, and shared decision-making. This approach focuses on repairing interpersonal relationships at the micro-level after harm by meeting the needs of people who have been harmed. Important principles underlying restorative approaches are:

• Harms are violations of people and interpersonal relationships

• Violations create obligations

• The central obligation is to “make things right,” not to punish or make the person who caused the harm suffer

These principles lead to questions:

• Who has been harmed? 

• What do they need to heal?

• Whose obligation is it to meet those needs?

Exploring the answers to these questions can help us take a restorative approach to conflict and harm, bringing people together to repair relationships, listen deeply, and repair what has been broken.

There is a strong focus on people who have caused harm taking accountability, whether this means restoring the person who was hurt to wellness or giving a meaningful apology and taking accountability.

Transformative Justice

Relationships, however, don’t occur in a vacuum and are impacted by the context of systems of oppression we live in. Transformative Justice-based approaches to harm go one step further by trying to repair the harm while also acknowledging the role of both interpersonal and systems-based trauma in creating the conditions for harm to occur and perpetuating more violence. 

For example, if someone steals breaks into someone’s home in order to steal so that they can feed their children: yes, there is value in bringing together the person whose home was broken into and the person who stole from them so they can share the impacts the incident has had on them (financial impacts not feeling safe anymore, feelings of violation etc.), but a Transformative Justice response would also look to improve the societal and systemic conditions impacted their ability to meet their family’s needs.

Because transformative justice-based approaches acknowledge that the violence caused by oppressive systems are root causes for harm and that state policing systems reproduce violence and create trauma primarily in minoritized communities, Transformative Justice-based responses to harm do not involve state systems that have the potential to cause more harm and instead involve community members and resources in the response.

This often involves creating support teams called “pods” around different community members involved in the harm. Each pod might have a specific focus, such as supporting the person who caused the harm in their personal transformation and healing while also holding them accountable, or supporting the person who has been harmed emotionally while also connecting them to needed resources.

*Additional Reading and Resources on Transformative Justice — 

• Transformative Justice: A Brief Description

• What is Transformative Justice

• Everyday Practices of Transformative Justice

• The Modern Roots of Transformative Justice

• How Shame Can Block Accountability 

• What are Obstacles to Accountability

• What is accountability?

• What does Justice Look like for Survivors? 

• Centering the Needs of Survivors part 1 

• Centering the Needs of Survivors part 2

• How to Support Harm Does in Accountability

• Pods

BALANCING A RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SELF-CARE AND COLLECTIVE-CARE IN COMMUNITY WORK CAN BE HARD. IT’S NORMAL TO EXPERIENCE ROADBLOCKS. IT’S NORMAL TO MAKE MISTAKES.

Transforming our communities and the systems in which we create and organize involves transforming how we create justice and our responses to harm. How we are with one another and the values we embody when things get hard really matters.

But it is incredibly difficult to work through conflict and respond to harm in a way that is restorative, non-punitive, and transforms everyone involved, because we are deeply embedded in cultural narratives of retribution where we are told that punishment teaches us a lesson and that experiencing pain will reduce the likelihood of further wrongdoing.

Fear of “getting it wrong” and being rejected socially makes us tighten up and revert to old fear-based responses, and our trauma responses and shame showing up when triggered make it that much harder to stay grounded in our values.

REMEMBER—Trauma lives in the body, and So doeS healing and justice. So, WHAT DOES IT LOOK LIKE TO BRING SOME OF THESE EMBODIED QUALITIES INTO YOUR APPROACH TO SELF-CARE, COLLECTIVE-CARE AND COMMUNITY WORK NOW?

• Leadership

• Transparency

• Connected communication

• Trauma-informed

• Non-punitive

• Accountability

• Attention to process 

• Affirmation of the whole self

• Congruence between written values/mission and experienced values/mission