About the Transformative Justice Practitioners Network
We are a network of groups, collectives and individuals in German-speaking countries who work practically on transformative justice and other collective ways of dealing with interpersonal and structural violence. We ground ourselves in the concepts of transformative justice and community accountability from feminist and queer BIPoC (Black, Indigenous and People of Color) communities in North America.
The activists of the network do educational work, support for survivors, work with people who cause violence and their respective communities, as well as consulting, accompaniment, or facilitation transformative justice processes. We also engage with theory and publish our writing. One of the goals of the network is to make the ideas of transformative justice better known and enable and encourage people to do transformative work in their own communities in a (self-)organized way.
The network organizes itself through a mailing list and regular meetings: monthly online and twice a year in person meetings. We communicate in German and English. We aim to accommodate translations and additional languages as needed.
Emergence of the network
The Transformative Justice Kollektiv Berlin disbanded after 8 years of work and left this website behind. Around the same time, the What really makes us safe?-Project, a project with connections to the Kollektiv, organized two networking meetings. One for people researching transformative justice and community accountability, another for those who practice it. From the latter, the current Transformative Justice Practitioners Network (TJ Practitioners) emerged in September 2019.
In the process, we developed a strategic approach to building the network in several steps: First, network members are engaging in an internal exchange to get to know each other and create a sustainable structure for our work. To this end, a weekend networking meeting is held at least twice a year. In the second step, knowledge will be passed on beyond the network in an organized manner by expanding your educational offerings. A third step, we will develop a shared infrastructure available to the public to consult on and accompany transformative justice processes, as well as undertake theorizing and education work together.
The network is currently (as of October 2021) focused on building up the organization internally exchanging knowledge between the members. At this point there is no central avenue for contacting us ; if you are interested in participating in the network, please contact one of the active groups or collectives.
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Graphik / image: @daveloewenstein (Instagram), CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 via justseeds.org