02/14/2025
Did you know that transformative justice is one of our core values?
Transformative justice, as an individual and collective approach, is similar to the concept of restorative justice, although, it is not the same process.
In CDN's workplace culture, transformative justice, as a core value, requires us to do the inner work as an everyday practice and to acknowledge that it is a two way accountability persistently.
In other words, we practice to strengthen our self-accountability approaches in various situations and practice to support people to gain confidence in taking accountability for themselves without inserting unrealistic expectations on them on daily basis.
Why are we bringing this into awareness?
We, as a collective, have witnessed harm caused towards a person by an organization. It showed that we all have a choice in responding to situations that directly or indirectly impact us.
We learned that there are 4 roles when responding to harm.
1) person being harmed
2) upstander
3) person or organization causing harm
4) leadership
We naturally responded to harm by learning all sides of the story within the situation. It guided us to see how it happened, why did it happened, where did it happened and what's missing in the picture through the processes of transformative justice. It allowed us to figure out how to address the harm appropriately even if it is not our direct experience.
We realized that when it comes to supporting a person being harmed, we must make sure that we are taking care of our wellbeing as individuals and as a collective. It means knowing what kind of support we can give without emotionally compromising ourselves or without taking sides, not knowing the full story, in an unhealthy way.
We also learned that people who are harmed may not get what they want on the receiving end. It is up to them to figure out how to respond to harm itself and how to heal from the harmful experience. They also need to be aware of impacts of emotional bleeding onto people who have not "cut them (word credit: Mia Mingus)".
When we experience harm from the communities or organizations or individuals, we learned to identify and name specific harms before addressing them in a safe and brave space. We recognize that when we don't name specific harms when we bring it up to the person or organization causing harm and giving examples of harms, we minimize the growth mindset opportunity for the person or organization to learn what kind of harms they have caused.
Transformative justice calls us to offer the space to support those to gain better understanding of self-accountability or collective accountability.
Because we internalize all kinds of violence and normalize to the point that we become unaware of it systemically or institutionally or culturally, we need to understand that accountability is always a two way street even if we are the people being harmed or if we are the people causing harm.
If you are curious about the resources we learned about the healthy ways to respond to harm(s) when addressed by a person being harmed or when addressing as collective leaders or as upstanders, you can find the resources in the comment section below.
We thank you for allowing us to have the space to continually improve our self-accountability and collective accountability approaches.
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VD: On white square background, "Cascadia Deaf Nation. (medium sized black text)" is on the top left corner.
Dark blue decorative element with right side vertical waves and different colored circles (green, light purple, orange, and yellow with black numbered text in the middle).
Images of people holding up arms in solidarity within a dotted circle (light purple), yellow checklist with circular arrows pointing towards two persons (yellow), hand holding heart with glow rays (orange), and side profiled face with growth leaves rooting out from head to out of the head (green, in an abstract form) are on the blue element background.
"Core Values (large white text in the middle of the blue element background)".
"01 Community Wellness (green circle).
02 Collective Stewardship (purple).
03 Mindfulness (orange).
04 Transformative Justice (yellow)".
CDN logo on the lower right corner.
[ends.]
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