Restorative Justice, Care Work, and Community Safety

• In Event: Roundtable: Diminishing Police Power, Building Community Safety Infrastructure

Abstract

Restorative justice focuses on developing alternative pathways for conflict resolution, repair, and accountability that are community-held. Community safety, that renders policing obsolete, lives inside of such carework, where the skills to interrupt harm and build collective resilience aren't held by a select few but rather at scale. Grace will speak to the work she is currently doing (restorative justice), past work in Tucson around reframing safety as community care work (resourcing, space making, relationship etc), and the pull of politicized somatics that she finds enlivening (a shimmering, vibrating thread of Grace Lee Bogg's instruction of how we actually have to transform ourselves to transform the world), and how they speak to one another.

Author

• Grace Gamez, Equal Justice USA