Transformative Justice Skill Up
Shana Agid | 2024-2025 Fellowship
The Interrupting Criminalization Transformative Justice (TJ) Skill Up Fellowship is creating an infrastructure for TJ practices through organizing, community-based skill-up, and the participatory design of a TJ Virtual Hub — a space for ongoing learning and for connecting practitioners in communities of practice. The Hub will allow people to find, organize, and share resources; do self-directed study of TJ skills; and be supported through, for example, live practice sessions, help-desk functions, and a community newsletter. TJ Skill Up Fellow, Shana Agid, is a community-based designer focused on collective and collaborative processes for making abolitionist infrastructures.
The TJ Skill Up and Virtual Hub are spaces to build confidence through opportunities to practice with others, teaching others what we do know and building conflict transformation plans with organizations, workplaces, and families.
TJ Skill Up Practice Lab
The TJ Skill Up Practice Lab is bringing together cohorts of collaborators to test, reflect on, and design a TJ Virtual Hub and the Skill Up learning space and materials core to the Hub. Through the Practice Lab, we are identifying specific needs, desires, and resources to build through our grounding questions:
What moves people from knowledge to action?
What supports and materials, opportunities, communities, and infrastructures sustain TJ capacity-building in people’s specific places?
How can the TJ Skill Up and TJ Virtual Hub build communities of and for TJ practice?
How can more people be, or become, confident using TJ skills in our everyday lives?
Through work with Practice Lab partners, the Fellowship will use the TJ Skill Up Suite prototype to learn from cycles of practice, evaluation / reflection, and (re)designing, making, and building to ask what supports a sustained move to practice for people interested in and already working with TJ. This will be used to hone the TJ Skill Up Suite and develop additional components for the TJ Virtual Hub, to be launched in the fall of 2025.
TJ Virtual Hub and Learning Space
The Transformative Justice Virtual Hub will be a space that connects people working to foster TJ practices to end violence, harm, and criminalization through organized information, resources, and skill-building tools.
We know that Transformative Justice builds through practicing skills like having difficult conversations, conflict de-escalation, making good apologies, and facilitating mediation as core tools for preventing harm and violence by engaging conflict in healthy ways. But practicing Transformative Justice can be hard, especially without low-stakes, supportive environments to try and try again with other people. Building on the core principle that there are no TJ “experts,” but there is critical knowledge and expertise that can only be developed through practice and learning together, the Virtual Hub will be a digital platform tied to what people are doing in their local place that increases access to Transformative Justice through open information sharing, mutual learning, and skill development.
When the Hub launches in the fall of 2025, it will bring together four critical resources under one umbrella:
Introductions and deeper dives into key concepts and terms in Transformative Justice housed on the site;
An activity bank with regularly updated exercises and facilitation plans for practicing tools and concepts;
Digital infrastructure to create and work with a Learning Pod, a group of people who practice together using skill-building materials and scaffolding in the Hub platform;
Curated links to content available across the internet, where there are many TJ resources, but fewer structures to guide people learning together
