Comrades, Thank you to everyone who has been so patient with us as we’ve been figuring things out, and thank you to everyone who has participated in the forum. We wanted to share our reflections on the forum before discussing further steps. In our eyes, the most successful aspect about the forum was giving people space to tell the truth and be heard. Many of you shared the harmful or abusive experiences you’ve had in various DFW organizing spaces, and it has become even more clear that misogyny is not being fought against in a serious way. Many of you also expressed frustration with the lack of transparency, respect, and diligence when trying to address harm. We’ve also been reflecting on all the feedback we have gotten so far and we hope to accommodate the requests y’all have made for the future forums. We hope to move forward with both organization and community wide forums as this will be a long process we must undergo if we want to understand what causes harm in our spaces, and how we as a community can work together to support victims. On this note, we want to follow up with a hybrid teach in about Transformative Justice and how we can become more militant as a community against misogyny and abuse. We’ll be studying the foundational principles of Transformative Justice and adding our own perspective as student organizers in August.
We find it necessary to educate on this topic and get on the same page before continuing with our forums. In the meantime, we are preparing for the next semester and restructure and educating internally. We also want to prioritize struggling through this as a community. Feel free to reach out with concerns, questions, or anything else on the topic.
Notes from the forum: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RXkEkFuQv5Soa7Q9PBHoxU0IBp28kHse/view
Transformative justice readings: https://www.creative-interventions.org/toolkit/
https://medium.com/@amasha00/beyond-firing-how-do-we-create-community-wide-accountability-for-sexual-harassment-in-our-fb6b1259a24d
https://transformharm.org/tj_resource/transformative-justice-a-brief-description/