Deana: [00:00:00]
Welcome to Stories for Power. I’m Deana Lewis and I’m a member of Just Practice Collaborative. Stories For Power is an oral history project produced by Just Practice Collaborative and Creative Interventions. It explores the political lineage and historical experiments that gave way to this wave of transformative justice, community accountability, and prison abolition.
In each episode of Stories for Power, we speak with activists and organizers from different cities who were and continue to be at the forefront of feminist abolitionist praxis. They talked about the bold experiments and interventions they were a part of in the early 2000’s through 2010, and how their work informed abolitionist, transformative justice, and community accountability organizing today.
Don’t worry, if any terms or words have you [00:01:00] confused, we’ll do our best to link to resources in the show notes, and you can always go back to listen to the special introduction episode for more context.
In this episode, you will hear from three inspiring abolitionist feminists, Theryn Kigvamasud’Vashti, Kiyomi Fujikawa, and Shannon Perez-Darby. We will talk about the courageous and radical work they were a part of in Seattle before the early 2000’s and 2010.
Have you facilitated a process using community accountability tools or strategies? We wanna hear your stories. Creative Interventions and Just Practice Collaborative wanna share new stories from people who are taking action to end interpersonal violence without the use of police or carceral systems.
Find the link in our show notes to learn more.
A note for our listeners, we will be discussing violence, including police violence, intimate partner violence, and community violence. We encourage you to take care of yourself and we understand that taking [00:02:00] care of yourself can also look like not listening to this podcast until you’re ready.
Now let me introduce our guests. They have amazing and extensive experiences and knowledge. I’ll do my best to summarize. We have linked their full bios in the show notes. You can also learn more on our website StoriesforPower.org.
Theryn Kigvamasud’Vashti is a community organizer, activist, facilitator, and adjunct instructor living in Seattle, Washington. Theryn has been working in the anti-violence and reproductive justice movements for over 20 years.
Formerly a co-executive director at Communities Against Rape and Abuse, also known as CARA, Theryn continues to support survivors of state and interpersonal violence.
Theryn: I transplanted to Seattle from Colorado actually in September ’95.
And I was drawn to CARA, Communities Against Rape and Abuse because I [00:03:00] was participating in these conversations with a new group called The African American Task Force Against Domestic Violence, which then became the African American Task Force Against Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault. But it was in those meetings that I met Alisa Bierria. And Alisa Bierria and Eliaichi Kimaro kind of cornered me after a meeting and said, “you need to apply to CARA.”
And I was like, “oh, you know, no, I’m, I’m good with the enslavement master that I currently have.” And they were like, “no, you don’t understand. You come onto CARA and you can build your own program ’cause we’re trying to do things very differently. We’re trying to look at communities, marginalized communities that experience sexual assault disproportionately to the dominant, you know, culture. We are trying to, um, think of ways to create safety without relying on law enforcement.” And I was like, “wow, okay.” So I actually interviewed with those two and then was [00:04:00] hired and I happened to have been the last person hired for that organization before they even had their space. So I feel super honored and blessed to see the inception of that organization.
And then while there, we began to have conversations with other groups in the country that were talking about abolition or whose focus of activism overlapped with ours. And that is when we started building relationships with organizations like Incite! Women of Color against Violence, Critical Resistance, the Committee on Women, Population, and the Environment.
There was also Sista II Sista in New York, Sister Song in Atlanta. It felt like there was a lot going on at the time to really study the intersections of these issues and the common need to create accountability [00:05:00] outside of mainstream systems of accountability, because so many survivors that we were representing, we were in community with – had experienced some form of enforcement violence. Whether that enforcement took place in immigration detention centers or prisons within the United States, people’s interaction with law enforcement itself. Also people’s interaction with the medical industrial complex. So really trying to think differently about how survivors’ experience living, being a survivor, but how can we draw on that same community to create safety?
So that was my work and I absolutely love it, and I still do work today that’s very much connected to it. I was not in the organization when folks decided that the best thing to do [00:06:00] was to release CARA. I still have mad love for all of it, for all of it.
Deana: Kiyomi Fujikawa got involved in movements to end intimate partner violence and rape in 2001. She moved to Seattle in 2005 and was involved with the Asian Pacific Islander Women and Family Safety Center, later known as API Chaya. She was also involved in For Crying Out Loud and other projects.
Kiyomi: Hi everyone.
My name’s Kiyomi Fujikawa. I moved to Seattle actually in 2005 after doing a lot of student organizing around ending rape and sexual violence. And I would say what I took away from that was really like a need for something like transformative justice or community accountability, but not really any practice.
And in 2005, I was working at what then was the API Women and Family Safety Center, now API Chaya. And [00:07:00] I remember just actually a few weeks in seeing a training that Xandra Ibarra did, talking about sort of the work that CARA had been doing. And I remember being in that training with a mix of folks, some of whom like worked for the prosecutor’s office or just like, you know, other places. And it was a pretty difficult workshop, I think, for folks just like for the room to receive.
But I remember just kind of seeing a different possibility there and then I also was involved with a group, maybe this was 2008 or so, called For Crying Out Loud, that was working in punk communities around ending rape and intimate partner violence that just sort of sprung out of some things that went down in community.
And I remember hearing from so many different folks that had been a part of CARA in different formations. I remember, just to get a sense of that time, really trying to get our hands on anything we could. There was a piece that CARA had written that we came back to a lot. I [00:08:00] remember some of the STOP stories were starting to be shared.
It was a pretty small network, but going to things like Critical Resistance 10 and just other moments like that being really big ones where I felt like I was able to find some community or other folks that were kind of thinking about this. So yeah, just sort of felt like there were a lot of seeds planted.
Deana: Shannon Perez-Darby is a founding member of the Accountable Communities Consortium. In her work Shannon centers queer and trans communities of color, while working to address issues of domestic and sexual violence, accountability and abolition.
Shannon: I am Shannon Perez-Darby. My background is very similar to Kiyomi’s. I started organizing, doing campus organizing with an organization, um, at the time called Stop Hate on Campus (SHOC). Which was a very hokey name for actually pretty cool things, which was like we were a bunch of queer punks and we got like $30,000 from the university to just do whatever we wanted with.
And so we did a lot of [00:09:00] organizing, a lot of getting that money to community folks through people in the offices who, like, knew how to help us get that money to folks. My very first time sort of doing work in the anti-violence kind of world, like working directly with folks who were experiencing violence in an organized way was with an organization, the Colorado Anti-Violence Project, which doesn’t exist anymore.
And then in 2007, I moved to Seattle to work at the Northwest Network of LGBT survivors of Abuse. My role at the organization was to help build out youth programming, like some robust showing up for young people experiencing violence and harm.
So a lot of how that was formed for me was in relationship and conversation with young people about what young people needed, about how that looked differently for young people than it did for adults.
Deana: So to help folks understand Seattle during this time, can you talk about what was going on in and around the city at this point?
So what was the historical context for your communities in the [00:10:00] city when you started with your different projects?
Theryn: For Communities Against Rape and Abuse, there was an organization called Seattle Rape Relief. And Seattle Rape Relief had a hotline, had legal services, had in-house therapy, did workshops all around the city about sexual assault. One day, those volunteers who staffed the sexual assault hotline were locked out.
So then that began to play on the news locally. And so as folks tried to figure out why the doors were locked, how can they get the hotline going, knowing that there were people, especially, uh, marginalized people who were not getting services as a result of the closure of the organization, they decided that maybe the best thing to do is to just let that organization die and create a new one.
I don’t know that I wanna get too much into [00:11:00] why Seattle Rape Relief died, but my son’s godmother, who’s Alisa Bierria, always said that CARA was the phoenix that rose from the ashes of Seattle Rape Relief. And when they came together, they wanted to serve communities that had not been fully served by Seattle Rape Relief before that time. And the communities that they decided on initially were the disability community, young people, and African Americans.
There was consistent enforcement violence against Black communities. There was violence against immigrants and refugees. We all knew that whether or not we had this money, we had to continue to support the communities that relied on our services.
Shannon: I think still all the time about the reverberations of the history that Theryn just shared. So the history of particularly how the domestic violence [00:12:00] work and the sexual violence work in Seattle has been in relationship to each other and diverged. A thing about Seattle is that it is very white. It is sort of famously passive aggressive.
It’s also famously decentralized. So it has these neighborhoods that have their own characteristics, which is not unheard of or unfamiliar to many big cities. But I think the decentralization of Seattle feels unique to me for other cities of its size. One thing you can see is we are one of the only sort of major metropolitan areas without a centralized LGBTQ center.
So you’ll see that in Chicago or LA or New York, we don’t have that kind of equivalent here. And so in the absence of a lot of centralized supports, what has happened is that we have developed lots of hyper-specific and hyper community specified culturally specific orgs. So where you don’t have an LGBTQ Center, you have five anti-violence organizations that all center queer and trans people.
[00:13:00] And the decentralization of that has actually meant we’ve yet to have really robust ports for very specific communities. So we think about the National Domestic Violence Hotline is based out of Seattle. We have API Chaya as a leader in supporting Asian Pacific Islander survivors based here. We have the founding of the Northwest Network of LGBT Survivors of Abuse, well known for supporting queer and trans survivors, based here.
And so I think there is something to be said about how that decentralization has allowed for this thriving kind of small-mid organization focusing on particular communities. And that’s a strength of Seattle. And so particularly in our domestic violence supports you…you see a robust network of these like smaller, culturally specific organizations that grow, and that some go away, some new ones are formed.
You do not see that in a parallel way around our sexual violence supports. Bring that back to the history that Theryn was sharing, which is that when Seattle Rape Relief closed, what happened [00:14:00] was that one organization sucked up all the sexual violence resources in the area and is still dominant today.
And so because of lots of policy things that’s probably too wonky for a podcast, it has made it not possible for folks to actually compete for that funding. So you have this really interesting set of scenarios where you have robust, culturally specific domestic violence and sort of like anti-violence, broad umbrella programs, but you have this one dominant, white led sexual violence organization that monopolized all the resources. In the closing of Seattle Rape Relief, and in CARA and, and other iterations of things people tried to start, I do think is there’s things about that that are unique to Seattle and the landscape of what you see today.
Kiyomi: For me, the number one thing that I think about when I think about those times is right after the WTO, there had been some movement around activism, but really what I remember is just intense gentrification happening.
There was just such a change happening in terms of the neighborhood, in terms of [00:15:00] space, in terms of just like, how folks had time for projects in different ways, and just to add in terms of the change that, you know, Seattle was going through. How folks were getting pushed out of their neighborhoods, and where maybe neighborhood based responses had been really strong, it was actually increasingly difficult as we were kind of getting spread out.
One other thing I might add in terms of some of the communities that I was a part of, I remember just the murder of Mia Zapata as someone who was a community figure folks really knew, who was, you know, violently murdered. And the response that came out of that was, so like, you know, Home Alive as an organization, working on really politicized self-defense and you know, self-defense skills that actually center like what are all of our tools? And not just like how do we beat somebody up? But like, how are we actually creating safety for ourselves?
So while that organization is gone, I haven’t ever seen another organization kind of center the ways of doing self-defense that [00:16:00] isn’t just like, learning a martial art, you know, but really thinking about how we’re constantly setting boundaries, constantly keeping ourselves safe, and putting that in a context of what safety even means.
Shannon: A lot of the work that Home Alive was doing back in the day is like skilling up work that I hear a lot of people interested in transformative justice asking for now. And Home Alive was doing that 20 plus years ago. And when they closed, nothing else came to like, fill in the space that that left. Like someone was just asking me like, for a deescalation kind of skills training, and I was like, yeah, Home Alive would’ve done that, and I actually don’t have a… I don’t have that for you. I don’t know who to send you to, to do that.
And just thinking about like, so much of what folks are asking for now, like there was a time where folks were doing skill building, like just heavily like skilling up communities with each other, like with these deep feminist, and I think like abolitionist, I don’t think those were the words people were using at the time, I don’t remember anyone calling it [00:17:00] abolitionist, but uh, with abolitionist values in there.
Deana: For sure. Skilling up is absolutely necessary. So much of the work can get complicated and people need different skills to address the issues that pop up. With that said, what are some memorable successes from your work?
Shannon: You know, I think in the spirit of One Million Experiments, some of the things that I think about as most successful is our opportunities to experiment together and to try things out. Seattle is a small, big city. It’s thought of as like a major metropolitan area, but there’s a lot of things about it that have a smaller city feel or like a mid-size city feel.
And I think because of that, for me, it felt like it gave me a lot of permission to experiment. I’m thinking about a series that Kiyomi and I and others got to collaborate on, Girl We Got You, in who knows what year. And just thinking that we were able to like, be in community with folks and folks are like, well, we need this, and we’re like, alright, well let’s try doing that.
[00:18:00] Without going into lots of detail, like one of the motivations for trying that collaboration together, which was fundamentally about skilling people up. So folks were saying like, “Hey, we know about transformative justice, community accountability work, and we need skills. Like, we need help thinking about what are the tasks, or the actions, or the skills we need.”
And the motivation for that was a group of survivors who had all experienced harm from the same person, saying like, “we need our communities to be more skillful to help us. We need our communities to have skills they do not have. Like, what do you got?”
And then that sort of like incubates or it like spreads into these other projects or to these other things. For me is like, the opportunity to experiment feels like the success.
Kiyomi: Yeah, and when I think about success, I mean, when I think of doing community accountability processes, it’s very hard to even know how to measure success.
And I think the skill, maybe this isn’t the success, but like the skill that I learned was really how to assess sort of what’s the landscape? What are the resources that we have? How can those help us? How will those, you know, what are the things that will get in the way? And I feel like developing that skillset across our community was really, really helpful because for so long we just knew what, what didn’t work, right?
And we just knew the things where we’re like, well, we’re not gonna call the police. That’s not gonna work. And we don’t wanna just let this be like, oh, well nothing happened. Which kind of were presented as the two options.
In terms of processes, I think just really being able to like, map our [00:20:00] resources and shift with some of those assessments, too.
Sometimes that’s on the level of like safety planning or creating immediate safety for folks, and sometimes that’s more on the sense of like, this person is not listening to us, but who would they listen to? Actually, we have some folks that we could tap, and maybe we also need to do a ton of political education with those folks, too, because in some ways misogyny shows up in a lot of places. And so yeah, without getting into specific examples, I just think that was one of the biggest skills to build in addition to like the de-escalation that, you know, safety planning things that I had some training in. The place where I didn’t was like, being able to measure that and being able to like, even get a sense of what might success look like and what might be realistic.
The success piece is hard though. I will say more often than not, I was like, well, I feel like I’m showing up in my values, and that feels like the success. But mostly I like, just wanna go to bed and like, eat a warm dinner, you know? [00:21:00]
Deana: Yeah, I completely agree. I think success is, we get to define what success is for us, and it’s really important to get it away from this kind of capitalist understanding of what success looks like.
Success is like skill building. It looks like going to bed, resting, nourishing ourselves. So thank you for wrestling through that.
Theryn, what do you think?
Theryn: In terms of successes that I love seeing? One thing would be normalizing the conversation about rape culture. When we were in the press, there was an interview with our program coordinator at the time, again, Alisa, and she talked about rape culture. And then a council member said, “rape culture doesn’t exist here in America. It’s in…” and just listed a series of Muslim countries.
And so CARA’s gone. It’s years later, and I am just rolling through [00:22:00] Capitol Hill, which has also been gentrified, and somebody went by and sprayed “end rape culture” like in big red letters. And I thought, wow, like that was not the case X amount of years ago. I was just overwhelmed, you know, with joy. And I took pictures of it and I sent them to Xandra Ibarra, to Ebony Colbert, to Alisa. I was like,” guess what y’all?” So I appreciate that. I also think it was successful in terms of laying the groundwork so that people can now lean in more quickly, calling out harm in their community and creating, uh, systems of accountability.
At one point I was supporting a survivor. We were creating a safety plan around someone who was a friend, then became a stalker. At that time, it was harder to [00:23:00] get people on board with understanding the significance of being a part of the safety plan. So I had lots and lots and lots of smaller conversations.
However, 10 years later, the same community is organizing in Capitol Hill around George Floyd, and there was a problematic person of leadership within the Black community. And some of the same young people who of course were 10 years younger, really resistant to trying to support that community member around their aggressor, like led the community around trying to hold this individual accountable, and I thought, that’s amazing.
This young person was able to see all these years of work, and it culminated in them feeling empowered enough to get those stories from other survivors of this individual and to begin holding this individual accountable. So I think that definitely there’s a legacy of CARA that’s [00:24:00] still here, and the legacy is also upheld with the organizations that are still here.
But I think the legacy of it continues to have an impact on the lives of the various communities that we were supporting.
Shannon: Just to be very explicit about particularly the legacy of CARA that I see today. I’m on a project right now trying to figure out how to engage with the landscape of folks doing work in the sort of like anti-violence umbrella.
So whether that’s at like the sort of more traditional direct service nonprofits, the DV orgs, the sexual assault orgs, as well as folks doing organizing that might overlap in sort of a TJ space or might be organizing around violence, but aren’t necessarily connected to nonprofits, or nonprofits aren’t the thing they’re organizing inside of. To just try to get people to connect violence and a critique of the criminal legal system. And to say like criminal legal system is not a viable response and is actively hurting survivors.
And I cannot get, [00:25:00] the like, white led nonprofits to do any kind of public conversation about that, still to this day. And I think that CARA holding that down, and CARA setting that example, and CARA modeling what it was to be able to have that at the front is such an important model.
I do think it seeded organizations we see today, like Collective Justice. Like many of the folks who are, I think that same thing, like, phoenix from the ash… ashes are like, see that gap. There’s probably a gift that those white led nonprofits haven’t tried, because like in the gap of nothing, like of just, silence, it actually has made some spaciousness to have folks like really build something because they’re not now in competition with those nonprofits’ resources. Because those nonprofits are just not, they’re just not saying anything about the criminal legal system in any critical way.
Being able to like look at the legacy that CARA set up and left I think is so powerful for what I really think as like this emerging crew and of anti-violence folks and like TJ folks in Seattle, [00:26:00] that are really like picking up that political analysis matched with showing up inside your communities that CARA modeled for us so beautifully.
Kiyomi: Absolutely, I would echo that so much. And I remember doing like a TJ transformative justice study group in like probably 2010 some, somewhere around there, just with like a group of folks that seemed interested that maybe had gone to the Allied Media Conference or the US Social Forum, or there was some like conference that folks were coming back from and there was some appetite for discussion.
And I remember we had a long conversation about just how much Seattle has been impacted by CARA’s work. Even just the framework for folks to say “community accountability” and have an idea of what that means because of that.
When I think of successes too, I remember talking with one of the founding moms of the API Women and Family Safety Center about transformative justice, and she was a little bit like, what’s this new word?
I was a very young person and she’s a little bit like, “I’ve seen everything under the sun, what could you show me?” Which [00:27:00] maybe was just my interpretation. But I remember sharing Incite! had created this like community accountability… it looks like a clover, there’s like four little circles that talk about the different work, and I was sharing that and she was like, “in the Filipino community, we do that. Here are the ways that we do that. Here are the ways that we’re showing up.”
And so also, I think sometimes people are like, oh, it’s a new framework and, it is, there’s important language and important political alignment that comes with it, but also helping some of the like aunties of our community be like, oh, I am doing this work. Actually I am a part of it, too. And I think having CARA as like a backdrop for them to know about that work too, I think has been really, really huge.
Deana: You’re providing so much context, practical skills and history for folks. I really appreciate it. And as we know with success, skill building and experimentation comes, challenges, our learning edges.
What are some of the challenges that stick out to you?
Kiyomi: While there was a [00:28:00] legacy and there actually were quite a few folks I could call, or like folks that had been a part of different community accountability processes, and largely we were just experimenting, trying it out for ourselves, and for me, I felt like that came from a very DIY ethos.
But I think a challenge I ran into immediately was like, with the crew of folks I was working with, we also had to reassess what our own boundaries were. You know, there is a level of buying into like, “cool, I am down for this as a political project. This makes sense. I support abolition, so I should be able to do these things.”
And I remember one person was a survivor, and they weren’t a survivor from the person that we were doing the process with, but we’re a survivor more generally. A couple meetings and they were like, “actually, I can’t do this.” There was a moment of just like, learning for ourselves what was possible, both in the expansive way of like, oh my gosh, so much is possible. And also in the ways of like, no, this part isn’t for me. I actually wanna protect some of [00:29:00] myself from this.
Shannon: I think it’s so important to not hide the ball about why I am here. Like to just be really transparent about like why do I spend most of my waking hours talking to people about violence, and about relationships, and about how to be in a relationship with each other. And for me, it’s because that’s what I need for my own life.
I found myself here because I had a situation in my life where I could not figure out how to be in right relationship with someone who I shared community with. And I tried everything in my power to figure out how to do that, and could not, like was not successful. My solution was to move to Seattle. That was the solution that I came up for that.
And in some ways, like I have spent the last 17 years trying to figure out the solution to that challenge. To say like, what could have been possible for me, for that other person, for our communities in that situation? When I reflect on that, the challenges that were true at the time [00:30:00] are much of the same challenges that are true right now.
I have grown and changed as a person. I am differently resourced. I’m in a different context, so like today, I would handle that situation differently. But the broader context that held us, actually isn’t that different. So like, part of the context for me at that time was that I made $7 an hour, and it was really hard to make a lot of choices about my days while I was making $7 an hour. And that I didn’t have stable housing, and that the chaos of addiction around me and that person, like those were the conditions under which that hard situation happened.
And like, we have not solved any of those conditions in the world in the last 17 years. So as much as those conditions still exist, I do believe so deeply in fractal work of like practicing, being in relationship to each other is how we’re gonna make the building blocks of the world we want. And there’s only so much a like right relationship I can be with folks without changing the other conditions under which we exist.
And so for me that is part of the challenge, which is that [00:31:00] like it’s still hard to be with people. Like people just keep peopleing! Not having good conflict skills, or being obnoxious, or being unskilled. And that is a challenge.
And I don’t know the solution to that challenge. And like the deepest desire I have, which is of like connection with others, and of right relationship, and to just keep skilling up and doing the best they can to at that task. But like, it was the challenge and it’s still the challenge in combination with all this urgent work of creating the base conditions of stable housing.
You know, there has been smoke in Seattle for like a month now, and it is like nearly impossible under the conditions of COVID and the conditions of smoky air, to be with my people. So like, a climate solution that involves not having smoke constantly in my life, like the amount of my daily decisions that are impacted by smoke, that would make it easier to be in relationship with people.
So when we really talk real talk about the like, larger conditions, that’s the important part. And I don’t know if we’ve made a lot of progress on that, honestly. And so that challenge [00:32:00] remains.
Theryn: I had to remind myself that it was the smoke… as I was trying to breathe last night and I was like, “why do I need my emergency inhaler? This is, what did I do?” I’m just saying that resonates with me and you’re, you’re spot on about how it is impacting how we move.
I would say something that was super challenging at that time was trying to create the vision that we wanted to create, but having to articulate it in the context of nonprofit work. To receive money from municipalities as a nonprofit, there’s a very clear structure to get your 501(c)(3). Your board, your executive director, and everybody else who flows under.
It was really difficult to explain that we were trying to operate without that kind of hierarchy in order, so that we can be part of the thing that we wanted to see. And [00:33:00] every time we applied for money, we were trying to squeeze that into this nonprofit language. And it had a very negative impact on how we even saw our roles within the organization.
That was super challenging, and even though I do work for another nonprofit, an arts nonprofit located in the Central District, I don’t know that that’s changed very much. I would say that the, the nonprofit that I work for currently has a structure where it’s based on this notion of concentric circles. And there are roles that people play within those circles. And that’s the closest I’ve seen to another way of thinking about how an organization with the need for a 501(c)(3) tax classification can receive funding. When, at the end of the day, [00:34:00] you really just wanna say, “look, trust us. Give us the money. We’ll put it into our community and we’ll tell you how it goes.” You know what I’m saying?
The the other thing that I found really challenging was making the argument for qualitative information over quantitative information. So smaller organizations don’t necessarily have the capacity to reach the kind of numbers that impress, again, municipalities and federal grantors. They wanna know that you helped X thousand people in the year. But when you’re in the smaller organizations, that long-term relationship building, creating trust, establishing trust, building that out, and having credibility enough to move things, to move conversations, to create safety, all of that. And that is not [00:35:00] something that can be measured on a quantitative scale. That is very qualitative.
And so then we started having conversations about outcomes, and that was another place where the frustration about the different methods of understanding how you’re having an impact was negatively impacting our organization. Because people wanted outcomes that looked like 20 families were served, not four families were served really deeply. Or the impact on the next generation, or the children of that family looks like this. Just in terms of trying to do the work with, in the context of institutions.
And also recognizing that because of systemic racism, and systemic homophobia, and systemic ableism and ageism, our society is based on these systems that have proven over and over again are not necessarily the thing that works [00:36:00] for our people.
And so, also trying to have that conversation. Not only do we deserve to turn to our community and build our community, but we also deserve not having to explain this every single time we sit down with you. For me, the short time that I got to be a director at CARA, that kind of stuff just made me think, I never wanna do this work again.
Deana: Thanks for that, Theryn. I also wanna talk about Seattle Rape Relief and how when it closed, it left a vacuum, as you mentioned, and how CARA was able to fill that vacuum in part because of the innovative perspectives that were rooted in communities of color. Can you talk a little bit more about the political conditions in Seattle at that time?
Theryn: I would say that politically it was not hostile. Then it became more politically hostile. It became more hostile, because there were organizations that did not like the fact that CARA got a quarter of a million dollars. I. And these organizations were mainstream organizations [00:37:00] led by white women. And it was so strange, they built relationships, or they had relationships with different council people and tried to undermine our work by having private conversations with those different council people.
And so at that point, it became really difficult for me to focus on that and do my job well. I did ultimately have to sit down with some of those people who were not fans of ours, to either do coalition work with, or to try to get to know, so that they would be more friendly towards our mission.
Unfortunately, CARA did not survive that period, but the organizations that did are still around and still use the work that we’ve all created at the same time.
Deana: I am sorry that CARA closed, but CARA’s legacy lives on and thankfully [00:38:00] we have a number of new people coming up in this work. What do you want new organizers to know about how to do this work?
Shannon: I want people to know to pace themselves. I had to learn some really hard lessons about the cost of overworking, the cost of never stopping, the cost of the hypervigilance, of doing anti-violence work for 20 years. And the cost on my body and on my health has been really high.
And I wish I had known how to do it differently, and I wish I had known how to go slower, and I wish I had known how to do less, because it was… felt so urgent. And so I brought urgency for a really long time…until my body literally said, you cannot do this anymore. Like, you will die. You cannot do this anymore.
I have just a deep desire that folks new to this work and folks coming up won’t have to learn that lesson the hard way. That they could get to do this work at a humane, sustaining, life affirming pace.
A [00:39:00] mistake I made was that I got too all-in in one organization and with one strategy. And so when that collapsed, the collapse was really devastating. And that what I needed to have had was a diversity of things and a diversity of like, there wasn’t all-in in just one place because we need a diversity of strategies to make the world we want.
There’s a lot of things that would’ve been different, um, without overinvestment in just one place. And overinvestment in nonprofit stuff. Capitalism is complicated, and it’s hard to know how to make money inside capitalism to meet your needs. But like being really thoughtful about our engagement with nonprofits, getting creative about how we think about leadership, and how do we think about rotation of leadership. So we stop having these entrenched folks, but we actually like, keep it moving with like, a deep bench of a lot of leaders.
The abbreviated list of things I would love the next crew to know.
Theryn: This is what I want for young organizers:
Don’t lose your optimism.
Make a long-term plan for your health, because you will age. [00:40:00] Invest in a 401(c). Like, invest in the possibility that you may really grow old and need a retirement. I would say that to young people because that’s practical. And as I’m aging, I’m realizing I’ve spent my entire adulthood working for nonprofits. Nonprofits that weren’t wealthy.
I would also say breathe…We get so hyped about, especially when we’re young, about like, this is gonna change. I’m going to affect this change. This is gonna, this is gonna happen. And it’s true that you are gonna affect change. And if you’re lucky, you will see that change immediately. However, the breath is not for just the moment, but for the years. Because some of those changes you won’t see for months. Some of those changes you won’t see for years.
And that’s what I mean by, it’s gonna be alright. Just thinking about success on less of a cultural [00:41:00] times table and more of an evolutionary timetable. That you can still be optimistic knowing that even if you don’t see this change, the seeds have been planted and that change will happen. You may move away. You may leave the field.
I think an example of seeds being planted is reflected in how I actually still work with API Chaya, and supporting them in their organizing. Recognizing who your organic partners are. You guys are gonna know each other 20 years from now, I promise. Some of you are gonna write books, and some of you’re gonna go to grad school.
Some of you may even become an esthetician, like my former coworker who said the only nonprofit work, the only thing she’s gonna give is free facials to women in prison. Everybody else gonna pay her good money, right? So [00:42:00] trust and believe. You will make it. This will be okay in the end.
This… everything gonna be alright.
Kiyomi: I love that so much, Theryn. Thank you. And thank you Shannon, too, for your comments. I think y’all have covered so much. What I was thinking of too is just that relationships really matter and you know, like Theryn said, you’ll likely be in relationship with folks for 20 years.
You’ll likely come back to these things. It, like, matters how you show up for each other, how you treat each other like, you shouldn’t take that for granted. What if when someone made a mistake or when someone did something that, like, didn’t feel right to you, like, what if we showed up knowing that this is someone that maybe I need to be in community with for a long time?So how do I do this in a way that can sustain that long relationship?
One of the things we didn’t mention about the Seattle context that I noticed right away was like, you come into these communities and sometimes there’s two labor organizations that broke up a million years ago, and yet I’m still navigating the drama of that [00:43:00] because they like don’t talk to each other, you know. And how much those fissures, it just takes so much time out of our movement.
How we actually do really, really need ways to get closer in relationship with each other and think so much about community accountability being, you know, you’re responding to an individual harm in a way that is going to change the systems of how we think about harm, of how institutional harm happens. It can feel like a lot is at stake with that when things don’t go as planned, when you have to pivot, when mistakes are made, when you’re just like, “fuck this, what the hell are we even doing? I don’t even know.”
You know, like in these really, really challenging moments. I do think that’s gonna be part of the life cycle of doing this work and of experimenting. As much as we can, like, be kind to each other. Not to say everyone deserves that, or that we’re just assuming good intentions from everyone, but I do think the social movements we need include most of us, so how do we [00:44:00] start making those?
Deana: Thanks to the amazing organizers that live and work in Seattle who are making this world a better place for all of us every single day. As always, I encourage you to take the lessons you learned today and keep practicing.
Have you facilitated a process using community accountability tools or strategies? We want to hear your stories. Creative Interventions and Just Practice Collaborative wanna share new stories from people who are taking action to end interpersonal violence without the use of police or carceral systems. Find the link in our show notes to learn more.
Stories for Power is presented by Creative Interventions and Just Practice Collaborative. Executive produced by Mimi Kim, Shira Hassan, and Rachel Caidor. Produced by Emergence Media.
Audio editing and mixing by Joe Namy and iLL Weaver, with support from Luis Luna. Music composed by Scale Hands [00:45:00] and L05 of Complex Movements in collaboration with Ahya Simone.
Stay tuned for more episodes of the Stories for Power Podcast. Check out our show notes and go to StoriesforPower.org to learn more.
