Section 1: Introduction

In the summer of 2020, sparked by the police killing of George Floyd, the city of Minneapolis became the epicenter of a national and global uprising for Black Lives. In cities and towns across the country, people called to defund the police, end mass incarceration, abolish prisons and invest in public safety in new ways. New coalitions and other campaign formations emerged, often made up of people and groups who had not worked together previously. These new formations have since been offered an unprecedented amount of resources including staff, money, and media attention. There is a great deal of pressure for these groups to make good decisions about how to deploy these resources and there is a fear that these resources and this potent political moment may burn out.

Inevitably, significant conflicts arose within these new formations, some of which caused harm. Safety measures related to the COVID-19 pandemic severely limited people’s ability to gather in person. Most connections between people and groups happened virtually. Because groups were so new, there may not have been time to build trust between people or to build processes to manage these new critical relationships and make decisions together. The people coming together have a shared commitment to shift resources and power away from police, but often are approaching this goal from very different perspectives. Because of the extreme sense of urgency and volatility, the conflicts that emerge escalate quickly. Those who have caused harm are called out and often punished in ways that caused more harm. The ongoing impact of harm then threatens the group members’ ability to work together effectively, and can lead to the collapse of a campaign that had promise.

Because youth and young adult organizers have been a strong driving force in this movement, they are finding themselves in the position of having to work with older adults, institutions, and other more established entities. Over time, Mariame Kaba, an abolitionist organizer and educator who has been working on these issues for over twenty years, has mentored a number of youth organizers. Some of these organizers and others have reached out to Mariame when harm has been done inside these groups. Mariame has received so many of these requests that she identified a movement-wide need to pull together a framework with tools and associated training to support the use of human-centered, non-punitive accountability practices in movement spaces.

About the Authors

The project is being overseen by Interrupting Criminalization, led by researchers Mariame Kaba and Andrea Ritchie. Interrupting Criminalization’s long term goal is to end the criminalization and incarceration of women and LGBTQ people of color. The people involved with Interrupting Criminalization have the reputation and relationships to ensure that such a toolkit would make it into the hands of people on the ground. However, given the demands of the time period, they do not have the additional capacity required to develop such a toolkit on their own.

In order to meet this emerging critical need, they determined that it would be most effective to work closely with Dragonfly Partners, a process-oriented consulting group with expertise in coalition-building, consensus decision-making, conflict transformation, and harm-reduction in movements for racial and economic justice. Dragonfly Partners is based in unceded Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape territory known as Philadelphia. Dragonfly serves change-making organizations across the continent and worldwide. Our team members bring complementary skills from the fields of community organizing, advocacy and policy, organizational development, anti-racism work, mediation and conflict management.

Dragonfly Partners advises, supports, and facilitates times of change for our client/partner organizations. We support them to make brave, principled and strategic choices on how to lead in a racist world. We help groups get unstuck, coach senior leaders, facilitate difficult conversations, manage change processes, develop theories of change, conduct strategic planning processes, develop strong and flexible organizational systems, and support organizations to choose thoughtful and brave ways to run a principled organization. Our sweet spot is at the intersection of advocacy strategy, organizational development, and organizational alignment with strategy and values.

Dragonfly values inform our work with our clients, partners, and each other:

We show up with kindness, warmth, and love.
We embrace contradiction and grey spaces. We are bridge people.
We’re brave and speak the truth even when it's hard.
Difficult conversations appeal to us because they contain the possibility of change.
We avoid formulaic answers in our own politics and in our approach with clients.
We remain hopeful about the group and the world even when things get hard.

Aarati Kasturirangan and Sara Joffe, both partners in Dragonfly Partners, co-authored this framework (with contributions from Mariame) and the associated training curriculum with significant input from their team members, particularly Kris Smith.

Acknowledging the Shoulders We Stand On

We do not claim to have invented or to own any of the practices and insights described in this toolkit. This work grows from soil enriched with indigenous and aboriginal healing traditions and governance practices. These ideas are rooted in the imagination of prison abolitionists, queer Black feminist thought, and the lessons learned from years of implementation and experimentation with restorative justice, community accountability and transformative justice-based efforts to address harm. We also owe this framework to hundreds of years of work to dismantle white supremacy and build communities grounded in accountability, reciprocity, and ethics of care and love and abundance.

Many of the tools that appear in this framework emerge from mainstream approaches to conflict negotiation, mediation, organizational development, and psychology. In some cases we have adapted these tools. The framework and the tools inside it have been filtered through a particular point of view that is feminist, anti-capitalist, and abolitionist. We recognize that the movement ecosystem includes organizations with a range of political and ethical groundings. We know that this framework may not resonate with everyone.

What’s Inside?

The framework and tools emerge from the decades of experience of the members of Interrupting Criminalization, Dragonfly Partners, and organizers and activists from around the country.

This framework and the associated toolkit is intended to support your effort to navigate conflict with those who you presume to have a shared purpose. Each section of the toolkit includes reflection questions which we offer as an invitation to tap into your own knowledge and experience. The toolkit begins by defining key terms and then making visible the assumptions upon which the toolkit has been built. This list of assumptions answers the question, “In this moment, what are the conditions that we believe all people engaged in movements for racial justice can subscribe to regardless of their social identity, political beliefs, or strategy for making change?” Once we have made plain our assumptions, we describe several common causes of tension and harm in our movement formations.

Once you have read through the assumptions and common causes of tension and harm, we provide a diagnostic tool to use when troubles arise in your group. It is important to determine what your group’s need is before using the tool, so that you can hone in on what is most useful and strategies that fit your need. If you use the framework and tools too narrowly, you may fight when you could talk -- you may call out when you could call in, you may harm relationships and people when you could connect, come near, cooperate, love in some way. If you use the framework too broadly, you may sacrifice the campaign, the movement, or some people to the oppressive system/s and badly-behaving people whose power you aim to diminish. You risk making them more, rather than less, powerful. The diagnostic tool will help you to narrow in on specific sections of the toolkit to attend to. It will also help you determine when it might be time to seek assistance from people outside the group and what kind of assistance would be most useful. Then we provide a few case examples of groups in struggle who might benefit from this toolkit. We developed these case examples from our experience and they do not reflect the exact experience of any one group.

Next, we share a set of grounding agreements for our efforts to build new approaches to mutual accountability and transform conflict. With these agreements as a foundation, we offer some specific tools for accountability that can help you to establish a structure, culture, and practices that promote healthy interdependence.

It is our hope that this framework and the tools within it will support you in navigating many of the challenges you encounter as a group on your own. We follow this with descriptions of the various kinds of practitioners who can help, and recommendations for finding a practitioner that meets your needs. Throughout the document you will find links to websites, articles, videos and other resources you can explore to support your learning.

Key Definitions

As you enter into the framework, we believe it is important for us to make plain our definition of several keywords.

︎Accountability

Accountability is closely tied to responsibility, commitment and support. In movement spaces, when we join a group, we make a commitment to take on certain responsibilities in order to advance the group’s overall purpose. This commitment can be implicit or explicit. The group, in turn, is then responsible for supporting the individual’s efforts to successfully achieve the desired outcomes associated with these responsibilities.

Accountability refers to one person’s ability and willingness to report back to the group and/or the community the group represents on actions they have taken, things they have done or not done, or things they have said, to take ownership of the consequence or outcomes of their action, positive and negative, learn from mistakes, make amends as needed, and change their behavior in the future.

To be accountable, the group, in turn, should name the actions or inactions of the group that may have made it difficult for group members to be successful, take ownership of the consequences, learn from mistakes, make amends and change group policies, practices, and culture as needed to increase the likelihood that group members will be successful in the future.

For more about the concepts of self-accountability see Shannon Perez’s Self-Accountability and Movement Building.

︎Calling-in

Calling-in is a practice used within groups of people who have a shared purpose when a member of the group takes an action that does not reflect the values of the group or breaks the named guidelines of group participation. The call-in is usually a one to one conversation in which a supportive member of the group reminds their fellow member that the group has shared values and guidelines, supports them in reflecting on the ways their behaviors may have led to unintended consequences or harms, and continues to work with that person to make amends and change their behavior.

︎Calling-out

Calling-out is a practice most often, and most effectively used to publicly name the harmful behaviors of people with institutional or systemic power or cultural influence and may include demands for specific behavior change and redress. The call-out can be used to draw attention to harmful behaviors and increase public pressure on the person with power.

Within a group, people sometimes call-out fellow group members who have repeatedly been called-in but have not changed their behavior in meaningful ways. In this case, the call-out is usually done in the context of a full-group meeting or on social media. Within a group, a call-out is often received as a form of punishment meant to shame the individual who has caused harm.

︎Conflict

Conflict is a state of being in which two people or parties see their point of view as in opposition to or incompatible with the other. Conflict occurs when someone needs something from another, and the other can't or won't give it to them. Conflicts can arise about a wide variety of needs including money, safety, information, cooperation, and dignity. In some cases, a conflict can arise as the result of a mistake or miscommunication that has had the consequence of someone feeling as if their needs will not be met.

︎Group

People who share movement space, or coalition or group space, and who have an explicitly named shared purpose.

︎Harm

Harm is the impact felt when a person is deprived of, or senses a threat to an essential need as a result of the action or inaction of another person, group, institution, or system. Essential needs can include access to care, food, shelter, money, safety, dignity, and bodily autonomy. People can also experience harm when faced with behaviors that mirror or embody past experiences of systemic harm. As such, many of us unintentionally cause harm by replicating internalized practices and norms that uphold systems of oppression.

︎Intent

Intent is the belief or desire that drives a person’s actions, which sometimes does not match the outcome or consequence of those actions. When we are part of group of people who have a shared purpose, and when that group includes people whose identities reflect different positions in relation to power structures, we are best served by the belief that people are joining the group with the hope that they can move into right relationship, while recognizing that they must work hard to identify and disrupt internalized patterns of dominance.

We believe that intent does matter - as a signal that someone is in the struggle to change. When good intentions that lead to unintentional consequences are met with punishment, the person who has been punished often ends up stuck in shame and hopelessness. However, when a person with good intentions that lead to unintentional consequences is called-in or asked to take accountability for their actions we allow that person to learn, make amends, and make changes.

︎Interests

Interests are the deeper hopes, fears, needs, wants and desires that drive a person’s actions or opinions.

︎Positions

A position is a specific stance, opinion or solution that one person has put forward because they believe it will meet their interests. Two people may assert different positions in response to a shared problem because they have not taken the time to identify all of the interests that are driving these positions. The perception that one person’s position threatens the other person’s interest can lead to conflict. However, once interests have been identified, both parties can work together to find a solution that meets the majority of both people’s interests.

︎Punishment

In psychological terms punishment is a response to an undesirable behavior that is designed to stop that behavior. A punishment can be taking away something good - for example, the right to be part of a group, or to have a certain position in a group. A punishment can also be administering something painful to the person - for example, by shaming the person, damaging their reputation, berating the person verbally, threatening future abuse, or physically abusing them.

︎Transformation

Transformation occurs when the two people or parties start out seeing their point of view as in opposition to or incompatible with the other. The two people or parties go through a process that shifts their perspective and allows them to come to a new understanding about what each party needs and how each party might be able to get their needs met. Conflict resolution implies that a conflict is resolved with one person being right and the other being wrong. In conflict transformation, the relationship between the two people or parties is where the change happens allowing for shifts in power dynamics, new ways of communicating, or new shared understanding of what the conflict is about.

︎ adrienne maree brown, an activist, writer and facilitator, has inspired some of our thinking in this framework.