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Deana: Welcome to the Stories for Power Podcast. Stories for Power is an oral history project produced in partnership by two survivor-led and centered projects, Just Practice Collaborative and Creative Interventions. I’m your host, Deana Lewis. I’m also a co-founder of Just Practice Collaborative, a transformative justice collective that started in 2013. We’re an abolitionist feminist, survivor- run, disability- centered, and mostly queer network of organizers who have been working to interrupt, respond to, and transform sexual, intimate-partner, relationship, and community violence without the use of prisons, police, and state systems.
You’ll learn more about Creative Interventions later in this episode. Stories for Power explores the political lineage and historical experiments that gave way to this wave of transformative justice, [00:01:00] community accountability, and prison abolition. In each episode, we speak with activists and organizers from different cities that were, and continue to be at the forefront of feminist abolitionist praxis.
Most of our guests identify as survivors who are Black, Indigenous, or people of color, and are mostly queer and trans. They talked about the bold experiments and interventions they were a part of and how their work informed abolitionist, transformative justice, and community accountability organizing today.
We focus on the early 2000s through 2010, and some of our guests even take us back to the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s. This is the introduction to the entire podcast series, so we are featuring the amazing people who knew this podcast needed to exist in this world: Mimi Kim, Shira Hassan, and Rachel Caidor.
In this episode, we’ll be in conversation with these three abolitionist feminists who are the co-producers of this podcast, Stories for Power. You’ll learn more about this series of conversations with other [00:02:00] abolitionist feminist practitioners who have shaped transformative justice and community accountability over the past two decades and more.
We wanted to record this intro to set the stage for subsequent episodes. Although we always try to link resources in the show notes, it helps to have some verbal context too. Go ahead and bookmark this episode.
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 care of yourself can also look like not listening to this podcast until you’re ready. We feel it’s important to name that the episodes for this podcast were recorded before November 2024. We had yet to learn the outcome of the US presidential elections and the many other events that are impacting our communities.
We know these stories and conversations are more important than ever, and these episodes, which talk about the largely underground organizing and work we [00:03:00] were doing to interrupt violence in our community without the state, are even more critical to our collective survival.
Now let me introduce our co-producers. 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. That’s StoriesForPower.org.
Rachel Caidor is a Florida born queer abolitionist feminist who spent over 25 years supporting survivors of gender-based interpersonal violence. She has worked closely with Incite!, Love and Protect, and Survived and Punished, and is a part of Just Practice Collaborative.
Rachel, can you talk more about the format and approach for this season and your reasons behind it?
Rachel: We decided to collect conversations with abolitionist feminists from seven separate regions.
We decided to focus hyper locally because specificity of place and [00:04:00] community are so important to each of the interventions that people talked about. People were tackling issues that impacted their communities in unique ways, and so solutions had to be community specific to meet those needs.
Transformative justice and community accountability don’t look exactly the same depending on where and what the local dynamics are at the time. We also recorded a couple of bonus episodes that are less about a single place and more about highlighting some of the OGs and historians of this work. Those are really exciting episodes.
It’s important to know that everyone we spoke to identifies as an abolitionist feminist. I will say that for us and our show guests, abolition entails dismantling the prison industrial complex and all of its proxies that serve to cage and kill individuals and communities. And we do that by building structures, networks, and strategies to [00:05:00] prevent and address harm that facilitate collective liberation.
I’m going to cheat and use a term from the book Abolition. Feminism. Now. and say that abolition feminism is a framework and a practice that requires us to incorporate abolitionist thinking when we’re practicing feminism – and to incorporate feminist gendered analysis when we’re thinking about creating a world without prisons and policing.
Abolitionist feminists on this podcast and beyond do their work with an attention to how racism, heterosexism, sexism, patriarchy, xenophobia, ageism, ableism, etc, co-create each other and how they must all be dismantled at the same time, in order to achieve liberation.
Deana: I appreciate you bringing up the book Abolition. Feminism. Now., and not to give too much away, but some of those authors [00:06:00] might be appearing on the podcast, so if people stay tuned, they might hear from them.
Shira Hassan is a queer feminist, drug user, former sex worker, and lifelong harm reductionist. She’s been working on figuring out solutions to violence that do not rely on police since the 1990s because sex workers, drug users, and street-based young people can never call the cops. Shira is a member and co-founder of Just Practice Collaborative. And she currently runs the Transformative Justice Help Desk at Interrupting Criminalization. She was born in Philly and has spent most of the last 30 years in New York City and Chicago.
Shira: The project was so important to us for a number of reasons, and so was the timeframe that we’re looking at. We’re looking at the period of time that was so underground.
We knew each other through whisper networks, and it was truly, in some ways, I don’t wanna say it was pre-internet ’cause it wasn’t, but we were really networked through [00:07:00] our relationships that were mostly offline. And one of the downsides of being underground is that we didn’t write down our own work and no one did.
And, you know, I’m a huge fan of being underground, but I think since we didn’t write it down ourselves, no one knew that it happened. And that is the best part of being underground, ’cause you can do a whole world of shit and make trouble in all the best ways and no one finds out about it. But then, you know, 20 years later, you kind of want people to know how you did the things you did.
So I feel like there’s two or three really important reasons why we wanted to start documenting some of that history. And one is because I couldn’t find it anywhere, and we all sort of looked, and none of us could find all of this history in one place together before.
Two, it’s ’cause it’s so precious and powerful. I mean, this is the history that shaped 20 [00:08:00] years of organizing and vocabulary in a way that got us so close to what we wanted to be, and it got us so close to this current moment. None of us imagined 2020 back then and the work that we were doing 20 years ago, and the fact that we can look back from a moment like 2024, like 2020 is so incredible – and really track back through our path together to how we got here.
And I think the third reason why documenting it in this format and in this way was so important was because we wanna revive the STOP story collection that was so artfully and carefully done. And Mimi’s gonna talk more about STOP, and the history of STOP.
It was such a good and careful container, because it was built through these relationships and through these quiet underground networks that moved at the speed of trust, and moved at the speed of relationships. And so they [00:09:00] were able to write things down. They were able to document it.
And so we wanted to create this audio documentary series as kind of like a nest for people to come into so that they could hear the stories of what the values are. Hear the stories of what we were trying to build, and transform. And hear the stories of how and why documentation is so important to us.
And be a little less afraid of sharing their own stories in this era of call out culture, in this era of things being on blast. In this era of everything having to be done to this giant scale of magnitude that’s not really what it looks like in the ’90s and early 2000s, and even in the ’70s and ’80s because we do talk to some people whose work goes all the way back to the ’70s and ’80s and really laid a lot of the foundation for what came next.
So I think creating this audio documentary journey [00:10:00] is a way of welcoming newcomers – people who came into the movement who aren’t as familiar with Creative Interventions and the STOP stories and the history from that time – to welcome you all into the content, into the community of people who were behind some of the original story collection and set that intentional invitation.
Deana: Mimi is a second generation Korean American, a daughter of immigrants from a country still divided. She’s a co-founder of Incite! and a founder of Creative Interventions, one of the partner organizations of this relaunch of STOP, Stories For Power. She has lived in many of the cities featured in this podcast, born in Seattle, politically raised in Chicago, a longtime Oakland person, and now living in Los Angeles.
Mimi, can you share what STOP is and how this podcast is connected to it?
Mimi: When we created Creative Interventions in 2004, we had a [00:11:00] couple of projects in mind. One of them was to actually start to pilot interventions to violence that we now call community accountability and transformative justice. These were the kind of interventions that we’ve had in our legacies as people of color.
They go back in time to the beginnings of our peoples, but we had lost them. We had forgotten them. And we had really been taken over by the idea that we had to have shelters and crisis lines, that we had to call the police to try to intervene in violence. And I knew we had so many more stories. I was starting to hear echoes of these stories and things that people were doing as we asked, “what else could we do to intervene in violence?”
But these stories had been lost. They weren’t stories that people even considered to be interventions to violence because they were things that we did when we were young people and tried to step in when we heard that our friend was experiencing harm from their [00:12:00] family. And I was starting to hear these stories, but I was realizing that we had forgotten these as the kinds of ways in which we tried to address and prevent violence in the future.
I was really intrigued by the idea of these stories and what they really told us about our own legacies of interventions to violence. I knew that they were really rich in how they could inform what we could do, and yet these were so lost. So STOP, StoryTelling & Organizing Project began early in the days of the founding of Creative Interventions to really start recalling these stories, to having them inspire us, and having them inform us about what people have done not only in the past, but what people are doing in the present.
And we really started collecting these stories. Many of these you can still see on the Creative Interventions website. The website that [00:13:00] we’re creating right now together, StoriesForPower.org, we knew these stories were precious in a world which really considered these examples to be worthless and disposable.
We didn’t even recognize them anymore, even when they were our own stories. But what happened as we started asking people, how we can actually intervene in violence, how we can stop violence, not only interpersonal violence, but also the violence of the state?
People started asking, oh, is this like what we did with our families? Is this what I did with my friends? Is this what I heard that my grandmother did before people even responded to violence using the police? And these were the precious stories that we wanted to collect, and that we started collecting, now, decades back – and that we’re starting to collect now.
And I’m so excited for us to have this opportunity to really recall these stories from so many locations here that you’ll hear from, but [00:14:00] also as a launching for our rediscovery of the stories – whether they be what we did in the community, or whether we did in our own family or just with a couple of friends. I think these are the things that we need to build from right now. The things that are forgotten, the things that are devalued, and this is what we mean to do in this relaunch of Stories for Power, or the StoryTelling & Organizing Project, or STOP.
Deana: Thanks for that. Mimi. You said a number of different things that I really appreciate and I wanted to just point out some of the connections that you made, and one is that this work, it wasn’t a formal project. You were using stories that you’ve heard your entire life. So this transformative justice and community accountability has been going on for a long period of time.
And also the connection with STOP from years ago to STOP now. And not only the connection, but the way that the projects have moved and changed over the years.
[00:15:00] Rachel, can you talk a little more about this project?
Rachel: One of the things that’s so interesting to me about this project is that it tracks the evolution of how and why people were doing transformative justice, restorative justice, community accountability. And also how it’s evolved, and how their thinking on their work evolved.
It’s really interesting to hear people talk about sort of like the experiments in blunders that happened 15, 20 years ago. And hear them be a little bit more gentle with themselves about those blunders in the aftermath and being more gentle with themselves and each other than I see people being now, and I remember people being back then. So I think that’s really key.
It’s an invitation to remember to have some grace around these really thoughtful experiments that turned out to be what we all now look at as roadmaps, but that at the [00:16:00] time were intentional experiments that people were trying because no one else was gonna do it. And that there was no roadmap or guarantee or even perspective that things were gonna turn out a very specific way.
And there’s something really liberating about that. And there’s something really liberating about remembering that this movement had really messy origins. Not that this is an origin story because we can’t track to the beginning of time. But it’s important to know that not everything that people tried started in a completely well thought out form. And that people were really agile and flexible and willing to pivot when those pivots were necessary, and they were willing to give each other grace when an idea was not landing or something felt incomplete. They went back to the drawing board. They went [00:17:00] back to community. And I think that that’s so useful to think about in this moment.
Deana: Mimi, I’d love for you to jump in to talk about this time period. So why did you focus on this time period? What were the unique conditions that you all were thinking of?
Mimi: I’m gonna speak fully honestly now. As we were thinking about relaunching this project, if people recall or can go back to the origins of STOP, the StoryTelling & Organizing Project, we had individual stories or stories from communities and families. We were entering an era where, for some of us, we had kept these secret. And we were trying to open them up so that people can learn from them, and there were so many people that actually wanted to share their stories.
We realize that we’re in a different era now and that there’s so much more of a call out culture. There are more people that are turning to the courts [00:18:00] or to litigation to try to stop people from telling their stories. And we really were mindful about the era of this relaunch. We realized that what we experience as the beginnings of our entry point into what we now call community accountability or transformative justice, or abolition, or abolition feminism started for us in the era of the 2000s.
For many of us, it was the experiences of Critical Resistance, of the start of Incite! In 2000, and you’ll hear a lot of people echoing these stories in the episodes to follow. We realized that this was an important time. This was a time when we were starting our local projects, and we were also starting to reach out to each other nationally and say, what are you doing?
What are we [00:19:00] calling this? What is different about this? How are we actually challenging the violence of the state? And how are we challenging the violence that we have experienced within our families, our communities, among our loved ones? How can we use what we learned and what we’re practicing now – just out of the urgency of the moment, and the urgency of really trying to do what was right, and to really make live what we believe to be social justice and liberation.
How can we learn from this? And we all, I think, who are part of this project, think that it is the documentation of people’s stories in their brilliance and their imperfection to build the movement of liberation that we’re all part of today.
Deana: Shira, you wanna jump in?
Shira: I think another goal in documenting, and documenting this history was also to start pulling [00:20:00] apart the flattening of terms. Like the term abolition has become the meaning of everything. And like abolition is transformative justice, abolition is community accountability, abolition as reform. And I think it’s just important to kind of like take these ideas apart and really start to understand the origin stories of all of it. Yes, like all of the work that we’re talking about, transformative justice, community accountability, the movement to abolish the prison industrial complex, defund, is towards the larger picture of transforming violence, interrupting violence, ending prisons and police.
But it also has, like, separate origin stories and separate meanings in a way. I think like for example, transformative justice cannot happen unless it’s abolitionist. And to me, I think of myself not only as an abolitionist [00:21:00] feminist, but also a transformative justice feminist and a community accountability feminist. And to me, I believe transformative justice, and I know transformative justice only happens outside of the state and cannot happen unless it’s a part of abolitionist work. So we really wanted to create some spaciousness and room so that people could fully wrap around some of the differences between those things because they’re really importantly different.
We don’t want a rigid purity politic that doesn’t allow us to disagree, grow, and make mistakes. And there’s certainly a tremendous amount of overlap between these concepts. But, you know, I think one thing that is super important is that transformative justice and community accountability mean ending violence without the state, and it has to be without the state. It doesn’t always look like moving money. It can. It doesn’t always mean starting a social service. It can. But those [00:22:00] things are necessary and radical life changing work, and we need that work too. And it’s okay to also call that work something else. And it’s okay to do life changing work that’s appropriately categorized and we can have agreements on what we’re doing.
We’re trying to move the needle. We’re trying to end violence. We’re trying to end state violence. We’re trying to end prisons and police, from a lot of different angles at once, and we don’t necessarily have to call that work transformative justice. We don’t have to call that work community accountability, and we can continue to have this critical and dynamic conversation because we need to make sure that community accountability and transformative justice do not get co-opted by the state. And we have worked so hard underground and outside the state and in relationships, and I think we need to really see how that arc happened.
Rachel: I wanna jump in here and say [00:23:00] that one of the things that was super important about this time also, and this speaks to the impact of the state, and why this work has to happen outside the state, is that the state and the state actions were the things that a lot of people were reacting to. Like the state made it impossible for our people to get redress in any other forum.
We are thinking about the early 2000s in the late 90’s, and we need to remember this is when the Violence against Women Act… so forms of accountability and care around gender-based violence became carceral really quickly. And that entire movement made a choice to align itself with law enforcement in a way that was so harmful for survivors, especially trans survivors, sex workers, queer survivors, Black survivors. And so creating experiments outside [00:24:00] of organizations that were primarily funded through the Violence Against Women Act were so important.
And that’s why so many of us are actually sort of like refugees from those spaces. Like we got our 40 hour trainings, which is really important for some context. But we knew that we couldn’t do the work in the way that our communities needed while under the parameters of our various nonprofits. Similarly, I think it’s really important to remember that this was the era of 9/11, and after September 11th, 2001, our relationship to policing in this country really changed.
For example, in places like New York, in places like the South, in places like the West Coast, you saw a huge pendulum swing from people, like communities, learning that they could have solutions outside of the police, and remembering that the police were actually antagonists – to, all of a [00:25:00] sudden – police are our heroes.
And I think that a lot of the interventions that people made was not only in reaction to this lionizing of law enforcement, but also a recognition that, especially Arab communities, Arab Muslim communities, people perceived of as Arab Muslim, people from the global south – were then under extra scrutiny, right, and therefore even more targeted.
So we’re talking about people reacting to layers and layers of targeting and scrutiny from the state while being told that the state is gonna solve your sexual violence issue, your family abuse issue, your community abuse issue.
And also not for nothing, this was a moment where we saw gentrification explode across the country. So we are talking about folks who are living in communities that now you cannot imagine ever having had cheap rent. [00:26:00] And so some of the violence that people were experiencing was the violence that is caused by not being able to be rooted in place, right? People being displaced, displaced a lot of community safety and community security.
And so a lot of the interventions were also directly in response to huge swaths of BIPOC people in this country, not being able to stay in the communities where they felt safe. So, so many of the stories that are in this project are also a really useful examination on how the key moments of USA’s history where the state decided to really take a turn, or an investment in not only intense capitalism, but also carceral logics, which are connected.[00:27:00]
And so it’s really even more phenomenal to hear these stories about people who are, who are trying these experiments with such care, on a micro level, under this immense pressure, not only of the state, but dealing with personal trauma. It’s phenomenal when you think about the things that people were able to accomplish.
And also this is before people had Signal, or the internet, or like were able to signal boost something on social media – which is so inspiring to me, and also reminds me that everything we try needs to happen outside the state because that’s a problem, not the solution.
Deana: So Shira and Rachel, I feel like you gave us just a hint of the juicy parts of the episodes that we’re going to be hearing. And Mimi, I would love to hear what juicy parts you’re excited [00:28:00] about or what do you want people to keep in mind and get excited about for this podcast?
Mimi: I think that some of what people struggle with today is the immense overwhelm of the increase in carceral powers. If I can talk about the current moment, the seeming backlash, that has been part of a strategy of what I can only call fascism right now.
So I think what is really instructive about this particular moment is that it was a time of 9/11. It was the time of the aftermath of the Crime Bill of 1994 and the Violence Against Women Act as part of the crime bill also of 1994. But also our response and our rebuilding of what we see as abolitionist practice. I [00:29:00] think people struggle with abolition only being about dismantling, but what we also see is abolition as a part of reclaiming and building and rebuilding. And what we see in this moment of recalling the period of the 2000s, is these small experiments and not so small experiments, that so many of us were engaged in within our particular communities and in conversation with across our communities.
I think what was really juicy is to learn from these, and I do think that everybody listening will resonate with a different story, with a different aspect of a story. Because all of our stories are unified in our challenge to state violence and our challenge to interpersonal violence as well. But the ways in which we do it in each of our communities and each of our histories, all of our legacies and how we [00:30:00] co-create them in our local communities is unique. I just love hearing the stories and recalling how, how I was inspired by each of them and learning so many new things about what was happening at the moment. And I just really am excited about people, whether you were there or whether this is a completely new story to you, or whether they fit into the stories you’re creating right now, can really resonate and inspire. We have to build now. We are building now. And we just have to be there to reclaim our stories, and move towards liberation together.
Deana: Rachel, what do you want people to get excited about?
Rachel: I want people to remember that these seismic shifts in culture that we are living in now that seem really natural – happened and were led by mostly BIPOC [00:31:00] women, trans people, sex workers, drug users, disabled folks, people who are on the margins. And our interventions in organizing culture, specifically, often gets flattened. We’re not always the first ones to grab the megaphone. We’re not always the first ones to chain ourselves to the door. But we’re absolutely the ones that people call when someone experiences a sexual assault. And I think that this is such an important moment to remember that BIPOC, trans, femme, disabled, sex worker, drug using queers started this all and are still holding down a lot of this work.
I also wanna put a plug in for the, like, sort of beautiful, complicated camaraderie that you see not only [00:32:00] from back then, but still exists now. People have moved around the country. People have changed the way they practice. People are like a little rolling their eyes at what they used to do. But that sense of relationship, that sense of like, principled struggle, but I wanna actually say grace, is so persistent. And you can hear it in the voices of people who haven’t seen or talked to each other in like 10 years. I love that comradery, and I love the space that people gave themselves and each other back then and today.
And I just really am excited for people to remember that transformative justice, community accountability, restorative justice was not only about an individual redress, right? It was never about this person caused this person harm, and [00:33:00] so we’re going to make this person quote unquote “accountable.”
Transformative justice is about transforming the culture and community in which the harms happened. It’s about a fundamental shift in how people relate to each other across the board – not only when hard things happen, but when good things happen. And I think that that’s such an important thing to remember, especially now as we are moving into a period where trust is harder to achieve, those connections are harder to achieve, and community means something different. But it doesn’t have to mean that we don’t give each other grace, and that we don’t recognize that we have the ability to transform our culture.
Deana: Rachel, that is so beautiful. Thank you for sharing that.
Mimi: Oh my god. We don’t have to have anything else except what you just said, Rachel, that was so fantastic. Thank you so much.
Shira: So [00:34:00] I love what Rachel was just saying, just, this is why I love working with all of you so much is because my mind gets blown and everything gets transformed every time.
And I was thinking too about how I think something you said in an earlier conversation, Rachel, when we were talking about these episodes, was like 20 years ago, you would’ve never heard anyone ask for a process. And the fact that people can say in a meeting, this isn’t going right, this isn’t what’s supposed to be happening. I need to intervene on this pattern of sexual violence, or this pattern of sexism, or this pattern of queerphobia and transphobia, and say we need a collective process.
That is down to the people who you’ve just named. That is down to largely BIPOC femmes, largely sex [00:35:00] workers, largely queer and trans folks, largely drug users. And there’s something that’s so incredible about this podcast, because we can really feel the impact and the power of building collective survival projects and strategies. And we can see what it looks like over the last 20 to 25 years, or really 30 years.
So if we think and talk, even in terms of care, we often think and talk in terms of the self, which is like so important, like now that we have language for self-care, I do believe that’s actually a really critical feminist principle because so many of us are taught that we don’t even have selves to defend and that our care is always meant to be outward. So I do really believe in the concepts of self-care, but I’m also excited for people to hear about how people came up with projects that incorporated everything from healing [00:36:00] to restoration, to organizing campaigns, to huge interventions that included large networks of people while also taking care of each person individually.
And that this work is not only about individual care and not only about transforming harms that happen between two or four people. But also about like’s been said so far, transforming the root causes simultaneously. To play a little bit with Mariame Kaba’s quote, “hope is a discipline,” I think this podcast can show us what hope can look like long term.
And I’m really excited for people to listen for liberatory harm reduction strategies that left no one behind. And to stay in love with each other’s individual and collective survival and survival culture.
Deana: Thank you all so much for being here, for doing this project, for just being in the [00:37:00] world. Folks, this is the first episode in the Stories for Power podcast.
I want to extend my deepest gratitude to you, Mimi Shira, and Rachel. You are amazing, and you all remind me of why I do movement work. For folks listening, I encourage you to take whatever helps you on your journey. Leave behind what doesn’t fit and keep practicing.
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.
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. Music [00:38:00] composed by Scale Hands 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.
