Stories for Power Podcast Trailer | STOP

April 8, 2025

Presenting: Stories for Power (Trailer)

What does transformative justice look like and where did it come from? Join us for a journey across local communities as we explore the last 25 years of building community accountability, transformative justice and abolitionist practice. Through the Stories for Power podcast, hosted by Deana Lewis, we trace the work of some of the architects and radical organizers of this current wave of work.

This podcast is part of the relaunch of STOP – the StoryTelling & Organizing Project – presented by Creative Interventions and Just Practice Collaborative. STOP collects and shares stories of everyday people, organizations and networks taking action to confront and end domestic and sexual violence through people power – not the power of the state.

Featuring

Deana Lewis

Deana is one of the founding members of Just Practice Collaborative, whose purpose is to build communities’ capacities to respond to intimate partner violence and sexual assault without relying on state-based systems. She also participates in the work of Love & Protect and Survived & Punished, two prison abolition collectives dedicated to supporting transgender and cisgender women, trans men, and gender-expansive folks of color who are harmed and criminalized by interpersonal and state violence. Finally, Deana is a Senior Associate Director at the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy at the University of Illinois Chicago.

Presented by Creative Interventions and Just Practice Collaborative

Executive Producers — Mimi Kim, Rachel Caïdor & Shira Hassan

Producer, Sound Recordist, and Audio Editor — iLL Weaver for Emergence Media

Host – Deana Lewis

Music editor and audio engineer — Joe Namy

Digital Strategy- Yessica Gonzalez

Graphic Design – And Also Too

Theme song & music composed by — Scale Hands and L05 of Complex Movements in collaboration with Ahya Simone

Stories for Power is supported by Collective Futures Fund and Libra Foundation

Learn more and share your stories at StoriesforPower.org

Tune in on April 15th for the official launch of the Stories for Power Podcast!☆

Learn more at StoriesforPower.org

00;00;00;00 – 00;00;26;08 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. Stories for Power explores the political lineage and historical experiments that gave way to this wave of transformative justice, community accountability, and prison abolition.

00;00;26;11 – 00;00;50;18 Deana

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

00;00;50;19 – 00;01;15;27 Deana

today. We focus on the early 2000s through 2010, and some of our guests even take us back to the 70s, 80s, and 90s. We know these stories and conversations are more important than ever, and these episodes, which talk about the largely underground organizing and work we were doing to interrupt violence in our community without the state, are even more critical to our collective survival.

00;01;16;00 – 00;01;28;06 Deana

For folks listening, I encourage you to take whatever helps you on your journey. Leave behind what doesn’t fit and keep practicing. Check out our show notes and go to StoriesforPower.org to learn more.

Do You Have a Story ?

The StoryTelling & Organizing Project was created to collect and share stories about everyday people taking action to end interpersonal violence.

When we talked to people about community-based responses to violence, we began to hear stories from people usually starting with the question, “You mean something like this?” What followed were stories, lots of stories — each a unique lesson in courage, creativity and collective action. We decided to collect these stories to inform and inspire our work in community accountability and transformative justice.

Fill out the form to the right or email us at
StoriesforPower at gmail.com.