Through this course, our ultimate hope is for you, the participants, to feel that freedom is attainable, even in the face of pervasive harm and oppression; to find a sense of hope and inspiration; to clarify your personal boundaries; and to have a stronger sense of what you believe and can do.
We have designed, developed and distilled this eight module course in community and collaboration with organizers, students, educators, care workers, and advocates. At Spring Up we have been practicing and teaching about Transformative Justice, harm reduction, and consent since our founding in 2013. The past decade+ has taught us to refine our perspective on TJ learning and have resulted in the bluelight academy digital learning platform and the learning theory that you’ll encounter within.
The result of our love and labor over the years on this course is our position on what meaningful learning requires from your participation:
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An eagerness to engage in personal reflection about: experiencing and perpetuating systems of harm, what contributes to personal and collective healing, and what boundaries are necessary for a fair trade care economy
- A commitment to seeking support from peers and coaches about specific challenges, growth edges, or real work scenarios where you are applying these principles in your daily life.
We emphasize your willingness to interrogate the self and build or nurture relationships because we believe that both of those supports will increase the likelihood that you choose to engage in TJ work past the conclusion of the live course. It is the personal and pair connections between the content and your ecosystem that will create the foundation and support that allows what you learn to continue to live in your lives beyond this class.
We do not set specific learning targets or goals for individual courses because we recognize that everyone is entering into this space with different backgrounds and experiences that bring them here. Transformative Justice is a life philosophy that can look a million different ways, and should be unique and specific to each person’s life and community. We do want and expect you to set your own learning goals based on what is right for you in the moment to move towards liberation. We invite you to think critically about what it is that you would like to take from the course.
As a collective, we work hard to cite the sources of the knowledge we share and teach. As facilitators and learners, we know that these ideas need to spread, but their roots cannot be forgotten. Read the newsletter written by Stas + Brianna digging into our citation practice as a way of implementing transformative justice values.
This work is the primary source of income for many of our households. We encourage our clients and co-learners to respect our intellectual labor and our livelihoods by citing us, and by checking in with us before replicating our language and quotes in your own public-facing and consulting work.
We have numerous free resources linked within this course, and on our free resources page, that we encourage you to share widely. If you share a resource we create, we ask that you invite someone to download those directly from our website in exchange for their email address.
