Resilience & Revitalization

We invite you to join our digital learning community for the launch of our first self-guided public curriculum! This course serves as a digital home for our new Resilience & Revitalization (R&R) zine, plus extended content.

Transformative justice asks we interrogate our relationship to systems of oppression -- the ways white supremacy, capitalism, heteropatriarchy, settler colonialism, ableism, etc. impact and shape our bodies, relationships, collective spaces, work and institutions. Resilience & Revitalization is an invitation to deepen our relationships with what it can mean to be accountable to our needs, desires, and healing. What and who do we draw upon for strength? How do we grow toward resiliency in a culture that forces many of us to choose constantly between immediate and long-term survival and safety? What can it mean to explore accountable, loving, and sustainable relationships to self and others?

In this course, we will be exploring what it can mean to engage our relationships with our bodies, minds, and spirits in ways that honor the vulnerability required to show up for ourselves and our communities. Featuring new works by over 25 contributors who are young, queer, trans, of color, disabled, incarcerated, and more, R&R offers us all the opportunity to connect with what is necessary to forge the futures we want to live in.

Register now to get access to the course! You can find at cost print copies of the zine and accompanying tote bags, posters, post cards, and stickers featuring the art from this project at timetospringup.org/shop

Reflection from one of the Editors, Xochi Cartland:

Being invited to work on the Resilience and Revitalization Zine was a moment for me when all my worlds came together. I’m a writer and I’ve often complained to one of my teachers, Dara Bayer, that being an artist and doing Transformative Justice work sometimes felt antithetical. They both require so much imagination and creative energy I felt like when I engaged with one I had little room for the other. The R&R zine completely proved me wrong, since this was a creative project rooted in radical imagination. We were trying to think through “what would a world without prisons look like? A world without psych wards? Without police? What would a world look like where people’s intrinsic value is respected, where empathy and radical love are our roots instead of capitalism and exploitation?” This is a world I hope to experience one day. It is a world I felt honored and excited to help create, even if in the fictional confines of this resource.

As a young person, there are times when the enormity of Transformative Justice is overwhelming. There are so many incredible practitioners, many of whom are elders or elders-to-be who move with unshakeable wisdom and grace. In this work, I usually feel like a baby deer learning to walk, awkward and unsteady. The year in which I have been lucky enough to be exposed to TJ is a complete 180 of the way I grew up, and the whiplash is as painful as it is exciting. The R&R zine, however, is exactly the resource I would have wanted when I first got involved in this work. It is made by young people who are also unsure and figuring it out as they go. It is a collection of poetry, art, and spells, all manifesting something better than the world we were born into.

The process of hearing from so many young people about their vision and working with our other incredible team members - Lea Roth, Stas Schmiedt, Alexis Hyatt, and Shaina Doliny - was unbelievably inspiring. More than anything else it solidified for me that there are so many people living and breathing this work. Many of these folks might not consider themselves TJ practitioners, but have incorporated that worldview into their daily life. I’m often reminded of something I once heard Mariame Kaba say, that the current Prison Industrial Complex was made by thousands of people each making thousands of small decisions, and abolition will have to be the same way. Hopefully this resource will help affirm for folks that no matter what they do and spend their time on, there is a way to do it that aligns with the values of Transformative Justice. We will create something new and healing, thousands of small decisions at a time.