Reparative Justice: Tool for Racial Healing

Reparative justice is an essential part of living out Quaker faith. This workshop explores the spiritual imperative and deep need for Quakers to commit to repairing harms done by Quakers and others through their involvement in slavery and its afterlives. Reparative justice is an essential part of living out Quaker faith. This workshop explores the…

Workshop Description

Reparative justice is an essential part of living out Quaker faith. This workshop explores the spiritual imperative and deep need for Quakers to commit to repairing harms done by Quakers and others through their involvement in slavery and its afterlives.

Reparative justice is an essential part of living out Quaker faith. This workshop explores the spiritual imperative and deep need for Quakers to commit to repairing past and continuing harms committed by Quakers and others through their involvement in slavery and its afterlives.

As an approach, a goal, an ideal, and an ethos, reparations provides a promising path towards healing, repair, and transformational social change. It addresses the dimensions of Spirit, relationship, and resources. As such, it offers a tool for Quakers and Quaker communities to understand our complicity in causing harm, and to explore our options for contributing to the repair of the past and ongoing harms of slavery and its afterlives, the penitentiary system, and settler colonialism.

This workshop will share an actionable framework for understanding reparations, and the basic concepts and skills required to take meaningful reparative action. Participants will learn about the experiments of others, discuss your own thoughts, actions, and plans, and practice applying the framework.

We will examine the patterns of behavior in Quaker meetings that may emerge around anti-racism initiatives, the beliefs that underlie these behaviors, and what stops us from taking collective action.

Through exercises, and discussion we will explore the issue of reparative justice and relational and financial reparations including topics/areas such as:

Reparations as a spiritual practice
A tool to budget for reparations
How abolition and reparations are intertwined movements
The Quaker case for reparations
Case studies of other faith and municipal efforts
The UN Definition of reparations and how to use it as a guide to inform your work
Micro-reparations as a frame to consider how to walk in reparative ways in our daily life

We will witness where other Friends are in the process of making reparations, to learn from each other’s struggles and learnings, and to support each other in discerning our next steps in individual and corporate reparative justice.

Leader Experience

Lucy is co-director of reparationWorks. She founded a reparations committee at Green Street Friends Meeting that successfully inspired the community to budget $50,000/year for ten years toward reparations, the initial project of which was a free legal clinic to secure Black housing wealth in Germantown. Lucy is co-leading    an emergent campaign to invite 100 majority white congregations in Philadelphia to sincerely engage in reparations accountable to grassroots Black-led organizations and small churches. She has served as Truth and Reparations Co-Fellow for the Truth Telling Project which is the organizational holder of the Grassroots Reparations Campaign.

 

Rob is co-director of reparationWorks. He co-founded the Design Studio for Social Intervention (DS4SI) at MIT to help social change leade rs imagine new ways to dance with their most vexing intractable problems. As a partner in the consulting firm Action Mill he and his partners applied methods from human centered design and the principles of Gandhian nonviolent strategy to challenges of authentic engagement, intrinsically motivated behavior change, and large scale systems interventions. More recently he co designed an experiential learning environment for employers seeking to build their capacity to forge relationships across differences in social identity and social location—the kind of relationships required to create workplaces and cultures that foster the humanity and nurture the development of all people.