the devi-coop organizes the following campaigns:
- TJ-ByThePeople – mobilize power for survivors via base-building a political home, develop a Southern-contextualized survivor narrative via regional community conversations and trainings, and design/facilitate a political education/development curriculum for survivors and their allies
- TJ-4DaSouf – reimagine public safety by being trained to offer transformative justice facilitators and/or community accountability mechanisms for cases of intimate partner and sexual violence and provide appropriate political education for the public
- Mass Commutation Campaign – strategize/implement a mass commutation campaign and defense advocacy coalition in solidarity and collaboration with incarcerated survivors (Igniting Hope)
tj-ByThePeople
This campaign seeks solely to visiblize survivor voices in Georgia in order to design policy/advocacy recommendations, create reports on what is the “southern-contextualized experience of intimate partner and sexual violence”, and to release art collections by survivors. By holding 6 community conversations over Georgia’s six major regions (NE, NW, SE, SW, Central, Atlanta), this campaign will showcase community thoughts/opinions/attitudes on a variety of experiences with carceral feminisms, abolition feminisms, and re-imagined futures. Conversations will be open to the public, with follow-up storytelling sessions with survivors which attended. Survivors who participate in the follow-up storytelling conversations will receive a stipend. These conversations will be led and designed by DEVI survivor organizers, under the leadership of TDP. TDP highly encourages movement scientists and movement artists to develop and hone their expertise in this space, and to join in our effort to elevate survivor voices.
This campaign will also publish intersectional political education on healing justice, abolition, abolition feminism/womanism, deconstructing toxic masculinity, patriarchy, and transmisogynoir in the South, and related subjects. Survivor organizers with DEVI will be encouraged to form relationships with other grassroots movements in order to release political education that is intersectional (i.e. collaborating with an abolition organization to release a zine on sexual violence as a co-opted tool of state violence and white supremacy).
tj-4dasouf
This campaign seeks to test and implement a transformative justice model with a “Southern context” to end intimate partner and sexual violence in the US South. Informing the “Southern Context” will be survivor-guided and survivor-led as we re-imagine community-centered solutions for the South that reckon with its dark history surrounding slavery, Jim Crow, transmisogynoir, and evangelical-based patriarchy. While this campaign will mainly focus on developing and implementing a TJ model for IPV/SV for the South, it will also work to develop a facilitators training for individuals in the community who are interested in using these tools in homes, workplaces, and/or communities. Furthermore, our facilitators are available for guidance if individuals in the community wish to utilize a transformative justice model to resolve workplace or interpersonal conflict. If successful, we hope to expand this option to the larger Southern region in 2023 with the development of other TDC sites, and will provide direct-TA to groups interested in beginning TJ-4DaSouf projects in other parts of Georgia after the two-year grant period.
mass commutation
Following the lead of Survived + Punished, DEVI will organize for the mass commutation of survivors in Georgia who have faced police interactions, civil lawsuits, criminal charges, and even sentencing to discourage their attempts for safety and survival. “Primary aggressor” arrest within cases of domestic abuse has been abolished as of 2020 within Georgia, and TDP feels strongly that the State of Georgia commute/expunge all cases/charges of incarcerated survivors that were under this statute, as well as re-examine cases where gender violence was not properly considered during survivor sentencing. DEVI will raise awareness of cases across the South where courts and police are used to legitimize gender violence, and call for the mass commutation of survivors in Georgia. Survivor organizers with DEVI will be encouraged to refer individuals to the advocacy program, and will be encouraged to become “pen pals” with individuals we advocate for through a collaboration with the Georgia Freedom Letters program. With the survivor’s consent, calls for action and details of their case will be published on digital platforms to raise awareness and support them. TDP will partner with advocacy and abolitionist agencies within Georgia in order to connect survivors with pro-bono/sliding-scale defense attorneys and/or participatory defense if they are facing civil lawsuits, criminal charges, or have been sentenced.
TDP, as an abolitionist entity, will not participate in the legitimization of the prison industrial complex or the sex offense regmine; however, we will not allow these systems to further legitimize gender violence within our communities through the charging and sanctioning of survivors. Therefore, TDP will aid survivors facing punitive/carceral/civil repercussions with mutual aid, crowdsourcing, organizing, communications, resources, and legal referrals, but will not provide direct legal representation. A mutual aid fund will be developed and run by DEVI and TDP with funds directly going to incarcerated survivors and survivors that are interacting with the prison-industrial complex. We highly encourage movement lawyers to join in on our efforts and allow us to provide referrals to their practice.