Fumbling Toward Repair; A Workbook for Community Accountability Facilitators

It was a deep honor to get to work with Mariame Kaba and Shira Hassan, illustrating their new workbook that offers skills for folks facilitating community accountability processes in their communities. I teamed up with my graphic designer friend Rachel Hoffman to pull their writings and activities together in this 160+ page workbook.

“Fumbling Toward Repair is a workbook by Mariame Kaba and Shira Hassan that includes reflection questions, skill assessments, facilitation tips, helpful definitions, activities, and hard-learned lessons intended to support people who have taken on the coordination and facilitation of formal community accountability processes to address interpersonal harm & violence.”

What is Community Accountability? “In their modern iteration, as developed and framed by groups like INCITE! Women and Trans People of Color Against Violence, community accountability practices and processes are partly about mapping possibilities for transformation and healing. They can be an important component of transformative justice (TJ). The people who helped to found INCITE! came to their understandings of CA through lived experiences with pushing for more laws to combat gender-based violence and/or with being targets of the criminal punishment system. We recognized that the CJ system increased violence in our lives. We looked for alternative systems for addressing the interpersonal and systemic harms that we were experiencing in our communities. Community accountability and transformative justice practices emerged from the lived realities of women of color, trans people of color, and others who were navigating violence.”

From Shira and Mariame; “This workbook is intended for people who have facilitated or attempted to facilitate  community accountability processes to address interpersonal violence. It is not a handbook for community accountability 101, nor is it appropriate for novices. 

This workbook is appropriate for people who already have some counseling, hotline, or first responder experience, and who already have knowledge of intimate partner violence and sexual violence either through paid or volunteer work.

Our goal is to support other survivors of sexual and interpersonal violence who have taken on the coordination and facilitation of formal of CA processes. We want to offer a resource we both wish we could have referenced when we began this work over 15 years ago.

This workbook is intended for use as an additional resource for those who have already studied community accountability and transformative justice writings, such as Revolution Starts at Home, Emergent Strategy, Color of Violence, and the Creative Interventions Toolkit.”

This workbook is currently available at akpress.org!