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- The majority of what we do and the bulk of what we do is focusing on consent and prevention and harm reduction work. And so, we were working with survivors for years, and, I mean, we're young, but it's still really intense to be hearing hundreds of stories and kind of after-the-fact, over and over and over again, just feeling like, you know, I want to support you, I want to do as much as I can, but is this gonna prevent further things, like, yes, it'll prevent further things from you harming other people or you being harmed, but is there something we could've done earlier? Is there something that we could have done to help you before this happened? And so, that's really how we got into consent education, is really wondering what are the basic skills, the communication skills, the understandings of power and negotiation that we need to be able to build consensual communities to be able to avoid the kind of harm that we're having. And I think that to me, consent is really how we operationalize liberation. Consent is literally a toolkit and framework

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for negotiating people with different power and negotiating everyone's agency. Everyone has the power to choose, and those choices don't always align, and consent is a framework for negotiating how, what do we do then? And so, where consent comes into our process is that violence is a violation of consent. Right? It's doing something without someone's agreement, collaborative imagining of what was gonna happen. And so, sometimes, for us, transformative justice is where folks start to practice those and start to understand that they have that agency, and they have the ability to respect other people, and their needs will still be met. And that is a whole different framework of looking at the world and looking at the way that you live your life. And I think what's been interesting is working with other practitioners, especially around restorative justice. It's like we can work through what happened, we can talk to each other about oh, you know, this happened, that happened, get into all of the details. But that doesn't necessarily mean

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that it's not gonna happen again. It doesn't necessarily mean that you have the literal tools and practices to not do it. Sometimes we'll talk to folks and they're like, I literally just didn't, I couldn't imagine another way of being. And for me, consent and consensual tools like our consent workbook that we make is giving you a lot of really tangible practices to know what to do to imagine other choices 'cause there's always a choice. And so, people excuse or deny or make a lot of reasons why they may be doing harm based on not imagining any other way of being. And consent gives you a lot of practices and ways of imagining other ways of negotiating people not wanting to do what you want to do. - Yeah, I think consent is transformative justice because it can both prevent harm by giving people skills that they were not trained in, like, asking good questions, how to respond to questions, how to relate to power dynamics, right? And it can also respond to harm, which is if someone's gone through a restorative process,

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it can add a transformative component to it by offering them some education on how to not repeat the harmful behavior once they've set that intention. - And become an agent for bringing consent into their community, right? So, I think that there's a way in which understanding harm that happened between you and another person can actually, in our experience, a lot of the folks that we hold end up becoming facilitators, end up becoming agents for consent. And, hey, I didn't have to do this harm if I knew other ways of being. Let me teach you, because I don't want other people to be in this position of feeling ashamed of who they are and what they've done and realizing that there are options. - Yeah, and hurting people they love. Honestly, that's, like, - Yeah. - that's very painful. - Yeah, people don't have very good models of healthy consensual love. People often think that abuse is what love looks like. I feel like many of us are trained really, really harmful understandings of love and just don't have really good models or practices to be able to be consensual with the people that we care about. - If our movements are transformative justice, they can't enable and normalize abusive

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and coercive behaviors, right? - That's right. - So, for our movements to be transformative justice, I think for our movements to really change structural dynamics, we need to practice consent, practice respect, practice upholding boundaries and not coercing and manipulating people within our movement spaces, if that's something that we want to offer to the broader society. - Mm-hmm, I think there's this idea that, like, the process is the outcome, and that there's no… if our goal is to liberate our people, then we need to practice liberation now. And so, I think that more movement spaces need to understand what they do as transformative justice and move through the world in that way as well. - Mm-hmm, right, and that means bringing healing justice, bringing disability justice, bringing gender justice, racial justice, environmental justice, into all of our movements.