[Covert photo of the interior of a greenhouse building filled with bushy plants on either side of a path down the middle. One of the plants on the right has many branches and a red flower. You can see the frame of one of the green house walls in the background.]

I wanted to share a few more resources for folks curious about strenghtening their communities with pod work.

SOIL has been doing truly amazing resource building since 2020. I have seen a massive rise in calls for "TJ facilitators" to come in and help mediate conflicts for folks in communities and organizations that haven't done fundamental community accountability work. I usually have to ask lots of questions to arrive at why they want specifically a TJ facilitator, and even more questions to arrive at whether that level of support is actually what's needed.

Usually what people want is assurances that whoever comes in to support will not cause more harm and will understand their human complexity. Furthermore, they want people who respect some of the values of their community. The logics are similar to seeking out queer therapists when you are a queer person. But TJ doesn't require professional experts from outside your community to practice.

Back to basics, Pod Work helps you build the kinds of relationships that can mobilize in response to harm without feeling like the only option is outside intervention. For many communities someone who won't cause more harm and will understand their human complexity AND be available to respond in a moment of crisis AND within the available cost and timeline constraints is a tough find.

Practicing with your people builds the community support needed to respond to life. SOIL is providing Pod Greenhouse as a practice space. Here's info from their site:

The Pod Greenhouse is a virtual work and practice space to support pod-building.

Making dedicated time for pod work continues to be one of the biggest obstacles people face in building and maintaining their pods. SOIL hopes that this space will foster practice, connection and community. We hope that by providing a regular space throughout the year dedicated to pod-building, it will offer opportunities for relationship building, cross-pollination, community support, and self-accountability.

The goal of our Pod Greenhouses is to support individuals to build their pods and build capacity for transformative justice and collective care.

Please note: Pod Greenhouses are not trainings.

Announcing SOIL’s 2025 Pod Greenhouses: March 15, June 28, Sept 20, Dec 6; 12:30pm-3pmET / 9:30am-12pm PT

Registration information for each Greenhouse will be sent through the SOIL email list. Registration for the March 15th Pod Greenhouse will be sent to the SOIL email list on March 3rd. Click here for more event information.

https://www.soiltjp.org/our-work/greenhouses

Southern Fried Queer Pride organizers visioned what they wanted more and less of in queer spaces at the start of 2020. Here’s some of what showed up on some sticky notes in the Southern wet coldness of the longest month in history, January 2020.

- Less cancel culture

- More real solutions for traumatized/abused queers, victims/abusers

- More eductation about conflict, trust, accountability, friendship, love

- More mental health resources & talking more openly about mental health

Folx from Southern Fried Queer Pride,  Queer Transformative Justice Atlanta Collective and Solutions Not Punishment Collabo met a couple times at coffeeshops in East Atlanta brainstorming the content of this zine for the Feb 19th SFQP Cancelled event as a take-home resource for participants.

Here's our digital version for reading through the PDF

https://www.dropbox.com/s/vv3ns4rso0zm5b3/Cancelled.pdf?dl=0

And if you'd like to print and fold your own

https://www.dropbox.com/s/sa4m2xa4m005kvi/Cancelled (print and fold).pdf?dl=0


editted and collected by zen lara, Hunter Ashleigh Shackelford, and Angie Wheelis

Audio version of this zine will be available here on this page.

One of the commitments we've made as a collective is to through collective effort make resources accessible for folks in a variety of ways. We are currently approaching reading accessibility in terms of prioritizing content that is written in non-specialist terms and available in paper, e-book, and audio formats. Where audio isn't available we sometimes record it ourselves.

Fumbling Towards Repair Audio

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

My first response when I started doing community accountability and transformative justice work to the question of "how do we handle harm that is mostly happening and witnessed online?" was "STOP THAT! DIVEST FROM SOCIAL MEDIA! IT'S TOXIC AS FUCK".

That's my own trauma and 12 years in digital marketing as a user experience designer that has cringed through the emergent ubiquity of habit-making social media platforms and of large-scale platforms that combine both the illusion that wealth is accessible to anyone through effort (We can all have Youtube or Twitch streams, capitalism may work afterall!) and that sense that we as individuals are not human beings existing as part of a community, but brands in a marketplace speaking to an..."audience". All the world's a stage and our public spheres have become bigger and bigger. As a queer person, the internet was the first place I felt like I could find other queer people, and it's still a life saving resource on a weekly basis, so my visceral reaction of "I hate Facebook oh so very much" while valid isn't a useful offering.

So let's assume you don't have all the baggage I have around social media and you're looking for resources for harm reduction around social media! We like harm reduction here!

I'm mostly going to link to two articles here and frame a little bit about how they felt to me reading them. These resources will focus on the internet call-out and give some guidelines for how to approach whether a call-out is about healing, community safety, accountability or...something else that has the potential for harm in your community.

https://thebodyisnotanapology.com/magazine/6-signs-your-call-out-isnt-actually-about-accountability/

The harm that I initially saw that brought me to transformative justice work was online. I was seeing Facebook callouts about behavior a housing insecure trans girl in my community had in the past, and I saw the callouts continue after she'd been alienated from community and run out of the entire state. She did cause harm, and those people she harmed deserved support. But there was a part of me that couldn't witness her continuously cut off from life-sustaining support, seeing her trapped in time with no hope for redemption, because it just...felt wrong to me that this was the best option. As a queer person, witnessing the discarding and dehumanization of other queer people was hard to hold while also trying to fight for my own humanity and the value of lives like mine. Queer liberation and queer disposability could not co-exist within me.

Call-outs are hard to navigate mindfully, but sometimes are still useful. Especially when you're dealing with someone with a lot of power who isn't likely to take accountability without social leverage.   This article helps with some framing around call-outs to prevent creating more harm with them. Had the person making the call-outs that first brought me to actively supporting in TJ work felt empowered and supported without first having to prove that the person who had harmed them and others was irredeemable and deserving of total social "cancellation" their relationship to their own community could have centered their healing instead of putting the onus on them of "proving" that harm really occurred.

This next article came out and is a trauma aware analysis by a queer person of color who is trained in mental health about why queer people are so mean to each other. I will say that a lot of what they talk about resonated deeply for me and my experience in queer community, but I still hated the title of the article because of how questions like this often bring up hard defensive feelings just because the syntax reflects how folks outside of queer community talk about queer people as a monolithic other. That aside, it's worth a read.

https://www.dailyxtra.com/why-are-queer-people-so-mean-to-each-other-160978?fbclid=IwAR1qXfx0-sCk3Ey95exnuyMZpVqi86KUq7LBzBCWeitH9cda-MN_8nGRJdI

Finally, from Fumbling Towards Repair by Mariame Kaba and Shira Hassan there is a section offering "How to deal with public callouts on social media"

Bless them and their work. Please go buy the workbook here on AK Press: https://www.akpress.org/fumbling-towards-repair.html

"How to deal with public callouts on social media"
https://www.dropbox.com/s/jjhslx72epf8pss/20190919.pdf?dl=0

Hope these offerings have something to support y'all in the work of nurturing and accountable community making.