Imkaan: Practicing Possibilities for Justice
A Transformative Justice Workbook
by South Asian SOAR
Published February 2025
This workbook is dedicated to those who have borne the weight of navigating oppressive systems, endured harm and its compounding effects, and held onto curiosity and hope for something better.
We honor your visions for transformation.
What’s in the Workbook
Chapter One - Reclaiming Safety: Focuses on defining transformative justice and understanding two key concepts: punishment vs accountability and community safety.
Chapter Two - Responding to Violence: Explores community responses to violence and models of how to respond to violence outside of the criminal legal system.
Chapter Three - Assessing our Organizations: Dives into organizational practices and tools for aligning our organizations further with abolitionist and transformative justice values.
Chapter Four - Embodying our Values: Discusses how we can embody values of accountability in our personal relationships and in our organizational cultures.
Closing - Building the Future: Closes with reflection, commitments, and visions for the future.
Read the Workbook
Why We Created this Workbook
One of the reasons we wanted to create this workbook is because many of us know the violence of the criminal legal system to be painfully common, yet we can often feel stuck about what else exists. If you feel stuck about this question, you are not alone! By creating this workbook, we look forward to exploring future possibilities for the South Asian anti-violence movement together.
In addition, transformative justice and abolition can often feel like abstract, intellectual concepts but are, in reality, rooted in deep histories of practice and experimentation. The goal of this workbook is to provide SOAR Members with concrete and relevant activities that encourage you to engage in transformative experimentation. This workbook offers resources to reflect, assess, and shift your organizational approaches further in alignment with transformative justice and abolitionist principles.
We also want to credit the profound lineage of transformative justice practitioners whose work informs this chapter. Transformative justice and abolition are Black-led organizing strategies and Indigenous practices that we are learning from. This work originated from multiple communities, including prison abolitionists, Black feminist thought, QTBIPOC communities, and collective organizing outside of non-profit organizations. This workbook is a compilation of tools, practices, and reflections from many writers and practitioners, including Mariame Kaba, Mia Mingus, Ejeris Dixon, Mimi Kim, and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, as well as groups such as The Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective, Critical Resistance, Survived & Punished, Interrupting Criminalization, Generation 5, INCITE!, and The City School.
“How can we respond to violence in ways that not only address the current incident of violence, but also help to transform the conditions that allowed for it to happen?”
- Mia Mingus