About

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Community Jewelbox is a consulting group of like minded and allied facilitators committed to sharing our gifts and talents for organizational and community support. Through our extensive experiences in social justice movements, we have collected skills and strategies to address the myriad needs that face organizations on the frontlines of justice and liberation.

Lisa Marie Alatorre

(she/her)

Principal Consultant

Lisa Marie is a community organizer, educator, and writer with over 20 years experience fighting for the abolition of imprisonment, policing, and oppression as a response to social problems and instead shifting towards care, healing, and transformation. She has formerly worked with movement organizations such as the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness and Critical Resistance and is currently a part-time lecturer in the Crime and Justice Studies Department at UMass Dartmouth. She is a Queer Femme of Indigenous, Mexican, and Jewish descent. Born, raised, and a descendant of Tohono O’odham and Hohokam people and land known as Maricopa County, Az., she is currently settled on Coastal Salish land known as the Key Peninsula, WA.

Viviane Saleh-Hanna

(she/her)

Collaborator

Viviane Saleh-Hanna is a Full Professor of Crime and Justice Studies and Director of Black Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. She has been studying and teaching on freedom movements, abolition, restorative justice, transformative justice, anti-colonialism, community accountability, and harm reduction. In the past she has completed certifications/trainings  and has practitioner experiences in victim offender mediation, family group conferencing, alternatives to violence projects, and circle programs in prisons throughout Canada, the US, north Africa, and west Africa. In the last few years she has completed the Indigenous People's Certificate (as a globally Indigenous participant) with the Center for Indigegogy at Wilfred Laurier University in Canada. Also with the Center for Indigegogy she has certifications in circle co-facilitation and in decolonizing knowledge through teachings by Kathy Absolon on Indigenous methodologies and knowledge creation. In her own indigenization journey, Viviane has been studying and applying the north African principles of Ma'at and west Asian wisdoms of the olive tree towards the establishment and facilitation of wholistic community building practices, organizational culture, and group based visioning with intentional space-making and mission-building practices.

Kai Lumumba Barrow

(she/her)

Collaborator

Kai Lumumba Barrow is a queer Black feminist, abolitionist, activist, and artist based in New Orleans/Bvlbancha. For over 40 years barrow has worked to end structural oppression and state violence through campaigns and projects to stop jail expansion; confront police violence; expose prosecutorial misconduct; free political prisoners, and experiment with abolitionist models for shrinking carceral logics. She is a founding member of Critical Resistance, and has worked with numerous social movement organizations as a facilitator, trainer and organizational strategist. As an artist, barrow is interested in the praxis of radical imagination. Together with her four muses: Absurdity, Sarcasm, Myth and Merriment, she experiments with abolition as an artistic vernacular. Her sprawling paintings, environmental installations, found object assemblages, and social practice performances are created in traditional and non-traditional spaces to transgress ideological, geographic, and carceral borders. Deconstructing materials and locations associated with Black women’s labor, the work performs queer, Black feminist theory as an aesthetic genre. To find out more about her work, see www.kailbarrow.com and www.galleryofthestreets.org.

Our Approach

Our work is grounded in principles and practices that support us to do our work sustainably, effectively, collaboratively, and in alignment with our values.

  • Liberation is a process and a vision. This includes: full participation of all groups in society that is mutually shaped to meet their needs, an equitable distribution of resources, where people feel safe and secure, not just physically but also emotionally, where individuals and communities are autonomous and interdependent, and processes are participatory, inclusive, affirming, and equitable to collaboratively create change. In order to move closer to this definition of liberation, oppression must be actively fought against on all levels; the nature of social inequalities is that it is woven through and pervasively occupies the complex web of relationships and structures that determine what is right/normal (institutional oppression), the ways we feel about ourselves (internalized oppression) and others (interpersonal oppression), all while being infused and reinforced through cultural norms and media.

    We believe an anti-oppression lens should be applied to every level of work.

    We strive to be constantly aware and observant of group dynamics as they are shaped by social forces, and are ready to support groups to bring up (or bring out) important dynamics so as to support navigating these dynamics in an intentional way together.

  • We utilize a harm reduction approach as a facilitation style. Some of the ways this looks is: treating participants with dignity and respect and upholding the view that participants have to take responsibility and have ownership of their own actions and impact on the larger collective group and society. We balance an approach where participants determine their own participation while also gently challenging individuals and groups to move closer to a larger vision of growth and transformation, one that impacts the growth/transformation of society. We also work with groups to be creative in solution-finding; we know that there are often many paths to reach the same vision and they have varying effectiveness for different groups, at different times, and in different context. Lastly, we strive to listen to the true flow of the group, letting go of individualized outcomes/agendas - allowing participants to name what options exist as well as empowering them to identify new options.

  • We believe that trauma is an inherent side effect of oppression and is present in the tensions, conflicts, and microaggressions that face all communities, collectives, and organizations. By holding a nuanced understanding of trauma, how it looks/manifests as well as how to heal and process trauma, we structure workshops and spaces that account for a group’s potential trauma needs. This includes utilizing exercises and facilitation styles that center story-telling, allowing for layers, complexity, and contradictions. We infuse participants with their own intuition and body-based communication for observation and learning new behaviors. And lastly, our approaches are aware of and open to natural human reactions to fear and harm that arise when diving into deep the waters of oppression and its intersection with trauma.

  • PIC Abolition refers to the eradication of carceral approaches to justice that rely on punitive state systems and mentalities such as police, imprisonment, criminal legal systems, and public entities that are deeply tied to the carceral institutions. In our work, we reject punitive and punishment based responses to challenges and harm and instead promote approaches that identify healing and possibility for change. This includes prioritizing sustainable, accessible, and culturally specific strategies that invest in healthy futures for all.

  • Transformative Justice steps away from top down, one-solution oriented processes that respond to harm that are rooted in punitive and colonial systems. We center authenticity and accountability in all of our work. We center survivors and those directly impacted by harm and always believe survivors. We also know that harm is complex and often those who have caused harm have also experienced harm and are survivors themselves. This approach allows for the person or people who caused harm to learn about the impact of their behaviors and decisions on other people while also having the chance to be involved in determining informed and equitable accountability measures. We also support communities and organizations to address the conditions surrounding the harm as it rarely occurs in a vacuum. For true transformation to take place, there must be change on both the individual and communal levels.

  • We strive to maintain a safe and confidential environment where participants are able to share their truths without fear of repercussions outside of the space. As advocates who have worked in highly-confidential settings, we are practiced in maintaining confidentiality and practicing discernment in regards to containing sensitive information. We are staunchly anti-surveillance and limit surveillance by limiting identifying information in written documents, deleting notes that are no longer relevant, and we do not disclose any specifics of any of our projects with outside parties.