26 Preventative Healing & Accountability — BYP100 Healing & Safety Council (P Ife Williams & Chris Roberts)

Welcome to part 1 of a 2-part conversation with Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100). This week, Healing and Safety Council members Pascale Ife Williams (Ife) and Chris Roberts join us to share about preventative healing practices, aka how we can set up organizational practices and culture to reduce harm. They talk about what enthusiastic consent means for their organization, their commitment as an abolitionist organization to address harm without using the punitive systems we seek to dismantle, approaching healing with playfulness, creating openings for conflict, and the power of boundaries in creating Black-only space.

Next week in episode 27, you’ll hear our second conversation, where we’ll talk with Je Naè Taylor and Kai M Green about interventional practices for harm repair.

Download the corresponding practice (26 Practice: Deepening Community Agreements) to join Ife & Chris in a guided collective exercise to explore creating group cultures of safety, affirmation, trust, accountability, and validation. Practice episodes always publish on Thursdays.

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FEATURED IN THIS CONVERSATION:

“Stay Woke, Stay Whole: A Black Activist Healing Manual” (1st edition), BYP100 Healing and Safety Council’s internal manual (not currently available to the public)

Mary Hooks, Co-Director of Southerners on New Ground (SONG)

The song "I LOVE BEING BLACK" is sung here by Ife’s son, Kamari. The lyrics were written by JeNaè Taylor and music produced by Jonathan Lykes for BYP100. The song will be featured on the upcoming album "The Black Joy Experience: Freedom Songs and Liberation Chants from the Movement" which is scheduled to be released in July 2018. The lyrics are for singing by Black folks everywhere: “I love being Black, I said I love being Black! I love the color of my skin, it’s the skin that I’m in! I said I love being Black, I love the texture of my hair, and I rock it everywhere! I said I love being Black, I love being Black!”

ABOUT OUR GUESTS

BYP100’s Healing and Safety Council is a body of members dedicated to cultivating and supporting self-determined forms of healing, cultural production, and harm reduction. HSC exercises the conceptual tenants of the Healing Justice Framework; HSC activates this work through [a] Creative Healing Praxis which is focused on prevention, intervention, and transformation. This looks like the creation and provision of an ongoing base of preventative care modules, community based intervention to interpersonal conflict or violence, and transformative ritual through culture creation and visioning. More about BYP100: https://byp100.org/

(P) Ife Williams is a Chicag