Training, Liberation and Transformation
BlackLine along with crisis listening and data collection (pertaining to negative public space encounters), provides technical assistance, training, and facilitation to organizations committed to leadership development, personal liberation, and community transformation.
Vanessa Green, M.A., Co-Founder and CEO
As a leadership coach and trauma informed trainer, she works with schools and other community-based organizations teams to identify core values, establish life sustaining community norms, and execute culturally responsive practices. Vanessa works to deconstruct the conditioning of white supremacy and dismantle institutional racism with a vision towards the evolution of human and planetary consciousness. She is also a cultural activist, published writer, and healing practitioner. Vanessa was influenced at an early age to take personal responsibility for making her community better and to confront all forms of oppression. As a youth leader she worked with community mentors to design and manage youth-centers. She majored in behavioral science and considered becoming a lawyer but organizing in and for her community was her life calling. Her graduate studies in Counseling Psychology specializing in Gender Diversity introduced her to group facilitation which has remained her passion. She has crafted life changing learning experiences for youth and adults nationally and internationally, including Haiti and Papua New Guinea. She was the senior instructor for the New York Model Batterer Program, which is a nationally and internationally known Batter Intervention Program for 18 years. She lives in San Diego County with her two children.
Definitions
Continuous Improvement Process
A four-part process, Plan, Do, Study, Act (PDSA), that ensures an alignment of strategies and tools with a desired change. It begins by identifying a problem that requires a solution and a clear articulation of the intended change. The process includes cycles of planning, executing, analyzing the results, and adjusting the plan. Any change requires several cycles of the PDSA process
Trauma Informed
Trauma-informed care means treating a whole person, taking into account past trauma and the resulting coping mechanisms when attempting to understand behaviors and treat the people we serve. The Five Guiding Principles are; safety, choice, collaboration, trustworthiness and empowerment. Ensuring that the physical and emotional safety of an individual is addressed is the first important step to providing Trauma-Informed Care.
Transformative Justice
The current punitive criminal justice system takes control, responsibility, healing, and accountability away from victims and offenders and instead gives them a powerless and victimizing experience. Transformative justice, however, views conflict not from the lens of the criminal justice system, but from the community; as such, those involved in the conflict are seen as individuals rather than victims or offenders. Moreover, transformative justice addresses oppression by systems of domination, such as racism, sexism, homophobia, ageism, elitism, classism, and ableism within all domestic, interpersonal, global, and community conflicts. In short, transformative justice is restorative justice plus social justice.
Transformative justice expands the social justice model, which challenges and identifies injustices, in order to create organized processes of addressing and ending those injustices. Transformative justice and social justice work together in addressing this need. Transformative justice also builds off the principles of restorative justice in order to address experiences of oppression within mediation. Transformative justice argues that we are all involved in complex relationships of oppressors and oppressed, domination and dominated.
I may be the oppressed in one situation, but I may be the oppressor in another situation. I may be the victim from one perspective, but I may be the offender from another perspective. Transformative justice is not about destroying and building anew, and it’s not about creating win-lose solutions common to social revolutions in which the oppressed become the new oppressors (Skocpol, 1995). Instead, transformative justice asks that everyone and everything change— we as individuals, as well as our systems, structures, and relationships.
Transformation in Action Services and Activities
Facilitate one day or half day training on issues of oppression, specializing in Sexual Assault/Rape, Domestic Violence and Racism.
Facilitate 4-6 one-hour sessions of staff development
Conduct 3 planning meetings with ED to facilitate continuous improvement changes processes
Provide technical assistance related to group dynamics, challenges, and solutions for conflict resolution
Cost for Services
$750 half day, $1,400 full day Training. Staff development sessions $100 per session.
Travel and lodging for the maximum two people will be provided by contract agency/organization.