Restorative Justice Community Action

06/25/2026

Bayard Rustin was a cornerstone of the Civil Rights movement in the United States. He was a close advisor of Martin Luther King Jr. particularly for his expertise in nonviolent resistance. He was active in the Congress of Racial Equity and helped form the SCLC. Rustin was publicly outed as gay after being arrested for “moral cause”. While his s*xuality was pushed to the background during his time organizing for Civil Rights, he was very open about it and later became an activist in the AIDS and LGBTQ+ rights spaces. His work focused on coordination and coalition building, power that pushed legislation and action at a large scale. We honor Rustin for his work toward racial justice that is essential to the work of restorative justice.

06/24/2026

Larry Kramer was an outspoken writer and activist who brought attention to the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and 90s. He is best known for starting ACT UP, an organization that pushed the FDA to speed up research for AIDS treatments. Kramer wrote the play The Normal Heart that followed a gay Jewish writer and activist grappling with a disease spreading amongst gay men, which brought attention to the unique and painful ways that gay men and trans women experienced the AIDS epidemic. Kramer commanded attention through use of direct and accusatory language, as exemplified in his New York Native editorial “1,112 and Counting”. Through his art and his voice, Kramer played an enormous role in bringing awareness to AIDS

06/16/2026

This week we honor the lives and work of two more q***r social advocates. The first of which is Pidgeon Pagonis, an inters*x speaker, author, filmmaker, and photographer. Pagonis’s work shines light on inters*x experiences, joy, and challenges. They seek justice for their community through ending the harm of nonconsensual surgeries on inters*x children. Their work challenges binary thinking, creating space for inters*x healing through visibility, community, and institutional change. This work is important to Restorative Justice because it demonstrates how truth-telling about the harm done to inters*x people can open pathways to both interpersonal healing but also to systemic change.

06/12/2026

To celebrate Pride Month, we want to highlight the work and legacies of q***r scholars and activists who have contributed to restorative justice thinking and practices. Based on principles of interconnectedness, truth-telling, and healing, restorative practices are in conversation with many other justice movements that seek to transform social harm.

Audre Lorde was an author and self-described “black, le***an, mother, warrior, poet.” Her work explored her life experiences, part of an intersectional tradition confronting the injustices of racism, s*xism, classism, and homophobia. Some of her most well known works are Sister Outsider, Zami, The Cancer Journals, and The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House. Lorde was active in women’s liberation movements, civil rights and Black cultural movements, and struggles for LGBTQ equality.
Lorde was a professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and Hunter College.
Throughout her career, she received numerous accolades for her work including three honorary doctorates, the 1990 Bill Whitehead Memorial Award, and the 1991 Walt Whitman Citation of Merit. Lorde was poet laureate of New York from 1991-1992. Her legacy lives on through the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde award for distinguished works of le***an poetry. This Pride Month, we celebrate Audre Lorde’s truth-telling of the co-constitutive dimensions of identity, her work an intellectual life source for many building more just systems.

06/10/2026

To celebrate Pride Month, we want to highlight the work and legacies of q***r scholars and activists who have contributed to restorative justice thinking and practices. Based on principles of interconnectedness, truth-telling, and healing, restorative practices are in conversation with many other justice movements that seek to transform social harm.

Andrea Ritchie is a lawyer, writer, organizer, researcher whose work fights against the policing and criminalization of Black women, girls, trans, and gender nonconforming people. She has authored or co-authored 5 books including Q***r (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States that argues the policing of s*x and gender expression reinforces racialized and gendered patterns of harm within the criminal legal system. She is a co-founder of the Interrupting Criminalization initiative with Mariame Kaba, an organization that focuses on building capacity for transformative justice at a community level. Ritchie’s work provides resources, shares knowledge, and builds networks towards the goal of creating safe, empowered communities that disrupt the harm of punitive systems.

04/01/2026

We are having our April circles for Coming To The Table!
The Racial Healing Circle (April 15th at 6 PM) & The White Affinity Circle (April 22nd at 12 PM).

The CTTT Racial Healing Talking Circle provides a space for truth-telling and acknowledging the impacts of historical and racialized harm on our lives today.

The CTTT White Affinity Circle provides a brave, restorative space for white-identifying people to learn and grow together.

To learn more about these circles and to register please visit our webpage with the link provided below! We hope to see you there!

The Coming To The Table Group hosts two monthly virtual gatherings. They are the Racial Healing Talking Circle and the White Affinity Talking Circle. Join others invested in transforming psychological trauma into nonviolent power each month to help instigate these monthly CTTT gatherings is for all....

01/29/2026

In Minneapolis, Spectacular Cruelty Meets Authentic Community by Michael J. Lansing

A Historian of Democracy Shows How His City's Organizing Empowered Their Response to ICE

01/15/2026

01/13/2026