Stories for Power

Deana Lewis talks with Valli Kalei Kanuha, Mimi Kim and Andrea Ritchie, whose entry into the feminist of color movement spans the 1970’s, 1980’s and 1990’s. Together, they weave a long view of the abolitionist feminist movement that crosses generations, geographic expanses from Hawaii to Minnesota to Toronto and movements including HIV AIDS, anti-imperialist/Third World feminism, anti-police violence, and trans and queer justice sp...

Deana Lewis talks with Mariame Kaba, Erica Meiners, and Shira Hassan - three abolitionist feminists who discuss the work they created and built in Chicago from the early 2000’s through the early 2010’s. They reflect on their path from witnessing the failures of the mainstream anti-violence movement especially for survivors, young people, formerly incarcerated people and sex workers – to experimenting and documenting their work in w...

Our host, Deana Lewis, chats with Theryn Kigvamasudvashti, Kiyomi Fujikawa and Shannon Perez-Darby whose early community accountability work in Seattle rippled throughout the country. Their feminist abolitionist work inside and outside the evolving local domestic and sexual violence non-profit context in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s innovated so much of what we still use today. They discuss the critical work from Black-led, sur...

Join our host Deana Lewis as she interviews Esteban Kelly and Jenna Peters-Golden who were core collective members of Philly Stands Up that worked to restore trust and justice within the Philadelphia punk community starting in the early 2000’s. Philly Stands Up developed essential frameworks and practices for supporting accountability and change for people who cause harm while also supporting survivors in their rage and healing via...

Deana Lewis chats with Cara Page and Mia Mingus about their work in Atlanta during the early to mid 2000’s. They discuss the building of the Atlanta Transformative Justice Collaborative whose critical work intersected with the beginnings of the frameworks of healing justice and disability justice and the burgeoning reproductive justice movement. Mia and Cara talk about the impact of racism, Islamophobia, ableism, anti-immigrant, ho...

Join Deana Lewis as she speaks with our guests Rachel Herzing, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, and Mimi Kim about the essential organizing they were a part of to end violence without police, prisons and other carceral systems during the early to mid-2000’s in Oakland and San Francisco. They discuss the impact of the events of September 11, ongoing gentrification, and ableism on forming abolitionist politics and synergy with the w...

Host Deana Lewis speaks with abolitionist feminists kai lumumba barrow, Paula X. Rojas, and Ejeris Dixon about organizing in New York City during the late 90’s and early to mid 2000’s. Their work to end police violence was spurred by police murders of Black and Brown people in New York City, sexual violence by police that targeted young people in Brooklyn, and anti-queer and transphobic violence throughout the city. Their projects ...

In this episode, our host Deana Lewis, speaks with three Black feminist abolitionist organizers from Durham’s SpiritHouse. Nia Wilson, Mya Hunter and Alexis Pauline Gumbs discuss the Black and Brown survivor led group they formed called Ubuntu as a response to the Duke lacrosse rape case that led to the creation of one of the first Harm-Free Zones in the country. Their work as artists, educators and cultural organizers prompted a c...

In this episode, host Deana Lewis talks with micah hobbes frazier and Morgan Bassichis, two trans/nonbinary leaders of the transformative justice/prison abolition movement emerging out of radical organizing in queer/trans spaces in the early to mid-2000’s. micah, in his role at generationFIVE and in the harm reduction movement, and Morgan, formerly at Communities United Against Violence (CUAV), reflect on the centrality of queer/tr...

Welcome to Stories for Power! Creative Interventions and Just Practice Collaborative joined forces to re-launch the StoryTelling & Organizing Project (STOP) project to document and collect histories and stories about how we have been working to respond to violence without the use of prisons, police and other carceral systems. Deana Lewis, our podcast host and Just Practice Collaborative member, speaks with producers Mimi Kim, R...

What does transformative justice look like and where did it come from? Join us for a journey across local communities as we explore the last 25 years of building community accountability, transformative justice and abolitionist practice. Through the Stories for Power podcast, hosted by Deana Lewis, we trace the work of some of the architects and radical organizers of this current wave of work. 

This podcast is part of the relaunch o...