AAPI Restorative Justice Network

Asian American & Pacific Islander Restorative Justice Network

Are you a restorative justice practitioner, healer, conflict worker, circle-keeper, or facilitator? Do you have cultural heritage or ancestry from the Asia Pacific region? Are you interested in connecting and building community with other practitioners?

You are invited to join a community of Bay Area AAPI folks who practice restorative justice with the intention of drawing connections between our identities, cultural knowledge, and the work of transforming conflict and harm. We hope to:

Explore traditions of justice and peacebuilding from our ancestral homelands.
Bridge what we have learned in our families and ethnic communities with the field of restorative justice, elevating our unique perspectives.
Skill up people who work in AAPI communities to implement healing-based modalities for addressing harm.
Create a network of practitioners available for peer support and case referrals.

Origins

This network is being created through a California State grant to address violence against Asian American and Pacific Islander communities. Asian Law Caucus is stewarding the grant and working with a variety of partners, including The Ripple Collective to:

Expand the number of AAPI restorative justice practitioners in the Bay Area
Increase awareness of and comfort with restorative justice practices in local AAPI communities
Provide pathways for AAPI communities to access restorative justice processes as an alternative to the carceral system

AAPI Restorative Justice Network

The Asian American and Pacific Islander Restorative Justice Network (AAPI RJ Network) aims to bring together existing and emerging AAPI-identified restorative justice practitioners in the San Francisco Bay Area. Through this network, practitioners will connect, build community, share knowledge, and offer peer support while centering our AAPI identities and our work with AAPI communities. Specifically, we will explore traditions of peace and justice from our ancestral homelands and bridge our cultural knowledge and lived experiences with practices in restorative justice and related fields of conflict and harm response.

Additionally, members in the network may choose to receive case referrals through the Asian Law Caucus’ legal clinic, community partners, and/or fellow network members.

Our intention is to cultivate a spirit of care, generosity, and community within this network. We hope that through the network, we can establish mutually-reciprocal relationships of learning and support, both for emerging and established practitioners.

Opportunities for Engagement

As we build this network, there are several opportunities for engagement. We invite you to participate in some or all of these spaces depending on whether you are a current practitioner, or an emerging/not-yet practitioner. Please note, the dates listed may change over the course of this project.

1. In-Person Practitioner Gathering (August 2024)

This gathering is intended for current RJ practitioners.
Engage in meaningful conversations with fellow practitioners about what it means to practice RJ from an AAPI lens, and to work directly with AAPI communities impacted by violence or harm. Out of this gathering and the virtual follow up sessions, we will co-create a document that lifts up the emergent themes from our collective conversations.
5-hour gathering, held in the East Bay.
Includes lunch and $200 stipend.

2. Three Virtual Follow-Up Sessions (October - December 2024)

Continue conversations following the in-person gathering about practicing RJ from an AAPI lens and working with AAPI communities. Following the virtual follow-up conversations, we will co-create a document that highlights the emergent themes and insights that may be applied in our work and shared with Asian Law Caucus/Transformative Grant partners.
2 hours per session, held via Zoom.
$100 stipend per session.

3. Restorative Justice Training for Emerging Practitioners (February 2025)

This training series is intended for new and emerging practitioners, community workers, educators, therapists and/or community-based service providers working directly with AAPI communities. The goal is to increase the number of AAPI-identified RJ practitioners in the Bay Area.
Themes and insights from the in-person practitioner gathering and virtual follow-up sessions will be incorporated into this training.
Two-day intensive experiential workshop.

4. Community of Practice Monthly Meet-Ups (April to August 2025)

Monthly virtual meetings for both current and emerging practitioners.
Opportunity to build relationships and continue conversations and practices for bridging our cultural knowledge and the work of transforming conflict and harm.
Once per month, 1.5 hours. Held via Zoom.

Interested?

Please fill out an interest form and we’ll be in touch with you.

Interest Form

Who Are We?

Elli and Tati met through leading restorative justice trainings for K12 school leaders and staff, and have continued our partnership through Partners for Collaborative Change in holding organizations with care as they work through the conflict that emerges from processes of dismantling oppression. Together with The Ripple Collective, and supported by the Asian Law Caucus, we look forward to centering our Asian heritage in conversations around conflict and harm. We look forward to cultivating a space for AAPI-identified folks to lead the way in implementing restorative justice and deepening networks of safety and care.

Elli Nagai-Rothe (she/they) I am a multiracial Asian American with Japanese (yonsei),Chinese, and German ancestry, proudly raised in San Francisco. As a conflict transformation practitioner and co-founder of The Ripple Collective, I support communities and organizations to move through conflict in generative and racially just ways, creating space for honest conversations, and engaging in the self-reflective work required to transform ourselves and the world around us in service to our collective healing and liberation. I practice restorative justice, social justice mediation, and inter-group dialogue among other modalities. In the context of AAPI identity-based work, I have facilitated dialogues betweenJapanese and Chinese students on intergenerational legacies of violence and harm; partner with West County Mandarin School and their Mandarin-speaking educators to build a restorative school culture, support Asian Americans Advancing Justice Atlanta to practice relational ways of working together and moving through conflict, and am gratefully a member of the YES Asian Diaspora community actively exploring our ancestral lineages and doing our personal and collective healing to further our social justice work. I am a mama to a trampoline-jumping and basketball-loving 8 year old, and I helped to create an outdoor self-directed learning co-op in Richmond, CA as part of our family’s unschooling journey and my personal practice of parenting as liberation work. We live in a multi-generational family village with our extended family in El Sobrante, CA.

Tatiana Chaterji ( তাতিয়ানা চ্যাটার্জী) (she/her) I am a mixed race Bengali-American with rootsacross the India-Bangladesh border and in Finland. I integrate tools from multiple traditionsto recover human connection across people at different ends of historical injustice, andseeks opportunity for dialogue and accountability from systemic oppression and the waysit manifests in interpersonal relationships. Some of this has happened in South Asiancontexts in exploring the legacy of 1947 partition and beyond, healing wounds ofcolonization, displacement, and casteism, and other structural violence. My journey in thisfield began through involvement with INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, informed byfeminist, womanist, and abolitionist alternatives to the criminal-legal system. I consider myself alifelong student of conflict and harm response, grounded in transformative justice principles, andblessed to have been able to practice restorative justice in community, school, and carceral settings. I have trained in drama therapy and develop cultural resistance strategies through Theater of the Oppressed and healing through creative expression and performance.For the past 3 years, I’ve had the privilege of partnering with the Chinese Progressive Association to pilot restorative justice through meeting community members where they are and leveraging ground-level knowledge, skills, and perspectives to develop alternatives to the criminalization of wrongdoing. I co-authored the white paper, “Racial Healing and Community Safety Through Restorative Justice,” to illuminate the solidaristic efforts between Asian and Black communities in San Francisco to repair from violence and divisiveness. I’m thrilled to take this inspiring work a step further into developing a practitioner base and envisioning a rapid-response network for addressing harm.

When We Say “Restorative Justice”...

We honor ancient and ancestral ways of being that are not fully possible under capitalism, in the aftermath and enduring legacy of colonialism, where relationships are transactional and based in hierarchy, individualism, and meritocracy. We are committed to developing robust and viable alternatives to the criminalization of wrongdoing. We embrace members of transformative justice and healing justice communities in the shared struggle to pave the road for the world we deserve. This network welcomes all who currently or are beginning to facilitate processes between people at various points of harm; those who hold space in conflict and in crisis; who develop plans for accountability in interpersonal tension and violence; and otherwise work to shift the cultural paradigm around communal care and safety.