tools for fostering connection

Let's Talk from Teaching Tolerance

Educators play a crucial role in helping students talk openly about the historical roots and contemporary manifestations of social inequality and discrimination. Learning how to communicate about such topics as white privilege, police violence, economic inequality and mass incarceration requires practice, and facilitating critical conversations with students demands courage and skill.This guide offers classroom-ready strategies you can use to plan discussions and to facilitate these conversations with your students.

Guide to Respectful Conversations from Repair the World

Your goal as the facilitator should be to create a space in which participants can express and listen to each other’s lived experiences and where both their experience and someone else’s are incorporated into a larger communal narrative. This guide holds suggestions about how to create that space.

Fumbling Towards Repair by Mariame Kaba and Shira Hassan

Fumbling Towards Repair is a workbook that includes reflection questions, skill assessments, facilitation tips, helpful definitions, activities, and hard-learned lessons intended to support people who have taken on the coordination and facilitation of formal community accountability processes to address interpersonal harm & violence.

Holding Change by adrienne maree brown

Holding Change is about attending to coordination, to conflict, to being humans in right relationship with each other, not as a constant ongoing state, but rather as a magnificent, mysterious, ever-evolving dynamic in which we must involve ourselves, shape ourselves and each other. The majority of the book is sourced from brown’s twenty-plus years of facilitation and mediation work with movement groups.

Transformative Justice: A Curriculum Guide from Project Nia

A resource guide to discuss transformative justice with youth, neighbors, colleagues, and friends.

Critical Practices for Social Justice Education from Teaching Tolerance

This critical practices guide offers practical strategies for creating a space where academic and social-emotional goals are accomplished side by side. It also provides valuable advice for implementing culturally responsive pedagogy and describes how teachers can bring anti-bias values to life

The Creative Interventions Toolkit

This toolkit contains a basic model for violence intervention, useful information, worksheets, and stories for anyone interested in carrying out a community-based intervention to violence.