Building Your Abolitionist Toolbox

Everyday Resources for a Punishment-Free World
Graphic notes by Laura Chow Reeve / Radical Roadmaps


In It Together

with Mariame Kaba & Dragonfly Partners

The "In It Together" toolkit provides a step-by-step diagnostic tool to asses conflict in movement-building organizations and groups and provides strategies, tools, and resources to transform that conflict. It emerges from the decades of experience of the members of Interrupting Criminalization, Dragonfly Partners, and organizers and activists from around the country.

Aarati (pronounced Arthi) Kasturirangan is a long-time organizer, activist, educator and researcher in movements for justice. She helps changemakers learn to be the most powerful version of themselves in the face of systemic oppression within society, structural oppression within organizations, and internalized bias within people. A trained community psychologist, Aarati grounds her work in strategic systems thinking to promote community and individual-level healing.

Prior to joining the Dragonfly team, Aarati served for four years as the director of programs at Bread & Roses Community Fund, Philadelphia's leading social justice philanthropy, where she led the planning and implementation of initiatives that develop individual and group capacity to redistribute wealth and decision-making power in the nonprofit sector. Before that, Aarati worked as a Program Officer for Integration and Impact at the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), where she trained staff from around the world to plan and evaluate social change work. Aarati started her career as a crisis-counselor for survivors of sexual and domestic violence.

In 2002, Aarati co-founded the Chicago chapter of Incite! Women of Color Against Violence, and in 2013 she helped re-launch the Philadelphia chapter of 350.org. Aarati received a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from St. Mary's College in Maryland in 1999, and a Ph.D. in Community Psychology from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2008. She received her degree in stay-at-home parenting from 2008 to 2012. Aarati lives in South Philadelphia with her husband, two children and two dogs.

Mariame Kaba (she/her) is an organizer, educator and curator who is active in movements for racial, gender, and transformative justice. She is the founder and director of Project NIA, a grassroots abolitionist organization with a vision to end youth incarceration, and has co-founded multiple organizations and projects over the years, including Survived and Punished, the Just Practice Collaborative, and Interrupting Criminalization. Mariame co-authored the guidebook “Lifting As They Climbed” in 2017, and in 2019 she published her first children’s book, “Missing Daddy.”


LINKS

In It Together Website & Resource

Graphic Notes

Dragonfly Partners