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ABOUT US

The Ahimsa Collective works to address harm in ways that foster wholeness for everyone. Our north star goals are to replace systems of punishment with paradigms grounded in healing, relationship, and love. To get there, we engage with deep trauma healing and restorative approaches while being grounded in anti-oppression. We work in deep community with people who have committed an act of violence, survivors of violence, and families impacted by harm. In all of our work, we center agency, liberation, dignity, and transformation. 

 

Our work intersects with restorative justice, transformative justice, healing justice, and ending sexual violence movements.

WHAT GUIDES US

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  • We are a collective that sees relationships as sacred

  • This is the place to talk about the hardest thing you ever did and the hardest thing you ever experienced and dismantle shame

  • Harming less, healing more (especially the shame filled stuff, like sexual harm)

  • We center both healing and diving into power and oppression

  • Healing is connected to personal and collective liberation

  • There is no one curriculum, one way, one DVD that can capture the spirit of transformation—we honor the agency of each person and the multiple ways of being, healing, and transforming  ​

  • We strive towards a culture of belonging​

  • We value opportunities to deepen relationship through conflict  ​

  • We recognize and live in the creative dynamic and sometimes tension between:

    • agency of each person and needs of a group

    • the big dream and the reality of what we can accomplish in one life cycle

    • the possibility of expansiveness and reality of concreteness

    • emergence and infrastructure​

  • The Ahimsa spirit is not limited to a physical organization and can outlive us​

  • We have faith that whatever we are trying to accomplish, we have what it takes to get through it together - #wewillfigureitout​

  • We are committed to self accountability and accountability to the work

  • We recognize there is no other, only another

  • We move at the speed of relationships while acting with the urgency of tomorrow

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Ahimsa

What does Ahimsa Mean?

Ahimsa is a Sanskrit word that means non-harm, and non-violence.  Ahimsa is more than a word, it is the concept of abstaining from violence in one’s mind, body, spirit, actions and thoughts. It is not nonviolence that is birthed as the antidote to violence, it is about deep cultivation of a spirit to cause no harm.

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