This is the first episode of our Creative Interventions series.

In this series, we will explore the Creative Interventions Toolkit, which provides tools, resources, and a model for community interventions in interpersonal violence. We’ll go section-by-section and talk to some of the folks whose work served as the source material for this project.

You can find digital versions of the Creative Interventions Toolkit or purchase a physical copy by visiting www.creative-interventions.org.

According to their website, “Creative Interventions provides vision, tools and resources to help anyone and everyone create community-based, collective responses to domestic, family, and sexual violence. The community-based approach centers those closest to and most impacted by harm, honors their expertise, and builds collective knowledge and power as the solution to violence.”

The CI Toolkit has been around for a while now but AK Press released it in print for the first time last December. So, while we’ve talked about it in previous episodes, we wanted to use this occasion to spend more time with it in the hopes of spreading some of the tools, frameworks, skills, strategies, and roles in ending interpersonal violence that come out of this movement.

We’re starting this series off with a conversation with Mimi Kim and Rachel Herzing, setting the stage by talking about where the CI Toolkit came from, how it’s structured, and how it proposes intervening in violence and, importantly, how its community-centered approach differs from others.

Mimi Kim is the founder of Creative Interventions and a co-founder of INCITE! She has been a long-time activist, advocate and researcher challenging gender-based violence at its intersection with state violence and creating community accountability, transformative justice and other community-based alternatives to criminalization. As a second generation Korean American, she locates her political work in global solidarity with feminist anti-imperialist struggles, seeking not only the end of oppression but of the creation of liberation here and now. Mimi is also an Associate Professor of social work at California State University, Long Beach and Co-Editor-in Chief of Affilia. Her recent publications include “The Carceral Creep: Gender-Based Violence, Race, and the Expansion of the Punitive State, 1973-1983” (2020) and “From Carceral Feminism to Transformative Justice: Women of Color Feminism and Alternatives to Incarceration” (2018). She is currently working on a restorative justice pilot project addressing domestic and sexual violence in Contra Costa County, California.

Rachel Herzing has been an organizer, activist, and advocate fighting the violence of surveillance, policing and imprisonment since the 1990s. Rachel was the director of research and training at Creative Interventions. Rachel was also the executive director of Center for Political Education, a resource for political organizations on the left, progressive social movements, the working class and people of color, and a co-director of Critical Resistance, a national organization dedicated to abolishing the prison industrial complex.