September 25 OWL Global Wisdom Circle: Sonya Shah
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A monthly video-circle for sharing wisdom, experience and support among global citizens everywhere. |
Justice that Heals
How can we each, in our own communities, help bring healing to the one that Gandhi called “the last girl in the village?”
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Sonya Shah, social justice facilitator, professor, teacher, and community healer, has decades of experience teaching and facilitating restorative justice practices in schools, prison settings, communities, and in her own family. She is immersed in seeding restorative justice and trauma healing modalities locally and nationally, and ending the charity-based model of working in “marginalized” communities. Her experiences as a survivor of child sexual abuse are critical to her analysis and approach to this work.
In 2015 Sonya founded Project Ahimsa, aimed at ending sexual abuse of children.
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Sonya is an Associate Professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS). She earned a BA from Brown University and an MA in Film & Video from the Art Institute of Chicago, was awarded the prestigious Fulbright fellowship and Jacob Javitz fellowship. In conjunction with her work in the restorative/criminal justice field, she’s spoken on various radio programs including NPR, BBC, KPFA, and KQED.
In describing her work, Sonya says:
Gandhiji had a saying—that we should be creating policy for the last girl in the last village and then we’ll have equity. I feel like that’s the nexus of where I work/live— in the U.S.A the last girl is sometimes the man sitting in solitary, sometimes the small child being abused by her mother … and sometimes that family dangerously crossing the U.S./Mexico border with nothing in their pockets… I don’t think I have the right to talk about anyone else’s suffering, what I can talk about is my experience of witnessing suffering and transcendence in the most extreme places and what it teaches us about the human condition, in particular why we harm each other. And I can talk about what it teaches me about myself.
More about Sonya Shah at Awakin.org.
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Sonya: Working with men in prison
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Questions & Comments
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Videos
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Thank you Aryae for posting all of this, what a delight to see our circle captured here.
You’re welcome! And thank you again Sonya!
From Sonya: There is a documentary people might be interested in, called Hollow Water, about a native community in Manitoba, Canada that worked internally in their community to interrupt child sexual abuse using a restorative process. Just wanted people to know about that. Also— to the nature of the conversation I think its easy to be kind, generous, open and practice peacemaking when those around us are, but we’re really tested when what is around us is aggressive. I think its around that aggression that we get to look internally to see what internal work have we really done on our own thoughts, reactions.
From Len: PRE-DECIDING ABOUT VIOLENCE http://traubman.igc.org/pre-decidingaboutviolence.pdf
1. Opening check-ins
2. Sonya Shah: Introduction, “Last Girl in the Village”
3. “Through-line” of her restorative justice work
4. Sonya: Working with men in prison
5. Question: How do I experience violence in my context and respond from the heart? Nancy Margulies, Rabbi Diane Elliot, Libby Traubman, Hema Sarang-Sieminski
6. Usman Mohammed M. Inuwa, Wendy Berk, Len Traubman, Aryae, Offuh James Offuh
7. Marty Gross, Claudia Miller, Andy Peri
8. Sonia: Reflections on what was said
9. Closing check-ins