Service to Justice (S2J) is a collective of social service providers, advocates, community members, artists, organizers, and justice-oriented institutions who recognize that the social service industry often perpetuates the current arrangement of power that maintains systemic poverty and structural racism.
In years past, S2J hosted conferences designed to confront some of the hard questions facing service providers, advocates, and organizers working for justice in DC. Some of these questions included:
How are we reproducing the values and outcomes of systems like white supremacy, patriarchy and capitalism in our daily work?
How can we balance our work in empowering low income residents to survive daily crises and addressing long-term structural solutions?
What tools do our organizations need to cede more power to impacted people?
How can we support transforming our organizations from a service to a justice model?
In 2018, we decided to take a more active role in helping folks learn to reshape the service sector.
Along with organizational consulting, leadership coaching, and facilitation, we now offer a bi-monthly training (Rooting Out Racism) designed to guide participants through the process of identifying the ways racism manifests in service & advocacy organizations, to develop anti-racist strategies for culture shift and outcomes, to contextualize our experiences and orgs within a systems perspective, and to engage creatively around the orgs and world we want to shape.
S2J organizes, teaches, and accompanies change agents to develop anti-racist analyses, build transformative relationships, make change from their seats in organizations, and commit to partnering for justice in our communities.