Apply today online!
Or, download the application here and send it to <lawandsocialchangejam@gmail.com>
Our Invitation
“Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic.
Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”
– The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. 1
Join 30 justice advocates and creative change-makers
for an exploration of love and power at the very first
Law and Social Change Jam
April 29 to May 3, 2015
More legal professionals than ever are becoming catalysts for change in their legal practices and broader communities. How can we continue to transform ourselves, and the legal profession as a whole, into peacemakers, healers, and agents of change? Come join a conversation about the role and experience of law and social change, as we explore ways to sow seeds for a more thoughtful, loving, inclusive, healing, and healthful legal system.
Growing international movements for change in the law include Integrative Law, Restorative Justice, Transformative Law, Collaborative Law, Sharing Economy Law, Mindful Lawyering, Natural Justice and Natural Law. How do those of us working in these transformative movements get and stay connected, experience our interconnectedness, and make the collective impact that the world is calling for? How do we carry forward the legacy of our teachers, s/heroes and role models? How can those working in more traditional legal realms incorporate all these ideas and both remain true to their core values and remain the best advocates for their clients? And how do we care for ourselves and each other as part of a profession with such high rates of burnout, stress, and anxiety?
These are some of the questions that will bring together 30 diverse legal professionals for five days of personal inquiry, skills-sharing, and movement-building. Add your piece to the first ever Law and Social Change Jam!
“Discourage litigation. Persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever you can. Point out to them how the nominal winner is often a real loser — in fees, expenses, and waste of time. As a peacemaker the lawyer has a superior opportunity of being a good man. There will still be business enough.”
– Abraham Lincoln, July 1, 1850
Jam? What flavor of Jam?
A creative, live gathering of talented musicians who spontaneously create a new sound is called a Jam! The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. This Jam will be a place where visionaries and leaders make music with their passion, vision, openness, and courage. We’ll gather for five days of dreaming, connecting, growing, and learning together, within and throughout the law and social change movements. To date, more than 90 different kinds of Jams have been held on six continents, bringing together intergenerational leaders from more than 85 nations. This will be the first-ever Law and Social Change Jam!
So…What are we going to do?
We will aim to address three interconnected levels of transformation: the internal, the interpersonal, and the social/systemic. This is not a conference, seminar or a typical meeting. The Jam offers multiple opportunities for deep, holistic exploration, in which each person has something to offer and something to receive. We will spend time in circle, sharing stories, making art, playing games, moving, co-facilitating conversation, being outside, and will have lots of free time for spontaneity.
We will draw upon the power of collective visioning, storytelling, personal and interpersonal transformation, systemic analysis, and deep integration. Through activities, exchanges and just plain hanging out together, we’ll get a chance to take stock of what’s important in our lives and work. To see things from new perspectives. To align our vision and values. To face our fears and overcome our blocks. We’ll get to heal and to find new friends and partners in our journey.
Me?
Yeah! The Law and Social Change Jam will bring together 30 passionate, dynamic change-makers from diverse regions and backgrounds. The Jam will include lawyers, judges, professors, community organizers, advocates, and restorative justice practitioners from a spectrum of identities and worldviews (class, ethnicity, race, religion, sexuality, age, etc.). If you are looking to make justice more just and accessible, if you are open to learning from people different from you, if you are willing to push the edges of your comfort zone, then this gathering is for you.
Sweet! Now What?
Apply today!
Priority application deadline = December 1, 2014
Final application deadline = February 15, 2015
To keep the Jam intimate and participatory, we have a limited number of places available.
Tuition to participate in the Jam is $900, of which $500 covers your food and lodging costs at the Green Gulch Zen Center, and $400 covers program costs, which includes organizing time, honorarium for facilitators, supplies and materials. Note: this tuition does not include travel to California, but we can help with rides to and from the local airports.
Money should never be a reason to not apply; partial scholarships are available on a limited and first-come, first-serve basis. We also invite work trades and monthly payment plans. In fact, we figure out with each applicant the right combo of tuition, work trade and scholarship that can work with them. However, nothing happens without an application first. Remember, the sooner you apply, the better your chances of receiving a partial scholarship if you need one.
“I thought, well maybe, the law could catch up with changes in society, and that was an empowering idea.”
– Ruth Bader Ginsberg
Who Is The “We” Behind the Invitation?
Rachael Knight is an attorney with expertise in the areas of land tenure security, access to justice, and legal empowerment of the poor, working as the Community Land Protection Program Director for the legal empowerment organization Namati. She previously served as Director of the International Development Law Organization’s (IDLO) Community Land Titling Initiative, working to document and protect the customary land rights of indigenous groups in Uganda, Liberia and Mozambique. Rachael also worked as a consultant for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) from 2004 until 2009. From 2002 until 2007, she founded and ran medical-legal partnership programs in Northern California that located legal services in primary care medical clinics to increase access to justice for low-income urban communities. Rachael recently completed a book for the FAO entitled Statutory Recognition of Customary Land Rights in Africa. She was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship, and is a graduate of Brown University and the UC Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall).
Ngoc Nguyen is a holistic attorney, a mindfulness practitioner, and social entrepreneur committed to developing humanistic and innovative strategies in legal practice. A daughter of refugees and native of Santa Ana, CA, Ngoc has dedicated her professional career to assisting low-income and marginalized people.For the past three years, Ngoc has spent her time running start- ups and discovering ways that technology and social enterprise values can expand legal services to underserved communities.
Most recently, Ngoc co-founded and served as Chief Program Officer at Civic Legal Corps (CLC), a legal social enterprise fellowship program that empowers young attorneys to restore and expand access to justice for low- and moderate-income people. Prior to CLC, Ngoc co-founded a holistic general practice law firm based in Los Angeles, CA, where she provided accessible humanistic legal representation to low and moderate income people. She also helped co-found the Western Gate Roots and Wings Foundation (www.wgrw.org), an innovative nonprofit assisting at-risk youth and veterans with life stage development through Rites of Passage ceremonies. She received her J.D. from Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, CA, and her B.A. in Political Science from the California State University, Long Beach, CA. She currently lives in Manhattan and recently celebrated her first year wedding anniversary.
Chris Tittle is passionate about cultivating more democratic and place-based models for building community resilience. As a deep ecologist, barefoot lawyer-in-training, and local economies advocate, he currently serves as the Director of Organizational Resilience with the Sustainable Economies Law Center, an Oakland-based legal organization creating a new legal landscape that supports grassroots economic empowerment. At SELC, his work focuses on community currencies, rethinking housing and land ownership, and bringing principles of social and economic justice into non-profit funding strategies. As an advocate of self-directed (and debt-free) education, he is also training to become a lawyer through the California Law Office Study program, a practice-based alternative to law school. Chris completed an MA in Economics for Transition at Schumacher College (UK), where his dissertation explored permaculture and a Rights of Nature framework as more culturally-appropriate and transformative responses to climate change adaptation in the Global South. He has worked with youth in the South Bronx, taught English in Japan, and explored mystical Islam in Senegal. Once, on a whim, he traversed 3/4 of the globe without stepping foot on a plane. His writing can be found on Shareable.net, MNN.com, and his blog at oaktreegarden.wordpress.com.
Shilpa Jain is currently rooting herself in Oakland/Berkeley, CA, where she serves as the Executive Director of YES!. YES! works with social changemakers at the meeting point of internal, interpersonal and systemic change, and aims to co-create a thriving, just and balanced world for all. Prior to taking on this role, Shilpa spent two years as the Education and Outreach Coordinator of Other Worlds and ten years as a learning activist with Shikshantar: The Peoples Institute for Rethinking Education and Development, based in Udaipur, India, where she served as coordinator of the Swapathgami (Walkouts-Walkons) Network. She has researched and written numerous books and articles and facilitated dozens of transformative leadership gatherings with hundreds of young leaders from over 50 countries. She is passionate about dance and music, organic and natural farming, upcycling and zero waste living, asking appreciative questions and being in community.
J. Kim Wright is a lawyer who now travels the world as an advocate and ambassador for transformative approaches to the law. She is constantly on the move serving as “a butterfly with a cause,” touching down wherever there is active effort to bring about radical change in the legal profession. She serves as a cross pollinator amongst lawyers active in restorative justice, peacemaking, therapeutic jurisprudence, holistic law, contemplative practices, and many other expressions of this new direction in the practice of integrative law. Mediation over litigation, rehab over prison for drug offenders, conscious contracts, and collaborative law are a few other examples of innovative transformations of legal systems throughout the world.
Judi Cohen has been practicing since 1984 and teaching since 2010. In 1993, Judi took an intensive mindfulness course and began an inquiry into how mindfulness practice could help heal the law. Since the mid-1990’s, she has participated in mindfulness workshops and retreats as a student and as a teacher, including over 100 days of silent practice, looking into this and other inquiries around mindfulness and law. In 2009, Judi founded Warrior One and created a training called Essential Mindfulness for Lawyers (EML), bringing together the practices of mindfulness and law to help lawyers cultivate greater wisdom and compassion for themselves, their clients and the profession. She now dedicates her efforts to bringing EML trainings to lawyers, judges, law professors and law students in public courses; at law firms, district attorneys’ office, public defenders’ offices, in-house corporate legal departments, and bench and bar conventions; and at Golden Gate University School of Law.
Jeff Carolin is a criminal defence and tenant lawyer in Toronto, Canada. His practice is primarily aimed at serving those people who cant pay for a lawyer out of pocket. Before setting up his own shop, Jeff had the opportunity to work at three legal outfits that all dedicate their legal expertise to some kind of socially just outcome: Pivot Legal Society in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, a community legal clinic called Parkdale Community Legal Services in Toronto,, and at the downtown Toronto public interest civil litigation firm of Klippensteins Barristers & Solicitors. When Jeff is successful at not letting casework overwhelm the rest of his life, he pitches in with a grassroots group called CLAY (Collaborative Legal Play) which supports community groups through a combination of creative facilitation (including theatre) and legal knowledge where necessary. He’s also a member of the Immigration Legal Committee (a legal migrant justice group) and the Law Union of Ontario. Previous to entering the whole law world,, Jeff was involved with solidarity projects in Bolivia and Guatemala. Jeff wants to know to how to achieve horizontal and vertical alignment as a practicing lawyer; the trickiest part so far is figuring out what that those words even mean.
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1“Where Do We Go From Here?” speech given August 16, 1967, 11th Convention of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Atlanta, GA