Priority application deadline = February 28, 2019
Final application deadline = April 25, 2019
OUR INVITATION
“Justice is what love looks like in public.” – Dr. Cornel West
Join 30 advocates for an exploration of
love, justice, healing, and the law at the 5th annual…
Law and Social Change Jam
June 25-30, 2019
The Watershed Center
Millerton, New York
“Hurt people hurt people,” as the old adage goes. This insight sheds light on our legal and political institutions, how we treat each other within these institutions, and the impact that these systems are having on individuals, communities, and broader society. It also seems more relevant than ever in our fractured, hostile, and climate-impacted world.
We believe that “healed — and healing — people heal people”, and that collectively, humans have the capacity to heal our world.
As more and more lawyers and legal professionals are called into the service of social transformation, we invite you to engage in the soul-nourishing and healing work of personal reflection, deep listening, and community-building as a way to strengthen ourselves and our collective capacity for the work we are doing now and on the road ahead.
We invite you to come seeking common ground while acknowledging the importance of difference; to arrive with openness and curiosity while acknowledging that this can be hard; and to be ready to tune in more to the wisdom of the heart, body, and soul, along with the analytical mind. We invite you to bring all of who you are, to see the whole in everyone else, and as a collective, to explore how we are walking similar, parallel, and diverging paths toward a better future.
During our time together, we will share where we are in our lives and work, and reflect on whether that place still serves us, the people we work with and care about, and the world. We will also explore how to care for ourselves and each other in a profession plagued by burnout, anxiety, depression, substance abuse, and suicide.
And we will engage, create, tangle & untangle, challenge & be challenged, struggle, and dream, in ways we cannot even predict.
Come join a growing community of law jammers who are building a more just, loving, inclusive, mindful, and healing legal system and world, at the 5th annual Law and Social Change Jam.
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 we will collectively make music with our passion, vision, openness, and courage. We’ll gather for five days of reflecting, connecting, growing, and learning together, across a wide variety of connections to law, social change, and social justice. To date, more than 150 Jams have been held on six continents, bringing together intergenerational leaders from more than 85 nations.
So… what are we going to do?
The Jam is a chance to practice the world we want to see. This is not a conference, seminar, retreat, or typical meeting.
Instead, we draw from all of your applications and the inquiries alive in each of us, put them in a big pot, stir them around, and come up with a flow of facilitated activities that will take place each morning, afternoon, and evening–with lots of down time between sessions for rest, reflection, and spontaneity. We will spend time in circle, sharing stories, making art, playing games, moving, engaging in challenging and generative conversations, and being outside in nature.
This means that our facilitation team doesn’t plan any specific content to transmit to you. Our facilitators are participants as well; they don’t have all the answers (or maybe any of them!). What they do offer are a variety of ways for each of us to arrive at our own answers — and new questions too! We’ll use a number of processes and tools and experiment with different ways of being together, all aimed at strengthening our self-awareness, our ability to communicate and work through conflicts, and our ability to vision and to put these pieces together. We see the Jam as a co-learning journey of the individuals’ and collective experiences, questions, powers, differences, and more.
Throughout all of our work and play together we’ll be addressing three interconnected dimensions of transformation: the personal, the interpersonal, and the systemic. Paraphrasing what adrienne maree brown writes in her book Emergent Strategy, we believe that the patterns we set on a small scale set the patterns for the whole system.
We’ll get a chance to take stock of what’s important in our lives and work, see things from new perspectives, align our vision and values, face our fears, and overcome our blocks. We’ll work towards healing ourselves so we can help to heal the relationships and systems around us. And we’ll find new friends and partners in our journey.
Me?
Yeah! The Law and Social Change Jam will bring together 30 passionate people from diverse regions and backgrounds. The Jam will include lawyers, legal workers, law professors, conflict resolution professionals, law students, community organizers, advocates, and restorative justice practitioners from a spectrum of identities and worldviews (class, ethnicity, race, religion, gender identity, sexuality, age, ability, etc.). If you are looking to make justice more alive and accessible, if you feel called to learn 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 = February 28, 2019
Final application deadline = April 25, 2019
To keep the Jam intimate and participatory, we have a limited number of places available.
Tuition to participate in the Jam is offered on a sliding scale of $500 – $1200. The actual cost of participation is $950, of which $475 covers your food and lodging costs at the Watershed Center for five nights, and $475 covers program costs, which includes organizing time, honoraria for facilitators, supplies, and materials. We invite you to give what you can and to give generously, as tuition costs provide our vendors and facilitators with equitable compensation, and any surplus supports partial scholarships for other participants. If you pay more than the at-cost $950 amount for tuition, that extra amount is tax-deductible. Note: this tuition does not include travel to the Watershed Center but we can help with organizing carpools to and from the local airports, train stations, and other nearby locations.
Money should never be a barrier to applying: partial scholarships are available on a limited and first-come, first-serve basis. We also invite work trades and monthly payment plans. We aim to figure out with each applicant the right combination of tuition, work trade, and scholarship that can work for you. The sooner you apply, the sooner we can figure out a plan that works for you and the better your chances are of receiving a partial scholarship if you need one.
Children are also more than welcome to come to the Jam. We will work out specific childcare plans with you, after getting a clearer sense of the needs of your family.
And for Law and Social Change Jam alumni who want to come back, please let us know and we’ll send you a separate registration process. Please keep in mind that as much as we’d love to have everyone back, we want to make this experience available to as many interested people as possible, which may mean we are unable to accommodate some alums. We’ll be considering the length of time since your last jam, the composition of new participants, and your application itself. Please send us an email at lawandsocialchangejam@gmail.com for more info.
“No real social change has ever been brought about without a revolution… revolution is but thought carried into action.”
— Emma Goldman
Who Is The “We” Behind the Invitation?
We are a diverse group of lawyers and legal professionals called to come together to organize and facilitate around the theme of law and social change. Each of us is engaged in our own projects outside this Jam, with particular interests in: mindful lawyering, restorative justice, solidarity economies law, racial justice and social equity, collaborative law, criminal defense, movement/community lawyering, among many more.
The organizers and facilitators of the Law and Social Change Jam are:
Parag Rajendra Khandhar is a principal in the solidarity economies law firm Gilmore Khandhar, LLC, and co-founder of the Asian American Solidarity Economies Network. Each is dedicated to building a resilient, radically inclusive economy centering upon principles of race and social equity, sustainability, and valuing people and the planet over profit. He teaches in the Small Business and Community Economic Development Clinic at George Washington University Law School. He has worked over the past 20 years in NYC, DC, and Baltimore with communities in direct and emergency relief services after September 11th, data advocacy, technical assistance, as a community lawyer focused on tenants’ rights and language access, and now as a solidarity economies practitioner. He has spent much of that time seeking and making Asian America, his beloved and fractured archipelago nation on street corners, in living rooms, DIY spaces, in the dreams of his collaborators and community artists, and as a facilitator-participant in the API Jam. He’s also the proud co-parent of a dynamic elementary school future Jammer.
Chris Tittle is a facilitator, organizer, and lawyer focused on land and housing justice, participatory governance, and co-creating post capitalist / post white supremacist futures. He is Director of Organizational Resilience at the Sustainable Economies Law Center, a democratically-run nonprofit in Oakland, CA supporting communities to create and control their own sustainable sources of housing, food, energy, and livelihoods. At the Law Center, he co-leads or contributes to the Law Center’s Housing, Worker Self-Directed Nonprofits, Farmland, and Money & Finance Programs. He became a lawyer without going to law school through the California Law Office Study Program, passing the California Bar in 2018. Prior to training as a barefoot lawyer, Chris completed an MA in Economics for Transition at Schumacher College, an international transformative learning center near Totnes, UK. His dissertation explored community-determined responses to climate disruption in the Global South. Chris also organizes with the Economic Development without Displacement Coalition and Defenders of Mother Earth – Huichin in Oakland, co-founded the Association of Legal Apprentices, and serves on the Board of New Economy Coalition and Oakland Communities United for Equity and Justice. He previously did youth leadership development in the South Bronx, taught English in Japan, and explored Islam in Senegal; and in between those two experiences, he traversed 3/4 of the globe by way of rail, sail, foot, and thumb.
Judi Cohen is a lecturer at Berkeley Law, where she teaches Mindfulness for Lawyers, and runs Warrior One, which offers mindfulness training for the legal profession to help relieve some of the suffering in the law, and that the law knowingly and unknowingly creates and perpetuates in society. Her programs integrate traditional mindfulness, contemplative neuroscience, and the psychology of the legal mind. Judi is also a lead teacher in Warrior One’s Mindfulness in Law Teacher Training, a bi-annual program for legal professionals interested in deepening their own practice and gaining the tools and confidence to offer mindfulness in law firms, legal organizations, and law schools. She leads two ongoing sitting groups: The Wake Up Call, Warrior One’s weekly, 20-minute online gathering of legal professionals bringing mindfulness solutions into the law, and the Sonoma Insight Meditation Sangha. She also provides leadership in the national mindfulness-in-law movement as a founding director of the Mindfulness in Law Society and as the chair of its Teachers Division. These days Judi believes more and more in the possibility of healing for lawyers and other folks working in the law, and in the idea that the law really can be an instrument of wisdom and compassion out in the world. Judi has been studying and practicing mindfulness since 1988, and lives in rural Sonoma.
As an inspirational force and dynamic educator, Ms. Kim Clark, Juris Doctor, brings a new approach to critical race theory, spirituality and social transformation. Her paper “Critical Race Theory, Transformation and Praxis.” Sw. L. Rev. 45 (2015): 795, tells of how she developed her method while a Changemaker Research Fellow at Pacific School of Religion, an Ashoka Changemaker University campus. Ms. Clark engages audiences with energetic workshops where she shares her methodology with legal and social change organizations seeking broader support for their legal social justice goals while staying true to their highest human potential. Her work has emerged from years of engagement with spiritual communities and practices and from her commitment to social justice. Kim invites her audience to grapple with the intricacies of injustice with its intellectual and emotional complexities and their interplay with the transdisciplinarity of race, sexual orientation, class, and spirituality. As a social entrepreneur with solutions to social problems and who seeks to make large-scale changes to society, Ms. Clark collaboratively assesses the possibility and design of critical alliances. As a leader in social innovation and changemaking in higher education, she creates a unity of natural, social and health sciences in a humanities context, to create an approach to solving systemic and institutional global inequity. Ms. Clark also teaches a series of courses at JFK University School of Law highlighting the intersectionality of law and spirituality.
Susan Brooks teaches and also oversees experiential and public service opportunities at the Kline Law School (Drexel University) in Philadelphia. Her teaching includes Family Law as well as innovative courses focusing on holistic representation, professional identity formation, reflective practice, effective communication, and access to justice. Susan has helped to create many community partnerships where law students receive intensive training and mentorship while providing pro bono legal services. She also helped establish a vibrant community-based legal clinic in West Philadelphia. Susan has a background in social work before attending law school, and has devoted much of her legal career to importing principles and practices from the field of social work into law. She has written extensively and has conducted workshops across the US and in several other countries to promote and help cultivate a relational approach to the law and legal practice.
Jeff Carolin is a criminal defence lawyer living in Toronto, Canada. He represents people who face multiple barriers to finding stability in their lives–and who often end up incarcerated and/or homeless as a result. And then, when he gets the chance, he loves to sit in circles. Hence the jam. But it’s more than just the circles. For Jeff, exploring the theatre of the oppressed and participatory community organizing traditions and attending jams has been a key part of discovering how he can–in this life, with this body, and with his experiences–engage around complex issues of racism, colonialism, inequality, and other forms of systemic oppression, without this work leading to further division, burnout, and in-fighting among people who are trying to build something new together. Lately, Jeff has been trying to fuse his criminal law experience and his passion for jamming by attempting to bring restorative justice practices into the criminal law world of Toronto. Although these attempts are nascent and it’s unclear what will come of them, he’s never felt more aligned. For a more legal-ly look at things you can check out jeffcarolinlaw.ca.
Demarris Evans teaches mindfulness through the lens of healing and human potential. She has worked as a trial attorney at the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office for the last 20+ years, and in this capacity, Demarris has represented clients in the Clean Slate Program, Collaborative Court Programs, including Drug Court and Community Justice Court, Juvenile Delinquency, and the Felony Unit, including handling all aspects of felony case litigation. In addition to other assignments, she is currently working as the Racial Justice and Equity Attorney for the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office as well as the Chairperson of the Racial Justice Committee. Demarris was an instructor in the Criminal Justice Department at the University of Phoenix for several years. She is also a member of the San Francisco Bar Association’s Criminal Justice Task Force where she chairs the Bias and Policing Subcommittee. She previously served on the San Francisco Bar Association’s Judiciary Committee. She has served on the Attorney Panel of California Bar Examination Graders for over a decade. She is a graduate of the Gerry Spence Trial Lawyers College and is a graduate of the Warrior One Mindfulness in Law Teacher Training Program of 2016. Demarris has been practicing mindfulness since the late 1990’s, and has sat numerous silent, multi-day retreats. Demarris is currently enrolled in the Dedicated Practitioner Program at Spirit Rock Meditation Center and Communities Rizing Yoga and Meditation Teacher Training Program for People of Color. Demarris has led numerous Mindfulness trainings, and currently leads a weekly sitting meditation practice at the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office. She is also on the Board of Directors for the Mindfulness in Law Society and is the Head of the Criminal Law Division.
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. Shilpa has not trained as lawyer, though her grandfather was one and she has married into a family of lawyers. She has also received a copious amount of legal education through TV shows and movies.
We are excited to see your application soon!
If you have any questions about the Law and Social Change Jam, please reach us at lawandsocialchangejam[at]gmail.com
We are looking forward to Jamming with you!
Demarris, Kim, Chris, Parag, Judi, Jeff, Susan and Shilpa
Voices of YES! Law Jam AlumniMy love affair started when I read the application questions. I knew I at least wanted to learn from the facilitators. I also trusted the people chosen to come would be just as amazing. It was truly amazing to meet 20 wonderful souls. People invested in making the world a better place. People invested in their own healing and supporting the healing in others.” — Saj Rahman, 36, Program Director, Institute for Transformative Mentoring, New York
“I learned a language and a whole new way of being and feel excited to integrate the experience into my work and relationships. I am committed to spreading the Jam and want to participate again and support others.” — Lisa Bliss, 55, Clinical Law Professor and Associate Dean, Atlanta
“The Jam was an incredible space to connect, to look within, to be challenged and to share LOVE. I know it has changed me in ways yet to be realized, and I look forward to experiencing how it unfolds, shows up, and challenges me to keep growing, keep LOVING in the years to come. It has also enabled me to embrace being an Elder.” — Marjorie Silver, 70, Professor of Law, Touro Law Center, New York
“Thank you for making me see so clearly that from within myself I can find all that I need to be free and to change the world.” — Vibhu Sharma, 30, Lawyer, Toronto
“To say this experience has surprised me would be an understatement. It’s hard to convey in words the gratitude I have for the honesty, love, vulnerability, laughter, tears, and abundance I have given and received. In these challenging times, I needed to be reminded that humans are love.” — Shari Kulanu, 47, Sustainable Business and Legal Consultant, Oakland
“I have learned, observed, embodied practices of listening + holding space for the circle/community that will deepen my engagement with activism. I thank you for this gift.” — Chaumtoli Huq, Editor, Law@theMargins, New York City “Thank you for helping me learn and unlearn, wake up and fall asleep, remember a deeper truth. I am taking the lessons learned and the questions asked with me, passing them down the generations and continuing to stretch so that I can better support others in their stretching and growing.” — Yoana Tchoukleva, 30, Attorney, Organizer, and Restorative Justice Practitioner, Oakland
“I experienced a rawness and a realness with fellow folks from this “law community” that I never thought would be possible. I absolutely loved that this was a space to connect and (re-) discover who we are not just what we do. The law and social change jam is what radical community building looks like and feels like. Taking time to open our hearts (even a little), take off our masks and drop into our true selves was such a magical experience for me. I’m so grateful for the trust and tenderness of fellow jammers who let me see and appreciate them….I feel full, inspired, and incredibly grateful.” — Mayoori Malankov, 32, Immigration and Refugee Law and Poet, Ontario “You showed me the potential in any group of humans to become an incredible community of support, mutual love and joy. You’ve also taught me to tune into the wisdom of my body….” — Thomas Gagnon-van Leeuwen, 27, Educator and Laywer-on-Hiatus, Yellowknife
“In a room of impossibly magical and impressive people, I found my own magic….My intention was to share my voice. You heard it. You saw me.” — Kim Francisco, 28, Second Year Law Student, British Columbia |