“JUSTICE IS WHAT LOVE LOOKS LIKE IN PUBLIC.” – DR. CORNEL WEST
Join us for an exploration of
love, justice, healing, and the law at the…
7th annual
LAW AND SOCIAL CHANGE JAM
October 28 – November 3, 2021
If you’re ready to Jam, the application awaits you!
And for Law and Social Change Jam alumni who want to come back, please apply here.
Applications due by October 11, 2021
“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 these systems are having on individuals, communities, and broader society. The insight seems especially relevant as we make our way through the COVID pandemic, a fractured and hostile society, and our climate-impacted world. We believe that “healed — and healing — people heal people,” and that collectively, humans have the capacity to heal our world.
As lawyers, legal professionals, and people connected to the law, regardless of our fields, we 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 are excited to gather with a group of about 25 to 30 committed people to dive deep into this moment, our roles in it, and the opportunities for collective liberation this moment brings.
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 set forth a vision of how we can each and collectively contribute to a more beautiful, interconnected world as we pick up during and after Coronavirus. At the jam, we will engage, create, tangle & untangle, challenge & be challenged, struggle & liberate, and love & dream, in ways we cannot even predict. The 7th annual Law and Social Change Jam will take place from October 28-November 3, 2021. We will be gathering in five shared sessions over the course of the Jam — from 9-11:30 am PST / 12-2:30 pm EST, starting Thursday, October 28th, Friday, October 29th, Saturday, October 30th, Monday, November 1st, and Wednesday, November 3rd.
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 to the wisdom of the heart, body, and soul, along with the familiar 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.
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 7th annual Law and Social Change Jam!
JAM? WHAT FLAVOR OF JAM?
A music jam is a creative, live gathering of musicians who spontaneously create new sound. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. This jam will be a place where we collectively make music with our passion, vision, openness, truth, and courage. We’ll gather for a week 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. Nearly 90 beautiful human beings specifically working in law and social justice have jammed together since 2015. Throughout 2020 and 2021, YES! has been offering online Jams all over the virtual world. You are invited to join us!
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 the applications and the inquiries alive in each of us on the leadership team, put them in a big pot, stir them around, and come up with a flow of facilitated activities that will take place each Zoom session – with lots of down time between sessions for rest, reflection, and spontaneity. We will spend time in (virtual) circle, sharing stories, making art, playing games, moving, engaging in challenging and generative conversations, and being outside in whatever small or large patches of nature are available to each of us.
This means that our facilitation team doesn’t pre-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 is a variety of ways for each of us to arrive at our own answers — and new questions. 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 put these pieces together. We see the Jam as a co-learning journey of the collective experiences, questions, powers, and differences of everyone who attends.
Throughout our work and play, 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 what we pay attention to grows and that what we practice at the small scale sets the patterns for the whole system. The global pandemic, political violence, and climate crisis are only some of the ways we see this insight unfolding right now — alongside resurgent social movements, flourishing networks of mutual aid, a growing body of transformative justice practice, and more.
At the jam, we will 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 passionate humans from diverse regions and backgrounds. It will include community organizers, advocates, restorative justice practitioners, law students, lawyers, legal workers, law professors, and conflict resolution professionals from a spectrum of identities and worldviews (class, ethnicity, race, religion, gender identity, sexuality, age, ability, and more). 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.
WHAT DO PAST PARTICIPANTS SAY ABOUT THE ZOOMY LAW AND SOCIAL CHANGE JAM?
SWEET! NOW WHAT?
Application Deadline: October 11, 2021
We are excited to be in this Zoomy Jam with you. To keep the Jam intimate and participatory, we have a limited number of places available (up to 25). We will be gathering in five shared sessions over the course of the Jam — from 9-11:30 am PST / 12-2:30 pm EST, starting Thursday, October 28th, Friday, October 29th, Saturday, October 30th, Monday, November 1st, and Wednesday, November 3rd. We will NOT have sessions on October 31st (Happy Halloween!) and November 2nd (Election Day). We are leaving space these days, both to integrate and rest, as well as for spontaneous optional offerings to emerge among our community, which will happen outside of our session times. We ask you to commit to attending all five of the shared sessions (for a total of 12.5 hours), and we invite you to leave as much space as possible throughout the rest of your week because we’ve found that much richness comes from participants self-organizing to meet online (or in person) in between sessions–whether it’s to connect and go deeper, hold a specific conversation on something we’re passionate about, share cooking tips, swap love stories, and whatever else!
Tuition to participate in the Jam is offered on a sliding scale of $100-$500. This covers our organizing time, honoraria for facilitators, and materials. We invite you to give what you can and to give generously, and any surplus supports partial scholarships for other participants. If you pay more than the at-cost $500 amount for tuition, that extra amount is tax-deductible.
Money should never be a barrier to applying. Partial scholarships are available on a limited and first-come, first-served 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. 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.
“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, facilitate, and support community-building 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 and transformative justice, solidarity economies law, racial justice and social equity, collaborative law, criminal defense, movement/community lawyering, and many more. The organizers and facilitators of the Law and Social Change Jam are:
John Lopez is still learning. He currently teaches with the National Public Defender Association (NAPD) and with Drexel Law. At NAPD, he trains on topics related to attorney self-care and mindfulness. At Drexel, John teaches writing to third year law students. John was first introduced to this transformative type of work when he started therapy in May 2018. Frustrated with the criminal justice system, he found tools in therapy that helped him heal from the trauma of the courtroom. Outside of work John focuses on growth, healing and connectedness. He’s trying to figure out how to stay healthy and help people. John’s passions include boxing, therapy, healing circles, reading and quality time with friends and family. Books like Just Mercy, My Grandmother’s Hands, Trauma Stewardship, The Body Keeps Score, and Until We Reckon have been transformative for him. John is trying to internalize the principles in this work and then figure out how to use them in his work.
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 mindfulness practice and gaining the tools and confidence to offer mindfulness in law firms, legal organizations, and law schools. She leads The Wake Up Call, Warrior One’s free, weekly, 20-minute online gathering of legal professionals bringing mindfulness solutions into the law (also a podcast), and 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 others working in the law, and in the idea that the law can be an instrument of wisdom and compassion in the world. Judi lives on unceded Coast Mewok and Southern Pomo lands, in what’s known to the US Postal Service as rural Sonoma, California.
Chris Tittle is a facilitator, organizer, lawyer, and dad focused on economic democracy, participatory governance, and co-creating liberatory futures. He is Director of Land and Housing Justice at the Sustainable Economies Law Center, a democratically-run nonprofit supporting communities to create and control their own sustainable sources of housing, food, energy, and livelihoods. Chris 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, where he did action research at Occupy London and explored community-determined responses to climate disruption in the Global South. Chris has also organized around fossil fuel divestment, anti-displacement, food justice, and indigenous sovereignty in California; co-founded the South Carolina Housing Justice Network; and serves on the Boards of New Economy Coalition and Fresh Future Farm. He previously 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. He currently lives and loves near the Ashley River on the ancestral lands of the Edisto Kusso-Natchez (Charleston, South Carolina).
Demarris Evans works as a Restorative Justice Assistant District Attorney in San Francisco. She is also a lecturer at San Francisco State University in the Department of Race and Resistance Studies. Her focus is on racial equity and restorative justice. Demarris worked as a trial attorney in Public Defense for over 20 years. She lead the racial justice unit in the San Francisco Public Defenders Office and practiced in several different collaborative courts with a restorative justice lens. She has previously worked as an instructor in the Criminal Justice Department at the University of Phoenix. Demarris was a member of the San Francisco Bar Association’s Criminal Justice Task Force where she chaired the Bias and Policing Subcommittee. Demarris also teaches mindfulness through the lens of equity, healing and human potential. She is a graduate of the Gerry Spence Trial Lawyers College, the Warrior One Mindfulness in Law Teacher Training Program and the Dedicated Practitioners Program at Spirit Rock Meditation Center. She is a co-facilitator for the Law and Social Change Jam and the Re-Storying Justice Jam offered by YES! And she is on the Board of Directors for the Mindfulness in Law Society where she heads the Equity and Inclusion Division.
Susan Brooks lives and works in Philadelphia. She has over 25 years of experience as an educator, facilitator, presenter, and trainer in the areas of experiential learning, relational practices, professional development, civic engagement, and cross-cultural communication., She is a Professor at the Drexel University Kline School of Law, where she focuses much of her time on efforts to create a culture of belonging and wellbeing. Susan has written extensively and has conducted workshops in the U.S. and across the globe to promote “Relational Lawyering,” an integrative humanistic approach to legal practice and education, which includes habits of mind and tools to build and strengthen emotional intelligence, cross-cultural lawyering, and resilience. She is also a leader in the field of Therapeutic Jurisprudence and is an inaugural member of the Global Advisory Council for the International Society of Therapeutic Jurisprudence (ISTJ). Two of her recent articles are entitled “Mindful Engagement and Relational Lawyering,“ and “Fostering Wholehearted Lawyers: Practical Guidance for Supporting Law Students’ Professional Identity Formation.” Susan has a Master’s degree in social work in addition to her law degree, and is also a certified family mediator and has received training to be a peacebuilding circle keeper. Susan completed a 200-hour Yoga Teacher Training certification and Judi Cohen’s Warrior One Mindfulness in Law Teacher Training in 2020.
Jeff Carolin is a criminal lawyer, facilitator, mindfulness and yoga practitioner, and father of two small children based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. As a lawyer, Jeff has appeared at all levels of court in Ontario, and has successfully defended cases ranging from minor thefts to homicide. The vast majority of his clients are marginalized due to poverty, mental health differences, and racism. As a facilitator, Jeff organizes team-building and leadership development retreats, supports conflict transformation processes, and brings emotional intelligence and body-awareness into all of his work. Lately, he has been building a practice at the intersection of criminal law and conflict transformation under the rubric of restorative and transformative justice. He is inspired by the possibility that trials and jails need not be the only result of harm and wrong-doing, and that transformation, healing, and hope can emerge from the darkest of moments. Representing the survivor of a serious sex assault in one of the first restorative justice processes in Toronto has only strengthened his resolve in this regard. As a father, Jeff spends most of his time trying not to step on little pieces of plastic, and figuring out how he can do right by these amazing and tiny little creatures.
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 and likes to make legal puns whenever she can.
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@gmail.com. We look forward to jamming with you!
Demarris, Chris, Judi, Jeff, Susan, John, and Shilpa