AAPI Restorative Justice Network
Asian American & Pacific Islander Restorative Justice Network
The Asian American & Pacific Islander Restorative Justice Network was birthed after months of deep conversation, planning, co-creation and intentional relationship-building. Our journey was ultimately made possible through a partnership between The Ripple Collective and the Asian Law Caucus—supported by a California State grant to address AAPI-targeted violence. This network represents a collective commitment to stewarding a future rooted in restorative alternatives to the carceral system. Alongside other partners in the restorative justice ecosystem in the San Francisco Bay Area, we hope to increase awareness of and comfort with restorative justice practices in Bay Area AAPI communities and provide pathways for these communities to access restorative justice processes as an alternative to the carceral system, and as a culturally-aligned pathway for healing.
As the only known gathering of its kind in the Bay Area and likely in the country, the AAPI Restorative Justice Network is a unique space for practitioners to build community, share knowledge, and offer deep peer support. We elevate our perspectives by weaving traditions and rituals of peace, justice, and healing from our ancestral homelands into our practice of restorative justice. By centering our AAPI identities and lived experiences, we are reclaiming our cultural ways of being to transform how we address conflict and harm response. This has been a rare opportunity to consider our holistic selves in our RJ work, including family upbringing and points of origin that are otherwise invisible or unknown to others. We cherish this unique and important space to integrate the Asian parts of ourselves into our professional, personal, and spiritual work in restorative justice.
The goals of our network include:
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Build community with Bay Area AAPI RJ practitioners.
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Establish mutually-supportive and reciprocal relationships of learning and peer support, both for emerging and established practitioners.
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Explore our Asian ancestral and cultural traditions, practices, ways of being–bridging our cultural knowledge and lived experiences with restorative justice and our work as practitioners.
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Skill-up people who work in AAPI communities to implement healing-based modalities for addressing harm.
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Create a network of practitioners available for case referrals or emergent needs within our communities.
Our intention is to cultivate a spirit of care, generosity, and community. The Network includes both current and emerging practitioners. We are conflict workers, facilitators, healers, educators, community workers, service providers, therapists, nonprofit directors, students, culture keepers, activists, parents, Asian food enthusiasts, and visionaries of a world that centers collective care and healing.
Who Are We?
Elli and Tati met through leading restorative justice trainings for K12 school leaders and staff, and have continued our partnership through Partners for Collaborative Change in holding organizations with care as they work through the conflict that emerges from processes of dismantling oppression. Together with The Ripple Collective, and supported by the Asian Law Caucus, we look forward to centering our Asian heritage in conversations around conflict and harm. We look forward to cultivating a space for AAPI-identified folks to lead the way in implementing restorative justice and deepening networks of safety and care.
Elli Nagai-Rothe (she/they) I am a multiracial Asian American with Japanese (yonsei), Chinese, Korean and German ancestry, proudly raised in San Francisco. As a conflict transformation practitioner and co-founder of The Ripple Collective, I support communities and organizations to move through conflict in generative and racially just ways, creating space for honest conversations, and engaging in the self-reflective work required to transform ourselves and the world around us in service to our collective healing and liberation. I practice restorative justice, social justice mediation, and inter-group dialogue among other modalities. In the context of AAPI identity-based work, I have facilitated dialogues between Japanese and Chinese students on intergenerational legacies of violence and harm; partner with West County Mandarin School and their Mandarin-speaking educators to build a restorative school culture; work with Tsuru for Solidarity to heal the intergenerational trauma of our Japanese American families' racialized incarceration during WWII while engaging in non-violent action and standing in solidarity with communities being targeted today; and am gratefully a member of the YES Asian Diaspora community actively exploring our ancestral lineages and doing our personal and collective healing to further our social justice work. I am a mama to a trampoline-jumping and basketball-loving 10 year old, and I helped to co-create an outdoor self-directed learning co-op in Richmond, CA as part of our family’s unschooling journey and my personal practice of parenting as liberation work. I live in a multi-generational family village with our extended family in El Sobrante, CA.
Tatiana Chaterji ( তাতিয়ানা চ্যাটার্জী) (she/her) I am a mixed race Bengali-American with rootsacross the India-Bangladesh border and in Finland. I integrate tools from multiple traditionsto recover human connection across people at different ends of historical injustice, andseeks opportunity for dialogue and accountability from systemic oppression and the waysit manifests in interpersonal relationships. Some of this has happened in South Asiancontexts in exploring the legacy of 1947 partition and beyond, healing wounds ofcolonization, displacement, and casteism, and other structural violence. My journey in thisfield began through involvement with INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, informed byfeminist, womanist, and abolitionist alternatives to the criminal-legal system. I consider myself alifelong student of conflict and harm response, grounded in transformative justice principles, andblessed to have been able to practice restorative justice in community, school, and carceral settings. I have trained in drama therapy and develop cultural resistance strategies through Theater of the Oppressed and healing through creative expression and performance.For the past 3 years, I’ve had the privilege of partnering with the Chinese Progressive Association to pilot restorative justice through meeting community members where they are and leveraging ground-level knowledge, skills, and perspectives to develop alternatives to the criminalization of wrongdoing. I co-authored the white paper, “Racial Healing and Community Safety Through Restorative Justice,” to illuminate the solidaristic efforts between Asian and Black communities in San Francisco to repair from violence and divisiveness. I’m thrilled to take this inspiring work a step further into developing a practitioner base and envisioning a rapid-response network for addressing harm.
When We Say “Restorative Justice”...
We honor ancient and ancestral ways of being that are not fully possible under capitalism, in the aftermath and enduring legacy of colonialism, where relationships are transactional and based in hierarchy, individualism, and meritocracy. We are committed to developing robust and viable alternatives to the criminalization of wrongdoing. We embrace members of transformative justice and healing justice communities in the shared struggle to pave the road for the world we deserve. This network welcomes all who currently or are beginning to facilitate processes between people at various points of harm; those who hold space in conflict and in crisis; who develop plans for accountability in interpersonal tension and violence; and otherwise work to shift the cultural paradigm around communal care and safety.