AAPI Restorative Justice Network
Introduction to Restorative Justice -Training for Emerging AAPI Practitioners
We held a successful Intro to RJ training for emerging AAPI Practitioners in the San Francisco Bay Area in February 2025. Stay tuned for future training offerings and opportunities.
This training was open to Bay Area AAPI-identified community workers, educators, therapists, social workers and/or community-based service providers working directly with AAPI communities who were new to RJ. It was open to anyone interested in deepening their understanding and practice of RJ so that they can become RJ practitioners to offer non-caceral RJ interventions, opportunities to repair harm and provide community care from this framework.
During this experiential two-day intensive participants:
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Learned foundational restorative justice principles and practices
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Explored AAPI cultural traditions, values, and practices that support peace-building, conflict transformation, and healing beyond prisons/police
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Learned and practiced circle design and circle-keeping
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Considered frameworks for deep listening, conflict and harm response
We connected with Bay Area AAPI-identified folks who were new to RJ in a relational container that centered our identities and cultural/ancestral knowledge. This training was offered by The Ripple Collective with support from The Asian Law Caucus. Training participants were invited to join the AAPI RJ Network (see below).
AAPI Restorative Justice Network
The Asian American and Pacific Islander Restorative Justice Network (AAPI RJ Network) aims to bring together existing and emerging AAPI-identified restorative justice practitioners in the San Francisco Bay Area. Through this network, practitioners will connect, build community, share knowledge, and offer peer support while centering our AAPI identities and our work with AAPI communities. Specifically, we will explore traditions of peace, justice, and healing from our ancestral homelands and bridge our cultural knowledge and lived experiences with practices in restorative justice and related fields of conflict and harm response.
Our intention is to cultivate a spirit of care, generosity, and community within this network. We hope that through the network, we can establish mutually-reciprocal relationships of learning and support, both for emerging and established practitioners.
More info about the AAPI RJ Network here.
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, 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 betweenJapanese 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, support Asian Americans Advancing Justice Atlanta to practice relational ways of working together and moving through conflict, 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 8 year old, and I helped to 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. We 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.