The Ahimsa Collective works to address harm in ways that foster wholeness for everyone. Their north star goals are to replace systems of punishment with paradigms grounded in healing, relationship, and love. 

To get there, they engage with deep trauma healing and restorative approaches while being grounded in anti-oppression. They work in deep community with people who have committed an act of violence, survivors of violence, and families impacted by harm. In all of their work, they center agency, liberation, dignity, and transformation.

EP and TAC have worked in collaboration. Together, they formed CIRCLES. Knowing that parole-mandated reentry services typically tell individuals more about what they must do than asking them what they need, EP and TAC innovated a program that amplifies the voices and needs of formerly incarcerated people through storytelling and dance as a means of healing and community-building. 

CIRCLES is a 10-workshop curriculum utilizing restorative justice (RJ) and trauma-informed practices to explore topics such as resiliency, gender socialization, racism, structural/historical conditions of violence, and impact on victims/survivors. We affirm the lived experiences and intersectional identities of participants; celebrate social dance forms rooted in Black and Brown communities; and provide a means of collective grieving, healing, and radical joy.

TAC has provided Restorative Justice trainings to EP dancers, and held restorative circles before and after EP’s performances as a way to engage community and tend to the emotionality of the stories EP holds. They’ve partnered on two of EP’s evening length performances. including: Music of the Actualized Child; and X-RATED PLANET. TAC was instrumental in the research and development of X-RATED PLANET. 

EP dancers joined TAC in holding restorative justice circles inside Valley State Prison (Chowchilla) and connected with participants who shared their stories. EP is deeply committed to continuing to bring art inside the carceral system and to all of those who are impacted by systems of punishment.

EP is currently working with TAC to have their artists trained through TAC’s Realize curriculum which explores social and restorative justice.