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How Shame Can Block Accountability

Featuring Stas Schmiedt and Lea Roth

Join us for an online discussion on Friday, October 25, 2019 at 4pm EST.

How does shame block accountability? Why do we tend towards performative apology when we work from a basis of shame? In this video, people with years of experience facilitating processes between survivors of harm and people who have done harm talk about how coming from a framework of shame can shut us down and get in the way of authentic accountability.

This video is part of the Building Accountable Communities video series. The Building Accountable Communities Project promotes non-punitive responses to harm by developing resources for transformative justice practitioners and organizing convenings and workshops that educate the public.

Created by Project Nia and the Barnard Center for Research on Women. Video produced by Mariame Kaba, Dean Spade, and Hope Dector.

Watch more from the Building Accountable Communities Project:

Nastassja “Stas” Schmiedt(they/them) is a nonbinary BlaQ-Italian storyteller, abolitionist organizer, healer, and imaginatrix rooted in Denver, CO and Miami, FL.
A. Lea Roth (they/them or he/him) works to prevent and respond to gender based violence as a consent educator, transformative justice practitioner, herbalist, and fiction writer based in Denver, CO.

Stas and Lea have been organizing together and in love since their student days at Dartmouth College. Together, they keep circles and hold spaces for healing, accountability and transformation for survivors and perpetuators of harm as well as communities. They developed their practice in response to the needs and experiences of queer and trans survivors of sexual and gender based violence on campuses. You can support their work and join their learning community at patreon.com/cultivateconsent

In 2013, Stas and Lea co-founded Spring Up, a social enterprise cultivating a culture of consent and liberty for all through storytelling, transformative justice, and popular education (timetospringup.org). Spring Up offers consent education to youth and care providers, and provides support to mission-driven organizations in: values alignment, practicing consent culture, conflict transformation; and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) through participatory, emergent workshops, coaching, and consulting.

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