Mission

The Chicago Torture Justice Center seeks to address the traumas of police violence and institutionalized racism through access to healing and wellness services, trauma-informed resources, and community connection. The Center is a part of and supports a movement to end all forms of police violence.

Values

Over the course of six months in 2019, we undertook a process engaging CTJC staff, the Survivor and Family Advisory Council, and our Board of Directors to create a shared set of organizational values that we could all agree to live with and to live by:

 

Holistic Support

The impact from trauma is complex, ongoing, and varies depending on identity (race, gender, sexuality, ability, age, class, language, etc.). Our services and programs for the incarcerated and non-incarcerated address various needs and urgencies. These include physical, emotional, social, and economic well-being, and evolve as necessary.

Community Relationships

We prioritize deep relationships and alliances with partners who recognize and share our commitments and values. The opportunity to share in lived experience and resilience are the life-saving and life-reinforcing methods of healing that enable change. The story of the Center does not sit alone - but within a context of the stories of communities of color in Chicago and throughout the United States.

Politicized Healing

We understand that healing encompasses the individual and the collective - within communities, throughout structures, and across generations. Central to our healing is acknowledging and working to dismantle the systems that have caused and continue to cause harm.

Liberatory Culture

We intentionally and actively create internal and external spaces that advance our liberation by developing and sustaining connections through accountability, grace, joy, truth-telling, and creativity.

Transformational Leadership

People are the experts of their own lives, therefore everyone is a teacher and a learner. Together we innovate a model of shared and accountable leadership, which creates spaces to flourish and contribute to the work of the Center by engaging in self-discovery, creativity, and practice.

Radical Justice

Recognizing the need for structural healing, co-creation, and innovation, we hold up resistance and imagination as our guides as we fight for systems-change and liberation. It is our duty to speak truth and to challenge and dismantle systems of harm, oppression, and state violence while creating new structures that allow all of our people to thrive.

Politicized Healing

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At the Center, we respond to community members harmed by police violence and race-based trauma with comprehensive support rooted in Politicized Healing. Politicized healing is the belief that our healing is political and our politics are healing. Politicized healing addresses the harm—felt by individuals and communities—caused by historic and evolving systems of oppression.

In addition to our therapeutic services for individuals, we identify harmful structures and systems that are rooted in fostering and replicating trauma at individual, familial and communal levels, and that reproduce inequity. We are dedicated to naming, deconstructing, and transforming these systems as an integral part of our work.

As we continue to grow as the first community center dedicated to survivors of domestic torture in the U.S., we are building out Politicized Healing into a replicable model for practitioners, organizations, and communities in the global struggle for healing and transformation from state violence.

Heal

Engage in a self-determined process of restoring ourselves and connecting to others and what we care about.

Dismantle

Unapologetically expose and deconstruct systems of harm.

Create

Build reparative power towards new paradigms that we collectively imagine for our communities.