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.