Reimagining Justice
Summary of Salal’s Transformative Justice Pilot Project (2021–2024)
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Reimagining Justice: Summary of Salal’s Transformative Justice Pilot Project (2021–2024)
From 2021 to 2024, Salal Sexual Violence Support Centre undertook a three-year Transformative Justice (TJ) Pilot Project as a bold step toward expanding justice options for survivors of sexualized violence.
With nearly four decades of experience as a feminist rape crisis centre, Salal recognized the persistent limitations of the criminal legal system and launched this initiative to explore non-carceral, survivor-centered accountability processes.
The TJ Pilot was rooted in the belief that survivors deserve access to justice pathways that reflect their autonomy, needs, and lived realities, particularly for those for whom state-based systems are unsafe, unhelpful, or retraumatizing.
Working in partnership with Just Outcomes Consulting, a Vancouver-based restorative justice organization, Salal supported five cases of sexualized violence through survivor-led accountability processes grounded in transformative and restorative principles.
Our Values in Practice
Throughout the project, Salal grounded its work in the following guiding values:
Survivor-Centered
Survivors determined the pace, shape, and goals of each process. Their agency was central, and no action occurred without their full, informed consent.
We approached harm from a lens of transformation, not punishment, recognizing the humanity of all participants while maintaining accountability.
All participants, including those who caused harm, engaged voluntarily and with clear information about what to expect.
Harm-
Focused
All processes confronted the impacts of harm directly and honestly, while seeking ways to reduce and transform that harm with care and compassion.
Though deeply influenced by transformative justice theory, we learned that what we were practicing existed in a unique space—a hybrid between TJ, restorative justice (RJ), and the realities of anti-violence service provision.
As the project evolved, we renamed it the Reimagining Justice (REJ) Project to more accurately reflect this blended approach.
Project Evolution & Lessons Learned
Genesis
The TJ Pilot Project emerged from a series of interconnected initiatives and community conversations. In 2017, Salal launched The Justice Project, a qualitative research study on survivors’ experiences with the criminal legal system.
Its findings were clear: the system was failing survivors.
Around the same time, Salal was engaged in the Inclusion Project (2017–2020) and later the Meaningful Inclusion Project (2020–2025), which expanded our services to include all trans, non-binary, Two Spirit, and gender-diverse survivors.
These initiatives revealed the need for justice models that were not only non-carceral, but structurally inclusive of those most often left out of traditional systems.
Insights from sex-working, trans, and racialized survivors challenged us to move beyond binary understandings of harm and justice. Many emphasized that transformative justice was not only preferable but necessary, especially in communities where those who caused harm were often survivors themselves.
In 2019, Salal’s Social Change Team connected with Just Outcomes Consulting, catalyzing a formal partnership to explore what survivor-centered accountability could look like within an anti-violence organization.
Years One & Two: Casework and Key Learnings
During the first two years, we worked directly with survivors interested in participating in accountability processes.
While one participant withdrew due to concerns about confidentiality, two others moved forward: one with the person who caused harm involved, and one without. Both processes evolved significantly over time in response to survivors’ shifting needs.
Early lessons taught us that our service structure often clashed with the values and adaptability required for TJ work. As a non-profit, we faced limitations that community-based TJ models often don’t. Still, we also identified a significant gap: survivors and communities wanted access to TJ processes, but capacity was scarce.
This led us to explore a more flexible “menu of options” for responding to harm including letter-writing templates, community care pods, and expanded referral networks.
Years Two & Three: Process Redesign and Renaming
In response to our growing awareness of structural constraints, we undertook a major redesign of the project. Key developments included:
Renaming to the Reimagining Justice Project: Acknowledging that our work blended TJ and RJ models, and was shaped by the context of service delivery.
Expanding Definitions of Justice: Some survivors chose not to pursue formal accountability but still found value in imagining what justice meant to them—and acting on that vision in other ways.
Extending Intake and Preparation: We added up to ten sessions with a caseworker to explore whether the REJ process was a fit, recognizing that many survivors needed support in clarifying what justice meant for them before engaging in accountability.
Creating a Structured Process Guide: Establishing defined phases, including a robust intake/readiness assessment, preparation sessions, facilitated dialogue, community goal-setting, and aftercare.
Formalizing External Supports: While internal consensus on supporting people who caused harm remained unresolved, we partnered with aligned external practitioners to ensure those participants also had meaningful support.
Over time, we saw that our process began to resemble traditional restorative justice models.
This raised important reflections about how structure can both support and constrain efforts to center survivor autonomy and lower barriers for marginalized communities.
Reflections and Future Directions
Salal’s TJ/REJ Pilot Project underscored the deep longing for alternative justice processes and the significant challenges in offering them within institutional frameworks. We encountered tensions between flexibility and safety, between abolitionist values and organizational capacity, and between innovation and replicability.
And yet, despite these tensions, the project opened doors—for survivors, for our organization, and for the broader anti-violence sector.
We learned that justice can be expansive, iterative, and personal.
We learned that transformative work often happens in the margins, in the conversations, and in the quiet shifts in how we relate to one another.
While Salal is no longer hosting this program, we carry its lessons forward. Our hope is that this work and the guide it produced (linked below) can serve as a foundation for future justice efforts that are survivor-led, community-rooted, and visionary.
Today, we continue to uphold a survivor-centered approach while deepening our relationships with restorative and transformative justice practitioners. We are committed to amplifying the voices of survivors who are calling for alternative paths to justice, and to supporting survivors in doing the internal work needed to prepare for processes like transformative justice, restorative justice, or healing circles.
This includes building and sustaining relationships with key partners such as RJ Victoria, Peace of the Circle, the Restorative City Collective, Global Survivors for Justice Reform, and Community Justice Initiatives in Kitchener. Alongside this external work, we are also turning inward—looking closely at our own systems and practices to ask how we can more fully embody restorative principles within our organization.
We offer this guide not only as a reflection of what was possible, but as a living resource for what’s to come: a future where justice is defined by survivors, grounded in community, and guided by care, accountability, and collective healing.
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