“Restorative justice changed and saved my life, and totally reversed my trajectory,” said Armand Coleman while describing his path to becoming a restorative justice practitioner. In this candid interview, Coleman, who serves as the executive director of the Transformational Prison Project, discusses how the organization is helping incarcerated individuals understand how intergenerational trauma has impacted their lives; disrupting the school-to-prison pipeline that often funnels Black and Brown youth into lifetime incarceration; and supporting persons who have caused harm to take accountability for their actions.

Climate change affects every person on the planet, but frontline communities — those that inhabit areas that face the worst consequences of climate change — are the most vulnerable. In this article, Senior Advisor Erin Ceynar and Samantha Ender, a Tides consultant, discuss how Wells Fargo’s Environmental and Social Justice Fund, which is housed at Tides Foundation, is advancing climate justice by funding 10 communities with needed resources to help implement community-driven solutions through a new program, “Dismantling Energy Inequity in Communities of Color,” with support from the Institute for Sustainable Communities. 

In February, Tidesters celebrated the Lunar New Year and Black History Month with a series of activities organized by our Asian Pacific Islander ERG and Black Caucus. We are thankful to have hosted traci ishigo, a therapist, trauma-informed yoga and meditation teacher, and community organizer. Ishigo led a conversation about the importance of movement leaders having space to attend to their own mental health and healing to sustain the social justice movement especially in the wake of ongoing violence against Asian American communities. We were also honored to host Dr. Yaba Blay, a scholar-activist and author whose scholarship is focused on the lived experiences of Black women and girls. Blay called on Tidesters to center the expertise of Black women scholars and movement leaders throughout the year and she challenged us to think about how we might expose marginalized groups to harm when we call on them to share their lived experiences on public platforms.