Community Accountability

Community Accountability (CA) strategies aim at preventing, intervening in, responding to, and healing from violence through strengthening relationships and communities, emphasizing mutual responsibility for addressing the conditions that allow violence to take place, and holding people accountable for violence and harm. This includes a wide range of creative strategies for addressing violence as part of organizing efforts in communities when you can’t or don’t want to access state systems for safety.” – The Audre Lorde Project, National Gathering on Transformative and Community Accountability, 9/2010

From Incite! Women of Color and Trans People of Color Against Violence (2012):
Community accountability is a process in which a community – a group of friends, a family, a church, a workplace, an apartment complex, a neighborhood, etc – works together to do the following things:

• Commit to ongoing development of all members of the community, and the community itself, to transform the political conditions that reinforce oppression and violence
• Provide safety & support to community members who are violently targeted that respects their self-determination
• Create and affirm values & practices that resist abuse and oppression and encourage safety, support, and accountability
• Develop sustainable strategies to address community members’ abusive behavior, creating a process for them to account for their actions and transform their behavior