Collective Climb is very much a product of 2020—our founders believe in the possibility of a new world. What started as an amalgamation of ideas scribbled on chalkboards across campus, written in letters to our incarcerated cousins, and manifested by our Black and Immigrant mothers became a chance to create Black joy, security, and freedom in our community.

After receiving the President’s Engagement Prize from the University of Pennsylvania, we spent our first year in between filing incorporation documents and introducing ourselves as worthy mentees to more established organizers, tending to soil wet with the tears of our neighbors. We took to the streets to learn how our community felt about the juvenile justice system through a month-long door-to-door survey campaign. In all, learned that 92% of respondents supported alternatives to arrest for youth, with 88% outwardly supporting restorative justice diversion. We tucked these notes away, savoring them for a partnership that would allow us to actualize freedom-making without conceit. Our team worked with the Restorative Cities Initiative to process the 800+ cases that came out of the summer’s protests for Black livelihood without system-based adjudication. This experience prepared us for the next step in our journey: the launch of our very own Restorative Justice Diversion Program with the District Attorney’s Office of Philadelphia in 2021. 

Concurrently, we operated paid focus groups with teens who knew in their souls that gun violence is a consequence of structural racism packaged as closed community centers, scarce economic opportunities, underfunded schools, and untreated trauma, both immediately experienced and inter-generational. This gave way to the Restorative Community Project, our paid fellowship for teens to learn about the origins of restorative justice, its practical implementation in daily life, and how to transform our world to be one rooted in care and community.

For the longest time, we could not disentangle our work from our West Philadelphia roots, but the demands for our work took us across the city. Today, we find ourselves in Center City, prioritizing a space that allows us to create a warm hub for all who may need what our work provides (more on this below).

Recently, two of our co-founders, Kwaku and Mckayla, spoke on Episode 3 of Diálogos with Gabriela Watson-Burkett and Vicky Diaz-Camacho of Inti Media to reflect on how we got started and how we use restorative justice and community building to create change in Philadelphia.