MAKE JUSTICE NORMAL
Image: 2024 Street Work Earth. “Worn & Worn.” By Make Justice Normal. Photo by Derrick Seymore.
WHAT
Make Justice Normal (MJN) is a collective founded in 2021 to develop and implement justice-centered organizing models, including equitable budgeting and contracts, democratic decision-making, and circular governance structures.
Designing systems in which it is possible to practice justice, loving care, and solidarity is our mission.
MAKE
Imagination can free us even within constraints. It liberates mental space to embrace new ideas and paradigms alongside the wisdoms of our ancestors.
Image: 2024 Street Work Earth. Chhaya. Photo by Brentton Wilson.
HOW
We turn values into governance, policies, and contracts in a centralized system studio. Each collective member can lead, support, advise, and invent based on their capacity and interests in a decentralized venture studio. MJN will never organize in hierarchy.
JUSTICE
Justice is the ground we walk to a future world where all people embody their full potential and harmonize with the land that gives us life. It is also imprinted with the past. Let’s repair, restore, and pay the debts owed.
Image: 2024 Street Work Earth. “Societal Composting.” By Mazorca Colectiva. Photo by Cindy Trinh.
WHY (NOW)
Justice can’t be an output if it isn’t embedded in the systems that produce it. When organizations are structured to concentrate power or limit participation, inequity is built into their daily operations. When these unjust systems are treated as neutral or “normal,” their effects compound, shaping markets and government itself. The threats to democracy today are not an accident; they’re the predictable result of millions of organizations and institutions built on a foundation of injustice.
NORMAL
Where did today's norms come from? How do they make justice impossible and stifle imagination? Where do we need new norms, or none?
Image: 2024 Street Work Earth. Próxima Tierra. By Kaleidospace. Photo by Derrick Seymore.