In an effort to cultivate safer space at VoxBody Studio, we have established an Incident Response Team and an Accountability Pod.
This page is to connect you with both, inform you of our processes and procedures, and to provide supplemental resources.
If you have an incident or account to report, whether it occurred at the studio or within the community, please read this page in its entirety before submitting your report to the IRT using —> THIS LINK <—
The VoxBody IRT Process and Timeline
Report Submission: When you submit a report seeking action or dialogue with the IRT, we will first provide you with a document that further details the team process. This will allow you to make an informed decision about proceeding with us.
Timeline: The IRT is a volunteer team that meets once monthly. We are committed to taking our time when processing information, and not making any rushed decisions. We appreciate your patience, and understand that waiting can be quite challenging after sharing personal information. It can be up to 8 weeks before you receive follow up communication from us.
Reports can be submitted anonymously. No email address or contact info comes through on the google form linked, unless you opt to add it within the body of the form.
If you have follow-up questions or updates, please email them to voxresponse@gmail.com; please do NOT send messages to the general VoxBody gmail nor to any individual team members.
The Incident Response Team commits to receiving reports with as little judgment, bias and defensiveness as possible. We are here to support you in sharing your report and to seek a path forward. That said, we are human beings with inherent subjectivity, and may not always get things right. We are here to do our best, and grow together.
About IRT decisions
The IRT does not play the role of judge, jury, or mediator between parties. We are interested in collaborating in transformative justice and in breaking free from carceral thinking. We do not make ban decisions lightly, and are interested in allowing space for accountability, growth and repair. We also understand that true accountability takes time and that sometimes we need to make a decision to help keep our community space safer in the moment.
Please note that the IRT does not offer community mediation, nor are any of the team members qualified to do so.
The IRT will not publicly post team decisions, nor will the team engage in any online discussion concerning reports. This is to protect the VoxBody Studio community as well as the anonymity and safety of reporting members and involved parties.
Our decisions are based on the information we have at the time and are subject to change. We will periodically re-evaluate team decisions , taking note of any new information available to us and genuine efforts towards repair.
VoxBody Studio's Accountability Pod
VoxBody’s accountability pod is another avenue for submitting information or reports to the studio.
We understand that it can be intimidating to approach VoxBody or the IRT directly with an issue concerning a class, a teacher, a performer, another studio attendee, the studio owner, or the studio itself. With this in mind, we established our accountability pod in February 2019.
Accountability pods are inspired by the transformative justice work of Mia Mingus.
An accountability pod is a way to share feedback about VoxBody Studio, to hold the studio accountable as a community space, and to be able to do so anonymously and via avenues other than the studio owner or team. The accountability pod will be composed of people (community members, allies, peers) who have agreed to be as unbiased as possible in receiving feedback on the studio, or events that happen therein. They have agreed to support those who come forward to address behavior issues and concerns.
You can report to the accountability pod anonymously, without having VoxBody Studio’s owner or liaisons know a report was made. You can also request that a dialogue is initiated with any involved parties.
As of May 2022, the VoxBody accountability pod contacts are:
Sage. Contact email: authenticallysage@gmail.com, Instagram, Fetlife
Resources
Listed below are resources that have informed the work of the Incident Response Team.
If ideas like accountability and transformative justice are new to you, we highly recommend taking some time to read and research these links. There are people who have put in decades of work on these topics, and much of that information is accessible for free. This is complicated, nuanced, and slow-moving work and should not be misconstrued as a quick fix. This is the work of imagining a world without prisons or carceral punishment, and of creating space for someone who has caused harm to reflect, grow, change and repair. We understand that there are no “good” and “bad” people and that anyone is capable of causing harm. In the last few years, there has been concerted effort in the rope scene to integrate this work into the ways we respond to harm and violations within our communities. However, we have yet a lot to learn.