Explorations Into Relational Repair: a report by Compton Foundation & Informing Change

Illustration by Flora Cabili of a stylized, abstract figure outlined in blue, exhaling a swirling green breath filled with stars. The figure cradles a golden orb in their hand, which contains a peaceful, sleeping face and radiates yellow rays like sunlight.

“Repair means a liberated future. It’s a path to wholeness and transcendence. It creates room for the next possibility.”

What happens when people choose to heal relationships broken by slavery and colonization?

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Narrated by June Wilson

“I was absolutely moved, thrilled, to get an invitation to be in a study group with her. We embarked on 18 months of learning about the history of oppression and systemic cruelty, specifically how black-bodied people are impacted.”

This is how relational repair work begins for most people. Not with grand theories or mandates, but with a friend extending trust.

“I take invitations very seriously.”

She had been thinking about reparations for years, but from an intellectual distance, reading books, attending workshops, feeling the weight of history but not knowing what to do with it. Then a friend she respected called and said, “I’m starting a group to explore what it means to repair relationships across race and class. Would you join us?”

The phone call changed everything. Not because she suddenly understood reparations differently, but because someone she trusted had invited her into something real. “The first thing that comes to me about why I joined is that I was invited,” she reflected later.

This is typically how people enter relational repair work — not through institutions or programs, but through the simple act of being asked to join.

This and the following stories are composites created from themes and insights gathered through interviews conducted for our research on relational repair. While they reflect real experiences and genuine perspectives shared by participants, the specific narratives presented here are fictional constructions designed to illustrate findings from our study.

Perspectives Matters

For many White participants, the presidential election of 2016 or George Floyd’s murder in 2020 created what one person described as “a clear call to anti-racism.” It was the pivotal moment when they realized their own participation in systems of oppression…

Necessary Conversations

The first few months were revelatory and exciting. Everyone was committed, the conversations were deep, and there was real affection growing between the Black and White women in the circle…

Resting to Repair

She had been fighting for so long that the fighting had become second nature. Forty-seven years of pushing back against poverty, advocating for fair treatment, doing whatever it took to keep her family safe and fed and housed.

More Stories

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Necessary Conversations

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Narrated by June Wilson

Transcript follows this audio.

The first few months, everyone was committed, the conversations were deep, and there was real affection growing between the Black and White women in the group.

Then three of them went to dinner together.

Nobody talked about who would pay. The White woman with wealth assumed, without asking, that it was her responsibility. The Black woman felt excluded, infantilized, disrespected. The other White woman sat between them uncomfortably in this revealed power imbalance.

“We’d better be explicit about those money conversations next time we’re together,” one of the women reflected later, “because everybody was hurt in some way or another.” Sometimes the smallest moment could reveal the enormous complexity of navigating race, class, and money in relationship with others.
Resting to Repair

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Narrated by June Wilson

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She had been fighting for so long that the fighting had become second nature. Forty-seven years of pushing back against poverty, advocating for fair treatment, doing whatever it took to keep her family safe and fed and housed. “Taking a break” sounded like a euphemism for stopping, for giving up — an act that felt both impossible and unforgivably selfish.

But the women in her repair circle held space for a different possibility. What if rest wasn’t luxury but resistance? What if having her basic needs covered wasn’t charity but restoration? What if she deserved to dream without the constant hum of financial anxiety?

The sabbatical lasted six months. She traveled to visit family she’d been too busy to see. She wrote in the mornings and gardened in the afternoons. She took long baths and read books that had nothing to do with productivity or advancement. She remembered who she was beyond what she could produce.

When she returned, she was different. More measured in her reactions, quicker to question. The tension had left her body. The repair circle could see it in her face — the particular kind of beauty that comes from being fully rested for the first time in decades.
In Plain Sight

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Narrated by June Wilson

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The bowl had been her grandmother’s, passed down through three generations before her daughter’s backpack nudged it off the kitchen counter. It shattered into a dozen pieces on the ceramic tile.

At a recent gathering, she had learned about kintsugi, the Japanese art of mending broken pottery with gold so that the breaks became a visible part of the object’s history — the good and the bad together, with nothing hidden. She decided to try it with her grandmother’s bowl.

As she mixed the golden epoxy and carefully joined each fragment, she thought about her family’s history, especially the things nobody ever talked about. The trauma that had been passed down alongside the recipes and traditions. The silence around her grandfather’s drinking, her mother’s depression. The ways poverty had cracked their spirits even as love held them together.

What if her family’s breaks could be beautiful, too? The good and the bad, together. What if healing required honoring the cracks as part of their story?

The repaired bowl sat on her kitchen table now, holding the full history of her family with honesty and acceptance, its golden seams glowing in the late afternoon light.
The Body, Not the Brain

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Narrated by June Wilson

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The shame lived in her shoulders, the build-up of four decades of carrying the weight of inherited complicity, of moving through the world in a White body that, like a key, opened doors of opportunity and privilege. She understood White supremacy better now, at least in her mind. But the shame that physically weighed her down remained untouched.

In the repair circle, they practiced breathing together. They focused on not just talking about racism, but feeling it in their bodies. She felt her chest tighten when discussing slavery. She felt her stomach drop when she acknowledged how much her own comfort depended on taking it from others.

It happened slowly, but through the months of breathing together, something shifted. The weight of shame transformed into something more useful: a bodily knowledge of her responsibility, a felt sense of connection to the women around her, a nervous system that could stay present with discomfort instead of fleeing into defensiveness.

“Repair begins when defenses soften,” someone had told her. She was learning to let her body lead the way.
The Privilege of Being Asked

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Narrated by June Wilson

Transcript follows this audio.

“What needs repair in your own life?”

That was the journal prompt. Simple enough, Sarah thought. But as she sat with her pen hovering over the blank page, she realized she had never seriously asked herself this.

What needs repair in the world? She had asked herself that question plenty of times over the years, and directed her energy on what needed to be fixed “out there.” But she had never turned her attention inward. What needed repair in her? What did she truly desire beyond being seen as a “good person” who cared about justice?

She took a breath, cleared her mind, and began to write.

The answers that came surprised her. She wanted to be forgiven for the years she had moved through the world unconsciously. She wanted to stop performing her politics and start living them. She wanted to thrive in real relationship with others rather than waste her time pursuing the empty high of one-way helping.

Sarah read over her answers and smiled; it felt clarifying to finally uncover these truer goals. Then she moved on to the second part of the prompt, and it stopped her completely:

“Now reflect on those who are never asked, or given the opportunity to answer, this question.”
Perspectives Matter

Listen to this Story
Narrated by June Wilson

Transcript follows this audio.

For many White participants at the gathering, the presidential election of 2016 or George Floyd’s murder in 2020 created what one person described as “a clear call to anti-racism.” It was the pivotal moment when they realized their own participation in systems of oppression.

But Black participants, who had always known systemic oppression, brought something different to the experience. It was about “claiming and fostering relationships with my family,” as one person put it, “[and] also with my ancestral community. It’s so healing.” Black participants were reclaiming spaces of healing that had been long denied to their communities.

These different starting points matter. They shape how people show up and the expectations they carry with them.

A group of six women stand in a mindful posture with eyes closed and one hand on their chest, participating in a calming or meditative exercise. They are positioned in front of a decorative yellow umbrella with hanging ribbons, creating a warm and reflective atmosphere. — Attendees in a grounding exercise at Compton Foundation’s relational repair convening, *Gathering by the River*, in New Orleans (November 2024). Photo by Alyssa Donyae.

“What does wholeness call you into?”

What do we mean by “relational repair?”

“Relational repair” has long been used to describe the reparative process that seeks to address healing in relationships between individuals and groups. When we use it, we are referring specifically to work where material and institutional reparations intersect with interpersonal healing and transformation.

We believe that, when we do justice work that bypasses human relationships, we haven’t really confronted how supremacy operates within all of us and any attempts toward true healing will remain incomplete.

Relational repair engages us in a loving, committed, long-term process of sitting within the complexity of history, personal wounds, and generational harms rooted in settler colonialism and racial capitalism.

Relational repair invites us to reach for our deepest urge:
true belonging and an unbreakable connection.

The Report & This Website

In mid-2023, Compton Foundation and Informing Change came together to document the processes involved in relational repair, speaking with Compton-funded partners and other individuals, projects, and organizations doing reparative work. The result, Explorations Into Relational Repair, examines the dynamics, frameworks, and practices that shape relational repair, told through the participants’ own words.

This website provides access to the full report, and offers other ways of exploring the observations and discoveries made by those who are doing reparative work.

“It’s messy, complex, and perfectly imperfect…”

A brown-skinned man with a closely shaved head and full beard, wearing a light gray button-up shirt, is shown from behind as he draws on a large illustrated board, known as a graphic recording. The board features colorful, hand-drawn visuals and text with themes like “Gathering by the River,” “Land as sites of repair,” and “If means possibility,” along with sketches of a rainbow umbrella, film reel, and phrases related to reparations, justice, and reflection. — Sean G. Clark, graphic recorder at Compton Foundation’s relational repair convening, *Gathering by the River*, in New Orleans (November 2024). Photo by Alyssa Donyae.

Inscriptions

Dozens of artists and participants were invited to select a quote from the report and make it their own — through handwriting, illustration, and personal interpretation. Together, these pieces reflect how the report’s ideas resonate in lived experience and creative expression.

Prefer to browse these posts directly? Visit us on Instagram: @relationalrepair_inscriptions

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From the Report

In these highlights from the report, we share the key elements, practices, and communities actively engaged in this deeply personal and collective work of healing historical harms and creating new paradigms of connection.

Four Key Elements

Core anchors that ground relational repair work across all contexts, present regardless of scope or complexity

The Invitation

Personal calls to engage that establish trust and connection

Reflection and
Motivations

Internal work to understand and heal personal and generational trauma

Being in Relationship

Moving from transactional to transformative connections rooted in mutuality

Addressing Power
& Identity

Confronting the dynamics that distort relationships and create power imbalances

A Few of the Practices

Relational repair is not a one-size-fits-all set of processes, but an evolving collection of overlapping approaches that honors multiple motivations and manifestations

Material Wealth Return

Direct transfer of financial resources and assets, understood as returning what was taken, not charity or redistribution, infused with trust and inseparable from relationship.

Personal History and Ancestry

Reclaiming untold or falsified histories through genealogical research and family exploration, honoring ancestors while healing wounds that echo through generations.

Cultural & Spiritual

Actively reclaiming suppressed rituals, ceremonies, languages, and sacred connections to land, viewing this recovery as both resistance and restoration of wholeness.

Narrative Practices

Intentionally reshaping language and stories to challenge harmful stereotypes and build hopeful, liberatory futures that treat root causes rather than symptoms.

Body-Based Practices

Using somatic approaches like breathwork, movement, and rest to process the physical manifestations of trauma and build capacity for sitting with discomfort.

Visioning Practices

Future-oriented collective dreaming and gathering spaces where communities imagine and practice the transformed society they seek to create together.

The Practitioners*

Diverse individuals, projects, and organizations across the reparations ecosystem actively building relationships and systems of repair

* This is not an exhaustive list; the practitioners named here represent one moment in time in the ongoing work of relational repair.

Cohort-Based Groups

Seattle Sisterhood – Black and White women building deep relationships across race and class through monthly gatherings and direct wealth return
Ripples – Seattle group engaged in wealth return and the development of deep cross-race, cross-class relationships between white-bodied and black-bodied women.
Reparative Action Experiment (RAE) with Entrepreneurs – Seattle group using gift tax exemption models to facilitate no-strings-attached wealth transfers between individuals
Seeing Whiteness for Anti-Racist Action & Atlanta Circle of Relational Repair – Atlanta-based skill-building circles helping white-bodied people notice and challenge how they protect whiteness
Jubilee Justice Journey – Louisiana cohort exploring intersections of land, spirit, money, and race through two-year healing journeys
Acts of Reparation – Documentary collective supporting people in retelling racialized stories and tracing Black genealogies
Re-Cede & Rest Love & Justice – Initiatives centering rest as revolutionary resistance and healing for Black women creatives

Organizations

A group of five women sit in a circle in a warmly lit room with brick walls and large windows, engaged in a deep, attentive conversation. The central figure, Carol Bebelle, an older black woman in a black embroidered tunic and head wrap, gestures while speaking, surrounded by listeners with diverse styles and expressions. — Carol Bebelle (a.k.a. Akua Wambui), pictured in the center, is discussing relational repair work with other attendees at Compton Foundation’s relational repair convening, *Gathering by the River*, in New Orleans (November 2024). Photo by Alyssa Donyae.

“It’s a practice, not a destination.”

Explorations Into Relational Repair

by Compton Foundation & Informing Change, November 2025

This report captures a snapshot in time, detailing the reflections, intentions, and experiences of practitioners engaged in relational repair.

Download the Report
65 pages, PDF, 2.4mb

Illustrated cover for a report titled “Explorations Into Relational Repair,” featuring a stylized figure exhaling a patterned stream and holding a glowing orb surrounded by radiant lines. Subtext reads, “Reflections, Intentions, and Experiences of Practitioners Engaged in Relational Repair.” Artwork by Flora Cabili, with credits to Compton Foundation and Informing Change, dated November 2025.

This report, prepared by Compton Foundation & Informing Change, reflects the contributions of so many wonderful writers, reviewers, editors, designers, and collaborators.