Three years ago today, our co-founder Kathy Boudin joined the ancestors on May Day.
Three years ago today, Kathy Boudin joined the ancestors on May Day. We miss her every day and her legacy still guides us and our work.
In December, we were able to relive her work and impact through her participation in our Degrees of Freedom film, a project of our Oral History Research Project, which premiered at the Dances With Films Festival in NYC and won the audience award for short documentaries. The film documents the advocacy of Kathy, Cheryl, and other women while they were incarcerated in Bedford Hills to bring the college program back after prison college programs were cancelled overnight across the country in the 90s.
We also celebrated 15 years of the Beyond the Bars Conference, which began when a Columbia School of Social Work student, Wakumi Douglas, approached Kathy and Cheryl about a day-long skill sharing conference for social workers to learn more about incarceration and its impact on communities and families. The conference has continued through the Center for Justice for 15 years and has grown into a multi-day, national and international conference, with over a thousand people attending our 2025 conference. Every year we pay tribute to Kathy during the conference program, with Kathy buttons, and in the Healing & Spirit Room (curated each year by Wakumi and her team).
Other passion projects of Kathy’s were our Women Transcending Collective Leadership Institute, which graduated its sixth cohort at the Beyond the Bars Conference and will be starting its seventh cohort in June; and our Justice Beyond Punishment Collaborative, which presented a workshop at the Beyond the Bars Conference, released a zine, is in the process of producing a podcast, and is planning educational presentations on how to support justice beyond punishment in our movements, narrative work, and advocacy campaigns.
Kathy’s legacy lives on through the Center and the many, many people to which she was a mentor, friend, and sister. We hope you will join us in remembering her today and do something in her honor. Thanks for being a friend and supporter of the Center.