Life Comes From It is a grantmaking circle focused on strengthening restorative, transformative, and peacemaking practices within communities, particularly led by people of color. It aims to address harm with community solutions instead of incarceration and punitive systems. The mission embraces grassroots movement-building work rooted in lived experience and relationships for restorative justice, transformative justice, and indigenous peacemaking, aiming to shift power, promote interdependence, and champion an intersectional approach.
The grant program by Life Comes From It is designed to support projects, organizations, and collaborations that aim to replace criminalization and incarceration with community-based solutions for addressing violence and repairing harm. It prioritizes peacemaking initiatives led by Native people and endeavors that are deeply rooted in the community’s own cultures, languages, places, faiths, and belief systems. The grants encourage anti-oppression practices, the creation of new holistic and liberatory thinking, and support for collective leadership and collaboration. Intergenerational inclusivity is a key principle, inviting participation from youth, adults, and elders alike. The program focuses on four main fields: Restorative Justice, Transformative Justice, Indigenous Peacemaking, and Land-Based Projects, with an overarching belief in human relations over institutional approaches, the importance of not further victimizing people in search for funding, and a vision rooted in the lived experience of community activists, formerly incarcerated people, crime survivors, indigenous persons, and people of color.