About NIPSA
Who We Are
NIPSA is a national organization advancing healing justice models that transform public safety and systems of care.
Our work centers the leadership, wellbeing, and safety of Black and Brown communities, who have been most impacted by systems of violence, criminalization, and disinvestment.
We support community-led solutions that build safety, health, and collective wellbeing.
Our Vision
We envision a future where:
Communities respond to crisis with care instead of punishment
Healing and health replace the war on drugs
Mass incarceration and punitive policing become unnecessary
Public resources support wellbeing, dignity, and community safety
Our Movement Ecosystem
NIPSA & APTP
NIPSA grows from the legacy and organizing work of the Anti Police-Terror Project. For more than a decade, APTP has challenged police terror and state violence while building real, community-led alternatives rooted in care, accountability, healing, and self-determination. Through programs like Mental Health First, The People’s Clinic, healing justice work with directly impacted families, policy campaigns, political education, mutual aid, and rapid response, APTP has helped demonstrate that public safety does not have to depend on policing, punishment, or incarceration.
APTP is a community-based organization rooted in Oakland that organizes against police violence while building community-led safety alternatives. Its work has been grounded in the leadership of Black communities, directly impacted families, healers, organizers, and people most harmed by the carceral state.
While APTP focuses on local organizing, direct implementation, and community-based models in Oakland and Sacramento, NIPSA expands Healing Justice and public safety alternatives nationally through training, research, policy advocacy, technical assistance, political education, and network building. NIPSA creates a vehicle to share lessons, tools, frameworks, and models developed through years of on-the-ground organizing so that communities across the country can adapt and build their own systems of care.
Together, APTP and NIPSA are building the infrastructure for community safety beyond policing. One is rooted in local struggle and implementation; the other helps carry those lessons into national strategy, movement infrastructure, and long-term systems change.
Why Now
Across the country, communities are facing rising instability, widening inequality, and deepening crises of health, housing, and safety. Yet the systems designed to respond to these challenges continue to rely on the same tools—policing, punishment, and incarceration.
Mental health crises are met with armed response.
Substance use is criminalized instead of treated.
Domestic violence and family crises are often escalated by systems that lack the tools to provide real care.
These responses too often produce more harm instead of healing.
At the same time, federal policies and political rhetoric are fueling fear, division, and expanded state violence—placing even greater pressure on communities already carrying the weight of systemic injustice.
But something else is happening as well.
Across the country, communities are developing new models rooted in care, culture, and collective responsibility. Healers, organizers, educators, and cultural workers are building alternatives that respond to crisis with compassion, trained care, and community leadership.
The question is no longer whether alternatives are possible.
Communities are already building them.
The challenge now is scale.
NIPSA exists to help grow the infrastructure needed to expand healing justice models—so that responses rooted in care, dignity, and collective wellbeing can become the norm rather than the exception.
The moment calls for more than reform.
It calls for new systems grounded in healing, community safety, and liberation.