Our Work
transformation. healing. accountability. reconciliation.
Rooted in a resilience & trauma informed lens, we support people and groups to deepen into dignity, accountability and belonging
Conflict Transformation Harm & Healing Circles
Conflict and harm can create pain and disconnection, making repair and healing difficult. Without accountability, people can remain caught in cycles of harm that prevent restoration and trust. Through restorative practices and circle processes, we guide individuals and organizations to engage in conflict transformation and rebuild right relationship with one another and their communities.
Healing & Therapeutic Support
Our behaviors and emotional patterns arise from both the lives we’ve lived and the generations that came before us, carrying supportive and challenging legacies alike. Through skilled facilitation, we help individuals develop awareness of these embodied inheritances and explore new ways of responding to life’s challenges. This work is rooted in values, presence, and self-compassion, fostering personal growth, healing, and resilience.
Ritual & Spiritual Work
At a time when human behavior edges toward destruction, we need more than material power to guide us. We stand at a crossroads where ritual, spiritual clearing, and reconnection are essential. The forces that move beyond human-centered thinking are vast and magnificent—inviting us to listen deeply, realign, and tap into the sacred power that restores balance.
Untangling Whiteness
Many white-bodied people carry both inherited privilege and deep, unacknowledged shame. This tension often leads to paralysis, defensiveness, or withdrawal, halting honest dialogue and meaningful growth. Through embodied, compassionate practice, we invite white people into accountability, healing, and transformation—learning to hold our history with honesty and love in pursuit of collective liberation.
Our Foundation
Facing In began as a collective of restorative justice facilitators — including Saba Ghebreyesus, Kusum Crimmel, and Kyle McClerkins — offering community-based circles and trainings rooted in accountability, healing, and repair.
When the pandemic arrived, Facing In was called to pivot. But more than a pivot, it needed to dissolve — to become compost. To return to the soil as nutrient-rich matter for new growth.
Saba stepped fully into the world of chocolate. Kusum and Kyle transitioned their primary work to Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth. In the dormancy that followed, Kusum deepened and expanded her practice as a somatic therapist, spirit-led fire ritualist, facilitator, and filmmaker with Untangling Whiteness (formerly Dissecting Whiteness).
Holding the many threads of her life’s work — and without any desire to weave them alone — Kusum reached back out to Kyle and a handful of powerful facilitators, healers, ritualists, and space holders to ask what new seeds might grow from the compost.
From that reconvening, Facing In re-emerged — not simply as it was, but as an organizational community devoted to transforming harm, division, and trauma into healing, connection, and collective liberation.
Facing In is inspired by a shared yearning to gather facilitators, healers, space holders, and ritualists in collective service to our communities. Together, we expand our tools, deepen our practice, and create offerings that have a tangible, positive impact on the world around us.
I’ve worked with Kusum from Facing In in two very different organizations, each navigating staff divisions that were causing harm to both people and mission. In both cases, Kusum brought not only a thoughtful restorative methodology to help staff have supportive and healing conversations going forward, but also steady calm, deep open-mindedness, and a solid belief in us as individuals and as a community. I would be delighted to work with her again and recommend her to any group seeking to unify a diverse community while embracing differences.
— Peggy Simmons, CNP
The Transformation Process & Impact
I had the great honor and privilege of working with Kusum as the circle keeper for a restorative justice circle. Kusum brings a very unique blend of somatic intelligence, adeptness and healing gifts intersected with a very evolved cultural and political knowledge base combined with a sense of experience and expertise as a seasoned circle holder. It is unique to have a circle keeper who has a clinical license, with over a decade of therapeutic work, as well as so much experience facilitating community healing that encompasses restorative practices and extends into fire keeping and artistic and community organizing.
— Nicole Klaymoon, Embodiment Project, ED
The Oakland Public Library worked with Kusum and Malachi of Facing In to help us institutionalize Restorative Practices at our organization. We had a vague idea of what we hoped to accomplish but lacked the experience, expertise, or tools to get us there. Kusum and Malachi were true partners in the process, helping us revise our vision while being sensitive to the needs of library staff. They were honest about what we could accomplish given our organizational climate at the time and gave us the tools to build trust among staff. Because of Facing In, library staff at several locations are committed to using Restorative Practices to strengthen relationships, which in turn has led to more open dialogue and decreased conflict.
— Brian Guenther, Oakland Public Library, Sir. Librarian
