Episode 37: Restorative practices and bridgebuilding on an individual and community level
with very special guest ANDREA BRENNEKE
Read her TIKKUN Article, A Restorative Circle in The Wake of A Police Shooting
Andrea Brenneke (J.D. Harvard Law School ?92, BA University of Washington, ?88) is a passionate advocate for justice and facilitator of individual and community healing and empowerment. She practices civil rights and employment law at MacDonald Hoague & Bayless in Seattle. www.mhb.com. A tenacious litigator and strategic negotiator, the results she obtains compensate her clients for violations of their legal rights and dignity and secure other types of injunctive relief and policy changes that make a lasting difference in society. Her litigation successes include substantial trial verdicts and settlements in sexual harassment, disability accommodation and discrimination, gender and race discrimination, retaliation, police and government misconduct. She supports employees through all types of work place disputes, contract negotiations, accommodations and claim reporting procedures. Andrea also facilitates creative solutions and negotiated resolutions to legal and social conflicts. Originally trained in negotiation at Harvard Law School, she now is a certified LR 39.1 mediator, a Restorative Circles practitioner, and an apprentice to Dominic Barter.
More...In her own words and a few resources:
Seattle Times Article
http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2014113565_diazreport03m.html
Also, with regard to the healing after the shooting, the work of the JTW project is really important to link to for me. That was another restorative response to the shooting -- a public art project and the totem pole. Check out: http://www.thejtwproject.org/
with the amazing Lauren Abramson,
Founder of the Community Conferencing Center of Baltimore, MD.
Lauren Abramson is Founder, Executive Director, Community Conferencing Center and also Assistant Professor, Child Psychiatry, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. She is a psychologist who has worked with children and families in communities for the past 25 years. She is the Founder and Executive Director of the Community Conferencing Center in Baltimore, Maryland and Assistant Professor (part-time) in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.
Lauren focused attention on Community Conferencing in Baltimore in 1995. She advances conferencing as a means of building social capital and collective efficacy on many levels, including:
• empowering individuals and communities to resolve their own conflicts
• keeping young people out of the criminal justice system, and
• mobilizing the existing untapped human assets in communities.
Lauren publishes articles on both the theoretical and empirical socio-political aspects of conferencing. The work of the Community Conferencing Center is groundbreaking for its multi-sector use of conferencing in highly distressed urban American communities.
Conferencing has helped Lauren learn that: while we can learn about conflict resolution through books and concepts, conflict--and personal--transformation happens through relationships and meaningful emotional experiences.
with Dr. Carl Stauffer of Eastern Mennonite University
Dr. Carl Stauffer teaches Justice and Development Studies at the Graduate Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, Eastern Mennonite University Harrisonburg, Virginia.
DOWNLOAD PDF OF CHAPTER
Finding Justice amidst the Rubble: Restorative Interventions in Post-war Contexts
Stauffer was born and raised amidst the war in Vietnam. In 1975, his family fled Vietnam and moved to the Philippines just as the Marcos regime was beginning to crumble. After completing his university education in 1985, Stauffer worked in the Criminal Justice and Substance Abuse fields.
In 1991, Stauffer became the first Executive Director of the Capital Area Victim-Offender Mediation Program in Richmond, Virginia.
In 1994, Stauffer and his family moved to South Africa under the auspices of the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), a faith-based international relief and development agency. In South Africa, Stauffer worked with various transitional justice processes such as the Peace Accords, Community-Police Forums, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Local Community Development structures.
From 2000 to 2009, Stauffer was appointed as the MCC Regional Peace Adviser for the Southern Africa region. His work has taken him to twenty African countries and ten other countries in the Caribbean, Middle East, Europe, and the Balkans.
Stauffer's academic interests focus on narrative studies, restorative/transitional justice, and post-war reconstruction and reconciliation. His research concentrates on the critique of transitional justice from a restorative frame, and the application of hybrid, often parallel indigenous community justice systems.
Stauffer is married to Dr. Carolyn Stauffer who teaches Sociology at EMU, and is the proud father of two university-aged children.
Mikhail is a member of the teaching faculty in the Department of Psychology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where, among other courses, he teaches an undergraduate course called Psychology of Race and Ethnicity and a graduate-level restorative justice practicum based at a youth detention center.
Since 2009, he has been a student and practitioner of Restorative Circles, a restorative practice developed in Brazil by Dominic Barter and associates.
Mikhail also writes a blog for Psychology Today called Between the Lines. This blog is primarily about race. The name comes from a DuBois quote: "The problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color-line."
Description: We covered a great deal of ground during this conversation with Michelle sharing background from her internationally acclaimed bestseller The New Jim Crow, personal insights and motivators for her in her work, and her belief that restorative justice provides a powerful solution to many of the problems we currently face. This dialogue is packed with stats, facts, and inspiring all the way through.
Brief Bio: Michelle Alexander is an internationally-renowned author and lawyer. Her most recent book, The New Jim Crow, has gained global acclaim for its pinpointing of the very real yet hushed critical issue of racial profiling and mass incarceration. She has been featured in major media worldwide, including Moyers & Company, NPR’s Fresh Air, CNN, and many others.
Quotes/Highlights from Transcript:
“It wasn’t long into that work (with the ACLU Racial Justice Project) that I realized that even I, someone who cared a lot about racial injustice and thought that I knew a lot about our criminal justice system, that I was deeply misguided and in a lot of denial about the way in which our criminal justice system wasn’t just in need of reform but had become the primary vehicle for creating and sustaining racial inequality in our time.” (10:08)
“I think that what I’ve come to see and understand better in recent years is that the American dream is just not real for millions of Americans and its not a matter of not trying.” (15:45)
“It (restorative justice) is definitely not a pipedream. I’m so encouraged by the movement that is growing around restorative and transformative justice. I think that one of the reasons why it’s such a crucial part of the work to end mass incarceration and to break this cycle of caste like systems in America is because it helps provide an answer to, well, if we don’t have prisons, if prisons aren’t the answer then what, what are we going to do about the harms and people affected. I think there is kind of real harm that has to be acknowledged and addressed. People do violate each other’s rights, commit real crimes against each other that cause pain and suffering in our communities.” (55:29)
Michelle’s full bio: http://newjimcrow.com/about-the-author
More about The New Jim Crow: newjimcrow.com
Michelle’s joint interview on Moyers & Company with Bryan Stephenson (jus
t below) of the Equal Justice Institute):
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04022010/watch.html
Interview from Justice Week During the Shift Network's Summer of Peace, 2012, Hosted by Molly Rowan Leach.
Arun Gandhi was born in 1934 in Durban, South Africa. Arun is the fifth grandson of India’s legendary leader, Mohandas K. “Mahatma” Gandhi. Growing up under the discriminatory apartheid laws of South Africa, he was beaten by “white” South Africans for being too black and “black” South Africans for being too white; so, Arun sought eye-for-an-eye justice. However, he learned from his parents and grandparents that justice does not mean revenge, it means transforming the opponent through love and suffering.
Grandfather taught Arun to understand nonviolence through understanding violence. “If we know how much passive violence we perpetrate against one another we will understand why there is so much physical violence plaguing societies and the world,” Gandhi said. Through daily lessons, Arun says, he learned about violence and about anger.
Arun shares these lessons all around the world. For the past five years, he has participated in the Renaissance Weekend deliberations with President Clinton and other well-respected Rhodes Scholars. In recent years his engagements included speaking at the Chicago Children’s Museum and the Women’s Justice Center in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He also delivered talks at the Young President’s Organization in Mexico, the Trade Union Leaders’ Meeting in Milan, Italy, as well as the Peace and Justice Center in St. Louis, Missouri. Sometimes, his journeys take him even further. Arun has spoken in Croatia, France, Ireland, Holland, Lithuania, Nicaragua, China, Scotland and Japan. Also, he is a very popular speaker on college campuses and in recent years, he has spoken at, North Dakota State University, Concordia College, Baker University, Morehouse College, Marquette University, and the University of San Diego, to name a few.
Arun is very involved in social programs and writing, as well. Shortly after Arun married his wife Sunanda, they were informed the South African government would not allow her to accompany him there. Sunanda and Arun decided to live in India, and Arun worked for 30 years as a journalist for The Times of India.
Arun and his late wife, Sunanda, rescued over 125 orphan children from the streets and placed them in loving homes around the world and began a Center for Social Change, which transformed the lives of millions in villages in the western state ofMaharashtra. Together, Arun and Sunanda started projects for the social and economic uplifting of the oppressed using constructive programs, the backbone of Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolence.
The programs changed the lives of more than half a million people in over 300 villages and they still continue to grow.
In 1987 Sunanda and Arun came to the US and in 1991 they started the M. K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence at the Christian Brothers University in Memphis Tennessee. In 2008 the Institute was moved to the University of Rochester, New York. In the 17 years of the Institute’s life the Gandhi’s took the message of nonviolence and peace to hundreds of thousands of high school and University youth around the US and much of the Western World.
Sunanda died in February of 2007 and the family is working to establish a residential-school in poorest rural India in her honor. Arun founded the Gandhi Worldwide Education Institute in 2008 headquartered in a suburb outside of Chicago, ILL. The Institute was founded to promote community building in economically depressed areas of the world through the joining of Gandhian philosophy and vocational education for children and their parents.
Arun is the author of several books. The first, A Patch of White (1949), is about life in prejudiced South Africa; then, he wrote two books on poverty and politics in India; followed by a compilation of M.K. Gandhi’s Wit & Wisdom. He also edited a book of essays on World Without Violence: Can Gandhi’s Vision Become Reality? And, more recently, wrote The Forgotten Woman: The Untold Story of Kastur, the Wife of Mahatma Gandhi, jointly with his late wife Sunanda and his bestseller Legacy of Love: My education in the path of nonviolence. In March of 2014 Grandfather Gandhi was released. A picture book for all ages by Arun Gandhi, Bethany Hegedus illustrated by Evan Turk.
To provide connection, advocacy, education and inspired action as a public service to individuals and communities seeking to proactively improve relationships and structures within their spheres and our world.
Restorative Justice on The Rise is an international live dialogue via Webcast and Telecouncil platform, held weekly, reaching an international constituency of a wide spectrum of invididuals, organizations, professionals, academics, practitioners, and beyond.
Restorative Justice on the Rise is an international live dialogue via Webcast and Telecouncil platform that reaches an international constituency of invididuals, organizations, professionals, academics, practitioners, and more. The mission is to provide connection, advocacy, education and inspired action as a public service to individuals and communities seeking to proactively improve relationships and structures within their spheres and our world.
Interview from Justice Week During the Shift Network's Summer of Peace, 2012, Hosted by Molly Rowan Leach.