Bringing RJ to the Center: Communities and Universities Working Together

The National Association for Restorative and Community Justice held its sixth National conference on community and restorative justice from June 16–18 in Oakland, CA. The event’s theme Moving Restorative Justice from Margins to CenteR: We’re the Ones We’ve Been Waiting For centered on promoting racial inclusivity and healing by elevating historically marginalized voices, promoting radical healing for all people, and exploring the intersection of restorative justice with other contemporary movements.

The conference was particularly enriching to me not only as an attendee, but also because I had the opportunity to facilitate a conversation around Building Community and Academic Partnerships for Restorative Justice Research. This session focused on the experiences of both researchers and the community partners who helped to design and implement a project evaluating the impacts of High-Risk Victim-Offender Dialogue in Colorado. For more information about the project, click here. Discussion participants included Greg Brown, Chief Probation Officer for Boulder County Probation, former Restorative Justice Coordinator for the State of Colorado Deb Witzel,, and Dr. Shannon Sliva of the University of Denver Graduate School of Social Work.

This session offered an opportunity for partnership members to connect and share their insights regarding what it’s like to work in a community-University partnership and discuss the unique challenges and benefits that come with it. The session included a discussion about how different partners became involved and guidance for audience members who were interested in building a similar partnership in their work.

This session allowed us to open up a dialogue and receive important feedback from practitioners regarding their hopes and concerns for partnerships like ours. We will continue to explore community-academic partnerships and how to make them a focus in our research efforts moving forward. The next step is for our researchers to interview our leadership team to capture their experience and thoughts on how the partnership is developing and produce an article that can be shared with academics as well as the larger community. Hopefully this article serve as another tool for those interested in building community-academic partnerships.