No One Is Defined by the Worst Thing They've Done: Rebecca Weiker on Restorative Justice and Healing

Transcript auto-generated from the episode audio; formatting has been cleaned up, but wording is verbatim.

And that no one is defined by the worst thing that's happened to them, or the worst thing that they've done. The way that we can solve problems is by bringing people together to listen deeply. Have you ever been in conversation with anyone that's incarcerated who didn't have some amount of trauma that came before, the harm that they did? Never. Every human being to know that you're heard and seen as a human being, and that your story matters and that you matter, can really create a very open door for lots of transformation and healing to happen. I'm Cynthia Marks and I head up the Holistic Psychoanalysis Foundation established by my late husband, Doctor Bernard Bail.

Welcome to And Now Love. Today I'm very happy to be joined by Rebecca Weiker of Mend Collaborative. Rebecca's work creates opportunities for survivors and incarcerated people to engage in restorative dialog, accountability, and healing. Doctor Bail's work explored how understanding our emotional experiences and our trauma can help us live more authentically and make room for love and healing. Let's talk about what it can mean to face harm and find a path forward. Rebecca, thank you so much for being here. We're so honored to have you. Thank you so much for inviting me. I'm really honored to be here.

Well, I have so many questions for you. And first, what is Mend Collaborative? Mend Collaborative. We're a restorative justice organization. We were co-founded by myself and Miguel Casada about four and a half years ago, with the purpose of providing survivors and people responsible for harm, with opportunities to come together to meet needs that our traditional criminal legal system is not designed to meet. And what brought you and Miguel to this endeavor? We each have our own stories. My story is that in 1992, my oldest sister, Wendy, who was my beloved oldest sister working in the world to make peace and to support children and families and young people.

She was killed at the clinic where she worked as a mental health provider. So sorry. Thank you. And I think from that experience and other experiences that I had working with young people in communities affected by all kinds of systemic problems, I have come to just believe that the way that we can solve problems is by bringing people together to listen deeply to each other's shared experience, and that no one is defined by the worst thing that's happened to them, or the worst thing that they've done. And when you were struggling with the loss of your sister, did you find yourself in a situation where you were being heard and listening to another individual or group where you found some soothing qualities coming to you?

I didn't really have access to the things that now I see that might have been helpful. That you've sort. Of created. I also think that, well, first of all, community and I didn't have a community of people. I had very close and dear friends and family, but I didn't have a community that was impacted by violence in the way that I have a much larger community now. And I also had no understanding or connection to the criminal justice and prison system, and had no understanding of what the life experiences are of people who have committed harm or who are incarcerated. And and that that would be such a place of finding meaning and purpose and healing.

I'd had no idea. And how did you come to find that out then? I have a dear friend who has been a long time children's rights lawyer, who was working on ending life without parole sentences for people who were children, adolescents, and she. I volunteered with her. I had some time, and I entered a whole world that I knew nothing about and saw the connection between that work and my life experience and what I was looking to try to create in my own life, and hopefully for other people as well. And you and Miguel then started this organization. Was Miguel coming from a similar place? I'm always hesitant because one of our values is that we let people tell their own story.

So I'll just give some headlines, is that he had his own experience with violence and incarceration, and had been working in the community also to create healing and opportunities for survivors and incarcerated people. And we came together facilitating a victim offender dialog as partners for for two siblings who whose mom had been murdered. And out of that experience, we realized that our different life experiences mine as a survivor, his as a survivor, but also somebody who spent 20 years in prison, that we had this model of people with these life experiences working to support survivors and incarcerated people was was very powerful, and that we wanted to figure out how to bring that model into existence.

And we started an organization with some support from some very people who believed in our vision and mission and knew the work we had already been doing for years. Miguel, inside and outside of prison, and myself also for years doing this similar work. And we had some people who supported us to get started. We're very lucky. And here we are four and a half years later. And how hard was it to sort of unlock the door and get into the prison system? Well, we one of the things that we do is we work with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation with our Office of Victim and Survivor Rights and Services, and our Victim Offender dialog program actually is housed there, and they are very supportive.

The whole model is community based organizations doing this work. It's actually quite unique that most states that have a program, and only about half of all states do have such a program. Most states that have one, the people who do the actual facilitation are they their employees of the Department of Correction in California and a couple of other states on the West Coast are unique in that they they have community members do the do the work. So that made it a little bit easier that they were already working with them. It takes a lot of perseverance and commitment and patience to access the prisons.

They have a lot going on. And yeah, it just it I'm not the most patient person and I have learned some patience working in the prison system. But maybe it's also good that you're not the most patient, given what you have to contend with. Patience and perseverance. So those things are important. I would imagine that there are lots of roadblocks, intended or not just part of the system, and it operates a certain way. And even though you've been doing this for a while, it's still kind of new. And you mentioned that in some situations in other states, I guess largely if I understood that some amount of state employees are the facilitators, so then they're not necessarily coming from a lived experience the way people in a community might outside of the prison or even in the prison.

Yeah, they're not coming from that experience. And also for the incarcerated person, they represent that system. They're not outside of it. So I would imagine that that could present some issues of trust. Yes. When I first started doing this work, there were lots of roadblocks to formerly incarcerated people going into prisons at all, let alone doing this kind of work. And in the last ten years, that has changed. And now people who have served life sentences, who have really have deep accountability, deep insight, and lots, many, many years more experience than I have with helping people understand how they got to be somebody who could commit harm and what they need to do to be accountable, and then how to heal from that experience, including their own harm that they experience, perhaps as a child or adolescent or during their incarceration.

And so it's really important that people with that lived experience and that skill set, because it's really a skill set, it's not just their lived experience, it's their skill set that they've developed. Our organization wouldn't be what it is if we didn't have the, the, the, our colleagues who have that that experience in skills set. And I love that you call that a skill set. I think that is wonderful for people who have been invested in a life in prison. And clearly they come away with so much knowledge, emotional knowledge, and someone can say, wait a minute, I'm I haven't been here for years and I'm completely empty.

I have something I can give. Yes. And that people who are in prison spend many hours a day reading, running groups, doing their own reflection that there are people who are peer counselors, substance abuse counselors, people who run groups that go for weeks and weeks, that are focused on accountability and insight. And so, yes, it's a it's a skill set. And not every formerly incarcerated person has it, but some absolutely do. So yes. So just in case some of us don't know what is restorative justice and how is it different than what we typically think of as justice in the prison system? So the three questions that that the traditional criminal legal system usually asks is what what crime was committed, who did it, and then what punishment should we give?

Restorative justice centers the person who was harmed, who was harmed, what are their needs? And then whose obligations are these? So it's it's not about the state. It's about the community responding to the needs of everybody who has been harmed in so centering the survivor and also acknowledging that if we don't attend to the needs and situation of the person who caused harm, that we haven't really addressed the underlying issue, and going forward, we probably won't prevent future harm. And do you think that our typical system of justice was designed to just sort of get an immediate fix? This person committed a crime.

This person did harm. They need to be punished. We have to get them off the streets. And then it just stopped there. Meanwhile, almost all of those people have some sort of life story that led them to this. If I mean all of them have some sort of life story that led them to be in a place where this harm could be done. Do you think that at some point way back in history that we were more as a civilization? Well, I think we're particularly bad in the United States, but more restorative, justice minded. And just as time went by and we our population grew, we have more issues. We need to take care of things immediately.

Yes. I think well, there are indigenous cultures that used a much more restorative and community based response to violence and harm where people were instead of being, they were kind of called into the community. And that's not how we respond now. We have a much more retributive and ironically, even though we have such harsh punishment for some people, we also there's so much harm that happens in the number of people we could never incarcerate. Are all the people who have actually committed harm in our community. If you think about the very high rates of child sexual abuse, of sexual assault, of domestic violence, that if we actually tried to try and convict and incarcerate all the people who are responsible for all those kinds of harm, we would need just we would need so huge numbers of prisons, it would just be completely untenable.

And yet we focus a lot of energy on the people who we have tried and convicted and arrested and incarcerated. And yet we don't address a lot of underlying issues that perpetuate all those harms out in the community and so many people suffering from those harms, and the person responsible will never be identified or convicted or incarcerated. I guess there might be more of us incarcerated than not. Yes. Because it's I think we don't want to acknowledge that how common all these harms really are in our in our society, but they're very common. I mean, look at what is just blatantly happening in our world now, particularly in our country, just blatant.

And, you know, it's we're just all walking around the same as each other, as if, you know, there's no accountability. Exactly. And I think doing this work right now, the irony of, of the lack of accountability for people who create harm in a daily basis to our community members, and then the people who I see who are working so hard inside prison, who are working to to take accountability for the harm that they've done, that it's kind of upside down world. We work a lot in women's. We work in the two women's prisons. And, you know, seeing the kind of gender, the the impact of some gender based violence of the people who are there.

And then also in the men's prisons, so much childhood experiences of abuse that just are invisible to most of us, that really fuel a lot of the harm that then continues out in our communities. Have you ever been in conversation with anyone that's incarcerated who didn't have some amount of trauma that came before, the harm that they did? Never. Yeah. And when you invite people to share with you, how hard is that on both sides? For example, are the incarcerated generally like, I don't need that. And that's not for me. I don't want to. I already feel bad. Why would I bring that up? And and like you mentioned, certainly with a staff member, it's almost like you are recommitting the crime or are you giving more power to the person already holding the power and the idea that in order to sort of feel like you need to survive in that situation, you do need to be tough and and less emotional and, you know, just sort of suck it up.

You did this bad thing, you're bad. And to get people to break out of that shell seems so close to impossible. But you and others that we've spoken to make it seem, no, it's not that. That is just a stereotype that is not accurate at all. Again, upside down world, because I can't tell you how many circles I've sat at in level four, which is the highest security prison in California, prisons of circles of ten or 15 or 20 men who are speaking about themselves in a very vulnerable way, connected to their emotions. We have a box of tissues in the center listening to a survivor recount what has happened to them, connecting with maybe their own experiences of harm or their experiences of committing harm.

It's voluntary and confidential, and we have lots of guardrails so that it's continues to be something that doesn't recreate harm for either person. But we also do something we call surrogate restorative dialogs, where we bring a survivor into a group that's a rehabilitative group in prison, and for them to share their story of experiencing harm for their own benefit, because maybe they don't want to or haven't had the chance to share their story directly. But being able to share their story with a group of people who've committed maybe similar harm is very meaningful for them, and then for the people in the group to hear from them when they may not have ever have the ability to hear directly or be in conversation with their own victims is very transformative.

And healing as well. Helps them connect the dots, help them really hear directly what that experience over time is not just at the time that the crime was committed, but maybe 10 or 15 or even 20 years later sitting in those circles or sitting, you know, directly with somebody who's preparing for a dialog. I think every human being to know that you're heard and seen as a human being and that your story matters and that you matter, can really create a very open door for lots of transformation and healing to happen in a relatively short amount of time. Sometimes the magic of listening, yeah, in the magic of being heard in these settings where you have one individual, a survivor sharing a story, or the other people in the circle, then sharing some of their story, that the hardship that they went through prior to harming someone, or is that setting just to have that survivor tell their story and be heard?

Usually the survivor comes in and it's part of a larger curriculum, and where they're they're working on their own experiences and understanding that and unpacking that for, for weeks before. And then we come in just to do this piece. And sometimes it's a standalone, but usually this session that we do and we do a at least one preparation session beforehand for people to kind of understand what's going to happen and be ready for the survivor. But it really is focused on this. On impact of violent victim impact and what what that looks like. And so the survivor is in dialog with the incarcerated people, but more for them to ask questions of the survivor, of what their experience has been and for the survivor to ask questions.

And they may ask questions about their childhood experiences. But the heart of the session really is to understand the impact on the survivor themselves. I see. So can you walk us sort of through the steps of of what a victim offender dialog looks like? How do you prepare for it? How do the parties come to it, and what do you hope would be achieved for the survivor and the offender? So the way that it usually starts, sometimes people find the Office of Victim Services and go directly to them, and then we get assigned a case sometimes because we're out in the community and we have our facilitators who are human beings, who are connected to so many other people that people come to us because they've heard about our work.

And so we receive them. We explain the process, we explain, and we also connect them up with Office of Victim Services. And so we explain what it is and what it isn't, that it's a process that is a mutual process. It's voluntary. It's confidential. So it means that there's always choice. Either person at any time can decide that they don't want to participate. There's no benefit to participating that doesn't even go in the incarcerated person's official record, so that the survivor can trust that it's for what it's for, which is this conversation, and not to be used to present themselves in a particular way.

Yeah. And it's confidential. So that often a survivor maybe is the one person in their family who has chosen that this is their path and we don't judge or evaluate that as better or worse. We just know that is their path. And we that's our work is to work with them. But and we recognize that they may have other people in their family who this is not their journey and path. So we want to protect them. And we also want to protect the incarcerated person that they can do this without having, you know, anyone have opinions or about what this process is about. So it creates this kind of wrapped of bubble of safety and security around these people to come together to do what they both are wanting to do.

I see. Yes. And you might not want your family or your children to be privy to what it is that you're sharing, right? And if there's let's say there's a parole hearing where this has happened, we don't want the other people, maybe, who are involved, to then be angry that this person has chosen to do this, which might get expressed against the survivor or against the person who's incarcerated. So so we start with a survivor and we have a meeting with them to understand what are your needs. What is this about? What are you hoping to gain from this? So that we have a clear idea of what they're looking for.

Also, that we can give them information about the process so that they have a clear idea of what it is and what to expect. What is it that most people expect? And they include, I mean, and what we tell them is you get to decide what it is that you're looking for. And then we hear, like, we kind of can check in with them about what is we, you know, we give no guarantees. But and they also might want to know what what people are looking for. So it could be that they they just want information. They maybe there was a plea deal or the trial. They could tell that everybody wasn't telling the truth.

They just want to know what happened. And this person might be the only one who really knows that they they might they might want to share about what their life has been like. They might if it was a homicide, they might want to share about who their loved one was, because they were more than the fact that they were murdered. They might want to share about who they were before and what they're all the impacts physical, emotional, financial, spiritual, all the ways that over this period of time, their life has been impacted. So I always say that's the bucket of things that they want to share about themselves, about their loved ones.

And then there are the questions that I started out with, like, what happened? Who are you? How have you spent your time? If you're released, what are you going to do? How do I know that I can trust you? How did you get to be the person who committed this crime? That's a lot to be faced with. Yes. And incarcerated people have said that this was the hardest thing they've ever done. Facing this person facing themselves in this way is the hardest thing they've ever had to do. And so what kind of prep work do you do with them in order to create a safe help them feel they're in a safe space? Well, our work is mostly in person, so we travel great distances all over the state of California.

Last week, my colleague, my Co facilitator and I drove out to Ironwood State Prison, which is in Blythe, which is on almost on the Arizona border, about four hours from Los Angeles. So we travel far. And so we spent about three hours in the prison when we go to visit people, because we have traveled far, you can sustain that kind of long conversation and difficult conversation in person. I don't think it would ever be possible, like over zoom or something like that. Just try to. Really maintain that emotional depth and connection and safety. So we go in person so we can sit with them in a private space, and at first we just get to know them a little bit, you know, hear about how they've been spending their time.

Well, the first thing we do when we go is we present the survivors request, because you asked before about, you know, what is the process look like. So the first thing is we present this request and we explain we sometimes I mean, we literally will write down what the survivor says so that we can convey exactly what their intention is. And they can say yes. They can say no. They can say I'm not sure. And almost always people say yes, but not always. And we tell the survivor that that people usually say yes, but they don't always say us and that we have absolutely have people say, no, no, thank you.

I would not like to participate in this process. So if they do say yes, we usually start out just asking about how they are, how they spend their time just to get to know them a little bit. And as we continue our work with them, we learn about their childhood. We ask about how they grew up with their family was like what their childhood experiences were like, which, as we both just discussed, often include abuse and experiences of violence and harm. And and we talk about the crime not not right away, but we we get to that when we've created a safe container and a connection and, and we talk about the crime so that we can hear what their accountability sounds like, so that if there are questions that the survivor has, that we know whether those questions are going to be answered, we don't give the answers to the survivor.

We really don't share much information back and forth, because this is a conversation for these two people to have themselves. And so we don't want to get in the way of that. And whenever you convey anything I've learned, even if I think it's the most benign piece of information, it always gets filtered through me. And so we really want to get out of the way and not put anything of ourselves into it. So it's really their conversation. And we also want to create trust and safety. So we're listening for that as we work with each person. So we continue to talk with them about their accountability, about their insight.

If the survivor has questions specifically, we want to make sure that we go over those, that we've gone over the information broadly and kind of listen to see if those things will be answered. And if they're not all there's places where there's like gaps that we address. Those usually anywhere from six months to a year, is the usual amount of time that it takes us get. To the point. Yes. And we go to the prison usually every between every four to 6 to 8 weeks. I see. So there's time in between. We send books, people can do writing and send it back to us depending on what people's capacity is. Some people really, it's really beneficial to do a lot of writing and reflecting other people.

That's just not going to happen. Yeah. So your trip to the prison in Blythe, is that the beginning of a process that you're setting up? I think that was our fourth time. And so these conversations will be coming up in the next few months, I guess. Yes. We're getting closer to setting a date for the dialog. And I don't know much about this prison or the size of it, but relative to the size of it, how many people can you affect? That's a good question because this is a very labor intensive and small program, so I don't know how many dialogs they've had at this prison. It's a handful we've had, I think, all together since we started, we've had about 58 or 59, maybe 60 at this point, referrals.

And we've done, I think, 32 actual dialogs, about 13 or 14 cases closed without a dialog. And the other ones are all still in process and process still. So you think, oh, that's a small number. It is. And we're one of, you know, about six organizations that do this work. And then I when I sometimes think like, oh, you know, what impact are we having? I know for the survivors, it's transformative and for the incarcerated person as well, that this is a life changing experience, and it costs over $130,000 a year to incarcerate a person. A person we're working with in Blythe has been incarcerated for 35 years.

My goodness. So if we think about this work in the scheme of the cost of that person's incarceration, the cost to the survivor who has lived with the harm for that period of time, that helps me think about this work in a different way. It's relative to everything else we spend. It's very modest amount of money. Yes. And my question was not at all meant to diminish your work. It's more like, how do we get more of this? What you're doing? Yes. Are you doing is so important and that you help one person is magical. I mean, just even one person. And. And by virtue of what you do, you can't help but help.

At least to. Yes. And my hope is, and maybe you can speak to this, that the work you're doing on both sides comes back into the communities that those people belong to. So for the incarcerated, it's their incarcerated community. It's the family they talk to on the phone. It may even be the staff that they have to work with. And then the same for the survivor. I mean, is there are there any do you have clues that that's happening or you. You it's funny because you actually answered the question that because but you're right that when we do we do this role play actually when we're preparing for the surrogate dialog that we call the ripple effect, where we have a it's a role play where we read about a kind of an amalgamation of a of a, of a homicide, not just it's not one person's story, but we and then we give everybody a card that has a person who has impacted, and they have to speak in the first person from that experience of how they were impacted.

And it's people who were connected to the victim, people who are connected to the person responsible, people in the community who are impacted, somebody who works in law enforcement or in the in the medical care system. And so you see and you could see very quickly how there are hundreds of people from one act, right, that are impacted by violence. And I do think that with our dialog work and our restorative justice work, it's there's the opposite. There's the positive ripple effect, right? Where if it's 1 or 2 people, that person is in their family and maybe a load that they have been carrying for years, for decades, they can put down some of what they've been carrying in terms of their grief, their shame, whatever it is that they're carrying.

And that impacts their children, their spouse, their siblings, their parents, you know, so many people and then within their community, right, their faith community, their work community, and then within the prison system, right. The way they interact with their peers. So much good work in prisons happens because of incarcerated people mentoring and supporting their peers. And that that that is how many people's transformation happens, is that there's somebody who takes an interest and supports them on their journey as they're doing their own journey. So there are huge and that's just for the dialog program.

And then if you think about our surrogate dialog program, that's why we have these different programs too. So that's a group of maybe 20 people. And then we do another one on that same prison facility and then another one. And then soon a big part of that community has had this experience. And I've seen that if we do sustained work that that can transform what's happening on that facility. And then we also do something called Days of Healing, where we bring in a bunch of people from the community, like 25 people from the community, including survivors, other community members, and have about 60, 70, 80 incarcerated people.

And we spend a day together focused on healing, community building. We have lunch, we do art, we dance, we talk. And so that's a way of giving everybody, if it's just one day, an experience of our shared common humanity. And that can also have ripples that people might shift themselves in some way, both on the outside and the inside. And we try to sometimes for the day of healing, there'll be somebody. Sometimes it's like in a visiting room and they'll look around and they'll say, I haven't been in the visiting room. And I had one person say, I haven't been in a visiting room in 25 years. I don't have any buddy who visits me.

So just being with people from the outside, from from community members is something that's transformative. That is so sad. Yeah, it's really sad. So there becomes, I wonder if there's just a moment for some people, particularly the incarcerated, where it's not an us and a them, it's not their powerful and we're not there good and we're bad. We're on the same plane. And what that must feel like to, you know, have lived years and years feeling otherwise. It's amazing when the person who does our dance is called dance from the heart. Susana Ortiz, she she does this and you can watch people who are.

It's it's it's not like a choreographed dance. It's it's really a trauma informed, embodied healing modality. And afterwards we do sort of a reflection check out at the end of the day. And often people will say, I forgot that I was in prison or I felt like I was a child again. And you see this like joy. And the idea that like in a day, it's a day, but in a day we can bring somebody that experience of connecting with their child self, connecting with joy, connecting with their humanity is really a beautiful thing. A day. And to be able to create this shift for someone who's been thinking of themselves in one way for all this time, to be able to just see that little opening and, and, you know, sort of soak up some of that light, that joy that I am part of humanity.

I, I, I have a reason for being and to not just be judged by the bad things supposedly, that you did. It made me think, why isn't there something? And I think you're you're helping make this happen. And and partially because these people that you're helping are seeing it themselves. And it's that ripple effect. They can bring it forward for others once they have it. And the more you give that experience to someone else, the more you also get it back again. You you're saying that that's something that we hear from so many survivors. They'll say, sometimes people say like, why are you wanting to do the dialog?

Right? And they'll say, I'm doing it because I really do have forgiveness. And so this is something I need to tell this person. I want to give this to them. And they say it's not for me. And then afterwards they'll say, you know what? I didn't realize how much it was for me and how much I was caring for the opposite. Right. That people this idea of of mutuality and giving and receiving and how powerful that is, especially when it's unexpected, especially when it's like you're not that's not what you're looking for, that it just kind of happens that it's so authentic and spontaneous and believable that it's like, oh, I didn't know I would get that.

I didn't know I would give that. Yeah. And what I love surprise. What a lovely gift to the process. And you and I were talking before we had our microphones in that. You know, what an interesting example it is, the work that you're doing in other agencies similar to yours in this prison system that is unknown to most of us and perceived in a certain way. And you would think that you can't make change there, you just can't, and that you are, and you're really doing something that at the bottom of it all is pretty simple. It's pretty simple. You're right. It is simple. And that it's not really that hard.

No, it's really about showing up and about recognizing people's humanity. Yeah. And somehow we turned it into an extremely unapproachable thing, which we do with a lot of what we consider on the outskirts of what ever it is we've decided is normal. But to be able to see how simple that is and, and to see, you know, the tough job that you do, getting to creating that simple process. Shouldn't we all just stand back and think, well, you know, what about my days where I don't feel like I can be motivated to do anything, or I feel like I'm the worst thing that I ever did? Oh, I don't feel loved or I don't know how to love.

And I just want to put the pillow over my head. And we all get to feel those things. But to see the work that you're doing is so motivating for all of us. I think every person we need purpose and meaning in our lives, especially in really tough times, we can feel really powerless. And and sometimes people will say, is it weird that, like, one of the best days of my life at this point was spent inside a prison and I say, no, I understand what that means because there's this real and presence and purposefulness and connection that everything is kind of dropped away. And each of us has something to give to the human experience.

Each of us does. And I, you know, I fear that we when we look around, you think, how could I possibly make a difference anywhere? Know why? My little voice, you know my little heart. And I think if we can just look at the work that you're doing and how much change is being made, it's just an example, a really good example of just, you know, doing one little thing leads to a lot of other bigger, fabulous human experiences. I love it when sometimes people will reach out to me and they're like, they were in a victim impact class that I, I used to do a kind of longer class years ago when I worked in other organization, and they'll be home from prison and they'll reach out, you know, and they'll say, like, Rebecca, remember me, you know, and I was in your class in 2017 and, and and they'll share like, oh, you know, that was the beginning of my journey or that helped me on my journey.

And it's it's like really I mean, it's their work. I always say that. It's like, I gave you an opportunity and you, you took it. You did the you did the work, you showed up. That was the most important thing. We were speaking with a gentleman named Carlos, and he heads up the organization called Larp here in Los Angeles. And he was sharing with us some of his struggles growing up and what led him to to do what he's doing now. And he said that at one moment there was a teacher who they just connected, and he knew that everything that she was saying to him, asking of him was nothing but pure love.

And he said that although he still sort of continued to do some things that weren't the healthiest, he held that. He held that. And he said, it's because of that that I ultimately was able to, you know, sort of stop those wheels from turning and get a new set of wheels. I thought about that the other day thinking, just what was that? That was just a moment in time for him, but it stuck to his heart and motivated him to make changes and do the fabulous work that he's doing. How easy is it to do something like that for someone else? It really is. I mean, if you if you understand what love is and you really, you know, are coming from it authentically, it's the best thing you can present to anyone else.

Yes, absolutely. One of my current colleagues, who's our facilitator, who I met when he was incarcerated, facilitating inside, and now works with us as a facilitator. He remembers the names of every survivor and the names of their loved ones, of every person who ever came into the prison to share with him and holds them like, like jewels. And, you know, because I feel like what he says is that he received that gift and that love and connection, and he holds that and carries that. And I think, again, I don't think we carry each other's stories. And if we all carried each other's stories with love and saw each other with love, in that way the world would be a very different place.

And I'm so lucky again that in these times I get to, even though it's people say, oh, it must be so hard. And I say, what you think is the hard part is not the hard part, because I'm working with people who are right at the edge of all of this. That matters so much that it's an incredible gift. The hard part is like the systems and the, you know, and that is the nose and the and the indifference or whatever, but but not from the people we work with. Never. That was sort of what my next question was going to be about was, how do you and your facilitators handle some of the weight of the stories that you are privy to?

So we we have a learning community where we share with each other, and we're we're in the process of, you know, continuing to build the support that we have. But that's one of the reasons why we Kofi, so that, you know, on a long drive back, we can kind of unpack and reflect on and get support and make sure that all of our that we're resourced in the in the right way. I think we could do better because sometimes, you know, the people around us, like we don't want to trauma dump on each other on our loved ones, you know? So we need to have places and make sure that we all have time and space to do our own processing and, and reflective work and regeneration so that we can sustain ourselves, our own practices, so that we can stay grounded.

I feel like the idea of really taking care of the care givers or the facilitators is fairly new. Like maybe years ago, we would just shove people into that space and not really think about how they're impacted and therefore how their friends, families, communities are impacted by what they're carrying. Yeah. I mean, we know that, like, for example, the people who are the correctional officers have very high rates of they they don't do well physically and emotionally because of their work. And so we know also and so our work we have to be attend, you know, we do here and support people in very difficult circumstances.

And it's very important for us to to take care of ourselves. We were able to create a new position and hire one of our facilitators to be the program director for our victim Offender dialog program, and so we'll have more capacity for ongoing check ins. And, you know, for our facilitators, both in terms of substantively and then also emotionally of how people are doing and if they do need additional support. Yes. How did the incarcerated even come to you? How do they find you? You must have a presence in the prison system. Are. Those offenders typically interested in finding things to do, finding ways to help themselves?

So it depends on which program. So with the victim offender dialog, it's because the survivor has initiated with our surrogate dialogs. Sometimes we're already engaging with a program that people have already decided they want to be part of. So for example, there's a program at the California Institution for women called Responsibly Driven that was started by incarcerated people, for incarcerated people who have committed DUI related harm. And so that's all run directly by the incarcerated women there. And so we bring survivors specifically into that program. So when we are working, for example, we have a dialog where we're working with somebody whose their loved one was killed in a DUI.

We brought her into that program recently so that she could share as part of her preparation. She could share in that in that circle. And it was very meaningful for her and for the women in the circle. So that that's one way sometimes for our days of healing, we just have sign up sheets in their housing units, and it has a little description and they can just write down, I want to be part of this. And I love that, because we also want people who are at the very beginning of their journey, that this might be their pivotal moment where they decide to go this way rather than this way. And you never know when that moment is going to be where somebody says, I'm tired of being part of violence in prison.

I'm tired of using drugs or alcohol, which are available in prisons. That's always a daily choice for people to not use, even if they're in prison. And they just they're like, I want to go this way rather than this way. Are there more people going this way then that other way? Yeah, our prison population is about 90,000 people now, and it was double that about 15 years ago. Was it really. Yeah. And so why is the work that you're doing. More prevalent in California than anywhere else? I think California has this ecosystem of people who've been working for decades to try to reform our criminal legal system and to to think differently about the causes of violence and harm and how we should respond and as like a social justice movement.

So I think that kind of formed the a lot of the foundation of this work, because then that sort of involved into people who were then going into prisons and doing work. And but until very recently, everybody who did work in prisons, there were all volunteers. There was no funding directly for it either. You had to there was no public funding for it. And over the last ten years now there is funding. It's still very small portion of the overall budget of the Department of Corrections. But it's to do something. But it absolutely is. And there's different grant programs now because the Department of Corrections recognizes and also the recidivism rates of people who engage in rehabilitative programs that are run by community based organizations versus the ones that are done by the prison system there, they have better outcomes.

That's a wonderful change. So they recognize that us as community members, that we add a lot of value and actually over time, like if those people are not returning to prison, that we are saving both lives and preventing harm and saving money. And so it's kind of a no brainer, right, that we should invest more in these community based organizations doing this work. And it's been the sustained advocacy of many, many people whose created that. But it's a constant, you know, we don't it's none of it's a given. The budget ask happens every year. And there could be a year where things are tough. And, you know, we just get to know.

So we also raise our for Mend Collaborative. We about half of our budget comes from foundations and individual donations. We we know that we can't be overly reliant on the public funding because it could go away. Yeah. Are there organizations similar to yours that are attempting to make connections with systems outside of California? Yeah, I mean, because there is this kind of work does happen across the country and some states are further along or have more resources than others were particularly interested in mend at. So nationally, there's there's been a movement to, to address extreme sentencing and sentencing of of youthful of people who committed their crimes when they were young and and that's in the interest of justice and also understanding brain development and and what's appropriate.

Right. And so those I personally think that those things make sense. And I also understand that that impacts survivors. Right. That it doesn't for many reasons. Keeping that person in prison for the rest of their life doesn't make sense. And the the victims and survivors in that case were told something, and now they're being told something else. So as part of that, we really believe that restorative justice has a key role, that if you're bringing somebody back to have their sentence changed and you're going to engage with a survivor, usually a survivor maybe has a chance to make a victim impact statement again.

But that's not that's not really meeting all these other needs that we talked about. Right. And it's not going to be addressed. And so we really think it's important that if you're doing that kind of sentencing review or resentencing, that you have restorative justice opportunities for survivors so they can have that direct conversation and learn, who are you? How did you get here? What have you done? Let me share more about what my life for the last 20 years have been like. Let me tell you what who I want you to be so that it's more of a dialog rather than just a statement out to somebody. Yeah.

My colleague Miguel and Anne, one of our facilitators, recently went to a conference that was focused on resentencing, and we presented on this very topic. They're well received, I'm sure. It was. And just thinking about what you said earlier, as a survivor, many of us are survivors given a particular harm that occurred. It might not just be one person. You know what? What have I, as the survivor, shared with my children about what I believed, how I felt, what happened? What this person was like. And when that person is now, you know, coming back out to be amongst us, let's say. I mean, what a huge shock.

It's not just your feelings, but it's the whole system you set up to support yourself, whatever that meant. I mean, I sometimes talk, you know, I have two my sons are 23 and 27. And I say when I share my story, which I don't do that often, but sometimes I do. I say, you know what? My sister was killed before my children were born, and yet her death had a profound impact on them because of what that loss did to me, choices I made and had to raise them who I am in the world. And so these ripple effects do continue. And so having opportunities to address things that grief, loss, things that haven't been addressed for many, many years, you know, sometimes we put somebody in prison, then we say, okay, that's what we gave you, is this person is now away.

Yeah. But there's so much that lingers that never was addressed. And so it can be kind of opening reopening a wound. But then also that might be there's an opportunity to heal that wound in a different way. Yep. Not everything feels good all the time, right? Yes. Yeah, exactly. So what about you guys going forward? What's next? Are you kind of at capacity and how much you can do. And you hope that you can get your message out. And other people might pick up the baton and do something similar or learn how to do this. Or can you expand? I think we're limited by our funding right now. If we had more funding, we could do more.

And I do think that there's an unmet need for the restorative justice work that we do, that if more people knew about it, they would ask for it. And so it could very quickly exceed our capacity. So we're kind of right at the edge of capacity right now. And how do survivors are victims? Because we use the word survive survivor for both the incarcerated, the victims and the offenders. How do the victims come to you? Sometimes they come through victim services. Sometimes they come because a community member, they found out or they were like looking for restorative justice on the internet. And I saw organization came up.

There's also a law in California called AB 60 that requires that victims and survivors are informed about community based restorative justice opportunities. Does that work well? Well, I'll just say that to date, I don't think there's a single victim Services district attorney's office in the 58 counties of California that has information about victim offender dialog posted on their website. Really? Yes. So that is something that is on our agenda, is to try to ask that just literally just to put the Office of Victim Services victim offender dialog link on their website. And we say we don't believe it's for everyone.

It's for some people though. So please let people know. Yeah, let them decide. Let them decide. If you believe in survivor autonomy then this should absolutely be one of the things that you let people know about that is is a possibility for them. Well, now, if someone is interested in contributing, where would one go? They could go to our website mend. Collaborative mend. Not. And there'll be a donate button there. And also you can learn more about us. And if you want to sign up for our newsletter, you can sign up for our newsletter. And if you want to want to connect with us in some way, we have our there's a contact form or info at Mend Collaborative and you can reach out to us.

And it doesn't sound like there's much really for volunteer opportunities. It sounds like it's quite the system you have in place that takes a lot of time educating those that are involved. But I don't know, maybe there's an opportunity to get people informed enough that they could be calling our representatives and saying, hey, why isn't this up on your website? Let's talk about it. I like that idea. And and also, you're right that that it's not we haven't figured out a way to really integrate volunteers because we do we do appreciate that. We like to train and pay our facilitators and and that our day of healing program is something that people who are interested in understanding more about this world, in this work, is something that people can, can be invited to.

So that is something that people can reach out and ask if they can attend one. And if there's space and it makes sense. We're we're happy to invite people to that to that program. Thank you. What a valuable experience that would be. As we were talking about how much it can be cherished by the people who have been seen less than for all this time. Same holds true, you know, just to look across the table and see someone who's, you know, created harm. But but know that they're just as human as you are. Yeah. So thank you so much for doing what you do. It's really a treasure, and I love that we have this opportunity to to share what you're doing with our audience.

I feel like you have such deep insight and such. Maybe because you lead with love, understand so much. You got us in our work so deeply. So I really appreciate that. It's been such a pleasure to talk to you. Please follow, rate and share this podcast and pass it along to someone who might need it. This is and now love, love. I know we think it's so corny, but it's like the best thing we have. Listen to your dreams and live from your heart. Thank you.