 Hello everyone, this is 15 minutes and I am here with Deb Witzel of Three Stories Consulting and this is the third part of our series on Restorative Justice Practices and I'm just going to let Deb explain what she does and why as a beginning and then we'll talk about it. Thanks, Marcia. So Three Stories Consulting is my business and we do everything that we do based on restorative values and principles. So we recognize that whenever conflict or some social infraction of any kind, crime, conflict, whatever it is, incurs, then we have created a rift in our relationships with each other, with our community and so Three Stories Consulting facilitates the repair of that harm. We recognize that when relationships are harmed or there's an infraction in our relationship that we have the opportunity to come together and have a conversation about what happened, who's been affected and how and what we need to do to make things right, to the extent possible. If it's a crime and someone has passed away, obviously we can't bring them back but the people who remain here have some relationship that occurred even if they didn't know each other. Anyway, I could go down a rabbit hole with that. But Three Stories Consulting, we provide facilitation and that might be individual, that might be organizational, but that's what we do best. Thank you. And that brings up so many questions. The first one is when we've talked about restorative justice before with the Longmont Community Justice Partners, they have a set relationship, a fixed relationship with Longmont's police organization and they have the set purpose of bringing younger offenders, not just juveniles but a lot of first-time offenders and being able to divert them out of the criminal justice system. And that means that they basically have a steady stream of customers. So you have a different business model, I hate to use such a crude term for it, but you know, you've got to get people to work on somehow. How does that happen with you? And I'm sure it's a variety of ways but a couple of examples. You know, one of the things is that when we were talking a minute ago, I invite people to reach out. So when there's a conflict, when there is difficulty between humans, Three Stories Consulting can help facilitate the repairing the bridge as well. So that's one of the ways. And then I also work in partnership with the 20th Judicial District Probation Office and facilitate high-impact crimes. So when, for example, there has been intimate violence of some kind, we have the opportunity to offer a restorative process to someone who's been impacted, someone who's been harmed, and if they are interested and that willingness to participate is bottom line the key point for everyone in a restorative process. Then we move forward to see if a person who's caused the harm, the responsible party has taken responsibility for their actions. And this is like, I'm giving an example, but there are, you know, any myriad of examples of these higher impact crimes that we can facilitate processes. And if they've taken responsibility, we can move forward and explore coming together. Sure. And so that in terms of the source of customers, there are, I can imagine two scenarios. First, someone is exiting the penal system on probation or someone's exiting the court system on probation without going through being imprisoned, but both of those are potentially high-impact situations. Do your referrals then come from the penal system or the court system to begin with? Yeah, what often happens is within the court process, a judge may ask for someone to be screened for a restorative justice process and that looks like us having that conversation that I was talking about a minute ago, seeing if someone has taken responsibility for their actions, if they have some level of understanding that they've had an impact. And if that's the case, then they are appropriate for restorative justice practices and will reach out and let the harmed parties or the victims or survivors of an incident know this is available to them if they are interested in it. That's one process, bringing those folks together. We have a lot of other restorative justice practices, different models that we can use if it's not appropriate to bring folks together in a restorative process. So you talked about community supervision, right? People who aren't going to be incarcerated but they are working with a probation officer over a period of time to really rebuild some skills to reorient to social norms and probation officers help make that happen. But recognizing that the community has been impacted by the thing that person did, we can bring in our case trained volunteer community members, people who understand the values of restorative justice practices, relationship respect, responsibility, repair and then reintegration. So those community members will be the folks that sit in a restorative process that we facilitate and the person responsible gets to repair the harm to the community. Very good. And now you said the five Rs. I did. Which I have heard before. Yes. And if you watch this series, you have heard before. But let's say them again because they're really important. Thank you. Yes, they are. They're foundational to this work. So they're, like I said, are lots of different kinds of restorative justice practices. All of them rooted in those five Rs. So I talked about relationship and how when something happens, our relationships are impacted. And we come together with respect for all people, for everyone, no matter whether they're the responsible party or the harmed party or community members who've been impacted. We bring people together in a context of respect. And there's a space in the holding of a restorative process that is about each of us taking responsibility for our actions. So if we've been harmed to really name how we've been harmed, if we're responsible for causing that harm to really listen to the impact that we've had and take responsibility for our actions that caused harm and move toward repair of harm, whatever we can do to make things right to the extent possible, that's the purpose of a restorative process. And then the intention is to bring us back together and reintegrate into the whole so that we can all move forward with a sense of dignity and connection that may have been broken. So that's the reintegration piece. I would like at this point in history to do reintegration on a societal level. I think I'm learning from you, which is different from my previous understandings, that restorative processes or practices can take different forms. If only one of the pair, usually of actor and harmed party, is interested, can restorative practices still be applied with the party that is willing? Yes. So there are lots of opportunities for, let's focus for a minute on the responsible party, for self-reflection, recognizing harm to self, recognizing harm to family or inner circle. And that might not be where the direct impact of the action occurred. It may be someone is a substance user and has multiple DUIs, but no one has been hurt like they haven't crashed or they haven't caused harm in that way yet. But we have the opportunity as a community to address that there is harm that occurs when someone has habitual substance abuse behavior. And we recognize that the behavior is actually a form of communication. So we as a community get to come together in a restorative process and explore what's the behavior, what's the need underneath the behavior or the cause of the behavior. And how do we address that? How does the person who has the habitual behavior heal whatever is underneath? Really look at what's there and change their behavior moving forward. And, you know, that change requires willingness. Yes. And as a member of city government, I'm painfully aware that some community problems like homelessness have addiction and unwillingness as a root cause. So does that mean that one source of referrals for you and one sort of community action might be with an organization like Longmont's Recovery Cafe? You bet. That's a great idea actually. I'd love to bring restorative into the Recovery Cafe context. Because I think that, you know, there again, the Recovery Cafe is a place where people recognize, you know, there's a behavior that I really want to change. I need to do something different in my life. And we have the opportunity to hold a space for self reflection and outer reflection or looking at the impact that the behaviors have on others. And when we look out and see the impact that we have on others, it starts to bring us into connection. Yes. And it's that connection that really begins to heal ourselves when we've caused harm, ourselves when we've been harmed. It's in connection that that healing happens. You know, and Recovery Cafe is, in fact, the fact that you're there having coffee is already an indication of willingness. Yeah. Showing up, that's more than half the battle. Yeah. Okay. So that's, let's get to the victim or harmed party side of the situation. I'm kind of assuming that you don't read in the paper that someone is a harmed party and call them up and say, are you interested in restorative justice? So how do those people come to you? Do perhaps their therapists maybe refer you to know that this is a sort of support that they could have? How does that work? Yeah. Sometimes that's how it happens. Often it's word of mouth. So, you know, in a lot of cases, people are sharing their story. And when sharing their story, someone knows about, has heard about restorative justice practices and they're like, you know, you might want to consider a restorative process. And there's a directory, a statewide directory on rjcolorado.org. That's one of those URLs. That's right. That's right. Colorado.org is the statewide directory of facilitators, service providers of restorative justice practices, organizations and stuff. And they can look for a provider there. We have a lot of messaging and education to do to really get the word out in a much more robust way. You know, one of the things that my high hope is that we as a restorative justice practices community start to broaden the messaging so that people know more easily. You don't have to have a conversation with somebody that knows about it. You know about it because you heard about it on the radio or TV or podcast. So yeah, I think speaking of podcasts, stories like I do with the RJ Chronicles, the Restorative Justice Chronicles podcast that I do, are helping people to understand what's possible with restorative justice practices. We trust the universe to bring people to you as I hope happens. It doesn't always happen. But I'm learning here that there is so much more to be said. But this has been 15 minutes. Oh my gosh. I know. So we'll think about what our next steps are in terms of getting this word out. I'd like to give you the opportunity to make one more statement because we didn't plan where the conversation would go. So if you have something I left out that's really important, now's your shot. Thanks. I think probably the most important thing is that we are talking about restorative as an opportunity. Like letting folks know that restorative justice practices is a great way to heal from crime and conflict. And I'm here. Three stories consulting is available to you. Okay. Reach out. That's what we need to know. And we will have some references to help people find you. I'm so grateful that you've given us this time. Thank you. And thank you for being here. And this has been 15 minutes.