Community Justice Initiatives
Community Justice Initiatives (CJI) is a community based, non-profit agency that offers programs and services based around a restorative model of justice. Restorative justice is a systematic response to wrongdoing that emphasizes healing the wounds of victims, offenders and communities caused or revealed by criminal behaviour. Crime is seen not as the violation of a rule or as an offence against the state, but instead is personalized and looked at in terms of the actual harms which have been caused to the particular victims, victims being both direct victims of the criminal activity and anyone affected indirectly as part of the larger community. Restorative justice places ownership of resolving conflict caused by crime within the community itself, engaging both the victim and the offender so that together they can decide how to repair the damage which has been done and, in the end, feel that they have received justice.
CJI has grown tremendously over the past 30 years, beginning as the founder of victim-offender mediations worldwide and now offering a multitude of community services and public education. Some programs include community conflict mediation, education around conflict resolution, circles of support for women in prison and facilitated support groups for people affected by sexual abuse. The victim-offender mediation program is still a large part of CJI's mandate, and thanks to the determination of CJI and countless other agencies like it over many, many years, has become a significant piece of the criminal justice system in the Kitchener-Waterloo region and across Canada.
I've had an amazing experience with CJI over the summer. Simply meeting so many people absolutely dedicated to transforming the way we think about crime and justice in Canada has been such a learning experience for me. One of the projects I worked on involved researching and writing training manuals and resources for CJI volunteers who wanted to work in the victim-offender mediation program. There was very little formal training for volunteers outside the standard community mediation courses and workshops and so there was a gap when it came to switching volunteers over from mediating community conflicts to mediating between victims and offenders. There was also a need for resources explaining the criminal justice system, it's many stages and terms, and how a victim-offender mediation fits into that process (ex. as part of a sentence).
In addition to my work with the mediation program, I also created public legal information booklets for people affected by sexual abuse. CJI is one of the only agencies in the region which offers support services for people who have offended sexually and as such has clients who come from many hours away to attend their support groups. It was quite a shock to me to realize how little assistance is available in local communities for people who have offended and so I believe the work I did will be helpful to many people for years to come.
