The Restorative Justice program at the University (RJUW) hosted its very first Community Member Volunteer Training over the weekend.
Overall, the training was a success, with the participants being fully engaged, willing to build new community bonds, and invested in learning about the Restorative Justice (RJ) process and the role they can play in it.
Connor Novotny is the program manager for RJUW and has been in that position for a year after the Dean of Students, Ryan O’Neil, made it a permanent position in his office.
“We’re brand new,” Novotny said. “And the work that we’ve been doing in the year since we started is essentially building our program.”
The RJUW program recently hired two new employees, UW Psychology Ph.D. student Natalie Poole and UW undergraduate student Kai Yeager, and now has the capacity to start taking on more work, which includes trainings and events like the Community Member Volunteer Training.
“A lot of what we’ve been doing is educating people and letting folks know about restorative justice,” Novotny said. “RJ is a thinking shift from our traditional ways of dealing with harm and making RJ a successful process at UW will take a lot of education.”
The Community Member Volunteer Training was overseen by the three RJUW employees and there were 10 other participants, four UW students, and six Laramie community members.
“I’m really excited to be here today,” Poole said. “I’ve been with RJ for just about a semester so I’m still in the learning process but I’m glad to continue learning with all of you.”
Those who attended the training spent three hours at the Lincoln Community Center learning about the RJ process, building community, and learning how community members can play a role in repairing harm through that process.
The RJ process and the work involved has two central elements, the actual reparative work and community building.
“20% of what we do is reparative work through RJ conferences and the rest is building community relationships,” Novotny said. “This is because you can’t restore people to bad communities. You can’t restore relationships if there is no relationship to begin with.”
The RJUW program operates out of the Dean of Students Office on campus and its services have been referred to students and responsible parties as an alternative to the university’s conduct process.
In the year that the RJUW program has been operating, Novotny and his team have overseen three successful RJ conferences and Poole will be facilitating her first one soon.
In these conferences, there are several groups of people present. There is a facilitator and a co-facilitator, the responsible party and the impacted party, and then a community member volunteer.
The training is mainly conducted for the community member volunteers who want to be involved in RJ. After the training, the RJUW collected signups from the participants so that they can be contacted in the future and potentially offer their services in an RJ conference.
“The community member is someone who has been trained in restorative justice but that is not connected to that harm itself,” Novotny said. “They offer an outside perspective and need to be invested in healing, harm repair, and active accountability.”
Harm is usually not just a campus problem, but reaches many areas of Laramie’s broader community. For RJ to be successful at UW, people from all around Laramie need to be welcomed into the process.
“We need to invite not just students, staff, and faculty. We need people from all over because we need a variety and array of perspectives,” Novotny said. “We need to understand ourselves as connected in a larger community and when we realize that then the energy and incentive to repair harms is that much stronger.”
