The Pajaronian published an interview CRC's Dany Torres and Alaya Vautier on December 22, 2021 about recruiting bilingual and bicultural volunteers for the DAOs Neighborhood Courts Program:

"A restorative justice-based program of the County District Attorney’s Office in partnership with the Conflict Resolution Center (CRC), NCP utilizes panels of trained citizens to determine outcomes for offenders of certain low-level misdemeanors. 

According to program coordinator Danitza Torres, the initiative has so far worked—successfully giving both offenders and victims in Santa Cruz County a chance to safely discuss the crime, decide on reparations and, eventually, heal.

“Out of 45 conferences … We had 35 participants who have so far completed their agreement, and they’re now completely out of the system,” Torres said. “Which is really good. We’ve had really good feedback. They’re appreciative of the program, and that they have a safe space where they can talk things out.”
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Read the whole article here. 

The California Health Report recently wrote an article about youth and restorative justice programs. CRC's Restorative Justice Programs Director, Alaya Vautier, was interviewed for the article.

"Coastal Santa Cruz County — a historically progressive region in the southern reaches of the greater Bay Area — has embraced restorative justice wholeheartedly. In Santa Cruz County, where 200-plus juvenile misdemeanor crimes are charged each year, the nonprofit Conflict Resolution Center runs two publicly funded youth diversion programs for minors charged with misdemeanor crimes such as shoplifting and minor burglaries. 

Last year, nine teens took part in the center’s victim-offender dialogue program, mostly held over Zoom. A total of 55 youth were referred to parent-teen mediation. In addition, 54 youth participated in victim awareness education classes.

Vautier said “there’s a will” among local officials to apply more restorative justice practices as a preventive measure, before youth even end up in detention. 

“Juvenile probation here is pretty progressive and very interested in keeping them out of juvenile hall as much as possible, to do things differently,” she said. “If we could reach the youth before they go through court, we might have better outcomes.”'
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You can read the whole article here. 

Community TV's (communitytv.org) Steve Pleich and Keith Gudger kindly interviewed our Neighborhood Courts Program Coordinator Dany Torres and our Restorative Justice Programs Director Alaya Vautier. They spoke about our work co-creating the Neighborhood Courts Program with the District Attorney's Office as well as a quick highlight of our many mediation and training programs. Check it out on on Community TV (communitytv.org) where it will be shown every Tuesday at 7:30 pm and Sunday at 4:00 pm for all of August and always available on YouTube.

Earlier in 2021, Lily, Daniela, Paola, and Maria completed internships with the CRC, greatly contributing to CRC's presence in the community. As the first intern, Lily helped pave the way for the others. She brought to life our social media presence and was a great support in the office and also with data analysis. We appreciated her responsibility and commitment. Daniela used her initiative to continue to support our social media presence and do a deep dive into our community mediation and VODP data analysis. Paola's ingenuity and tech savvy was a big help as we switched our training programs to Zoom. She also helped us with promoting CRCs work in the community. Maria helped us translate materials from English to Spanish, a hugely necessary and valuable support for CRC and the greater community. We are very grateful to our extraordinary team of interns!

Lilly: 
Job task: Lilly focused on developing a social media influence. She also handled office work that involved entering and analyzing data. 

"My first internship was at the CRC and long story short I got really lucky to be apart of such a wonderful organization. The entire team was extremely knowledgeable on the topic, but more importantly, open to learning new things and hearing peoples stories. The team and my experience as an intern at the CRC has given me tools that I can use for the rest of my life in various situations. Thank you CRC!"

Daniela:
Job tasks: Daniela worked on the creation of social media posts. Daniela also invested time analyzing victim offender and community mediation data analysis.

"My internship experience at the CRC has been amazing. I have been able to expand my skills as a mediator through the CRC and I have learned so much from everyone I have worked with. The CRC has opened so many doors for me as a mediator. I was able to expand my skills from parent-teen mediations to small claims. I also learned multiple other skills through different tasks I completed, such as how to gather and present data. I decided to intern at the CRC because I learned how many programs were under the CRC and I knew how important the organization was to the community. I knew the CRC had so much to offer and I wanted to be a part of an organization that focused on Santa Cruz county. I also wanted more hands-on experience with mediations and I wanted to expand my knowledge."

Paola: 
Job tasks: Paola helped facilitate technology support in different trainings as well as designing social media posts. She promoted community mediation training's across all platforms. Paola worked with Daniela in analyzing victim offender and community mediation data.

"My internship experience at the CRC has been immensely rewarding and beneficial to me. Everyone at the CRC has been so welcoming and I have learned so many professional skills thus far. Not only have I improved my mediation skills but I have also learned a lot about how people communicate, deal with conflict, and do their best to be heard. Overall I have thoroughly enjoyed my time here at the CRC and I am grateful that I can continue to work with them!"

Maria:
Job tasks: Created social media posts and translated  from English to Spanish various posts.

​"Overall, it was a really great experience. I got to meet lots of wonderful people from different backgrounds. Through the internship at the CRC I have a better understanding of building relationships and listening to everyone's inputs when discussing ideas or  brainstorming ideas for our project. I decided to intern with the CRC in order to gain outside experience for my major and build career skills. I wanted to use my bilingual skills to help translate important information towards our Latinx community within social media. While also spreading CRC's mission and values." 

As we are all aware by now, Santa Cruz County Public Health Officer has issued Shelter-in-Place Order, directing all people who live in the County to remain in their residence except for essential movement until April 7th. You can read the order here.

BY HUGH MCCORMICK
POSTED ON DECEMBER 18, 2018
GOOD TIMES SANTA CRUZ
​War took 13-year-old Lejla Bratovic and her family by surprise.

In this episode of the public radio program Speaking of Faith, (from their website): “Michael McCullough describes science that helps us comprehend how revenge came to have a purpose in human life. At the same time, he stresses, science is also revealing that human beings are more instinctively equipped for forgiveness than we’ve perhaps given ourselves credit for. Knowing this suggests ways to calm the revenge instinct in ourselves and others and embolden the forgiveness intuition.”
Hear the show>

In this post from the pop culture blog Videogum.com, blog author Gabe Delahaye remarks on the unusually civil debate among two comedians who have a famous (among “comedy nerds”) feud about the authorship of their jokes. The relatively well-mannered scene took place in a recent episode of Louis C.K.’s highly-regarded series, Louie. Warning: the scene employs some of the raunchiness and coarse language typical of modern comedy, as does the comments section of the blog post that discusses it. Both are included here because they provide a nice example of how conversation — both in the scene and in the comments section — doesn’t have to be pretty or textbook-polite in order to reach a mutually acceptable conclusion. One can hope that such instances of simple civil discourse will be less remarkable over time. Will they ever be the cultural norm in the United States?

“Resolve” comes out the third Friday of every month, and highlights aspects of the conflict resolution process we use with clients. Catch up with these .pdfs of the first, second, and third issues, and look for future editions in the Sentinel!

NPR’s Fresh Air featured an interview this week with a ‘violence interruptor’ in Chicago’s streets, and a filmaker who documented the efforts of Cease Fire, the organization that trains and deploys interruptors. One key factor in CeaseFire’s mediation: that the mediator reflect the demographic of the people s/he’s trying to cool down. Read more, and listen to the 44 minute interview, here.