Thursday, September 5th from 6-7:30pm at the Brick House Community Resource Center for the Community Listening Circle.

This is a mask required event.

Brick House is located at 24 3rd St, Turners Falls, MA 01376.

To the Greater Valley Community,

After careful consideration, stepping back, assessing, and being in discussion with both 10 Forward staff and other community members, Kaia, Jenyka, and Jules believe that it is in the community’s  best interest to host a Community Listening Circle. We  hope that this will offer everyone a chance to hear one another out and help determine next steps together. This is different from a comprehensive Restorative Justice Process, and we are choosing this strategy for a number of reasons.

How is a Listening Circle Different from an RJ Process?

A Listening Circle:

  • Centers authentic self-expression of all parties 

  • Encourages the practice of active listening to build empathy and places of shared understanding

  • Encourages but does not assume shared trust, values or mutual goodwill

  • Allows an allotted amount of time for each participant to be heard

  • Responses only come in the form of seeking clarity (ex: “I heard you say X, is that correct?”)

  • Involves facilitation, but is less structured and does not necessarily require restorative mindset of all participants

  • Is one step that may or may not lead to next steps in a comprehensive RJ process

A comprehensive RJ Process:

  • Seeks to repair harms caused

  • Relies upon shared trust and values

  • Requires baseline mutual goodwill and the desire for shared growth of all involved

  • Is highly structured, facilitated, and can only happen when everyone is ready to be in a restorative space with one another

  • Can take varying, and sometimes quite expansive lengths of time

Why are we choosing this method?

It’s clear that the workers at 10 Forward and community members within the Valley deeply want to be in conversation and take a next step in a restorative direction. However, it’s also become clear to us as facilitators that there is more work to be done in order to build the collective capacity and skills needed to implement a more comprehensive process. That work takes time; it’s “deep culture” work that can’t be done overnight. However, to continue to push out the conversation to wait for conditions to be right  for a comprehensive RJ process is something neither 10F staff nor community members wish to do. The facilitators recognize that there is a need to be timely and responsive, but we also encourage everyone to exercise caution and come into the conversation adequately aware of both the risk and lack of guarantee of safety inherent in such an endeavor. Listening Circles can be extremely rich if we choose to see conflict as generative, but again, provide less support than the facilitated dialogues that are often part of an RJ Process. While we hope that healing will take place, we want everyone to opt in with full awareness and consent of what to expect.

In this spirit, we invite folks to gather on Thursday September 5th from 6-7:30pm at the Brick House Community Resource Center for the Community Listening Circle. Afterward, we will invite participants to form affinity groups  to generate suggestions to be shared with 10 Forward, who will then be given the opportunity to decide how to best implement them into their future practices and procedures.

Thank you  for your ongoing engagement in this process,

Sincerely, Jenyka, Jules, & Kaia