RESET (Restoring and Empowering Social Equity and Truth) prepares youth that caused harm and persons harmed for restorative circle conferencing as an alternative to the traditional juvenile justice system.
Circle conferencing provides a space for those directly impacted by an incident to voice their needs to create pathways to repair harm. This allows the community the opportunity to share their honest feelings and opinions through encouraging reflection of individual experiences, beliefs, and values.
During the conference, everyone collaboratively creates a restorative plan with agreements for the youth to complete in order to best deal with the impacts of the incident in a way that restores the dignity and well-being of all. Once the responsible youth completes the restorative plan, the program is concluded and the youth’s legal case is closed via SF juvenile probation.
Youth are deferred to Huckleberry’s Community Assessment & Resource Center (CARC) to handle their legal case informally, after CARC’s restorative justice coordinator assesses each possible case and youth, an in-house referral is made and the youth are held accountable by completing the RESET program.
AFTER (Aims to Foster Transformation and Ensure Restitution) provides community-based programming for young people that have a financial restitution obligation to fulfill, while also supporting the person harmed to meet their financial and other needs following the harm. Through the program, young people make amends—through participating in restorative justice conferences, performing community service, engaging with other CBO’s, participating in financial literacy programming, and/ or being connected to job opportunities—and are held accountable for their actions. The person harmed is paid restitution from a community fund and can participate in other services to support them.
Our goals are to support both the young person and the person harmed by: providing the young person a caring and compassionate environment to hold young people accountable, connecting them to services that are tailored to their needs, and lifting the burden of monetary restitution debt that they and their family cannot pay; and connecting to the person harmed in a restorative way, ensuring that their voices are heard by criminal legal system, and meeting their financial and other needs on a much faster timeline than in the traditional restitution process.
Youth are referred to the AFTER program via SF juvenile probation and or their attorneys.
Learn more here: https://sfgov.org/financialjustice/news-resources/after-program
