Liam Chinn, a social justice advocate in Oakland, California, remembers meeting a young man who had been arrested for stealing a cell phone and assaulting the victim in the process. He was on track to go into the criminal justice system, but Community Works West, a local nonprofit that advocates for alternatives to incarceration, worked with the county and diverted the young man into a restorative justice program. The process of restorative justice brings the perpetrator and the victim into a circle with family and community members; they discuss the crime, and reach mutual understanding and forgiveness. All of it takes place outside the typical criminal justice structures.

A new center in Oakland, for which Chinn will serve as the executive director, wants to build a way for restorative justice to connect–quite literally–to crucial opportunities like job training and housing advocacy. Called Restore Oakland, and housed in a reclaimed building that once contained a music store at the corner of 34th Avenue and International Boulevard in the Fruitvale neighborhood, the facility, when it opens in early 2019, will feature rooms dedicated to restorative justice on the top floor, above a restaurant where members of the community, along with people who have been through the restorative justice program upstairs, will be able to receive job training. Other rooms in the cavernous space will be set aside for local advocacy groups like Causa Justa, which supports immigrant and tenant rights; the basement will serve as something of a coworking space for local nonprofits feeling threatened by rising rents in the steeply gentrifying Oakland. Designing Justice + Designing Spaces, a local nonprofit that uses design to imagine alternative spaces to the current system of mass incarceration, created the concept for the building.

From the response to Restore Oakland so far, it’s clear that this effort is something that the Ella Baker Center and ROC United are not alone in supporting. Google, Inc signed on as one of the early supporters of the project, and the Novo Foundation and an anonymous donor from the San Francisco Foundation also gave funding. Capital One and Telacu invested through the New Market Tax Credit program to help the Restore Oakland coalition purchase space.

Read the full article by Eillie Anzilotti about Restore Oakland from FastCompany