On this page:

Overview of Space for Change • Eligibility for Participation • Services • Volunteering • Bigger Context: What & Why? • Developing Your Own Community Response • Credit & Resources


Information

Resources for People Who Have Caused Harm

  • A Call for Change Helpline - a free, anonymous hotline for people who are causing harm, or are at risk of causing harm, to their family and/or partners

  • Streets2School - online batterer intervention program currently used by Santa Cruz County legal systems

Handouts about Domestic Violence (PDFs)

Staff Contact

Marjorie Coffey
Community Engagement Coordinator
mcoffey@wafwc.org
(831) 426-3062, ext. 215

Space for Change

An Alternative Justice Program for Domestic Violence

Space for Change is a collaboration between Walnut Avenue Family & Women’s Center (Walnut Avenue) and the Conflict Resolution Center of Santa Cruz County (CRC). It offers opportunities for people who have caused domestic violence or who have experienced it to work on building safer, healthier relationships based on principles of restorative and transformative justice.

Participation in any of the program’s services is fully voluntary at every stage. Every participant has the option of exiting the program at any time, for any reason, without negative consequences from Walnut Avenue or the CRC.

Situations involving accountability that a program like this might address include:

  • People wanting to continue a current intimate relationship where violence has occurred

  • People looking for closure around a past relationship in which violence had occurred

  • Co-parents with shared custody who want to work on interacting in healthier ways with one another

  • People who have caused harm looking for help in learning how to make safer choices in current or future relationships

  • Survivors wanting to address indirect harm caused by family or friends

  • Loved ones of a survivor who are looking for tools and skills to be safer, more effective support people for the survivor(s) in their lives

  • Youth wanting to engage with a parent that’s caused harm, or a parent who wants to address the harm that their actions have caused to their children

What this program cannot offer:

  • Couple’s counseling, family therapy, or mediation. However, our advocates are happy to provide information about local resources for individuals and families seeking those services!

  • A legal process, legal judgment, legal order, or legally binding agreement or consequence.

  • Punishment or revenge.

  • The guarantee of a specific outcome. Participation in this program is fully voluntary, at every step, and the goals, needs, and safety of every case are defined by the people participating in them.

Program Participation

Before deciding whether or not to participate, Walnut Avenue and the CRC encourages people to read this page in its entirety. The staff contact can also answer any additional questions or concerns that may come up.

  • To participate in this program as someone who has been harmed by a partner or family member or as someone who has caused harm to a partner or family member, please contact the program coordinator, Marjorie Coffey, using the contact info in the side menu.

  • To participate as a volunteer, please continue reading this page.

  • To access trainings for your classroom, workplace, or community space about domestic violence or peer counseling, visit our education page. For education on mediation and restorative justice outside of domestic violence, please visit the CRC.

  • If you have general questions about this program or about other resources related to alternative forms of justice, please contact the coordinator.


Overview of Space for Change

Guiding Principles of the Program

Space for Change claims that:

  • People are not inherently violent, cruel, or mean; violence is a learned behavior, sometimes through unsafe experiences as a child, sometimes through the way our society teaches us what we do or don’t “deserve”

  • Violence is a choice, which means that safer and healthier choices are possible

  • Change is possible only when someone is committed to making it happen

  • Forgiveness from a survivor is not required for healing to happen

  • Coercion and punishment, such as incarceration, don’t provide the impetus for healing and change

  • Compassion and support are integral elements of accountability, not barriers, when they are appropriately balanced with boundaries and communication.

Space for Change endeavors to offer services which are fully voluntary for all participants. It aims to be as responsive as possible to the safety, wants, needs, and goals of the participants themselves.

Eligibility for Participation

Walnut Avenue and the CRC recognize that every situation is different and often complicated. The only universal requirements are that:

  • All participants must be aged 12 or older.

  • The situation must be assessed by the advocates as low or moderate risk in terms of safety.

    • High risk situations are too unsafe for a long-term program like Space for Change and crisis intervention will be offered instead. When crisis has passed, then your situation may be reconsidered for Space for Change.

  • In cases of a process involving multiple participants, there must be no current court order which would prohibit communication between them. (However, if such an order does exist, the person who’s caused harm would still be welcome to participate in a personal process with their own advocate and support circle.)

Depending on the circumstances of your situation, your advocate may want to discuss additional concerns with you to ensure that we’re not putting anyone at greater risk.

How Walnut Avenue and the CRC Are Involved

Walnut Avenue and the CRC have a joint program in which they train volunteers, called “circlekeepers,” in domestic violence, restorative justice, and peer counseling/group facilitation techniques. These circlekeepers are then assigned in pairs to individual cases to help guide whichever process the participant is seeking.

However, ‘guidance’ is focused on logistics (such as scheduling meetings), group facilitation (keeping the conversations on track with the participant’s self-identified goals), and peer emotional support around very personal, often intense subjects. The actual goals of a process, what’s said and done, what decisions are made, and how quickly the process moves are all determined by the participants themselves, not the circlekeepers.

Like our advocates, the circlekeepers cannot provide clinical or therapeutic support, diagnoses or medical treatment plans, or legal advice or representation, but they can provide information on other local resources which do offer those services.


Program Services

Below are some examples of what this program can offer. If you’re looking for a service that isn’t described here, you may contact the coordinator to discuss whether it’s something we can offer or whether it’s something that other organizations can provide.

Healing Circles

In this program, healing circles are designed to help survivors of domestic violence connect or reconnect with people they trust. Isolation from community and loved ones is a common consequence of domestic violence. Sometimes survivors encounter stigma and judgment from loved ones who mean well but may not understand the dynamics of the domestic violence, which can deepen the feeling of isolation. Sometimes survivors themselves may have caused harm to their children or other people.

A survivor interested in a healing circle meets with one or two of our circlekeepers and discusses their goals. With the circlekeepers’ help, the survivor invites their family, friends, and/or other people to participate in a group discussion that’s guided by the circlekeepers. Goals for this kind of process might include:

  • Sharing with family members about the domestic violence that occurred and the ways in which the survivor’s family can be more supportive in the survivor’s personal healing

  • Speaking with a parent about harm that occurred in a person’s childhood

Some healing circles might only meet once while others may meet multiple times. This depends on the survivor’s goals and the willingness of the circle members to participate.

Education for Loved Ones & Community Members

Harm is often caused not by intentional malice but by people who are well-meaning. Unfortunately, evidence-based information about healthy and unhealthy relationships isn’t something that everyone has easy access to. We can unintentionally alienate the survivors in our personal lives by making assumptions about the nature of domestic violence, what kind of people get abused or causes abuse, and other myths that get perpetuated in our society.

Family, friends, neighbors, and other folks who share community connections can receive education from our circlekeepers on how to be safer, more effective support people for the domestic violence survivors in their lives. This education is offered at no cost and can be customized to address specific concerns, cultural contexts, and other unique factors.

Accountability Processes for People Who Have Caused Harm

When someone recognizes that they have caused harm and would like support in learning how to make safer choices for themselves and others, they can participate in an accountability process. This person is assigned their own advocate to support them from start to finish. They are also assigned two circlekeepers who help put together a wellness plan and a support circle of individuals who want to help them accomplish the goals in their wellness plan.

Wellness plan: a personalized plan in which someone chooses their own concrete goals for long-term success, and those goals are then broken down into a step-by-step strategy to help accomplish them.

All of our accountability cases follow the same overall steps, but at a pace that’s set by the participants. Those steps are:

  1. Screening

  2. Assembling the participant’s support circle and developing their personal wellness plan

  3. Participant’s individual process, with support from their advocate and circle

  4. Optional: shared process (if someone who’s been harmed is also participating in this process and everyone involved agrees to meet together)

  5. Program wrap-up and exit

In cases where the only participant is a person who’s caused harm, or if there isn’t mutual agreement from both a survivor and the person who caused them harm to have a shared process, then Step 4 would not apply. A single case can take up to a year or longer from start to finish.


Volunteering

As a Circlekeeper in Space for Change

Circlekeepers in the Space for Change program are volunteers who have been jointly trained by Walnut Avenue and the CRC in domestic violence, peer counseling, restorative justice, and group facilitation. Upon completing this training, circlekeepers are assigned to cases individually or in pairs.

Circlekeepers must meet the minimum eligibility requirements for all volunteer programs outlined on the volunteering page.

As an Advocate for Survivors of Domestic Violence

If you would like to volunteer as an advocate for survivors of domestic violence and provide direct service outside of the Space for Change program, you can find more information on our domestic violence advocacy certification page.

As a Mediator or Group Facilitator Outside of Domestic Violence

The Conflict Resolution Center offers different kinds of mediation and restorative justice services for cases not involving domestic violence. For more information about the CRC and its programs and trainings, please visit the CRC.


Bigger Context: What & Why?

Prioritizing Safety, Emphasizing Consent, & Responding to Institutional Violence

Unfortunately, where domestic violence is happening, mediation and couple’s counseling aren’t very helpful. This is because mediation and couple’s counseling both require the people involved to have equal power in the relationship: that is, each person has the same level of decision-making ability about the relationship and neither person is experiencing the kind of fear which would undermine their ability to freely make choices, including choices that might upset the other person. Because domestic violence is fundamentally about one person having power and another person experiencing fear because of that imbalance, mediation and counseling are often unable to get to the root causes of the violence.

However, the legal system isn’t always a safer option, either, especially for people who have experienced harm from the legal system. So if mediation, couple’s counseling, and the legal system aren’t options for someone, what else is left?

Community-Based Responses for Safety & Change

People who historically have been unable to rely on the legal system have been very effective in coming up with a wide variety of alternatives to address domestic violence within their own communities. This includes (but is not limited to) Black and Indigenous communities, LGBTQ+ folks, sex workers, and prison abolitionists.

You may already be familiar with the terms below, or you might be encountering them for the first time. There are no strict definitions for these, so for the sake of clarity, here’s how Walnut Avenue and the CRC are using them:

  • Community Accountability
    A community-based (i.e. not involving courts or law enforcement) strategy of addressing harm that occurs within a community, and this strategy intervenes without external system authorities, such as the prison system.

  • Restorative Justice
    Identifying the harm that was done and addressing the needs of victim and offender to heal. Restorative justice models have become increasingly common forms for court diversion programs, such as victim-offender dialogues (VODs).

  • Transformative Justice
    Transformative justice builds on the principles of restorative justice with the additional goals of transforming the person who’s caused harm to prevent recidivism as well as the community itself. This means changing unhealthy social norms within the community which allow violence to occur. Transformative justice also aims to put the power for change and accountability into the hands of the community itself and the people affected, thereby limiting or outright removing the need for state interventions.

Some of the principles of transformative justice include:

  • Violence is a choice and a learned behavior, which means change is possible under certain conditions

  • The occurrence of violence involves social and collective factors, not just personal ones; both areas must be addressed to prevent violence happening again

  • The violence impacts many people, not only the survivor

  • There is no “one single approach offers justice to everyone” solution

  • State involvement (e.g. law enforcement, prison system) causes more net harm than benefit

  • Removing the person causing harm from the community is not always the best response

  • Punishment, including incarceration, is neither justice nor the impetus for change

Its primary goals include:

  • Survivor safety as highest priority

  • Accountability and transformation of person causing harm

  • Accountability and response of community

  • Change in community and social factors allowing violence to occur


Developing Your Own Community Response to Interpersonal Violence

Whether you’re part of a group of people who want to have a better way of responding to interpersonal violence happening in your community or a member of an organization wanting to explore a similar program, there are a lot of factors to consider to avoid causing new harm.

Integral skillsets for facilitating a successful accountability process include:

  • Domestic violence and/or sexual assault training

  • Trauma-informed peer counseling

  • Group facilitation experience

  • Community accountability/restorative justice process training (which is different from being a mediator or counselor)

Without these skillsets being brought to an accountability process by the people facilitating it, whether it’s an informal community space or a program within an organization, the likelihood of success is low. This can worsen safety risks and re-traumatize people who have already experienced harm.

Walnut Avenue and the CRC offer many trainings relevant to these basic skillsets. At this time, we do not offer circlekeeper training for other organizations because Space for Change is still in its pilot stage.

  • Visit the CRC’s website for more information about subjects related to mediation and restorative justice which don’t involve domestic violence

  • Visit our own education page for information about domestic violence and peer counseling trainings, all of which are offered at no cost

Many trainings are also offered by the resources listed below.

Interested in implementing a program like Space for Change with your community or organization?

Walnut Avenue and the CRC are happy to share their materials at no cost which your organization can adapt to its own needs. Staff contact is listed in the sidebar menu above. We especially recommend checking out the resources below for more comprehensive and varied approaches to this work.


Credit & Resources

Walnut Avenue and the CRC’s Space for Change program is based on the work from:

Walnut Avenue’s commitment to Black Lives Matter was a deciding factor in creating another option for healing around interpersonal violence without the pressure of relying on state systems that often increase violence and trauma. Our work wouldn’t be possible without the years of prior and current work being done by marginalized communities, especially Black, Indigenous, LGBTQ+, and sex worker communities.

Additional local and national resources about community accountability, restorative justice, and transformative justice include:

We also list some books on alternative forms of justice and prison abolition in our staff Reading List page.

Walnut Avenue is unaffiliated with any of the organizations listed above.