I grew up in East Oakland, near Fremont High School. But I never saw the inside of the high school until I was in college.

My parents and grandparents scrimped and saved to send me to Catholic school. I never forgot the sacrifice they made to enroll and keep me there. Because of their support and because I had a guidance counselor who believed in me, I went to Harvard. My first year, the student affairs office asked me to help recruit high school students from Oakland.

I went to Fremont High to talk to students — and saw an absence of guidance counselors, the presence of police, and low graduation rates. I thought about how different my high school experience had been. And I reflected on how my friends and I at Harvard were treated very differently for our youthful mistakes, compared with the friends and family I grew up with.

Nearly two decades later, I have held onto that lesson: Each of us is more than our worst mistake. That’s why I am helping launch Restore Oakland, a community advocacy and training center with a restorative approach to both justice and economics to ensure we do not treat anyone in our community as disposable.

Scheduled to open in spring 2019, the new center is a joint initiative of Ella Baker Center for Human Rights and Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC United). At Restore Oakland, local residents will dream, organize, and act together to build power and access opportunities to make it possible to earn a better living and build toward a safe and secure East Oakland.

We often think of major social problems as being separate, from the mass incarceration of people of color to segregation in the restaurant industry to cycles of poverty and violence. But these problems are closely interlinked, and that’s what Restore Oakland is all about.

Community members who have been incarcerated may struggle to find jobs when they return to the community. Meanwhile, residents who experience poverty and violence in their neighborhoods may also be harmed by increased policing and punishment.

What’s unique about Restore Oakland is that it will respond to multiple community needs — healing, jobs, advocacy — in one place.

I think of a young man who participated in a restorative justice program run by a local partner, Community Works West. While he was on a path that could keep him out of the youth-to-prison pipeline, his situation was still precarious because he and his mother were homeless. She was doing everything she could to help him avoid ending up in the juvenile justice system, and simultaneously trying to make a better life by attending a job training program, but was struggling to get by after being displaced from their home. When I think of all the people who would benefit from the services offered by Restore Oakland, I think of that young man and his mother.

Restorative justice is a method for diverting young people from the criminal justice system and a proven community healing model. Involvement in a restorative justice program instead of the criminal justice system cuts the rearrest rate for youth by almost half, and for a fraction of what it costs for a youth on probation ($4,500 vs $23,000 per year). At Restore Oakland, Community Works West and Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth (RJOY) will lead efforts to hold youth and residents who cause harm accountable while keeping them in the community through mediation and conflict resolution.

Oakland is very different now from when I was growing up. My father worked for eighteen years as a shipyard worker before being laid off. Living wage jobs that used to be available to high school grads like him are all but gone. The city has become one of the most expensive places to live in the world, pushing Oakland to become a tale of two cities. A city where students who attend Fremont High have a diminished chance of graduating compared to students who attend Piedmont High.

An Oakland that thrives for all of its residents will only come from real economic opportunity that benefits everyone. To meet this need, Restore Oakland will house a restaurant run by formerly incarcerated people and other working people, and provide training that will give East Oakland community members the experience to access restaurant jobs that provide living wages, such as fine dining servers and bartenders.

To make sure that the solutions we offer are brought to scale, Restore Oakland will be a home for community organizing to hold our elected officials accountable to putting resources behind what works.

Zip codes should no longer determine our life outcomes. Restore Oakland can become a model for reinvestment and equitable community development in other parts of California and the nation. Let’s empower our communities and build cities across the country where everyone has access to dignity, hope, and opportunity.

Zachary Norris is a Co-Founder of Restore Oakland and Executive Director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights.

Dream, Organize, and Act for Stronger, Safer Communities was originally published in Justice in California on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

There’s a lot in the news today about how California is beginning to take long-overdue steps to address the inhumanity and the unfairness of our criminal justice system. But something’s still missing in the conversation about recent proposals and reforms — the disproportionate and poisonous impact of current criminal justice policies and procedures on indigenous peoples and our communities.

My father served seven years in San Quentin State Prison. After he was released in 1976, he dedicated his life to making sure incarcerated Native Americans were able to find healing and wellness through traditional ceremonies and practices. Ultimately, the California Department of Corrections hired him on as a spiritual advisor for Native prisoners. On weekends as a child, I’d go out gathering willow branches with him so he could build the structures for the sweat lodge ceremonies he organized for inmates. I remember my father spending hours in the law library researching legal remedies to the injustices facing our communities. I have relatives — immediate family members who are currently incarcerated and don’t have access to fresh produce, healthy foods or clean drinking water. This is a barrier for all people, but especially in California, as our tribal members are incarcerated on our own tribal lands, a continuation of policies and laws enacted by the first governor of California to exterminate California’s tribal peoples.

After I started attending college, I became a volunteer in a women’s federal prison in Dublin, California. The stories of the Native prisoners I met were harrowing. Many had been transported to the prison from faraway places like Alaska, Arizona or Montana to make it especially hard on their families. There were young girls sentenced as adults, and they were serving alongside grandmothers and mothers. Some had left infant children at home and wondered how they could survive. And most were caught up in the system for nonviolent crimes — being in the car with a husband when he was charged with drug possession, or forging a check in a moment of desperation and getting years in jail as a result. I remember ending my prison visits heartbroken.

Imagine not being allowed to pray in the way that you were raised to, to not have access to the foods that you are used to eating, to not be able to visit places that bring you peace in your everyday life. As indigenous peoples, every day is a struggle to be seen for who we are, not the stereotypical image that Hollywood tells us what a Native person is supposed to look like. I have learned that no one should be invisible and that we all have basic and fundamental rights — the right to equal treatment by the government; the right to a fair trial; the right to practice our religious and cultural traditions, grow our own foods and take part in our daily practices without our rights infringed upon. None of this should be controversial or in question.

And yet, more than four decades after my father first set on a path to providing desperately needed support and services to Native people caught up in the criminal justice system, injustice and inequality — and invisibility — are still the rule for our communities.

The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics did not keep data on Native Americans in prison until 2006. As recently as 2013, the State of California still listed indigenous people as “other” in a summary of state offenders’ racial and ethnic identities. Yet, when we are counted, the numbers tell an undeniable story of injustice. For example, when compared to our numbers in the overall population, Native Americans are vastly overrepresented in prisons and jails in California and throughout the nation. Data show that the indigenous inmate population in California jumped from 145 per 100,000 Native Americans in 1980 to 767 per 100,000 in 2000. In addition, the number of Native people in federal detention increased by a stunning 27 percent between 2010 and 2015.

The unequal treatment of indigenous people in the criminal justice system is the unsettling legacy of racist and genocidal policies dating back centuries. At the time of the Gold Rush in California in the 1800s, we had bounties placed on our heads by the government, and state militias regularly raided our communities and killed thousands of men, women and children. Today, this legacy continues as Native Americans are killed by police at a higher rate than members of any other racial or ethnic group. Except for African Americans, Native American young people also are more likely to be disciplined or suspended from school, creating the “reservation to prison” pipeline that entraps thousands of our youth every year.

In response to these crises, I am part of a burgeoning movement called Native Justice Now. Across California and throughout the nation, we are working to provide direct services and support to incarcerated people so they can stay healthy and connected to their traditions and their communities while they are behind bars. We are organizing and advocating for reforms in policing and criminal justice policies and procedures so we can reduce the trauma and violence perpetrated on our communities by today’s unjust system. We are providing educational opportunities to help indigenous people learn their rights. And, we are bringing cultural, spiritual and science-based solutions to the work of reducing and treating substance abuse and addiction, preventing violence, reducing recidivism, and addressing other community needs.

It’s time once and for all to stop marginalizing and harming indigenous people and our communities. It’s time to recognize that we are not invisible, and that we have a right to equal treatment under the law. My father dedicated his life to these principles, and today I am following his lead. It is time for renewal and justice for indigenous people.

Morning Star Gali is a member of the Ajumawi band of Pit River located in Northeastern California. She is a Rosenberg Foundation Leading Edge Fellow focusing on the disproportionate impact of the criminal and juvenile justice systems on Native Americans.

Morning Star Gali: We Are Not Invisible — Native Justice Now was originally published in Justice in California on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Tinisch Hollins has lost more than 20 family members and neighborhood friends to gun violence, including two brothers.

Kali’ Battle is a survivor of human trafficking. From age 7 to 11, she was trafficked by a man who abused her and her mother.

When she was 19, Sandra Balbuena’s brother and father were shot in an attempted robbery orchestrated through a Craigslist scam. The robbery ended in her father’s death.

Impacted by different forms of violence and crime, all three are survivors who are turning their healing into action. All three are committed to lifting up the voices and needs of those most harmed and least helped. And all three are part of Crime Survivors for Safety and Justice (CSSJ), a growing network of survivors who are demanding new safety priorities that will truly make our communities safe and result in healing and transformation.

A project of Californians for Safety and Justice, CSSJ is a national movement of more than 10,000 survivors with five regional chapters across California and developing state chapters in eight additional states. At Crime Survivors for Safety and Justice, we are working for smarter policies at the local, state and national levels that prevent crime, reduce mass incarceration, and support survivors, families and communities. The good news is this work is getting results, including in California, where the state has created a nationally recognized network of trauma recovery centers that provide counseling, mental health services and supports for healing and recovery from harm.

The success and growth of our survivor movement holds three important lessons as advocates and communities continue to work for solutions to America’s criminal justice crisis:

Lesson #1: Listen to survivors. Crime survivors have a close-up view of both the flaws and the failures of the justice system, and the solutions we seek. When survivors speak, people listen. That’s why we’ve conducted extensive research on the views and opinions of survivors. Ask my colleague, Aswad Thomas, and other survivors about the biggest challenges our communities face, and most will point to a lack of access to supports that address trauma and recovery from harm. We know from our research that the communities most harmed have the least access to these supports. This is why so many survivors are calling for new safety priorities. By a two-to-one margin, survivors want more rehabilitation than punishment. In fact, 61 percent of crime survivors favor shorter prison sentences and more spending on prevention and rehabilitation instead of longer prison sentences.

Lesson #2: Elevate survivors’ voices. Every year, Crime Survivors for Safety and Justice brings over 500 crime survivors from across California to Sacramento for Survivors Speak. This powerful event, held during National Crime Victims’ Rights Week in April, brings together crime survivors, particularly from communities most affected by crime, to share stories, honor loved ones, and advocate for smart justice policies that transform families, communities and the state.

Lesson #3: Ensure survivors’ voices are at the center of justice policy debates and decisions. The movement of crime survivors is helping to redefine what we mean by safety. In California as in so many other states, too much money is invested on punishment and prisons instead of solutions that keep people from entering and cycling through the justice system. Crime survivors are organizing and getting results. We played a critical role in the passage of California’s Prop. 47 in 2014, the landmark ballot measure that reduced penalties for low-level offenses and directs the savings from lower incarceration rates to community crime prevention. And now, 10 percent of Prop. 47 savings will go to trauma recovery for survivors. Today, there are twelve trauma recovery centers in California.

I became involved in the work of justice reform because I, too, am a survivor I was separated from my birth family in South Korea as a baby, so I learned trauma before I learned to speak or walk. I am also a survivor of child sexual abuse. I have realized that every time we tell our stories, we get closer to both our individual and collective healing. My advocacy is part of my healing.

By telling our stories, lifting up our voices, and advocating for reform, we are working to heal our communities, our nation and ourselves.

Anna Cho Fenley is Director of Crime Survivors for Safety and Justice California.

How Crime Survivors Are Fighting to Redefine Safety was originally published in Justice in California on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In 2008, my organization launched a new community organizing model that works with families of individuals caught up in the criminal justice system in Santa Clara County. It’s called “participatory defense.” The idea is that, when it comes to challenging mass incarceration, the best change agents are the people and communities most affected by the problem. When family members get involved and work for just treatment of their loved ones, we can have a real impact on the outcome of cases and begin to transform the landscape of power in the courts.

As we sat down with families under this new model, we began to hear a similar refrain. In overwhelming numbers, people told us that their loved ones remained locked up for the same reason: they couldn’t afford bail. In early 2016, for example, Jeysson Minota was in jail for four months awaiting trial before his mother was able to come up with $5,000 to pay a bail bonds company to secure his release. It turns out Jeysson had to get out so he could get urgent medical treatment for a collapsed lung caused by a mass in his chest. Now, the family owes more than $30,000 to the bail bonds company.

Jeysson’s story isn’t all that rare. It is a shocking fact that in our democracy today, 450,000 of the 2.3 million people held in our prisons and jails have not been convicted of a crime. In California, more than half of the inmate population are awaiting trial or sentencing.

The practice of money bail — requiring defendants to pay a deposit to the courts, usually through a commercial bail bonds company in exchange for release from custody while awaiting trial — is a major factor in mass incarceration. It is also unconstitutional, discriminatory and does not impact whether or not people appear at court dates.

In Santa Clara County, where my organization is based, the proportion of people detained “pretrial” for lack of money to afford bail is 70 percent. Alarmed at the injustice of this number (not to mention the added costs of rampant incarceration), the county is experimenting with new approaches aimed at reducing the effects of money bail.

One of these innovations had its origins in our conversations with families of those who are sitting in jail despite not being convicted of a crime, but simply could not afford bail. Known as the Community Release Project, it involves enlisting community-based organizations to work with defendants on pre-trial release to ensure that they make their court dates and have critical supports (including housing, transportation, etc.) to hold onto their jobs and keep their lives on track. It is a model that already works for people getting out of jail as faith-based and other organizations are engaged to support reentry, and now we’re putting it to work at the front end of the system as well.

Community Release is just one of 17 new policies that the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors adopted last fall in an effort to end our reliance on money bail. Other changes include a reduction in how long people must wait for a first hearing, as well as a provision increasing the number of people who can be released with citations for minor offenses. In another simple, yet important, change, the county removed the poster by the phones in the jail advertising the various bail bonds companies seeking to profit from defendants’ problems. Now there will be a poster that describes the range of services and support available to defendants along with contact information for the Office of Pretrial Services.

The remarkable thing about implementing these changes is that it hasn’t been a knock-down, drag-out fight. There has been broad support for reform throughout the system, from the District Attorney’s office to the presiding judge to the probation department and public defenders. In 2014, our Board of Supervisors created a Bail and Release Work Group composed of these and other stakeholders along with community representatives. From the start, the consensus among this group was that the current system wasn’t helping anyone, and it was time for change. The unanimity is a consequence of how indefensible money bail is as an apparatus in terms of cost, justice, and logic.

Beyond Santa Clara County, there is broad support for bail reform in California and nationally. Governor Jerry Brown has promised to make reform a priority in 2018. Nationally, Senators Kamala D. Harris and Rand Paul joined together in 2017 to introduce new legislation that encourages states to replace or reform their bail systems. Advocates of bail reform point to the collateral consequences of having to stay in jail because a person cannot afford to pay bail — the loss of employment, housing, and the impact on other family members. In 2016, the PreTrial Justice Institute launched a national campaign called “Three Days Count” to support states that initiate legislation to end money bail systems. In other action, the city and county of San Francisco was sued by Washington D.C.-based Equal Justice Under the Law for incarcerating people because they cannot afford to pay bail. The Center has filed 12 money bail cases in nine states since 2015.

Eliminating money bail is an idea whose time has come. Regardless of politics or party, people are united around that idea that when it comes to issues of justice and incarceration, money shouldn’t talk. It’s time to reform the system so it doesn’t punish people based on their wealth and income and instead gives all people what our Constitution guarantees: equal protection under the law.

Raj Jayadev is director and cofounder of Silicon Valley De-Bug and the Albert Cobarrubias Justice Project.

A Movement Demands: Eliminate Money Bail was originally published in Justice in California on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

For more than 80 years, the Rosenberg Foundation has aimed to be a risk-taking grantmaker for social justice by supporting innovative leaders and promising solutions to some of our most pressing problems.

The theme for this year’s Justice in California series is #LeadingEdgeIdeas, highlighting next-generation progressive movement leaders who are tackling deep barriers to opportunity for communities of color and low-income communities in California and around the country.

We asked some of the leading thinkers and advocates in social justice to share with us their bold ideas, strategies, and vision for taking on pervasive inequity and injustice in the areas of criminal justice, immigrant rights and racial justice. Each month, we will share with you thought pieces by these visionary — and unconventional — leaders and advocates who are working tirelessly to change the odds for people in California and nationwide.

As always, our hope for Justice in California is that it will inform our public conversation on how best to realize our common values of justice and equality.

Justice in California — Leading Edge Ideas was originally published in Justice in California on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.