For the last several years, Healing Communities PA partnered with the Metropolitan Christian Council of Philadelphia on the Restorative Cities Initiative™️, a grassroots “porch front to city hall” model of bringing restorative practices to every part of community life, particularly in BIPOC [...]Read More
Restoring Community Belonging
Those Leaving Prison and Those In Churches Need Each Other To HealPrison reentry efforts can too often—unintentionally—keep men and women returning from prison isolated from the rest of their communities. With specialized reentry nonprofits, paid staff, transitional housing, and other important [...]Read More
Justice Through Healing
Equal Justice USA today is a much different organization than it was more than 20 years ago at our founding. Then we were focused sharply on ending the death penalty through state campaigns, and we’ve succeeded on that front. As important as those wins are, what we learned from those campaigns [...]Read More
For People in Prison, a Listening Ear Can Make All the Difference
by Paige DeurMatthew grew up in a Christian family. At nineteen, he gave his life to Christ and began to see his life transform.Four years later, he found his life falling apart as he sunk into depression. “This was at the beginning of my marriage when I was supposed to be happy, but I wasn’t happy [...]Read More
Sacred Neighboring
By Rev. Dr. Lori E. Banfield34 “Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the Kingdom prepared for you from the creation of the world. 35 For I was hungry, and you fed me. I was thirsty, and you gave me a drink. I was a stranger, and you invited [...]Read More
The Weaponization of Trauma upon Reentry
by Antonio (Tony) PizarroWhat is trauma? How does trauma affect reentry? This is the question that we should be asking ourselves. We fight collectively for liberation. Yet, once liberation is achieved there is no fight to address the traumatizing events that could hinder a successful reentry into [...]Read More
Welcoming a bit of the garden of Eden into the reentry process
by Stephanie Vander Lugt“Its time to play… Guess. That. Vegetable!” The room erupted into game-show worthy applause as cruciferous and leafy wonders passed from table to table. Hushed tones ensued. Is it a beet? A melon? A kind of celery? Each team efforted to correctly identify the most vegetables [...]Read More
How our Church got Involved in Mass Incarceration
by Joe MarcucciOur entry to the dizzying world of Mass Incarceration began with the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, and the book Rethinking Incarceration by Dominique Gilliard. We were determined to move the marker for what our church was engaged with. When the initial registration for our [...]Read More