What We Do

Mission

The Restorative Community Coalition is in the business of Re-Claiming lives. We are an action oriented coalition advocating for restorative, economic, systemic and social change.

Since 2006 we have helped thousands of people heal in the aftermath of crisis, incarceration, and trauma in their families. As a result, our vision is to help our community build a network of support to put people to work, rather than into jail.

What Holds Us Back from being FULL SERVICE?

In the past, our all volunteer non-profit has been “shunned, shamed and silenced” because we help people who are justice system involved (labelled as criminals) get their feet back under them so they can recover.

This has not been the privileged, prestigious, powerful “polite society” conversation. Today, in the aftermath of the Impeachment, the Constitutional Crisis, the George Floyd death, the civic protests – people are now talking about defunding the police, changing our systems, etc.

This is exactly the work that our Coalition has been doing for 14 years in Whatcom County specifically.

Our Coalition has in fact worked with over 200 Interns, thousands of citizens, and hundreds of volunteers to research how to turn around a mass incarceration driven local economy to become a Local Enterprising People Driven Economy (LEPDE). Yet, most of these people have been afraid to “go public” with their opinions, experiences, knowledge – for fear of retaliation, retribution, or public shaming, silencing or shunning.

Most people do not know that 1/3 of our population in America has been arrested at one time in their lives…and they “don’t want to talk about it”. And a full 50% of the households in our County have someone in their family who is dealing with an arrest or conviction problem right now.

But this is not just a problem in Whatcom County. It is nationwide, and people of all colors, all classes, all professions, all backgrounds are being affected by the SILENCING by SHAMING and SHUNNING. It is worth noting that:

• 12 Million people are jailed nationwide annually, most for non-violent offenses – funding a multi-billion dollar mass incarceration business model.
• That mass incarceration industry is driving the expansion of the school-to-prison pipelines in small counties across the nation.
• This means that our local law enforcement industry is part of the process of promoting the contrarian predator/prey/parasitic economic system nationwide.
• Our entire local community jurisdictions then become complicit in funding the incarceration business using the “Supply and Demand” marketplace economic model.
• Local leadership people are silenced because they are in a Catch 22 Predicament: We identified how it works in “Noble Cause Corruption” report.
• We have also identified that the local officials are being compelled to hire jail building contractors to plan to expand the multil-billion dollar scavenger industry we have identified as a “privateeering” industry.
• And those privateering industry people promote the passing of taxes, to compel taxpayers to pay more for an unsustainable, tax addicted public safety system.
• By passing taxes, they get local citizens (who are the prey to being arrested) to pay taxes to underwrite the jail system, which then punishes them.
• It is a repetitive trauma based system that is self-perpetuating and self-destructive to the community, and it produces homeless, generational poverty, abuse, addiction and mental illness.

Our Coalition has identified the problem, we have proposed solutions, we have built templates, we have developed a track record. Today we need help funding our solutions to free the people, put them to work, reconstruct our social safety network county-wide. We have developed a prototype Restorative CommUnity Action Plan that we are implementing in 2022.

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