Bay Area Community Services-BACS
BACS has been a leader in behavioral health services and housing continuum of care services supporting Adults, TAY, and their families for 75 years. Deeply rooted in the East Bay, Solano, and Sacramento communities, BACS sought to bring engaging culturally rich and relational supports and services to the people and stakeholders we partner with. Since 2018, BACS has partnered with Atunse Justice League (AJL) to circle and train our family of service providers, whom hold a diversity of competency and scope of training, as well as lived experience, with an experiential Restorative Justice practice that is applicable to myriad of community-based settings our personnel operate in. AJL created an inviting space that brings direct service providers, management, and senior leadership to experience RJ together. VP of Quality Improvement Shanice Kelley, Vice President Harjit Singh Gill, and COO Jovan Yglecias among key participants as well as other high level management and leadership.
Malachai and Hyp have an engaging, exploratory, and trauma-informed approach that is sensitive to the dynamics that bring people together and the dangers that would silo relationships. The caring and intentionality they have shared in their circles and trainings have lifted up the complexities of the intersectionality of lived experience and the work, while holding a foundational lens on Restorative Justice. In the time they have worked with BACS they have helped to train over 600 hundred personnel over multiple counties and communities; who in turn have impacted the lives of thousands.
~Jovan Yglecias, Chief Financial Officer-BACS
San Francisco Recreation and Park Department, Capital & Planning Division
Ever-learning their lineages and strengthening their roots, Atunse Justice League shares cultural technologies for human connection and facilitates restorative justice healing circles with integrity, vulnerability, curiosity, and deep care.
Their work with the Core Partner and Fillmore Community as part of the Buchanan Street Mall Renovations – Park Improvement Equity Action Initiative was a transformative influence.
The project team circled regularly with community members whose voices have historically not been heard nor headed in the shaping of their neighborhood and broader society. From simple prompts, profound stories were shared, building trust, elevating new ideas, and growing relational capacity. In addition, Hyp and Malachi’s more intimate work with the project team Core Partners helped folks articulate needs and boundaries, name and step outside of white supremacy patterning, and increase listening.
AJL’s work is helping to ensure that public investment in capital improvements is truly inspired by the vision and responsive to the needs of the Fillmore Community. Community engagement around Buchanan Street Mall Renovations is marked with many notable innovations, and the forthcoming Park Improvement Equity Action Toolkit strongly recommends that future projects include restorative justice healing circles in their process.
~Lauren Dietrich Chavez, Project Manager-SF Rec and Park Department, Capital & Planning Division
Dig Deep Farms
Words can’t express how needed and supportive the AJL’s Circle Trainings are. The range of provided learning styles, placemaking and openness with the instructors and participants helped to comfortably bring out vulnerabilities, understandings, and humanness within the group. These days it is hard to find practitioners that are culturally relevant, AJL is just that! Many thanks to the AJL team, you all are amazing!
~Sasha Shankar, Co-Director-Dig Deep Farms