Episode 36: Community Conferencing: Restorative Practices and the power of our grassroots action

with the amazing Lauren Abramson, Founder of the Community Conferencing Center of Baltimore, MD. Lauren Abramson is Founder, Executive Director, Community Conferencing Center and also Assistant Professor, Child Psychiatry, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. She is a psychologist who has worked with children and families in communities for the past 25 years. She is the Founder and Executive Director of the Community Conferencing Center in Baltimore, Maryland and Assistant Professor (part-time) in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Lauren focused attention on Community Conferencing in Baltimore in 1995. She advances conferencing as a means of building social capital and collective efficacy on many levels, including: • empowering individuals and communities to resolve their own conflicts • keeping young people out of the criminal justice system, and • mobilizing the existing untapped human assets in communities. Lauren publishes articles on both the theoretical and empirical socio-political aspects of conferencing. The work of the Community Conferencing Center is groundbreaking for its multi-sector use of conferencing in highly distressed urban American communities. Conferencing has helped Lauren learn that: while we can learn about conflict resolution through books and concepts, conflict--and personal--transformation happens through relationships and meaningful emotional experiences.