Community Conferencing Center

Community Conferencing Center

contact

Media Contacts

For an interview, please contact:

Lauren Abramson, PhD
Founder, Executive Director
Community Conferencing Center 
(410) 889-7400

View Lauren's Bio

News & Articles

Contact Us

For general inquiry, or to request one of our Services or Trainings:
Please complete our Contact Form

Community Conferencing is also available throughout Maryland.
Find out more about the Statewide Network

10th Anniversary Conflict Resolution in Schools Campaign!
We can and will create safe learning environments for our children

The Community Conferencing Center launched a 10th Anniversary Conflict Resolution in Schools Campaign, to further our work in Baltimore City Schools. Funds from this campaign will help us reach more our schools, providing them with effective conflict resolution services such as:

  • Community Conferencing - An effective and highly inclusive circle process for handling incidents of serious harm
  • The Daily Rap - A classroom Dialogue Circle that effectively builds relationships between students and teachers, preventing conflict, suspensions, and arrests
  • Staff and/or Student Dialogue Circles - Ongoing facilitated learning-conversations focused on building and managing healthy relationships

We extend our sincere gratitude and appreciation to two supporters who helped us launch this campaign with generous contributions:

Fund for Populations at Risk - Suzanne F. Cohen 
The Louis B. Thalheimer & Juliet A. Eurich Philanthropic Fund, Inc.

Please help us reach these goals for the 2008-2010 school years:

  • To outreach each of the 190 Baltimore City Schools, making them aware of the effective relationship management services available to them and their students
  • To provide over 400 teachers with Daily Rap training
  • To conduct Community Conferences in at least 60 schools

Your contributions will help us provide these services:

$100 Supports Daily Rap training for several teachers

$500 Helps provide a Community Conference to handle a multiple student fight/bullying situation

$1,500 Supports Daily Rap training for all school staff (including coaching for the entire year)

$6,500 Helps provide Daily Rap and Community Conferencing services for an entire school year

Please let us know if you would like to designate a particular school!

Ways to Give

Ways to Make Tax-Deductible Donations to the Community Conferencing Center:

Make a donation today

Make your check payable to the “Community Conferencing Center” and mail to:

Community Conferencing Center
2300 N. Charles St. 2nd Floor
Baltimore, MD 21218
(410) 889-7400

  • Make a recurring gift
  • A gift of appreciated stock (not subject to capital gains taxes)
  • Honor Someone Special
  • Make a donation in memory of a loved one
  • United Way Campaigns:
    Combined Charity Campaign (CCC): 9824
    Combined Federal Campaign (CFC): 5405
    Maryland Charity Campaign (MCC): 1157
    Chesapeake Bay Area Combined Federal Campaign (CBACFC): 99637
    For all other United Way Campaigns write in "Community Conferencing"
  • Consider a Legacy gift
    Legacy gifts offer a way to endow the future of the Community Conferencing Center while creating tax savings and/or income benefits for you. These gifts include bequests in a will or living trust, life insurance, pension plans, financial accounts, charitable gift annuities and charitable trusts among others. This gift ensures that your support for people transforming conflict into communities carries on to the next generation.

Overview

With your help we are able to provide Baltimore residents with an effective way to safely resolve crimes and conflicts themselves, within their own neighborhood.

We do not shy away from challenging cases. Further, recent studies of our work have proven that our Community Conferencing efforts work – reducing re-offending rates in young offenders by 60%.

Your gift makes a difference. Please consider helping us sustain this innovative and internationally recovnized program.

There are many ways to give. All will strengthen our ability to make Community Conferencing available to the people who need our help the most.

Bring Community Conferencing to your Area

Starting and sustaining a Community Conferencing program that delivers high quality services requires good up-front planning and strategic implementation. In fact, 90% of the effort goes toward program development and implementation; only 10% is typically used for facilitator training and skill-building. The Community Conferencing Center has worked locally, nationally, and internationally with organizations who have developed their own viable Community Conferencing programs.

The CCC offers unique “soup to nuts” Community Conferencing Program Development services for those interested in building a high-quality Community Conferencing program. The support we provide covers every aspect of developing and implementing a sustainable program, including:

  • Engaging stakeholders to design a program that fits your needs
  • Finding a viable “home” for the program
  • Facilitator training and skill-building
  • Developing quality assurance systems
  • Maintaining reliable referral sources
  • Tracking program outcomes with a user-friendly customized Community Conferencing database
    • Easy data entry
    • Comprehensive case information
    • Easy to generate grant reports

Our goal is to help build sustainable programs that provide high-quality Community Conferencing services for years to come.

If you are interested in starting a Community Conferencing program in your area, please call 410-889-7400 or fill out our Contact Form

Start a Dialogue Circle at your Workplace

Workplace Dialogue Training Workshop

By training people within your business or school to conduct regular Workplace Dialogue sessions with staff or faculty, you have ongoing-access to a powerful social technology that helps build team cohesion, and can prevent minor conflicts from escalating into formal grievances or legal battles.

This 3-hour Training Workshop is for businesses and schools who have experienced the Workplace Dialogues process with Community Conferencing Center facilitators, and who wish to bring that facilitation capacity in-house.

The Workplace Dialogue Training Workshop combines experiential and didactic learning to provide an informative and fun learning experience. Individuals trained as Workplace Dialogue facilitators will also be provided with ongoing skill-building sessions as well as individual coaching.

For more information, contact:

Lauren Abramson, Ph.D. (410) 889-7400
or Fill out our Registration Form

Start a Daily Rap Program

Our schools are facing a crisis of connection. Students do not have opportunities to be heard, and to find their own path forward on issues that most affect their lives, and hence--their behavior and their ability to learn.

To address this, the Community Conferencing Center developed the Daily Rap-- a simple and effective classroom tool that puts teachers in the role of non-judgmental and non-directive facilitator of a circle dialogue with their students.

The Daily Rap helps transform school culture from one of blame to one of accountability. The outcomes are better behavior, more respect, and increased academic performance.

Students determine topics to be discussed, and discover support and solutions to their own problems. Teachers get a chance to learn about and understand their students, opening the door to more meaningful connections.

Teachers report that the Daily Rap helps them “buy back" teaching time, as students are empowered to take more responsibility for their individual and collective behavior, building better relationships and resolving their own conflicts before they develop into serious incidents.

What Teachers say about Daily Rap

Other Daily Rap outcomes include:

  • Emotionally intelligent students
  • Trusting relationships
  • Empathy
  • Strong problem-solving skills
  • Responsibility to each other and to self

Daily Rap (Staff Dialogues) for Teachers, Administrators and Staff

Daily Rap sessions are also a powerful team-building tool for school staff!

Staff Dialogue sessions can take place at staff meetings, and help staff and administrators build better rapport with one another, learn classroom management techniques from each other, and become a cohesive team.

Daily Rap Training

  • Initial 3 hour training workshop.
  • Ongoing skill-building sessions.
  • Individual coaching.

Interested in the Daily Rap?

Please call (410) 889-7400 or contact us.

Interested in becoming a Community Conferencing Volunteer Facilitator?

The Community Conferencing Center offers training to individuals who wish to become part of our effort to provide Community Conferencing in underserved communities.

This includes:

  • 20 hour Facilitator Training Workshop
  • Facilitator Apprenticeship

Co-facilitated by Executive Director Lauren Abramson and Community Conferencing Center Facilitators, this highly participatory 20-hour training combines experiential and didactic learning, and emphasizes both the principles underlying the process as well as techniques of Community Conferencing facilitation.

Upcoming 2009 Facilitator Training Workshops:

  • July 14-16, 2010 - REGISTRATION IS NOW CLOSED
  • January 2011 training (check back for dates to be announced soon)

              NOTE: Registration is not complete until payment has been received.

Training workshops include:

  • Maryland Social Workers and Licensed Counselors can earn 20 CEUs for this training.
  • History of Community Conferencing
  • Principles of the Process
  • General Guidelines for Facilitators
  • How to Facilitate a Community Conference
  • Role-Plays
  • Program Implementation
  • Impact on Individuals, Communities, Systems
  • Apprenticeship Information

Are you interested in Daily Rap Training for your school or youth program? Learn More

The Community Conferencing Center offers Daily Rap training workshops for school and youth program staff training consists of:

  • Three hour initial training workshop
  • Ongoing skill-building sessions
  • Individual coaching sessions

Please call (410) 889-7400 or contact us for details.

Training

The Community Conferencing Center provides innovative and high-quality training in

Please contact us for more information.

Research

Resolving Conflicts, Changing Lives

Here are just a few of the powerful true stories about real people, real conflicts, and how Community Conferencing transforms conflict into cooperation.

Community Conferences are held each week so be sure to check back for more stories!

Overview

Community Conferencing: Using Crime and Conflict as a Stepping Stone to Building Community

Whether Community Conferencing is being utilized by the juvenile justice system, schools, courts, or neighborhoods, the result is the same: People in conflict come to understand each other better and find ways to repair the harm and move forward in a better way.

The impact is significant. Residents are empowered to resolve their own conflicts, victims have a voice in deciding outcomes, and citizens are directly engaged in public safety issues and are mobilized to find ways to build their communities based on relationship and accountability.

Community Conferencing impacts individuals and communities in several other ways:

Immediate response

  • Community Conferencing can help resolve things in as few as two weeks.
  • Community Conferencing brings everyone together immediately after an incident, avoiding the sometimes lengthy wait for official action from courts or other institutions.

High Compliance / Accountability

  • Everyone affected by the conflict decides how to resolve things, therefore compliance with sanctions is extremely high.
  • 98% of the Community Conferences in Baltimore have resulted in a written agreement created by all participants, with over 95% compliance with those agreements.

Reduces Recidivism

  • A recent Maryland juvenile justice study showed that young offenders who participate in a Community Conference are 60% less likely to re-offend.

Reduces over-representation of people of color

  • Over 97% of the young offenders diverted from the juvenile justice system have been minorities, thereby providing youth of color with the same alternatives available to many Caucasian young offenders.

Improves School Culture

  • Students are held directly accountable for their harmful behavior.
  • Parents are included in deciding outcomes.
  • Administrators report that for the first time, previously ongoing and intractable fights among students are “quashed” through the use of Community Conferencing
  • The Daily Rap violence prevention tool developed by the Community Conferencing Center has been taught to over 400 Baltimore City School teachers.

Teachers using the Daily Rap report:

  • better classroom behavior
  • improved ability to handle disruptive behaviors
  • stronger positive relationships between students
  • far better communication and problem-solving among students

Community strengthening

  • Crime and conflict becomes a stepping stone to building a sense of community.
  • Over 7,000 Baltimore residents successfully resolved their own crimes and conflicts through Community Conferencing.
  • Victims are included in deciding outcomes, and report feeling that “justice was served.”

Programs and Services

Statewide Network

Peacing it Together Award

The Community Conferencing Center is proud to, each year, present the Peacing it Together Award to extraordinary individual and organizational partners who help us fulfill our mission in remarkable ways.

Please join us in celebrating the efforts of these Peacing it Together honorees:

2009

  • Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld, Baltimore City Police Department
  • Chief Judge for Maryland Court of Appeals Robert M. Bell
  • Chief Marshall T. Goodwin of the Baltimore City School Police Force

2008

  • Lacey Benton, Community Conferencing Facilitator
  • Juan Brice, Community Conference Participant
  • Ray Cook, On Our Shoulders
  • Mike Jones, Baltimore City Police Department
  • Duvol Langley, Community Conference Participant
  • Karen Ndour, Baltimore City Schools
  • Janice Williams, Baltimore City Schools
  • Joyce Wright, Maryland State’s Attorney’s Office Juvenile Division

2007

  • Shakita Anderson, Community Conference Participant
  • Gretchen Banks, Baltimore City Schools
  • James H. Green, Baltimore City Police Department
  • Jacqueline Holley-Bowman, Department of Juvenile Services
  • John Nwokoroku, Maryland Department of Juvenile Services
  • John Prince, Maryland Department of Juvenile Services
  • Brenda Tuck, Baltimore City Schools Suspension Services
  • BANNER Neighborhoods, Community Partner

2006

  • Frank Broccolina, Maryland Judiciary
  • Cheryl Casciani, Community Activist/Funder
  • Keith Dyson, Community Conferencing Facilitator
  • Tricia Rock, Baltimore City Schools
  • Marie Sennett, Community Conference Participant

2005

  • Elizabeth Duverlie, Community Conferencing Facilitator
  • Commissioner Leonard Hamm, Baltimore City Police Department
  • Barbara Henry, Baltimore City School Police
  • Marc Steiner, Community Activist
  • Community Mediation Program, Community Partner
  • Maryland Mediation and Conflict Resolution Office (MACRO), Maryland Judiciary

Our Partners

Our Staff & Board

How We Got Started

Our History

In 1995, Dr. Lauren Abramson introduced Community Conferencing in Baltimore. After learning about the process at a conference of the Silvan S. Tomkins Institute in Philadelphia in 1994 from Australian David Moore, Lauren attended the first facilitator training workshops conducted in the United States by Transformative Justice Australia.

Lauren became keenly interested in bringing Community Conferencing to inner-city Baltimore because of the power conferencing has to not only bring about important system reforms (e.g. in criminal justice and education), but to also empower individuals, families and communities to resolve their own conflicts and crimes.

After three years of promoting the process to local leaders in criminal justice, education and community development, the first Facilitator Training Workshop was held in Baltimore in 1998 with the support of the Governors Office of Crime Control and Prevention (GOCCP). The GOCCP then funded four Baltimore communities to build their own Community Conferencing programs, with Lauren providing technical support which was funded by the Maryland Judiciary.

The Community Conferencing Center is born

Total decentralization of Community Conferencing was not resulting in an effective growth of the process or the programs. The need for a centralized organization to serve as a 'hub' for outreach, referrals, training, quality assurance and evaluation became increasingly apparent. More info

Up to this point, Lauren had been coordinating Community Conferencing efforts on her volunteered time, which greatly limited the amount of effort to this work. In 1998, Lauren received an Open Society Institute Community Fellowship, allowing her to focus her work on developing and expanding Community Conferencing efforts in Baltimore and Maryland.

Lauren worked closely with Australian colleagues in elucidating the theoretical underpinnings of this effective process. One particularly unique aspect of our work is that it is grounded in our understanding of the role of emotion in bringing about both individual and group transformation. More info

As the use of conferencing grew in Baltimore, Lauren drew from research and theory, extracting and defining basic principles for both the conferencing process and for the implementation of the program, which has given rise to a model that allows for the effective use of Community Conferencing in a variety of sectors and with a variety of populations.

The Community Conferencing Center was born in the year 2000. The CCC remains unique in that it is the only broad-scale conferencing program in a large American inner-city, providing theory-based services across several sectors.

The Community Conferencing Center now also serves as the training and technical assistance 'hub' in Maryland. Working with over a dozen jurisdictions, the Community Conferencing Center has helped establish Community Conferencing programs in:

The Community Conferencing Center also receives inquiries about our work from other states and from other countries, and as worked nationally and internationally to assist others in establishing similar programs.

Vision & Mission

Vision:

Communities and individuals will recognize they can safely and effectively resolve conflicts themselves-when provided with an appropriate structure to do so.

Mission:

To provide a highly participatory, community-based process for people to transform their conflicts into cooperation, take collective and personal responsibility for action, and improve their quality of life. Through partnerships with people, neighborhoods, governments and institutions, the Community Conferencing Center helps Maryland communities resolve conflicts and crimes within their own communities.

Operating Principles:

  • Conflicts present opportunities for learning, healing and transformation.
  • People will generate creative and lasting solutions to their conflicts when everyone affected by a conflict is given a safe forum to tell his or her story and be part of the solution.
  • Conflicts within communities are best resolved within those communities.
  • Mobilization of existing assets and building community cohesiveness are paramount to quality of life.
  • Violence can be prevented if people are given a safe forum to collectively resolve their conflicts.

Our Work

The Community Conferencing Center is the first and only multi-sector program being conducted in a large American inner-city, offering services for:

Overview of CCC

The Community Conferencing Center (CCC) is a conflict transformation and community justice organization that provides ways for people to safely, collectively and effectively prevent and resolve conflicts and crime.

The work of the Community Conferencing Center has been recognized nationally and internationally for its use of conflict management strategies in a variety of settings, including criminal justice, education, community development and business.

Our Community Conferencing efforts in Baltimore are unique—being the only broad-based conferencing program in a large American inner-city, with most services provided at no cost to participants.

The Community Conferencing Center also provides training, technical assistance, program development, and program evaluation services.

Getting Started with ExpressionEngine

Thank you for choosing ExpressionEngine! This entry contains helpful resources to help you get the most from ExpressionEngine and the EllisLab Community.

Technical Support:

All tech support is handled through our Community forums. Our staff and the community respond to issues in a timely manner. Please review the Getting Help section of the User Guide before posting in the forums.

Learning resources:

Getting Started Guide
Quick Start Tutorial
Video Tutorials

Additional Support Resources:

ExpressionEngine User Guide
Knowledge Base
ExpressionEngine Wiki

If you need to hire a web developer consider our Professionals Network. You can also place an ad on our Job Board if you prefer that professionals find you.

Love ExpressionEngine?  Help spread the word and make some spare change with our Affiliates program.

See you on the boards,

The EllisLab Team

Lauren Abramson, PHD
Founder, Executive Director
Assistant Professor, Child Psychiatry,Johns Hopkins School of Medicine

Nicole "Nikki" Glass-Brice
Deputy Director

Patricia Escarfuller
Program Coordinator

David Williams
Outreach Coordinator

Cindy Lemons
Facilitator

Schoene Mahmood
Facilitator

Back to Top