Mellon Symposium 2025
Organized by Xerxes Minocher
Friday, February 21, 2025
Lutnick 200 & VCAM
In demands for collective liberation, restorative justice (RJ) often takes on an important position for the kind of worlds we want to build. But many questions remain around what that can look like. Bringing together a range of RJ practitioners across the Philadelphia region, this symposium explores where restorative justice comes from (its roots), how it has been developing in our city (its branches), and what it can look like in the future (its seeds), all in the hopes of clarifying what alternatives are possible. Join us for a day of speakers, panels, workshops, free food, and an art gallery showing to explore and share your and others’ understandings of restorative justice in Philadelphia. Together we can continue building the worlds we want to see, where restoration and transformation are not just imagined, but possible and happening. All are welcome, and feel free to come for portions or the whole day!
Sponsored by the John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities.
“Justice First” by Celeste Byers
Schedule
Friday, February 21, 2025
-
- Time and Location
- Event
- Description
-
- 9:30—9:45 a.m.
Lutnick 200
- Opening remarks
- Roadmap for day
-
- 9:45—10:30 a.m.
Lutnick 200
- First panel
- Some roots of Restorative Justice with Brujo de la Mancha
-
- 10:30—10:45 a.m.
Lutnick 200
- Coffee/Tea Break
-
- 10:45 a.m.—12:15 p.m.
Lutnick 200
- Second panel
- Growing branches of Restorative Justice in Philly with Pablo Cerdera, Camila Pretel, and Mckayla Warwick
-
- 12:15—1:30 p.m.
VCAM Lounge
- Lunch
- sandwiches/salad/drinks will be provided
-
- 1:30—3:00 p.m.
Lutnick 200, VCAM
- Workshops
- Haverford People’s Walking Tour by Beyond the Bell Tours and Workshops with Let’s Circle Up and YASP
-
- 3:00—3:15 p.m.
Lutnick 200
- Coffee/Tea Break
-
- 3:15—4:45 p.m.
Lutnick 200
- Third panel
- Planting seeds of Restorative Justice in Philly with Kaia Chau, Felix Rosado, and Rev. Dr. Donna Jones
-
- 4:45—5:00 p.m.
Lutnick 200
- Closing circle
- Ending the day
-
- 5:00—7:00 p.m.
VCAM Upper Create Space
- Opening gallery reception
- Opening Reception for YASP (The Youth Art & Empowerment Project) exhibit & Pizza party!
Map
How to get to VCAM and Lutnick Library
Enter on College Lane, turn left on to Coursey Road and park in the visiting parking lot. You do not need a parking permit.
Participants
Pablo Cerdera
Pablo Cerdera is a Restorative Justice (RJ) Practitioner and Educator and has been the Associate Director of Restorative Practices at the University of Pennsylvania since February 2020. They live on the Indigenous territory known as Lenapehoking, the traditional homelands of the Lenape or Delaware People, in what is now called West Philadelphia. Growing up as a middle child in a cross-cultural, cross-class, and multifaith Spanish and Jewish home Pablo developed their conflict and communications skills at a young age. They began their professional work at the Legal Rights Center in Minneapolis, and has volunteered or worked as an RJ practitioner with Restorative Justice Community Action, the Conflict Resolution Center, the Good Shepherd Mediation Program, and Let’s Circle Up. Pablo has provided training and consulting services at Yale, Princeton, Drexel, Haverford and numerous community organizations. They are a contributing author to "Applying Restorative Justice to Campus Sexual Misconduct" edited by Kaaren Williamsen and Erik Wessel. They are committed to sharing the restorative approach and firmly believe in the power to transform harm, promote meaningful accountability, and develop strong and healthy communities through this approach.
Kaia Chau
Kaia Chau (Bryn Mawr College '24) is a lifelong Philadelphian. She is one of the founders of Students for the Preservation of Chinatown (SPOC), a coalition of college students in the Philadelphia area fighting against the proposed construction of the new 76ers arena less than a block away from Chinatown. Kaia attended Folk Arts Cultural Treasures Charter School and grew up going to Chinatown almost every day. She was raised by organizers who dedicated their lives to fighting for the existence and preservation of Chinatown. She is also one of the founders of the Ginger Arts Center, a community youth and arts center located in Chinatown. There, she co-leads the operations and programming teams.
Jasmin Diaz
Jasmin Diaz (she/they) is a restorative justice facilitator at Healing Futures, Philadelphia’s first youth diversion restorative justice program under the Youth Art Self-Empowerment Project. In this role, Jasmin supports young people in accountability, healing, and embracing self-expression. Their work is grounded in the belief that true justice prioritizes creating spaces for people to heal and grow within their communities. Jasmin is also currently a master’s in social service student at Bryn Mawr College Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research. In her free time, Jasmin enjoys live music, dancing with friends, and trying new foods.
Let’s Circle Up
Let’s Circle Up (LCU) is a restorative justice project founded in 2007 by Charles Boyd and Felix Rosado, while incarcerated at Graterford State Correctional Institution. LCU looks to facilitate individual and social change by raising awareness of harm’s relational impact.
Guided by restorative justice (RJ) values and principles, our workshops and other group dialogue experiences empower us to practice RJ in everyday life with the aim of restoring damaged relationships caused by past harms, to the extent possible, and ending future harm.
LCU encompasses a philosophy and a way of life - a view that education about RJ can transform us. This has led to a series of partnerships between LCU members inside SCI Phoenix and a variety of community organizations near and far. Beginning in 2017, LCU was able to offer its first workshops outside of prison, at Haverford College and in Philadelphia. To date, over 2000 individuals have participated in introductory and advanced RJ series, as well as in special workshops including the annual Call To End Harm event.
Rebecca Fisher
Rebecca is the co-founder of Beyond the Bell Tours, an inclusive historical tour company known for their Badass Women’s History Tour and Gayborhood Tour. Graduating from Haverford College in 2018 with honors in Italian Studies and Peace, Justice and Human Rights, she is multilingual and wrote her thesis about inclusive tourism. Rebecca was the Tutleman Artist in Residence in 2022, where she designed an on-campus tour covering many of the justice themes covered on a typical Beyond the Bell Tour called: The People's History Tour of Haverford College, for which she received the Young Alumni Award in 2023. Rebecca is currently a collaborator with Our Market Project to create a tour of 9th Street Market that incorporates oral history, archival research and public artwork created by Michelle Angela Ortiz. Additionally, Rebecca is a collaborator for the Drag Arts History Project, which is collecting oral history interviews from drag artists. The oral histories will be developed into a tour called: Drag Me Philly! Highlighting drag history and drag artists in Philadelphia. Rebecca was recently named one of Philadelphia's Most Influential LGBTQ+ leaders by Philadelphia Gay News 2024.
Donna Jones
Rev Dr Donna Lawrence Jones has been a restorative practitioner, trainer, author, and advocate for over two decades. Dr Jones serves as Executive Director of the Metropolitan Christian Council of Philadelphia, a Church Foundation that resources nonprofits, grass-roots community leaders, and congregations involved in the education of persons living in low-wealth neighborhoods through its Mabel Kuhn and Walter S. Kuhn Memorial Trust: distributing over $125,000 in grants to individuals, organizations and groups in the tri-State Area during 2019). Dr. Jones has been a Restorative Practice trainer since 2004, and in 2017 founded of the Restorative Cities Initiative™, which promotes training and advocacy collaboratively with city residents and public/private-, formal and informal- city agencies toward neighborhood wide integration of restorative practices throughout social systems toward community wellbeing.
Brujo de la Mancha
Brujo de la Mancha is a multidisciplinary, self-taught artist specializing in danza azteca. In 2003, he co-founded the Ollin Yoliztli Calmecac, an Aztec dance troupe and non-profit organization in Philadelphia with the mission to “investigate, understand, and raise awareness of the Mexicayotl culture, which flourished in Mexico prior to the arrival of the Spanish in 1492.”
In 1998, he continued his family experience by moving to Philadelphia. He won a grant from The Institute for Cultural Partnership to learn how to make Tlapizcalli clay flutes, with the Master Xavier Quijas Yxayotl. In 2014, he received a Folk and Traditional Arts Apprenticeship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts to study traditional Aztec dance and the sewing of elaborate, detailed regalia or costumes with master artist, Roberto Franco Totokani. From these classes he went on to make a clay instrument called Ehekachiktli, the dead whistle, used by the Aztecs during war to frighten their opponents. Today, the artist’s full-time job is traveling from town to town across Pennsylvania, educating both Hispanics and non-Hispanics alike on Aztec culture and Mexican identity in the 21st century.
Camila Pretel
Camila is an award-winning Popular Education facilitator and restorative justice practitioner with a decade of experience on the frontlines of internationalist movements for workers' struggles, indigenous sovereignty, prison abolition, gender liberation, and an end to US imperialism. She began organizing as a teen during the Ferguson Uprising and now serves as Co-Director of CORA GSM, Philly's oldest and largest community mediation center, where she founded its first RJ department. Camila oversees the development and delivery of all restorative justice services, youth programs, and related training and consulting at CORA Good Shepherd Mediation. Under Camila’s leadership, the Restorative Justice team became its own department in 2021; championing community-based alternatives to incarceration with projects like The Transforming Justice Hub and diversion workshops, supporting student-led solutions to the school-to-prison pipeline through Peer Mediation trainings, and providing trauma-informed approaches to healing interpersonal harm with Circle Process facilitation for families, neighbors, classmates, coworkers, and comrades.
Felix Rosado
Felix Rosado is Program Manager of Healing Futures, a youth restorative justice (RJ) diversion program with the Youth Art & Self-empowerment Project, and teaches RJ at Chestnut Hill
College. In 2022, Felix narrowly escaped death by incarceration (also known as life without
parole) via governor clemency after 27 years. While inside, he cofounded Let’s Circle Up, an RJ
education project, and wrote Justice from the Inside Up: A Restorative Justice Education
Facilitator’s Manual, which was published this summer by Living Justice Press. Also while
inside, Felix cofounded the Coalition to Abolish Death By Incarceration, earned a bachelor’s
degree from Villanova University in interdisciplinary studies, and served in leadership with the
Alternatives to Violence Project and the Inside Out Prison Exchange Program. Now happily
engaged and residing in southwest Philadelphia, he is the proud father of Jubilee, born a week
shy of his two-year freedom anniversary.
Queen-Cheyenne Wade
Queen-Cheyenne Wade (They/She) is Program Manager of Healing Futures, Philadelphia's first Restorative Justice Diversion program housed at the Youth Art & Self-empowerment Project (YASP).Through this program, Queen is given the opportunity to facilitate restorative justice processes that expunge youth charges, support community driven solutions to harm, and provide hope to BIPOC teens and families with justice-system contact or exposure to community violence. Queen has been organizing restorative and transformative justice processes for survivors of community and family violence for the past seven years, founding alternative police programs, and creating popular education curriculums for schools, grassroots and systems adjacent programs. Queen is honored to step into the amazing work of community led- restorative justice in Philadelphia. When Queen isn't handling the duties associated with a program manager, they enjoy making art through collaging, taking hikes and baking for their friends and families.
Mckayla Warwick
Mckayla Warwick is a restorative justice practitioner based in Philadelphia, PA. While she arrived here in 2016 to complete her Bachelor of Arts in Sociology, Urban Education, and Africana Studies from the University of Pennsylvania, it has been the relationships that keep her deeply rooted in place.To express her gratitude for all that Philadelphia(ns) has given her, she co-founded Collective Climb, a Black-feminist organization that empowers youth, especially BIPOC girls and femmes, and communities in healing from interpersonal and intergenerational harm through art and restorative processes. And truthfully, this work is healing her spirit too.
Organizer
Xerxes Minocher
Xerxes is the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Technology and Justice at Haverford College, and a Visiting Assistant Professor in Peace, Justice, and Human Rights. Their most recent research focuses on public engagement with technology, studying how impacted constituencies reshape, challenge, and refuse AI systems. They are most excited about using restorative and transformative justice practices to reimagine the need for carceral technologies around us.