Connect pathways
Make warm handoffs easier so people do not have to restart their story at every doorway.
Community capacity · connected
Justice lives in community.
Community Justice Fresno helps people, families, practitioners, organizations, and institutions find one another around the work of preventing harm, navigating conflict, supporting people through difficult moments, strengthening accountability, and building a more connected Fresno.
Want the deeper CJC framework? Explore what CJC means by community justice.
Start where you are
You should not need to understand the system before you can use it.
Choose the doorway that sounds most like you. The organizational architecture can stay behind the scenes.
I need support
Start with what is happening.
Conflict, a difficult conversation, a family concern, harm, or simply not knowing where to begin.
Find a place to beginI want to learn
Build skills you can use.
Learn practical ways to navigate conflict, strengthen relationships, and practice community justice.
Learn with CJCI do this work
Practice alongside others.
For mediators, facilitators, advocates, mentors, youth workers, educators, and other community practitioners.
Explore practitioner pathsMy organization wants to connect
Bring what you already have.
Services, practitioners, space, knowledge, referrals, relationships, and ideas can become part of stronger local capacity.
Start a partnership conversationWhat is happening?
Begin with life, not a program name.
Community justice reaches across prevention, conflict, crisis, repair, reintegration, safety, family stability, and belonging. Sometimes CJC is the right next step. Sometimes the right answer lives with a partner or public system.
Community capacity belongs alongside public accountability and formal systems — not in place of them.
Conflict or a hard conversation
Slow things down, understand options, try practical tools, or connect with mediation support.
ExploreA young person or school situation
Explore prevention, school climate, conflict response, family support, youth voice, and restorative options.
ExploreComing home or rebuilding stability
Explore accountability, reintegration, relationships, practical support, and connection back to community.
ExploreRepair after harm
Understand when a restorative process may create meaningful voice, responsibility, accountability, and repair.
ExploreConcern about an older adult
Connect with Elder Justice Fresno for information, support, options, and a safer next step.
ExploreI am not sure what I need
You do not need the right program name. Start with the situation and let the next step become clearer.
ExploreChoice
Empowerment starts with knowing your choices.
A large part of supporting someone is helping them see real options that were not visible before — then making the path they choose as straightforward as it can reasonably be.
- 01See the options
Understand what is actually available, and what each path would mean for you.
- 02Make a choice
Decide what fits your situation, your values, and what you need.
- 03Move forward
Once you choose, fewer forms, less repeating yourself, fewer handoffs and dead ends.
When real choice exists, it can look like
- Address it yourself with better information
- A conversation
- Mediation
- A restorative process
- Practical or community support
- A trusted partner organization
- A public or formal system
- Learning and building skills
- Choosing not to proceed, where participation is voluntary
Not every situation is optional. Mandatory reporting, court orders, safety duties, legal obligations, and emergency response still apply, and some paths are not a matter of preference. Where choice is real, it should be clear, informed, and yours.
Start with capacity
The answers are not all inside one organization.
Fresno already contains people, relationships, skills, spaces, knowledge, organizations, and informal forms of care that help community function. Community Justice Fresno asks what is already here, what can be strengthened, and what still needs to be built.
Everyone starts somewhere. Everyone has something to contribute. Everyone belongs in community.
Lived experienceTrusted relationshipsMeeting spaceCultural knowledgeMediation skillsYouth mentorshipNeighborhood presenceTransportationTraining capacityEmployment connectionsVolunteer timeA willingness to show up
Community Justice Network
Connect the capacity that already exists.
CJN is one collaboration layer within Community Justice Fresno: a way for residents, practitioners, organizations, and institutions to work together around specific community-justice efforts without asking one organization to own every service or relationship.
Participation should be project-based, role-clear, and respectful of each organization’s identity, governance, participant relationships, and responsibilities.
Collaborations take shape as specific projects — for example CJN PeaceMakers, a CJC-sponsored project where approved organizations do restorative processes and related practice together.
Visit Community Justice NetworkConnect people
Create places for residents, practitioners, and frontline teams to find one another around real work.
Connect organizations
Help partners contribute services, referrals, space, staff, and community knowledge without giving up their identity.
Local examples + developing connections
Local identity. Shared pathways where they help.
Some relationships below are established and some are still developing. Each organization defines its own role. Connection does not turn a partner into a CJC program or transfer ownership of its work.
CJCPractice + stewardship
Community Justice Center
Mediation, restorative processes, schools, training, coming home, public partnerships, and network stewardship.
VisitEASIElder justice
Elder Justice Fresno
A distinct issue-area front door showing how community education, support, volunteers, and coalition work can stay connected.
VisitPOWERNeighborhood practice
Southwest Fresno POWER
Community mediation in Southwest Fresno shows what it can mean for trained capacity to live closer to the community it serves.
ARCReintegration
ARC Fresno
A developing local connection offers a model for how a partner can retain its identity while connecting referrals, pathways, and community support.
Practitioner hub
Community justice needs people who know how to do the work.
Learning, supervised practice, peer connection, clear project relationships, and eventually more paid opportunities can help practitioners grow without erasing the organizations and communities they come from.
The Practice Lab is a working preview of the practitioner experience and may ask for preview access. It does not grant practitioner status, assignment, case access, or network membership.
How a practice grows
- 01Learn
Build practical skills through the Academy and community training.
- 02Practice
Use those skills with preparation and supervision, not alone.
- 03Collaborate
Work alongside practitioners from other organizations on shared projects.
- 04Be supported
Reflective supervision, consultation, and a place to bring the hard parts.
- 05Do real work
Practice in real settings, with clear roles, boundaries, and responsibility.
- 06Paid opportunity, where funded
Where funding and an appropriate role exist. Not a promise of work.
MediatorsRestorative facilitatorsYouth workersViolence interruptersAdvocatesMentorsReentry practitionersCommunity organizersEducatorsNeighborhood leaders
CJC · steward of Community Justice Fresno
CJC helps connect the work.
Community Justice Fresno is a CJC-led initiative. CJC does not need to deliver every service itself. Its stewardship role is to strengthen what exists, connect what should connect, build capacity where more is needed, and step in directly when CJC is the appropriate resource.
Relationship to Fresno DRIVE + CJN
Fresno DRIVE’s Community Justice Network is a related regional initiative. CJC has been part of its founding leadership and supported its development. Community Justice Fresno is the CJC-led public project shown here; it does not claim ownership of DRIVE or of participating organizations.
01
Convene partners and community
02
Train and support practitioners
03
Operate mediation and restorative pathways
04
Develop shared projects and referrals
05
Support practice quality and learning
06
Turn plans into usable community infrastructure
From plan to practice
Fresno has been building toward this for a generation.
The story is not that nothing happened. Fresno accumulated decades of practice, relationships, institutions, and learning. The next opportunity is to connect more of that capacity and make it easier to reach.
A framework
Fresno published Restorative Justice: A Framework for Fresno — a community-centered vision extending beyond any one program or institution.
A network
Fresno DRIVE advanced a Community Justice Network and Community Justice Center vision spanning prevention, restorative practice, reintegration, and local capacity.
Make it usable
Community Justice Fresno can connect services, practitioners, organizations, places, and learning into something residents can actually reach and use.
Community Justice Campus
A home for the work. A center of gravity for the network.
Shared space can turn relationships into daily proximity: organizations working near one another, practitioners learning together, families meeting in welcoming rooms, and community work having a visible place to land.
How the Campus could sustain itselfShared home
Bring community-facing organizations closer to the people they serve and to one another.
Learning place
Host training, practice labs, workshops, and practitioner development.
Community rooms
Create welcoming places for dialogue, mediation, circles, meetings, and support.
The Commons
Use mission-aligned coworking and shared space to activate underused rooms and strengthen the ecosystem.
The Campus is not the whole geography.
The Campus can be the central place for training, convening, and shared work while community access also grows through trusted neighborhood, school, faith, nonprofit, and partner locations.
CJC trains. Partners host. CJN connects.
The Campus gives that work a home and a place from which more distributed community access can grow.
Future capitalization layer
Fund the people already creating safer communities.
Fresno does not lack people willing to prevent harm, interrupt violence, mediate conflict, support victims, help young people, and restore community. What is missing is durable infrastructure to employ, train, coordinate, protect, and sustain them.
The working proposal is a three-year, $15 million community capitalization campaign — the Fresno Community Safety Infrastructure Initiative. Its largest allocation is deliberately the people who do the work.
A working proposal under active revision. Not awarded, not approved, not a commitment from any named funder, and not $15M going to CJC. Shown here so partners can weigh the scale of what sustaining this work would actually take.
What the investment would do
Pay people
Put durable compensation behind practitioners doing prevention, conflict, repair, advocacy, and reintegration work.
Strengthen organizations
Help frontline organizations absorb supervision, insurance, coordination, workspace, and operational costs responsibly.
Build learning
Support training, certification, practicum, peer learning, and pathways for emerging practitioners.
Connect the work
Invest in shared referral, coordination, measurement, and public-accountability infrastructure without centralizing ownership.
Working allocation · three years
$10M
Practitioner Workforce Fund
120 paid practitioner-years over three years — including preparation, follow-through, and supervision.
$1.5M
Training, Certification & Learning
Shared preparation, certification pathways, practicum, and peer learning.
$500K
Volunteer & Emerging-Practitioner Pathways
Routes in for people building toward practice.
$1M
Community Innovation & Organizational Stabilization
Helps host organizations absorb the work responsibly.
$1.5M
Resilient Infrastructure, Measurement, Communications & Stewardship
Shared tools and measurement that make the work legible.
$500K
Independent Evaluation & Fund Administration
Held separately from the organizations delivering the work.
Community Justice Fresno
Build what helps community show up for itself.
The people are already here. The organizations are already here. The history is already here. The work is to connect what should connect, strengthen what is stretched too thin alone, and make community justice easier to reach and practice.
Community Justice Fresno is a CJC-led community initiative.
Public review · developing partner roles and fund concepts remain subject to confirmation.