Restorative Spaces

Restorative Spaces

New Community Outreach creates and cultivates restorative spaces for healing, reconciliation and flourishing. We envision a Bronzeville where youth and other community members meet trauma with restorative justice in order to renew relationships (with ourselves, our neighbors, and our environments) which lead to our individual and collective flourishing.

Here’s a peak at how we are living out our mission and vision…

KEY Summer Leadership Program: This summer, 10 student participants, 2 student interns, and 2 senior interns learned about the interconnectedness of our individual selves and our community as a step to activate change as leaders. We grew as a community, delving into topics such as race as a social construct, transgenerational trauma, growing in knowledge of our community’s history in order to participate in collective healing, and more. We learned from guest speakers in the fields of community leadership, mental health, and violence prevention and by going on a bus tour of Bronzeville & its surrounding neighborhood led by The Chicago Race Riot of 1919 Commemoration Project. 

After several skills workshops organized by the Chicago Bulls Community Relationsteam, our cohort successfully pitched a community impact project that centered around the need to create safe spaces for their teen peers to discuss difficult topics like mental health, homelessness, safety, and needing mentors, and connect teens to resources in these areas. Students came to consensus on addressing the harms that have been caused in their community as a result of the lack of guidance teens are receiving and the lack of resources their peers are actively accessing and utilizing. 

By the end of the 7-week program, the cohort worked with professional videographers to produce and launch four videos which connects to their linktreethat has been intentionally curated to direct teens to local resources in these four areas.  All videos are available on our social media platforms, and the cohort aims to keep the conversation active so that there is a platform for youth to discuss personal experiences rather than repress them. The videos have collectively generated just over 4000 views.