Innovating Restorative Justice
College of health & human services
In 1994, the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) passed as part of the Crime Bill, marking the strong collaboration between the anti-domestic and sexual violence sector and law enforcement. Dr. Mimi Kim, Associate Professor in the School of Social Work, was working at a domestic violence shelter at the time and was shocked by the compromises made by a feminist movement that fully supported the buildup of mass incarceration. As the daughter of a refugee from the Korean War’s divide of the peninsula into North, the home of her father, and South, the home of her mother, Dr. Kim’s dedication to non-violence turned in a decidedly anti-military and anti-policing direction. She sought an approach that might bring an end to domestic and sexual violence without tearing families apart and that did not rely upon state violence to contain interpersonal violence. Dr. Kim has been awarded as a 2023 Marguerite Casey Freedom Scholar in recognition of her social justice contributions.
In what is now popularly called “transformative justice,” Dr. Kim imagined an approach to violence prevention and intervention grounded in the values of social justice and the methods of community organizing. In 2004, she founded Creative Interventions in Oakland and piloted a now prominent and enduring alternative justice model of violence intervention. A toolkit documenting the model, published in book form in 2021, and a companion workbook, published in 2022, have now been adopted in places as wide-ranging as St. Louis, Barcelona, and Iraq.
When Dr. Kim graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 2014 and joined the faculty of the CSULB School of Social Work, her approach to violence intervention caught the attention of the Blue Shield of California Foundation, a funder interested in community-based culturally responsive approaches to domestic violence prevention and intervention. The foundation asked what it would take to scale up the approach of Creative Interventions. This became an applied research initiative that has now extended across a decade.
Dr. Kim then became interested in “implementation science,” or the ways in which innovations in human service interventions are successfully implemented within other organizations and geographic regions. Focusing on California, Dr. Kim began to train anti-violence organizations in collective approaches to violence intervention that, unlike conventional programs, offered the possibility of safety and justice without necessarily separating families or turning perpetrators of violence or “people who cause harm” over to the agents of law enforcement.
In 2018, Dr. Kim collaborated with a group of community-based organizations in Northern California’s Contra Costa County to look at a restorative justice approach to domestic and sexual violence—using a more established restorative justice circle model that had been developed as an alternative justice intervention for youth who caused harm. An evaluation of a pilot project now called The CHAT Project (Collective Healing and Transformation), published in 2022, stands as one of the only evaluations of a restorative justice program addressing domestic or sexual violence.
At a time when the demands for restorative justice are rising while programmatic examples remain scarce, Dr. Kim’s experience in innovative alternative justice interventions and applied research is filling a critical evidentiary gap. A decade of Blue Shield of California Foundation funding for Dr. Kim’s arc of research and more recent multi-year funding from Collective Future Fund for narrative-based research on transformative justice interventions has brought data-driven evidence to a social justice arena now known for documentation.