Partner Spotlight: Focusing on Justice-Involved Individuals

This fall, we welcomed three wonderful new partners to Negotiation Works: The WIRE, the DC Department of Corrections, and Father Factor!

The WIRE is a network of formerly incarcerated women who have successfully reintegrated back into the community after release and who provide peer support to other women returning from incarceration. Lashonia Thompson-El, founder and Executive Director of The WIRE and co-chief of the Cure the Streets program at the Office of the Attorney General, provided inspiration for this partnership. We first connected with Cure the Streets in the spring of 2021, exchanged information about our respective programs, and invited them to join our spring celebration event. Lashonia trained as a Negotiation Works instructor in the summer of 2021 because she believed that our negotiation curriculum would be worthwhile and timely for the members of The WIRE.

This fall, we taught two 4-week courses for The WIRE — one on-site course and a second course over Zoom for members who weren’t able to attend the on-site program. Shirl, a participant in these courses, shared her experience in the class: "I enjoyed all the content and walked away with a lot of tools.”

In addition to Lashonia, volunteer instructors for these programs include Sherri Smith and Lauren Creamer (for the on-site class) and Lauren Creamer, Khiran Sidhu, and Sarah Batcheller (for the remote class).

We also began a partnership with the Department of Corrections and taught two inaugural classes at the DC Jail, with one class tailored to residents of the women’s unit and the other to residents of the men’s unit. The residents greatly enjoyed the program and shared feedback about what they found to be valuable about the course. One resident stated, “[The course] make[s] me know how to strategize my negotiation skills to get what I want and put myself in the other person's shoes.” Another resident explained that she expects to use the negotiation skills in the future when she “disagree[s] with someone or a situation” and that she will “better analyze the situation [and] the solutions”.

Thank you to Susan Borke for joining Melissa Reinberg in teaching in this program. We plan to return to the Jail in the new year to teach another set of classes and look forward to continuing this new partnership.

Father Factor is our newest partner. This fantastic organization provides a number of services, including violence interruption programs in conjunction with the city’s Cure the Streets program. We are providing Father Factor with a series of custom-designed professional development workshops on negotiation strategies for their violence interrupters and outreach workers. The goal of the workshops is to offer additional strategies the staff can use in their daily work with and on behalf of community members at high risk of gun violence. Volunteer instructors Derek O’Leary and Susan Borke have been instrumental in the design and delivery of these workshops.