May 2024
The Public Justice Center (PJC) is a 501(c)(3) civil legal aid nonprofit organization founded in 1985 that provides advice and representation to low-income clients, advocates before legislatures and government agencies, and collaborates with community and advocacy organizations. The PJC uses legal advocacy tools to pursue social justice, economic and race equity, and fundamental human rights for people who are struggling to provide for their basic needs. The PJC chooses projects and cases that will make a significant impact on systems, laws, and policies. Current projects include advocating on behalf of families needing healthcare and benefits, low-wage workers, low-income tenants, and students facing exclusionary discipline and school policing; using appellate cases to establish good law in poverty and civil rights cases; and building a national movement to establish a right to counsel in civil cases involving basic human needs. The PJC employs 33 people across several project teams as well as in fundraising and administration; our staff work from our office in Baltimore, MD and from their home offices in Maryland, Illinois, Missouri, New York, Pennsylvania, and Alabama. The PJC has an annual operating budget of approximately $4 million.
The PJC is committed to cultivating a restorative workplace, which includes both a proactive component (developing trust through authentic relationship-building) and a reactive component (a transformative justice conflict resolution process). The PJC seeks an implementation partner to develop, test, and revise a transformative justice conflict resolution process and to provide external transformative mediation, as needed.
While the PJC has always been an organization committed to anti-poverty and anti-discrimination, our mindful shift to advancing race equity and anti-racism began in 2014. In the last ten years, we have partnered with the Racial Justice Institute at the Shriver Center on Poverty Law, Baltimore Racial Justice Action, and Co-Lab Consulting to develop our knowledge of institutional, cultural, systemic, and structural racism; to assess our organizational dynamics, policies, and practices; to develop and facilitate staff training; and to build strategies to keep racial equity at the center of our work.
The Racial Equity Action Plan we adopted in February 2023 focused on four priorities: 1) a transformative justice process that can be used to build community and address conflicts and harm within the PJC, 2) restorative justice culture and practices within the PJC, 3) anti-racist community engagement practices, and 4) supervision practices that incorporate racial equity considerations in one-on-one and team meetings, in problem-solving conversations, and in supporting staff experiencing racism in the course of their work. Since February 2023, a workgroup of PJC staff has drafted a set of guidelines for transformative conflict resolution and identified the need for outside expertise, described below, to fully implement our transformative justice conflict resolution process.
1. Review and provide input on the draft guidelines for transformative conflict resolution, including helping the workgroup answer questions identified during the process of developing the guidelines. These questions include how to identify and train PJC staff members to support an internal conflict resolution process, how to minimize power dynamics in an internal process, how the process works when both/all parties in conflict allege harm by the other(s), how to support staff who are harmed while participating in the conflict resolution process, and what data to track/how to know whether the process is working while ensuring confidentiality. We aim to complete this component of the work by October 31, 2024, while acknowledging that the guidelines will be revised throughout the process of testing and implementing our new transformative justice conflict resolution process.
2. Develop and facilitate three types of training resources: 1) a training session for all PJC staff on transformative justice in general and the PJC’s transformative justice conflict resolution process specifically, 2) a training session for one or more PJC staff members to provide one-on-one coaching and internal transformative mediation, and 3) a resource library of books, articles, videos, etc. for staff to learn more about transformative justice and conflict resolution. The work to create the training sessions and resource library will overlap with review of our draft guidelines. We aim to complete this component of the work by December 20, 2024.
3. Provide external transformative mediation, as needed, that aims to restore the relationships of the parties in conflict and looks at the conditions – whether structural or systemic – that may have enabled the harm to occur and aims to repair and transform the PJC community at large. The details of this component of the work will be further fleshed out during review of our draft guidelines. We expect this component of the work to be ongoing, with at least an annual evaluation of the partnership.
The successful proposal will likely demonstrate the following attributes:
Email the following to Kathleen Gregory (gregoryk@publicjustice.org) with the subject line of “Transformative Justice Conflict Resolution Partner”. Proposals will be accepted on a rolling basis, with a priority deadline of July 1, 2024.
If you have any questions or would like to schedule a video conference to discuss the project in more detail before submitting a proposal, please email Kathleen Gregory (gregoryk@publicjustice.org) by June 10, 2024, if possible, so that we have sufficient time to engage with you before the priority deadline.
The PJC’s Transformative Justice & Conflict Resolution work group – a cross-department team of six staff members – will review proposals, follow-up with any questions, select potential partners to interview, conduct interviews, and make a recommendation on who to hire. Interviews will include the PJC’s Executive Director and other interested staff and will be conducted by Zoom. We aim to complete the selection process and sign a contract for the partnership by September 30, 2024.
The Public Justice Center is an equal opportunity, affirmative action employer that encourages all interested persons to apply regardless of race, color, national origin, ancestry, ethnicity, citizenship, creed, sex, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, age, religion, genetic information, physical or mental disability, marital status, or any other legally protected status. We strongly encourage Black, Latine, Indigenous, and other applicants of color, people with disabilities, and other people historically marginalized to apply.
