In 1993, Heart Phoenix lost her eldest son, River, to tragic circumstances. He was an actor and humanitarian with boundless promise, with talents cut short just as they began to bloom, and Heart has spent much of the two decades since his death honoring his memory through social work.
“River was always solution based,” Phoenix said. “He was an activist from a very early age. From five years old on, he was going into prisons, singing, talking about the Earth. He was way ahead of his time.”
After several years lobbying to create a cabinet-level Department of Peace in Washington D.C., Phoenix and her husband, Jeffrey Weisberg, decided to come home and work for peace in Gainesville. Using what they had learned on a national level, they founded the River Phoenix Center for Peacebuilding.
“Changing thinking, changing behavior, changing attitudes is what we’re aiming for,” Weisberg said. “It’s more of a sociological approach to conflict and violence. In the context of peacebuilding, there are peacekeepers who go in to help stabilize and stop war and fighting. That’s not enough. You have to build an infrastructure and relationships and systems within communities that help propel people forward into not only survival, but how do we thrive?”
When Phoenix and Weisberg started the RPCP, they contacted Gretchen Casey, a friend in the office of the State Attorney, 8th Judicial Circuit Court. Casey, the office’s director of victim services, helped the fledgling organization make valuable contacts.
“They wanted to do something that hadn’t been done in Alachua County: peacebuilding and restorative justice,” Casey said.
She said she was only too happy to help.
“We’re so incredibly fortunate that we have people that are so well trained and so sensitive to the needs of kids and families that have been affected by adverse childhood experiences, but also recognizing that the schools can’t do it alone,” Casey said. “The law can’t do it alone. When you’re exposed to really good training, it can make us all do our jobs better.”
After meeting with Casey, Phoenix and Weisberg began working to promote the concept of restorative justice, which focuses on repairing the harm done by a crime rather than simply punishing the offender.
“The prison system is basically, ‘You broke the law and you’re going to pay,’” Phoenix said. “You separate the person that did it and the person it was done to, and they don’t even know how to look at each other. We believe that when a crime happens and when hurt happens, the entire community is affected, whether it’s their family, their schools, their teachers. There’s an extended part of that that doesn’t get addressed. When that doesn’t get addressed, it seethes like a sore. Restorative justice is about bringing together victim and offender and the communities on either side and answering questions like, what happened? What was the impact? How can we repair the harm, and how can we prevent it from happening again?”
Phoenix and Weisberg have already seen this practice pay dividends to the community.
“There was a case when these three boys tried to knock in a door at night and they got caught,” Weisberg recalled. “The police asked us to do a restorative justice circle, so we brought one of the kids with his family together with the family who was victimized and came up with an agreement, and it was very successful. They had to fix the door, do community service (and) write a letter of apology.”
Phoenix added, “The kid is 13 years old. He thinks it’s just funny. The guy behind the door, who was home with his family, he said to the kid, ‘If I had a gun, I would have killed you.’ The kid’s jaw dropped. That hit home. That kid is changed.”
The RPCP has several other programs, including a Communication and Self Esteem teaching series, Community Conferencing, and a Youth Leadership series, which they teach in local schools, juvenile detention centers and just about anywhere else people will listen. They are also training Gainesville Police Department officers about de-escalation of violence techniques, conflict resolution and early child brain development through the Police-Youth Dialogue Program, which also gives police and local youth the opportunity to connect outside of negative situations.
As Casey noted, “They wanted to work with the police and young minority youth before any of the stuff happened in Ferguson, Missouri, or all the things that have been happening across the country. What makes Jeffrey and Heart so different is that they really do live it and breathe it.”
Ultimately, Phoenix and Weisberg say that the goal of the RPCP is to promote self-awareness, which gives people alternatives to violence.
“I’d like to see social and emotional learning as part of the school curriculum from an early age,” Phoenix said. “You need a sense of self; you need a sense of others. I’d love to see some of these practices that we’re doing replicated to other communities throughout the world. We’d love to see gender equality, racial equality and a new sense of realizing that life is precious.
“We know conflict is inevitable. Violence isn’t.”