How One Local Ministry Is Living Out Its Call to Restorative Justice | Sojourners

How One Local Ministry Is Living Out Its Call to Restorative Justice

Precious Blood Ministry of Reconciliation creates sacred space in a Chicago neighborhood.
A cross on the lawn of Precious Blood ministry in Chicago.
Photographs by Jermaine Jackson Jr.

ONCE A MONTH, 30 mothers and grandmothers gather at the Precious Blood Ministry of Reconciliation in Chicago. The women share a meal before coming together in a circle. Facing each other in their chairs, they begin to share stories of painful loss.

Sister Donna Liette, who coordinates the organization’s Family Forward Program, created this space 10 years ago for women who have lost children and grandchildren to gun violence or incarceration. Gun violence has been a devastating reality in the city for decades. In 2020 alone, the Cook County Medical Examiner reported 875 gun-related homicides. And while incarceration rates have declined in recent years, Illinois had approximately 38,000 incarcerated individuals in 2020, according to the Henry Frank Guggenheim Foundation.

Liette says she keeps in touch with around 80 women through the program, many of whom attend the monthly gathering. Judy Fields is one of them. Three of her grandchildren have been killed by gun violence in the Back of the Yards neighborhood.

“I first met Sister Donna four years ago, and we became instant friends,” Fields said. “I don’t have anybody to talk to, and she fills that void. She looks after me—she knows how to listen.”

Reimagining a core calling

JUST NORTH OF Sherman Park, the Precious Blood Ministry of Reconciliation (PBMR) is housed on the second floor of a former school building. The grounds boast a large community garden and basketball court. There are several colorful “peace poles,” each standing as an international symbol of the hope for peace.

Rev. Denny Kinderman, who is frequently accompanied by his small black dog, Francis, was ordained a priest in 1967. He is a member of the Catholic community known as the Missionaries of the Precious Blood. All Catholic religious communities are centered upon a spiritual gift known as a charism, which guides the work of each community’s ministry. For the Missionaries of the Precious Blood, that focus has long been reconciliation and restorative justice.

Kinderman, who is white, spent the first 17 years of his priestly ministry in a Black neighborhood in Cincinnati. Coming from an all-white community in Dayton, Ohio, Kinderman said he spent the early years of his ministry walking around, listening to, and learning from the neighborhood. “In the Black community, I learned spirituality,” he said.

Then came the 2000s. Kinderman said his religious order’s numbers were rapidly diminishing. Priests were dying and retiring, and fewer men were choosing to pursue the vocation. Around the country, the order could no longer take care of parishes and so returned them to the care of dioceses. Kinderman and Rev. David Kelly, who now serves as PBMR’s executive director, were called to participate in the order’s special meeting to reimagine its charism.

The two priests considered what a ministry of reconciliation would look like without a parish, due in part to the reality that parish ministry had become incredibly time-consuming. After consulting with local church leaders, they decided to relocate to the Back of the Yards neighborhood. In 2002, Kinderman, who is now the ministry’s spiritual adviser and youth counselor, and Kelly moved into a small apartment connected to St. Michael the Archangel parish. “We went around the neighborhood and introduced ourselves,” Kelly said. “From the corner store to local pastors to the schools—anyone who would be willing to talk.”

As two white outsiders in a largely Latino and Black community, Kelly said that the most important element of founding the reconciliation ministry was to not make assumptions about the needs and assets of the community. After a year of meeting with community members, Kelly and Kinderman founded the nonprofit ministry based on what the community said they needed: help dealing with gun violence, poverty, and a lack of work and educational opportunities.

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Participants in a “peace circle” in Chicago's Back of the Yards neighborhood.

Shaped by the community

THE BACK OF the Yards neighborhood is named after the Union Stock Yards, once the country’s largest stockyard for animals before advancements in transportation and distribution forced it to close in 1971. Originally home to immigrants from Slavic countries, by the 1970s institutionalized racial discrimination—manifested in redlining and white flight—shifted the racial and ethnic makeup of the neighborhood to what it is now, a largely Black and Latino community.

But years of job loss and disinvestment can be seen in the boarded-up buildings throughout the area. Between 2014 and 2018, vacant units made up 20 percent of the housing stock in the New City community area, which includes the Back of the Yards neighborhood, compared to 12.6 percent in Chicago as a whole. Like other U.S. urban hubs, Chicago lost its core of industrialized jobs when the factories shuttered. In the years since, Back of the Yards has suffered from disinvestment in public schools. A report from the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning revealed that, as of 2018, 28.3 percent of the people in New City had not finished high school.

Community members of the Back of the Yards neighborhood have also been impacted by the nation’s prison-industrialization complex, which has monetized incarceration for private prison owners and suppliers across the U.S. “Rarely are we measuring the negative impact of racism, generational poverty, inadequate schools, lack of safe spaces for play,” Kelly said. “Nobody is saying, ‘What is that doing to the youth and our families?’ And these are the forces [people in Back of the Yards] are fighting against.”

The first program Kelly and Kinderman developed was a weekly “peace circle” for young men in the neighborhood—sometimes from rival gangs—to meet in a safe space and talk. The priests also worked in the juvenile detention center, forming relationships with the young men and staying in contact with them after their release. One of the first programs offered for boys in the neighborhood was painting lessons, which have since evolved into a community art space, Art on 51st, where anyone can display their creative work.

Throughout the years, the programs have been largely shaped by the needs and ingenuity of community members in collaboration with partner organizations and PBMR staff members. Participants’ interest in music led to the creation of a recording studio. Social enterprise programs, including carpentry and screen printing, provide participants with job training and income. A high school diploma program, which is housed on the first floor of the building, was envisioned by a participant who had dropped out of high school and wanted an alternative to a GED program. And the community garden sprouted through listening to the community’s need for fresh produce—the neighborhood is among many “food deserts” in Chicago, with most residents living more than a mile from a grocery store.

Facilitating sacred space

ONE OF PBMR’s central ministries is the facilitation of the peace circles. Indigenous and First Nations communities have a long history of similar conflict resolution practices. Peace circles have been adapted to resolve disputes between community members in a nonhierarchical format, as well as to connect with others in open conversation. Restorative justice practitioner and trainer Pamela Purdie says peace circles are a “sacred space” that need to be conducted with “integrity.”

Cheryl Graves leads the Community Justice for Youth Institute, which brings restorative justice practices to youth and communities throughout Chicago. The initiative has been a partner of PBMR’s peace circle program since the beginning. “This [restorative justice] can’t be done with professionals, it needs to be done with the people impacted,” Graves said, explaining that restorative justice is a community-centric practice and not something, in her view, that can be properly practiced by courts or other institutions.

All PBMR staff members are trained in facilitating the circles, which require a meaningful object as a centerpiece and a “talking piece.” Only the person holding the talking piece can speak, creating an environment of deep listening. Participants often bring in personal objects, such as photos of loved ones, to use. The center’s carpentry program designs and sells wood talking pieces.

The two organizations also work together on a program called “Just Peace,” an initiative focused on the Back of the Yards neighborhood through which community members are trained on “going deep” with the relationship-building that restorative justice requires. The idea is to train community members in restorative justice practices so that the community can solve its own issues.

On the other side

FOUR YEARS AGO, 18-year-old Curtis Dixon encountered PBMR while playing basketball on the courts outside of the office. Since his initial visit, Dixon has become an active participant in many of the programs, including learning how to screen-print T-shirts and make flower boxes. Dixon is also a certified peace circle keeper and lives in housing the ministry provides for people in need of transitional housing . Dixon said the center brings hope to his community, which he described as dangerous due to frequent shootings and gang activity. “We don’t have productive things to do [in the neighborhood],” he said. “The center changed that. And it heals people.”

As a young Black man, Dixon described several instances of being stopped by police and racially profiled, including a recent experience when he was borrowing Kelly’s car. Kelly said the police officer “violated several codes of conduct,” handcuffing Dixon and his friend for no reason. Dixon and his friend were eventually released and not cited or charged.

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Reentry case manager Joe Joe Mapp of Precious Blood Ministry of Reconciliation.

Policing is a topic of contentious conversation in Back of the Yards. Still, PBMR was able to provide a space for dialogue between police and the community a few years ago by hosting a peace circle between members of Black Lives Matter and the Chicago Police Department. Police officers have joined peace circles with members of the community numerous times since, and participants have shared personal, vulnerable stories, including those involving police brutality.

Joe Joe Mapp, PBMR’s program manager and director of reentry for returned citizens, grew up on Chicago’s South Side. He learned of the ministry while incarcerated. Staff members wrote him letters and cultivated a relationship with him, he said. Now on the other side, Mapp spends his days accompanying men through a trauma-informed process as they navigate both the prison system and the difficult stages of reentering society.

Reentering society is not only “disorienting,” Mapp said, but filled with bureaucratic red tape for necessities such as identification cards. Returned citizens also face stigmatization during job searches and often have difficulty obtaining housing. The Metropolitan Planning Council and the Illinois Justice Project reported in 2019 that nearly 40 percent of people who have been incarcerated return to prison within three years.

In the last year alone, Mapp has accompanied at least 72 people. His work includes writing letters to men in prison, picking them up once they are released, helping them prepare for jobs, and assisting with buying clothes, bus passes, and other things they need. “We let people play the lead role in designing their success,” Mapp said. “Once you start to feel more valuable yourself, you start to value others. You start to invest in your community, you want to clean it up.” Mapp added that he and his colleagues work in partnership with a variety of community organizations such as Chicago Votes, which advocates for voting rights and provides voter registration forms to formerly incarcerated people once they are released. “We try to engage the systems that speak for, and speak with, those people who may not be heard in these spaces,” Mapp said.

Having Mapp’s expertise and presence is essential to PBMR’s ministry, Kelly said. Mapp plans to buy a home in Back of the Yards. “I think this community is full of potential,” Mapp said. “I think, given the opportunity, this community can thrive.”

No matter what

SISTER LIETTE’S OFFICE is located on the first floor of the building where Kelly and Kinderman live, just across the street from the ministry’s main building. The outer room of her office boasts a brightly colored mural designed by members of the Back of the Yards community.

Pointing to a butterfly painted on the mural, Liette told the story of Branden, a young man involved in the ministry. Branden was murdered in the neighborhood a few days after helping to paint the butterfly.

The reality of suffering and death, Liette said, ties back to the charism of her religious community of women, the Sisters of the Precious Blood. She said there will always be an opportunity for restorative justice through the blood of Jesus.

“There’s a power in the blood—there is a call to the preciousness of every human being,” Liette said. “Jesus shed his blood for all people. No matter what, you're precious.”

This appears in the August 2021 issue of Sojourners