​BEL AIR — The Harford County Community Mediation Program (HCCMP) has initiated a new restorative justice program for youth in Harford County through a partnership between the nonprofit Community Conferencing Center and the Maryland Department of Juvenile Services.

The program will offer community conferencing as an alternative for young people involved in crime and other harmful behavior. HCCMP is seeking volunteer facilitators to guide participants through the process; training will be provided.

Community conferencing empowers the community of people affected by an incident, including victims, offenders and supporters, to collectively decide how to best repair the harm and prevent future occurrences. Because all stakeholders are included in decision-making, compliance averages 95 percent and the recidivism rate for youth offenders is 60 percent lower than in the juvenile justice system statewide, according to the Community Conferencing Center.

Read full article in Cecil Whig.

Involvement in the juvenile justice system increases the odds that a young person will drop out of high school and be incarcerated as a teenager or an adult. A new video tells the story of a young woman in trouble for whom caring adults made a different decision.
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Baltimore Sun It has been years since visitors to North Gay and Washington in East Baltimore have seen anything much but blight. Boarded-up rowhouses line the streets. Weeds flourish in sidewalk cracks. But Walker Marsh looked at the Broadway East neighborhood and saw possibility. Marsh, 28, has created a flower ​farm that is an oasis

Baltimore Sun

It has been years since visitors to North Gay and Washington in East Baltimore have seen anything much but blight. Boarded-up rowhouses line the streets. Weeds flourish in sidewalk cracks.

But Walker Marsh looked at the Broadway East neighborhood and saw possibility. Marsh, 28, has created a flower farm that is an oasis of neighborhood beauty, put teenagers to work and holds out the promise of becoming an engine of economic opportunity.

“People look at a neighborhood like this and they don’t see much in the way of hope,” Marsh said while watering hundreds of plants at the half-acre site of Tha Flower Factory. “I’m hoping this shows there’s a lot that can be done with the resources we have.”