Tonight will represent the culmination of months of work by at least twenty to as many as forty different people in our community. It should be an amazing show, featuring Judge David Gottlieb presenting as the keynote speaker at the Vanguard‘s Third Annual Dinner and Awards ceremony. Judge Gottlieb, a 2005 appointee to the bench by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, is currently the presiding judge of the Juvenile Delinquency Court for Fresno County.
He has been involved with innovative programs at the Juvenile Court, including FBHC (Family Behavioral Health Court) which provides specialized collaborative service for delinquent juveniles, CJC (Community Justice Conference), a unique predisposition restorative justice program, and he actively participates in the Juvenile Justice Commission and Fresno County Interagency.
Fresno County has been ahead of the curve, with a Victim Offender Reconciliation Program that was founded in 1982, the first in California, and the Community Justice Conference, which has been duplicated around California.
We will also feature Assemblymember Tom Ammiano and San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi. The dinner, catered by Ciocolat, is worth the price of admission ($50) by itself. There will be tickets available at the door and you’ll be able to purchase them via credit card, check or even cash. You don’t have to wait, you can purchase them, up until the time the doors open at 5 pm tonight, at our site.
But this column is not about our dinner tonight. It may be that you, like many, are taking advantage of the three-day weekend to get out of town. It may be that you have no interest in restorative justice or disagree with the speakers.
This is about what the Vanguard has become to the Davis community. Right now we are using a four-year-old website that is being held together by silly string, putty and a lot of luck. On January 2, 2014, or thereabouts, we plan to feature a brand new, state of the art, fast and effective modern site that deals with all of the little things that have bothered you for the last four years with this site, and all of the things that have cropped up because we are running very old software.
So, if you either can’t or do not wish to make it tonight, consider donating to the Davis Vanguard because you believe you get the best and most in-depth local news coverage in Davis here. Because the Davis Vanguard offers this community a free and open forum. Because you cannot picture this community anymore without the Davis Vanguard. You can donate via our secure site or you can donate via PayPal (account: info(at)davisvanguard(dot)org).
On July 30, 2006, I took one small step in creating a free blog using free blogger software. I did so for very specific reasons that have long since been rendered irrelevant by history. But I also did so for reasons that stay with us today – I wanted to create a news source that covered the stories that other papers and news entities were not covering, to be able to analyze stories from different perspectives and in greater detail, and to foster community discussion – all in the furtherance of exposing the dark underbelly of what purported to be a progressive community.
I did so with no background in journalism whatsoever. So it was a learning process. One of the biggest lessons I have learned is that you cannot tell people what to think. It sounds simple, but people are intelligent and will reach their own conclusions and so, while I started out with a hybrid of news and commentary in the same articles, over the years I have tried to separate news from opinion.
Have I achieved perfection in these efforts? By no means. But read early articles and compare them to recent articles.
Even within my opinions I have moved away from definitively taking a stand, toward asking questions and attempting to foster community dialogue.
The Vanguard has grown much in terms of mission, professionalism and readership since those early days in 2006 when I was happy if we got 100 readers in a day. This year, more than 1 million people have read the Vanguard.
This is no longer a small, one-person community blog.
While I remain the executive director and have the responsibility of day-to-day reporting, soliciting guest pieces, raising money, and managing dozens of interns and volunteers, this has become a much broader community-based organization.
That will be on display tonight. Tonight’s event will be about the promise of restorative justice helping to create what Martin Luther King, Jr., would call the “beloved community.” As Dr. King said following the Montgomery Boycott, “The end is reconciliation, the end is redemption, the end is the creation of the beloved community.”
“What I want to stress here is that Dr. King never said that there would be no harm done within this beloved community,” Sujatha Baliga would say at the MLK Event this past January. “Indeed without wrongdoing we’d have no need for reconciliation or redemption. Rather, he expected that these matters would be resolved through peaceful methods of conflict resolution – and even the opportunity for reconciliation in the wake of unthinkable harms.”
“Restorative justice, I think, offers that opportunity,” she said.
Restorative justice offers our community a way to fix both its own interactions and the judicial system as a whole. It is not a panacea and it will not prevent harm from being done.
But while tonight will be about restorative justice, it will also be about something even bigger than that, at least on a personal level. It will be a culmination of six months and, indeed, seven years of hard work to transform the Vanguard into a vital community-based organization, and it will be the start of the next chapter, wherever it might take us.
It may sound trite, but I need everyone’s help to get to the next stage. So if you can make it tonight and celebrate with us, that is great. If you can’t, I want you to help us out as you can and send a contribution today so that on January 2, 2014, we will be ready with a brand new webpage, to usher in the next chapter of the Davis Vanguard and the Davis community.
For more information click here
Or click here to purchase tickets:
—David M. Greenwald reporting
All my family can spare right now is the $100. we sent. If we had more, believe me, it would go to you and your family.
Thank you for giving us in-depth news stories. Thank you for giving us food for thought. Thank you for trying your best to report events from all sides of any issue.
And, thank you forever for your Court Watch. God bless you, David.
My thanks to David, Cecelia, Highbeam, Robb, the interns and all others whose hard work made last night’s wonderful event possible.
It presents hope that with enough people engaged, substantial improvement can be made in turning away from our highly inequitable and punishment based judicial and incarceration systems to processes that protect the community while allowing individuals to rebuild their lives with hope for reintegration into the community.
I am disappointed my wife and I missed the dinner, but I bought my tickets anyway! And I consider myself fortunate to be a guest columnist on the Vanguard and thank David and the editorial staff for allowing me and the City to work as partners in getting information out to the broader Davis community. I look forward to the new website and the growing engagement of Davis residents through platforms like the Vanguard. Thank you again to all those involved in the process, and especially to David, Cecilia, and the staff at the Vanguard.