Hello,
My name is Guerds Jean and I am double majoring in Peace and Social Justice and Spanish while minoring in French.
This summer I had the privilege of interning with the Kentucky Center for Restorative Justice and I loved it!
The KCRJ is a social justice center and is the only restorative justice center in the state of Kentucky.
I did legal analysis, investigation and community outreach.
For the first two weeks of my internship I was able to help the organization with a death penalty case.
I worked on capital cases by viewing the trials and analyzing the strongest and weakest arguments of the prosecution and the defense.
I also investigated the lives of the victim as well as the defendant in order to find any information that could be found as useful for trial.
I did this through searching housing files, pats criminal records, social media pages, etc.
The hardest part for me was getting too personal with the case and that was extremely difficult when we essentially “lost” the case.
As an office, we debriefed together and had to share with one another and come to terms with this, especially with those who were newer to this like myself and the other interns.
The other hard part was knowing that there is only so much that we can do and never being able to win.
Because of this internship instilling a love of law within me I have decided to apply for the Bridge Out Support Grant for Professional conferences through the CTL and use that in order to spend Homecoming weekend learning about law school from lawyers, law students and other professionals.
I will network and also take law school tours.
I was not extremely interested in law before this internship and I am extremely happy that it took the turn that it did.
My supervisor asked me what I wanted to do instead of just handing me work and it turned out fostering a love for law within me.
While working on these cases, I was able to see the many complexities of the legal system and many of its injustices.
So now I know that I want to change the world but through law.
I plan to apply for a seven week summer fellowship at the University of Michigan where I will take courses to begin a dual degree JD and MPP program, technically International affairs and Law.
Also, I hope to use all the knowledge that I have gained from my internship to apply to the Caux Scholars Program.
This program accepts twenty students a year to study conflict resolution for a month during the summer in Caux, Switzerland.
And even better, our supervisor, Diana Queen is recommending me for this wonderful opportunity.
For the community outreach portion of my internship, we created the Community Restorative Justice-Covington, the community and restorative justice center in Covington, Kentucky and the second community and restorative justice center in all of Kentucky.
We help with the planned and execution of their first event to launch their organization.
This event was called Corner to Corner. We invited the residents of the three neighborhoods that we planned to serve and gave them the chance to voice their opinions, concerns and questions at a community forum.
I have helped to organize banquets and even weddings before but never an event where the whole entire community joins together so that was a really cool experience for me.
I was even able to translate Spanish to help the organization as well.
We invited them by community canvassing. Canvassing was literally going door to door and telling them about this event but also taking the time to allow them to tell us what needed to be changed, enforced or even created in their neighborhoods.
Like Ishwar, we too wore casual clothing and had no assigned seats
This came so much easier to me because of everything that I learned the summer after my freshman year while partaking in an EPG Summer Institute.
Within the first day of class, we completed learning inventory tests and were placed in groups with people who had learning inventories that were the most different from our own.
This allowed working with my fellow Berea College interns as well as the community leaders and members to be an enriching experience since I had all of this prior knowledge to draw from.
Our theme was having the community growing with us by solving community problems together with the community members.
In order to further emphasize this idea we gave each community member a plant to bring home as a symbol of the growth that the organization wanted to do with the community.
It was not only the organization and the community that grew but as a result of completing this internship I grew a lot as a person as well.
I also helped with a lot of the administrative and logistical parts of the organization.
I was able to add input to the the new website and add my ideas into what new direction I think the organization should move in.
In the end, the Kentucky Center for Restorative Justice changed its name to Kentucky Community and Restorative Justice.
This was because the organization wants to focus more within the realms of community outreach, family building and...community courts.
Since I was offered an internship here for next summer hopefully I can continue working on my law path by working to create the first community court of Kentucky with them.
This is right within my realm since this is a form of restorative justice, allowing victims, defendants and community members the chance to create solutions to their own community problems.
We are also working on starting an Academy for New Americans
All in all, I had an amazing time with the now, Kentucky Community and Restorative Justice and I do look forward to returning there for a future internship.
And I too have a possibility of working here after graduation.
