About Us
Who We Are
We are a team of trauma-responsive anti-racist and human rights activists, scholars, and practitioners with local, national, and global experience supporting truth and reconciliation processes that center Black, Brown, and Indigenous voices. We draw on best practices and lessons learned from comparative examples of restorative and transformative justice, transitional justice, Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, and Indigenous peacemaking practices. Our efforts come alongside communities and commissions to support them in seeking truth, justice, and reconciliation from historical harms, systemic racism and sexism, and entrenched cultural habits using a trauma-informed, arts-based, and healing-centered approach.
Offerings
We provide technical assistance to the process of designing, implementing and following up on truth commissions, to ensure they are compliant with human rights principles, and can effectively contribute to peace and justice in societies harmed by injustice and violent conflict.
Our areas of technical expertise include the analysis of truth commission legal mandates and other foundational documents, participatory processes of planning for truth commission operations, planning and implementation of core truth-seeking and truth-telling processes, such as research, survivor hearings, public outreach, report preparation and policy recommendations.
We provide our support in different forms: research and analysis, capacity building, peer learning, and participatory design, monitoring and evaluation.
We help design initiatives in the intersection of truth commissions, memorialization and art-based approaches, such as performance and storytelling.
We facilitate Peacemaking Circles as a way to contribute to a community healing process and honor their origins from within Indigenous communities.
Our Work
Approaches
Our key approach is the centering on victims and survivors: their rights, interests and perspectives. We aim to build truly co-creative processes at all phases of a truth commission process, honoring survivor and victim wisdom and leadership.
We ensure that essential perspectives are transversal to all our work, including trauma healing, gender justice, racial justice, and responsiveness to the cycle of life, disability status, migration status, incarceration, and LGBTQ experiences.
We build on the growing fields of knowledge and practice of transitional justice, restorative justice, and trauma healing, to effectively tackle intractable conflict and focus on transformation of societal, cultural and emotional structures.
Core Values
We enter this work through a trauma-informed lens that acknowledges the role of structural violence, systemic racism, and oppression in keeping marginalized people trapped in cycles of trauma. We also employ healing-centered approaches to truth telling. This is a liberatory framework that supports the development of agency and empowerment.
Right Relationship
Responsibility
Respect
Humility
Courage
Truth
Integrity
Justice
Unity
Who We Are
Melinda Salazar - Ph. D.
Executive Director
Dr. Salazar’s scholarship, research, and praxis are located in the intersections of gender, environment and Indigeneity, peace studies and peace education, feminist Participatory Action Research, human rights, and trauma-informed racial justice. At the heart of all her work is the intimate relationship humans share with ourselves, each other, and the more-than-natural world as expressed through cultural practices, art, story, and healing.
She is a former professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of New Hampshire. She directed the Masters in Elementary and Secondary Education Program at Western New Mexico University-Gallup Graduate Studies Center, a site for returning Peace Corps Fellows serving Diné and Zuni Pueblo Nations. She taught in K-12 rural classrooms in northeastern Vermont and southern New Hampshire.
As Co-Executive Director of the Truth Telling Project, Dr. Salazar received grants from the MacArthur Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities on behalf of the organization. MacArthur Foundation provided multi-year funding for reparations movement building and education. The NEH is funding the recovery and documentation of oral histories from the community of descendants of the 1912 racially violent Forsyth Expulsion in Georgia.
She holds an M.Ed. in Feminist Peace Studies and a Ph. D. in Natural Resources and Environmental Studies with a focus on gender, international development, and rural Indigenous communities.
Jena Kitchen, M.S.
Facilitator, Organizational Transformation
Jena Kitchen supports social impact organizations through trauma-responsive program design, development, feature writing, and strategic organizational changes that promote staff well-being and societal flourishing. As a person with a disability, she has lived experiences with structural discrimination and, combined with a keen sense of creative problem-solving, she uses these experiences to advocate for and promote others’ well-being and to create pathways for individuals and communities to thrive.
In 2023-2024, she supported the Iowa City Truth & Reconciliation Commission established by the City of Iowa City in their efforts to organize trauma-informed truth-telling events for the public. Between 2021 and 2024, she helped launch the program strategy and organizational systems for a small peacebuilding organization, including managing a team of trauma-healing leaders doing community-based reconciliation in the Horn of Africa. She has previously coordinated a participatory action research project with reconciliation practitioners and designed a trauma-responsive leadership project for leaders in Burma. She is the founder of Radiate Social Impact Consulting, LLC.
Jena has a master’s degree in conflict analysis and resolution focused on trauma-responsive leadership, an executive leadership certificate, and bachelor’s degrees in sociocultural anthropology and Latin American studies.
Eduardo Gonzalez, M.A.
Senior Advisor
Eduardo González is a leading global expert in the field of transitional justice, with twenty five years of experience supporting the design, implementation and follow up of post conflict justice instruments around the world. In the field of truth-seeking and truth-telling, he has supported, among others, the truth commissions of his native Peru, Timor Leste, Tunisia, Mali, Brazil, Canada and Greensboro, N.C.
In the areas of reparations, memory and culture, he supported the work of the National Commission on Reparations and Reconciliation in Colombia, the Secretariat for the Coordination of Reconciliation Mechanisms in Sri Lanka, and the design of the Reparations Policy and Memory Strategy for Mali. He serves as an advisor for Peru’s Site of Memory Tolerance and Social Inclusion and Timor Leste’s Chega National Center.
He has developed guidelines to ensure that truth commissions respect the rights of Indigenous Peoples, following international treaties and declarations, and he has provided direct support to indigenous design and participation in truth commissions in Maine-USA, Colombia, Australia, Sweden and Finland.
He serves as the UN Independent Expert on the situation of human rights in Mali.
Leo Hylton, M.S., Ph.D. Student
Facilitator, Restorative Justice Specialist
Leo Hylton is a PhD student at George Mason University’s Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution, currently incarcerated in Maine State Prison. His education and work are based in trauma-informed, healing-centered Restorative Justice practices, with a vision toward an abolitionist future. To that end, he is working with Think Peace Learning & Support Hub as a Restorative Justice Consultant in support of transitional justice work, toward truth telling, racial healing, and reconciliation. He has worked as a Visiting Instructor at Colby College, co-teaching AY346 – Carcerality and Abolition. He was a lead facilitator of Maine State Prison’s Restorative Practices Steering Committee, served on Colby College’s Restorative Practices Team, and provided consultation to RJ practitioners in the US and abroad. Leo is a core organizer of the Carter School Working Group on Forgiveness and Reconciliation, creating spaces of co-learning, growth, and trauma healing in the context of forgiveness and reconciliation. He is also a columnist for the The Bollard (formerly Mainer), where he writes a monthly column to raise public consciousness around the existence and power of humanity in carceral spaces.