About the  COMMONWEALTH JUSTICE COALITION

The Commonwealth Justice Coalition redefines public safety in the Commonwealth of Virginia puts it into practice. We reimagine public safety in the Commonwealth as a community-centered public safety ecosystem. 

 

Sam Heath, Jean Knorr, and Susan Perry met in the summer of 2023 and heard from countless nonprofits that justice work in the Charlottesville area was rich and thriving yet needed a collaborative container for all the overlapping needs, events, and advocacy opportunities. 

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Charlottesville is a ten-square-mile city of 50,000 people, closely connected to surrounding counties and Richmond. Within its limits are more than 700 nonprofits—many focused on justice-related issues such as healthcare, housing, education, and the criminal legal system. Each year, hundreds of homeless residents and more than 300 people returning from incarceration come to our community. Gun violence remains high, and countless spaces like Charlottesville City Schools can engage even more in restorative practices rather than punitive responses like suspension and expulsion.

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Charlottesville faces a serious justice challenge. Nonprofits and city services are often scattered and siloed. Many spend most of their energy simply sustaining their budgets rather than advancing systemic change.​ The justice landscape has shifted. Federal funding cuts have weakened many local groups, while the field remains crowded with nonprofits competing for limited resources. 

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Public safety is still too often defined by punishment—police, prisons, and control. In Charlottesville and the Commonwealth as a whole, this punitive frame dominates, reinforcing rather than breaking the cycle of harm and violence.

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Our response was to help build community—the deepen relationships. 

 

We gather justice leaders and organizations for twice-monthly virtual meetings as well as host large in-person summits on issues such as: 

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• Youth incarceration 

• Gun violence 

• Reentry services

• Recovery housing, and

• Women and incarceration

 

For several years we’ve helped lead reflective jail tours in order to give people proximity to our jail and learn about restorative justice.

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We teamed up with the UVA Center for Community Partnerships to build out a needs assessment looking at the state of reentry in Charlottesville and joined with The Fountain Fund and the Tom Tom Foundation to create a Reentry Summit Report, with dozens of suggestions from the community on how to address services for citizens returning home from jail and prison. 

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Today, the Commonwealth Justice Coalition is a fiscally-sponsored project of Social and Environmental Entrepreneurs, a registered 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. We are also a project of UVA Law’s Community Organization and Social Enterprise Clinic. We participate in the Virginia Community Violence Coalition and the Virginia Restorative Justice Policy Coalition.