Tikkun Long Island is currently focusing its efforts on Program LIVES and the Herstory Writers Workshop. Below, please find information about what we'd like to do as we continue to grow. While Tikkun Long Island isn't yet available to offer all of the below services, through Program LIVES, Tikkun Long Island is currently offering mentoring and career counseling. Additionally, Tikkun Long Island is also planning to do another Healing Week. Stay tuned to this page as we will continue to provide updates and start dates for the below programs which are currently in the planning stages.
We treat people according to their potential,
not their mistakes.
Tikkun is proud to offer both victims and perpetrators of harm
a variety of programs, events, and services.
We stop the harm, and begin the healing.
Our programming implements a three-pronged approach to criminal justice: Prevention, Intervention, and Healing.
PREVENTION
INTERVENTION
HEALING
WHAT WE DO
PREVENTION
What We Do:
INTERVENTION
Mentoring
It is common for people who have had contact with the legal or disciplinary system to want or need mentorship. They often need a person with whom to perform meaningful tasks and activities, whether it be attending a ball game, doing communitiy service, or just doing homework.
The goal of Tikkun Long Island in these cases is to be able to facilitate and monitor a high-quality mentor-mentee relationship that actively contributes to the individual meeting his or her life goals. At a bare minimum, these relationships should serve as a good alternative to harmful or risky relationships the affected individual might have with certain peers. Such relationships, when cultivated and supported with the right resources, can be a powerful factor in reducing redicivism. Tikkun Long Island's mentors are professionally trained by The Mentoring Partnership of Long Island, a 501(c)3 non-profit that helps other non-profits design effectivementorship programs.
What We Do:
Career Counseling
In the overwhelming majority of cases, individuals who have come into contact with criminal or disciplinary systems have substantial career goals. Whether they need help getting into school, completing a GED program, or finding a job, Tikkun Long Island is ready to assist them in reaching these goals.
Sometimes this will mean providing mentees with a job counselor, a tutor, or a specialized type of mentor.
Referral Services
Unfortunately we are not able to provide each and every individual with everything that might help aid their recovery process or help reach their goals. We do not provide drug rehabilitation or professional psychological services, for example.
Tikkun's professionally trained case workers, however, can make high-quality referrals to other service-providers across Long Island. Our case workers will use what they learn about Tikkun clients -- information like type of offense, family and friend relationships, health status, education, and work experience -- to make the best recommendations possible.
HEALING
What We Do:
Victim-Offender Mediation
In the wake of harm, it is natural for a victim of a crime to feel emotions like anger, hatred, and regret. These feelings, while natural and predictable, are not unavoidable, and can cause long-lasting pain and suffering for a victim and his/her loved ones. Crime and related types of harm have ripple effects throughout the community, affecting individuals who are separated by three, four, or more degrees of separation from the original crime. Often crime leads to further crime, harm leads to more harm, and pain begets more pain.
Tikkun Long Island strives to break this cycle of crime, anger, and pain by providing safe opportunities for victims to reconcile with those who have caused harm. While forgiveness is not strictly necessary, it can and often does relieve both victims and offenders of significant burdens. Victim-offender mediation can take a variety of different forms, depending on the situation and the wishes of both victims and offenders.
Whether it is a child visiting his or her parent in prison for the first time, a victim of crime forgiving an offender, or a group session where victims can share their experiences with young people who have caused harm, victim-offender mediation is a service that Tikkun strives to facilitate wherever possible.
Healing Week
Once per year, The Tikkun Community gets together to tell stories, learn about restorative justice, and celebrate healing wherever it has occurred. People from all walks of life -- law students, high school teachers, ex-convicts, leading academics, victims of crime, authors, documentary film-makers, and ordinary people like you -- convene at Touro Law School for an unforgettable weekend.
Click here to learn more about Healing Week, watch related videos, or attend an event. We hope to see you there!
In-School Programming
Tikkun Long Island is committed to preventing crime and delinquency among young people before it happens.
That is why we plan to use the proven methods of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)—or "thinking about thinking"—in Long Island schools. Dr. Rob Goldman has already piloted a CBT curriculum in a small number of schools, which he plans to further refine and scale up across Long Island schools.
To see what a difference CBT can make in preventing crime and delinquency, check out this study (one of many): How Thinking About Thinking Reduced Crime in Chicago.
Tutoring
An effective tutor can be the difference between a marginal student who drops out of high school or commits a crime, and a student who successfully graduates and finds meaningful employment. That is why Tikkun Long Island will connect students who have been suspended or expelled with high-quality tutoring services, rather than condemning them to idleness or leaving them to their own devices.
High-quality tutoring is part of our commitment to helping schools move away from an adversarial model of suspensions and expulsions, and towards a more constructive model, which respects every student as a high-potential learner and human being.
A note about evidence:
We are committed to using a rigorous, evidence-based approache to everything we do. If we are using a certain strategy or tactic, we want it to be because there is good evidence that it actually works, not because we find it aesthetically pleasing.
For that reason, we are taking three steps to ensure an evidence-based approach to everything we odo.
First, we are writing a white paper laying out the empirical basis for all of our programming. While everything on this page does have some rigorous empirical support, it will take some time to summarize the literature and connect it to what we do.
Second, we are committed to rigorously monitoring & evalutating all of our programming. It is not enough to rely on evidence from similar types of programming; every program, context, and individual is unique.
Third, we are committing ourselves to publically sharing the results of our monitoring and evaluation -- whether positive or negative -- in all of our annual reports. The first of our annual reports is expected to be released on year after we receive 501(c)3 tax-exempt status, which is still pending.