Volunteer with Healing Communication
Healing Communication’s in-prison program helps people living incarcerated learn a communication framework for cultivating empathy, self-awareness, and compassionate conflict-transformation, using the core principles of Nonviolent Communication (NVC).
To support the healing transformation of approximately 125 participants each year, we rely upon the hard work and dedication of volunteers trained in NVC.
Our year-long program is divided into three 16-week trimesters during which participants, inside facilitators and assistants, and program providers meet weekly on Wednesdays from 3-5 pm at the prison facility. We request a minimum one-year commitment from volunteers, who spend their first 48 weeks shadowing a Teaching Facilitator as “Circle Supporters”. We ask volunteer Circle Supporters to primarily listen and observe as they become familiar with the prison environment, the classroom community, and how facilitators teach, collaborate, model, and embody NVC. Circle Supporters may also offer empathic support to participants as needed, and potentially teach a class segment on an NVC topic of their choosing that aligns with our curriculum. Circle Supporters participate in regular team meetings and reflective spaces with teaching facilitators and the inside team. After experiencing the full 48-week curriculum, we encourage Circle Supporters to work with different teaching facilitators over time to experience multiple teaching styles and to build connection with the full team and the program.
After completing this year with the team and based on mutual alignment, readiness, and program needs, Circle Supporters may be invited to co-facilitate a class alongside inside facilitators and with assistant support. The timing and progression of this pathway vary for each individual. (Friendly reminder for clarity: this role is a volunteer/unpaid, and participation does not guarantee a future opportunity to join our team or teach our NVC program.)
Nonviolent Communication Experience
We request that applicants interested in a volunteer commitment with us have at least one year of NVC study, including experience actively practicing the principles and methods of NVC in groups and classes with other participants in real time. In addition to volunteering for at least one year, we ask that volunteers remain open and willing (if not eager!) to have ongoing reflection and conversations about various forms of privilege - including “whiteness”, marginalization and oppression, and systemic inequities. As we teach a highly traumatized population, we aim for a trauma-informed and healing-centered approach to not only our curriculum, teaching, and engagement with participants, but also between each other as a team. We encourage volunteers to explore and engage with how these dynamics and identities show up in oneself for the sake of coming to the table with a humanizing, equity-focused, and open mindset. Our work takes place within the broader context of the U.S. criminal legal system, which is shaped by racial and social disparities, and we view this awareness as essential to practicing NVC with integrity and humility.
We select volunteer candidates through a careful and thorough vetting process that includes email communication and video interviews, culminating in one or two in-person meetings.