This commentary is by Marc Wennberg of Burlington, an independent consultant in restorative justice.
In May 2019, I was contracted by the Burlington Community Justice Center to facilitate the restorative inquiry into St. Joseph’s Orphanage.
For the next 2.5 years, I worked with a truly remarkable group of participants — the Voices of St. Joseph’s Orphanage — who collaboratively identified and approved a series of projects and initiatives that would serve to both acknowledge and memorialize their experiences, and seek to protect present and future Vermont children.
This restorative process and public accountability were long overdue. The former children of St. Joseph’s Orphanage have been raising their voices and sharing their stories for more than 30 years, giving repeated and often traumatizing testimony to the harms that they experienced at the “Public Welfare Institution.” It was only after the publication of a 2018 journalistic report, however, that we began to truly grapple as a community and a state with the orphanage’s enduring legacy of abuse and neglect.
In response, many public and private institutions — with a few notable and deeply disappointing exceptions — have stepped forward to first listen, and then respond to the former children’s requests.
The results from these engagements are impressive. The group successfully advocated for the passage of landmark legislation; developed and presented a training to leadership and frontline staff from the Vermont Department for Children and Families; co-created a traveling multimedia exhibition that includes their oral history excerpts, photographs and documents; and published a writers’ group anthology and produced theatrical events.
Now it’s our turn, as a collective community, to do our part.
For their final project, the Voices group has partnered with the Burlington Parks and Recreation Department to collaboratively design a memorial on the former orphanage grounds. The memorial, which will honor the more than 13,000 children who passed through the orphanage, will be integrated along a bike and walking path of the recently established Kieslich Park.
A group of community supporters has come together to raise the $160,000 needed to complete the project. The fundraising campaign is off to a promising start, receiving more than $75,000 in just three months, including a very generous donation from the Pomerleau Family Foundation; contributions from both the city of Burlington and the state of Vermont; and a growing number of local and national donors. The goal is to raise all of the funds by the end of the year.
The children of St. Joseph’s Orphanage came from all across Vermont, and the memorial project will take a statewide effort to complete the task. From a restorative justice framework, this is our collective obligation.
I hope you will join me in supporting this effort. To learn more about the Restorative Inquiry and all of the group’s projects, go to the inquiry website: https://www.stjosephsrjinquiry.com/.
