Updated at 9:13 a.m.
Connections and community are what drives Barbara Shaw-Dorso.
The Burlington resident loves to meet new people, have deep conversations, walk her dog, ride her bike, explore downtown and practice Zumba.
Shaw-Dorso, 75, is also a key face of the Burlington Community Justice Center, where she has worked for about 15 years as a mediator, talking to victims and trying to resolve conflict outside the traditional justice system.
Currently the coordinator of the conflict assistance program she created, Shaw-Dorso said she considers herself lucky to have found work that’s the perfect match for her temperament.
“My core value and an aspiration of mine has always been to be a peacemaker,” she said.
Unsure how else to define it, she said she relishes sitting with people, listening and solving conflict, which, at its core, she said, is a lack of understanding and a breakdown of communications. Bringing victims and perpetrators of harm together to hear each other out is what drives her, she told VTDigger.
When someone describes how they’ve been harmed and the perpetrator listens and apologizes, “it seems to me that you can’t help but bring people closer together,” she said. “When I understand how I’ve harmed you, I just have to become more caring and understanding.”
That’s at the heart of the alternative restorative practices at the Community Justice Center. For Shaw-Dorso, affectionately Barb to her friends and colleagues, it’s a perfect match.
The Burlington center is funded through local, state and federal money and functions under the city’s Community and Economic Development Office. It is one of 17 such centers in Vermont, first launched in the late 1990s as a partnership between the Department of Corrections and the communities that the programs served. The center aims to divert people from the traditional justice system through an array of programs, including for people accused of crimes and those who have suffered harm.
“I think the unique thing about restorative practices is that they center victims’ voices whereas the mainstream system often leaves those out entirely,” said Rachel Jolly, the director of the Burlington Community Justice Center.
Programs at the Church Street center, which employs 17 people, include serving people responsible for low-level offenses — such as leaving the scene of an accident — who are sent by police or the courts to a restorative justice program. For victims of crime, the center offers an array of services from resource referral to emotional or financial support. Programs also help Chittenden County residents address conflict among themselves and, for people facing mental health or substance abuse issues that contributed to their crimes, it rapidly connects them to services.
The concept of restorative justice, which prioritizes understanding and addressing impacts of harm and crime, and avoiding the repetition of that harm, comes from ancient practices in many indigenous cultures. It treats crime as a harmful act against the whole community rather than as an individualized event.
“If you’re engaging in restorative practices,” Shaw-Dorso said, “you’re looking for that reciprocity, the social contract, the connection.”
Besides helping to resolve conflict among neighbors — noise issues are a common one in the city — Shaw-Dorso has also started leading conflict resolution workshops so people can do it themselves. And anyone can refer themselves to the conflict resolution program, she noted.
Once an anti-war activist, Shaw-Dorso is finding other ways of resolving conflict in her corner of the world today. Over time, she said, the phrase restorative practices has evolved to mean different things to different people — from a way of life to a code word for civility.
“In my dream world, people would come together when they have a curiosity about another person. When they have some kind of conflict they want to resolve they would feel comfortable in talking to each other.”
To that end, colleagues said Shaw-Dorso never stops trying, never stops aspiring. Jolly described Shaw-Dorso as a “lifelong learner.”
“The work is more than a job for her,” Jolly said. “She considers herself a peacemaker and is very much into the relationship-based part of our work.”
Early life
Shaw-Dorso’s parents were from New Brunswick, Canada, and moved with her to Massachusetts when she was about 5 or 6. Her father got a job taking care of a beautiful estate on South Street in Needham, and they grew up in a home on the grounds.
She always had varied interests. Itching to get away from the suburbs, Shaw-Dorso headed to the University of Vermont, where she dabbled in math, religion and psychology but dropped out after two years.
“The long story short of that is that I just didn’t know where I wanted to go at that time,” she said.
She worked in retail for a bit. She started as a store clerk at Hathaway Shirts, working her way up to manager. On her 18th birthday, her friends took her out to a bar, where she met her future husband Daniel. He was a soda salesman and a reserve in the National Guard, “so we had very different lifestyles,” she recalled. But they started dating, got married in 1969 at Marble Island in Colchester, and had two children.
Daniel — who grew up in a traveling carnival — loved working with machines, had an entrepreneurial spirit and got along well with people, she said. They were friends with an immigrant man, the late Louis Lapidow, who established New York Cleaners, a dry cleaning business in Colchester. When it came up for sale in the ’70s, they bought it and ran it for some 40 years.
“I think we were good to the folks we worked with but I needed more. I wanted more,” Shaw-Dorso said.
She commuted from Colchester to the College Street Congregational Church. Her time spent at the church was an outlet, but it wasn’t enough, she recalled.
Seeking a reason
Shaw-Dorso was looking for a way to connect with the community and to do good. As business owners, she and her husband participated in Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility, a statewide nonprofit. At one of the conferences, she asked people how she could get involved in the community more. Then-mayor Peter Clavelle — they were both parents of children in the schools — suggested she try the community justice center.
It was about 2008 and the center was almost 10 years old. The youth restorative justice program and the parallel justice program for victims of crime were fledgling components when Shaw-Dorso walked through the doors.
“I said, it’s been recommended that I stop in and talk with somebody and see if this is the kind of volunteer opportunity that would suit both of us,” she said. “And it was great.”
She got some basic training and began volunteering on restorative justice panels held after referrals came from the police department. One of her mentors was Richard Kemp, the late social justice leader who served as the first African American city councilor in Burlington.
“He and I would talk about the process, what worked and what didn’t,” she said. “But we both thought that in order to inspire more of the promise of restorative practices, we needed to have more victim presence.”
They voiced that to the person who was running the panel and to the coordinator at the center, she said, and they agreed.
At the time, the AmeriCorps VISTA program was operating out of the same office, which was then near the City Market grocery co-op. VISTA was trying to establish a program for victims where staff would reach out to affected parties of alleged crimes.
Shaw-Dorso volunteered and transitioned into that role, which she worked for two years. Then she wrote a grant application to Vermont Community Foundation, which proved successful. From volunteering at the center and writing grants, her job as victim liaison became a line item on the budget in November 2011.
There was a lot of experimenting involved in those days to work out the kinks, but she found her niche and expanded into other opportunities at the small but growing organization.
“I was panel coordinator and volunteer coordinator, and some of those times everything at once, which is quite challenging but I loved it,” she said.
Jocelyn Dubuque, a former volunteer with the restorative justice panels who recruited Shaw-Dorso, said her passion and dedication stood out from day one.
“She can just be very true with people and it will feel very comfortable speaking with her because they know that she isn’t passing any kind of judgment or anything on them — which is huge in restorative justice,” she said.
As the center’s work expanded, more funding came in to support more staff. It now runs 12 programs that aim to resolve conflict — or at least keep scores of residents out of the more complex and costly traditional criminal justice system.
Sarah Trieb, who works in administration at the Burlington Police Department and has taken many calls from Shaw-Dorso over the years, described her as reliable, efficient and personable.
“I often emailed and spoke with her on a regular basis,” she said via email. “She is a very genuine person, and cares very much about people. I always hung up the phone smiling after a conversation with Barb.”
‘A beam of light’
Many in the city and in the organization credit the success of many of the justice center’s programs to Shaw-Dorso’s advocacy, skills and compassion. They cite the numerous awards she has been given over the years, but mostly they laud her interpersonal skills.
“I think she is a deep listener. When you are talking to her, often you can feel like you’re the only one in the world because she’ll just zero in and really want to hear your story,” Jolly said.
In her line of work, that can lead to hourslong conversations with people whom she just met, people who really want to share their whole story, not just recount an incident. “And she is there for that,” Jolly said.
“She knows that this work is holistic and is relationship-based and that we’re not defined by some of the worst things that we’ve done, or the worst things that have happened to us. So she will set aside whatever she’s doing to hear, to hear those full stories,” Jolly said.
Aside from her skills of listening and training in mediation, Shaw-Dorso is dedicated to spreading the work of conflict resolution and not so much her role in it. “She really does want to spread that word about conflict as an opportunity rather than something to be avoided,” Jolly said.
People who know her describe her as feisty, fearless and fun.
Jolly described Shaw-Dorso’s presence like “a beam of light” accentuated by her colorful outfits (she sported a bright rainbow-striped fleece scarf during an interview), earrings and shock of white curly hair.
Doing the work of restorative justice is hard, said Dubuque. “You have to surround yourself with white light before you go into meetings because it can be incredibly draining.”
But Shaw-Dorso goes into it ready, knowing the truth will be heard and that some level of healing will take place, Dubuque said.
When she’s not working, Shaw-Dorso has lately taken to audiobooks, she said. Maya Angelou reading her own works is a current favorite.
“And I do a little bit of needlepoint but the fingers aren’t like they used to be,” she said waving her hands.
“She’s full of energy. She does more steps in a day than many of us here,” laughed Jolly. “I think she is proud of her identity as an elder and has a lot to offer those of us who were born in different decades than her.”
Marcy Johnstone, 62, of Grand Isle, met Shaw-Dorso at a book club through church about two decades ago. They have been friends since.
Johnstone participates in a Zumba class with her once a week and said anyone in the Zumba world knows her. When they went to Orlando for an annual Zumba convention, Shaw-Dorso was pulled out of the audience and brought on stage because “she just has that aura,” Johnstone said.
“She listens fully and she just has a great personality,” she added. “I’ve brought some things to her that I’ve had issues with and you know, she’s given me solutions and I’ve used those. So the work she does for the community justice center is just so up her alley, that’s her thing.”
Finding balance
Shaw-Dorso, who enjoys walking downtown at all hours of the day, said she has never felt unsafe or fearful there. She is aware of how the community and its needs have changed over the years and believes that restorative systems are needed now more than ever.
“With so many people who are experiencing an addiction now, homelessness, mental health issues — any of those life experiences — how can you expect someone to be empathetic and compassionate when they’re just trying to survive?” she said softly.
“On the other hand, I do want to say that I have seen people in those communities show care for each other, watching out for each other, supporting each other. That’s their community,” she said. “Trying to involve them in the larger Burlington community is harder.”
The key, said Shaw-Dorso, is communication, honesty and authenticity. That journey has not come without struggle for the woman who protested the Vietnam War and wrestled with the implications of the so-called peace that emerged.
She is hesitant talking about her views of the current justice system, mindful of her job in the city and her promise of confidentiality to her clients.
She once thought of going into law or working as a paralegal. “I was looking for the absolutes and that’s where I think our traditional system still lies,” she said.
But after exploring philosophy and the social sciences, she realized nothing is absolute, especially the justice system, which she said often tries to resolve conflict like the proverbial square peg in a round hole.
She thinks a lot about where accountability fits in. One of the greatest challenges she faces is people getting stuck in their positions “where they have become intransigent in not wanting to compromise to the extent that they don’t want to make a plan to work with someone” right from the beginning.
She doesn’t have all the answers but after years of experience, what is important to her now is finding balance. “And when I say that I mean having the mindset that even though you disagree with someone, take the next step to imagine where they are and what challenges they have had in their lives,” she said.
