Presentation

ID: WICC2025-PID165 20 Feb 2025

by Co-Founder and Director DEANNE BENOS, Alyssa Benedict, Colette Payne, Elizabeth Cruz, Sandra Brown, Latoya Hughes, Willette Benford

Reclaiming the Narrative: How the Women’s Justice Pathways Model is Creating Real Justice with/for Women

WICC2025 Presentation by Deanne Benos, Alyssa Benedict, Colette Payne, Elizabeth Cruz, Sandra Brown, LaToya Hughes and Willette Benford (WICC2025-PID165)

Authors

Co-Founder and Director DEANNE BENOS

Executive Director & Co-Founder, Women's Justice Institute, USA

Benedict is a psychologist and public health practitioner with a subspecialty in the neurophysiology and ecology of trauma and resilience. The Executive Director of CORE Associates, she has 20+ years supporting system and agency level healing, growth, and transformation by promoting evidence-based and innovative approaches with women and girls, amplifying lived experience, and promoting inclusive and intersectional frameworks. Benedict has worked across the U.S. to promote gender responsive, culturally attuned and trauma-informed care, has served as an architect and core faculty for various national initiatives, and has authored and co-authored impactful publications, models, and staff training curricula, including NIC’s Supervision Agency Gender-Responsive Evaluation (SAGE), and the widely implemented trauma-informed staff communication model Creating Regulation and Resilience (CR/2™). Benedict is co-founder of the Women’s Justice Institute (WJI), a “think and do tank” building transformational justice across sectors with the goal of ending women’s mass incarceration, co-author of WJI’s groundbreaking report “Redefining the Narrative,” and co-creator of the Women’s Justice Pathways Model (WJP©) and other tools designed to support dynamic, cross-sector work. CORE and the WJI’s work continues to inform efforts to improve justice and behavioral health with women and communities, and has been featured at various state, national, and international conferences.

Alyssa Benedict

Co-founder, Women's Justice Institute, USA

Sessions

Colette Payne

Director, Reclamation Project, Women's Justice Institute, USA

Colette is an organizer, leader, student, mother, and grandmother. She is the Director of the Women’s Justice Institute (WJI) Reclamation Project, the first initiative of its kind to be led by-and-for system-impacted women. Colette worked to design and launch the Reclamation Center in the Pilsen Arts Corridor of Chicago, which serves as the Project’s home for arts and advocacy, mutual support, healing and connection, community building and leadership development among women with lived experience. She engages women impacted by the criminal legal system to become agents of change and create solutions to end women’s mass incarceration. She speaks on topics ranging from the reunification of children and mothers, reproductive justice, mental health care, the need for increased programming in prisons, and barriers to employment for people with criminal records. She also provides expert testimony before legislative committees and has received several awards for her leadership, including Claim’s JoAnn Archibald award (2013), the Jane Adams Center for Social Policy and Research Community Leadership Award (2015), Safer Foundation’s Carre Visionary Award (2018) and the Chicago Foundation for Women (CFW) 2020 Impact award for her dedication to improving the lives of women and girls in the Chicago area.