2011 & 2012 Peacemaker Awards

2012 | 2011

2012 San Francisco Peacemaker Awards

Honoring Raymond Shonholtz, Founder, Community Boards, 1943-2012

The Raymond Shonholtz Visionary Peacemaker Award: Leslie Simon

For an outstanding individual who has made significant contributions to community building, peacemaking and antiviolence work in her/his community.

Leslie Simon created and has coordinated Project SURVIVE, the City College of San Francisco’s sexual violence prevention program, since 1994. Along with several community-based organizations and a strong group of students, she helped create Expect Respect SF (ERSF) in 2006, which brings youth-friendly healthy relationship and dating violence prevention presentations to all San Francisco public high schools.

The Gail Sadalla Rising Peacemaker Award: Fatima Albowyha

Honors a youth 12–24 years old who is making a difference in her/his school or community, setting an example for other youth in community building, peacemaking and violence prevention. Named for Gail Sadalla and her pioneering work developing Community Boards’ peer mediation program, training materials, and classroom curricula.

Fatima Albowyha is a member of Abraham Lincoln High School’s peer mediation program, who has facilitated mediations with dozens of students and leads her peers in developing a safer, more understanding school culture. She prides herself on helping other youth by listening to their concerns and helping them develop solutions to their conflicts. Fatima believes that it is better when peers help each other resolve conflict, rather than depending on faculty, because youth mediators can relate better to the students than adults. She strongly believes that peer mediation makes students feel less concerned about bias.

Community Boards Leadership Peacemaker Award: Kids’ Turn

Honors an organization that has an established, significant and meaningful track record in community building, peace making and violence prevention.

Kids’ Turn is the sole provider of Bay Area programs designed to help ease children through the debilitating effects caused by parental separation or divorce. Since it was founded in 1988 by Claire Barnes (pictured), the commitment to its mission—to reduce conflict in reorganizing families—has been unwavering. Parental separation occurs in epidemic proportions in our country. Fifty percent of all children in the United States experience this phenomenon before they reach the age of eighteen, and that statistic is significantly increased when the increasing numbers of never-married or never-lived-together parents are included.

Community Boards Award for Excellence in ADR Practices: OCC Mediation Program

Honors a program, organization, or individual whose innovative work is introducing and establishing new standards for best practices in ADR (alternative dispute resolution).

The San Francisco Office of Citizen Complaints (OCC) Mediation Program was established in 1995. The mediation program enables complainants to resolve their issues with the implicated officer in a face-to-face dispute resolution process involving a trained mediator. The goal of the program is to bring together the involved parties in an effort to achieve mutual understanding. The OCC Mediation Program provides a safe environment in which citizens and members of the San Francisco Police Department are able to tell their story, be heard, and create mutual understanding regarding the incident that resulted in a complaint being filed. Donna Salazar (pictured)

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Click here to view the 2nd Annual SF Peacemaker Awards program booklet.

2011 San Francisco Peacemaker Awards

Raymond Shonholtz Visionary Peacemaker Award
Sharen Hewitt is the founder and executive director of the Community Leadership Academy and Emergency Response (CLAER) Project, San Francisco’s leading organization providing immediate crisis stabilization for victims of violence. With over 20 years of advocacy experience, Sharen is bringing heightened attention to San Francisco’s burgeoning homicide rate and the impact it has on San Francisco’s families. The CLAER Project operates by the motto: “We help neighbors change their neighborhoods for the better.”

Community Boards Leadership Peacemaker Award
Community Works West has as its mission the engagement youth and adults in arts, education and restorative justice programming, which interrupts and heals the far-reaching impact of incarceration and violence by empowering individuals, families and communities. By supporting communities most affected by mass incarceration, Community Works West aims to keep people out of the criminal and juvenile justice system and provide viable alternatives and resources for them to move forward with their lives.

Gail Sadalla Rising Peacemaker Award
Yessenia Pozo, a fourteen-year-old student who volunteers for the Weekend and Daily Meals Programs at GLIDE Church, tutoring students, participating in the senior visitation program, and assisting with developing childcare activities to support families in need. When she was asked what community building means to her, Yessenia said “It’s a lot of people working and not thinking about themselves, but what other people need.”