Turning Challenges Into Change: We Resolve Shares Community Impact Results
- Tim Dorway & Damon Drake
- Aug 3
- 4 min read
Editor’s note: We Resolve is a participatory defense hub in St Paul, Minnesota who recently celebrated the organization's growth over the last six years. Damon Drake and Tim Dorway write about their community event as they reflect on the impact We Resolve has had in their community and the continued lessons they’ve learned over the years of participatory defense organizing.
More than 100 community members gathered in Saint Paul, MN on July 16 for We Resolve’s Turning Challenges into Change event, celebrating the organization’s growing community impact through participatory defense and support for people and families navigating the criminal legal system.
The gathering brought together families, community members, partner organizations, advocates, service providers, legal-system stakeholders, and people whose lives have been directly affected by We Resolve’s work. Most importantly, the event created space for impacted families and community members to be seen, heard, and recognized as leaders in shaping better outcomes. Throughout the evening, We Resolve shared lessons, stories, and impact results from its work as Minnesota’s participatory defense hub. The central message was simple: outcomes improve when community members are organized, informed, supported, and meaningfully involved.
We Resolve illustrated this message through the image of a stool. The criminal legal system is often treated as if it rests on three primary legs: police, courts, and corrections. Yet those institutions frequently make decisions without fully understanding the people, families, histories, and communities affected by them. Community is the missing fourth leg, a leg that stabilizes and makes the stool stronger.
Families, mentors, treatment providers, housing partners, employers, faith communities, neighborhood leaders, and people with lived experience hold knowledge that the formal system cannot provide on its own. When that knowledge is welcomed and organized, it can change how a person is understood and what outcomes become possible. We Resolve helps families engage in that process through participatory defense meetings, court support, systems navigation, social biographies, resource coordination, mentorship, and community advocacy. Families gain a clearer understanding of the system, learn how to support the defense process, and help ensure that attorneys and decision-makers see more than an allegation, charge, or case file.
This work does not avoid accountability. It insists that accountability must also include dignity, context, support, and a real opportunity for change.
“Too often, families enter the criminal legal system feeling powerless, isolated, and unheard. This event demonstrated the strength that already exists within our communities. When families are given information, support, and a meaningful role in the process, they help create outcomes that are more informed, more responsive, and more connected to the realities of people’s lives. Community should never be treated as an afterthought. It must have a seat at the table.” - Damon Drake, Executive Director of We Resolve
As We Resolve approaches its sixth year, the organization has helped prevent more than 1,983 years of incarceration, eliminate approximately $10.4 million in fines and fees, and avoid an estimated $115.8 million in incarceration costs.
Those figures represent more than financial savings or reduced sentences. They represent parents remaining connected to their children, families maintaining housing and stability, people accessing treatment, and community members having the opportunity to move forward with support rather than being defined permanently by one period of their lives.
One case shared during the event demonstrated the difference community involvement can make.
A young father faced the possibility of 25 years in prison for offenses committed nearly a decade earlier, when he was still a minor. He acknowledged the harm caused and accepted responsibility. At the same time, his life had changed significantly. He had become a father, maintained employment, and built meaningful connections within his community. We Resolve connected him with skilled legal representation, attended hearings, began developing a whole-person social biography, and helped organize support from mentors, treatment providers, faith leaders, and community members.
The resulting plea agreement included no jail or prison time. Instead, he received probation, treatment, and the opportunity to remain in the community with those who love and support him. The outcome was possible because the process included a fuller understanding of who he was, how his life had changed, and what support existed around him.
The event also highlighted several lessons that have emerged through We Resolve’s work: people are more than the worst thing they have done; families possess essential knowledge; housing and stability shape legal outcomes; technical violations often reflect unmet needs; and meaningful community engagement must begin long before a case is resolved.
We Resolve expressed deep gratitude for the leadership of the National Participatory Defense Network and the directly impacted families who built and continue to lead this movement. The Network has created opportunities for hubs across the country to learn from one another while remaining rooted in the culture, strengths, and needs of their own communities. That national connection has helped We Resolve grow, strengthen its practices, and understand its local work as part of a larger movement led by families and communities refusing to remain on the margins of decisions that affect their lives.
Turning challenges into change requires more than programs or institutions. It requires organized families, shared knowledge, trusted relationships, and communities that recognize their own power.
When community has a seat at the table, better outcomes become possible.
Accountability with dignity begins with community.
View WeResolve's report below!
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