Board
DRJ is always looking to build our community —this includes growing our Board of Directors. We have many volunteer roles and positions available. If you are interested in learning more about our Board, or of becoming a Community Volunteer, or interested in other ways of getting involved, please contact us.
Our Board of Directors meets every third Tuesday of the month. At our annual meeting we elect officers, receive reports on the activities of the board, and determine the direction of the board for the coming year. We have between five and eleven directors at any given time. Our officers consist of two co-chairs and a treasurer.
Please email ALL@DowneastRestoraticeJustice.org with any questions, or for a copy of our bylaws, handbook or annual reports.
Employees
Kayla Gagnon
Restorative Youth and Community Coordinator.
Kayla is a tender of relationships who has heeded to the call of her ancestors to bridge our modern divides & bring us back to circling together in community. Values such as decolonization & abolitionism inform much of her work.
She has spent much time in her life working as an advocate for the Earth, Indigenous Rights here on Turtle Island, Survivors of gender/sexual based violence, and Spanish speaking communities across Mexico & the United States. She graduated from College of the Atlantic with a Bachelors in Human Ecology where her senior thesis work focused on femicide & sexual based violence in Mexico & the U.S. Trauma Informed Care & Consent Education have been a major focus of her work in prevention of community and interpersonal violence.
In her time not spent working with DRJ, she works as a elderly caretaker/death doula, and land tender. Kayla also takes great pride in being an Auntie to many young ones in her life. While she has a background in Somatic Therapy, her dog, Rose, is her greatest teacher & ally in keeping her grounded in the importance of play and movement.
Nina Milliken
Reentry Program Coordinator
Nina is an advocate, educator, community builder, and legislator whose work is grounded in the belief that every person deserves dignity, compassion, and the opportunity to build a meaningful life.
Nina strives to spend a day each week in a prison or jail setting, building relationships with incarcerated people and learning about their lives prior to incarceration, their experiences inside, and their hopes and dreams for the future. She works to make their time inside as comfortable and humane as possible while supporting them in leaving stronger than when they arrived. Nina believes that when we incarcerate people, we have an obligation not only to them, but also to the communities they will return to, to provide the support, resources, and human connection necessary for successful reintegration.
As a person in long-term recovery from substance use disorders, Nina is deeply committed to supporting people navigating addiction and the trauma that often underlies it. She is an active advocate for restoring parole in Maine and creating safe, meaningful pathways home for people leaving incarceration.
Nina has spent much of her life in community with Spanish-speaking people and is bilingual. She holds a BA in Latin American and Latino Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz. After college, she settled year-round on the Blue Hill Peninsula and worked for Downeast Sexual Assault Services. She later spent years cooking in restaurants, taught high school, and continued building a life rooted in service, connection, and community.
Elected to the Maine Legislature in 2022, Nina serves on the Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee, where she focuses on prison policy, reentry, and public safety. She is currently pursuing a master’s degree.
Nina lives in Blue Hill with her three young children, Great Dane, and 2 cats. Outside of work, she loves feeding people, building community, hiking, boating, sailing, and helping create a world where everyone has the opportunity to come home, heal, and thrive.
Leslie Ross
Program and Case Coordinator.
Leslie inherited from her familial elders strong visions of the possibility of a just world and just communities of inclusion, compassion and dialogue. Familial elders –generations of migrants and immigrants– who even through displacements held fast with connecting to earth, people and place no matter where they were. In migrant footsteps of their own, from Turkey to France to Quebec, Leslie moved to New York City, lived, worked, played and connected there for 30 years before moving to Downeast Maine in 2014. Deeply engaged in both community gardens and collaborative experimental art communities in NYC, she is now as engaged in the restorative and transformative work and communities here.
Leslie sees her current restorative work as the natural development and continuous journey from past community and collaborative art, music and performance work, all under a collective essence of some sort, but most importantly as the syntheses of her political and spiritual being. Abolitionist at heart, she believes in the healing potential that can arise when we are given the opportunity to see each other whole –this despite the impossible and unbearable task we may also have of navigating the very real dismissive, stigmatizing and dehumanizing aspects of the cultures and systems we live within. She is looking towards a time when it is common practice that response to harm is held by the affected communities themselves.
Leslie continues to play, compose and collaborate whenever possible, sea swims as weather allows, gardens and cooks, spins and knits. With her partner, they run and host community gatherings, residencies and events in an old canning factory that is the home they share along with books, sheep, cats, chickens and canaries.
Directors
John Paul LaLonde
Karen Roper
A small business owner in Southwest Harbor, Karen has been involved with Restorative Justice since 2014 and served as a mentor, circle facilitator & board member over the years. Her hope is through restorative circles & practicing restorative language broadly, community members can understand how their actions impact those around them & use those skills when misunderstandings occur.
Tara Young
Drug Free Communities Program Coordinator for Healthy Acadia. Youth substance use can often result in school suspension or expulsion, and restorative practices can give teachers and principals the opportunity to explore the root causes of students’ negative behaviors and provide the services or supports they need to address the root causes of behaviors, rather than continually responding to symptoms.