Danielle Sered, MA, MFA

Danielle Sered has spent her professional career working on innovative strategies to address youth violence through conflict resolution and arts education.  She has developed Common Justice with the support of the Vera Institute of Justice after several years of working with court-involved youth.  

Learn More about Common Justice www.vera.org/project/common-justice

Prior to starting Common Justice, Danielle designed and launched ArtsReach.  Using education through the arts in inner-city Atlanta schools and juvenile detention centers, ArtsReach taught conflict resolution, prejudice reduction and provided information about HIV/AIDS.  

She has additional experience with youth justice issues through her time supervising the Youth Justice Project at the Harlem Community Justice Center (a project of the Center for Court Innovation) where she directed the youth court.  During this time she also designed and supervised creative writing workshops for juvenile jails and prisons for the PEN American Center.

Most recently, Danielle served as Interim Director of Community Services at the Adolescent Re-entry Initiative at the Vera Institute.  Working with young men returning to the community from Rikers Island jail, she designed and refined work, literacy and case management services for the youth.

Danielle brings personal experience of economic disparity, violence and loss to her work and alongside it a recognition of her extreme privilege as a white person with access to education, and the support of caring adults in her life.  

Of the types of cases Common Justice hears, Danielle has been both victim and offender of each and has seen both traditional court-based approaches and more innovative community-based responses to crime. After experiencing firsthand how poorly the system meets the needs of those harmed by crime, Danielle developed a serious commitment to building alternative processes.  Whether it traces to the first time she saw someone killed or to the first time someone she loved was incarcerated or the first time she saw conflict resolved with dignity, the roots of her commitment may be in loss, but that commitment grows above ground in the work she does now— and in hope.