Rebecca Thomforde

Rebecca Thomforde leads our Intimate Partner Safety and Justice work at Community Justice Solutions. CJS is a national venture of the Center for Justice Innovation dedicated to helping communities and jurisdictions adopt the next generation of justice policy and practice. We have been pioneering new responses to intimate partner violence in courts and communities for more than 25 years. In collaboration with a dynamic team of advocates, attorneys, social workers, practitioners and subject matter experts, the work Rebecca leads now focuses on helping jurisdictions pinpoint intimate partner violence’s myriad intersections: with gun violence, with access to housing and behavioral health treatment, and with the legal system.

Working from a perspective of social justice and grounded in collaboration, Rebecca has trained court and community partners on a variety of topics including: procedural justice, values-based community engagement, evidence-based best practices, abusive partner intervention programming, IPV risk assessment, and coordinated community responses

Rebecca has developed curricula for people who cause harm through IPV in the criminal and civil contexts and supported programming locally and nationally. For five years, she was the Domestic Violence Accountability Coordinator for the state of Vermont, overseeing the certification process of domestic violence accountability programs.

Before coming to the Center, Rebecca was a Victim Witness Advocate at the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office in Boston. While in Boston, she also worked at Safe Havens: The Interfaith Partnership Against Domestic Violence, creating curricula and coordinating a year-long domestic and sexual violence education program for clergy and laity from Christian, Jewish, and Muslim congregations.

Rebecca is a graduate of Earlham College and Boston University where she studied theology and received a Fulbright Scholarship.