Restorative Champaign-Urbana presents:
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
8:30am-9:30pm Central Standard Time
(with long breaks for lunch and dinner and shorter breaks throughout the day)
We have scheduled long days in an attempt to make the event accessible to people whose schedules vary widely from each other. We hope that scheduling it this way will help everyone who wants to be there to participate in as much of the event as they can.
A 4-day Restorative Circle Facilitation Practice follows this Overview (register separately)
UC-Independent Media Center (IMC)
202 South Broadway #100
Urbana, Illinois, USA
www.ucimc.org
Restorative Circles are increasingly valued for their ability to support communities of many kinds - families, schools, work teams, faith groups, neighbourhoods.... - to understand and benefit from engaging with conflict and difference.
In an interactive day of demonstration and experiential learning, Dominic Barter will present the key elements of Restorative Circles and of the development of a systemic context that supports their use. We will focus on the evolution and practice of the process, and its application to various types of conflict, ranging from family disagreements to criminal conduct. Through exploration of key concepts, grounded in a step-by-step process and illustrated by real world examples, we’ll envision ways of bringing it to our own communities.
Participants will be invited to apply the learning to their own social and personal contexts and increase their ability to see and act restoratively.
Facilitation Practice
For those eager to start bringing this transformative process to their communities and for those already doing so, this Overview will be followed by a 4-day Facilitation Practice. This 4-day event requires a separate registration (click here).
More About Restorative Circles and Dominic Barter
In the mid 1990s, Dominic Barter began conversations with favela residents in Rio de Janeiro's hillside communities, which led to the emergence of a new iteration of an ancient practice - community self-care through engagement with the dynamics underlying conflict. Spreading by word of mouth, indebted to the pioneering research of Marshall Rosenberg, and belatedly recognised as a restorative practice belonging to the social movement Restorative Justice, the practice spread and developed on a community level until attracting the attention of schools, government and, in 2004, the federal Justice Department and the United Nations Development Programe. Starting in 2005, Dominic and a cross-disciplinary team lead by local judges adapted the process - now known as Restorative Circles - into school, court, prison and social services settings as part of the first Brazilian pilot projects in Restorative Justice. These projects have won national awards for innovation in justice and in education, as well as national media attention. Since then - with the support of communities, as well as UNESCO, the Special Secretariat for Human Rights and State Secretaries for Education - Restorative Circles have spread in several states and been credited as an active contribution in the lowering rates of urban violence in Brazil.
Dominic, and those learning with him, have brought the work to over 20 countries in the last 4 years, in Africa, Europe, North and South America and Asia. In 2008 Dominic was a keynote speaker at the 11th World Conference of the International Institute for Restorative Practices. In 2010 the UK's foremost social innovation think-tank, NESTA, featured RC in their Radical Efficiency report. Dominic coordinates the Restorative Justice Project for the international Center for Nonviolent Communication.
For more information about Restorative Circles: www.restorativecircles.org
Co-creating the Financial Resources for these Events and Our Work:
We offer this event as a strategy for supporting the creation and ongoing availability of compassionate responses to conflict. As such, we are committed to making Restorative Circles as broadly available as we can. Thus there is no specific fee required in exchange for participation; we invite those who attend to do so in the spirit of collaborating to create and support these systemic responses.
These events, and our ongoing work with RC and the projects we support, involve resources that are raised exclusively by the communities served. This has been an immensely empowering way to approach money and care for the work. We'd like to extend this invitation to you. For those who wish to help cover the costs of the event, and amply fund the reach of RC to all those requesting it, we will share information on the financial costs used in developing this event, RC itself and the projects our team of four support in several countries. This will be available during the event.
We understand that this way of doing things can introduce complexities that some organizations are not set up to respond to at this time. Employers and organizations preferring to work with a set amount should contact restorativeCU@gmail.com to make arrangements.
Lodging:
Hotels / Motels
If you are coming from out of town and would like to stay in the home of a local participant, please email restorativeCU@gmail.com with the dates you plan to be in town and your accommodation needs.
If you live locally and are willing to host someone coming from out of town, please email restorativeCU@gmail.com with the number of people you are willing to host, the dates you are willing to host them, and anything you think it would be important to know about your home.
While we can make no guarantees, we will do our best to match those requesting lodging to those offering it. If we are not able to find housing for everyone, we intend to prioritize finding it for those for whom the cost of a hotel would be a barrier to participation. If this is the case for you, please let us know in your email.
Airport, Bus and Train Information:
Airports
Champaign-Urbana is within a reasonable driving range of several airports
Airport Shuttles available to Champaign from: O'Hare airport, Midway airport and Bloomington airport:
http://www.illinishuttle.com/schedule.html
http://www.lincolnlandexpress.com/
Train and Bus
Amtrak, Greyhound and Megabus travel to Champaign and stop at "Illinois Terminal", 15 minute drive from venue and hotels.
Tickets start at $1.00 (ordering well ahead of time) and go up as you get closer to event date.
Sponsors: