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.