Restorative Circle Facilitation Practice creates the conditions for focused exploration, peer support and group practice in the dynamics of Restorative Circles, with the company and support of more experienced practitioners. Led by Dominic Barter, these 4 days of intensive learning are designed to foster and deepen the craft of facilitation in Restorative Circles.

With our focus on craft work, rather than knowledge accumulation, we'll alternate between conceptual investigation and hands-on exploration, between large group discussion and small group application. Increasing our attention to process, and thus our effectiveness in achieving results, we'll unlearn some of the impediments to serving communities in conflict and facilitating transformative action.  

Facilitation Practice aims to supplement the development of our ability to create conditions for such transformative action, while recognising that the real shift in our ways of weaving just, safe community happens when we engage, directly and ongoinly, with the ways in which our communities respond to change.

A basic understanding of the RC process and its systemic pre-conditions are necessary for being able to maintain a focus on practice at this event. Participants are asked to have completed an Introduction to or Overview of RC with Dominic Barter, either in person or on-line (available soon). An Overview is offered immediately prior to this event (register for the overview here).

As a strategy for including those whose schedules don't allow them to be with us through the whole event, we are dividing the days into 3 sessions:

• 8:30am to noon
• 1:30pm to 6pm
• 7:30pm to 9:30pm (except Sunday)
  

For the fullest learning experience, we encourage everyone to participate in as many of these sessions as possible.

In addition to the meal breaks, there will be breaks during each session. 

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.