“We don’t need to be lawyers, prosecutors, judges or social workers here,” he said. “We just need to be humans and talk about our experience, to change the world and make peace.”

Maia helped organize the group of 54, the largest of any one nationality to attend SPI at one time. It included people who are judges, RJ promoters, officials of the judiciary, lawyers, university professors and municipal guards. Dozens more were on a waiting list.

Most participants this year took courses on Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience (STAR) I and victim-offender conferencing.

The SPI courses, Maia said, provided tools that will broaden how RJ is used in Brazil, where current guidelines proposed by the national council of judges focus on the use of circle processes.

“Here at 91����Ƶ, we are learning that RJ is not what the law says, but what the community and people feel about the justice,” he said. “It has given me a new lens, and prepared me and other people in the group to talk more about restorative justice, and be ready in our spirits to go back to Brazil and talk about how these theories and practices are important to the community and not only to judges, prosecutors and lawyers.”

Trauma-informed justice

RJ, which is grounded in repairing the harm of crime in processes that engage individuals and other community members, is well served by trauma training, said second-time SPI participant Mayara Carvalho. She has practiced RJ in the Brazil juvenile justice system, schools and university settings, and she earned her PhD researching restorative practices in communities. She is also laying the groundwork for an RJ center.

Carvalho incorporated STAR training she received at last year’s SPI into her work with a young boy in Brazil who had been convicted of murder and drug dealing, but who had also suffered poor health and bullying.

“When I put trauma and resilience together on the table, we could see him as a person,” she said – and “he started to think about himself as a person, not as a victim or as an offender.”

In addition to her book Justiça Restaurativa na Comunidade, about using RJ in communities, Carvalho has written a guide titled “Programa NÓS – Belo Horizonte” for using restorative practices in schools. Brazilian schools, she said, are often “a kind of door to criminalization” because of how they respond to students with problematic behavior.

“We’re trying to develop nonviolent communication, restorative practices and circle processes inside schools,” she said, “to work on conflicts in a better way.”

Changing the conversation

The SPI experience has shaped the Brazilian conversation about RJ, said Maia, and prompted the group to think about “what we’re doing in Brazil and what needs to be changed to do better, to expand this restorative understanding, and then to [bring] this powerful tool to the community for transformation.”

It’s not only about law, he said: It’s also about a social theory of justice.

“In Brazil we just see what the law says, and apply this in cases,” he said. “Now, we are starting to think, ‘Is this justice, to resolve the case only by law? Or justice is to give people the chance to heal their trauma?’”

Tentative plans are for another group of 25-50 to attend SPI next year, with the current group returning the following year to take STAR II and an RJ course that has a dual focus of RJ in education and RJ in the legal system, Goldberg said.

Drawn to peacebuilding work since she was a child, Tovar will help connect alumni around the world. She’ll also help current students and faculty connect with alumni.

Like most CJP students, she brings a host of experiences to her academic work, her peacebuilding practice and her current position.

Shaped by violence

Her father, “a very big motivator of my work,” was kidnapped twice by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. After the second kidnapping, he moved with his family to Romania for security reasons, where he was a diplomat in Bucharest. Tovar, then 13, and her three younger brothers attended a French school.

Her family returned to Colombia around her 18th birthday, and she enrolled at Pontificia Javeriana University to study political science, conflict analysis and resolution, and research for peace.

There, a class on consensus building proved to be pivotal, as well as reading CJP co-founder John Paul Lederach’s The Moral Imagination. This sparked what would be her later research interest in the intersections between transitional and restorative justice, and eventually led to her studies at CJP.

A circle-keeper with Chicago youth

A second life-changing event, she says, was an internship with , a nonprofit working on civic engagement and community-strengthening. Through , she was introduced to a number of restorative justice practitioners, and trained to be a facilitator of circle processes.

After the summer, Tovar returned to Bogota where she served as project coordinator for a transitional justice project based at Pontificia Javeriana University in collaboration with George Mason University. Colombia’s Victims and Restitution Law of 2011 had just been passed, which “was the first time the government was acknowledging the victims” of decades of internal armed conflict, explains Tovar.

Tovar’s project involved listening to victims who had resettled in Soacha about how their wounds and losses could be redressed. Soacha “is a microcosm of Colombia,” she says, where the country’s refugees – peasant farmers, indigenous people, Afro-Colombians and ex-combatants alike – live in tight quarters.

“That was the first time I really understood that victims and perpetrators had to live together,” says Tovar.

When that project ended, Tovar returned to Illinois, where she interned with the Cook County Juvenile Detention Department. She was moved by her experiences with the Chicago gang youth.

“There I understood … this dichotomy between victims and offenders was something really damaging.” While accountability is necessary, explains Tovar, she saw each offender as both a victim and perpetrator.

Narrowing her focus

In Chicago, Tovar attended a lecture by Professor on the intersection of transitional and restorative justice, the topic of her then-in progress thesis.

After graduation from Pontificia Javeriana University, Tovar assisted with several projects, among them a two-month joint project with the Victim’s Unit, in which providers analyzed the collective reparation needs of a community affected by war. Tovar contributed to the self-care component among those who had direct contact with victims. She was then was hired by UNICEF as a consultant, a job which appeared at the right time among personal upheaval, but which eventually led her to graduate school.

“Deep, deep in my heart, I knew that I only wanted to study peacebuilding,” she says.

At CJP, Tovar is pleased to be among “amazing and incredible people who go back to their communities and do amazing work,” she says. “When we come here, we have a shared value, and it’s wholeness, the interconnectedness that makes us responsible to our local and global neighbors.”

“I really expected to kind of be laughed at,” recalls Zehr, who was director of Mennonite Central Committee’s Office of Crime and Justice and working as a freelance photographer at the time (he joined the 91����Ƶ faculty in 1996).

Changing Lenses received little press or attention from reviewers after its publication in 1990; instead, Zehr says, it “became a word-of-mouth book” that passed from person to person. Along the way, and in great contrast to his early expectations, the book – a fourth edition was released in 2015 – became a seminal work in the restorative justice field.

To mark the 25th anniversary of Changing Lenses’ publication, the journal Restorative Justice: An International Journal released a special issue online and in print in December 2015. It included essays from five scholars and practitioners, who wrote about the book’s influence on their lives and professional environments.

“[Changing Lenses] has been a major stimulus to, and has had a profound influence upon, restorative justice as a field of study and practice,” wrote Gerry Johnstone, a professor of law at the University of Hull in England and the book review editor for Restorative Justice, in his introduction. “In publishing the symposium we hope to stimulate readers – especially those new to the field – to read (or reread) this classic text and engage with its ideas and arguments.”

In one of the essays, Kay Pranis, a Minnesota-based restorative justice practitioner and regular instructor at CJP, reflected on Changing Lenses’ ongoing significance to her field.

“In the U.S. restorative justice is a movement without a center. There is no central organizing authority to promote restorative justice, to establish standards, to define practice or to marshal resources,” she wrote. “It is a very decentralized movement. In spite of that I find it to be a remarkably coherent movement. In a movement without a national center, Changing Lenses has been a primary centering force.”

Zehr also contributed a reflection to the special issue of Restorative Justice, writing that he was “deeply honored, of course, by the attention to the book in this issue, and the kind things the authors have to say.”

In addition to Pranis, the following scholars also contributed essays to the issue:

• Jacques Faget, University of Bordeaux, France;
• Christopher Marshall, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand;
• Brenda Morrison, Simon Fraser University, Canada;
• Thomas Trenczek, Ernst Abbe University of Applied Sciences Jena, Germany;

Looking back, Zehr believes that the book’s accessible, non-academic language and broad spiritual appeal were important pieces of its success. In conversations with readers over the years, and as he watched others apply restorative justice principles in schools and in other innovative ways, Zehr also came to realize that the values that Changing Lenses specifically envisioned for a criminal justice system have far broader application. Accordingly, some years ago, he published on his blog a list of “.”

One of the entries on that list cautions against “imposing our ‘truths’ and views on other people and situations” – a theme to which Zehr returned at the end of his essay just published in the special edition of Restorative Justice:

“To those of us who advocate restorative justice: at least in our own lives and messages … May we propose, not impose. May we listen as much or more than we speak.”

Read about Professor Howard Zehr’s retirement “roast,” which celebrated the 25th anniversary of Changing Lenses . Zehr now co-directs the with .

“Kay Pranis is a one of the best teachers of circles in the world,” says (CJP) program director . “We are very fortunate to have her working with us.”

Used in many settings

Pranis is an international leader and freelance trainer in restorative justice and peacemaking through circle practices, which bring together victims, offenders, community members, and police officers to discuss how best to respond to a crime. Moving beyond cases of crime, she has worked with others to facilitate the use of peacemaking circles in schools, social services, churches, families, museums, universities, municipal planning and workplaces. (For an overview of her work and her background, view her 2013 Chautauqua Institution lecture on “.”)

The circle process is one of the core foundational concepts of CJP’s training for peacebuilders and has been used with positive results in many regions with a history of long, entrenched conflict, Docherty says.

“This is an important, transformative and deceptively simple process for engaging people around really hard issues,” she added.

The course begins Friday, Feb. 5, from 6-9 p.m. and continues Saturday from 8:30 a.m.-5 p.m. and Sunday from 1-6 p.m.

Pranis has taught a 1-credit course on circles at CJP every year for the past 13 years. She returns to teach a second course for CJP in response to high demand. (Pranis is currently a member of the CJP , a group of expert advisors who help guide and shape the mission and work of the center.)

Circles ‘balance needs’

Diana Tovar Rojas, a CJP graduate student and political scientist from Colombia, took Pranis’ class in November. The course was a “wonderful learning and healing experience,” she said. “Not only is Kay a highly experienced circle keeper, but also a warm and spiritual one.”

Rojas has worked with UNICEF Colombia and within the juvenile justice system in the United States. She sees a great value in utilizing circles to “develop the ability to create a space for emergence and unlock the potential for collective knowledge sharing.”

Pranis first encountered peacemaking circles in the mid-1990s when studying with Barry Stuart, a judge in Yukon, Canada and also with Mark Wedge and Harold Gatensby, First Nations people of Yukon. Before that time, she worked six years as the director of research services at the Citizen’s Council on Crime and Justice.

From 1994 to 2003, she served as the restorative justice planner for the Minnesota Department of Corrections. Since 1998, Kay has conducted circle trainings in a diverse range of communities—from rural farm towns in Minnesota to Chicago’s South Side.

Of her own journey learning about and working within the circle process, Pranis says: “The circle became a way for me to see how humans can live more successfully with each other and the natural world, balancing group and individual needs and gifts. The circle became a way to move to a kind of world that I want to live in.”

Pranis has written widely on the subject: two recent publications are Circle Forward: Building a Restorative School with Carolyn Boyes-Watson (Living Justice Press, 2014), and Doing Democracy: Engaging Communities in Public Planning with Jennifer Ball and Wayne Caldewell (Living Justice Press, 2010).

More information about course content is

For more information and registration, email , CJP academic program coordinator, at bennerj@emu.edu.

“We sought to bring together a cross-section of restorative justice practitioners, theorists and innovators,” said , co-director of the Zehr Institute and the project’s leader. “Some of the invitees were world-recognized in the restorative justice field, but others were invited to ensure that diverse and often-unheard voices would be represented.”

One-third of the 36 participants were from populations that are under threat socially and economically in their regions of the world. The genders were equally represented. One person was under age 21, though two other young adults had been expected to attend.

Conversing about RJ’s ‘revolutionary intent’

The idea behind the unusual mixture of invitees was to foster provocative conversation about the possibilities for restorative justice (RJ), particularly for addressing structural injustices, said Stauffer.

In the prospectus for the three-year project submitted to the funder, , the organizers wrote: “On the social margins, there is growing research and experimentation with RJ as a tool for addressing structural harms and injustices. This project will explore and document these emerging practices in order to recapture the revolutionary intent of RJ.”

The organizers called attention in their prospectus to what they viewed as the danger of RJ settling into a “social service practice” centering on “repair at the micro-interpersonal level.” Instead, they wished to highlight the ways that RJ can “provide a coherent framework for transforming macro-social structures that cause harm.”

Aware that many of the 36 attendees at the first consultation would not have prior relationships with each other, the organizers devoted about half of the five days to exercises and facilitated conversations designed to establish trust and a common basis for exploring future possibilities. Senior graduate students at 91����Ƶ’s served as facilitators for the process.

Tough questions

First, the attendees prepared a history line of RJ, then they explored identity, power and privilege in the field. On the third day, they embarked on a discussion of best practices.

“We accepted the challenge of bringing together a highly diverse group, especially given that many of the participants are international leaders in the field, [being] accomplished researchers, authors, practitioners and facilitators in their own right,” Stauffer said.

“The challenge was heightened because the group grew beyond the original envisioned size of 20 to 25,” he added. “We needed to go well beyond 25 to have a true cross-section of voices, but it was difficult to develop coherence among three dozen people with strong opinions, especially in only five days.”

Yet the participants were largely positive in their final evaluations, he said, indicating that they had not regretted investing a workweek in wrestling with each other over tough questions, such as the extent to which RJ should be viewed as a social movement, as opposed to simply a set of restorative practices.

Stauffer did not pretend to be neutral on this last point. In his opening remarks to the group, he referred to the U.S. penal reform movement having been “co-opted.” In contrast, he said he hopes RJ continues to grow into a social movement in North America, with the aim of “transforming deep structural conflicts and injustices.” Toward this end, North Americans have much to learn from their international brothers and sisters about “large-scale applications” of RJ, he said.

Agreement on RJ’s core values

For a social movement to be successful, Stauffer told the group, it requires political opportunity, resource mobilization, a framing message, and critical mass (or a “tipping point”).

On the last day, in a final small-group presentation, a participant observed that the 36 attendees had largely agreed during the week on RJ’s core values, but not necessarily on how to practice restorative justice.

This first consultation will be followed next year by a public conference attended by up to 120 people. Next time, Stauffer said, his organizing team will work to create a conference format that moves participants more quickly into discussions on the future of the field, with a view of moving into a research and writing phase in the final year of the project.

Participants in the consultation

The 36 participants were:

1. Aaron Lyons, Fraser Region Community, Justice Initiatives, Canada
2. Ali Gohar, Just Peace Initiatives, Pakistan
3. Barb Toews, University of Washington Tacoma / Designing Justice+Designing Spaces, USA
4. , Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, 91����Ƶ
5. Brenda E. Morrison, Centre for Restorative Justice, Simon Fraser University, USA
6. Carl Stauffer, Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, 91����Ƶ
7. Carolyn Boyes-Watson, Center for Restorative Justice, Suffolk University, USA
8. Catherine Bargen, Restorative Justice Coordinator Crime Prevention and Victim Services Division, Government of British Columbia, Canada
9. Dan Van Ness, Center for Justice and Reconciliation, Prison Fellowship International, USA

10. , Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, 91����Ƶ and Atlanta (Ga.) consultant, USA
11. Fania Davis, executive director of Restorative Justice for Oakland (Calif.) Youth, USA
12. Cameron Simmons, youth worker with Restorative Justice for Oakland (Calif.) Youth, USA
13. Gerry Johnstone, University of Hull, UK
14. , Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, 91����Ƶ
15. Jeanette Martinez, Circle of Justice LLC, New Mexico, USA
16. Jennifer Graville , Community Conferencing Program, KBF Center for Conflict Resolution (Md.), USA
17. Jodie-Ann (Jodie) Geddes, Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, 91����Ƶ
18. Josh Bacon, James Madison University (Va.), USA
19. , 91����Ƶ
20. Katia Ornelas, Independent Consultant, Mexico
21. , (STAR), 91����Ƶ
22. Kay Pranis, Circle Trainer, USA
23. Kim Workman, Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies, Victoria, University of Wellington, New Zealand
24. Linda Kligman, Vice President for Advancement, International Institute for Restorative Practices, USA
25. Lorenn Walker, Hawai’i Friends of Restorative Justice, USA
26. Lorraine Stutzman Amstutz, Mennonite Central Committee, USA
27. Mark Umbreit, Center for Restorative Justice & Peacemaking, University of Minnesota, School of Social Work, USA
28. Matthew Hartman, Clackamas County Juvenile Department, Restorative Justice Coalition of Oregon, NW Justice Forum, USA
29. Mulanda Jimmy Juma, Africa Peacebuilding Institute, St. Augustine College of South Africa
30. Najla El Mangoush, Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, 91����Ƶ
31. Robert Yazzie, Chief Justice Emeritus of the Navajo Nation, USA
32. Seth Lennon Weiner, Porticus, New York, USA
33. sujatha baliga, Impact Justice, USA
34. Susan Sharpe, Advisor on Restorative Justice, Center for Social Concerns, University of Notre Dame, USA
35. Theo Gavrielides, The IARS International Institute and the Restorative Justice for All Institute, UK
36. , Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience (STAR), 91����Ƶ

The facilitators were led by project manager , and included CJP graduate students Janine Aberg, South Africa; Michael McAndrew, USA; Jordan Michelson, USA; Mikhala Lantz-Simmons, USA; and Ahmed Tarik, Iraq.