About Us
About ORP
- ORP promotes connectedness and belonging, builds trust across differences and transforms tensions into opportunities for growth and learning within a safer community.
Our Vision
The Office for Restorative Practices (ORP) within Student Affairs & Campus Diversity promotes an inclusive campus climate where all can engage in meaningful, restorative dialogue around community and conflict, viewing conflict transformation as a pathway to a stronger, caring and more just community.
Our Intentions
Restorative practices comprise a variety of techniques and processes intended to nurture, encourage and mend relationships, as well as to foster cooperation, improve communication, promote accountability and resolve conflicts to the advantage of the entire community. Utilizing these practices, we aim to cultivate a strong sense of community while effectively managing conflict and tensions, while acknowledging the fundamental significance of relationships in promoting learning, growth and a thriving community.
Our Restorative Tools
Restorative Circles
The tradition of gathering in a circle has ancient roots. Restorative Circles encompass various forms, including Community Building, Reparative, Re-Integration and Collaborative Decision-Making Circles. These circles serve as a platform for equitable sharing of thoughts and experiences, fostering a stronger sense of community, addressing harm and reintegrating those who have caused harm back into the community.
Workshops & Trainings
We provide interactive training sessions covering topics such as Identity and Conflict Transformation, Restorative Justice vs. Punitive Justice, Active Listening for Conflict Resolution, Circle Facilitation, Peer Mediation, Dialog for Difficult Conversations and Apology and Amend Making. We aim to share our valuable insights and learning experiences.
Listening & Mediation
In facilitating dialogue with conflicting parties, we aim to bear witness to the harm caused, hold each accountable and offer support as needed. Participant’s efforts are committed to repairing relationships. We emphasize that lasting peace relies on the expression of one's truth and the feeling of being heard, valued and believed.
ORP Stories
ORP Stories is a round-up of curated links, as well as articles about the Office for Restorative Practices.
“Communication is merely an exchange of information, but connection is an exchange of our humanity.”
- “Restorative Justice is respect. Respect for all, even those who are different from us; even those who seem to be our enemies. Respect reminds us of our interconnectedness, but also of our differences. Respect insists we balance concerns for all parties. If we pursue justice as respect, we will do justice restoratively.” ~ Howard Zehr
- “Conflict is not a problem that needs solving but a phenomenon that needs understanding.” ~ Dominic Barter
- "But when it comes to human beings, the only type of cause that matters is the final cause, the purpose. What a person had in mind. Once you understand what people really want, you can't hate them anymore. You can fear them but you can't hate them, because you can always find the same desire in your own heart." ~ Orson Scott Card
- “Forgiving is not forgetting; it’s actually remembering -- remembering and not using your right to hit back. It’s a second chance for a new beginning. And the remembering part is particularly important. Especially if you don’t want to repeat what happened.” ~ Desmond Tutu
- “For the white person who wants to know how to be my friend...the first thing you do is to forget that I'm black. Second, you must never forget that I'm black.” ~ Pat Parker
- "For it isn't enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn't enough to believe in it. One must work at it." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
- "No matter how big a nation is, it is no stronger than its weakest people, and as long as you keep a person down, some part of you has to be down there to hold him down, so it means you cannot soar as you might otherwise." ~ Marian Anderson
- "Until he extends the circle of compassion to all living things, man will not himself find peace." ~ Albert Schweitzer
- "I destroy my enemies when I make them my friends." ~ Abraham Lincoln
- “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view, until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.” ~ Harper Lee
- "Violence produces only something resembling justice, but it distances people from the possibility of living justly, without violence." ~ Leo Tolstoy
- "There are many young girls, boat people, who were raped by sea pirates. Even though the United Nations and many countries tried to help the government of Thailand prevent that kind of piracy, sea pirates continued to inflict much suffering on the refugees. One day, we received a letter telling us about a young girl on a small boat who was raped by a Thai pirate. She was only twelve, and she jumped into the ocean and drowned herself. When you first learn of something like that, you get angry at the pirate. You naturally take the side of the girl. As you look more deeply you will see it differently. If you take the side of the little girl, then it is easy. You only have to take a gun and shoot the pirate. But we can't do that. In my meditation, I saw that if I had been born in the village of the pirate and raised in the same conditions as he was, I would now be the pirate. There is a great likelihood that I would become a pirate. I can't condemn myself so easily. In my meditation, I saw that many babies are born along the Gulf of Siam, hundreds every day, and if we educators, social workers, politicians, and others do not do something about the situation, in twenty-five years a number of them will become sea pirates. That is certain. If you or I were born today in those fishing villages, we might become sea pirates in twenty-five years. If you take a gun and shoot the pirate, you shoot all of us, because all of us are to some extent responsible for this state of affairs." ~ Thich Nhat Hanh
- "You can't separate peace from freedom because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom." ~ Malcolm X
- "Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal." ~ Martin Luther King
- "I plan to stand by nonviolence, because I have found it to be a philosophy of life that regulates not only my dealings in the struggle for racial justice, but also my dealings with people, and with my own self." ~ Martin Luther King
- "A riot is the language of the unheard." ~ Martin Luther King
- “There comes a point where we need to stop pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in” ~ Desmond TuTu
- “I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.” ~ Martin Luther King
- “The moral arc of the universe bends at the elbow of justice.” ~ Martin Luther King
- “Reconciliation does not mean forgetting or trying to bury the pain of conflict; it means working together to correct the legacy of past injustice.” ~ Nelson Mandela
- "Peace is not the absence of conflict but the presence of creative alternatives for responding to conflict -- alternatives to passive or aggressive responses, alternatives to violence." ~ Dorothy Thompson
- "We enact many laws that manufacture criminals, and a few that punish them." ~ Benjamin R. Tucker
- “Human beings are inherently relational in that we are not merely interdependent with one another, but that we understand each other, through each other.” ~ Jennifer Llewellyn
- “Justice is truth in action.” ~ Benjamin Disraeli
- “The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth.” ~ African Proverb
- “If you are to punish a man retributively, you must injure him. If you are to reform him, you must improve him. And men are not improved by injuries.” ~ George Bernard Shaw
- "If you have come here to help me you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together." ~ Lilla Watson
- "Oppressions are by definition linked--linked by common ideologies, by institutional forces, and by socialization that makes oppressions normative and invisible." ~ Lisa Kemmerer
- "Simple stories of the perfect victim and the monstrous perpetrator bend reality to fit the pretexts for state violence, helping us to pretend that the physical, emotional, social, and civic injuries of prison are somehow justice.” ~ Mariame Kaba
