Community Peacebuilding Restorative Practices: Trauma-Informed Approaches for Cultivating Resilience

By Heart Phoenix, Board President, River Phoenix Center for Peacebuilding

Community Peacebuilding Practices, such as Social-Emotional Learning, Restorative Justice, and Dialogues, have been around for decades, yearning to be embedded within our schools, justice systems, law enforcement, mental health encounters, organizations, families, and communities. These practices provide a continuum of opportunities to create and maintain healthy relationships through conflict, adversity, and even trauma. Since 2012, the River Phoenix Center for Peacebuilding’s (RPCP) primary focus has been to embed these evidenced-based modalities into systems that could help catalyze this shift.

And yet we wonder why it has been such a slow process for institutions to adopt these best practices that provide a deeper understanding of the core issues that elicit harmful behavior. In 2014, we experienced a grand opening of hearts and minds when Dr. Nancy Hardt first introduced the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study (ACEs) that linked childhood maltreatment to issues with later-life health and wellbeing, along with the latest scientific research on the effects of trauma on the brains of young children. RPCP joined together with Drs. Hardt, Carol Lewis, and Teresa Drake to co-found Peace4Gainesville (P4G) a Trauma-Responsive Community Initiative in Gainesville Florida, a sister organization of Peace4Tarpon.

Why was this a turning point in the receptivity of our community leaders and professionals? Who can argue when science and soul meet to help us understand the underlying causes of harmful behavior? We believe that no matter our stature in life, we are all touched personally by adverse situations that can define us unless we have the skills to build resilience and transform these patterns of behavior. It became the calling of P4G and RPCP to “Advocate, Coordinate, and Educate to build resilience, aimed at reducing the effect of trauma on the individual family and community.”

Restorative practices are a variety of strategies to support healthy relationships and increase accountability while promoting a safe and cooperative family life, classrooms, organizations, and communities. This includes developing a skill set that increases self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, compassion, and empathy through relationship skills that support effective communication and conflict resolution.

Through these strategies, labels vanish, common humanity is discovered, people develop their voice and a sense of belonging and inclusion, which support investment in themselves and others, as well as engagement in learning. We learn to take responsibility for our actions, actively making things better with those who have been affected. And thus we move from punitive to restorative and even transformative!

Some of the programs and trainings that RPCP currently offers in Florida, the U.S., and other parts of the world include:

• Social-Emotional Learning in Schools, Prisons, Organizations
• Restorative Justice Circles and Practices for Schools, Law Enforcement, Prisons, Organizations
• Police/Youth Dialogues, Student/Educator Dialogues, Community Dialogues
• Trauma Awareness and Resilience Building practices
• Peace Through Sports - Emotional Literacy and Physical Literacy
• Nine-Day Community Peacebuilder Immersion - RPCP’s Comprehensive Model

For more information on our programs and trainings, click here. You can also email us here or call (352) 234-6595.