Valuable principles of restorative practice

Staff members from West Arnhem Regional Council’s Community Safety team and Youth Sport & Recreation from Jabiru, Gunbalanya, Warruwi and Minjilang took part in half-day training in the principles of restorative practice recently.
Facilitated by Darwin based Sacha King of Two Two One Counselling, restorative practice is a technique of working with people that focuses on respect, listening, healing and mutual reconciliation. 
It is especially effective after conflict or behaviour that causes hurt or disruption, to people, property or places. 
For workers, it is about facilitating safe conversations that help people to reflect and listen to each other and ultimately find a solution. 
These frontline teams sometimes face extremely challenging and confronting circumstances that require a calm and open mind, an ability to build trust and to listen, to convey respect and de-escalate tense moments. 
These are some of the core values of restorative practice, and the training provided time to go deep into what they mean and how to apply them in high pressure situations.
To support and illustrate this, Larrakia artist Shaun Lee created epic graphics.
A community of people is like a troopy; all the parts have an important role to play, and if one part is struggling, the whole vehicle suffers.
When all parts are strong and supported, the car works and moves in one direction.
After exploring the main ideas of this approach, and some deep reflection on how the teams works, they were asked to question, ‘do the current approaches match up with restorative practice approaches?’ And, ‘what can we take from restorative practice to our everyday work?’
Participants agreed that is was valuable to reflect on how they work and what techniques they already use, and how Restorative Practice could benefit their work.
See Shaun Lee’s Instagram page for more: https://www.instagram.com/hafleg/