Videos about the process: http://www.youtube.com/user/RestorativeCircles

Twitter: @RestoraCircles

Restorative Circles are a community form for having and learning from conflict. The Circles are owned and run by those experiencing painful choices around each other's actions, within the context of a wider community agreement that conflict is too valuable to be forcefully curtailed before the change it is offering has been fully heard and transformed into mutually beneficial action.

Developed by Dominic Barter in the context of social violence involving and impacting urban youth in Brazil, particularly in shanty towns, the Circles — and the Restorative System within which they are used — have since been applied in the public school system, youth prisons, the court system, youth shelters and become part of municipal services in several cities. Social organisations and local communities have adopted and self-run the Circles, both as complements to, and as replacements for, traditional models of justice. Some intentional communities / eco-villages have begun to investigate Dominic's proposal that we consciously create compassionate justice systems at all levels of our social co-existence.

This work makes deep use of Nonviolent Communication, and can be seen as a social application of NVC principles.

Restorative Circles have more recently been shared outside Brazil, in Scotland, Northern Ireland, England, Iran, India, the United States and Canada.