My project week was in Colorado and I had a challenging experience to learn about restorative justice in the United States of America.

    The first challenge I faced, was when we went to Silverton in a small school. Well, besides the fact that I was the only woman of color in my trip, when we arrived there I got to the realization that I was the only black person in the entire town. I confess I was scared, but it also fueled my struggle understanding how can they apply restorative justice in cases of racism if they themselves didn’t have that much racial diversity in their own town? This question triggered me the whole trip and it made me think about who gets to live in those specific towns and who gets the advantages and the disadvantages in there. It was also really empowering to experience in the first person the problems that minority groups face in America, and I’m happy that I didn’t let my fear make me lose myself from the focus of making it a good and worth learning outcome for me and my fellows.

    The second challenge I faced was the fact that I was too skeptical about the effectiveness of restorative justice. I came from a really violent background and trying to apply this new type of justice would be a big challenge, but as I saw during this project week, restorative justice starts in small communities and have a bigger and more effective impact than Retributive Justice.

    Moreover, I learned the importance of applying restorative circles into the community in order to promote heal and forgiveness when someone is harmed. And something that surprised me is hearing repeatedly that restorative justice is not only about solving, but also about preventing harm from happening. This completely changed my mindset that of the idealistic way of thinking about it and made me realize that sometimes the roots of the harm are in the system itself.

After a week, we came up with a proposal of how to implement restorative justice back on Campus and I was amazed on how many good ideas our group suggested.

  One idea that made me happy the most is the creation of a new Exed on campus. This exed would enact in the areas of academics, residential life, other Exeds, and mental health. However, one of the challenges that we particularly faced in the beginning was coming up with ways to implement restorative circles into the community because we were too focused on the prevention part rather than on the remediation part of the process. But with a lot of perseverance, we finally agreed on ways to implement the restorative circles on the community, particularly on the residential life, because acknowledged that for the other areas it would be hard to implement restorative justice in an effective manner. We were also aware of our lack of experience in the field and that other challenges will be faced in the process of implementation of restorative justice back on Campus.