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Our center offers free community building circles & circles in response to harm to anyone affiliated with the university.
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Our processes include:
In our restorative responses to conflict and harm, we guide participants in co-creating spaces where people can build trust and engage in open conversations to explore and deepen relationships, address intentions and impacts of our actions and responses, and take accountability for actions and behaviors with the goals of personal growth and collective transformation. We recognize that hurt people hurt people and seek to explore the root causes of harm and conflict, and interrupt cycles of harm that can deeply impact campus communities. For confidentiality, we invite people to sign agreements where they agree that nothing said within our process can be utilized in a legal or official university process. This allows people to speak their truths without fear of having their words repeated in other contexts or misrepresented. Please complete our intake form to help us determine how we can best serve your needs.
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In community building workshops, we facilitate processes and conversations to build intentional communities based on shared values and community agreements in your cohorts, living spaces, and classes. Through these workshops, your group will develop skills in self-reflection, active and empathic listening, deepen relationships and create strategies for responding proactively and restoratively when conflict or harm occurs.
Our workshops for anti-racism and racial healing are unique in their restorative approaches. For best practices, these workshops can be scheduled alongside other campus offerings. In our workshops, people are invited to develop common language and understanding and impacts of racial anxieties and racial harms ranging from micro-aggressions to racial hostility, as well as bias, lack of equity and the perniciousness of “white supremacy” or dominant culture norms in classes, departments and workplaces. Our goal is to create supportive spaces for acknowledging the differences of intent and impact and taking accountability when harm occurs, and for collectively addressing personal, interpersonal and structural harms that occur around race, gender, power, and more.
In this training, people develop skills for creating and holding spaces for peers, colleagues and communities to build and strengthen relationships, to increase a sense of belonging, to improve communication, to address difficult subjects through inclusive conversation. Participants experience the process and practice of Community Building and other types of circles, while engaging in self- and collective-reflection around facilitation styles, cultural humility, and groundedness. Emphasis is placed on deepening circle practice to engage Equity, Inclusion, Diversity and Belonging in our spaces through discussion of shared language and principles and goals for understanding and transformation. We focus on prevention of and community responsiveness to harms around difference, identity, intersectionality, such as micro-aggressions and other forms of othering and discrimination.
These workshops blend Community Building Circle practice with courageous conversations around consent--what it means to people in your community, how you can practice consent in all areas of life in your spaces, and how to understand and navigate rules and policies around consent. Workshops may also include conversations around expectations for bystanders in your community, and values and agreements for healthy relationships in your space, as well as how to respond when conflict and harm occur. Contact us for more information.
Here are some of the campus student groups and orgs we work with:
The RJ Center maintains complete confidentiality in all our processes, and everything that is said in our RJ processes is protected by California evidentiary standards, except for sexual harm cases, which are subject to UC policies. RJ Center practitioners are considered to be responsible employees and are not confidential for any sexual harm cases that are subject to UC policy. If an incident has already been reported to the Title IX office, the RJ Center staff can convene an appropriate process for people or communities who are in need. We recommend that anyone who is affiliated with UC Berkeley should contact the PATH-to-Care Center prior to initiating an RJ process around an incident of SVSH.