Basic Restorative Justice Skills

This training course is designed for anyone wanting to use or refresh their restorative skills in their work – whether in conversations, preparing for and facilitating restorative meetings or for running circles. The course is open to everyone who wants to learn the foundational skills essential for restorative justice, restorative practice or for those who wish to refresh their knowledge in the subject. It may be especially relevant for teachers, social workers, psychologists, healthcare practitioners, community activists, and professionals working within the criminal justice system.

The course is not designed to provide a license to become a certified conference or circle facilitator. For this you would need to check the local requirements in your country and fulfil a training programme that is accredited there.  At the moment there is no accreditation that is recognised across Europe, and the EFRJ aims to deliver practice-oriented training that may be beneficial in various environments. 

The sessions will be participative and experiential. Learning methods will include:

• Full group sessions will include short presentations, and they will allow extended time for interactive activities, including the practice of the circle process.
• Small group work will provide many opportunities for participants to explore the subject and practice in pairs and smaller groups and get feedback on their work from the trainer.
• Role-play scenarios provide the opportunity to attendees to apply their learning in concrete situations.
• Individual work includes participants to engage in private reflection and commit to private study in between on-line sessions.
• Course booklet, course handouts - Participants will receive their digital copies of a number of useful learning resources.

Dr Borbala Fellegi, PhD is a researcher, mediator, conference and peacemaking circle facilitator as well as a trainer and lecturer. Her PhD thesis was about the implementation of restorative justice in Hungary. From 2008 on, as founder and executive director of the Foresee Research Group she is in charge of Hungarian and EU programmes researching the potential application of mediation and peacemaking circles in community conflicts and in the prison settings as well as doing different community building, researching and training projects in Hungary related to conflict resolution. Since 2015 she has been the assistant professor of the US-based International Institute for Restorative Practices’ Graduate School. She has been working as consultant for the Council of Europe, the UNODC, the National Crime Prevention Board and the Office of Justice in Hungary. She gives trainings and lectures at several universities, and she is the co-founder of the nationally accredited ‘Dr. Fellegi & Winkler Mediator Training Programme’ (www.mediatoroktatas.hu). Besides numerous articles and book chapters she is the author of the book ‘Towards restoration and peace’ (Napvilág, 2009), one of the first comprehensive studies on the implementation of restorative justice in Hungary. Her publications can be downloaded from: http://www.foresee.hu/en/

Dr Susanna Z. Papp, PhD is a psychologist, trainer and lecturer. She earned her PhD in psychology at the Doctoral School of Psychology at ELTE in Budapest in 2020. Her doctoral research focused on examining the dynamics in interpersonal conflicts and in victim-offender mediation. Susanna has a decade of experience as faculty teaching communication, cultural studies, restorative justice and psychology at various at university level. As a trainer she has over a thousand hours of experience in working with groups on capacity building in communication, conflict management and restorative practices. She is trained in restorative methods and mediation. Since 2017 she has been based in Stockholm teaching positive psychology and managing EU projects.

The course will take place virtually via Zoom.  You can download the desktop Zoom application from here to have the best experience (and access all the features of the programme). If you already have Zoom it is recommended to install the latest updates. This improves security and also gives you access to functions that are enabled via the updates.  Minimum recommended bandwidth is 1.5Mbps/1.5Mbps (up and downloading speed). You can check your internet speed here for example. You can read more about system requirements for using Zoom here.

You will also need to have a video camera, microphone built in or connected to your laptop and a stable internet connection to be able to fully participate in the event. We request that you have your camera on during the training in most of the times. 

We ask people to apply for this course only if they can commit to the whole course. Check the dates carefully. Please make the necessary changes to your diary, if need be, so that you can prioritise attendance on the course, from the beginning to the end of each day. It is difficult for everyone if some attendees miss certain modules or sessions within a module. Each module builds on the previous one and so missing a session will impact on the learner and disturb the growing sense of safety and trust we will be building in our learning community.

The language of the course will be English.

EFRJ members get a discount of the fee. The discount is automatically applied to members (after logging in to our website). If you haven't paid your membership due for 2022 yet,  you will not get the discount automatically. If you don't get the discount for any other reason, please contact Bálint Juhász to get your discount code before you fill in your application. 

Is the participation fee a barrier for you to participate? We can offer a limited number of partial or full waivers of the fee. If you would like apply for that please contact Bálint Juhász and explain your situation in an email in an email until the latest 10 September 2022.

Cancellation policy: if you cancel your participation before 1 September you get 100% refund of your subscription fee. Between 2 - 25 September you get 70% refund of your subscription fee. After this date, reimbursement is no longer possible.

The header image is based on the drawing of Joan Barjau Capdevila.