At a glance
This pilot initiative, supported by the Resilience Lab and Campus Sustainability Fund, aims to design, implement, and evaluate… Read full summary
- Funding received
- 2024-2025
- Small
- Awarded
- $4,400
- Funding partners
-
- Services and Activities Fee (SAF)
This pilot initiative, supported by the Resilience Lab and Campus Sustainability Fund, aims to design, implement, and evaluate a restorative justice (RJ) conflict resolution process within the UW School of Social Work (SSW). The project seeks to address non-criminal, interpersonal conflicts among students, faculty, and staff, fostering a culture of connectedness, belonging, and community through restorative principles of kindness, compassion, and gratitude.
Key deliverables include forming a work group of SSW members to develop and coordinate activities, integrating RJ theories and practices aligned with social work values, engaging experienced RJ consultants for training and implementation, providing RJ interventions for selected cases, and evaluating outcomes. This initiative prioritizes centering marginalized community members, including BIPOC, trans, disabled, and queer individuals, and aims to dismantle inequities within the SSW and beyond.
By promoting restorative practices as an alternative to conventional conflict resolution, this project aligns with the SSW’s mission and has the potential to influence broader UW systems and stakeholder relationships. Future sustainability will be pursued through collaboration and additional funding opportunities.
Conflict resolution methods grounded in repairing and sustaining human relationships are core to ancient societies over time and space, with its origins in many Native and Indigenous communities (McCaslin, 2005). Some Christian denominations also have long traditions of
peacemaking practices with Mennonite Howard Zehr considered the most prominent scholar and practitioner of restorative justice practices in the U.S. and globally (Zehr, 2015). Restorative justice practices (RJ) across communities, issues, and methods emphasize core
principles including:
- Centralizing the needs of those who are harmed or hurt, whether individuals, groups, or
communities - “Making things right” between parties who are harmed and cause harm, engaging their
communities of identity and connection - A deep, sustained belief in and commitment to respect, care, kindness, love, grace, and
healing for not only those who harm and those who are harmed, but for all members of
their communities and the communities in which they are embedded.
Over the past three decades, critique of carceral systems that comprise the expansive prison- industrial complex in the U.S. has resulted in exploring alternative forms of accountability that are not rooted in punishment or retribution (Strang, et. al., 2013). Specifically in higher education, student conduct violations and interpersonal conflicts between students, faculty, and staff have conventionally been managed using codified, legal frameworks and procedures that are often extensions of criminal-legal codes in the public realm. As a result of this emergent anti- carceral climate, restorative practices are increasingly viewed as a viable and preferable response to interpersonal conflicts or social conduct violations in many different contexts, with a broader goal of building healing relationships and community connections, including in colleges and universities (Karp & Allena, 2004).
With this Resilience Lab and Campus Sustainability Fund grant, we propose to design, implement, and evaluate a pilot restorative justice (RJ) initiative at the UW School of Social Work. Our objective is to develop a conflict resolution process grounded in RJ principles to address non-criminal, interpersonal conflicts and harms that occur between students and/or between students and faculty/staff in our UW social work community. The goal of the project is to build a culture in the School which “fosters connectedness, belonging, and community” through “kindness, compassion, and gratitude toward each other and ourselves” built through the use of restorative principles and practices when interpersonal harms occur. We believe this approach to conflict resolution will demonstrate the praxis of theory and applied practice that we can enact not only in the School of Social Work, but also in the UW system and in the ways the UW as an institution interacts in/with the SSW community, stakeholders, and constituents in Seattle and King County.
The project will include the following deliverables:
- Convene a project work group of SSW faculty, staff, and students to design, deliver, and coordinate project activities.
- Identify relevant RJ theories, principles, and practices that are consistent with social work ethics and values, and which can be integrated into the RJ project model.
- Engage experienced RJ consultants-practitioners to guide development and implementation of the project model.
- Train work group members on RJ principles, practices, and procedures, specifically in higher education settings to inform the design of an RJ intervention which can be employed in the SSW community when non-criminal, interpersonal harms have occurred.
- Provide RJ interventions with 5-8 case situations at the SSW.
- Evaluate the processes and outcomes of the project.
Three groups will be involved in grant activities: 1) SSW project work group members - faculty, staff, students (Deliverables #1-6), 2) consultants/trainers (Deliverables #2, 3, 4), and 3) SSW community members (faculty, staff, students) who agree to participate in an RJ intervention (Deliverables #5-6). Designing and promoting RJ practices at the SSW will also support the School’s mission to dismantle inequities at multiple system levels. Restorative practices are an alternative to conventional conflict mitigation/resolution processes for those most vulnerable in society, particularly persons and communities that are BIPOC, trans, poor, disabled, and queer (Valandra, 2020). If awarded, we are committed to centering these members of our SSW community at all stages of our project.
We have been in conversation with non-SSW faculty and staff at UW with interest in RJ and hope to engage them with our project. We also aim to build and sustain the project by seeking other funding opportunities.
Dr. Val Kalei Kanuha
Project lead
- kanuha@uw.edu
- Affiliation
- Staff
- Affiliated groups
- Associate Dean of Academic Affairs School of Social Work
Mike Spencer
Support
- mspenc@uw.edu
- Affiliation and department
- Dean School of Social Work
- Stakeholder approval form
Request amount and budget
n/a
Measure the impacts
| Impact / goal | Metric(s) of success | UW stakeholders impacted |
|---|---|---|
| n/a | n/a | Undergraduate |
Consistent with the principles of RJ practice (Chouinard & Boyce, 2018), the evaluation will use a community-based participatory research (CPBR) methodology. The evaluation will include: 1) develop evaluation plan concomitant with intervention design/approach, 2) develop basic pre- post measure administered to RJ facilitators and participants, 3) interview all RJ intervention participants to assess their experience with the intervention, 4) engage work group members in assessing formative processes and outcomes of the project, 5) data analysis, 6) final report, and 7) disseminating report to SSW community.