David Moore

The February 2023 session was with David Moore, an experienced facilitator and educator. David discussed key lessons from 3 decades of work in restorative practices in Australia and internationally, which are summarised in a forthcoming book, co-authored with Alikki Vernon: Setting Relations Right: core skills and new horizons for restorative practices (Routledge 2023).

David Moore’s story explored

• his experience at Charles Sturt Uni in Wagga setting up justice studies program and working with NSW police John MacDonald and Terry O’Connell with the support of Regional commander Christine Nixon and the innovations in NSW Policing
• Using John Braithwaite’s recently published book “Crime, Shame and Reintegration” as the theory to underpin justifying their work to state agencies
• the key insight of transforming conflict into collaboration by getting the players to co-craft the story of what happened with everyone in the room
• changing his PhD to the emotional dynamics of these meetings rather than the theory of reintegrative shaming
• expanding the manual of how to run a meeting about undisputed harm to include the history that all incidents have
• running Community Justice Forums and training across Canada, UK and Norway
• meeting the need of creating mechanisms to help people work on common ground rather than differences
• resurgence of interest in RP in Australia since 2010 with redress schemes and institutional harm (including families)
• moral injury
• no matter which range of conversations, meetings or conferences practitioners need a basis of 6 core skills
  1. Diagnosing the situation
  2. Defining the process
  3. Preparing to participate
  4. Narrating the story - where we are now and where we want to go
  5. Strategic negotiation
  6. Reflection
• Central Victorian Justice Alliance as model for inter agency collaboration often driven by schools or aboriginal organisations
• poor practice in some redress schemes getting people to tell stories they don’t want to tell and the language of labelling
• administrative language vs human relations and healing language - person harmed and person responsible
• complex trauma and betrayal trauma from institutions that expected to be trustworthy