On July 5 & 6, 2010, I visited two APAC prisons (Associacao de Protecao e Assistencia aos Condenados in English translated as: Association for Protection and Assistance of Convicts) in the city of Itauna, state of Minas Gerias, Brazil. The original APAC prison, which was in San Paulo, Brazil was reportedly the [...]

The Columbia Heights/Shaw Family Collaborative (CHSFC) is a community based organization dedicated to improving the quality of life for people in Washington D.C. It uses restorative justice interventions and provides three basic levels of programs for the community: family group conferencing, youth violence prevention, and work training and jobs for adults. Solution-focused brief therapy [...]

Martin Luther King, Jr. would have been 81 on his birthday January 15, 2010.
He received the Nobel Peace Prize at age 35, and although he only lived for 39 years, his impact on the world was immense.  Not only is he a hero for his work to end racial injustice in the United States, but [...]

“We simply have got to stay and keep helping the people touched by these programs,” says Barbara Tudor with passion and zeal.  When she says she is “staying” you know she means it.  She is a sturdy sixty-ish woman with curly blond short hair and clear blue eyes.  Most striking is her abundant energy, which [...]

About five years ago I learned about solution-focused brief therapy (SFBT) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solution_focused_brief_therapy), which focuses on “preferred futures” instead of “problem talk,” and since then I have been applying it to my work and life.
While restorative justice gives us the opportunity to face wrongdoing and social injustice by imaging what we need to heal or to [...]

We are providing a restorative justice facilitation skills and solution-focused problem solving training for a group of 20 incarcerated men at Waiawa Correctional Facility on O‘ahu.  A paper on this training program that we have now provided to five groups of incarcerated people, is available on my website under the Articles page and is titled [...]

In 1978 I was in my junior year at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa (UH).  While college is a normal transition for many Americans, I got there by a frightening twist of fate, which left me seriously injured and almost dead.
Although I was always a terrible student in school–I dropped out when I was [...]