Blog
Research, resources, links and commentary.
For us in Aotearoa New Zealand, building strong healthy relationships are at the heart of everything we do. The central building block for this is family. The concepts of whanau (family in its widest sense) and whakapapa (all the connections we have; to people, places, history) are the starting point of these relationships, so we organise our services and our practice around these key connections.
In many ways, Whanganui is New Zealand’s first experiment with restorative practice on a city-wide scale. Other cities where this has occurred are Halifax in Canada, Hull in the UK and Leeds the Child Friendly City in the UK. In all of those cases it has produced very positive results in terms of things such as school attendance, reduction in school suspensions, better relations in the workplace and reductions in family violence to name but some.
