Have you voted for your £500k to be spent on incarcerating two arsonists yet?

-or did you vote for the money to go to Hastings Pier and White Rock Trust (HPWRT)?



Vote on the www.sussexcommunity.blogspot.com (the poll is on the left, just press 'Page Down' on your keyboard once)

Hastings Pier being burned down; so?

OK, so there is a bigger issue in the world than Hastings Pier having burned down:

I was asked "Why the particular interest in Hastings Pier being burned down"?
Well, I'm moved by it, friends and family live there, the community is so affected, 'arsonists' have been caught, and I want to run a particular web-based system of video messaging there, leading to restorative processes and eg a community that is an exemplar of working with disaffected youth. I guess that's the short version of why.

SafeGround Management -innovation in Victim-Offender Mediation

SafeGround is a "Reboot Britain" project funded by the National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts (NESTA).

SafeGround provides a platform to support a facilitated mediation process between victim and offender, and was the winning project at the 2010 Social Innovation Camp (www.jailbrake.org). The judges who awarded the SafeGround team top prize were from the Youth Justice Board, the Prison Reform Trust, the Police Improvement Agency and the Foyer Housing Foundation.

NESTA, funding our work through "Restorative Technology Ltd", has also produced the 'Radical Efficiency' report  in which they acknowledge the work of a friend in Brazil who is innovating, clarifying and offering  Restorative Justice to great effect:

'A great example of a new entrant to an issue bringing passion, naive intelligence and insights from elsewhere is Dominic Barter, who founded restorative circles,"

(I have paraphrased p11 of the report here; see p42-43 for much more about RJ in Brazil)

To see any of the Interviews 1-6 with Dominic about his Restorative Justice work, about Radical Efficiency and SafeGround, please go to my YouTube Channel:
Toothpaste007

SafeGround1 and SafeGround2
On April 2nd 2010, following a meeting between Aleksi Knuutila and  Paul Crosland, Aleksi published to the SafeGround group that "Paul will pursue building up a Safe Ground that would work outside of the youth justice system, sharing the same technology behind it, and would appreciate any help with that. This will be called SafeGround2 for now."
Update: SafeGround2 (as it was called) will be launched by November 5th 2010 at the website www.peoplesjustice.org.uk 

Piloting SafeGround1 in Devon is progressing, and the first report back to NESTA (primary funders for Restorative Technology Ltd's work) in due in the last week of November 2010.