Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Scheduling community mediation in cohousing “neighborly awareness” from becoming surveillance (with CPS calls)

[Diana Carroll (dianaecarroll]

Our situation isn't helpful for comparing to yours because we didn't
originally schedule the restorative justice circle *for the purpose *of
addressing the conflict. In the fall, we had scheduled a weekend workshop
for the following April. The workshop was going to be on the topic of how
to run a restorative justice circle. However, when we started preparing for
the workshop in March, it turned out we had an active conflict that had
become so difficult that the workshop facilitator we had hired did not feel
it was possible to have a workshop *about *restorative justice circles in
the abstract, but rather that we should just repurpose the April workshop
as an actual circle, with some teaching aspects tucked into the corners. We
were lucky to have already scheduled/hired a very skilled circle leader
(Duke Descherer) who was able to refocus our planned workshop to
accommodate our real-life conflict.

That sort of synchronicity can't be planned, sadly.

Diana

On Mon, Oct 13, 2025 at 2:43 PM Kathryn Lowry via Cohousing-L <
cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org> wrote:

> Thanks Diana,
>
> How long did it take to schedule the restorative justice circle?
>
> On Mon, Oct 13, 2025 at 7:51 AM Diana Carroll <dianaecarroll [at] gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > Indeed, once we choose to address an issue as a community issue, rather
> > than just an individual conflict, I would expect the entire community to
> be
> > involved in the solution. In fact, we had such a situation like that
> > recently. Not that it involved children, but it was conflict between
> enough
> > parties that it became a community issue. We treated it as such and had a
> > restorative justice circle to which all members of the community were
> > invited, whether directly connected to the conflict or not. Sure enough,
> > when people were able to speak, lots of community members and issues
> turned
> > out to be affected, at least peripherally. We didn't "solve" the conflict
> > but I believe the process resulted in forward progress towards a
> healthier
> > community. I hope your community will be able to make forward progress
> > through this as well.
> >
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