Questioning key to restorative city

Restorative community advocate Professor Jennifer Llewellyn says it's about asking the questions and keeping on asking. Photo/Stuart Munro

Asking the right questions, rather than looking for the answers at the beginning, would set Wanganui on the best path to creating a restorative community.

That was the message delivered by the keynote speaker at the opening of the Whanganui Restorative City conference yesterday.

Jennifer Llewellyn, Professor of Law at Dalhousie University and Halifax, Nova Scotia, said often people were drawn to the answers without understanding what the question was "and sometimes that is the way with restorative practices".

Prof Llewellyn is an academic who has written and published extensively on the theory and practise of restorative justice around the world and her address launched a conference of workshops yesterday and today organised by the Whanganui Restorative Practices Trust.

The conference has attracted delegates from Canada, Australia and New Zealand and its theme is making sense of restorative practice.

Prof Llewellyn said communities needed to start with the questions that were the most fundamental such as "who we are and what it is we need from one another and within institutions, organisations and systems that structure our lives in the community".

"Otherwise restorative practices cannot make the difference we hope for, cannot be the answers we need," she said.

And she said the question needed to be asked if being a restorative city was the answer for Wanganui.

She said the community should be aware that sometimes the term restorative practice has limited a community's understanding of what is trying to be achieved.

"How we talk about things structures the way we think about them. And how we think about and understand what we're doing affects what we do and how we do it. It's about changing more than simply shifting the furniture around.

"Real change requires us to understand that what needs changing is not just what we do within our systems and institutions or organisations. It needs a shared understanding of the city, of the relationships that can bring you into common conversation and about how to work together to secure the common visions."

Prof Llewellyn said a restorative approach was not a new programme but rather a framework to think and analyse "what we are doing and what we want and what things are already working well".

She said it was not something people could be "trained" for in simplistic ways but rather required a learning community to support and foster on-going learning.

"It is this learning community that you have all been creating here in Wanganui. It has to be about a vision of what it means to be a community, to live in a community, to be Wanganui."

She said a restorative city was not a banner of achievement.

"Your strategic plan should be an ongoing commitment to a way of approaching your work together, as much about how you recognise and strive to address the harms of the past and present. It's about being restorative.

"A restorative approach can help us ask and and keep asking the right questions so that we can seek the answers together."

The conference ends at midday today.