Unpack the power of restorative justice and practices and their profound impact on healing and accountability. This episode features Joe Brummer, a distinguished consultant in peacebuilding, restorative justice, and trauma-informed education. Joe courageously shares his personal journey, from surviving early trauma and violent hate crimes to dedicating his career to fostering safer and more compassionate environments. Discover how his mission is transforming schools by moving beyond traditional punitive systems to redefine accountability and cultivate stronger, healthier communities for everyone involved.
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Restorative Justice And Practices: Transforming Trauma And Healing With Joe Brummer
Unpacking The Trauma-Informed Education Network
Our guest now is a trauma survivor having lived through early exposure to violence, child abuse and neglect. In two separate violent hate crimes, he has turned his healing journey into a career in peace building and restorative justice in a consulting and trauma-informed education. I’m so honored to have our guest, Joe Brummer. Welcome to the Live Your Possible show. How are you doing, Joe?
I’m good. Thanks for having me.
Tell me what’s going on. Tell me what’s on the top of your mind? What’s got your attention?
Travel. I’m packing. I’m leaving for a conference to speak. Even though I love to travel, the whole process of travel makes me nervous. That starts getting on my brain a couple days before I have to leave.
What’s that all about? What are you nervous about in general?
Have you seen the news reports? Twenty-five people were hurt in a turbulence incident, accidents, and planes catching on fire. It’s nerve wracking but, at least, you don’t have to take your shoes off anymore.
I’ve been pushing that aside. We tried to avoid some of those things in our minds but you’re right, there’s been some weird things going on lately. I’m just curious. I love your shirt. Are you wearing that shirt to the airport? Will that be okay wearing that shirt?
Probably not in an airport. I would not wear this shirt. I might get in trouble for that. I know one of my friends wore an early version of this shirt that didn’t say “Unapologetic Disruptor for good.” It didn’t have the good part and the TSA made her turn inside out.
Tell us a little bit about what the shirt is about. What’s the group doing?
This is from a group that I started as a Facebook group and then became a podcast. It’s for the Trauma Informed Educators Network, which was founded by an educator and a principal in Nashville, Tennessee named, Matthew Portell. I’ve been part of the Trauma Informed Educators Network for a couple of years now. We’re a group of people that willing to go into school systems and help introduce the concept of trauma-informed education, restorative justice, and non-punitive discipline and ways that we can take care of kids who experience neglect, child abuse, and disappointing, war, famine and natural disasters.
We’re seeing a lot of kids coming to schools these days from other states because of flooding and fires. You look at California and Texas with flooding and fire. There’s a lot of traumas going on and we live in just a toxic traumatic environment for nervous systems. This is a group of people that want to at least make schools a safer place for kids who’ve experienced hard things.
We live in a toxic, traumatic environment for nervous systems. Share on XThat’s a beautiful group. The need is there. As we’ve been evolving over time, it’s more transparent. It’s out there. People are seeing more of the trauma, feeling the trauma and the beautiful thing is we’re talking about it. We’re at least now trying to acknowledge it. We’re trying to bring groups together like yours. You’re going to speak. Where are you speaking? What’s going on there?
That’s one of my favorite parts about what I do, is I get to travel a lot. I’ll be in Appleton, Wisconsin for the Southern Wisconsin Trauma Conference. August brings me to Wisconsin, and in September I’ll be in Colorado. In October, I’m somewhere but I can’t remember where. In November, I get to go to Newfoundland, Labrador, Saint John to do a conference there for four days. I come home and I jump on a plane to Barcelona, Spain to do a conference there. It’s fun when you get to travel and somebody else pays for it.
No kidding. It sounds fascinating. We’ll get into more details later. I’m just curious. Are you informing and educating? Are you training? What are you covering in general at these events?
In Wisconsin, it’s a conference. I love speaking at conferences. Those are more didactic presentations. Sometimes, I get to do Q&A’s or a workshop session. Oftentimes, I go into schools themselves. When I had to go to Colorado, I’m working with the school district. The entire school district has only 300 kids. It’s very rural. It’s also at 12,000 feet. My last trip there was literally nauseated. I just did not get the oxygen this body needed and I’m pretty little.
Hopefully, the second trip out there, my body will adapt to that altitude a little quicker. That’s out there for a workshop. I’m going to work with educators in that school district along with a curriculum specialist who’s helping them work on their curriculum delivery. We are working on creating a better climate for a school system that has a pretty decent culture and climate now. The superintendent just wants to see them grow in how they create relationships with students and how we create list viewers for students that are safer. My trips in November are both to just speak at conferences. Also, locally, I’ll be in a lot of schools in the next couple of months as we prepare for the new year. My busiest time of year is right before school starts.
It feels like a new beginning. It’s like, “We’re going back to school. It’s the fall. Let’s reset.” That’s interesting. I want to dive into all that. I want us to define restorative justice, practices, where at work and where there are challenges. I want to get into all that but before we do, I’d love to start back in your childhood and go back so then we can get to how did you get here. I’d love to know what you’re willing to share about your childhood. Maybe we go there and we could break it down into your twenties and some of the events that you had to counter and how you went through that, then your healing process to get to this point.
A Childhood Shaped By Trauma
My early childhood was interesting. I wasn’t even a year old before my mom started experiencing some real tragedies for herself, so just making her an emotionally unavailable parent and my dad traveled a lot. Being the youngest of four, it was my brothers and sisters that probably paid more attention to me than my parents. Even at four years old, my mom was the target of a motorcycle gang initiation.
The initiation for this new motorcycle gang person was to go beat up the first woman he saw on this street in broad daylight and so he did. Unfortunately, my mom’s four children were in the car. This is back in the days where you couldn’t leave kids in the car. We were all in the back of the car while she was supposed to be running in from lunch meet but instead, we watched her get beat up by this guy. I was only four, so I probably have only physical memory of this.
I obviously can’t remember this incident, but I’m sure my body does because that’s how the nervous system works. It just keeps going from there. That puts my mom again further away from being an emotionally available parent. She, herself was a child abuse survivor or ideas of punishment or word violent, meaning the woman was just violent. What’s scary about her is that she could go from being a playful and happy mom to violent mom within a blink of an eye. It just trained all of her children’s nervous systems to be on guard, trying to prevent any meltdown that women could have because meltdowns turned it into beatings.
That was my childhood. You add Catholic Schools into that and grow up a gay man. Now I’m going to school. School is not safe because I’m hearing about how horrible of a human I am and burning in hell. I go home and home is not safe. You add a kid with a whacked out nervous system and send him to school. I can’t sit still, concentrate and get good grades. I got mediocre grades because I could barely pay attention. That leads other kids to easily make you a target of bullying. There were lots of challenges in that, then you get into my teenage years.
By the time I was probably 10 or 11 years old, my parents had checked out on parenting. They’re like, “They’re all good now. They’re older,” but forgetting that I’m like 10 or 11 years old. I hung out with my sister’s friends who were all several years older than me. At 12 and 13, I was hanging out with 18-year-olds getting high, doing drugs, and going out to the train trestle to drink and do cake parties. This was the ‘80s, so things were different then. We went to the train trestle to drink. It was easy to get marijuana and other substances and so we did. I was a teenager doing a lot of drugs and a lot of drinking.
At about 21 years old, unfortunately, I met my first gay bashing, in which five guys in a baseball bat jumped me and beat the crap out of me. I just try to escape them. I rolled myself into a river. That wasn’t wise. It was a brilliant idea like, “I’ll get rid of these guys,” but then my body hit the water. I was like, “I have to swim? I don’t have energy for this.” Amazingly, some people pulled me out of the water. I can barely remember even that happening. It’s like some stupid memories of what that looks like but that put me on an even worse path.
Most of my twenties are just trying to get by and try to deal with PTSD and quite a struggle. It meant lots of bad relationships and poor decision-making. Coming out of the Downtown Providence, Rhode Island nightclub. Bunch of university aged kids were running down the street and body slammed me to the ground. I hit my shoulder first and second, slip my collarbone. All that fun stuff, but the silver lining, I suppose, if there is such a thing, an acquaintance basically that I knew jumped me to the hospital because I turned the ambulance away from being kicked. “Sir, you have no health insurance.” I was like, “You people have to go. I can’t afford you.”
The realization when the endorphins wore off that I was very injured. They took me to the hospital and it’s about 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning. Folks in the hospital are like, “You can go home but you can’t go home by yourself.” I’m like, “What’s the problem? I’m here by myself.” They’re like, “No, that guy that brought you here is still here.” Some life advice, when a guy you hardly know is willing to take you to the hospital, stay with you all night and wait for you to take you home. You should marry him. Keep him around. It’s been 25 years and we’re still married. We’re still together. That’s how it worked.
Finding Stability And A New Path
That was also a great turning point. That’s when, at the time, I was being kicked out of my place in the apartment I lived in because they’d sold the building. The rent they were raising me to was just not anything I could afford. This was 1999 and my rent was like $450 for a very nice two-bedroom apartment in Providence. They were raising $700 and I was like, “I can’t pay that.” I was going to move in with a friend who I wasn’t thrilled about moving in with. Instead, I just moved in with my husband and that was that.
It meant giving me stability. The thing that he provided for me that I didn’t see coming was stability. The ability to apply for better jobs. He’s literally asking, “Why are you applying for that? You can get better than that.” I would and then I got those jobs. Now I have a career path, a stable job, a stable place to live, and a relationship that I cared about and didn’t want to F-up. Those are all stabilizing things to a person who hasn’t had a lot of stability. That was life-changing and that’s what put me on the path that I’m still on.
It seems like you found acceptance with him and with yourself to be able to start to feel that stability and feel grounded. I imagine based on what your comments were about your parents. Your parents didn’t accept you for you through those years.
My parents are great about me being gay. Where my parents are not great is their priorities in life for them. I had invited my parents to my wedding and they did come, which was a ceremony I had with friends and family in my boss’s backyard. It was beautiful. They set up their dining room tables with China in the backyard of my friend’s house, and decorated it all with cool outdoor lighting. We had a Justice of the Peace coming to a ceremony. It wasn’t legal but it was meaningful to our friends, our family and us. We later got legally married en masse in 2008 and then moved to Connecticut a month later where we had to get a civil union and health insurance.
I’ve done the whole ID thing three times. I’m probably going to do it again. I just don’t want to pay the Justice of the Peace this time because I’ve already done that bunch of times. My parents were good about that. My parents were always good. When I came out to my dad, my dad’s first words were like, “So?” It’s like, “I thought you should know.” He’s like, “When’s dinner?” It’s a laughable conversation. Where my parents are not good are being parents. They weren’t good about giving guidance or being supportive of just anything.
My mom had ways of just saying the most cruel things to people then I watched her do it to her grandchildren. The same vile crap coming out of her mouth. I’m lucky because I’m the youngest of four. I think my older brother and sister took a lot more of my mom’s anger and vengeance. I was the youngest, so I could get away with more. What’s awesome is I got a lot less of her harassment but when it comes to being gay, they love my husband. That’s never been their issue. Their issue is that they think they’re wrapped up in themselves. My mom was very wrapped up in making sure she had great clothes and she had subs to take.
She bought herself a mountain house and would start going away every weekend but like, I’m sorry, you have children that you’re supposed to be raising. We weren’t guided to get into college. We weren’t guided in high school. I only think my parents knew what my grades were in high school and after the fact, they were involved in any of it. The other things, paying the bill to send me to Catholic school. My parents were so good about looking good on the surface.
To the outside world, our family looked like the perfect little Suburbian family, but inside the house, it’s a different story. My mom was a nurse. She eventually worked as a neonatal nurse and that’s a hard job to have. It’s little babies that are probably not making it. That took a large toll on her. My dad travels all the time for work. Especially in my teenage years. He lived in Upstate New York and would just come home on the weekends. These are non-existent parents to me.
In 2018, I did this crazy move. I got on the plane. I went down to visit my parents and just had a deep conversation with my dad. It became very apparent to me that even the biggest milestone of my life, he didn’t even remember. He’s like, “I don’t remember that happening.” I’m like, “You don’t remember your son being almost killed?” It was just a wake-up call and so I left that little conversation and changed. It finally sunk through my head like, if I’m going to heal, these people need to be in my life. I just walked away. I haven’t talked to him since.
The Power Of Self-Compassion And Grieving What Didn’t Happen
They call once in a while and I don’t pick up because anything they have to say is going to be about that. The thing for me to heal, I needed to start taking care of myself and not people please other people. I shake off guilt and shame just like, go live your life. Some of the more healing stuff I’ve ever done is to have that. It was just a realization like, if you can’t remember half of your kid’s life. That seems awkward. I was like, “How memorable is that?”
At one point, my dad had written this biography thing. He called it his ramblings. It talks about all the jobs he’s had and how he bought our house that I grew up in and how it was transformed into a bigger house, remodeled and started out with no heat. He talked in detail about house, his jobs, his career and his time in the military. He never mentions his children. We are not mentioned in that rambling anywhere. You wrote a whole lot of biography and all you talked about were houses, cars, where you lived and how you met my mom. That’s cute but you had four children.
That says it all.
How come we’re not in the story? That’s when I just walked away. I was like, “I need my space to heal.”
Joe’s Healing Journey: EMDR And Somatic Experiencing
Good for you. I love that you have some empathy, even for your parents. Even though you let them go, you recognized they had their own struggles yet they didn’t do enough. I love to hear a little bit more about your healing process. Conversations maybe with your siblings and things you might have done to frame out what happened and what different methods. I know we’ve talked a little bit before you’ve gone through different methods and techniques. I’m curious for our audience, what has worked well, too?
Especially in my younger days. I started going into therapy and mental health care in my twenties. Not long after a surprise, about a year after my first gay bashing. I ended up in-patient in a mental hospital in Pennsylvania, which was the first of its kind. It was the sanctuary unit, which is a famous trauma unit in Fort Washington, Pennsylvania. It was started by a woman named Sandra Bloom, who later went on to coin the phrase, “It’s not about what’s wrong with you. It’s about what happened to you.”
It’s the title of Dr. Bruce Perry’s book, What Happened To You? I had a short stay there and then did some therapy for a while after that. Off and on throughout my life, I was always doing the therapy. As I got into my 30s, I did more therapy and learned that talk therapy will help you get through your day-to-day but it’s not going to go back and rewire your nervous system. That’s just not how it works. For most people who had significant trauma, talk therapy is just useless because the problems that you have are not cognitive.
We got cognate behavioral therapies. A lot of things like that don’t work because problems aren’t cognitive. They’re not what you’re thinking. They are your nervous system. Your nervous system gets wired through trauma to be less relational and more survival, so hypervigilance and racing hard. You’re constantly on the alert. To calm down, sleep and not have anxiety can be difficult. I started doing therapies and a bunch of things happened though all at once. I started doing EMDR, which is Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing.
Basically, it relies on bilateral stimulation. It’s working both sides of the brain alternating. Bilateral stimulation just by itself is great for your brain and regulating your brain. You can find videos on YouTube of bilateral music. You can do bilateral activities which are a series of exercises with beam sandbags and racquetballs. That again, work both sides of the brain through doing patterned, rhythmic and repetitive exercises. In therapies, EMDR mimics how your brain processes memory like it would during REM sleep.
Which is a period during sleep that your brain processes what memories go where, what to keep and what not to keep. Your short-term memory gets committed to long-term memory during your process of sleep. EMDR mimics that process and allows us to process memory we otherwise wouldn’t be able to touch. Through that, I’ll be able to work through some stuff. I won’t say it was like had I gone deeper into it, it might have done more for me. I moved on to something called somatic experiencing, which is about recognizing how your body holds trauma within your body.
I’ve been doing that now for quite some time, but I’ve done all of this in coordination with my sister. I have a sister who’s two years older than me. It’s been like a lifeline of working through this because we grew up in the same house. Sometimes, that’s one thing trauma survivors need, is validation. It’s like, “This happened and it wasn’t as bad as I thought.” Sometimes, I’ll pause even now and be like, “Was it really that bad?” My sister will be like, “What’s wrong with you? It was,” and it was like. My parents were very harsh and hard to navigate and things like food were weaponized. Conversations were weaponized. Access to them was weaponized. Everything could be weaponized.
One thing trauma survivors need is validation. Share on XThat’s the hard place to grow up. I’m also one of those weird people that are curious about history that I don’t remember. I have loved my desk here. We’re a family of these slides. If you remember these wonderful things from the ‘60s and ‘70s, everything my parents did was on colored slides. This is what happened with colored slides in the ‘80s and even the early ‘90s. You take those pictures. Once a month, we’d set up the projector and everybody would look at the pictures and then you never see them again.
Reconstructing The Past Through Pictures And Timelines
It’s not like there were a lot of pictures to look at of my childhood because they were all on slides. I bought myself a nice scanner and started to scan them all. Putting them into folders year by year so I could look at what my life looked like year by year. That was pretty telling. I learned a lot about my family, my mom’s descent into mental health. Our house was very clean in the first couple of years that she started being a mom. We were all into activities and then you just see the decline. You see the house getting more full of stuff.
The hoarding kicked in because both my parents are hoarders. Collecting stuff came in and it got hard but I could see it and validate it like this happened. At the same time, my sister and I were both creating timelines of, “Year by year, here’s all the stuff that happened.” It put everything I’ve been through into perspective. I started to be a lot less hard on myself and a lot more self-compassionate, which all the therapy I’ve had hadn’t given me. That chance to be self-compassionate and to be like, “My friend, if you’re dumb, you have every right to be but give yourself some slack if you’re not perfect. That means living life a lot easier because I’m a lot less hard on myself.”
Compared to before where it’s constantly the, what’s wrong with you? Now, it’s like dude, you struggle. Of course, you do. I developed that compassion now for other people where I look and I’m like, “Of course, you’re struggling. You’re not perfect and so is anybody.” That’s helped me look at the rest of the world differently.
I find the timelines very interesting. In the pictures, being able to see your past and being able to look at that compartmentalize about not only validating yet also understanding like what about that do you want to bring forward or what about that do you want to leave behind? It’s hard to. I always feel like it’s hard to think about where you are now and your future, which is that more uplifting, “We can do this possibly and see what’s possible.” If we get stuck in the past, we keep reliving those moments and just the darkness, the heaviness, the anger and the frustration.
Seeing the timeline, the pictures and seeing everything laid out gives you time to grieve. What’s interesting is that we talked about people grieving even death. It means they talk about how grief requires a witness and somebody to just witness like this grief that you’re holding. I started realizing that to heal from childhood trauma, traumatic events that we’ve been through, it’s a grieving process. We have to grieve sometimes like what didn’t happen to us that should have.
From Pain To Purpose: A Journey Of Growth
We grieved the things that did happen and how much they’ve impacted or taken away from your life. There’s also a chance to see in that grief like a call for lack of something better. We’ll use the layman’s term, post-traumatic growth. If these things had not happened, I may not be where I am and I like where I am. It’s not perfect. I’m not perfect, but I like how far I’ve come, to go from being somebody more interested in going to a bar and drinking and doing drugs. Who cares about showing up hungover and tired?
Being a person that has published two books, won a 2025 Nautilus book award and is getting paid to travel around the globe and talk about this work. That’s a pretty big journey. Again, sometimes we have to look at the things that happen to us, good or bad and be like, “Those things do not happen for better or for worse, it might not be where I am.” I like where I am.
You’ve turned that pain into something positive. It doesn’t mean you don’t have some of that now. It sounds like you’re pointing it to do more good just like your shirt “for good.”
That’s your choice. You can do something good with it or you could wallow in it. I had my period of time where I just swallowed it and self-pity and all of that. I don’t think that all of this is learning lessons for other people, especially educators. I talked to educators and tell them about this work and talked about this story. It’s not because I want them to feel sorry for me. It has nothing to do with me at all. I want them to know that that kid in their classroom who can’t sit still, who they know is coming from a tough home, I just want them to see that kid has potential and that kid could get through this.
Eventually, if they can’t sit down and learn, they will eventually find their way to learn in some way. I was the guy that didn’t get a chance to go back to college until I was in my 40s. Amazingly, everything else in my life fell apart in an interesting way. I met a former colleague who said, “I went back and got my degree.” I was like, “I wish I could do that. I just don’t have the money and I don’t have the time.” They were like, “There’s this program.”
I ended up going through this program through Roger Williams University and an organization called College Unbound and got my four-year bachelor degree in one year using prior life credits and all kinds of other methods. I was able to get 90 credits of life experience and then do one year of classes. In 2014, I got to graduate with my degree then went off to India for three and a half weeks. I feel like there’s been growth all along even if it’s baby steps. I want educators to see that stuff. I want them to be like, “Maybe that kid is late for class every day but maybe next week, it will be all three days instead of five.” Change is baby steps and it requires a lot of patience for yourself.
You could do something good with it or you could wallow in it. Share on XIt seems like it’s a level of human care. It seemed like it’s pausing and slowing down. To throw in as you’re talking, I’m thinking about my history of coaching youth sports teams. I have two kids and I’ve coached about 30 teams. I always spent more time with what I felt like the more troubled kids. Who knows what was going on, to your point, they’re struggling with or where they’re coming from. I just felt like that was important.
I felt that there was a different connection. There’s a way when you lean in. Kids want to lean back in if they can start to trust you, probably like any human. Anybody that wants to connect, open up and start to trust. It starts with being there for someone, especially for the teacher, the leader, the coach or whatever that might be. That’s what’s coming up for me. I didn’t know I was practicing some of that. It feels like it’s an element of just being a good human.
We learned now from neuroscience, which is where I spend a lot of my energy. It’s learning neuroscience. The more we’ve learned about neuroscience, the more we learned that we are wired for connection. We are wired to be in a relationship with other humans because we are herd creatures. At the end of the day, we are warm-blooded hairy mammals. If you like to think that we’re somehow superior to every other animal on the planet but the reality is, our brains are wired to be connected to each other.
The reason is safety. The reason for that is forging for food and we do better in numbers. Some of anthropology and sociology believed that the reason humans evolved so quickly was because we learned how to throw rocks collaboratively. Think about that. That’s an amazing thought. We teamed up with one another to throw rocks at predators and turn them into prey. You give me a mountain lion among my own.
I can’t throw rocks fast enough. It’s not going to work. If I got three or four of my friends with me and we’re all throwing rocks. There’s a good chance not only when we get away from that mountain lion alive. We might kill it and have dinner. Some anthropologists attribute a piece of our evolution to how we could collaborate so you stay safe and get food. They pay their bills and they do it by throwing rocks.
Restorative Justice: Redefining Harm And Repair
Unbelievable. I’m interested to shift a little bit to defining restorative justice in the work you’re doing. If you don’t mind giving us a little bit of the definition and what it looks like.
There are lots of definitions out there and I don’t know if I have the perfect one. Restorative justice is a return to a way of thinking that humans have had for most of our evolution. When we look back at human evolution, we’ve been on the planet in this form for about 200,000 to 50,000 years. In most of that existence, when someone does something that causes harm or “breaks the rules.” We do something that is disrupted to the community.
In more ancient times, our ancestors knew that people are not disposable. We need every able body that can contribute to the tribe. We don’t have the luxury of having people be disposable. If people did something wrong, all of those people that were involved in that incident are the people that should solve that incident. Generally, that was done through the elders. If you and I got into a tiff, it would be our elders that would work that out and we would just accept what they came for us because that’s how it worked.
As we got into the Middle Ages, especially the second part of the Middle Ages, there was a shift. Instead of the elders and two tribes or two families working out things like, “You armed my daughter, so your family needs to give me three goats and a horse.” That’s what restitution used to look like, or even people taking over each other’s land. Whatever solved the problem and repaired the harm. Different tribes throughout the world had different ways to do this. Everything from the Pacific Islands to all the people of New Zealand. All these people had similar reparative approaches that we might now called restorative justice.
As we dive into the Middle Ages when it shifted, we stopped paying things to each other and we started paying things to the church, the vicar, at least in Western cultures. Later, that shifted as we separated church and state. Now you paid your restitution to the state. We left the whole light, people who were harmed in a dust back in the Middle Ages. Now, there are these two camps, our traditional discipline and our traditional systems of justice, which focus on what law or what rule was broken, who broke it and how we punish you for doing that. Knowing fully all along punishment doesn’t work.
The research has been very clear on that for the past 100 years. The odds are more harm than good. We see that in a country like the US, where we have more of our citizens incarcerated than any other country on the planet. We have larger jail systems and less rehabilitative systems. Compared to other countries like Germany where their justice systems are very different. They are focused on rehabilitation. They’re focused on getting people to be contributing members of society. Here, we’re just damaging people further by treating them like numbers.
This thinking is what moves away from, what rule did you break, who broke it and how do we punish you to, what’s the harm, who’s been harmed and how do we repair that harm? It’s the inclusion of community. It’s the inclusion of victims and of what we would call collective accountability. In our traditional systems, we focus all our energy on who did it, the offender. We forget about the community that had been impacted. We forget about the circumstances, conditions and environments that the community created that may have caused that person to act.
We hold them accountable but we never look at ourselves and say, “We created the conditions, circumstances and environment,” which is important when we think about kids. We move to this new way of thinking, what’s the harm, who’s been harmed, and how do we repair this harm? That involves collective accountability, especially in children in the school. We, the adults, create the expectations, the rules then we create the circumstances, environment and conditions. Who do we punish when it doesn’t go well? It’s not us. We go right for the kid, but we don’t take into effect the larger picture that is the conditions and environment.
That’s where trauma-informed comes in. It’s looking at sensory information. It’s looking at how children have a dealt sense of safety, both emotionally, psychologically and physically. When things go wrong, we’re using that restorative justice mindset and what we call in schools restorative practices. We are using practices that either build, maintain or repair relationships. The emphasis being on building and maintaining so that we don’t have to repair.
Rather than waiting until a kid does something wrong, why not create the circumstances, environment and conditions that don’t foster those behaviors? That’s not unfortunately what happens in many schools now. In many schools, it does. Educators are equipped to do this because educators are very created. It’s just shifting our mindset away from carrots and sticks, who deserves what and to more problems solving approaches.
That’s the short elevator pitch of how to describe restorative justice. It can be hard to describe to people because it’s complex. It’s not transactional. It’s transformative, where many of our systems now are just a transaction. You did this, you get that. End the story. We don’t care about human lives. We care about the number of years or the sentence or the three-day suspension. What did he get? I hear that from educators like, “What did he get?” The answer is, “I’ll get them what they need to do better next time.”
Building Proactive Relationships In Schools
It’s like we need to have that outcome. It’s that immediate gratification whatever that might be. They got that. We got the answer. I love what you just said, it goes from transactional to transformational. On the proactive building of the community, how does that work? How are people doing it? You mentioned there’re some schools that are doing well, for example. How do you set that up? I love that. It doesn’t mean there’s some action, which we’ll talk about next. How do we get it so we can avoid that, which I love?
Again, we go into schools and we’re focused on those three things, the circumstances, the environments, and the conditions. We start looking at how we build relationships. I know a lot of teachers are tired of being told, “You just have to build relationships.” There’s way more to it than that. The relationship is the starting point because we’re humans. We’re warm-blooded hairy mammals. Quite frankly, children will borrow a line from Rita Pierson. Children don’t learn from people they don’t like. We have to have a relationship.
We have to have a relationship between students. They have to have a relationship with themselves, with their fellow students, their teacher, the administrators and the people in the building. They also have to have a relationship with what they’re learning. Is this relevant and rewarding for them to be learning? If you set those conditions up, you’re probably going to have students that learn. If the conditions foster like an us versus them thinking. That’s one of the things that punishment does, is school building, and it does it with adults, in general.
Punishment creates an us versus them between children and adults. As soon as you start with a bunch of punishments, kids stop liking you. I know a lot of adults that are like, “They don’t have to like me.” Yes, they do. That’s how brains work because having them like you comes from a sense of emotional safety. That is the starting point for all human beings, you and physical safety. Safety in general. Generally, in schools, they physically can feel safe. Although, some don’t because of school shootings or because they grow up in a household where they’re getting hit or neglected.
Dealt physical safety can be hard but it’s kids avoiding shame, blame and being embarrassed. How we deal with their wrongdoings and their mistakes, which they are kids. They’re going to make lots of them because they don’t have a fully developed cortex yet. They don’t have a fully developed brain and they won’t until they’re like 30. The average age of a human being developing their frontal cortex is 31.
That seems like that’s gotten longer.
It has. Now, they’re finding there’s some inner pieces of the brain that may even go beyond that but that’s different from the executive function frontal cortex which they’re guessing. The estimate that I heard from Dr. Bruce Perry, a neuroscientist/psychiatrist who’s famous in treating trauma, is around 31 years old. It’s when the prefrontal cortex reaches its maturity. All the cells and structures are developed by the time you’re about five. What we’re talking about are the neurological connections. A neural pathway that allows you to access executive function.
Restorative Justice In Action: Real-World Examples
Now let’s go through this example, if you don’t mind. If you think about a couple different scenarios, let’s say there was an event. We talked a little bit about bullying. It happens all the time and I’m fairly close to it as well. How does that recovery happen? Another example could be, maybe there’s a kid or a child that broke into a school during the weekend they weren’t supposed to and they did some things that weren’t good.
That one is real. I’ll give you an example. I’m going to twist it around so I don’t get too much confidential information because I don’t want to do that but we had it. One of the things I’m involved in along with schools is I’m involved in the State of Connecticut. We used diversion programs. In Connecticut, those formerly were called juvenile review boards. We’re now moving away from that term and using the term youth diversion teams. The logic between that is how stigmatizing the term juvenile is. When do we ever use that term other than to talk about bad kids?
We used to term it juvenile. There’s no juvenile choirs, juvenile football teams or juvenile theaters. Only bad kids, then you add the word review board onto that. Now, it sounds bad. We’ve changed the name of that to juvenile to youth diversion teams. We had a bunch of kids that broke into what they thought was an abandoned house. The house wasn’t abandoned. It was just not being used. It was mostly being used for storage but they thought all that stuff was abandoned. They smashed some dishes and ruined a wedding dress that was supposed to be a family heirloom.
They cost some significant damage. There was some damage and the homeowner wanted the kids to make a donation because the insurance paid for a lot of the damages. She wanted kids to like to learn from their actions. We asked her, “What would make you feel like justice has been served?” She’s like, “I want these kids to earn some money and donate it in my late husband’s name.” They did. They went out and did it. She wanted to collect food for bottle deposits. It was during the pandemic. That’s not happening. Not when we had some super virus going around but what they did do was raise not only money but donations for a food pantry.
These young people knock that out of the park. They collected a huge amount of money and a huge amount of food. Later, when we circled everybody up to talk about what happened, everybody walked away feeling like these kids learned what they needed to learn about their actions and also made an attempt to make that right. Again, it’s not what everybody else thinks justice looks like. It’s what if the person who was harmed served justice. In this case, that human was happy with the outcome. We had another incident. There’s a video about this happening in California with a good friend of mine. She worked at a place called Impact Justice at the time.
They had a young man who’d been arrested for stealing cars. He wanted to make things right with his victim but he and his mother were undocumented immigrants. They didn’t have a lot of money. Probably the reason he’s still in cars in the first place is because they don’t have any money and they’re trying to survive. This woman knew. It was clear she was not getting what the damages were. The damages were around $4,000. They went back to her and said, “Was there any reason to do this even if $4,000 isn’t going to be the outcome?” She’s like, “I just want to meet this kid and tell them what he did wasn’t right.”
She had brought a friend with her that day as a supporter. He was like, “I just want to talk with this kid and see if we can get him back on track.” On the day of the conference and what we would call a restorative conference or basically, a restorative circle. We bring everybody to the circle and we start to talk and he couldn’t remember what color the car was. It became very clear that he’s stolen many cars. This gentleman that the woman had brought with them looked at this young guy and said, “I know you because I used to be you,” and went on to describe how he himself had ended up stealing cars and gotten on the wrong path for a while.
They had this moving conversation. She looked at the kid and said, “What are you good at?” The kid says, “I’m a good artist,” where his mom chimes in and says, “You can’t pay this woman $4,000 for your art.” The victim jumps in and says, “Yes, you can.” She describes something like, “This kid could paint a Tinkerbell.” As tall as she was and she was about 5 feet. She was very specific about what that Tinkerbell should look like, old-school and not too much cleavage. If he could paint this Tinkerbell, then she’d forgive all the debt and so he did. The kid got involved with them. They found the community artists to come support him in the project.
He wanted to purchase all the supplies himself so he got a job to buy the paint and did this amazing Tinkerbell. You can play pictures of this on the internet. I could send you pictures of the Tinkerbell. At the end of that video, some people think, “He stole a car but he gets to paint a Tinkerbell? Isn’t that soft on crime?” If it’s what the victim wants, that gets this kid back on track for the rest of his life. He went on to get involved in the community art programs and even the diversion program he was part of. If those restorative justice moves, get these people back on life and give the victim exactly what they want then we should be happy about Tinkerbell.
We should be happy about the idea that we can put young people back on the path to being good community members, versus just making sure they get a good punishment. What we call punishment is what we call passive accountability. You’re not being held accountable but you’re serving out a sense. If I suspend you from school and you go home for three days. You can still come back and say, “I didn’t do anything.” It’s not actual accountability. Accountability means owning your actions. At least in restorative justice, we’d refer back to Kate who says, “Accountability is five dimensions.” You’ve got to own that your actions have caused harm to others and you had agency in those actions.
Two, you got to know who you hurt and in what ways. Three, you got to repair that harm like, what’s the harm and let’s clean it up to the best of your ability? Four, you got to repay your community for bringing home. Most importantly, number five, we need to address the patterns of behavior that led you to this place in the first place. How do we prevent you from doing this again? That’s what most prime survivors want. They want to make sure it’s not going to happen to them or someone else again. I think if we started focusing on accountability and less on punishments, we have a very different society.
I love your definition there. It’s redefining how we hold each other accountable and doing it in a way that we want the better community as a result coming out of this. I love it. Joe, there’s so many wonderful things there. I just think about how we are helping people to recover themselves instead of spiral into something worse and recoil.
How do we overcome some of the challenges? As you said, some people view this as soft or maybe some people don’t recover or don’t stop doing what they’re doing. What are some of the things we could put in place to help us overcome those challenges in the public eye, in schools and even in the workplace? We can still focus on the schools just to keep us centered on that.
Overcoming Challenges In Implementing Restorative Practices
I’ve gone into districts where every school got the same resources. Let’s say there’s four elementary schools and I’m making these numbers up. Three of them can do well with this work and one of them will fail completely. Right there, the answer comes into two things. One, did the leadership of that school get on board with this work? Do they believe in it? If they don’t, it’s going to be hard to get a whole school on board and do it right. There needs to be fidelity. Unfortunately, here’s the second part. How much opportunity do the schools have to get training that is ongoing and doesn’t make this mistake? I hear this on a regular basis.
People say, “We’ve already trained X amount of people.” I’m like, “No, you didn’t. There’s no such thing as just being trained.” If that’s the case, I would have been trained eighteen years ago when I first took my first restorative justice training. There’s no such thing as training. There’s, you took training but you need more. Eighteen years in, I still need more. It’s an ongoing process of learning about the brain, the nervous system, the behavior and how it happens and learning how to respond rather than react to behavior. That’s never ending.
When you go into school systems, I regularly am faced with like, once a month 90-minute session. Do we think we’re going to do a whole school transformation when you bring in a consultant for 90 minutes a month? That’s what some schools are doing. Teachers start saying, “We’re a restorative school. We’ve been trained but it’s not working.” That’s because, one, you got very little training. Two, you aren’t really trained. You had training and it wasn’t sufficient. Three, you all say you’re doing it when you’re not. They’re doing restorative practices and name only. Everybody gets this vibe going in a state or in a district that this doesn’t work.
It only works if you’re doing it. It’s not magical that you took training and you handled the kid’s poor behavior differently. That’s not a school transformation. If schools want this to be successful, it will only be successful as you invest in it. Unfortunately, schools are locked on curriculum timeline. They’re locked on peak professional development like what’s mandatory professional development and then what stuff that helps to improve their school. They need professional development for the curriculum. They need professional development for their teaching skills. There’s not a lot of room left.
Very often, when I talk to schools, there’s no professional development time to devote to this work. They wonder, how come some schools pulled it off? It’s because they used every faculty meeting and every staff meeting at every professional development. It’s a chance to grow the work. What they saw is reduced absenteeism. They saw reduced suspensions, referrals go down and you get less behavior problems.
You get more community, but you’re not going to get that if you aren’t doing proactive tier one interventions to build community in relationships, using circle practice, respect to agreements and the restorative practices that build relationships. When it comes time for you to use the things that repair relationships, you have relationships to repair. You can’t repair what you never had. You can’t repair a community that you never built. That’s where we’re making mistakes with this on an international level.
The Impact Of Hyper-Individualism On Community
It would continue to divide and it’s very individual. Our society is very focused on the individual now and less so about what you’re talking about. Helping us look at this as a community and how we get better and stronger together as a group.
The United States and Australia are the two countries that rate the highest on a scale that was created by this PhD, whose name alludes to me. You could look at this up, the individualism scale. They looked at all the countries and rated them on the scale of 1 to 100 of how elective they were. The lower numbers were more collective and the higher numbers were individualistic. The United States and Australia ranked two of the highest most individualistic countries on the planet. The United States ranked at around 91 out of 100 and Australia was right with us around 90.
Our structures even if there’s an interesting statistic from Dr. Bruce Perry. It talks about how we have this 80/20 flip. Several hundred years ago, it was like an 80/20 split. Eighty percent of the population lived in multi-generational and multi-family settings where there were multiple care givers for every kid. The ratio of caregivers to children could have been 6 to 1. This actual study was 2022. In 2022, those numbers had flipped. Twenty percent of the population is living in these multi-generational multi-family settings with caregiving for a child around 6 to 1 and 80% of us are living in these nuclear family traditional family things.
That’s a myth. The “nuclear family,” mom, dad and 2.5 children is mythology. In our evolution, that has never existed in 250,000 years. We have always been in tribes of 60 to 80 people, where multiple caregivers were responsible for a child. Even infants would be breastfed by multiple women because it’s not realistic for two people to take care of three children. That’s not realistic and it doesn’t meet the needs of children. If you borrow some lines from Gabor Maté, a physician who writes on trauma a lot.
He says that we basically have created a world that pits the irreducible needs of children against each other. Merely, the two needs are authenticity versus attachment. I, being me authentically and still be loved. Little children are making this choice like, “Can I still be me and still be loved?” We’re such a conformist society, where literally pitting every decibel need of children against each other and then wondering why the mental health of children is the worst it’s ever been. Again, more reasons that we need to just start rethinking. Culture, society and just understanding our nervous systems so that we’re not creating a world that is so toxic.
Accountability means owning your actions. Share on XStarting in our schools and you bringing this to the workplace. There’s different variations of this and to your point about it takes effort, commitment and belief. What I was thinking about as you’re going through as you said the training. How do you put it into practice? It has to be part of everything you do. It’s just like what I’ve had my weekend about making sure I’m welcoming everyone to people that might have a different background are different than me. Whatever it might be. It’s embracing that.
It’s the distinction of. It’s not separating. Only the distinction of how are we together? How can we be better back to this community concept versus separating? Our society separates our uniqueness and differences as a device of mechanism versus bringing us together. With this work, to me, it feels like a lot of things. For this to be immersive, it needs to be experienced and be practiced. Back in the school system or even workplaces, when we’re taught something, this teaching. Most things fall in the scrap pile.
When you’re taught something, it’s proven like 5% of what you learn might be attained and maybe half of that might be practiced. A lot of it just goes to the wayside. If we’re not putting this to practice or putting this until all the avenues that you mentioned facilitating and experiencing going through restorative circles and conversations, seeing what good looks like and seeing, “I could have done better.”
Being self-reflective of, “I should have maybe done that a little bit differently,” and getting that real time feedback. I’m curious. Joe, I don’t know if this is something you do. How can schools or workplaces do a better job at making this experimental? For transformation to happen, it has to be practiced or else it’s just going to fall away.
We’ll start with schools, but then we also could bring this into the workplace. My co-author, Margaret Thorsborne is big into doing workplace work, which I used to do. I’m much more interested in schools these days. Right off the start, it’s fighting and training. We tend to go in with this training brain model where it’s like, “Let’s just train everybody and hope for the best.” I’m sorry, that doesn’t work. It’s nonsense that we even imagine for a second that just giving people information and they’ll start doing it.
What we need to focus on is two things. One, are people ready for change? You go into a school building where teachers have had four principles within three years. That’s not a building that’s ready for change. They’ve already had so much disruption and other changes probably going to make them go crazy. Are they ready for the change? Two, who’s managing the change? It doesn’t matter what the change is. When you want to implement anything, that disruption is a disruption. We like disrupting and it’s my shirt.
At the same time, that disruption messes with people’s nervous systems, their habits, their problems and now you’re asking them to do something different. That’s hard. People don’t adopt School easily. If you’ve ever seen that diffusion model of change, you have your innovators, your early adopters, your late majority or early majority, then you’re laggards were not coming on board. Everybody’s adopting this for their reasons. Not your reasons. I can tell you all the reasons to do trauma-informed restorative practices but the reality is, you’re not changing because of me. You’re changing because you.
We have to commit change with a change implementation science like how does an organization adopt change? We need to balance out telling people what trauma-informed restorative practices are when we implement them, what they look like and how we use them. Now we have to start making them part of our day-to-day life. That’s a structural change. That’s how people work change, people change and training changes. That’s, “Let’s adapt our policies and procedures.” We literally have to change policy and procedure so it supports the change that we want to make, regardless what that change is.
We don’t focus enough in schools and in organizations on just implementation science, change management. People get riled up in the first year and then their fire goes down in the second year. By the third year, all that training is gone and there’s no traces of any of this work. If you want to be there in 3 years, 4 years or 5 years, you have to think long term. Right from the beginning, year zero, planning and training. Come up with a plan of how you enroll this out over the course of time and make that a revolving plan.
I always say, you have a revolving three-year plan. You finish a year and you add a year. Maybe I can’t get a de-escalation sensory space in my school year one but I can start writing grants to get it in year three. I’m thinking long term all the time. I’m thinking about what change is going to look like long term. As we just look at the short time stuff, we’re not envisioning where we’re going and so it won’t happen. That’s where schools need to focus their time and energy. It’s on that training and planning but then practical implementation.
Teachers need to see what it looks like. They need people like me not to just come to training. They need people like me to come into their classroom and spend a day, which I do all the time. I love going to classrooms. I surprised myself because I didn’t start working around kids until 2008 or 2009. I was never one of those people that were like, “I can’t wait to work around kids.” I know nothing about kids and I was never one of those people that was a natural kid leader but I surprised myself when I started doing peer mediation training for kids in schools.
Now, we do circle training for kids. We teach them how to be circle keepers. I’m surprised how much I like working with kids. That is not something I ever envisioned that I would enjoy. When they say the funniest thing, how can you not love being around them? You’ve coached them. The stories I could tell you of the things kids do and say, I’m amazed. Even my diversion kids are all kids that have been arrested. They’re being diverted from that arrest in court to come to a restorative justice program. Some of them have done some pretty egregious stuff yet you talk to them. They’re just kids and I just think that’s like the route but if we’re going to make change, change requires change management.
I often will say when I’m out talking with folks that I got my management experience by coaching those 30 youth sports teams because you hear everything. You get every scenario possible. The kids are generally themselves. Not all. They’re going to tell you what’s going on and you have to pivot and be with them. You got to go with them and meet them where they are. That’s the opposite of what we teach leaders or we teach ourselves or tell ourselves what we need to be.
It’s interesting as you’re going through the approach. I do some leadership training with a company called Be Generative. One of our tools is exactly what you’re talking about in the sense of, if you think about three little circles and you have a big circle that surrounds all that. One of the little circles is this reactive place that most people spend their days. It talks about the past and how to react. I’m using that word on purpose.
Where if something happens and we’re reacting to an email, an incident or we’re punishing someone or we’re doing all these things. We’re not spending time to set the conditions to use your language and also about how we step out of that circle and go to this other circle about being more proactive. Which is setting those conditions for us to prepare for the future and to think about next year or the next 3 years or 5 years. It’s setting those conditions. As you said, put the grant together. Start to put some of the training together and put some of these transformative circles together.
At that point, once this is set and people are starting to communicate. We’re creating language for conversations to have. These conversations end up being a dialogue that we need to learn, grow and expand. As we expand, that circle that surrounds all this starts to expand. That allows us to have discovery for what’s there. Discovery for what the kids are struggling with. Struggling with or for what they need to get resolution for to maybe go paint that Tinkerbell. We discover that is something that’s going to change that person’s life.
That’s the change management type of model but most of us are so stuck in this reactive mode because we’re so busy. We’re on our phones. We’re reacting to our to-do list, the emails get longer, life is going faster. We’re not slowing down to do exactly what you’re saying. It’s changed management.
It’s also slowing down and slowing down. My friend Justin Carbonella who is a Youth Services Director in Connecticut for the City of Middletown. He always says that when we talk about restorative practices and restorative justice, it’s very intentional that we’re doing good things on purpose. I steal that line from him all the time because it’s exactly what we’re trying to do. It means we have to slow down, breathe a little and do things not to get them done but to do things to get the outcomes we want. If you’re going to get the outcomes you want, you have to be intentionally doing good things on purpose.
That’s one of the reasons people struggle with restorative justice. It takes time. Where punishment is easy. It’s transactional. You do this, you get that, and we’re done. You come back from your three-day suspension to no fanfare and whatsoever and you just go back to class. What if we didn’t send you home for three days? What if we brought you into a circle with the other people who you’ve harmed? Maybe the other people you got in trouble with. With a couple of school people and your parents, we also sat down and said, “How do we solve this problem?”
A philosophy of restorative justice is that the people in the problem are the most equipped to solve the problem. They’re the experts on the problem. I’m a facilitator of this work. I’m not the expert on their problems. I might be a mediator and might be highly trained in conflict resolution. That, I am highly trained in, yet I can’t solve your problem. You can solve your problem because you’re the expert in it. You’re the ones in it and we believe that. That inclusive decision-making and that involving the people who are involved in the problem in the actual solving of that problem.
That’s a far in concept to a lot of people when it comes to wrongdoing, harm and incidents. Sometimes there is no repairing it, but there’s making sense of it. Sometimes, we’re just circling up to make sense of everything so that we can walk away from it feeling like we’re all okay. You don’t get that out of punishment. You don’t get that out of the three days suspension and sending someone to prison. I love how Marshall Rosenberg, who was a psychologist for the 1980s, developed this process called nonviolent communication, which is widely popular. It’s what you talked to Jeremy Brewer about. It’s not about communication because I trained in that.
He said, there’s a punitive use of force and there’s a protective use of force. Sometimes, we do need to put people in a place like a jail. Not to punish them but to keep everybody safe. That’s the protective use of force. Sometimes, violence is necessary and force is necessary to protect people, but we can do that with that sense of protection. Let’s keep everyone safe until we can reach some problem solving but that doesn’t mean that we have to use punitive force. With most violence is punitive. That’s what violence is.
Violence is retribution. Violence is somebody trying to get somebody back for something that is past perceived wrongdoing. Violence always has the element of retribution, revenge and making people pay for a perceived wrongdoing. If that’s in your heart and you’re the principal of a school, what kind of punishments are you dishing out? If you’re the court judge or the prosecutor and your heart is full of revenge and they deserve that, we see it. Look at the comments in any Facebook posting or news article about someone who’s done something wrong. Basically, we’re still living in a mindset of, “Burn them at the stake,” and “Let them rot in a hole somewhere.” You see in the comments. That’s how we lose sight of each other’s humanity.
I always thought that’s been part of my philosophy for the many years probably through a lot of therapy. The second I lose sight of someone’s humanity, I’m no better than the people who lost sight of mine. I can imagine the young gentlemen that were beating the crap out of me. I can imagine those people have no ability to see my humanity. That’s how human beings hurt each other. We humanize each other. I’ve come to this place in my life, and maybe it’s from studying non-violence, which is why I went to India. I went to study non-violence.
I went through a whole program on non-violence in Gandhi. The second I start losing sight of other people’s humanity, I know better than the people who lost like mine. I don’t love that. When you think about what I want for my life and how I want to see myself, I don’t want to lose sight of other people’s humanity regardless of what they’ve done. The second I do, I’m better than them.
That’s a fair point. I’m just curious. If you don’t mind sharing for the folks that harmed you as a victim in this restorative way of thinking. What would you have wanted for them?
That is a question I think about all the time. Again, none of these events was anyone arrested or anyone caught. These are all just like phantom people in the world who, unfortunately, because of the way brains work. I don’t remember what they look like or what they’re saying. I have a very scattered memory of any of it. That’s a pretty vivid memory of the first one. The second one, I not only have no memory of the event. I have no memory of the entire evening before it.
Aside from my parents, I’m having fun with my friends that I don’t remember any of. It’s sad that I lost that but I always think to myself like if I could sit down with any of these people, what would that conversation look like? I’m not sure because I don’t know what was going on for them. It’s hard to say, but like every other crime survivor out there, I’d want to know that they’re not going to do it to somebody else. That’s what matters to me. Please assure me you’re never doing this to someone else.
I feel like you’re doing that in this work you’re embarking on speaking to, whether you’re helping millions of people, kids, people in the workplaces and schools and what have you. I just have to ask questions. One is, how do people get a hold of you if they want to learn more regarding schools and the workplaces and your colleagues? Certainly we’re going to attach links to your website and your books. There’s a lot of good information for people to start to dive into but where should they start working to learn more?
Visit my website. There’s a lot of good information on there. I will open up and say it needs an update. My second book isn’t even listed there yet because I just found the right person to help me update that. You can always get me through my website. There’s a contact form on the website. You can also get me to LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. I’m on almost all of those. I still somehow hanging out on X even though it’s torture, but even Bluesky.
I’m on most of the social media sites, so you can find me on any of them but my website is probably the easiest. There’s a contact form on the website to send me an email. I tell educators this all the time like, I am happy to support any educator that writes to me. I’ll send you materials. I might not send you a long and detailed email but I’ll get you resources. I have a big collection on Dropbox of just all the Articles and things I’ve read that I found helpful like games, activities, classroom lesson plans, and professional development.
I have a lot of that stuff I can share with folks. I’m happy to do that for educators and I don’t ask anybody for anything. I do it because I believe in my work. I’m not in this for the money. I’m not rich. My website is just my name JoeBrummer.com and my email is pretty easy. It’s Joe@JoeBrummer.com. You can always email me. I try to answer every email that I get. Sometimes I forget. If you don’t get an email back from me in a week or two, know that I might have just seen your email and then forgot to respond. Nudge me and I’ll respond. Sometimes I get overwhelmed by the people that write to me but I’m still happy to like to send anybody the things that have been helpful to me if it’s going to be helpful to them.
Living Your Possible: The Hummingbird Parable
Thank you for that, Joe. One last question. I love asking my guests about their definition of the name of this show, Live Your Possible. What does that mean to you? Are there any tips that come to mind for the audience?
Living your possible is like doing the best you can. What can you do now? That might not be everybody else’s best but it’s your best. I went to Vancouver and did a presentation there for the Vancouver Board of Education for a bunch of educators. At the end of it, they gave me this plaque. It had a picture of a hummingbird on it and on the back of it explained the hummingbird parable. They’re like, “Have you ever heard of this before?” I had never heard this parable, but I’ve warmed up to it. It’s what this show’s name is about.
The parable goes like this. If there were a bunch of animals in a forest fire, the hummingbird kept going and getting water and shooting at the flames. The other animals look at the hummingbird and they’re like, “What are you doing?” That’s not going to do anything. The hummingbird just looked at him and said, “I’m just doing the best I can but I’m doing something.” The parable of that is like I think all of us. for a lot of us, even my Angela, like, when you know better, you’ll do better. That’s what living your possible is probably about.
It’s like, just do your best. It might not be everybody else’s best but it’s your best now. Maybe tomorrow will be a different battle. Maybe you’ll get better the next day and the next day but it’s day by day. It’s baby step by baby. Healing from one incident to another. You’re possible now might not be as good as the possible you have tomorrow. Keep moving. Keep blowing the water at the flames regardless whether or not they go out because at least you’re moving.
That’s beautiful. I appreciate that story. I appreciate all your stories. You’ve been vulnerable, expressive and informative. It’s everything I was hoping for now and you’ve helped our audience to understand quite a bit about restorative justice, practices and how we can get engaged, learn more, practice this and see how we can change our communities as you’re impacting our world very strongly and very favorably. I admire the work you’re doing. I appreciate you and I’m honored to call you a friend. I hope you have fun with Jeremy. Please give him a hug from me. That way, you’ll get one back from me, too. Again, thanks for your time. I appreciate you.
Thanks for having me on.
Important Links
- Joe Brummer
- Joe Brummer on LinkedIn
- Joe Brummer on Facebook
- Joe Brummer on Twitter
- Joe Brummer on Bluesky
- Joe@JoeBrummer.com
- Trauma Informed Educators Network
- What Happened to You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing
- College Unbound
- Dr. Bruce Perry
- Dr. Gabor Maté
- Be Generative
- Justin Carbonella on LinkedIn
- Becoming a Trauma-Informed Restorative Educator: Practical Skills to Change Culture and Behavior
- Building a Trauma-informed Restorative School
About Joe Brummer
Joe Brummer is a trauma survivor. Having lived through early exposure to violence, child abuse and neglect, and two separate violent anti-LGBTQ hate crimes, he has turned his healing journey into a career in peacebuilding, restorative justice, and consulting in trauma-informed education. Joe supports schools and youth justice institutions internationally using a trauma-informed restorative lens to create supportive human-centered environments.
Joe is an adjunct faculty member at Hartford International University for Religion and Peace, teaching the Peacebuilding Skills: Dialogue, Trauma & Restorative Justice course. Joe has appeared on dozens of podcasts and webinars and presented at national and international conferences. Joe has completed the certification course in Dr. Bruce Perry’s Neurosequential Model in Education and is a member of the Attachment and Trauma Network’s Training Collaborative.
Additionally, he partners with the Trauma-informed Educators Network. After years of working in the mental health training field, he was the associate director of a community mediation center, where he ran both adult and youth criminal mediation programs, community dialogue initiatives, and school-based peer mediation programs, along with training hundreds of people to become community mediators.
He served seven years on the board of directors for the National Association for Community Mediation. His first book, Building a Trauma-informed Restorative School: Skills and Approaches for Improving Culture and Behavior (2020) is used by schools across the globe. His next book, Becoming a Trauma-Informed Restorative Educator: Practical Skills to Change Culture and Behavior, co-authored with restorative justice pioneer Margaret Thorsborne, was released in June 2024 and won the prestigious 2025 Nautilus Book Awa
