Webinar: The Transformation of Prisons, Prisoners, and communities: restorative justice through trauma healing awareness

As practitioners of Restorative Justice we often do not take enough time to reflect on our practice and the learnings we have gleaned from this beautifully healing and hard emotional work. This webinar explores Restorative Justice through the lens of working with men in prison and trauma healing awareness. Jeff From has conducted over 50 multi-day trauma healing awareness workshops (THAW) in three Ohio prisons with the Horizon Prison Initiative (Horizon). The men who are incarcerated are experts in experiencing trauma as both victim and as the one offending. The THAWs are an exploration into the true value of Restorative Justice: the emotional healing attached to the wound created when someone commits harm against another. This webinar will include a presentation on prison reform from the perspective of the Horizon mission of transforming prisoners who transform prisons and the communities they are a part of. The presentation will be followed by an interview with the presenter, Jeff From.

Guest Bio

Jeff From is a Restorative Justice Practitioner based in Berea, Kentucky. He has spent his adult life as a social servant and educator working in emergency home repair Central Appalachia, wilderness therapy with adjudicated boys, sustainable agriculture and food security in south-central Pennsylvania, high school teacher in Tohatchi, New Mexico, and staff and instructor at Berea College. Since earning his M.A. in Conflict Transformation from the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding at Eastern Mennonite University in 2007, Jeff has worked to create restorative mediation practices for juveniles in central Kentucky, start Support and Accountability Groups for the formerly incarcerated, been a faculty member in Defense Initiated Victim Outreach trainings, and taught as an adjunct professor at Berea College. The combination of his personal and professional work experience has coalesced and brought him to his present work with the Horizon Prison Initiative, a multi-faith behavior modification program which is based at three prisons in the State of Ohio. Jeff contracted as a facilitator of Trauma Healing Awareness Workshops with Horizon. He was a stay at home father for the first 3 years of his daughter’s life before accepting the Program Coordinator position with the Horizon Prison Initiative at the London Correctional Institutions Faith Based Unit. He now splits his time between his home in Berea, Ky., and London, Ohio. Most recently, he has begun volunteering as a trainer for the Green Dot program, a bystander intervention violence prevention program, with the local high schools in Berea.