Community Conferences

Involves: Responsible Party, Harmed Party/Parties (optional), Support People (optional), Community members, Surrogate Victims (optional)

Community conferences an approach to facilitation in which community members, responsible parties and harmed parties (or in some cases their surrogates) come together to discuss a harm, its impacts, and how to make things right. Often in community conferences end with a formal agreement about how to make things right and move forward.

Community Conferences can involve a directly harmed party, or not. There are two primary situations in which a Community Conference can be used. The first is when the impact of a harm is on a community as a whole, as opposed to primarily affecting a single individual. The second is in situations with a directly harmed individual who is not interested or able to participate in a joint process. In these cases a surrogate or surrogates from the community stand in for the harmed party in conversation with the responsible party. The process itself is often similar to Restorative Conferencing in terms of content and facilitation style.

Community Conferences can be used at here at Penn as long as the responsible party is a member of the University community.

Unique features

• Meetings with “surrogate” harmed parties (in the case of those directly affected opting out of the process) and community members
• Focuses on harm to the community
• Those directly harmed do not need to be involved if they do not wish to be
• Can respond to multiple responsible and harmed parties in the same process