The Importance of Intention

One of the common threads that has been woven through my YDL experience has been the importance of intention.  As a youth worker, there are hundreds of different strategies and curriculum designed to address all of the different issues and situations that young people face.  I suppose this can be said for lots of professions, particularly those that strive to help people.  What I have learned though, is that whatever I do as a youth worker must be grounded in intention-- remaining steadfast in purpose and outcome.    


As I have been learning more about restorative justice practices, I have started to recognize ways that those practices have been infused into the work I have already done.  Unfortunately, what wasn't infused was the intention behind those practices.  For example, I use to work in a group home for youth with various emotional/behavioral needs.  An expectation for the more serious consequences was that youth would have to complete a sheet that asked questions such as: "what did you do to get this consequence?", "what could you have done differently?" and "In the future I will..."  Once they completed the worksheet the entire house, including staff, would come together and the young person would read off their sheet.  Then staff and residents had an opportunity to give the young person feedback about the situation.  


Though I was not involved with the initial implementation of this process, I have a strong suspicion that it was rooted in the group conferencing model meant to repair harm because many of the same elements are present. (sitting in a circle, everyone has an opportunity to speak, offender must talk about the harm they caused, etc)  What wasn't present, at the time, was knowledge about restorative justice and the intention behind it.  Had I, as a staff, been equipped with the knowledge about restorative practices, I would have facilitated those groups much differently.  Instead of opening the floor for others in the group to give feedback (aka "you should have done this" or "I would have done that"), I would have expected the other residents to talk about how they felt about the situation ("I was really worried that something bad would happen to you when you ran." or "Everywhere that I live, people steal from me, it makes me sad and angry that I have to protect my stuff all the time").  Looking back, I see such a lost opportunity-- not only to give the victims of the harm an opportunity to speak their truth, but also to guide the offenders toward empathy and community rather than anger and division.  


One of the questions that I will keep with me as I continue on this journey is: how is the purpose and intention of restorative practices being rooted and maintained?  This is something I will be increasingly interested in as I begin learning more about restorative measures in schools.  Schools are big and districts are even bigger so saying that they utilize restorative justice measures is one thing, but acting on the original intent is entirely different.  My hope is that both words and actions are met with intention.